I apologize for missing last week. It was a weird week for me, and by the time I realized I hadn’t put in an entry, it was Sunday, and I was up to my hips in laundry. I’m back now, and we’ll see what happens for this week. Just remember the old kender saying: If it’s been in a house for longer than two weeks, it’s an heirloom.

I also haven’t been doing much writing, sad to say – it’s been a weird week. However, when I did resume…I think I hit a moment when the character managed to sit down and have a little chat with me as the author. It was a moment of reflection for Valentina when she was getting ready to go out and hunt some more. She came to the realization that she didn’t eat to love, she loved to eat.

Serial killers, as I’ve found out through research, end up giving themselves little permissions to escalate their actions. John Wayne Gacy is a good example of this. He built up to his homosexuality, then built up to his murderous impulses bit by bit. Now, whether that’s for the sake of maintaining the dopamine flow in his brain, or he just got more and more comfortable with his actions, is not clear to me. Valentina does the same thing, but we’re watching her transition from being a romantic cannibal to a more lust-driven cannibal. If we were to equate this to just sex – this is Valentina going from someone who was highly monogamous to someone who plays the field vigorously.

There’s another phrase to describe this: the berserker phase. Gacy had it. Bundy had it. Valentina’s dipping her toes into it as she gets more comfortable.

This is not how I envisioned Valentina in the beginning, but it’s how she’s turning out. I’ve always maintained that the characters in my head have a small spark of autonomy. Whether this is something that other authors have had happen to them, or I’ve crossed that threshold and I’m ready for the starch white love-me coats – I have no idea. But I am excited about this and I can’t wait to see how it ends for Valentina by the close of the second book and how this impacts the third.

I love times like this because it keeps me interested in writing the book. I want to see how everything turns out because sometimes, I really don’t know. I’m just a chronicler of this very twisted woman’s life. I take that back – she’s going to end up on Death Row, but how she gets from here with hacking up prostitutes to sitting on Old Sparky saying ‘I don’t even know why I’m here’ is a bit of a mystery to me.

Man, I love this job.

As my battery is getting low, I will let you all go. Feel free to drop a line or check out the books I sell on the right hand side.

Have a good day.