Good Journeys, To a Beloved Friend

Most of the time, I’m quite fatalistic about life, and death.  But, every once in a while, they smack me upside the heart and remind me that these things are supposed to hurt.

This evening, I learned that a very dear friend of mine passed through the veil, releasing her battle with cancer.  At the moment, I’m a little raw with the pain of it, so please forgive me if I’m overly emotional.

Mary was the kind of person who just inspired you to try harder, to never give up or back down.  She had a strength and a tenacity that you couldn’t help but admire.  And a sense of humor that just wouldn’t quit — not even in the face of one of the world’s most terrible killers – cancer.

My first memory of Mary is her mischeivous grin.  That grin greeted me upon my arrival at another friend’s home for a meeting of the local chapter of the Society of Creative Anachronism (a historical re-enactment society).  But it was more than just her grin.  As with all my family of spirit, Mary became a part of my soul — someone who has never been further away from me than my heart, no matter the distance physical space imposed.

Like all family, we had our ups and downs.  Can’t put two fiery personalities in the same space and not get an argument or two.  The annoyance never lasted, and there was never any real anger.  Every memory I have of Mary is a fond one – even the times we disagreed.  Mostly, though, I remember the laughter.

One memory that never fails to brighten my day is the memory of my first trip to a reenactment camp called Pennsic.  I was seventeen, and I’d never been to anything quite like that, before.  I didn’t know that Pennsic always comes with downpours of rain that make one  think of building an Ark.  Our Common Area space was covered by a tarped, PVC-and-2×4 structure with a flat roof.  A roof that quickly filled and sagged with water.  And I have this image forever imprinted of my mind of Mary, somewhere around a full foot shorter than I, with a pole arm (that’s a weapon) in her hands, holding up the center of one of those bulges to let the water run off… Only it ran right down between the overlap of the tarps, just barely missing Mary. I remember all of us standing around trying to keep that bloody shelter up, swearing like sailors and laughing like crazy.

I won’t say good-bye, Mary… I don’t believe in permanent good-byes.  Instead, I’ll say good journey, my friend… While my heart feels the hole of your moving on, and my soul hurts from the loss of your light in this world, I know that you aren’t lost to us forever… We will meet again.  Somewhere, someday… And I will be blessed to have you in my life, again.

Good journey, Mary… may the love of those who think of you light your way into the next life.

Out of the Dark: It’s Not Easy

I’m sure, by now, that many of you are wondering why I would expose my deepest pains and darkest nightmares in such a public way.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy to have to remember those nightmares, or to feel that pain.  But, even more, it’s not easy being an adult, and reflecting on my early childhood with the knowledge I have today about rape and rapists.  At the time, I felt dirty and bad, ugly and horrible.  I truly believed it was my fault, that I had done something wrong.

Today, I know that there’s no such thing as a one-time rapist.  Rape is about power and control, about inflicting pain.  I know I wasn’t to blame for what happened to me.  It took someone loving me, without condition or reservation, for me to understand that.  But I still can’t help thinking about all the other little girls that boy who raped me might have already raped by that time, or might have gone on to rape, afterward.  How many girls like me might I have spared that pain, shame, and misery if I had been stronger, less frightened, or felt more sure of my family’s love and support.

I never knew his name, or anything about him, so I can’t even be sure he’s ever been caught, ever been held accountable for any of the crimes I either know he’s committed, or am pretty sure he’s since committed.  That’s a fear I have to live with every day of my life — that someday, I might come face-to-face with him.  Maybe I’d recognize him, or maybe he’s changed so much I wouldn’t even know him to see him.  The idea, quite frankly, makes me want to vomit, every time it crosses my mind.

I’ve devoted a substantial part of my life, both as a writer and a counselor, to helping other victims of abuse.  And not just girls.  There are a large number of boys who are also victims of rape.  Unfortunately, our society makes it even more difficult for them to come forward than girls, because of a misguided belief that males cannot be victims of sexual crimes.

So, while revealing the past I’ve kept so closely guarded all these years isn’t easy, I do believe it to be necessary.  At the very least, it will help you, as a reader of my work, to understand what drives and fuels my darker brand of Romance.  But it is my fervent hope that relating my experiences does more than that — that it inspires you to reach out and help someone who may be suffering as I have suffered for all these years.  If my words move you to become that listening ear, that non-judgmental, loving compassion that shows a victim they are beautiful, clean, and worthy of love, then every word I’ve labored over in order to express the experiences that still plague my nightmares, still visit my daily life with fear, are worthwhile.

Out of the Dark: Glimpses of My Life, Part 2

A lot of people hear the term “Romance” applied to my books and automatically assume that I write feel-good stories about white-bread people who’ve never even had a passing acquaintance with trouble (or, at very least, who have never done anything that could be construed as deadly, extremely dangerous, or even downright illegal).  Those people would be wrong.

One of my most critically-acclaimed and most-loved series is my SF nod to both Military Fiction and Romance, Underground.  It deals with the hard realities of living in a post-global-war world, still teetering on the edge of another war.  And a lot of the characters, and some of the events, are loosely (and not so loosely, in some cases) based on real people I’ve known, real events I’ve experienced or witnessed.

The childhood terror I revealed in my last segment?  Yeah, it’s there.  Slightly modified, it shows up in the past of the main character, Tamia.  She is my mirror, my foil, sometimes an expression of my turbulent emotions as a child and teenager, and sometimes the focus of conveyance for events that either did happen, or could have been.

It should come as a surprise to no one, then, that I first began working on Underground at the age of twelve.  Incidentally, this was around the same time that my life both spiraled out of control, and began to finally find focus.

Confused? Yeah, I figured as much.  I’ll try to explain, but you’ll have to bear with me through some taboo discussion topics, for a moment.

While I’m not going to talk about it, here (that’s a subject for all its own post, if I decide to get into it), it’s important to note that when I was ten, and just before the events I’m about to discuss started happening, I witnessed a horrible accident and its aftermath that would leave me forever scarred.  But, as I said, that’s a subject for a post all its own.

When I began to hit puberty, at around eleven, I was still struggling daily with the shame, fear, and self-loathing of what happened when I was six.  Puberty isn’t a good time, emotionally, for any kid.  For me, it carried a double-whammy I knew nothing about, and never saw coming.

I began having headaches.  Massive, paralyzing headaches, accompanied by wretched abdominal pain.  Most times, I couldn’t even move, fought to breathe, and yet tried to downplay or hide my symptoms as best I could.  I didn’t know what they were, and I was scared.  Still, I began missing school, which eventually only increased the number of times I had the pain, as I fought to make up homework, classes, etc.  I had blackouts (not memory ones… I remember every moment leading up to and directly after the blackouts) — I ended up in the ER several times, and each time, they hooked me up to an IV of glucose, and monitored me, and I bounced back within several hours, so they’d label it “dehydration” and send me home.

But no one had an explanation for the headaches, or the spiraling depression I was suffering (the latter,  no one knew about mostly because I kept it to myself.  I already felt helpless — I didn’t want to be branded “crazy” as well).  Twice, I ended up in the ER because I attempted to kill myself — only, no one knew, because I never made a peep about what I’d taken.  I wanted to die — why would I help them make me live?  Things happened that I can’t explain here, but I will say that those events both saved my life and changed it.

Then, one day, I met a girl whose philosophy about life would forever change my own.  She already knew she was dying.  She had a blood clotting disorder that was killing her, and she knew she wouldn’t even make it until she graduated high school.  Her life had an expiration date.  And she gave me the best advice anyone has ever given me.  “Life is something grand and too brief already. Throwing it away cheats everyone who wants to live and can’t.”

We became fast friends — me, her, and her brother, who was her legal guardian since their parents died a few years before .  She was the sister that, until that point, I’d never had.  And he was my best friend, and my confidant. I won’t divulge their names here, because they were important enough to me that, even though I’m sure it no longer matters, I will protect their memories with my life.

When I was fourteen, my soul-sister died.  She was just six months older than I, and I mourned her passing with wretched grief that I kept locked away from the rest of the world.  I was convinced that the rest of the world would not allow me that grief — after all, I believed that they hadn’t allowed me my own pain, when I was a child, and I felt abandoned.

But I retreated inside, became quiet and withdrawn.  The only people to whom I would open my heart and soul were the “guys” — a group of friends who stood by me and supported me through everything (and for those who would otherwise make disparraging commentary, NO, they were NOT all men. I just call them “guys” here because I’m not going to make my friends’ lives difficult because of small-minded individuals who might otherwise do them harm) – and my best friend in the world, who was also the first man I ever loved, and the only man to whom I ever gave my whole heart, without reservation.

I know some of you will snarl and find it disgusting that over 10 years separated us in ages, and I was just fourteen at the time.  I really don’t care what you think.  We intended to spend the rest of our lives together, and there was nothing sordid or perverse about our love.  Remember, in many ways, I had never been a child.  I was well-ahead of my peers, emotionally and mentally.  Many people mistook me for much older than I was, physically.  I didn’t even LOOK like a child.  And he gave me a joy and love I haven’t felt since.  He showed me all the respect and tenderness I never felt worthy of before, and made me feel beautiful and beloved at a time in my life when it seemed the rest of the world had nothing but hateful things to say.

Sadly, it wasn’t to last.  Though we were making plans for the future — a time when I would be old enough for us to finally no longer have to hide how we felt for each other — we had no idea what was coming.  A freak accident took him away from me.  I stood on the tarmac and watched the plane he was flying go down in flames, and a large part of me died, that day.

I can’t even describe how it felt.  Every time I try, the numbness just sets in, and I can’t feel, all over again.  I wasn’t allowed to grieve him, not anywhere but in the dark of night, and in the confines of my heart.  Only at night could I cry, my tears muffled by my pillow.  And the stress of that loss, the agony of living like that, sent my health spiraling downhill.  That was something my family couldn’t help but notice.  They took me to doctors, looking for answers that never came.

And, for the second time in my life, I wanted to die.  But something stopped me.  The words of my soul-sister, and the knowledge that ending my own life was something neither she nor the man I loved would EVER want for me.  So, I decided to live — for them. But a part of my heart closed off, and I knew that loving the way I loved him would never happen again.  Not in this lifetime.

That’s not to say I haven’t dated, or loved anyone, since.  In 2004, I got married for the first time.  I love my husband, in my own way, and he knows the story of my first love, and that there are just some parts of my heart he can never have.  I’ve never kept that from him.

So, yes, I know what Romance is.  It’s loving someone so much you hurt inside, but take peace from knowing that, in some ways, they’ll never leave you completely.  It’s having the courage to love again, even if it’s not in the same way.  It’s not about Happily Ever After — it’s about “I love you” meaning more than a fairytale.  It’s about that love giving you the strength to go on, even when life seems impossible to bear.

Out of the Dark: Glimpses from My Life, Part 1

I promised everyone that I would let you take a peek inside my head, to help you better understand what and how I write.  I always keep my promises, one way or another, so here goes:

The faceless “they” of publishing wisdom always advise a writer to write what he or she knows.  I often wonder if “they” know what they’re asking for.

I write gritty, dark Romance that often skirts the very edge of denying the traditional “Happily Ever After” ending.  I write characters with real flaws – nobility tarnished by deeds not so very far in the past, nightmares that still follow, and destinies riddled with the very things they most fear or despise.

Why?  Because life is NOT a fairytale – at least, not the watered-down, roses-and-songbook variety of today.  Life is an old-fashioned, Grimm fairytale, drenched in blood, tears, and darkness, through which a sliver of light shines, if you know where to look for it.

That’s not to say that I don’t dream of happiness, or that I don’t believe in true love.  I happen to believe in both, and I’ve been called a Pollyanna, before, for insisting on looking at the bad parts of life as a learning experience.  But I’m also realistic enough to know that turning life into a Valentine’s Day greeting card fantasy isn’t likely to inspire much hope – it only highlights how destitute one’s life looks, in comparison.

I know my writing, and my viewpoint, isn’t for everyone.  I tend to deal with material and circumstances that turn conventional Romance, and even fiction, on its ear.  I’m sure some people have found my work shocking, disturbing, and even offensive (and I have the reviews to prove it).  I make no apology for what I write.  I’m doing exactly as the publishing axiom says – I’m writing what I know.

Bits and pieces of my life and experiences show up in my books.  In the characters, the locations, the plots.

One of my most common themes is trauma.  This isn’t a capricious or accidental move on my part.  I’ve seen enough personal trauma to fill a dozen lifetimes, and I tend to mete a portion of that trauma out to my character, especially.

I’ve learned the hard way that life and love aren’t the stereotypical hearts-and-flowers romance.  I’ve learned that sex isn’t always precipitated by love or desire — sometimes, it’s a power play.  Sometimes, it’s an armored tank that leaves you flattened and bleeding in the middle of life’s road.

Which makes the perfect segue into giving you a peek into my past.  I will warn you, what follows is as shocking and terrible as it is true… And it’s a trauma I live with every day of my life, and will continue to struggle with until the day I die.  Contrary to popular opinion and urban myth, there is no 100% recovery — because there’s always that wary little part of your soul that keeps waiting for disaster to strike.  Most of the contents of the following, I have only recently finally revealed to my own parents – I hid it all so well that even those closest to me wouldn’t suspect.  Nor did anyone suspect just how badly the false face I wore ate at me.  But my path in life does not allow me to hide from myself or others, and part of facing my past, for myself, is in relating my story to others in bare terms, no longer covered by the thin veneer allowed for so long by my writing career.

I’m sure most people live an idyllic childhood.  I’ve heard enough stories to be jealous of those people who remember childhood fondly.  I have a very few of those memories.  Most of the “happiness” in my childhood is false.  It was a veil I dropped over the terror and shame I felt.

That’s not to say it didn’t start out relatively normal.  There were a few bumps, but those remain highly private, as I don’t seek to harm the person who inflicted them – in any event, those would have been bearable, compared to what came later.

The horror descended into my life at the tender age of six.

To say I was entirely ignorant of the mechanics of sex, even at that age, would be a lie.  Thanks to an accidental exposure to a particularly racy adult film, I had an academic knowledge of sex starting at the age of 4.  However, my childish mind equated all sexual acts with love and romance.  I truly believed in it.

That all came crashing down after I turned six.

My elementary school, at the time, had mandatory swimming lessons at the base pool.  Two days a week, we were bussed over to the pool, where we learned to float, swim, etc.  Sounds like a great time, right?

Not for me.

Now, I’ve never been overly fond of the water.  It’s part of my nature, a kind of back-of-my-mind fear.  At least, it always was before.

I remember it being a sunny, warm day in September.  School had just started for the year, and I was excited about first grade.  When I learned we’d have a short set of trips to the pool for swimming lessons, that Fall, and then a longer stretch of them in the late Spring, I was naturally a little anxious.  But not so much as to keep me from attempting my best to learn a new skill, and maybe conquer my minor trepidation.

To this day, I wonder if some of those early misgivings were a warning I failed to heed.

Our final day of swim lessons for the Fall, I wasn’t feeling well.  Given that I was never a strong swimmer, the swim teacher decided it would be better if I lay down somewhere quiet, rather than get back in the pool.  She had some high school kids there, helping (I’m guess, now that I’m older, that they were on work study), so she instructed one of them to take me back to the pool’s office area, where it was quiet and dim, so I could lay down.

Did I mention that I was a trusting child?

I did as I was told, followed the guy back to the offices.  I still remember the smell of chlorine and dust, mixed together – it hung in the air, there.  To this day, the smell of chlorine makes me ill.  Because that day is forever etched in my nightmares, and began a long, terrible battle with PTSD.

I remember how quiet it was.  You couldn’t hear a sound from the pool area.  The office was dark, smelled of stale air and pool water.  The couch was hard, the material abrasive.  I didn’t want to lay down on it.  He didn’t give me a choice.  He pushed me down, held me there, and did things to me that still make me nauseous to think about, all these years later.  That day was my first introduction to real evil — I can still see the cold, soulless look in his eyes, smell the scent of chlorine on his skin and the feel of his hand over my mouth when I started to scream.  When he finished, he threatened me with terrible things, told me what a terrible little girl I was, and that if I told anyone, he would find me and hurt me more.

I was six years old, and my innocent belief in fairytales came crashing down.  I learned the ugly truth that sex isn’t always about love.  Sometimes, it’s about power.  Sometimes, it’s about pain, and fear.

I’ve spent a lifetime with that secret locked in my head.  Tried not to gag, or scream, or give away any emotion whatsoever, when confronted with water – particularly swimming pools.  I just scrunched up my courage, and forced myself into the water, when I couldn’t avoid it.

That afternoon in Hell was only one among many I would eventually face, but it scarred me for life, and for years afterward, I thought I was bad, I was shameful.  I hated myself, and believed no one could ever love me.  I was tainted.

I’ll leave off there, for now… I’m emotionally drained just from that, and I don’t think I can bear to share any more, at the moment.

Do I believe I am the only one who’s ever suffered this way?  Far from it.  There are people who suffer far worse every day of their lives.  These are the people I write for – to show them there is hope.  That you don’t have to live an idyllic, or even a “good” life to find love or peace (and yes, in spite of everything, I do believe in both – but that’s a story for another day).  It can find you in even the most destitute and imperfect of situations.

You don’t need a white knight to rescue you — you only need faith in yourself.  With a little faith, and a sliver of hope, you can find love even after the most terrible of tragedies or abuses.

Exploring the Future

I bet half of you immediately perked up and thought “Oh, wow… A SF excerpt!”

Not today.  I’m embarking on a new phase of my life, where I’ll be exploring the different facets of my life, and allowing you a little peek into who I am underneath it all.

Sound scary?  It is, but it’s also necessary for you to understand the me behind the writing.  There are a great many things people don’t know about me.  Things that would surprise even my closest friends and family to learn.  But, dear readers, these areas of my life are already an open book (pun intended) to you.  You just may not be aware of how much you know about me, after reading my books.

For example, those of you who had a chance to read my Underground series (before the publisher went under… for the rest, don’t worry… I’m working damned hard to get my books back out there) know I wanted to be a Marine… Health issues got in the way of that.  A lot of other details of my life come into focus through that series, but it’s far from the only one that takes a peek inside my life.

Readers of Project Prometheus (available from Aspen Mountain Press at www.aspenmountainpress.com ), for example, will learn I have a deep attachment to the spiritual, and that it tends to filter into all aspects of my life, including my writing.  You’ll meet demons and angels and Fae… Gods, goddesses, mythic heroes, and creatures from the collective mythology of the world.  Project Prometheus, beginning with IN HER NAME, explores the deep mysteries many have chosen to ignore, in our modern world of computers and gadgets.

Going forward, you may start to see some very distinct changes to my website, blogs, and more.  I think this is a very positive and exciting event, and I hope you all agree.

To learn more about me and my books, visit my website (http://www.esthermitchell.com ) and do a little exploring of your own… You might be surprised at what you find along the way!

My Writing Life

I get asked a lot how I got started writing… *grin* So here’s a little bit of my writing past history:

I really can’t remember a time I DIDN’T want to be a writer. When I was wee little (before I even learned what an alphabet was), I would create stories in my head of fascinating, mythical places and strange creatures. I scribbled in the blank (and sometimes NOT so blank… forgive me, I was a baby…*GRIN*) pages of every book I could find, until my parents finally decided it would be safer to give me a notebook I could mess up all I wanted, and leave the rest of the reading material alone. And so began the creation of a writer. I carried that notebook everywhere with me (never mind that even the most talented handwriting expert in the world wouldn’t have been able to decipher it).

Then, when I was about 3, I grew determined to actually be able to read what I wrote (remember, I still thought I was writing words), so I sat down with children’s versions of Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf (the pictures in those books always fascinated me), and painstakingly (and with the help of my then-kindergarten-aged brother) taught myself to read. Imagine my surprise (and dismay) when I discovered that what I’d been scribbling all along was just that… scribbles!! Well, that just wasn’t good enough, anymore.

So out came the pencil and crayons and, for hours at a time, I sat and carefully replicated my letters, using the children’s books I loved. Being a perfectionist, even then, I naturally spent more time being frustrated by the fact that I wasn’t mastering it fast enough. I had no clue that, at my age (not even 4, yet), no one expected me to be able to read even a single word, let alone string sentences together and actually WRITE them!

Eventually, I felt I mastered my letters well enough. I turned to vocabulary, then, determined to know as many words as I possibly could. I carried the dictionary with me everywhere, and taught myself 5 new words every day.

By the time I actually started school, I’d mastered reading, and writing my basic alphabet in block letters. And I was hungry for creative expression. Unfortunately, kindergarten does not provide for that kind of expression… So, to cover my disappointment, I buried my desire to write and plodded through school. Until 3rd grade.

My 3rd grade teacher, bless him, saw something in me that most of my teachers thus far hadn’t. He encouraged me to write essays, and then, short little stories where I put myself in the place of an inanimate object (yes, I still have those stories… these days, I wince at how juvenile and uncrafted they sound, but at the time, I was damned proud of those stories! …). And that was when my desire to write was reborn completely, and I made up my mind. No matter what else I did in life, I wanted to be a writer. I was GOING to be a writer.

When I was nine, I went back to my very first literary love… Arthurian Legend. I read everything I could find ever published on Arthurian Legend, from Celtic mythology to Sir Tomas Mallory and beyond. And I grew increasingly more attached to Celtic mythology, and began to form my own views of the legend. Shortly before my tenth birthday, I decided it was time to write down my version… So I got together notebooks, and undertook an epic that I’m still, to this day, hard at work on. So was born my Chronicles of a Dragon’s Realm (now a 17-book series, as yet unpublished, because I haven’t found the right market for it).

At the age of eight, I’d discovered the world of Romance, thanks to a little book by Christine Smith called Murder Most Strange. And I was already deep into reading the works of Tom Clancy and Leonard B. Scott. So, after a while of writing historicals (and after my first meeting with a group of very dear friends of mine who were all Active Duty military), my interest broadened, and I began drafting the first pages of what would eventually become my first published novel, Tamia.

Tamia, the first book of my Underground Futuristic series, was originally published in January of 2004.  And so began my rocky road with publishing, the first round.  After three years of ups and downs with a single publisher, that publisher went bankrupt in July of 2007, and a court battle to regain my copyrights later, I was ready to face the publishing world again – excited, weary, and a good bit wiser to the ways of the publishing world.  Since then, I’ve had two books published with a different publisher (you can check them out here ), and Underground may soon be making its way back to the market with another publisher.

That sums up my writing life, to the present.  Stay tuned for more announcements about upcoming releases!