MaryJanice Davidson | Best Job in the World is...

If no one's ever said it outright, I, MaryJanice Davidson, the artist formerly known as trailer trash, will say it:  writing is the world's best job.  I don't mean best in terms of helping humanity (doctors, nurses, and paramedics have that sewn up).  I mean best in terms of pure awesomeness. 

Writing took me from the trailer park to the best-seller list.  Writing allowed me to quit my succession of SDJs (Stupid Day Jobs), change my family's lifestyle (my kids don't have to study hard for a scholarship; they can go to a party school!), and see the world.  I've given speeches in Australia and France, Los Angeles and Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.  My readers come from all over the world, too.  Incomprehensibly, Betsy is available in fifteen countries.  I can't tell you how many times a German or French or Thai reader has asked me, "What is ‘asshat'?"  (What, like I know?)

So, let me think over the sum of my life so far:  no more SDJs?  Check.  World travel?  Yep.  (MJ, trailer trash and bitterly sarcastic product of Air Force housing, coming to your hometown soon!)  Set my own hours?  Uh-huh.  Get paid ridiculous amounts of money to do what I did for free for over a decade?  You bet.

Right!  So that's it.  I'm awesome.  My books are awesome...or at least readable.  Things are pretty great for me, and it's all thanks to...

...readers.

Yeah.  You guys.  Because no matter how brilliant I am (I'm not), or modest (also: not!), world-famous (sorta), driven (literally? as in I'm being driven to the airport by my daughter? because I'm that kind of driven, but not the other kind), or tenacious (I will have a Cinnebon today, and you can't stop me) I am, or have been, if the books weren't selling my life would be different.  Not worse, necessarily, but much less fun at the least. 

So!  To the readers who buy the hard covers the day they come out, thank you.  To the ones who get the book out of the library (forcing librarians to order more, more, more! mwah-hah-hah!), thank you!  To the ones who wait until it's in paperback, thank you.  To the ones who skim a couple of chapters each time they're in a bookstore because they can't afford to buy it and take it home, thank you.  (That last?  I used to be that reader.  I'd stop at the Wordsworth in Harvard Square in Boston, grab the latest Anita Blake book, read twenty or thirty pages, memorize the page number, go home, go to bed, get back up, go to work, go to Wordsworth, read more Anita, rinse, repeat.)  I like that reader, too, because the minute I actually had some disposable income I bought every Anita Blake book I could get my claws on.  So thank you!

Truly, you have changed my life, you have changed my family's lives, you've made me more than I could have been on my own, and I'm more grateful than I can ever, ever say.

--MaryJanice

www.maryjanicedavidson.net

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UNDEAD AND UNSTABLE excerpt

Spoiler the reader will find out in the first third of the book

Sinclair and I were rigid in our bed. For one of the very few times in our marriage, we had no interest in banging each other into semi-consciousness.

Nope. Thanks to the zombie who had the run of the house now, sex was the last thing on our minds.

"Okay, it's weird, right?" We were both staring at the ceiling. "It's just so creepy. He's our friend and I wanted him back—"

"Monkey's paw," Sinclair muttered.

"—but there's a zombie creeping around our house."

"He has to keep busy."

Boy, did he. Marc had explained that he needed tons of mental stimulation as a zombie, and thus was doing everything he could to keep his zombie brain sharp. Apparently the modern zombie fed from mentally taxing work (like accountants, I guess), which kept him from needing brains. Excuse me: Braaaaaaaains. Marc was a modern cuddly zombie as opposed to a revolting terrifying George Romero creation.

Okay. Fine. We could adapt. We had to adapt to weird stupid things all the time. But we still had the problem of knowing a zombie was creeping around the house trying to keep busy so he wouldn't rot.

I wriggled around on our new bed (Sinclair and I occasionally broke our beds, which was why we were on bed no. 7 . . . thank goodness he was rich!), which mussed our sheets.

"Now I'm apprehensive and my feet are cold," Sinclair sighed.

"You think I'm any happier? It's so creepy knowing he's creeping around being all creepy."

We stared at the ceiling for a few more minutes. "It may be psychological," Sinclair said.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I cannot actually hear anything. We did not know he was in the house before he revealed himself. Now we know he is not only here, he is a zombie. Perhaps our tension is psychological."

"I have no idea what you just said. Oh, fuck."

"Was that a request, or an epithet?"

"My mom's supposed to drop BabyJon off tomorrow." BabyJon was my half brother/ward/son, kinda. But because I was a vampire, and all sorts of bad shit tended to happen around me, I often fobbed him off on my poor mother. The good news was, she'd had to baby-sit so often she was actually getting attached to the kid. "This is gonna be so lame . . . hey, thanks for watching our baby yet again, and by the way, you can't drop him off because now there's a zombie in the house and we're not sure he can be trusted, here's more money for diapers. Ugh."

"The alternative is even less pleasant."

"Dammit!"

We stared at the ceiling some more. "At least Laura called me right back."

"Yes?"

"Yeah. But she wants to meet at this farm outside the Cities, God knows why." My husband flinched at the G word, and I muttered an apology. To all vampires except me, the G word was like the lash of a whip, or a summons to traffic court: unbearably painful. "She said she's got stuff to show me and she wanted to meet on neutral territory. So some farm on the outskirts of Mendota Heights qualifies, I guess."

"I shall accompany you."

"Figured as much."

We examined the ceiling in silence for a few seconds, broken by Sinclair's hopeful "Perhaps, to take our mind off the problem, we could—"

"Uh, no. It's just too weird. I won't be able to not hear him while we're—nope. Sorry."

"I suppose you're right."

Stupid Thanksgiving.

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