Anya Bast

Some people scorn Valentine’s Day as a commercial holiday, some embrace it as a celebration of romantic love. Some people hate Valentine’s Day because they haven’t yet found anyone yet to share it with. Whatever you think of Valentine’s Day, here is it. Again.

My opinion of the holiday falls somewhere in the middle. I note it, buy a gift for my honey, accept his gift to me and move on. If my honey doesn’t buy me a gift…HE’S IN REALLY BIG TROUBLE!!!!! Ahem. Just kidding. Seriously, I don’t really care about V-Day. *koff* Really.

But Valentine’s Day has me thinking about love in all its various forms — ALL forms of love, not just romantic love. There is motherly love, sisterly and brotherly love. There is the love we feel for our friends, our pets. There is the love we hopefully feel for ourselves.

However, this Valentine’s Day I find myself thinking a lot about the kind of love I have with my husband. Something I would term “mature love”.

Ugh. I feel old now.

Anyway, after over a dozen years of being together I would say that the blush is definitely off the rose. Oh, we have our moments of return to that giddy place when we were first together, when passion ran high and my heart beat faster just because of his presence. But, let’s face it, that kind of love doesn’t last…and thank goddess! Otherwise we’d all have heart attacks five years into our relationships.

No, my husband and I have that enduring, settled, I-can-finish-your-sentence kind of love. The kind of love that has weathered storms that made our relationship stronger. The kind of love that is comfortable and based in deep friendship. My husband is my best friend and I know he’s got my back as we progress through life. Just as I have his back. (No! That’s NOT what I meant, you perves! I mean we’re protective and supportive of each other.)

Even though he and I are different personality-wise and we’ve found a way to make that work. We complement each other and give the other what we, individually, don’t possess in our personalities.

So, I guess I’m giving up a little yay for the more “seasoned” type of love this year…even though it makes me feel old. (I got married young, peoples!)

This Valentine’s Day, I hope you DO celebrate. Who cares if it’s commercialized! What holiday isn’t? Today is just one more excuse to honor love, in any form, and that’s never a bad thing.

If you don’t have a sweetheart, celebrate anyway. Celebrate yourself. Treat yourself to something nice, a bubble bath and a glass of wine. Give yourself the evening to do whatever it is you want to do and free yourself from chores and responsibilities.

If you have a friend you’ve been meaning to call, call him or her! If you have a pet, buy her some cat nip or a dog toy.

Celebrate the luuuurve, people!

And, so, to show my readers that I love and appreciate them, I’m having a contest. Send me an email at anyabast (at) gmail.com sometime before Friday, February 16th and put LOVE in the subject line and I will hold a drawing for a free download from my backlist.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

Today I’m going to talk about heartbreak. Tomorrow, in honor of V-Day, I’ll talk about luuuuurrrrve. Because, you know, into every life a little heartbreak must fall. It goes hand-in-hand with luuuurrrrve.

Yes, heartbreak is something everyone experiences. It’s a “character building experience,” as my father would say. So, yeah, I have a lot of character. Enough with the character-building already! That’s what I screamed in my early twenties. (Luckily the heartbreak ended shortly afterward because I met my current husband).

I can still remember my very first heartbreak poignantly. I was, oh…fourteen, I believe. He was my first Boyfriend of Consequence. It was the innocent, new kind of love. The fourteen-year-old “going with each other” love. Do kids still say they’re “going with” someone or was that an eighties thing?

And, boy, I can still remember the day he broke up with me. We’d been “going together” for quite some time. I thought he walked on water (that opinion changed soon) and we would be together forever, (I’m glad I was wrong about that because I looked him up later on in life. Ahem). It was the middle of winter, snowdrifts up to my eyeballs. That afternoon I’d walked to a friend’s house and talked endlessly of him because I thought he was so cute and soooo awesome and incomparable.

Then I called him. And right there, on the phone, in my friend’s house, out of the clear blue heavily gray snow-clouded skies…he DUMPED my ass! He gave me a speech about a monkey wrench being thrown into a car engine or some such. The bottom line was that…HE’D MET SOMEONE ELSE! Dumped for another girl!

Oh, I thought my heart was going to disintegrate. I can still remember the sorrowful trudge through the snow to get home, my tears freezing to my cheeks. Ah, the drama of youth.

I was miserable for a long time, moped around and thought I was dying. I never went through the “I’ll get him back” phase that most girls and women experience in the initial stage of heartbreak. I went straight to the “that rotten scoundrel!” phase. But I was still heartbroken and despondent.

Months later, after my heart had healed, a met a new boy…and I broke his heart. Heh.

So it goes, round and round. Break, mend, break, mend. And then…sound of angelic choir… hopefully you meet The One. And that love is all the more sweeter for the bedrock of heartbreak it’s laid upon. But more on that tomorrow.

Can you remember your first heartbreak?

We’ve been on a ski trip for the last week (which is why I haven’t been blogging, see?). Well, actually my husband and our friends were on a ski trip. I just sat around in our lovely rented townhouse, sipped hot chocolate by the fire and acted like a nordic queen (and I wrote a lot ). It was great. I love the cold and snow. I did my heart and soul good to be around it for a while.

So, I’m still a little jet-lagged, but here are some random shots from where we stayed.

Our Zen Alarm clock broke a couple days ago and my husband and I mourned.

We’d had it for a long time, about 7 years, and it had undergone lots of abuse…mostly from the cats. Cats abuse everything. We’re continually having to replace our blinds because little kittehs like to stick their little kitteh heads through them to look out the window and break the slats in the process (tangent).

Anyway, we love the Zen Alarm clock (no, I get no money for sounding like commercial here) because we hate — with burning passion of a thousand, million suns — waking to the obnoxious, annoying ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! of your standard digital alarm.

Neither do we enjoy waking to music or talk radio. I can STILL remember the Braunschweiger and Old Home Cottage Cheese commercials that were always on the radio as I awoke as a child. If I hear anything about Braunschwieger or Old Home Cottage Cheese to this day, it sends me into a violent fit. (tangent)

So, when we lost our beloved Zen Alarm clock, we sat on the bed with the object between us and stared mournfully down at it. I just ordered a new one. *Sigh*

They’re good, too, if you’re like me and dream vividly. I want to remember my dreams in the morning and being jarred from my sleep by ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! ZHUNN!!! is not conducive to this. It, in fact, ruins my whole day. The Zen Alarm clock awakens you gently with carefully spaced ting, ting, tings that are graduated in volume.

Best of all, even if I hear ting, ting, ting, sometime throughout my day, I am not catapulted into an instant rage, like a red flag waved in front of a bull, as I am with the aforementioned commercials. I think this is a Very Good Thing. Anything to make life a little more pleasant, you know?

I know this post had nothing whatsoever to do with writing. But, now, I am off to write.

First, Nipple Nibblers…

…is better for your lips than Carmex. Of course, Nipple Nibblers really aren’t meant to go on one’s lips, per se…but whatever works, right? I buy this product for my lips and only my lips. (*koff* No, really! I swear!)

And second, I love me some kitty feet.

I think kitty feet are one of cutest things in life.

That’s about all I have on this lazy Saturday. Exciting, no?

Here is my TBR Pile…one of them, that is. This is my immediate TRB Pile. We won’t talk about the bookshelf in my office, mmmkay? If one day I’m brave enough, I’ll post a picture of that one and let you all shudder in disbelief.

Not pictured is the book I just finished — Archangel, by Sharon Shinn. Loved it. Am now bent on buying Shinn’s backlist.

1. Surviving Demon Island, by Jaci Burton. I started this one last night and frigging couldn’t…put…it…DOWN! I stayed up waaaay too late and read about half the novel. It’s a fast, action-packed read. I love the characters. (I always love Jaci’s characters.)

2. (Sequel to Archangel), Jovah’s Angel, by Sharon Shinn.

3. The Rest Falls Away, by Colleen Gleason. I’ve heard so much about this book. I can’t wait to start it.

4. Blood lines, Eileen Wilks

5. A Hunger Like No Other, Kresley Cole (another book I’ve heard a lot about)

6. Beyond the Pale, Savannah Russe

7. If Angels Burn, by Lynn Viehl. I’ve been meaning to try this author for some time. Honestly, it was the title that got me on this one.

8. Hell’s Belles, by Jackie Kessler

And…Blood Bound, by Patricia Briggs is soon to be released. I can’t wait for that one.

Yesterday I got my Witch Fire edits back to Berkley. Now I’m working on polishing up Whisper of the Blade for EC. I hope to have off to my editor by Monday. After that? Well, I have a couple different projects I can turn my hand to.

Now I’m off to stick a nice organic, non-poisonous chicken in the oven for dinner. I prefer the organic, non-poisonous ones, but they’re expensive. *whimper*

I also really need to clean my house. *looks around and shivers* It’s pretty bad.

I dare you to tell me I don’t have the cutest cat eveh. I dare you!

I have more than one, you know. There are eight kitty-kats that run this house. I am subject to the whims of each and every furry paw. They crawl into my lap when I’m trying to finish an important scene. They bat at the pointer on my computer screen. They lounge on the terminal and curl up on the satellite receiver. When one of them, Wiggle, is hungry he steals paper from my printer page by page and scatters them all over the house.

Yes, I have eight cats.

I can even herd them. People say you can’t do that, but I say you can. All you need is a little cat food. They herd just like a bunch of tiny, furry, meowing cows.

Seems like most writers have cats. I find it interesting that so many writers seem to share this common masochistic love of felines. I love them so much I named myself Bast.

Or maybe the truth of why we love cats lies somewhere in this quote…“Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance” – Dan Greenburg

Yeah. Blogging, too.