Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

WITH NO ONE AS WITNESS by Elizabeth George.

She killed off the pregnant Lady Hellen Clyde.

I am still angry with the author and she is not invited to my house.  Ever.

The characters belong to the author and so do the consequences of the author deciding what to do to and with them.  It’s called the plot and that is the author’s as well.

If my authors are happy, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.  As the first reader on behalf of the public what I do is try to convey the impact of some decisions about plot and character which don’t work for me. But the author’s name goes on the book and the choices ultimately should be up to them.

Kate

Helen not Hellen, I know.

Poor woman deserved better.

I’ve told my editor stuff I planned on doing to characters in various series and she’s flat out told me no, absolutely not, you are not doing that, and made me take it out.  And by “made me”, I mean she’s written me 8 page single spaced editorial letters about why it’s wrong. 

Sometimes I’ve fought her on it, but usually I’ve done what she said and taken it out (case in point, if left up to me, Book 2 of the Princess Diaries series would have been called “Princess of Puke” and would have featured long puking scenes.  We won’t talk about some of the other things I wanted to do that she talked me out of). 

And, looking back, even though it enraged me at the time, I’m glad I did it, because she was always right. 

And that’s why when that particular editor recently left my publishing house, I followed her.  Because sometimes you just get so caught up in the story, you can’t see properly.  Maybe those other writers just don’t have editors who care. —Meg

COUNTERFEIT LADY by Jude Devereux, the first and last book of hers ( or is it his?) I will ever read.  The ‘hero’ is a spineless, drunken fool, the ‘heroine’ is such a doormat that she ought to have “Please wipe your feet’ tattooed on her forehead, and the villainess is fat. That’s her main evil trait:  eating her way through the planet, while Mr Spineless and Ms Doormat do nothing to stop her.  I consider that an insult to the Fat Women of the World.  I was furious with the author for writing such a piece of crap (which gets my vote for Worse So-called Romance Ever) and with the publisher for letting it see the light of day. There ought to be some sort of standards, to protect the reading public.

The most recent book that angered me was Liz Carlyle’s Two Little Lies

It made me angry for a few reasons. The book that preceded it (

One Little Sin) was rather enjoyable, and it introduced me to the characters that would be featured Two Little Lies

.

The problem was that the first book did NOT give me a good impression about the characters of

Two... (Possible Spoilers Ahead) In Sin

, Quin was affianced to a girl, who happened to discover him engaging in sexual activities in his study with a woman who kept slapping him with her riding whip.

Lies

carries on the story between Quin, and the Italian opera singer (the woman with tendencies to whip men).

Which meant that

Lies

had to re-tread old ground for the first quarter of the book—simply from Quin’s perspective and not his jilted fiancee’s. Which was boring.

THEN there were even more flash-backs to establish the relationship between the two characters. Flash-backs on top of flash-backs made me really, really mad. Since the actual story about these two people in the present, didn’t even get going until half-way through the book. By then, I didn’t really like any of the characters very much. They whined a lot, they complained about their lives, about the bad choices they’d made, etc.

And there were practically no sex scenes. The most exciting one was the one in

Sin

with the riding crop and that was just sexual play—they weren’t even having sex.

So. Recap of why I was angry about this book: Double flash-backs were double boring. Self-indulgent characters who WHINE. A LOT. And practically no decent sex scenes (and by “decent,” I mean “naughty”). BUT the supporting characters were very interesting and it was actually the supporting characters who kept me reading the book.

LOVER REVEALED by JR Ward.

I was not so much angry as bitter. I just felt like she’d walked Butch and Vishous to the line (they embraced naked for God’s sake!), and then wussed out. How much more interesting the long-term relationship would have been if they’d crossed the line and then had to go back!

But no.

Also, a little hot BDB butt secks would have made me happy. Maybe it’s just me.

I don’t want to name names, but I get really mad when I’ve been waiting and waiting and WAITING for a couple/character to get their story, only to find that a) the most interesting parts of their story were already written like, 3 books ago and/or b)the story is boring, lame, and totally unworthy of a character I have grown to love over several books

I think I mostly get mad at the author, for stringing me along through a zillion books, and for writing what I consider a lame story when I know, based on past books, that she is capable of writing truly awesome books. Kind of like a mom getting pissed at her kid for not working up to his or her potential. I’m not just mad, I’m very disappointed… 

As for who those characters belong to, it’s the author, obviously. But at a certain point, especially with ongoing series, I think there’s more of an obligation to give readers what they want, even when it might be more interesting creatively to kill off a long standing character or do something equally unexpected. 

Oh, and I’m like, supposed to have a vision? Crap. I better email Hilary, pronto, and see if she has any ideas…  Kidding aside, my editor (and Kate) had a huge hand in the concept for the series I’m working on now. Since I’m really new at this game, I rely on their years of experience and knowledge of what readers respond to.

I have a third kind of reader-anger, which is when an author does something that makes me unhappy but that I know makes the story stronger (e.g. killing off a character I like, separating a couple I want to be together). I get over this anger eventually.

I definitely get angry at the author, not the book.

I think characters do belong to the author, but as you say, reading is an emotional process, and the second type of reader-anger you mention makes me feel betrayed. It’s, maybe, like breaking up with someone: no one may be technically in the wrong, but you’re still mad as hell and don’t want to be in the same room anymore.

Charlaine’s blog doesn’t surprise me at all. I met her a few years ago at a boom signing, if I recall correctly, she claimed that she and Laurell were friends. And further, Charlaine said she was a huge fan of Laurell’s. I imagine it’s hard to watch your friend and colleague take so much heat from former fans.

*shrug*

And if it only takes one person to write a book, what’s with all the dedications on the first page? “This book would not exist without the help of Yadda Yadda Yadda”?

I certainly don’t think that fans have any say over what happens to characters, but they have every right to express their opinions as loud as they like.

Errr BOOK signing, not boom signing.

*head desk*

I’m an avid reader, and I do get disgusted with long-favorite authors because of the direction their writing has taken.  Case in point, anything written by Linda Howard in the last couple of years has been a severe disappointment, especially her tendency to linger (waste page space!) on the pov of the bad guys.

That said,  I know the author is the ultimate ‘god’ of his/her universe.  I’m along for the ride.  If I don’t like it, I can move on to another universe.  But constantly harping about how the ‘author’s done me wrong’ has never entered my mind.  He/she is the owner of her work;  me, I’m the owner of my wallet and have the option of not buying that person’s work anymore.

I haven’t been angry at a book in ages. Can’t remember the last. Maybe because few of them have been significant enough in my brainpan to make me feel cheated. Is that terrible? No, I just don’t read as much as I should.

As for the village analogy—dude, you won’t wanna see my stuff before my CPs get hold of it. UGLY. And that’s before the pros step in and make is saleable. Solo authors turn into crazy authors who can’t self-edit.

I have to answer Ms Harris a bit.  I am a big fan of her Southern Vampire books.  Now I know they aren’t romances, but rather a hybrid of romance, mystery and paranomal.

She started her books off with the heroine Sookie Stackhouse falling for Vampire Bill.  Then a few books in, Vampire Bill began to fall out of favor.  Then there was Vampire Eric, Werewolf Alcide, and Weretiger Whatshisname (I don’t like him, can’t ever remember his name).  But I’ve stayed with the books, even though I’m a Bill fan (and terrified that Ms Harris is going to kill him off), because the books are good.

However, the last one wasn’t that good.  I felt Sookie was out of character, didn’t pick up on things she would have normally.  Basically, the book was a bridge, connecting where the previous books have been to where the story is going.

I know that Ms Harris has a very vocal message board at her site and an author can’t please everyone.  But who are we to be upset with when the characters seem to spiral out of character?  Are we to be upset with the fictional characters or their creator?  As someone who paid $25 for Ms Harris’s last hardback, I have a right to my displeasure.

Larry McMurty kills off his main characters with an alacrity that drives me nuts. But I can’t help myself; I keep coming back.

After Lonesome Dove I swore I wouldn’t read another. But then I read the sequal.
The hero in the sequal gets killed off after getting his arms and legs chopped off and squirming his way across the desert. I exaggerate, but not by much.

I swore then I would never read another. But then I did. I read ever single one of his books. I hated myself while I did it. But his characters are so damned good I can’t stay away! And then he kills them.

Maybe this explains why S&M shows up in so many of my books. Hmmm. Back to the shrink.

What was the last book you got angry about?

Karin Slaughter, she did a very bad thing, with one of her main characters. I think that donkey has been flogged well enough now though.

Prior to that was Patricia Cornwell, she too did a very bad thing with one of her key characters. Readers went crazy, then she tried to make it all better, by cancelling out the bad thing that she did.

It was never the same after that though.  Kind of like trying to stay friends after you split up with a former lover.  Awkward and uneasy.

Sweet Revenge by Nora Roberts. Dear lord that book pissed me off. I didn’t realize it was a re-release of something from the 80s. I expected better from Nora Roberts. Even when I realized it was probably an earlier work I was disappointed. It wasn’t funny. I didn’t like the characters. And it had a rapist abusive sheikh for chrissakes! Oh and I can’t forget the hero who magically healed the heroine, who was afraid of sex after witnessing her mother being raped by her father the sheikh, with sex. Man, it still pisses me off that I spent money on that book.

But, I don’t think I was really mad with the author. Disappointed yes, but I was mad at the book for sucking so hard.

The characters definitely belong to the author, though, which makes it hard not to get angry at the author when a book isn’t what you expected.

I get more annoyed when authors tend to carry on series far beyond their logical conclusions.  Case in point: Jean M. Auel (enough of the mammoth sex already) and Diana Gabaldon (enough of the OMG I know the future we’re all going to die—but then we don’t—followed by sex).  I would rather leave my characters who I’ve grown to love at a time and place where I can feel good about them and know that there’s a HEA.  The parallel is when a TV show goes on for far, far too long.  No one really watches it and it sinks into obscurity, clinging to guest starts and cameo celebs.  Those are the things that make me upset with books/authors.

MaryKate - I agree. I would have liked to see the Vishous/Butch thing explored further. One thing that grated a little was when they finally have their embrace - it was followed by this was Never going to happen again, NEVER EVER, that’s NEVER EVER EVER. She couldn’t just let the action speak for itself and leave it ambiguous.

As for the book that last upset me. I almost hesitate to mention this ‘cause I know blogs and message boards where discussion is still ongoing. But it’s Karin Slaughter’s Skin Privilege (Beyond Reach in the US). I’ve given away all the books in the series. I read the end and felt like I’d wasted my time and money.

I’ve gone off series before (LKH) but I’ve kept the books I enjoyed. But this last Grant County book…it’s the first book that’s made me appreciate Kathy Bates position in Misery.

I think what bugs me most about the Harris post is her disingenuous “surprise” that readers are so invested in books/characters that they become angry when the books take a direction they don’t like. When an author invites readers to interact with them (and with each other) via a blog or message board or forum, readers will feel more comfortable voicing their opinions. Is that so difficult to comprehend?

As for the last book that made me angry, I think it was Stephanie Plum #12, when Stephanie kissed Ranger while living mostly at Morelli’s house. Infidelity is my #1 bulletproof squick, so between that and the lazy writing (barely 200 pages, 14-point type, 16-point line spacing, and 1.25” margins) I felt quite justified in not only skipping #13, but in donating #s 1-12 to my local Goodwill.

I’m starting to get a little scared by the spamblocker’s psychic abilities: my current word is reaction99.

Gee Mary Kate,

Um I am not gonna waste my time even reading that JR Ward book.

Thank you for the heads up.

I agree with Two Little Lies.  85% of the damned novel was unnecessary and blatantly stupid.  It felt like John Jakes old crap.  Wallow, wallow, sex, wallow, wallow.

Anyway, I hate to harp on her, but I not only can’t read Hamilton anymore… her promotional nightmare with Micah was an outrage.  I picked it up, took one look at the gi-normous font and print spacing, and discovered she’d gotten a novel’s worth of cash out of me for a cheesy, incomplete, bad novella with unpleasant TMI sprawled over every page.

Johanna Lindsey’s Captive (not the last, but the one before—may have the title screwed up) was, IMO, so badly written I was convinced the first few pages were either a joke or something awful had happened to her and an intern was forced to write the book.  I haven’t picked up the new one.

I think everyone was pissed at Charlaine Harris when she killed off the husband in one of her other series. I can’t remember which one. It was a big deal, I guess, but I read the last book first, so I didn’t really care. But I recall that her readers were outraged. Tough titty.

I was pissed at the Vampire Queen’s Servant. Sorry Joey. I suck, I know it. I just didn’t like her guys. Sorry. I couldn’t find ANYTHING redeemable about her. Nothing. And that made me a little mad because I was so looking forward to reading it. But I will keep reading Joey Hill. :)

“Also, a little hot BDB butt secks would have made me happy. Maybe it’s just me.” ABSOLUTELY agree with you there, Mary Kate.

The characters belong to the writer, during the process of creating them and telling their story. A writer can’t write with readers hanging over her shoulder giving their opinions, their hopes, their wishes.

Which one(s) do you listen to?

But the characters become the reader’s when the reader opens the book. And she has every right to get as angry as she wants, as happy as she wants.

An editor edits—and thank God for good, solid, smart editors who tell us no. (No to Princess Puke!)

I don’t think writing is a collaboration. It’s a partnership, and that’s a different thing to me. Ultimately, it’s my decision whether to listen to my editor, and to take her direction. If I’m a good partner, and trust my partner, I’m going to listen, and the majority of the time, take her advice.

The reader then becomes another partner—each individual one. A writer can’t listen to all of them, as they’ll often contridict each other. What one loved, the other hated. Who’s right?

Both.

But…

When a large group of readers agree, the smart writer needs to listen, and to consider. Just as she listened to her editor, and considered.

When a book meets my bedroom wall, it is almost never because of something that a character has done.  My major beef is with style.  If an author I enjoy has gone off the rails and written something that is more an exercise in, “Look how literary I am!  Aren’t you impressed by my magical writerliness?” than an actual story, I’m done.  Every time this happens, I have a mental image of editors fleeing like rats from the author’s sinking ship.  And if the editors have abandoned them, so will I.

I read to be immersed in a world, not befuddled by wordplay.

lisabea,

Did you see the new Joey Hill “Rough Canvas” out over at Ellora’s Cave?
It’s got man on man action.

I am reading it as we speak… Get it!

Unfortunately, the most recent book to piss me off was by a new author that I met and absolutely adored. I rushed out (err - 6 weeks later) to snatch up her book. At first, I loved it. It was riveting, and so well written. I was in love with the characters, especially the main character, and then suddenly at the second to last chapter, the main cc revealed that she was in fact the villain and had been lying to the reader the whole time about her role in the book’s murder. I was so pissed about that. It completely let the air of the balloon for me. I truly hate those unreliable narrators.

I tend to be a good (or maybe lucky) picker. The last book I remember getting really angry about was the third book of the Bitterbynde Trilogy by Cecelia Dart-Thornton. Terrific trilogy, really liked it, well written, nice riffs on Celtic myths and legends, heroine makes progress at the end of each book, heading nicely toward a HEA…

[SPOILER WARNING]

...until BOOM! Ten pages from the end the heroine is RIGHT BACK WHERE SHE STARTED, no HEA, no memory, no friends, no lover, massively disfigured by horrible accident.

[OK, safe to read now.]

I believe I may have yelled “I just read 1000 pages for THIS?”

I think I was mainly mad at the book. With a side of pique for the author and whoever let her do that. Up to that point it had been great, though.

I also get disappointed when good series slide. Again, I’ve been a pretty lucky picker up to now, so it hasn’t happened that often.

Lisabea, I think I read that Charlaine Harris—it’s the only one of hers I’ve read. Mainly I was puzzled, in a “Huh. Well, that came out of nowhere” kind of way, but I suspected I would’ve been quite annoyed if I’d been a long-time reader of the series.

I picked up a book the other day (sorry, I got rid of it, don’t remember the title or the author) but after 30 pages I put it back down, pissed because I’d already wasted that much time on the story.

What did author do? Wrote in so many cliches that I began to think it was the goal. As if the characters speaking and thinking cliche lines weren’t enough, their jobs, their internal conflicts, problems with family EVERYTHING FEAKING THING was nothing but one big cliche.

Grr….

The only author I ever got seriously pissed at was Stephen King when I got to the end of “Cujo”.  I was so upset that it took me nearly 10 years to pick up another Stephen King novel even though he had been a favorite up to then.  I’ve probably only read three of his books since then.

I have had other authors that I’ve left in the dust because their stories got annoying.  Cathleen Coulter is really pissing me off with her regurgitated novels.  They read like they were written 20-30 years ago.  Story styles and storylines have changed over the decades.

Also, a few years ago I picked up a bunch of Harlequin romances at a garage sale…something like 10 for $1.00.  I read a bunch of them and was getting really irritated.  Then I thought to look at the published dates and they were all from the early 80’s.  All the stories had a similar theme where the “hero” basically blackmails the heroine to be with him.  We call that sexual harassment these days and I really can’t stand to read those storylines any more.

Of course readers have the right to be sad/annoyed/angry when a book doesn’t turn out they way they want.  Everyone is entitled to her own feelings.  But that doesn’t mean those feelings need to be aired outside the privacy of one’s own head. 

Can you imagine it in an art gallery?  “You know, she used more blue in her last painting, and I liked it so much better.  This painting should be blue!  And all her future works should feature blue as well—because I like blue!” 

No matter what happens in a book (movie, painting, whatever), someone will hate it.  Someone else will love it.  The creator of the work can’t please both;  so she has to please herself, first.

I don’t get angry when it’s the “author’s vision” of the character and it seems to follow some kind of arc.  I get very annoyed when things seem neatly wrapped up in an HEA, and then there is another book and they have broken up because ... well, there is no logic to the character change.  It just happens. The book hits the wall, the author is removed from my buy list.

And paranormal series can make me crazy.  The big baddy can’t be the *ultimate* evil in every book if it’s different every time.  How many apocalypses can there be?  How come no one ever discovers mediocre evil plots? Or demonic forces that will take out, oh a square mile or two of New Jersey instead of destroying ‘life as we know it’ EVERY DAMN TIME they run into something sinister?  If the first book in a series confronts an ultimate evil and does come to some kind of reasonable resolution, it has to be extraordinarily well written and plotted with really appealing characters before I’d even consider buying the second.

Mostly if I am angry, it is at the author.  Why would I blame the book?  The book has no say in how it’s written.

Gwynnyd

Of course the characters belong to the author as she/he created them and they can do what they want with them.

BUT. . . . .

they need to be prepared for reader reaction. Just because they think that what they did was the best thing for the book/characters doesn’t mean everyone is going to agree.

And when readers get pissed, the authors need to put on their big girl pants and deal with it.  Not whine about what a bunch of ungrateful idiots the readers are.

Taking the questions in order:

1. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry about a book. Well, not about fiction. I’ve been angry about nonfiction books, but that’s not under discussion here.

2. I don’t get angry, but I do get disappointed. I’ve read books that I thought were bad, or not as good as the author could be. I always hope that the author will get better again, or back to the sort of thing I dig, but I know in reality that that is unlikely. It’s a rare author who can keep my interest past six books; they tend to wind down like a top after that.

3. I’m disappointed in the book when I feel that the author is telling a story that I’m just not interested in. I’m disappointed in the author when I feel that they “phoned it in” or just did a lot of illogical, silly things with the plot and characters. I often am annoyed with the editor at that point, too, since it’s her job to keep the author from displaying stupidity, but I know that editors don’t have a magic author-control switch.

4. The characters belong to the author. Period. I have come to tolerate fanfic as an expression of how captivating an author’s world is, but in the “canon” works, the author is God, and the readers can dig it or they can stop buying the books.

5. I haven’t got an editor yet, but my agent made excellent suggestions on my first novel. She really “got” what I was trying to do, and made suggestions that made a lot of sense to me and amped up my own vision. When/if we sell the book, I hope it’s to an editor who sees it the same way.

The only books I really get mad at are those that leave you hanging…and there isn’t a sequel.

Gone with the Wind pissed me off royally.  The first book that I read of Guy Gavriel Kay’s was the only book I’ve ever thrown at the wall (too lazy to look up the name now).

I gave up on Charlaine’s series pretty early on. I was still reading LKH at the time, so Charlaine’s books seemed (to me) like LKH Lite in the South. Then LKH dropped Micah and that was it for me, as well. Which makes me surprisingly sad because I LOVE the Anita Blake series. And I had thought that she was getting all of her wild ‘n crazy sex out in her Merry Gentry series but… no. Now it’s all just wild ‘n crazy sex and, if I had wanted that, I would have just bought some erotica. (LKH also wrote some random book based of an RPG card game, I think, called Ravenscroft

, or something similar, and that book scarred me for LIFE. It was appallingly disgusting and I must have been high when I bought it.)

Back to the topic at hand: I never, ever assume that a writer is writing for anyone but him/herself. It’s their world, and their characters. The author is merely inviting me into that world.

BUT if a book angers, or disappoints me, it makes me wary of buying another book from the same author. I give new authors a chance all of the time and I often never give them a second chance.

And with established authors (series or not) like Harris and Liz Carlyle—one really bad book can be enough to put me off their work indefinitely. And not out of any sense of betrayal, but because reading a bad book from an author I had previously enjoyed just makes me sad. It makes me feel like an English teacher who is telling her student that she could do SO MUCH BETTER.

I was really, really looking forward to the new Nora Roberts (“High Noon”) only to get royally pissed off with her main characters. The heroine is so strong, hard working, wonderful, etc. that she made my head hurt - nobody, not nobody, is that self-sacrificing. The hero was no better - come on folks, he WON THE LOTTERY, loves his family and is there to help with laundry when you need him. Can anyone say pandering?

To an extent I agree, my character’s are mine so back off dammit.

But then I read a book by Erica Spindler and saw red for a week. I saw the twist in the plot at chapter one and her heroine was dumber than spit. She had sex with a guy. The afterglow was her throwing up dinner, because she was that uncomfortable with him touching her and then the same heroine decided to get engage to him and told herself she’d get over it eventually.

WTF?!!

When this happens I think something has gone wrong in the village. I understand and believe writer’s should write first for themselves, but at some point you have to think of the reader. I’m not saying censorship, but an author should asking themselves how would I feel about this character if I wasn’t writing he/she but reading he/she’s story?

The most recent book that pissed me off was “The Jury” by Fern Michaels.  Has anyone else read this dog?  You have my sympathy.  Thank Jebus it was given to me and I didn’t pay money for it.

It has bad writing, mean-spirited physical abuse, man-bashing, and so many other bad points.  The book opens with the main character estranged from her love interest.  Apparently her past bad behavior has driven him away for good.  Until they magically get back together with absolutely no mention of how they resolved their issues.  So very bad…are all Fern Michaels like this?

As a reader I get angry when one or both H/H do obviously stupid things. The BIG misunderstanding ploy annoys, really annoys when used more than once in the same book. The other thing is when an author kills a great series by never letting it end. Brilliant is exceedingly difficult to repeat endlessly in the same world with the same rules.

I’ve only had one editor and she is a GODDESS! She has told me NO a few times, but she has been sooooo right. Only once did I insist on a point. I am dang lucky to benefit from her knowledge and experience.

I can’t remember ever being as angry as I am right now at Stephanie Laurens and her publisher, and her editor and her hair dresser… sigh. Her newest, Beyond Seduction, is the same book with different characters.

She is a wonderful writer. Hers is beautiful, almost poetic writing… but every single couple in the last few books thinks exactly the same thing as the couple in the previous book. Does the same thing. Says the same thing (to themselves, no less). STOP IT.

Why wouldn’t the editor say: “Steph, you’ve done this one before hun, 14 times?”

Yes, it’s her world and she’s god in it, but I’m not paying with my time and money to worship at the alter of an author’s lack of imagination, or unwillingness to take some chances…. or an ego that says the readers won’t recognize this as already having been done, by me, a lot…..

Every author is going to piss some readers off some time. J R Ward would have seriously pissed off some romance readers if she had let Butch and V have sex, and she seriously pissed off some romance readers when she didn’t let them have sex. Doesn’t matter, she wrote a great story and no one can say it was a bad book—- it may not have gone where you wanted it to, but it was good writing and an interesting story. Her characters, her decision, but not boring.

Stephanine Laurens, not so much anymore

Katie,  LKH wrote a novel for the tapletop RPG Ravenloft.  My husband has been a gamer since middle school, and collects the novels from a number of different gaming worlds.  I’ll play any game, but woo boy, some of those books are not pretty.

Teddypig,
I am so incoherent. What I meant to say was this: I didn’t like Lady Elyssa what-ever-the-rest-of-her-name-was from the Vampire Queen’s Servant. She was too dark. Which makes me sound like a whiner for expecting a nicer vampire, but, hey, that’s just me. She was all: “I kill humans, deal with it. I am evil dark dark dark”, and he was all, “Yea babe, that’s cool. Where do I sign on?”  NOT sexy. She had 1000 years worth of baggage, which just made the relationship too much work. I couldn’t finish the book. Waa. Sadly, it hit the wall.

I’ll down load the Joey Hill tonight cuz it looks very, very good. ;)

Oh, too funny and how timely.  I just did a blog at the LotC blog about 13 Pet Peeves of a Cranky Bibliophile because I read a really awful batch of books in the last few weeks.

Let’s summarize the blog:

1 - Getting the facts wrong.
2 - Getting the culture/vernacular of other countries wrong.
3 - Getting foreign languages wrong because you’re too lazy to crack open a dictionary.
4 - TSTL characters.

As for my editor, I LOVE her.  She has an eagle eye, makes suggestions for improvement, but knows when not to push because there are somethings I just won’t give in on (e.g. comma placements).

I’m with Chicklet on Stephanie Plum. Number 12 gave me the creeps. I’m done. No more of the love triangle, no more Grandma, no more bloody funeral home, no more Lula - I just can’t take it anymore. What else is there for her to do other than die in one of her cars that constantly seem to blow up or get married to Morelli and have his damn babies? I just can’t be excited about a character who hasn’t grown AT ALL in the entire time these books have been coming out.
FFS make a bloody decision all ready and be done with it!

My verification word? Taking43. Make that taking 43 very deep breaths to calm down!

I remember the first time a book’s ending upset me—I was five and the story was “The Little Mermaid.”  So I simply tore out the last two pages of the book and stuck in my own ending.  Problem solved (except for the parental lecture on not tearing pages out of books).  Silly as it sounds, when a book’s outcome annoys me, or a character development bothers me, I rewrite it in my head.  As far as I’m concerned, Scarlett always gets Rhett back and Lady Helen Clyde is still alive and kicking.  When I re-read, I just stop reading before the bad bits.  Hey, it works for me. Although I realize that it does raise all sorts of other concerns about authorial ownership and the integrity of the story….

Thomas Harris

Hannibal

SPOILERS

Except I don’t really care if I spoil this book, because IMHO, people need to be warned off.

Clarice Starling, one of my all time favorite strong, female characters, becomes a drug-addicted, cannibal love slave.

There are other parts of the book that are merely, wall-bangingly bad. But the ending is an abomination.  It doesn’t just read as a character violation, or shameless cash grab by the author.  It’s as though Harris wants to punish his audience for liking Hannibal Lector too much, and demanding too much gore and depravity. 

The vibe I got, as reader, was that he held me in utter contempt.  And it’s even more annoying that it’s beautifully written.

The movie has a totally different ending, and is 100 times better than the source material.

~Can anyone say pandering?~

I can understand and accept that any reader doesn’t like characters I write or a storyline, or, well, pretty much anything inside the book.

But I don’t get what you mean by pandering. See, this assigns a motive to me, as the writer—who you don’t know. And it becomes about me and my motivations—which you couldn’t possibly know—and not about the story.

It’s like: Say you think I screwed the pooch on any given book. Okay with me.

Say you believe you know why I screwed the pooch. Not so okay with me.

I’m still violently bitter at Suzanne Forster for The Morning After.

GIANT SPOILER ALERT:

The hero drugs the heroine, marries her and has sex with her to get her pregnant while she’s roofied up, all so he can steal her amniotic fluid to cure his dad of some rare disease, and lies to her about who he is through the entire book, and she just lets it go? WTF?!

See, six years later, and still violently bitter.

For my editor self, it’s a fine line, especially on the first book with an author… it’s a giant trust issue until you’ve built up a good relationship where they know you know what the heck you’re talking about.

I’ve asked for entire chapters to be cut, and while the author was really upset by the suggestion, in the end, she was very happy with the finished book.

As for keeping my authors happy, I try to pick my battles. Let it be a bit of a give and take as far as edits go. I’ve played devil’s advocate, I’ve offered compromises and I’ve stood firm on the really really big things.

Ultimately, my only goal is to produce the best, most awesomest book evah. And I just hope that my authors remember that when they’re stabbing my voodoo doll. *grin*

I think that until the book is released, the characters belong to the author. Once the book is out, it becomes more collaborative because the readers start to imagine different endings or missing moments, etc. This is where fanfiction comes in.

I have two examples of books that made me rather angry.

1) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. At that time, I was a fairly active fanfiction writer and clearly imagined where I thought the story should go. Apparently, JKR did NOT get my memo and the book totally did not meet my expectations. I HATED it at first. Now, with time and distance, I see that the book is just fine. The issue was with me and my overblown reader expectations.

2) I just finished the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. I love, love, love her conception of vampires. The Cullens are amazing. That didn’t stop me from wanting to kick her TSTL heroine, Bella. Seriously, could she be more of a selfish, self-absorbed brat? And that obnoxious werewolf, Jacob, is just as bad. I suspect I’ll read the next one because I really do love the vamps but I wanted to toss the book across the room last night.

“The characters belong to the author. Period. I have come to tolerate fanfic as an expression of how captivating an author’s world is, but in the “canon” works, the author is God, and the readers can dig it or they can stop buying the books.”

I can’t disagree more strongly with this statement. As soon as the book is published it belongs to the readers and they can interpret it any way they like. The author is only ‘god’ in the sense of creating the world. Like ‘god’ they then stand back and let people do whatever they please.

If a book in a series sucks royally and the author assassinates her own characters, I’m quite within my rights to shrug, dismiss it completely and go off and read a better-written fanfic.

Yeah JK Rowling, I’m looking at YOU!

In general, the things that piss me off about stories are these:

1.Infidelity. Yes, I know it happens in real life. If I wanted real life, I would go the fuck outside.

2. Stories where nothing gets resolved and everyone’s unhappy at the end. I mean, screw that. Read above about real life and going the fuck outside.

3.The characters are miserable for the entire book. When I read, I’m sucked in, and everything is happening to me. I get upset and frustrated, instead of having a good time. THE FUCK OUTSIDE.

But the things I hate the most, the absolute most, that make me fling books across the room in fury, are:

4.When the author is trying to say something with the book, and it’s bullshit and/or isn’t backed up. I read Citizen Girl a while ago, and let me tell you, I was ready to set the book on fire. The author wanted to say that pornography was wrong—fair enough, convince me—but she spent the whole book preaching to the choir. The exaggerations frustrated me along with some pretty stupid assumptions, but it only made me support pornography out of spite at the end.

5.Old style science fiction bothers me. I know it’s a product of its time, but I can’t deal with books where all the females are either simpering, boring, overly-sweet twits, or BATSHIT INSANE. My own fault for reading old scifi, which was written for teenage geeky boys, but seriously buddy—just because girls don’t make sense to YOU does not mean we don’t make any sense at ALL.

Lord, back in the day I would get really angry about reading bad books.

Back in the 70’s or 80’s, the guy (Eric something) who wrote Love Story went on the write a book called The Class, I think, and it absolutely reeked! I wanted to go out and find him but I think I was in Spain then. I still think I got robbed.

A while back I read a book called The Reluctant Miss Van Helsing. It was so godawful it prompted me to write my first amazon review. And I can’t get rid of the frikkin’ book now. UBS doesn’t take romances. I’m still pissed about that experience and won’t give that author a second chance. Ghastly!

Any takers?

Then there’s LKH naturally, big surprise.

J.R. Ward irritated me with her first book (that stupid lingo and spelling) but I probably could have moved on if I hadn’t started running into her freaky fans, but I guess that’s a different topic.

I know which Charlaine Harris series in which she killed off the husband, then she killed the cat, from old-age she said - it was only seven years old! And she had the heroine marry that skinny writer - he was so dull. Kind of a let down. I’m more annoyed that she ended the Lilly Bard series. If Sookie’s started to slip maybe I won’t go back to it.

There are other writers I got turned off of because of weak writing, bad research. I usually don’t get to far with those and sometimes if I hear good things about them I occassionally give them another chance.

I do believe that writing is a solitary process with the help of a good editor. Sometimes the author sees something in her story arc that needs to be addressed that her readers are unwilling to accept. But I also think an author should pay attention to her readers when they bitch about editing or lame plot lines; then the bottom line is in peril.

That was way to long…

My latest disappointment was Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer.  I was upset because the actions of the heroine seemed to completely contradict her behavior from Twilight.  Eclipse simply ruined the magic of Twilight, if I reread Twilight it just won’t be the same.

Dumping Billy by Olivia Goldsmith. I don’t think this was actually written by her, she died around the time it came out. Still it sucked rocks and I was motivated to write a cranky review on Amazon. Especially galling since I loved her other books and her characters were funny, human and she even threw in a little social commentary from time to time (Fashionably Late). Bad Boy stank too but it had some good moments and a geek hero.

The public wants unique, brave and inspired fiction. It does not want pandering crap. In order to get unique, brave and inspired fiction, you need to give the author the authority to do her thang.

However.

If a writer wants to get published, then she has to write material that other people enjoy reading. Yes, she depends on her own instincts and talent to do that, but she is still applying those instincts and that talent to the problem of giving others what they want. It’s not a selfish endeavour.

Where authors like Anne Rice, et ilk, go wrong is in thinking the books they write strictly for themselves deserve to be published.

It’s the difference between masturbation and sex. If you’re having sex, then you need to think about someone else’s pleasure, as well as your own.

What we readers are complaining about, when we complain about an about an author who disappoints us, is that we signed up for sex and instead had someone masturbate on us.

The only book I can think of that ever seriously pissed me off was Adele, later reprinted as Thornfield Hall, by Emma Tennant.  If somebody wrote the same story with different names inserted and it had nothing to do with Jane Eyre, I would probably have just thought it was cliched crap that occasionally contradicted itself, and not particularly hated on it.  But I don’t think that you get to use somebody else’s characters when the only resemblance is the names.  I read that book during the summer reading club at the library last year, the staff version of which involved filling out slips to be drawn for free ice cream.  This is what I wrote on the slip for that book:

“This is the worst book ever.  I need ice cream to get the bad taste out of my mouth.”

(I got it, too.  The person who drew it laughed.)

An author is god to his or her characters.  We can like what happens to them or not, but we have to recognize that we don’t get to make the decisions.  Here I’m thinking of the end of Robin Hobb’s Tawny Man Trilogy.  There are a lot of people who think that it’s a bad ending because their favorite ship didn’t become cannon and are desperate for her to write more and make it cannon.  I don’t care for the ending much myself, but I say it’s because she didn’t sell me on the ending well enough- in fact, for most of the trilogy she seems to be selling the exact opposite.  An author can do whatever she wants to her characters, but I expect her to convince me that it makes sense.

The only author I have been angry with is Sandra Brown.  The first book I read by her was Unspeakable.  I loved it.  Some of the passages were truly poetic and I felt I gained insight into the world of the deaf.  Then I bought 6 (count ‘em) six more of her books, looking for the magic again.  And I hated every single one of them.  One was set in New Orleans.  I hated living there for awhile as a child.  Ok, maybe that’s why.  Next book, hero sucked.  His own mother couldn’t love him.  The sixth and final book had the sucky twins and I was done with her forever!

As for Sweet Revenge by Nora Roberts.  Robin wrote a post at Romancing the Blog, I think, about seductive reads, books that ought to bother you and don’t.  Well, I hate sheik books and I hate books where the h/h are crooks.  But I really enjoyed the story in Sweet Revenge.  Her triology with the vampire.  I detest neck biters.  Squicks me out.  But I thought, ok, LaNora, I’ll give it one chance.  Wound up really enjoying the trilogy.  So I guess that the authors are correct, they write what they think will be appreciated and sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

But I am still pissed at Sandra Brown for writing 5 crapass books after one that I loved and I will not forgive her during this century.

Knight in Shining Armor
Jude Deveraeux (sp?)

A wonderful story, great heroine, great hero, funny scenes etc..the ending made me throw the book at the wall.

Years later I re-read it, threw it at the wall again LOL.

Moral of the story, men are disposable, just find another with the same eyes.

creeeeeepy.

I am not one to get angry at a book.  I am like many others that I will be disappointed with an author every once in a while.  I have stopped my auto-buy of Linda Howard books.

The one that I remember making me mad was Wuthering Heights.  UGH. Two more selfish, self indulged humans that had NO IDEA how to love anyone or anything but themselves I’ve not seen again.  I was mad that I expected a great romance and got those two.  I was also mad because of the small part of my poor brain that said ‘no, you just aren’t smart enough to get the story’.

I still think it was an awful book though. 

Sam

Amazon.com thinks I’m a god.  Don’t believe me?

Check my blog:

PROOF

btw, my submit word is his59

I’m not even going there.

I agree with a lot of points brought up here. An author is definitely god of their own universe, but if she puts a book out there for readers to read, she should expect criticism of it.

I usually don’t finish books that make me angry, although ones recently that annoyed me were Stephenie Meyer’s

Twilight

, which I was expecting to be the best YA paranormal book ever, and which, well, was not. I got so annoyed with Bella, and found her relationship with Edward more squicky than romantic that I just couldn’t finish it.

Before that I read Christine Feehan’s

Dark Prince

, while my inner feminist shrieked at me and told me that there’s no way I will ever find codependent women with psychotic men sexy at all. Except I clearly wasn’t all that angry with the book since I went on to read the next book and liked it a lot better.

I usually get annoyed by lazy research in books.  The last book I became very annoyed about was a Nocturne—Harlequin?  Where the author screwed up a bit of forensic evidence that she could have researched by watching CSI. Luckily I had picked it up at a thrift store and it went right back the next trip.

Then there was Cast in Shadow.  At the very beginning it started to remind me too much of Simon Green’s Hawk and Fisher series, then I discover that she really wants to be a Healer and Do Good Works.  I gave up right there because that was a one/two punch that I didn’t enjoy.  I could have dealt with Hawk and Fisher reprise—after all there is not enough fantasy police procedural—but Healer heroines are right out of it. 

Annoyed at the author in the Nocturn, the Cast in Shadow just left me uninclined to read any further. 

Characters belong to the author but he or she better not bore me with them or I won’t read that person any more.

Right now I am luxuriating in Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins mystery series—She’s a “Priest in Charge” (vicar) if a small village and a “Deliverance Minister” (exorcist)attached to the Herefordshire Diocese and he writes a very believable female character—in fact most of his female characters are quite believable. 

Don’t know how so many romance readers miss the mark with women in romances heroines and villains.

Oh man, I forgot the one author who I refuse to read any more: Anne Tyler. I had to read The Accidental Tourist for senior English. Hated. It. Hated the characters, hated the story, hated the movie. So, of course, I read Breathing Lessons willingly thinking it couldn’t be as bad. I was wrong. I have worked very hard to block this book from my memory but all these years later I remember that I got violently angry at it.

And I got angry at Anne Tyler. I got angry with her for writing such horrible unlikeable characters in such depressing situations. It was completely irrational, especially since I read one of her books willingly (I got angry with my English teacher for making me read The Accidental Tourist)

But very few books incite anger or hatred in me at either the book or the author. Anne Tyler is just very special. She could write the greatest book in the world that every one loves and I still would not read it.

I just bought (and extremely disliked) Real Vamps Don’t Drink O-Neg, by Tawny Taylor.  Catchy title, eh?  Not so much related to the book, as far as I could tell.  Well, there ARE vampires in it.  But to be fair, I have to concede that two-thirds the way through it I just started skimming to see if the ending resolved any of the plot points, so maybe the o-neg mystery is resolved and I missed it.  Anyway, the back sounded kinda sexy, and I have this vampire thing lately, so I went with it.  The beginning and initial setup was interesting, and then it went nowhere.  In the end, I was just angry I spent $13.

The Midnighters series by Scott Westerfield.

It was one of those happy happy fun books where everything goes right in the end. Of course there was conflict, and they were very good books, but you always knew the ‘Justice League’ would prevail, and that Jessica and Jonathan would fall in love and get married and have lots of babies. In the end of the third book, he just screws everything over with this awful not-happy ending that makes you want to track him down and throw rocks at his windows so he can’t sleep.

I was mad at the author. The book can’t help who writes it and how stupid he is.

Definitely the author. A writer friend of mine based a character off of me and she is in no way mine. I would do the same to her.

As an author who sends stories out to be critiqued by friends, chapter by chapter, things are very much influenced. It’s always good to get a second opinion.

LB

Also, I have to confess I was new to Nicholas Sparks when I picked up True Believer.  I love love loved the book and was thrilled when I found out there was a sequel, in which the heroine dies in the end.  Sorry to spoil it for you if you, dear reader, are unaware that they all die in the end with Mr. Sparks, as I was.  I was so angry I’ve never been able to read anything else by him, even knowing in advance that they’re gonna die.  =)

My feeling on reader anger is this: all through a novel, the writer builds certain expectations, and the reader is . . . prepared, conditioned, inclined, whatever you choose to call it, to have those expectations fulfilled. If the author decides to twist the ending, for added angst or because they think “look how original I’m being!” or whatever, the reader’s not to be blamed for being upset. There’s a promsie in a story and that promise had better be delivered.

My editor’s a doll and I love her to bits, because she couldn’t have made things more smooth for this beginner.

I hate to say mad, because I rarely get mad. Dissapointed? The books that Jennifer Crusie has written with Bob mayer are the most recent.

I love Jennifer Crusies books, “Welcome to Temptation” I have bought 3 books on tape (wore the first 2 out) and have gone through 2 paperbacks of.

I actively didn’t like “Don’t look down.” but decided to give “Agnes” a chance because of good reviews… I wrestled with why I didn’t care for the book and came to the conclusion that the characters were so busy doing, that the wonderful characterization that I loved so much in earlier books is missing.

I think if Agnes had been a book by any other author I might not have disliked it so much. I have come to expect certain things from Crusie and it just hasn’t been there for me. I hope that I will get over this bias because I do believe Agnes was a good book, just not what I wanted when I saw Jennifers name on the cover.

Linda Howards last few books have been that way for me also.

I won’t even get into the LKH debacle except to say that they may be her characters, but when you create characters and use them in more than one book, it would be nice if everything from their age to their eyecolor would stay the same from book to book. We won’t even go into the characters turning into pod people.

Such a great topic!  I think it’s fascinating how every time someone reads a book it in a sense becomes a collaboraration between that reader and the writer.  The reader may interpret things dffierently from how the writer intended, may imagine scenes that aren’t in the book, mentally continue the story after the book ends, rewrite the ending.  As a writer, this doesn’t bother me—I’m just thrilled if someone’s reading my books :-).  I recently had a chance to read through one of my books and make minor changes for a re-issue.  I got to a scene where a character dies, and I found myself thinking “this is so sad, I don’t want it to happen.”  I realized that while I had had total control over those characters and that story while I was writing the book, now that the book was published the world of the story was no longer in my control.

But I do think a writer should have total control over where she or he wants to take a story (I’ve never had my editor pressure me at all to take a story in particular direction). Of course as a reader if I’m unhappy with the direction a series takes, it’s totally within my control to stop reading the series :-).

Oh, man, this is strange.  I just blogged about authors’ Pygmalionish (looks like Pygmy-lionish, ain’a?) tendency to view characters as real people, although it had started out being a blog about weirdass fannajamma readers who see characters that way.  (I chickened out, though, because I didn’t want to offend anybody.)

Anyway, I truly don’t care what authors do with their virtual people and stories as long as they DO IT WELL.  Nothing crimps my cranium more than looking forward to a book—maybe even getting into it a bit—only to have it rapidly turn to crap before my very eyes, as if I were watching a digestive tract in operation.

Novels with ambiguous or up-in-the-air endings can make me a little crazy, but again, if the tale was well wrought, my needs as a reader have been satisfied.  (Anybody read In the Lake of the Woods?  That novel exemplifies what I’m talking about.)

I routinely get angry at non-fiction and academic books, either for poor argument/analysis or historical bastardization.  I tell myself it’s all in the service of intellectual integrity.  Whatever.  Makes me feel marginally better about getting mad at a book.

In Romance, I got seriously pissed off at one book and, by extension, the author, because IMO the history was bad, the characters offensive, and the plotline abhorrent.  I won’t share the title or author, but suffice it to say that I wanted to lock her in a room until she had read every feminist text ever written.  She might be a very intelligent and wonderful person, but when I read books, I generally don’t think of the author as a person, but rather as a persona.  Ditto for the blog presence.  So if I find myself disliking a book or an online personality, it doesn’t really feel personal to me.

As for Charlaine Harris’s rant, if I didn’t think so highly of her books and the quality of her craft, I’d find her post insulting, I think, if only because I think it’s a bit disingenuous for an author, especially a series author, to say she doesn’t get reader anger.  IMO, genre fiction is really aimed at securing extreme reader loyalty, and at making readers feel very personally connected to the books.  So then when readers get angry and feel betrayed, it’s like an unwelcome surprise to the author, when those gushing fan letters weren’t?  That doesn’t mean an author shouldn’t have exactly the mindset Harris does about authorial autonomy—in fact, I wish more authors felt that way about the integrity of their authorial vision.  But I think it becomes a sort of double vision for the author—in understanding and appreciating reader loyalty, there needs to be some recognition of the flip side of that (i.e. feelings of betrayal).  I don’t think most readers hate the author as a person, but as more of a *name* or a *voice*, and even if that makes authors feel uncomfortable—totally understandable reaction, IMO—it shouldn’t, IMO, be a complete surprise to authors.  It doesn’t mean the author is culpable of any crime toward the reader, but I think the author can recognize that invested readers might feel angry and betrayed without authors themselves feeling or copping to any wrongdoing or sense of deserving the reader’s ire.  At that point, it’s like two realities—that of the author and the reader—in parallel formation rather than cooperative engagement in bringing a book to life.

Yay Sandy O! Another Bill fan! And ITA about Harris’ last book. I’m so glad I didn’t buy it, but borrowed it from a friend. I stopped buying her books awhile ago. I’ll still read them, but I’m not paying for them..

Here’s what gets me.

1. Historical fiction authors who write about lords and ladies but who don’t bother to take a few minutes to learn how nobles are addressed or referred to. It comes across as an arrogant form of reverse snobbery. Either learn how to refer to them or don’t write about them.

2. Writers whose characters exist in a different culture but who act as if they were the writers’ next-door neighbours. The most egregious wallbanger recently had a Canadian character (right out of the Bob & Doug McKenzie School of Elocution) who during his time studying for his undergraduate degree at “college” (NO) attended the big “college football” (NOOOO) game in his “college town” DO NOT WANT DOES NOT COMPUTE PC LOAD LETTER

3. Unattractive, paunchy middle-aged nebbish lands unimaginably hot babe, then dies to save the universe. I’m talking to you, Robert Harris. (Fatherland put a dent in the wall.)

4. The miracle HEA. It doesn’t just happen in romances, either. The first book I actively loathed was The Andromeda Strain, and it was precisely for this reason.

The last book I got really mad at was Lilith Saintcrow’s new book The Devil’s Right Hand.

Dante went from being an emotionally stunted bad-ass to being an insecure, wishy-washy, liability. I’d have cheered if Japh would have smacked her at least once. And still, the author refuses to throw us any kind of useful “bone” regarding the whole “Fallen” situation. It’s my last Dante Valentine book, no matter how much I love Japh.

I’m glad, too, that there were other people who found Lyssa from Joey Hill’s The Vampire Queen’s Servant totally unlikeable. I love Natural Law and the Ice Queen/Mirror of my Soul series so much and Vampire Queen really seemed to lack that sense of intense interpersonal interaction that those other books had.

I understand that authors have the right to do whatever they want with their characters, but sometimes I wonder like with Harris/LKH if they don’t introduce so many new love interests because they don’t want to—or can’t—do the difficult work of making a really complicated relationship between two people interesting? Is this like the equivalent of adding a cute kid to a sitcom when the ratings go down?

Meredith

The last book that made me mad for the time I spent reading it was Twilight

.  It had gotten such good reviews, here and elsewhere, that I was expecting it to be pretty good, and it wasn’t.

Here’s my review of it.

Grave Surprise

by Charlaine Harris also annoyed me because it felt like she’d all-of-a-sudden decided on a new writing style for the first half of the book.  After that it went back to what I remembered, but the choppy sentences and sparse descriptions with repetitive sentence structure in the first half was a bit unnerving.

Patricia Briggs’ husband, Mike, said it best, I think. Here’s the link and scroll down to Jan 19, 2007.

http://www.patriciabriggs.com/news.shtml

Octavia (9/13, 5:29), I’m trying to figure out where what I said contradicts your position at all.

I strongly object to readers demanding that writers do this or that with the characters in future books. The author’s obligation to the readers is to tell them a competently written story, not to tell them the story the reader dictates. If the reader wants a different ending, they can write their own damn book, or fanfic if they insist it has to be these characters.

If a reader hates where an author is going overall, that’s the time to stop buying that author’s books.

I stop buying author’s books all the time. Much as I wish Laurell Hamilton would write books with mystery and plot as she did in the first four Anita Blake novels, I recognize that LKH doesn’t owe me a goddamn thing. If she wants to paint Anita purple and have her skip off into the land of daisies and dildos, that’s her business. I won’t know about it because I stopped reading them many books ago.

The most recent book to make me angry isn’t a romance. It’s a kids’ book from the 70s. If it weren’t a library book—an interlibrary loan book at that—it would have hit the wall.

And it’s just one line that really made me mad. The first person narrator, a boy of eleven or twelve, made a throwaway comment about the general stupidity of all women and how they can’t understand anything important in the real world. He was talking about his mother. It’s not out of character given his age and the time when the book is set, but… the comment’s not necessary to the story. It doesn’t add depth to the characterization. It’s just the narrator’s voice telling the reader that women are stupid

The book is The Big Kerplop by Bertrand R. Brinley, published in 1973. It’s a prequel to a pair a of books that I loved when I was ten—The Mad Scientists’ Club and The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club. I could deal with the way that those two books excluded female characters, particularly since I read them in the 70s when there weren’t a lot of better options, but I don’t remember that sort of casual misogyny. It may well have been there, but I don’t remember it.

Nicholas Sparks - “Message in a Bottle.”  That blew chunks. It was based on a bunch of hugely coincidental things…too many. And then the ending…?  What the hell!?

Joanne: I’m so glad it wasn’t just me! I’m actually reading Stephanie Lauren’s Beyond Seduction

right now and I just can’t seem to finish it. Which is so strange for me because I’ve adored every single one of her books, to the point where I devour them in a day. Last night, I fell asleep while reading a sex scene! The whole book is giving me the deja vu feeling that you discussed—been here, read that.

Kimberly Anne: Thanks for clearing up the title for me. That book can still give me nightmares.

Re: Vampire Books In General I love ‘em. But I’m also glad that I wasn’t the only one who was underwhelmed by Stephanie Meyer’s

Twilight

trilogy (I only read the first two). As someone mentioned earlier, the fascinating Cullens did not make up for Bella’s lack of character development.

Someone else mentioned about not liking Nora Robert’s

Circle Trilogy and I think that’s a good point. Some people just don’t like vamp books. My Mom and I take turns buying Nora Robert books because we share them but as soon as I saw the Morrigan’s Cross

, I called Mom from Target and said that she wouldn’t be liking this new Nora Roberts book. Vampires and witches are not her thing at all, whereas I squealed to my husband that Nora Roberts was writing about vampires now!

I can’t stand Fern Michaels (someone mentioned her, as well) because her books are written by two people and YOU CAN TELL.

One last bit of randomness: Is anyone else enjoying Libba Bray’s

A Great and Terrible Beauty series? Even though they aren’t vamps like in Meyer’s Twilight, they are definitely paranormal and Bray writes with the passion, and eloquence that I felt was missing in the Twilight

series.

(Also: Shout-out to Meg Cabot and

Princess of Puke! For my birthday, I told my husband that I wanted some more Princess Diaries books and he got SO embarrassed having to wander around Borders looking for a pink book. I would TOTALLY have read Princess of Puke

. But that’s because I love you and will go anywhere that you take me.)

(Speaking of… does anyone else have a husband/SO who is somewhat embarrassed by your love for romance novels? Mine tries to be understanding but he turns red when I pull one out of my bag to read.)

What was the last book you got angry about?

I’m rarely angry over a book.  Disappointed, yes.  Surprised that some titles were considered for more than bird cage lining, but not angry.  I usually express my disapproval with my pocketbook.  I won’t buy the author’s next book. 

For me, I’d have to say Mary Balogh’s latest stuff.  I’ve loved MB in the past, but the last two books I read were stylistic nightmares.  The opening line in one of them was so convoluted and poorly executed, I had to read it three times just to make sense of what she was trying to say.  Flat characters, dull sex, two-dimensional or weak villains, unsympathetic heroines…ugh.  She used to be an auto-buy for me.  No longer.

Why were you angry?

See above.

Were you mad at the book, or at the author—or both?

Author.  The book isn’t a sentient being.  And if an author claims to be god in his/her universe, then he/she best prepare for folks to be angry.  They get angry at deities all the time.

Who do you think the characters truly belong to: the author? The readers? Both? Neither?

Initially, I’d say they belong to the author.  However, a reader emotionally invested in the story will adopt the character.  There are certain expectations the author sets for the character in the beginning of the story.  The reader picks up on those expectations and expects to see consistency throughout.  I’m all for the author playing god in their own universe, but I also hope they follow the ground rules they set.  I, as a reader, will get irritated if the author suddenly takes a sharp left into la-la land and blows her character creations out of the water by having them do something suddenly out of character with no supporting backstory or explanation for why such a thing has happened.  That is truly a WTF moment for me.  I’m okay with an author using “I’m god in my created universe.”  I just expect as an all-powerful deity in that universe, the author keep tight control of it.

Last book I got angry about?  Not sure.  Mostly I just get bored and wander away.  I do remember my greatest anger at a book was years ago with Susan Isaac’s ALMOST PARADISE.  It was a big, juicy, wonderful romance.  At the end, the heroine died.  I was so furious that she broke that major promise.  I don’t necessarily need HEA, but I sure need living h and H and/or a little hope, if you don’t mind.

I was actually mad at the author for taking my totally reasonable expectations and having nonconsentual (sp?) buttsecks with them.  I still love Susan Isaacs, but I’m totally wary when I read her books since then.

Characters “belong” to the author in an objective sense.  In a subjective sense, if the reader doeesn’t feel attachment/investment/ and even a degree of “ownership” of/in the characters, nobody cares about the book and the question is moot.

My editor for a thousand years and counting is very careful with the suggestions she makes. She never fixed a thing that wasn’t broken.  And when she says there’s a problem, I listen and fix it. I’ve had other editors in the meantime for various reasons, and temporarily.  Most asked for more changes than my regular ed. I felt I learned from making those changes, learned from taking what that ed said didn’t work and fixing it in my own way.

Can you imagine it in an art gallery?  “You know, she used more blue in her last painting, and I liked it so much better.  This painting should be blue!  And all her future works should feature blue as well—because I like blue!”

Ah, that actually happens all the time.  People give their opinion all the time, not just readers.

Suzanne Forster for The Morning After.

Never going to read that book.  Ugh.

Harris is being totally disinegnuous.  She’s taken a lot of flack for killing off Martin in a Fool and His Honey, a series which is pretty much dead in the water after that book came out (interestingly its a mystery book and it was her mystery fans that were upset and not buying her next books, not those emotional-off-their-rocker romance readers).  Her response is I get to do what I want with my characters.

That’s fine, but don’t be surprised then when readers are angry and get angry with the creator.  And really, if the author is god of her characters what does she truly care what peon readers think?

Thinking it over I realize I have two different reactions to two different things.

1. If I don’t like the way a story is going, or the way it’s written, or the characters, or if for whatever reason it’s just not compelling to me, I’ll stop reading it. Life is short and there are many books I haven’t read yet that I’ll probably like better. (I will read some pretty awful books if I find them gripping—witness The Da Vinci Code.) I don’t blame the book or the author; we just don’t click, clearly, and it’s nobody’s fault. (Although if I find the writing style clunky enough I will bitch and moan about it for a few days, and probably read out random passages.)

2. If the ending of the book suddenly takes a 180-degree turn from where it was going, for no discernable reason—if the author is being God for the sake of being God, not for the sake of the story—THEN I get mad. I may not like an ending, but if it fits with the rest of the book, if it’s a progression that makes sense to me, I can live with it. But if there’s a random or illogical or arbitrary ending (“And then they all got run over by a bus. The End”), where the author is in effect saying to me “I’m the author and I can do anything I want!”, that’s annoying. Yeah, the author CAN do anything she wants, but why go to all that trouble of creating characters and a plot if you’re not going to give them a decent ending? And I’m not saying the ending has to be happy. Sometimes the book is all headed for a sad ending and then everything gets nicely cleared up in the last two chapters and everyone lives happily ever after and I think… huh? Where did that come from?

(Tangentially related: sometimes I get a bit annoyed if the H&H move from “I despise you and everything you stand for” to “I was a jerk, forgive me” to “I love you forever” too fast. There are some books where I feel one party or the other could stand do do a little more atoning before they earn their HEA.)

I guess I’m saying I don’t have to like the ending of a book, but I do have to find it satisfying. I see Jenna said all this much better than me a little further up. ;)

Katie W asked:

(Speaking of… does anyone else have a husband/SO who is somewhat embarrassed by your love for romance novels? Mine tries to be understanding but he turns red when I pull one out of my bag to read.)

**

No - my husband has stacks of D&D sourcebooks and novels bigger than my romance and knitting books will ever be…  He has even picked up the odd one and read it after hearing me laugh out loud (although he more surreptiously listens to them on CD so no one can ‘see’ what he is reading).

**

As for being angry at an author - well, I am not sure anger is the right emotion.  I’ve been distraught over the loss of characters (but honestly, that only stays with me really until the next book I read) - but if an author disappoints me a few times I am imminently free to read other books not written by him/her.

I believe the author is god and should be allowed to whatever he/she likes with their characters. In that regard, plots don’t make me mad.

What makes me mad is reading a whole bunch of great reviews about a book or author, deciding, whoa! I’d better read that, then being horribly disappointed. Three examples:

“The DaVinci Code” (OMG WTF INRI)
“Honest Illusions” (Apologies to Nora. I hated it.)
“Odd Thomas,” Dean Koontz (One word: Elvis.)

Obviously, since they all got good reviews, my opinion is in the minority. And it’s not that any of them is a terrible book (okay, except for Dan Brown’s). It’s that my expectations were built up and then dashed.

Conversely, I tend to gush over things that I thought were going to be bad, but turned out to be not bad, even if they weren’t actually GOOD.

I will toss in with those rectchedly disappointed with Laurell K. Hamilton’s crap.  I wasn’t mad at the direction of the series.  She can porn it up anytime she wants too.  I was mad that the OBVIOUS MISTAKES in grammar and sentence structure and all those other things that make books readable (using the world spill more than 10 times on a page is a BAD thing mmk?.  I was mad that they were ignored. And when people pointed them out Hamilton’s PR person told everyone to go F themselves.

I COULD have kept reading.  I COULD have suspended belief and checked my brain at the door to get some enjoyment out of the stories.  But not after I’m told grammar and spelling and recalling important characterization isn’t important.  Writing is a CRAFT damnit.  You may not do it perfectly every time but you should strive for it and you shouldn’t shit on your readers who ARE willing to point things like that out.

Another set of authors that left me tossing the book at the wall and wishing I wasn’t so far from the US to send my book back, was “Rebel Fey” by the Barb and JC Hendee.  It was flat out awful.  Seriously awful.  It had started out as various POVs from all the characters.  It was a nice change from the grating 1st person POV that is everywhere.  But in this latest book they kept switching every other paragraph.  One minute it was one character, the next the dog, then another character then another.  A scene which should have taken MAYBE 10 pages dragged on for over 25 because EVERY POV had to be touched upon.  It was just awful.

Other authors have disappointed me and they no longer get my money.  The only one who deserves my rancor and my internet time is LKH because of her extreme idiocy.  I just have to keep going back for the humor of it.

I don’t remember the most recent book I got mad at.  Happily, I have trained myself to stop reading a book if it doesn’t grab me in the first few chapters.

What makes me mad is when a writer changes a character to be completely opposite of what they started out.  That’s what pisses me off about LKH.  I’m all about character growth; Anita was character degradation.  Plus I was annoyed that the character descriptions never changed from book to book.  Copy and paste is wonderful, but not wholesale.

Electric Landlady said:
But if there’s a random or illogical or arbitrary ending (“And then they all got run over by a bus. The End”), where the author is in effect saying to me “I’m the author and I can do anything I want!”, that’s annoying.

—>I agree 100% that this is annoying. I don’t however, jibe with the motive you are ascribing to the author. Oh, sure, some authors may have such a motive, but I’d be more likely to blame deadline woes.

Writing the ending of a book is really, really hard. Pacing in general is extremely difficult, and pacing the ending is worst of all. Since most people write more or less in order, that’s often the part that gets the least attention, or has the least time available.

Within the industry, editors are usually crunched for time (most editors do their actual editing outside of the office). They are encouraged to not tie up a lot of capital in stock these days, so whereas in the past a list would be scheduled two years ahead, nowadays the lag is much shorter. Everyone’s under the gun to get the damn book in.

So if the author is a month late, and the editor is over a barrel in workload, and it’s June, July, August, or December, the book is going to be rushed. The ending will be rushed.

It sucks, I know. Most of the bean-counters, unfortunately, have a hard time with the subjective nature of “a good book” vis a vis “a crappy book.”

As far as I can tell, the real sign that an author is about to take a nosedive in quality is that they have taken a leap in popularity. Suddenly they’re being pressured to produce, more and faster, to maximize profits, to keep them on the radar. Often they’re offered fat multibook contracts, and that’s a very, very hard thing to turn down.

Unfortunately, no one does their job best when someone’s standing behind them shouting, “Hurry up!” Do I blame the authors for accepting these situations? Partially I do, but is it really fair to blame people for being human?

~As far as I can tell, the real sign that an author is about to take a nosedive in quality is that they have taken a leap in popularity.~

Well, that seems seriously like sweeping everyone into the same pile—and incredibly unfair.

Popularity=poor quality?

Joanne:

I bought Stephanie Laurens’ Beyond Seduction because I love Devil’s Bride and I read a review that said it was her comeback book, that it was great and lovely and sexy and all things wonderful…

Oh. My. God.

By the end of it, I was reading one sentence per page—and it STILL took me three days to finish.

I spread the pain though and gave it to my sister. I don’t hate my sister, but she kind of pissed me off by holding me responsible for her confusion while reading MelJean Brooks’ Demon Angel, a book I liked and recommended to her.

So, suck it, Colleen. Ha ha ha

There are a couple of things that will enrage me about books.

First is not clearly marking a book as part of a series, and then having a cliff hanger ending. That makes me mad enough to throw the book across the room, and then get up and go stomp on it for good measure. (This has happened multiple times, and made me leery of trying new fantasy novels if there are not multiple books by the author available.)

Second is bad or stupid science. I will never read another Michael Chriton book, because I could not comprehend the sheer stupidity of the scientist in “Jurassic Park”. If I knew about species that change gender, than how did the scientist not consider that when creating the dinosaurs.

The third was a book I took back to the book store after 20 pages, Michelle Hauf’s “Seraphim”. The author quite blatantly is trying to hide the main character’s gender (despite the cover and book blurb) that she used incredibly ridiculous and clumsy sentence constructions to attempt to describe a scene without using she or her. It was just so poorly done that is was completely obvious that the author was attempting to hide the gender of the character. Which ALWAYS means the character is female.

That entire scene made me feel like the author thought I was a moron who would never see through her not-so-clever plot trick. So I guess I was more insulted than mad.

But an unfinished series. That enrages me. Usually my husband has to placate me with chocolate if that happens, or I’ll rage for hours.

La Nora said:
Well, that seems seriously like sweeping everyone into the same pile—and incredibly unfair.

—>LOL on me, because I thought to myself, “I should include a disclaimer that this OF COURSE doesn’t correlate 100%” and then couldn’t come up with a way to make the grammar flow, so I bagged it. That’ll teach me to omit the equivocation.

However, notable exceptions (and let’s face it, Ms. Roberts, your success and output are an exception beyond most exceptions!) aside, the list of writers whose quality dropped sharply within a few years of their careers taking off is pretty long.

Note I don’t say their careers nosedived; many authors coast for a good long time while the readers keep hoping for them to “come to their senses” or whatever (the number of people I know who keep buying the next Anita Blake novel, and then whinging about how crappy it is, astonishes me).

But with extremely rare exceptions, both author quality and author success tend to follow a ballistic trajectory. Some peak fast and come down hard, and some get a long, sustained flight, occasionally with second-stage boosters. But very few make it into a non-degrading orbit.

There aren’t a whole lot of authors about whom we can say, “Their final book was their best one.” Of the authors we can say that about, most of them died young.

Now, it’s certainly an academic point whether their quality become objectively slack, or if it’s symptomatic of an ageing author whose tropes have passed beyond fashion. Considering how often the nosedive seems to correlate with a sharp boost in popularity, I’m not leaning toward the ageist explanation.

My mental list is mostly speculative fiction writers, since I’m most familiar with that genre. Maybe it’s not as true in other genres, but judging by the number of people in this thread who aren’t happy with, for example, Stephanie Laurens’s latest, I wonder. I think it’s no coincidence that Laurens jumped to the top of her publisher’s list four or five years ago, doubled her output three years ago, and now readers are expressing dissatisfaction.

I agree very much: it doesn’t take a village.

In fact, if a writer listens to much to outer criticism, I think it’s bound to lead to a screwed up book.  The old saw, “Too many cooks spoil the broth” seems really apt here.

And think: the readers who take the time to complain are a vast minority! And they are not normal! They *may* represent the majority view, but sometimes I think they are just lone crackpots. (-: Of course, this works both ways—the readers who take the time to compliment are also lone crack-pots—just a very nice sort of crack-pot.

The market doesn’t know what it wants. It just knows what it likes when it sees it.

And if a reader doesn’t like what she’s read, she should go out and write her own damn book!  Lord knows, careers have been launched by wallbangers. Fabulous ones, too.

Just my two cents.

The ending of Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer was a little frustrating to me.

**SPOILER**
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The fact that Bella has been from day one professing her love for Edward, and then goes off and KISSES Jacob and is “confused” about who she loves blah blah blah… it really pissed me off.  And Edward doesn’t even get pissed off about it.  WTF!?  I personally love the series and want Edward and Bella to be together, and her being wishy-washy completely went against her even wanting to become a vampire to be with Edward.  Argh!!
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**END SPOILER**

In the end, I’m not mad at Stephenie Meyer; in fact, she is one of few authors who really evokes such real and raw emotions in her writing (you really feel like an angsty 17 year old when you’re reading it!) and I love her books. I guess I am just pissed off more at the character for not doing what I thought she should have :-)

THANK YOU Kate Duffy!!! I cried for days when Lady Helen died, I’m still furious about it.

It wasn’t just the death. It was that we waited four years for her to have that baby, too.

And then she added insult to injury by writing another book about the same story.

The death moved her from Autobuy to Buy Used, but “What Came Before he Shot Her” was so contemptuous of EG’s readers I won’t even read her for free anymore. I’m done.

This is a subject I get very passionate about. Yes, my characters belong to me. Yes, it’s my story to tell.

But if it weren’t for the readers I wouldn’t be paid to tell it.

Doesn’t mean I won’t write what I feel, but it does mean I won’t rub their noses in it afterward with patronizing diatribes (and I’m NOT referring to Ms. Harris here) about how it’s none of their business what I do with *my* characters.

You know, I’m realizing something as I read these responses. I simply don’t give that much of a rat’s ass if a book disappoints me UNLESS it’s a romance.

I know it’s wrong… I mean I KNOW IT’S WRONG.  I’m a writer, for shitsakes, so I know it’s fiction. 

BUT

When authors have lead characters who seem genuinely confused about love, or when they seem to switch affections from one to another… when they are “confused” about their affections, I find myself wondering about the relationships of the writer.

I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW!!!  Fifty beatings with wet noodles.  Wrong, bad, naughty!

Can’t help it.  Yes, I have had relationships that had me confused.  Yes, I have vacillated between more than one person.  But never, at any time, have I been under the delusional misapprehension at these times that I might be “in love.”  And never, in moments of confusion and uncertainty, was I feeling this about THE ONE. 

Having found THE ONE (which is what most of us read romance for, right?) I never question it.  I mean NEVER.  Attracted to another guy or girl?  Sure.  Angry at him and concerned about our relationship a few times?  Why yes, indeed, we are human.

Is he the one?  Will it last?  Yes, yes, and if you open your mouth about “things happening even in the best of blah blah” I will completely tune you out because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Now… there are always the speeches about those mythical marriages/partnerships that “seemed perfect” and fell apart.  I have yet to see one of those.  I see relationships OTHER people may think of as ideal fall apart, but I’m never surprised.  Never.  And the friends I consider to be solid—never seen one of those fail yet.

So perhaps my anger at some romance novels is more anger at others’ perceptions of love, true love, and romance.  I mean, I don’t get pissy about a fantasy novel I dislike, or a sci-fi novel, or a thriller.  I stop reading.  But when a romance goes bad I feel like LOVE is getting shafted.  So my reaction is more visceral.

Believe me, I know how irrational this is.  I think that’s the crux of my point.  I read romance to be emotionally engaged, swept away, and left a little limp with wonder at the magic of love.

Fuck with that and I am going to stab you in the eye with my pencil. 

Just sayin’.

I read the column and had one very specific book in mind, only to open the comments and have the very first one be about the book.  I’m not angry at Elizabeth George as a human being, and I firmly believe authors need to follow their muse.  My problem is that when an author is good and over the past 20 years has created characters who become living, breathing parts of my world (at least of my interior world), then when something very bad happens to one of them, I think I am entitled to my reaction.  This book has some of the most beautiful passages about grief I’ve ever read, and as painful as it was, I was awed by their near poetry and poignance.  However, I don’t think I can read any of the future books because there is no way I can envision any happiness for Tommy, not after losing the woman who’d been part of his life for so many years—as friend as well as lover and then wife.  So perhaps it is testimony to Elizabeth George’s skill, but I think I’ve bought the last of her books.  On the opposite end, I loved Alexander McCall Smith’s “The Right Attitude Toward Rain” precisely because he allowed me to believe in the possibility of happiness.

Thomas Harris

Hannibal

SPOILERS

Except I don’t really care if I spoil this book, because IMHO, people need to be warned off.

Clarice Starling, one of my all time favorite strong, female characters, becomes a drug-addicted, cannibal love slave.

There are other parts of the book that are merely, wall-bangingly bad. But the ending is an abomination.  It doesn’t just read as a character violation, or shameless cash grab by the author.  It’s as though Harris wants to punish his audience for liking Hannibal Lector too much, and demanding too much gore and depravity.

Yes yes and yes again. I was wondering if someone would bring this book up. It’s the most vivid disappointment of my reading career.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Candace Steele’s books (unless I missed it), as I recall those sparked a hot debate about the need for   a HEA in romances, within the past six months.

Other authors I’ve stopped reading because I’m unhappy with the direction they took their characters and/or feeling that the books weren’t moving anywhere are LKH and…um, LKH (both Anita and Merry).

Most recently I was disappointed with the way Lover Unbound by JR Ward went, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop reading her.

I think the authors own the characters, yes, and of course they get to decide what to do with them, but I think there does come a point when an author needs to really be sure they want to take the course they’ve set (like killing off a main character) and not cry foul when readers get upset about it.

Because readers are, at heart, consumers and I think they want to feel as though they’re getting the product they expected. Even if they do know in their subconscious there are no guarantees, when it’s a tried and true author, I think a sense of betrayal when the reader orders a cheeseburger and ends up with chicken nuggets (I just couldn’t resist the fast food analogy) is not completely unwarranted. But neither can we blame the authors for wanting to keep their work fresh and unpredictable, to keep readers interested and to create a buzz. It’s an interesting dilemma and I think finding a balance is quite a difficult one.

“Most recently I was disappointed with the way Lover Unbound by JR Ward went, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop reading her.”

Wait. Doesn’t that come out next week?How did it go? Badly? Crap.

I got an ARC. My post about it is on my blog, still on the front page if you’re curious, lisabea.

readers are, at heart, consumers and I think they want to feel as though they’re getting the product they expected. Even if they do know in their subconscious there are no guarantees, when it’s a tried and true author, I think a sense of betrayal when the reader orders a cheeseburger and ends up with chicken nuggets

I can partially agree that “when it’s a tried and true author”, expectations are unavoidable.  But the more general “readers are… consumers” is problematic for me.

When I go to an art exhibit, I don’t always go for a particular experience.  I’m happy if I either love what I see, or discover something I hadn’t known/seen before.  E.g. I’ve loved exhibits of unusual works by famous artists, or works that bucked a trend.

Books are similar—it’s less important that I “get the product I expect” than that I have a good or interesting reading experience.  If I buy what I think is a genre romance, and it turns out to be more sci fi-like or historical, or it has an equivocal ending, I’m not automatically pissed off.  My P.O.ness depends on whether the book worked overall, regardless of what label was stuck on it.

I’m with Electric Landlady:
I may not like an ending, but if it fits with the rest of the book, if it’s a progression that makes sense to me, I can live with it.
and
I don’t have to like the ending of a book, but I do have to find it satisfying.

Hmm…on the Charlaine Harris tip, I hate the way the relationship between Harper and Tolliver went in the second book of her new series, but never for a moment did I scream for Charlaine Harris’ blood. *shrug* I know I’ve thrown books across the room and have been made angry by them, but the only time I’ve actually cut eyes at an author is if the writing was pure dreck. Bad writing, and the continuance of a writer to never mature in skill is my particular bete noire.

I think that when there are a whole series of books with the same characters, the readers become more emotionally involved than in a single book.  Take Harry Potter, for instance.  Plenty of readers hated that she killed off Professor Snape (who turned out to be the tragic hero ) and married Hermione Granger off to that dweeb Ron.  I’m sure JK Rowling is being beseiged by readers demanding an eighth volume in which Snape turns out to have faked his death and Hermione winds up with him after divorcing the Weasley twit.  Not bloody likely, as Eliza Doolittle would say, but there’s volumes of fan fiction in which she does exactly that, usually without marrying Ron first.  Thanks to the internet, its readily available.

I don’t know that I agree that “a book is written alone”.  A writer is constantly drawing from the public domain of collective stories, imagery, assumptions, archetypes.  The writer’s contribution to this is to spin all these ingredients in new, interesting and engaging ways.  There are more great quotes about writing taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar (or vice-versa) than I could list here.  The imaginary of writing as some noble, solitary endeavor divorced from the world, or lived interactions, is a very popular one that some writers like to trot out, but I think that “bullshit” can be called through the pairing of these two quotes. They come in sequence on my favorite quote site, and the gender-theorist in me loves the irony of it:

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.  ~Burton Rascoe

The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.  ~Agatha Christie

Who the fuck is Burton Rascoe (answer: a little known turn-of-the-century literary critic and journalist).  I’d much rather be like Agatha Christie.  Writing is no more a solitary process than living is.  If I had to acknowledge everyone who contributed to even my smallest piece of writing, I’d go mad.  So, yes, I feel some proprietary interest in the particular ways I construct a story, but I also understand the story as a conversation between the people who inspired the story, and the people who read the story, with myself not as a God, but as a translator.

KatieW Said:
Someone else mentioned about not liking Nora Robert’s Circle Trilogy and I think that’s a good point. Some people just don’t like vamp books. My Mom and I take turns buying Nora Robert books because we share them but as soon as I saw the Morrigan’s Cross, I called Mom from Target and said that she wouldn’t be liking this new Nora Roberts book. Vampires and witches are not her thing at all, whereas I squealed to my husband that Nora Roberts was writing about vampires now!

Personally, I think Nora’s circle trilogy is a perfect example of an author not just writing something to be self-indulgent, but writing something that’s different…a genre she wanted to try…but also keeping her fans in mind as she wrote it.

Of course, I could be completely off base with this because as Nora said previously, none of us knows what went through her mind when she wrote it. But, if Nora will forgive me speculating here, I think Nora is a writer who understands what her readers want, and tries to give that to them while still being true to herself and what she wants as a writer.

I say this because I myself don’t care for Vampire stories. I’ve read a few, and I just don’t like them. BUT…the Circle Trilogy felt more to me like a “Nora Story” with some vampire aspects, instead of a “Vampire Story” with some Nora aspects. There’s a BIG difference, and I think that went a long way towards me viewing the series favorably.

I LOVED the series, and LOVED Cian, despite the fact that he was a vampire, and I generally dislike vamps.

Now, that also could be because I’m a huge fan of Nora’s. I like her style a lot, so there’s rarely a book or series of hers that I dislike. But I have to think…is it just because I’m a fan that I like what she’s written even though its a character or genre I wouldn’t otherwise like? OR, is it that, again, she knows what her fans expect, so she writes those characters and situations that might be “foreign” or unpalatable to her readers in such a way as to make them palatable?

Or both? Or neither?

I guess only Nora knows for sure.

AJ

There is one historical romance novel which pissed me off to no end many years ago.  I hesitate to name names, maybe because I’m an author, I don’t know, but I can’t bring myself to do it.  But I will describe the book. 

First, let me say that I write historical romance myself, and have done at TON of research on Medieval and Georgian England with a VAST library to fall back on, so basically I know what I’m talking about. 

But there was one book that made me want to scream and write I VERY nasty letter to the author, but which I refrained. 

The problem:  It wasn’t the characters, not by far, they were actually very intriguing which is why I kept on reading to the end, it was the author’s historical inaccuracies and (the most frustrating thing of all) her ability at NOT explaining everything in the end. 

The hero and heroine had met and fell in love but she was forced to marry another.  Well on the night before she was to wed, they made love, fully aware this would be their one and only time.  Nine months later, she give birth to a boy.  Throughout the ENTIRE book, the author drops hints that the boy is the hero’s son.  And then, when we finally get to the end, SHE FORGOT TELL THE READERS!  But that wasn’t the only thing she forgot to wrap up.

But the BIGGEST clincher for me was when she had the bad guy KILL HIMSELF WITH A CROSSBOW!!!  Okay, so this still gets my goat every time I think about it.  For those of you who may not know, crossbows in the 1200s were HUGE cumbersome weapons, and sometimes took TWO men to load (depending on size).  Even personal crossbows were very large and heavy and would have been IMPOSSIBLE to kill ones self with.  Not to mention that men (in general) did not commit suicide back then (but that is neither here nor there). 

Anyway, that was the first and LAST book I read by that author.  And it was the only book that I ever threw across the room.  Usually I will give an author three chances before I stop reading her books, but not this one.

As to whether characters belong to the reader or the author or both, well that is difficult to say.  As an avid reader, I have come across some fantastic books with characters which still “haunt” my mind, but I don’t consider myself the “owner” of them.  Now as an author, you have to understand that once an writer begins the journey to creating her novel, the characters DO take a life of their own (I’m a pantser and that’s how it works for me).  For example, In one of my books, one of the secondary characters (a woman) gets raped and beaten.  I cried like you wouldn’t believe while I wrote the scene, and though I desperately wished it had been otherwise, I could not change the course of her history.  It was her “fate” to be raped.  My only solace was knowing she would have her own book and therefore her happy ending.  Maybe that sounds strange, but my emotions are deeply tied in with every character (good and bad), I cry and laugh and feel anger right along with them, but to be honest, I don’t think of them as “mine”.  They are who they are, and in the universe of my mind where they live, they are real.  (And no, I’m not ready for the rubber room just yet!)  They make their own decisions, they have a certain fate which at times I can guide, and other times I cannot.  I know this may sound lame to some, but that is what writing is like for me…it is being lost in a world of mine and the characters’ making.  But I digress…

Another pet peeve I have when reading, is when an author associates the word “quiver” with a man.  I’m sorry, but men to do NOT quiver.  I’ll never forget when I read the line of book of a very well known author, and the hero said to the heroine “you make me quiver…”  (Excuse me while I stick my finger down my throat.  LOL)  I’m sorry, but that has to be one of the most UNBELIEVABLE lines I’ve read in a book.  Men may shake, tremble, shudder, quake, etc., but they do NOT quiver!

My last pet peeve is head-hoping.  Now head hopping during a love scene is fine by me, in fact, I think it enhances the scene to see and feel what both characters are going through, but PLEASE do not interject the POV of a character who will only ever appear in the book on that single page for one paragraph!  It completely disrupts the flow of the story and the thoughts of the main character whose POV you were in, in the first place. 

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to rant, it is much appreciated…  LOL

Women may quiver, but neither men NOR women say that shit out loud.

If I looked right at my husband and said “you make me quiver” he’d burst out laughing.

Nobody says it.  Get real.

I’m being generous.  I mean, people look at us funny because we use the word BELOVED out loud, and we only do it because Ahmed (hubby) loves the word… English is his primary language but it’s not the language of his birth and I think he likes the sound.

Some words are just not conversational no matter how lovely they are for narrative.

Kate Duffy wrote:
WITH NO ONE AS WITNESS by Elizabeth George.

OMG, the FIRST response in the thread is the book I would have named and for EXACTLY the same reason.

I will never read another Lynley because I will never forgive the author for killing off Helen.

Bad, bad author!