Yeah, we bitches not above some scandalmongering every now and again. So a little birdie told us that Laurell K. Hamilton was given the ole what-for during Archon for all the sexx0ring in her books—told off by other writers, no less. Anyone have any details? Anyone?
Honestly, the early books were VERY good. I stumbled across them in a bookstore in San Diego and bought every book I could find immediately. They were gripping. Regardless of what you think about LKH’s tendencies to repeat things/editing grammar, she told gripping stories.
Where to stop reading the books varies from person to person (and if you prefer one ‘ship over another). I’d say to stop around Blue Moon or Obsidian Butterfly, others would say earlier. But DO NOT READ NARCISSUS IN CHAINS or later seems to be a standard, i.e it’s the book where Anita became the town pump and did a 180 in terms of character.
I didn’t need a 12-step program to quit LKH- I just got so bored of four-way paranormal porn with no plot that I quit on…Cerulean Sins, I think?
I blogged about LKH not too long ago. It’s called Random Bitching. The gist is that the ladies here got me to try Merry Gentry and she degenerated into MerrySue so fast it made my head spin. Before that, I was an LKH virgin so I can’t speak to when Anita Blake lost her character, but there’s something almost grotesquely riveting about the Merry Gentry novels.
It’s like a trainwreck; you can’t stop watching. I bought book four (even though I was sicked by book two) because I keep thinking, surely it can’t go on this way, they wouldn’t keep publishing this, would they? There has to be story, somewhere! But thing is, they can and will, as long as people buy it. As I said on my blog, she’s not a writer, she’s a sickness.
The idea of a Anita comic book (mentioned in one of the notes-from-conferences link) is making me want to climb under the dining room table and hide.
All this and I’ve only read one book—Danse Macabre. But the pictures from that? The family bed. The lion and mermaid sexx.
Ferfe, you run the 12 step program and I’ll be there.
Ferfe, you run the 12 step program and I’ll be there.
As BAMM recently reminded me, I need to get off my ass and see about finding a publisher for the sequel to Revenge Gifts. This also means I need to behave myself in public 😉 Probably impossible, but …
It would be fun …
No. No.
Damn you Kate do NOT tempt me like this when I am weak.
Fear not, you were not the only one. I furrowed my eyebrows in deep concentration and didn’t get it until I read your comment. Bless you.
My reading life has been so much more enjoyable since I refused to read Micah, and this latest one…which I was thinking should be called Anita Fucks the Circus. Or the ballet troop or whatever the hell they were.
Also- giggling evilly that someone in the community finally said something to her. Although give it a little time- it will be twisted around so this other writer isn’t as famous, is jealous, is a hater, is a self-loathing masochist…you know, the usual.
I have read the first 2 issues of the Anita comic book. Mediocre, but the way the artists draw the hair on Anita and JC is massively annoying. I am interested to see how the comic book will deal with some of the Xrated stuff once it gets to that point.
And still no delicious gossip details.
I think that the gossip over what was actually said is so juicy and so specific that no one is willing to come forward with the he said-she said for fear of having their identity revealed.
To that person or persons I say, be brave! You are loved here! We will all be as silent as the grave. Promise!
Is it just that the early books were SO GOOD, or something else?
—They were. The sex is also very hot, IMO. If you just read for the sex, it’s not so bad.
I, after having told myself that I would not fork over another hard earned buck to LKH and co., paid for DM.
I got to the chapter where she beasts trying to jump out of her like someone had dumped water on Gizmo from the Gremlins.
I was in the tub, I threw the book across the room so hard, my mother thought I fell out of the tub.
It’s a farce, a sad farce and sadly as being one of the 1-2%, I think having invested 25 bucks apiece for every hard back I’ve paid for, some once or twice, I have a right to say that I’m being ripped off.
I don’t think an author has a right to show up at a convention, whether it be ARCHON, COMICON, etc and get their asses up on their shoulders when someone asks them to explain what the fuck is going on in the series and then cry that they are being ATTACKED.
Someone yelling across the room, “You’re a sad piece o’ shit and should die.” can be construed as verbal abuse, but asking questions about a piece of fiction that they have invested their time, paid for or not, to read entitles them to an opinion.
Now I don’t care if Anita pulls a “Legs Spread across American fund raiser” at least have the common decency to make it flow in the story.
I’m so tired of reading about Anita needing to have sex, her whine before she has the sex, whining during the sex, until she starts screaming like a Howler monkey, then hopping out of bed with the entire NFL first pick rookies to wipe her ass with a baby wipe and start bitching about it again.
If LKH got her ass chewed by some authors at ARCHON, so be it, and you know what they have ever damn right, especially when every time I pick up someone else’s book they have, “If you like LKH…..”, “Another intriguing read … same style as LKH.”
These people are being associated with someone who has turned her series into the most typical B movie bull crap, that we all hate, laugh at or yell at the screen for.
Killer on the loose, but the couple is in the car screwing.
Cop is called in for a heinous crime, told to be there in 5 minutes but she has time to have a full blown Skin-a-max sexorthon.
I mean really, unless I’m watching Skin-a-max, have picked up the book in the erotica section, I don’t want to have to read someone needing to have sex to save all the Supernaturals in the world.
Nor do I want to have to read Vampires: The Seduction, where the owner of the game has a lvl 99 Sexomancer, that is cannot be killed and anyone on her team is immortal.
Wow, you guys are so uptight.
I love the Merry Gentry series.
I will keep reading just to see Merry finally fuck the guy with the tentacles!
Let me take a minute to enjoy the novelty of being called uptight. Hee. That’s fun.
Okay, that’s good.
It’s not the gushing fuckfests that turn me off the books; it’s the lack of accompanying plot.
You know, I actually don’t hate the Merry Gentry series. I can see why the mary-sueness of it all might get to some, but the series itself doesn’t make me feel ripped off. It never was anything but what it is, and somehow it seems much hotter to me, sexwise, than anything in AB now. (in which the sex seems clinical and joyless). I enjoy her guys alot, even with their unfortunate tendency to change personalities at random, and I especially like the cast of villains. I just badly wish she’d given up Anita in favor of Merry, since she prefers to write erotica now.
I remember when I first read JC and Anita doing it in the bathtub. My toes curled. Ah memories.
I don’t have to go looking, shouldn’t even be here (finals week) but LKH Lashouts on LJ probably have links to it: http://community.livejournal.com/lkh_lashouts/
Alex M.(first post here)
Man that is kinda anticlimactic. Unless George R. R. managed to sound really nasty while saying his part.
Robin- where to stop reading ABVH? Dont read past Obsidian Butterfly. Just dont because you will have try to pull out your eyes and scrub your brain to expunge the horrible memories.
Merry Gentry series devolves quickly into a sexfest but it doesnt matter cause Merry was always a half faerie ho. We knew that going into it and if we as readers want her to have tentacle sex- then its all good. The problem with ABVH is that we came to like the sexually-repressed-lame- Catholic-bad-guy-ass-kicking-Anita but then she became a supersexed Anita that happens to fall onto alot of supernatural dick and forgets she is even trying to kick ass or solve a mystery.
I didnt need a 12 step but I admit to the temptation to rubberneck like at a bad car accident when passing Danse Macabre at the library. But then I remember that reading the next ABVH book would be losing 4 hours of my life that I just cant ever get back.
I just had to delurk to bitch about this because I hate what this series has become. I started reading in 1998 and eagerly awaited each new installement. Oh to go back to the beauty of that bathtub scene.
Hey FerfeleBat
please get back to work. Revenge Gifts was snarky, sexy and funny. I want more more more!
You probably have a panel with Harlan Ellison in mind. Not sure if that was at archon or not. But it’s the closest to a public rebuke I’m aware of. And admittedly I’m not even sure it actually happened, having not been there myself.
Ellison and LKH where apparently on a panel about modern horror, and Ellison is supposed to have told her to shut the fuck up at one point, and at another point expressed amazement she was on the panel at all for her lame vampire books. Apparently he and some of the other authors got to discussing the perfect crime with the audience and LKH tried to stop them on grounds that if anyone actually did what they were talking about they’d be accessories after the fact.
I’ve also seen a rumor that JD Robb referred to LKH as a hack and refused to be in another anthology with her.
I loved the Anita Blake series. I own all those books, even the new, absolutely awful ones that I swore I wouldn’t buy. My sister was also really into the series, and I almost refused to let her borrow Danse Macabre to spare her the misery. But she’s bigger than I am, so…
I want to know what the catalyst was that turned her from gripping author to Mary-Sueing writer of bad porn. Because let’s face it – after OB, her books have as much plot as your standard pornographic movie. TELL ME WHAT CHANGED!
I’m one of those who still reads all the LKH books. Even if both series have essentially the same characters (two sets of brothers, pale guys with lots of issues, dark guys with different issues, weak guys who are special pets)—I still read ‘em. Yeah, it’s a sexx0rama without a lot of plot. I don’t care. I know it’s bad for me. I don’t care. I’m beginning to think it’s an addiction, cause I’m not sure what will be too much, what will make me quit her. Ain’t found it yet.
About the proofreading though, I don’t care how many times you go through it, you can still miss stuff—and sometimes, when you correct things on the galleys, the pub doesn’t bother to fix them. Really annoying.
Ana…you pegged LKH, “she’s not a writer, she’s a sickness,” and “it’s the lack of accompanying plot.” I can’t read her message boards, really strange fans…but a sickness…now I understand.
Gail…I suffer from the same addiction, what can I say? I use those stretchy text book covers in public so nobody knows what I’m reading…does hiding my addiction make it better or worse?
If there was substance to this rumor, I think it would have appeared here. But…it’s really fun to lurk around SB and become enlightened!
Veering off topic – but while on the subject of Mary Sue’s, anyone else think MaryJanice Davidson is due for an obvious name chance?
Since there appear to be TWO of us, I had to distinguish myself.
Anita Blake – I haven’t read the last few. I have some FEW standard. Not many, but a few.
Merry Gentry, I read, but it’s cataloged as porn in my db (I’m a db developer). I want to read about her having sex with tentacled guy.
Harlan Ellison(tm) rebuking ANYONE is a laugh. The man is an ass that used up all his idiosyncrasy credits a long time ago. Hell, in a different situation, I’d give someone a chance just because Harlan Ellison(tm) ripped on ‘em.
My thing is this.
When I want to read SEX, I can trot my hips down to my local porn store and get some PWP.
When I pick up a book and see Vampire Hunter down the spine, that’s what I want to see.
If the character wants to fall on a couple of dicks every now and then, vampire or not; go ahead but I’d like to see some staking going on every once and a while, and I don’t mean the protagonist’s vagina either.
I’m so damned tired of being called up tight, because I don’t want to read a Walk thru/Talk thru on how to give head.
I don’t need to know that even after having slept with several men who are WAY above average, according to the Cock Hound, that she’s still tight.
Maybe the unidentified strand of lycanthropy found in her blood stream my be a WEREVIRGIN or WEREHYMEN.
Descriptions of sexual antics that read more like how many adults can we fit in this phone book are not appealing to me, and damn sure not sexy at all.
Sometimes, NOT ALL THE TIME, but sometimes, leaving something to the imagination is sexier than standing naked with the bare biscuits and a tired soldier sitting on wrinkled duffle bags, for all the world to see.
This is such an interesting comments thread.
Is there a disconnect between what the readers want and what the publishers are buying?
Editors cry they want it hot, hot hot.
Here we have disgruntled readers screaming for plot, plot, plot.
Somebody must be reading the hot hot hot reads, or editors wouldn’t be buying.
I like the Merry Gentry series because the sex is so weird. I don’t get tentacles and wings and love bites from other hot speculative romance stories. I mean it is *speculative* romance. I don’t want Blaze in Space.
I suggest to get what you want as readers, start voting with your dollars. There is plot, plot, plot out there in small press. Buy it now and again, instead of snapping up whatever New York hands you, and New York will catch on. I hope.
*cue sorrowful violins*
A friend got me hooked on the Anita Blake series one summer when I worked and lived at a camp, and at night I’d scare the crap out of myself reading the early books of the series, watching the shadows in the pine stand, and wondering when Amazon would send me the next book in the series that I’d ordered rush delivery to the middle of the woody nowhere.
The series rapidly declined for me when the focus and the struggle became less about the conflicts that “sexually-repressed-lame-
Catholic-bad-guy-ass-kicking-Anita” (TM Acajou) experiences within herself about her job and her life, and more about external conflicts that are inflicted upon her by otherworldy forces with big, turgid members.
The biggest disappointment for me was the loss of Anita as a character I liked. After awhile, her behavior was so far from the motivations I had identified in the early books that I couldn’t read anymore. I think I stopped before Obsidian Butterfly. I really and truly missed that girl who would wear a red polo shirt, red socks, black shoes and black jeans and then go out and kick incredible amounts of ass, and then wonder what everyone thought the big deal was because, hello, did you see the matching socks and shirt?
*end sorrowful violins*
I buy a lot from small press, including ebooks. In fact, I prefer ebooks because there is a total of one (count em, 1) English bookstore in all of Mexico City and it’s all the way across the city. That means if I get an actual book, it will take 2-3 weeks (sometimes a month) to reach me, and if I want to read something, I want it now, dammit. That makes downloading ebooks perfect for me.
The downside is that many epubs put out what I consider extremely irregular quality. Ellora’s Cave has some really amazing authors (like Shelby Reed) but they also put out stuff that I consider all but unreadable. Bottom line is, I don’t buy whatever NY throws out there because I can’t.
Joyce: “Editors cry they want it hot, hot hot.
Here we have disgruntled readers screaming for plot, plot, plot.
Somebody must be reading the hot hot hot reads, or editors wouldn’t be buying. “
I don’t think it’s ‘editors are buying’. I think they have a vested interest in what they perceive is a hot selling author. That doesn’t make her any good and when she stops selling books, they’ll drop her and move on to the next hot thing.
So it’s not like they have a whole lot of personal loyalty to her. Just to her ability to sell books.
I don’t really think this is so much a cry for plot in general, as a lament for a character we all enjoyed. Sure I have discovered lots of well written and hot small pub stuff since I started reading AB. – but no amount of any of that can bring back the ass-kicking Anita Blake. Really this is mourning for a character we really valued. We’ve had varying degrees of hope that she would make a reappearance (I think it is safe to say that possibility is long gone), and spent $$ on hardback books which really aren’t even the same series as they used to be. Same names, some same characters, totally different personalities, no more (real) mysteries, gore for the sake of gore, clinical tab a into tab b, tab c into a1, now put your leg here and I’ll jack up here, now insert here sex.
I think it just goes to show how beloved the series was, to have this kind of showing here. I like to think that the people enjoying the series now started reading with the books I consider shitty, and went back. I like to think that. Don’t know how true it is. I just know that for me, it is sadness for what was probably my favorite series, and is now past redemption. It sucks and I miss it!
This reminds me, and it’s not news to many of y’all, but Lilith Saintcrow’s Dante Valentine series did alot to heal my Anita Blake disaster wounds. Really excellent, hot, ass-kicking, terrific plot, royal (sympathetic) bitch of a main C. Love it. She can’t get those books out fast enough for me.
Yep, I devoured both those in a single day.
If Harlan Ellison was involved, I want video.
I saw the man at a con once, and he was explaining: if you’re here to hear Peter David and me talking about writing for television, tough, because we decided we want to do a cabaret act.
a tired soldier sitting on wrinkled duffle bags
Laughing in delight at this image. Probably it’s in common circulation but for some reason, I’ve never seen it before.
[No opinion to offer on LKH, since I haven’t read her & had no idea until recently that she existed. I think I’ll continue on with my blissful ignorance.]
I read ONE Anita Blake book (the first) – because my mother was (emphasis on present tense) a fan. And even then she set a standard. I was fifteen, and she said I was allowed to read the first three books and NO OTHERS until I turned eighteen. *lol*
I never read past the first book (wasn’t totally that interested, and I don’t think I completely understood it), but dear old Mum had no qualms about complaining about how porny they got. It got to the point where when I heard the title of one of her newest books would be called “Stroke of Midnight”, my first thought was “Heheheh. Stroke.”
Okay, so if I read any of these, I’m warned not to proceed beyond Obdisian Butterfly for fear of mindbending addiction. Got it.
One thing, though, is that now I’m going to be even more mortified whenever Sookie Stackhouse is compared to Anita. Poor Sookie needs to be protected from such slander.
I’m sure this solution has occurred to everyone involved, but the way I deal with series I’ve grown tired of but am not ready to completely quit is to buy the books used. That way I get my fix but don’t send a message to New York that I want more more more. Because really I don’t—unless the book is right there in front of me, of course, because I still have enough curiosity to risk the disappointment. If someone with greater wisdom would just stop publishing the damn things, it would be fine. A mercy killing carried out by the unmerciful publisher or author. Maybe this is what some of you Anita addicts face . . .
“Editors cry they want it hot, hot hot.
Here we have disgruntled readers screaming for plot, plot, plot.
Somebody must be reading the hot hot hot reads, or editors wouldn’t be buying. “
At my last ebook house, the emphasis was on getting books out as fast and as often as possible, and make sure they were hot. Quantity, not quality. I fought as much as I could and was criticized by many because I wanted ‘too many edits’ and ‘spent too much time proofing’.
When I opened my new house, I made sure folks knew up front that I wouldn’t play that. We do releases once a month, not once a week, and they are carefully edited. I’m picky on what I accept. I don’t just want good writing, I want original good writing.
Just because it’s hot doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get the same amount of attention and care as any other genre.
I am TERRIFIED that Sookie Stackhouse is turning into Anita Blake. When SIX men in the series want in her pants…oh NO.
Seriously, I haven’t bought the last book in the series after reading the review on dionnegalace.com. It sounds just like the series is becoming Anita Blake #3 (Merry Gentry being #2), and I am refusing to buy Definitely Dead until it comes out in paperback. I will no longer pay hardback money if the series is becoming another paranormal pornfest. , and if it is becoming a paranormal pornfest, I’ll probably stop reading Sookie too.
Btw, here’s the review: http://dionnegalace.com/wordpress/2006/05/07/definitely-dead-by-charlaine-harris/
And what the next one looks like:
http://dionnegalace.com/wordpress/2006/12/05/stop-breaking-my-heart-charlaine/
Hey FerfeleBat
please get back to work. Revenge Gifts was snarky, sexy and funny. I want more more more! ~ Acajou
Gracias. I’m getting back to work. Candy set down the gauntlet and I may have gone a little over the top in this next one demonstrating just how NOT gay Sam is.
I now return you to your LKH addiction therapy session.
Seriously, I haven’t bought the last book in the series after reading the review on dionnegalace.com. It sounds just like the series is becoming Anita Blake #3 (Merry Gentry being #2), and I am refusing to buy Definitely Dead until it comes out in paperback. I will no longer pay hardback money if the series is becoming another paranormal pornfest. , and if it is becoming a paranormal pornfest, I’ll probably stop reading Sookie too.
Well, at last count, Sookie has slept with exactly two men—count ‘em, two. Having not read the Blake series, I don’t have the comparison, and as much as I generally enjoy Bam’s reviews, I have a different take on DD than she does.
For one thing, I don’t think the Bill revelations had anything to do with Quinn—I think they had to do with the fact that Sookie just could not separate herself emotionally from Bill and she really needs to in order to move on as an independent woman (whether or not she ultimately ends up with Bill). And I think it’s been coming for a while (there’s that scene in an earlier book where Pam gets cut off before telling Sookie something terrible about Bill, other than the fact that he went off with Lorena) and wasn’t just cooked up by Harris to manipulate readers or clear Bill out of the path of true love/lust with Quinn.
I know Harris’s series is a paranormal, but I see it as very grounded in human problems and issues—in the dynamics of how an outsider makes her way in the world and in a very small judgmental community. I don’t see Sookie as a Mary-Sue, because she herself is filled with so many of her own prejudices and small-minded moments. I see her as a woman who basically has a series of choices to make—should she stay as a marginalized person in a town that doesn’t really accept her? Should she become a part of the supe community, which doesn’t fully accept her, either, and of which she really isn’t a natural part? Or should she carve out her own boundaries and borders and shape a path independent of those two less than ideal options? To me, anyway, Harris has been building the series toward the third option, and there is a scene in DD where Sookie finally understands that the world she has built for herself is a lie that made me feel that Harris is opening up that third possibility for Sookie in the books to come.
As for the men in Sookie’s life? I think the first few books reflect the excitement of a young woman who hasn’t been able to experience the sexual attentions of men in an enjoyable way finally have that in her life. And because Sookie is a late-bloomer, what would be more common with a younger person in most cases has played out within an older Sookie. But I think the fact that she refused to sleep with Quinn in DD suggests that she’s growing out of that late adolescence, out of the emotionally stunted place we found her in the first book.
That’s not to say Sookie won’t eventually go down the Anita path, but it’s difficult for me to imagine that. I don’t know whether the fact that I’m not reading the series side by side with LKH’s makes me more objective or more naive.
~I’ve also seen a rumor that JD Robb referred to LKH as a hack and refused to be in another anthology with her.~
While I may not be a fan, I’ve never referred to any writer as a hack. I did express some annoyance to my publisher when in an anthology with LKH, LKH did not write a novella as the rest of us did—as advertized—but used the opening of her upcoming novel instead. So no, I would be unlikely to participate in another anthology with her, but I don’t diss other authors. Just tacky to do so, imo.
I weep for Anita of yore. I also live in fear for Edward. But it’s Sigismund I feel sorry for. When character disorder strikes, and heroines turn into whinging, two-dimensional blow-up bints who can’t take a dainty, round-heeled (and round-toed too) step on itty-bitty feet without slipping on black satin sheets to land vice-like fanny-(Brit sense*)-first on a manly member or six, and then writhing in the throes of increasingly tedious ecstasy, it’s the flightless birds that suffer most.
(*or maybe not… I kinda lost the will to read around NiC. I tried to continue, but just couldn’t take all the endless damn words. So many, many words. And all the same.
Instead, I would just pop into a bookshop while waiting for the bus and flick through the latest release, skipping all the s-e-x and trying to glean any bits of leftover plot. At least it kept me busy while the barista with the floppy hair made my coffee. Anyhow, my lack of attention to things that pulsate means I have no idea if one of la petite pute’s stable has now made it ‘twixt her peachy nether globes and down the hershey highway to narcolepsy. Frankly it’s not something I’d care to contemplate.)
And when did Anita stop going to the gym? I liked that she worked out and didn’t lift stupid pink girly weights.
Sod the bloody ardeur, I’m off to save the penguin.