Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 21

Danse Macabre--chapter 28

And we open with Anita angsting about the baby. Again. This time specifically because one of her men is happy about the baby and his emotions are infecting her and making her happy.

We ignore this. Having another person's needs and wants and emotional satisfaction usurp yours? Oh, that's just a metaphysical accident. That doesn't matter. What matters is Anita doesn't know how she feels about having a baby.

Lemme make this real clear: This is not a choice issue. Anita has made her choice about three times now. She's not aborting the baby. She said that to Ronnie, she said that mentally, and she said it to Richard when he pushed for an answer. Anita is having the baby. What Anita's issue is now is that she's not happy about having a baby.

The problem? It's her choice to keep the baby. She's rejected the obvious solution--abortion!--because it disagrees with her religious beliefs. Which is fine. But now she has to deal with the consequences of being pregnant, and that would mean changing her lifestyle. Which could actually have been interesting. We could have explored the difference between dangerous, out of control and toxic relationships, and healthy, managed relationships that would be dangerous, but really aren't because we're all mature adults and we know how to do this shit. And that doesn't mean "White picket fence" which apparently equals "evil" in this series. That means doing things like getting the psychic vampirism under control so it doesn't hurt the kid. Vetting the harem so that she knows they'll all be safe around kids. (Which should have been her second move after having the test come up positive. Yeah. PSA for today? Background check EVERYBODY you bring into your kids' life. Babysitters. Repair men. New boyfriends. Trust me, blog readers, this is necessary.) Figuring out how to were-proof a nursery so that a were doesn't whoopsie-shift on a full moon and decide Baby-nita is dinner and not darling. At the least, working out when she'd have to restrict her activity and then defining what "restrict activity" means so that she can keep on working (it doesn't mean bedrest. It means "Let the person with the combat armor and SWAT training go first."). Learn how to use safewords and safety gear during rough sex so that if something goes wrong, they can stop before somebody gets hurt and/or get the shit off fast when somebody is hurt. (WHICH SHE SHOULD BE DOING ANYWAY BECAUSE FUCKING GOD.) Baby-safeing an unusual lifestyle doesn't mean giving up that unusual lifestyle, or even toning it down. It just means taking a couple extra steps to make sure that when you practice your lifestyle, the baby is safe. Most people wouldn't have to do much, if anything, and the steps you would have to take, far as I know, isn't all that far removed from taking extra steps to make sure that you are safe when you practice your lifestyle.

And instead of dealing with this like a grownup, sitting down and taking a few minutes to decide what all her options are and start planning for the next stage, Anita is going to wallow in being panicked. Because she's the ONLY WOMAN EVER who has had to deal with an unwanted pregnancy they also don't want to abort. She's the ONLY WOMAN EVER who has had to work through a pregnancy when she has a dangerous job. (Let's tell that to the cops and FBI agents and firemen and other employed women who get fired because they are pregnant.)

(And if you wanted to do realism, Anita's biggest job would apparently be AVOIDING HER MURDERER.  as that is one of, if not the, leading causes of death for pregnant women.)

And the fact that Anita is finding I don't want the baby more important than SOMEBODY ELSE IS URSURPING MY THOUGHT PROCESSESS AND MAKING ME FEEL SHIT I DON'T WANT TO FEEL is kind of telling at where her priorities are. She's being mentally raped and potentially brainwashed into keeping a baby she very pointedly does not want, and it's like it's fucking Tuesday.

...actually, this is an Anita Blake book. That is Tuesday.

She gets dressed. We get the list of Sharp Pointy Things Anita Blake Hides Under Her Miniskirt (TM) and Requiem says "Isn't that a little much?"

Dude. At this point Anita ought to be wearing battle armor and a gatling gun.

She decides to call her doctor and gets a female doctor instead. She asks Female!Doc about the pregancy test multiple times and Fem!Doc is like "You need to come in for a prenatal exam" and Anita is all like "Can I speak to someone else?" and she pushes until she gets a male doctor.

I am not making this up. It's right here in the text.

“Anita, I talk to a lot of women. Most of them are happy about the news, but not all of them. You don’t sound like this was good news to you.”
 “It wasn’t.” 
“Dr. North is just coming out, I’ll let you talk to him.” Silence, then the sounds of movement, cloth rustling, and a man’s voice. “Hey, Anita, how’s my favorite vampire hunter doing?” 
“Not so good today,” I said, and my voice sounded small, and hurt.

Female doctor? Dick measuring contest. Only with emotions. Male doctor? Anita is small and hurt and wobbly and in need of comfort. LOOK AT IT PEOPLE. LOOK AT IT. IT IS NOT ME DRAWING THIS OUT OF MY ASS THAT IS RIGHT THERE IN THE TEXT.

 “I can’t (abort), not unless there’s something majorly wrong. I mean, I’ll need to be tested for Vlad’s syndrome, and Mowgli syndrome.” 
“I figured the Vlad’s syndrome test, but you only need the Mowgli test if you’ve had sex with a shapeshifter while he’s in animal form.” 

I put my forehead against the cool marble tiles of the wall, and said, “I know that.”

...I guess LKH wants to be all inclusive, and that means giving the zoos something to play with. I...genuinely don't remember this happening. At all. Also it's apparently just an excuse for Anita to be this edgy person on the thin edge of the sexual norms and it just doesn't work at all.

Also Mowgli syndrome (aside from being drawn from The Jungle Book and probably not kosher for persons of Indian descent) means that the baby can gestate at the rate of the animal, which means if Anita had it she'd be ready to give birth by now, though the baby could just suddenly go "Well, we've gone normal up until now, it's time to get my Renesmee on" and have Anita wake up with a belly ready to deliver.

Which would probably result in severe uterine tears, hemmoraging, and a very dead Anita. But the Doctor doesn't mention this.

“If you have even a mild form of Mowgli syndrome, then by Monday the fetus could come up on an ultrasound as over the age limit for abortion in this state. You really do not want to be out of options on this particular birth defect, Anita.”

Which is why ultrasounds for abortions are kind of bullshit, but the book is going to ignore that in favor of the scary scary birth defects poor Anita's baby might have. Which is actually a serious and traumatic event a lot of women have to face. Anita is dealing with this fairly legitmately, and setting her limits on what is acceptable for the baby. Something about the language is off, but I can't put my finger on what it is. (My gut says it's because nobody's discussing the effect of these birth defects on the baby past "It'll eat out of the uturus." Which, I'll admit, is a pretty big defect.)

...though it does come across a little "I CAN'T ABORT FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS FIND ME AN EXCUSE PLEASE DOCTOR." Which also reminds me of the "ABORTION IS BAD" arc in Left Behind that ended with Hattie Durham having a life-threatening miscarrige that poisoned her attending and also a baby that the GOOD CHRISTIAN DOCTOR referred to as "it" before dumping it in the incinerator. (Because MAKING A STATEMENT OF FAITH is good, but actually dealing with the consequences of the "right" choice isn't something the writers wanted to explore. JBJ and TLH really, REALLY suck for a lot of reasons.) (It was also the anti-christ's baby. Who was himself the result of artificially inseminating a spiritualist with the genetically engineered semen from two gay men who only married the spiritualist woman for her baby. They left her in the care of a witch who sacrificed a baby mouse during the birth, in the middle of a pentagram in the middle of the modern delivery room. I think Tim and Jerry played "Offended Fundie Bingo" when they were writing the prequels) (Sadly, nobody ever shot Rayford Steele in the face. I was kind of hoping for that.)

Anyway, it all comes off like Anita is going to keep the baby because that is the Author's Statement of Purpose. But because that Statement would actually fuck up everything the author finds cool and interesting, we're going to get rid of it anyway.

NO. Either abort and get it over with, or deal with a full term pregnancy and its consequences. DON'T FUCKING COP OUT.

Though I have to say Dr. North sounds pretty awesome. Anita is like "I had sex with a shapeshifter in animal form and we're bringing about fifty people with us to the pelvic exam" and he's like "Yeah, sure, the more the merrier."

And then Anita feels cold and realizes she might be draining Damian down to death without intending to kill him, so it's time to forget about the baby plot and go focus on feeding.

Maybe we’d eaten a big enough meal from Auggie last night, but I couldn’t chance that. I needed food. The only question was, which hunger to feed first? Sex, or coffee? Hmm, let me think.

Anita. I know it's been a while since you've actually encountered it, so let me explain this to you very carefully. NEITHER OF THOSE ARE FOOD. Good fucking God everybody has told Anita that the best way to keep the ardeur AND her inner menagerie under control is to eat a goddamn hamburger. Mcdonalds is outside, this is one of the incredibly rare times when a serial killer isn't out to kill you. It is safe for you to use a drive-thru like the rest of us. GO GET REAL FOOD.

End of chapter.

Books and things

So we're having to revise the publishing schedule because I kind of botched it. So here's what my plan is for the next several months.

Today I'll be uploading the Gray Prince books and the Exiles Omnibus to Nook Press and Smashwords. Those of you who don't have copies because you don't like Amazon can now get copies.

I've also been working on a print version of the Starbleached omnibus. A month of purse-testing has proven that the book will survive. (AKA No Mommy I don't want to have to make another gargle-blarble PDF) So we're going to see how much of that I can get done over break. In the same vein, I'll start working on the Exiles Omnibus for print and a Dragonbreath...well, we'll get to that.

Third point: I'd like to lightly revise one thing. All the books published so far, I've kind of thought of as serialized novels. So Dragonbreath is one book, all the Exiles books are one story, all the Starbleached books are one story, and so on.

I told ya'll about a year and a half ago that I had a lot of books planned. Here's the Master List of what I've done and what I plan to do:

Starbleached:
Starbleached (duh)
Liberty (AKA next big project)

Exiles:
Silver Bullet, Black Hounds (It's out)
Iron Bars, Silver Stars
Green Water, Golden Daughter
White Lies, Red Skies

Tales of the Gray Prince:
Sign of Eagles (AKA everything that's already released, plus one)
Sign of Bulls
Sign of Lions
Sign of Men 

 And after all that's done, I'll be publishing The Book, and then we'll see where we go from there. Obviously, this is gonna take a long, good while.

So as far as what you get to look forward to this coming year: Liberty, then the next Exiles book in the summer, and Leythorne gets his next ride in the winter. Sound good?

Good.

Now. I have to go do about sixteen million chapters, so if you'll pardon me....

Danse Macabre--chapter 27

One thing that I find myself forgetting is that these books are fiction. No, no no, not THAT way. But I start ascribing stupidity to Anita or Jean Claude or Requiem or something else, when in reality these are not real people. This is all make-believe, and if one character does something it is because the author decided having them do that would be a good idea. This is theoretically a good thing, because that shows that LKH can still manage some kind of suspension of disbelief. The plot sucks, but you, the reader, behaves as if the plot sucks because Anita is making bad choices. In reality the plot sucks because the Author wants it to go there and doesn't give a flying fuck what the implications are.

Case in point? The whole "Addicted to the ardeur" thing.

There is one thing in this universe I get really, really well, and that's addiction and recovery. I grew up around it. A typical sunday afternoon conversation with my Dad would be about how cocaine works and why it was so hard for Person X to not relapse. The "Come to Jesus" talks that my dad had with several people in our living room. I overheard that. And then I went off my own deep end and still have to deal with it every day. The other day I found out a couple really upsetting things involving my artwork and how someone I kind of trusted and liked has been using it, and my first impulse was not ranting and raging, but rather "I want to go cut." And it's not flamboyant and dramatic and full of screaming. It's still and quiet and very, VERY hard to resist. Having an addiction, chemical or psychological, means either spending the rest of your life sitting on the edge of your seat, wanting something you didn't ever want to want again, or it means dying. Unfettered addiction is a terminal disease. You will always escalate. Where you are right now is not where you will be next year. You'll either be sober, or you'll have taken things two or three steps further.

Requiem is lying on the bed staring at Anita with unfettered longing and everyone else is talking about how he's an addict and so are London and Auggie and how the only solution is avoidance, and it suddenly hit me that the ONLY reason this shit is here is to make Anita Blake an addictive substance. To make her more desirable and more better and just...well, MORE. The current conflict here is between Anita and Meng Die, and so Meng is suddenly an uncontrollable danger and Requiem is so addicted to Anita he'd leave Meng for her...and it's just to make Anita look good. 

That's it. 

 “He is an addict, ma petite, an addict to the ardeur. I saved him from Belle Morte, who would have addicted him again, but London and I discussed that even your ardeur, and mine, might be too much for him. If it is”— he gave that graceful shrug—“ I will find him some place far away from such temptations, but it will take time to find a home for someone as potentially powerful as London.

I'm not even going to say that this could be a good plot. No. No it can't. LKH doesn't have the ability to handle it right. I probably don't either. And the fact that it's here just to make Anita look prettier than the other females in the series is absolutely fucking wrong.

I shook my head, because this wasn’t him. It was his body, but whatever made Requiem who he was, that wasn’t in his eyes. It was a stranger’s face. What makes people people is not just bone structure and eye color, but the force of their personalities. The years of experience painted on their faces. Them, for lack of a better word. Them.

Anita Blake is so powerful she erases other people's personalities without intending to.

And the point where this all falls apart? Anita is trying to bring Requiem "back" from his addiction by using the ardeur.

Because addiction totally works like that.

They kiss and cuddle and lots of spilling happens and Anita gives back what she took away in the first place because she totally can do that. Using addictive behavior to showcase how powerful and motherly and good natured your main character is isn't an issue at all.

Anita's necromancy goes haywire, and she tastes all the vampires psychically. Apparently Jean Claude is running an ice cream shop. She stops because this is bad...somehow...and Wicked reminds her to "bind" him the way she bound Truth, or else undo it. She says "Well, I didn't know it would do that" because that TOTALLY fixes everything (Did Anita/LKH skip kindergarten or something?) and that kind of goes nowhere.

Requiem reminds Anita she needs to feed, because we haven't totally already done that. Anita demands that everyone else leave the room, and Elinor is all "But the test won't work if we're not here" which has to be the dumbest excuse to watch public sex in the history of intercourse, and Jean Claude says "We've failed" which means nothing whatsoever to me.

Anita needs gauze because Requiem fed on her. Random Person named Cisco gives her a piece of gauze and starts staring at her chest, because we needed to be reminded Anita's done all this in a bathrobe.

Jean Claude then gets pissy that Anita is bandaging her wound because it's a "mark of favor" and that means she must be ashamed of it rather than, you know, be bleeding from an open wound on an expensive fucking bathrobe. He talks her out of getting proper medical attention because bandaging it means she doesn't love him anymore.

I am dead fucking serious.

Then he licks her blood off his fingers and goes in to kiss her, and she isn't completely sold on the kiss (probably because he just manipulated her out of medical care) and he pouts because she's not enthusiastic enough.

“I want you and Richard to embrace yourselves, and I am out of time to await this miracle.”

Translation: You guys aren't completely happy being rapist serial killers yet, and it's dissapointing me.

Requiem then says that Anita is becoming like Belle Morte because she dangles the promise of arduer sex in front of vampires and then takes it back, because being called a cock-tease by a man who desperately wants sex is totally progressive and not at all the behavior of a manipulative douchebag.

Oh, hey, it's time to have the creepiest conversation in the book so far:

“Oui, Nikolaos feared what I would become if she allowed my powers full rein. The Master of the City that traded me to her feared me, as well. He sent me to Nikolaos because he knew that her child’s body would not be something I would willingly seduce.”
 “She looked about twelve or thirteen; that’s legal in some places.”

 He shook his head. “Not for me,” he said, then he shivered. “You met her, ma petite; could you ever see me purposefully doing anything to draw her attention to me in that way?”

That bolded part? Anita says that. Ms. "Seventeen is too young" is now questioning Jean Claude's choice not to bang a thousand year old vampire in a child's body. And it's implied that the thing keeping Nikolaos safe from JC wasn't her age, it was her absolute bad-ass batshit murder-impulse insanity. THAT IF NIKOLAOS HAD BEEN LESS SCARY THAT MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE HAPPENED.

Which also means at some point LKH sat down and thought "Hum. I need to explain why JC never fucked the thirteen year old villian who was technically his master."


 Jean Claude then goes back to the test he said they failed, and explains that if Anita can roll Requiem without obliterating him again, than she'll be safe enough to take to the party:

“Then it is controllable, incredibly powerful, but controllable. It is something our enemies and allies will fear and lust after, but they will not fear us too much, or lust too greatly. It is the difference between having a weapon that one can use, and one that you dare never use.”

We're finally there, folks. It's a weaponized vagina.

Anita then takes a second to piss on Ronnie:

If Ronnie had been there, she’d have shot herself, or maybe shot me.

Because "Good" (gag) girl Anita is refusing free sex.

Also, I think if Ronnie were there, she'd have dragged Anita's ass down to the nearest cult deprogrammer, and then gone back with a very large gun to turn Jean Claude into very small kibble.

Requiem and Anita stare at each other for a few minutes, with Requiem doing passive agressive little digs to try to get her to fuck him, and then Asher shows up.

Asher takes one look and says "Oh, good, I'm in time to watch."


 Asher has been talking Meng Die down, apparently, and Meng has agreed to not kill Requiem as long as Anita keeps feeding Jean Claude more power. Well, there's that plot thread resolved. Nice to know it happened ENTIRELY OFFSCREEN.

We get a nice dose of Asher Scar Angst, and then he and Anita start making out.

This chapter will never end. It's still going on. END. END. EEEEEENNNNNNNNDDDDD.

 Anita decides that Asher has rolled her and Jean Claude says that since everybody's gotten a level up, Asher's ability to facinate must have gone up a few notches (I wonder if they had to delete any abilities. I always hate it when I need to give somebody FLY and my choices come down to either a major attack or something like CUT or DIG). Anita demands that Asher try his gaze out on her while her sheilds are up. Everybody refuses to do it, so the conversation goes back to "Why Won't Anita Fuck Requiem," which in turns goes back to the pregnancy scare.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

This then segues into "Anita won't let the two gay men have sex" with a nice helping of "You'll leave our powerbase I'm making myself miserable AND IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT."


Everyone in this book is horrible. EVERYONE.

Anita gives them her benediction to have a relationship. They're greatful. No, really. THEY'RE GREATFUL ANITA GAVE THEM PERMISSION TO HAVE A RELATIONSHIP.

 And of course, we have to bring up Juliana, JC and Asher's dead girlfriend.

Julianna regretted that she never gave me a child.”

Because it all revolves around babies and vaginas and reproduction and FUCK NO. One, I don't like that suddenly EVERYTHING IS CHILDREN. Two: No way in FUCK a reasonable person would bring a child of any kind into Belle Morte's court. NO FUCKING WAY. Just trying to think about that brings up so much nope it's traumatic.

The chapter FINALLY ends with everyone tummy-rubbing Anita and being blissfully happy and Anita realizing that she has to start "living for" the people she loves.

We are now sixty percent of the way through this book. HELP. ME.

Danse Macabre--chapter 26

Time for Anita to angst about having sex for all the wrong reasons. Again.

Part of me hopes that someday I get over being so damned uncomfortable about group scenes like this;

Here's the thing about Anita's guilt trips: It's never for the right reason. Here. Let's go over the things Anita Angsts About:

Having sex. Having sex with more than one person. Falling in love with someone. Not loving someone. Not conforming to normal standards of proper. Not being blond.

Things Anita Should Angst About But Does Not:

Raping Richard. Being so unable to control her powers she literally breaks people. Raping Auggie. Raping all of Auggie's people.

Seriously, this list could go on and on and on and on.

LKH then proves that she doesn't understand what "Choosing between the lesser of two evils" means and has Anita yearn to choose the "Lesser Good".

Blazing blue fuck, Anita, you do that ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Every time you make a choice, and I mean every single fucking time, you choose the least good option. You choose not to regulate your power through eating normal food. You choose to feed your sex drive on people you goddamn fucking know are not strong enough to handle it. You choose to place yourself in questionable positions because you decide that a dick measuring contest is more important than any other consideration. You are HORRIBLE at police work because you literally cannot back the fuck down and let other people work. You choose over and over and over and OVER to ignore other people's boundaries and you choose more often than I can count to use your understanding of someone's personality to get what you want out of that person, after which you usually choose to discard them like trash. And you NEVER choose the lesser of two evils. Auggie, for example. The "lesser of two evils" would have been to fake an emergency phone call, or go for the very real one going on upstairs, and book it until you had decent backup and had a chance to get calmed back down. The choice was between letting two of your allies grouse at each other for ten minutes or raping one of them, and incidentally raping all the people they have with them. There is no way in fuck going for the latter option is choosing the lesser evil.

Finally Anita understands that she basically broke Requiem, and after going through great pains to make her emotional pain bigger than her actual crime, so, you know, she doesn't actually have to accept responsibility for it, she asks Jean Claude to fix it. Requiem is spread out on the bed, looking erotically wounded, and you have no idea how much I would have given to never have typed that.  Jean Claude says nothing, and Elinor, who is still in the room, asks Wicked and Truth, who are also still in the room, if it's possible for Jean Claude to fix things.

They bounce back and forth, implying that they've got the power to fix things but refusing to do so. Anita basically says "Fuck this shit" and commands Requiem to free himself from her power, otherwise she won't feed on him. This is like telling an addict that they need to sober up, or else they won't get any more cocaine. RECOVERY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.

Requiem says he doesn't want to, so there.

Jean Claude suggests Anita use her necromancy to free Requiem. After a few minutes of back and forth, he says something like "I wanted to give my people shelter, not chains" and this makes Anita fall in love with him, and they get mushy all over each other. And of course this all has something to do with Richard, though fuck if I know what.

London, who is also still in the room, tells Anita to effectively shit or get off the pot. Either free Requiem, or stop angsting about it. Anita turns to do so....aaaaand the chapter ends.

Danse Macabre--chapter 25

This chapter is an ongoing parade of pants-shittingly stupid inanity, and I have no idea how I'm going to make it through.

I skipped it last night because HOW CAN I MAKE ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOTHING FUNNY?!?

One POS paragraph at a time, CW, we can do this.

Anita comes out of the bathroom. This is starting to induce a pavlovian cringe--going into and out of bathrooms. Nothing happens this time, though, because it's just Jean Claude talking to a blond vampire. And it's the first blond where I can't decide if she's supposed to be teh evuls blonde, or an actual character.

Her long blond hair fell in a pale wave around her body, like a second robe, so long. She was a vision in pale delicate colors, then she looked at me. Her eyes were a pale icy blue, the wrong color of blue for that delicate face. Her face was a near-perfect oval, dainty and unreal, as if someone had carved her from some white, pure rock, and breathed life into her. Unless she worked at it, hers was a cold beauty. If her eyes had been a brighter blue, I think it would have made her look warmer.

Look. Speaking as an artist the most important aspects of an eye are that they are wet and roughly the right shape. Dramatic pictures aside, most people don't notice eye color. For example, I fucking love the picture of Sharbat Gula (Aka the National Geographic Afgan girl) because it's a good picture. The only reason I can tell you her eyes are green are 1. I looked up the picture several days ago and 2. I just looked it up again so I could refer to her by name and not title. And the green is more of a "well...I guess so" and not, you know, GREEN. Green eyes, blue eyes, violet eyes and gray eyes are all REALLY close together. You don't notice them from across the room. The famous "Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes" line meant "let them get REALLY FUCKING CLOSE."

And I don't see how turning up the saturation would make blue less cold.

She had the blond Nordic beauty that I’d craved as a child. Craved so I’d fit in with my blond, blue-eyed father and his new family.

....you know, for all that Anita goes on and on and on and on about being mixed, and how it's thoroughly traumatic for her that she's not blond...she doesn't have a lot of Hispanic. The pale skin thing is negligable--you live in South Texas, you meet a lot of people who are mixed race, and you meet a lot of white people who married Hispanic people and took the Hispanic last name. I have, no shit, met an awful lot of blond, blue eyed Garzas. And Anita has no cultural ties to Hispanic things. There's no Tejano music, there's no mad rushes for pan Dulce or Bunuelos for New Year's. There is NOTHING to suggest Anita either has Hispanic heritage or values that Hispanic heritage. She brings it up a lot, sure, but it's always in how that heritage never measured up to white people--her heritage is only mentioned when it's a negative.  And while we're on the subject of blue eyes, there's a really interesting Creator Approved picture from the Anita Blake Comic Book...

This image belongs to Marvel. I have nothing to do with this. Come on Anita, pout harder.
Remember all those "Jean Claude has too-blue eyes" descriptions? Yeah. I can't tell.
Also: Marvel paid really good money for that image. And coloring job.

I weep.

And Anita isn't Nordic/Hispanic. She's German. German skintone might be white, but hair and eyes pretty much come in brown brown brown and uh...brown. There's the occasional blonde and blue set thrown in, but most of the "I ARE ARYAN GERMAN" actors--both when the Nazis were in charge and after--come from Sweden and Norway. Maybe her stepmom really is from nordic stock, but she'd be whining about the blond hair even if she weren't Hispanic.

Just one "I spent today tracking down my heritage" mention. Just one. 

 The big crisis is that Elinor is awake before noon. Yeah, everybody got a powerup, remember? A lot of vampires are waking before they're supposed to. I wanted one of them to turn into a charizard, but I guess you can't have everything.

Elinor also doesn't need to feed, because Jean Claude is full and then some. They contemplate how this will help them expand their power base. But enough about that, because Requiem is here!

Requiem shrugged back the hood without using his hands, the way you’d flip long hair behind your back. The hood slid down and the right side of his face was a mass of deep-purple bruises. One of his eyes was almost swollen shut...

I call bullshit. Not on the injuries. Abuse is wrong and always will be. I call bullshit on the whole "Meng Die beats up Requiem" thing. This isn't a character fail. This is a creator fail. The ONLY reason this is here is to obliterate any trace of Meng Die as a strong, competent female character anywhere near Anita's level. Because that can't be allowed at all. LKH wrote a character, realized that character was in competition with her main character, and decided to demonize the first character so that Anita would stay on top. How fucking competitive do you have to be to character assassinate your own fucking creations?

 Oh, and here's the other reason Requiem had to get battered into a pulp:

I did it without being asked. I’d noticed the bruises last night, but hadn’t seen all the bandages under his shirt. I had had no idea how hurt he was. I hesitated in the bathroom with the scissors in my hand. I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I looked sort of startled. Had he really dumped Meng Die because of me? Dumped another woman on the off chance that I might take him as a pomme de sang? I stared at myself in the mirror and just didn’t see a woman who could make a man dump someone on the possibility of sex. Elinore, maybe, but me… I just didn’t think so.

Anita is so desirable men would risk death at the hands of a woman to get to lie adoringly at Anita's precious feet.

Oh, and she's so modest she'll never admit it in a million years...but she sure is thinking it.

 Because it's not like one vampire just pounded another into raw meat, and this is wrong or anything. Nope. It's to prove that Anita is just that wonderful.

And Meng Die did this where everyone could see, so Anita asks how they covered it up:

“Mass hypnosis is not illegal, ma petite, only personal hypnotism.”

Mah. Gah. Gabada. Whaaaa...you're serious? LKH, you seriously expect your audience to swallow that the government left a loophole that big in the vampire laws? It's illegal to hypnotize one person, but not a whole crowd? Well, fuck, why aren't vampires on the payroll for politicians? Vote for me...vote for meeee...

Also: Way to go covering up serious domestic violence, Jean Claude. A sane person would have dropped Meng's cross-wrapped coffin off at the police station with a nice folder of photographs of Requiem's face, but you're much better than that.

Everyone in this book is horrible. EVERYONE.

 And of course Requiem is addicted to the ardeur and the only cure is to send him far away and never let him have pleasure again, so Anita has to take him into her bed. It's selfish for her not to. I mean, he just got beaten the fuck up for her and all. It's just her self-doubt telling her she can't possibly love more than one person. And look at those battered blue puppy eyes, don't you just want to?

“I don’t want to collect men,” I said. I stared down at the man in my lap. “I certainly don’t want them this… besotted. This a level of wanting that’s just wrong.”

The one thing that never fails to amaze me is how this book manages to say exactly the truth when it's trying to do "Character A is sorting through their inhibitions."

“Ma petite, you must meet this obligation.” 
I stared at him. “Obligation?”

 “You have addicted him to you. Would you be as cruel as Belle Morte herself and cast him away, with this desire riding him?”

This book was published in 2006. TWO THOUSAND MOTHERFUCKING SIX.

 And then Elinor and Jean Claude reveal that Anita is basically the dumping ground for Jean Claude's own ardeur, and she's taken all the pressure off of him. Isn't that nice.

Anita finally agrees, but not for right now...probably because even LKH knows the readers will revolt if she forces another sex scene down our throats. Requiem is hurt.

And then Wicked and Truth show up.

Anita and Jean Claude decide that means the powerup is tied to Anita's ardeur and not so much Belle's line--which doesn't explain Elinor but whatever--and that they need to go test the ardeur on more vampires. End of chapter.

Hate. Hate hate hate hate HATE this book.

DRAGON BREATH PART 3 IS LIVE

Here's Amazon

Here's Barnes and Noble

And here's Smashwords.

GO GET YOUR COPIES. GO. GO.

Book Drop: It's comming

As I said on tumblr, the uploading of various files to various websites is in progress.

That progress goes somewhat like this:

Basic format: Identical no matter where it goes.

Smashwords: Save as .doc, doublecheck to make sure there are no headers/footers/random stray shit from track changes (Seriously. Track Changes is worse than burs. It sticks to everything and it never fucking goes away. It only makes you think you've eradicated it. There's always some portion of the manuscript retaining Track Changes like some kind of mutated primordial appendix, waiting to spew the red letters and comments back across the manuscript in a burst of formatting-destroying frenzy) Upload to Smashwords. Upload artwork to Smashwords. Sit back. Enjoy a few minutes of peace.

Amazon: Save as .html. Open Calibre. Load .html file into calibre. Change metadata three times because just typing a name and hitting enter isn't a fucking option and you forget this every time. Add cover art. Let the program resize it for you. Convert book from .zip to .mobi, making sure you check the little box that will read < H1 > as a chapter header so that it will recreate the table of contents you already created in Word. Save. Go to Amazon. Upload file. Upload artwork.

Nook Press: Save as .doc. Create new project. Upload file. Hopefully we remembered to use section breaks and not chapter breaks so we do not have to re-create all the chapter breaks manually. Check file over. Realize that once again, every fucking chapter header is wrong, and that these garbled titles are going into the TOC Nook Press will create when it processes your file. Spend a mind numbing HOUR changing these fucked up headings to "Chapter One" "Chapter Two" ect. Ect. Ect. Upload art. RE-upload art because you used the big file. Thank all your stars that despite all this, Nook Press has the friendliest user interface out of the trio, and that they are your friends. Pledge blood and a kidney to keep BnN.com alive for another year. (Please. They're my favorites and they don't require nearly as much flogging as Amazon does for sales. Please do not die, Barnes and Noble. Please.)

Afterparty: Get drunk and watch something stupid on Netflix/Amazon Prime.

Edit: AND IT IS LOADED. AND LIVE OVER ON SMASHWORDS.

Indie-go-go contributors should go check their emails. IF YOU CONTRIBUTED AND YOU HAVE NOT GOTTEN YOUR COPIES LET ME KNOW PLEASE.

Danse Macabre--chapter 24

Everybody's got to take another bath to wash pieces of Nathanial, Haven and Graham out of their hair. That's what the text says. It also says this part:

Thanks to the problems we’d had with the masters of both Cape Cod and Chicago, we had extra guards. They had actually put guards on the coffin room, which was fortunate; Meng Die had cracked her coffin when she got the power rush that all of Jean-Claude’s people got from our sex with Augustine. Meng Die, more powerful, not a good thought.

Last post I mentioned that sociopaths are unable to maintain peer-to-peer platonic relationships. Anita is straight; women are demonized because she can't snow them, she can't stand being a student anymore (the handful of positive female relationships so far have all been teachers, like her Wiccan friend) and nobody is stupid enough to try to learn anything from Anita Blake. This is a prime example. Meng Die is pretty powerful. She's not powerful enough to force Anita to accept her as an equal, but she's powerful enough to make that acceptance a good political choice. Instead of making that choice and working with Meng, Anita demonizes her for being out of control and dangerous. And there's a little more than sociopathic misogyny going on here. Another characteristic of sociopathic relationships is isolation. If you're involved with a sociopath, they will make great attempts to isolate you from people they cannot control. In the case of a romantic relationship, this usually means demonizing family and friends, especially people the sociopath has no interest in seducing. If the sociopath is in a "teacher" role with you, they will demonize other information sources--other students, other teachers, experts in your feild--so that you become dependant on them and only them. If they're your student, they're the student constantly telling on their peers and continually sucking up to you, trying to convince you that they are the only person who values your knowledge. The reason behind this isn't gender competition. It's a power play. The fewer people you trust, the fewer reality checks you have, and the more secure their control is.

Anita is attempting--successfully, I might add--to distance Jean Claude from a powerful female figure who sees right through Anita's bullshit. That's what's going on here. Its easy to read this as a gender thing, but IMHO that's an oversimplification because it implies that it's a passive act on Anita's part, and if she simply changed her perspective re: women, Anita would be able to relate to Meng Die (and Ronnie. And the female cop whose name I can't remember.) on a peer-to-peer basis. But Anita dislikes Meng Die because Anita can't manipulate Meng Die; Meng Die sees through Antia. Meng Die is a potential source of trouble and Anita needs to get her men away from her before Meng Die "infects" them with, you know, sanity.  And cloaking it under a blanket of misogyny lets her hide the actively toxic behavior as something a little bit more passive. Jean Claude has been doing the same thing with Anita since Guilty Pleasures. (Which doesn't mean misogyny isn't there; it's just that Anita hates women because she has no power over them and she fucking knows it. I'm actually having a lot of trouble articulating this thought...)

Anyhoo. Anita and Jean Claude start cuddling. They both reveal that they're dreaming about the Mother of All Darkness. And the text pretty much illustrates exactly what I'm talking about:

“I saw her bend over you, ma petite. I saw her begin to take you away from me. But I could not reach you, the darkness held me as her figure bent over you.” He shuddered, and held me tight against his body. “I could not reach you, and her voice taunted me for my carelessness.” He kissed the top of my head. “But she also told me that if I had given you the fourth mark, that she would have killed you, for if she could not control you, then she would destroy you.”

Have I mentioned lately that everbody in this novel is terrible?

They discuss how Anita used her inner wolf to bite the MOAD, and Micah reveals that Chimera could invade people's dreams with his inner animals so maybe Anita got the lion part of her inner zoo through Chimera and maybe she got that other power too, because it's not like Anita isn't overpowered enough.

You know, my three favorite characters all count as Mary Sues (Honor Harrington, Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor). They're overpowered as fuck in their respective universes, But I think the difference between, say, Honor and Anita is Honor doesn't give a fuck and Anita does. Probably the key difference between Anita as a character and Honor Harrington as a character is that Honor actively seeks peers and Anita actively destroys them. Honor not only has no problem dropping to someone else's level, she actively works to raise other people to hers. Even her enemies, once the shooting's over, get treated as equals with a good deal of respect. Her employees are treated as peers, captains in her fleet are treated as equals, and her family relationships are fucking awesome. (Of course part of this is because David Weber is a stone bastard whose goal is to make you weep uncontrollably at least once a book)  Anita cannot have peers. She actively fights against having any platonic equals. There is something about Anita's character that makes peer-to-peer relationships an active threat that needs to be avoided at all cost. That's why she's got all the powers and all the beauty and all the boyfriends and basically all the things ever: nobody can ever be her equal. And if someone is? She has to break them and take the part of them that makes them capable of facing Anita on an equal footing.

And I'm not pulling this out of my ass. THIS IS IN THE TEXT.

Jean-Claude answered, “If you are to be a panwere, and there is a chance that you will gain new animals until your first change of shape, then we have the opportunity to gain great power.”

Yep. Jean Claude wants Anita to go collect more of the things.

Remus, who I guess is a were-rat, comes in to check in with the boss before the shift-change. This sounds like a rational move to me, but Anita treats it like it's a thing and gives Remus the nth digree. It turns out that everybody wants Anita under guard so that if she shifts for the first time, they can get her under control without killing anyone, including Anita. Again: this is a rational move. Not only is a shifter dangerous, if Anita does change nobody knows what they'll get.

Of course, this is a deadly insult that must be broken down immediately. But Jean Claude and Micah prevail and get Anita to agree to having two body guards at all time. We then digress into why Narcissus and his were-heyenas fell so easily--because Narcissus recruited the wrong kind of men. "Looks and muscle" and not big strong manly manly men with ex-military backgrounds, which is what Narcissus is recruiting now.

End of chapter.

Book Update

Alright. Artwork is done. And here:

As for the book itself, I'm still working on edits and I will work on those until the wire, but I think it's as close to good as I can make it without taking another three months. Editing was fantastic, Tiger did a great job and I highly recommend them for any work you might happen to need. Any screw ups or bad shit will totally be my fault, anything good is all on them and their amazing perspective on things.

It will drop on Sunday. I will spend all night and all day tomorrow trying to nail out the last little bits and polishing as best I can, but it'll drop Sunday morning at midnight.

Good? Good.

Danse Macabre--chapter 23

Anita is watching Cookie Monster AKA Haven walk over to her bed.

It's kind of obvious how consistantly LKH dehumanizes sex objects in this series. I'd say "male sex objects" but women get objectified a lot too. They're not as frequent because Anita is straight, but every time there's a woman onscreen and she's attractive, she's objectified on some level. The only women who are allowed to be likable people are the ones who are either teacher figures, or LKH's definition of unattractive. (And FYI a key sign of a sociopath is someone incapable of an equal relationship with a non-attractive sex. If they cannot make a sex object out of a person, they assume either a student/submissive role, or a teacher/dominant role. Straight women sociopaths will have female teachers and female students. Gay ones will, I assume, be either a student of men or a teacher. They will never have peers of a gender they do not want to seduce. A sociopath is incapable of sustaining a peer-to-peer relationship because you CANNOT bullshit a peer for very long. If you've got a same sex/non attractive sex buddy who keeps your relationship on a student/teacher dom/sub sort of level, be EXTREMELY careful with that individual. And there's nothing "cool" or "edgy" about being a sociopath. It's a shitty situation for everybody involved, including the sociopath. I don't give LKH credit for characterization for this. It's too obviously inadvertent.) In fact, I'd go so far as to say that one reason all the women who aren't Anita are made repellant is being made an object of scorn is still a form of objectification. Still, if women are pieces of shit in this series, guys are just dildos. And LKH has taken the personification of a male lion/bodyguard for the truly dangerous and reduced him to a Sesame Street Tattoo.

Anita describes sexual attraction through the eyes of her inner lion.

You know, one thing that's always bugged me about most shapeshifter stories is how the alternate form is treated as a separate personality. Like this person's got DID and one symptom is that they change form completely. I love shapeshifter fiction, but I don't like that. Even in Patricia Briggs, every time Anna Cornick starts going off on her wolf (or worse, Charles. Talk about DID) I kind of start tuning out. I think this is less a snark thing and more a YMMV.

If I let the lion think it could boss me around, would that set a bad precedent for later? Then a thought came to me; the lion was me. I was fighting with myself. How terribly Freudian, or would it be Jungian? Either way, how strangely me.

Congratulations, Anita. You've employed two schools of psychology without bothering to understand what either of them mean. I think you'll like Freudian thought better. And LKH? The whole symbolism thing loses all its power when you bash it over our heads like a clue-by-four. AND KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF JUNG THANK YOU KINDLY.

The thought was so me, that it opened my eyes. Cookie was standing beside the bed. His hands were at his sides. The look on his face was eager, but wary, as if he’d finally figured out that something might be wrong. His blue hair was flattened on top as if he’d been asleep when I’d called him. His eyes were very blue as he stared down at me. I could see the tattoo on his left shoulder now: the faces of Bert and Ernie. I sensed a theme. “Any more tattoos?” He grinned. 

“Yeah, want to see?”

One: These paragraphs are consecutive.

Two: What did Sesame Street ever do to Laurel K. Hamilton. Did it sodomize a sex fantasy of hers? Was she watching during the episode where Bert and Ernie finally came out of the closet? Is she now obsessed with the stalker U from the "U got a hold on me" video? Is all that sweet innocence, positivity and light too much for mz. darkety dark goth to endure? Because it must be a deep set grudge to not only involve Bert and Ernie, but to momentarily imply that Big Bird might be referring to Haven's penis.

I think it must be her daughter's favorite show.

(Seriously. I once babysat for a kid that watched the last twenty minutes of "Space Jam" for eight fucking hours. That ranks up there with listening to the Jackson 5 sing Christmas Carols and waterboarding. I think murdering a child's favorite show because you'd rather have bamboo shoved under your nails than hear the theme song one more time is sometimes an approprete response. I just want to know what set this off.)

 Cookie turned to him, frowning. “I don’t understand.” His nostrils flared, as he scented the air. “She smells like lion, but she smelled like leopard earlier. She smelled like wolf, too.” He shook his head, as if clearing his mind from the scent. He looked down at me, frowning, speaking softly. “What are you?”

An uber-special Mary Sue with the boundaries and sexual proclivities of a termite.

Jean Claude explains Anita's super speshulness by saying that she absconds with the Animal to Call of vampires she fucks. Which is actually a better explanation than "You have four strains of were-whatever in your bloodstream and this is like catching HIV twice in this universe, so we're going to go find a nice bunker now and get back to you when science starts working again". It'd remove the impossibility, the broken universe, AND give Anita the excuse to nab whatever animal LKH got on her calenders this year. (Hippos. Please God. I want were-hippos. Steve motherfucking Irwin was scared of the motherfuckers. Mail LKH all the hippos.)

 The conversation continues. And continues. And continues, and Anita is lying naked on the bed while a massive number of strangers watch her writhe in pain.

“Don’t mistake force of will for stubbornness,” Micah said. “There is a difference.”

My parents had a lot of teaching books when I was a kid. The Big Book of Virtues was one, but my favorite was this book on being stubborn. It had four situations in it, and in the first three the kid involved refused to get on a waterslide, try new things, or play with new people, and the book showed the reader how that was all wrong...but then it lead into a situation where the kid was absolutely right to be stubborn and explained why it was okay to dig in under that situation. My point? Other than mentioning an awesome teaching book whose title I wish I could remember? Being stubborn isn't always bad. Also: IDK what the difference is when employed in this context. Also: if we're not having sex, can somebody please pass out panties?

Anita gives her lion to Haven. She's now covered in the mucus goo from three different shapeshifters. Do not tell me that the shapeshifter exploding thing is not a metaphore for ejaculation. It explains too much.

Haven takes a few post-shift moments to check out Micah's penis.

We have to know this. It's important to the non-plot.

Haven says the "Fringe benefits" Of hanging with Anita had better be awesome, and then takes great pains to make sure we all know he means sex.

Anita and Richard pick a fight over paternity and being together and how much he wants her and I'm really sorry, but this couldn't broadcast "not over it" any harder if it was a Bruno Mars "love" song, and I'm not talking about Anita and Richard. Jesus fucking Christ, I do not want to read this shit into the book but it is so obviously fucking there. Factor in the rape scene from Narcissus and what that would actually mean, and every interaction with Richard is just a big pile of nope.

Anita and Richard take a moment to say "I love you" followed by "I hate you" and the chapter ends.