Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 30

Eternal Prey--Chapter two

Business updates first, boys and girls: I'm about halfway done with my edits for Part 2 of Dragon Breath. And when that's done we'll send it off to the editor. Which means that the Indiegogo thing is really important. Please, if you have not donated, and you want to support the book, PLEASE go support it. 

 If you have already donated, you are awesome and I love you.

Oh GAWD Guys how could I have forgotten about this book. Oh my God.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to top the baptism by fire-crazy that is the first chapter, and the second is not nearly as nuts. Oh, don't worry. It gets crazier. Like I said: EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK IS WONDERFUL.

So, where were we?
Right. Fin has just told the Eleven--who are ten men because one of them has died--plus Lia about their baddie from a few hours ago being Zero and not Seven.

These names are never not going to be fun.

Utah points out that Zero attacked him because he wanted to draw out Fin, and not because he wanted to kill Zero. Okay. Zero says call next time, and Utah says no. Zero says that the Eleven are not expendable--DUDE, they come with a freaking save point. Yes they fucking are--and it is Lia of all people who says that Zero is right, he really needs the Eleven.

While I am glad that Lia has a spine, HOW WOULD SHE KNOW THIS? Far as I know her FULL EXPERIANCE with these dudes are being rescued from a museum and watching Zero blow up Utah's car. But of course everyone agrees with Lia's sudden revelation of wisdom. Apparently she's the modern day Julian of Norwich.

Utah checks out Lia's legs. Which he can't think about, because eventually Lia will become a vampire and then he'll have to kill her.

This repeats itself frequently in every chapter.

Fin asks if there are any leads on Seven. He asks if there's any weird activity. He's answered by a guy named Q.

I'd be imagining John De Lancie in this role if there weren't a much better role for him later on in the book.

Fin says that Zero and Seven are recruiting from the paranormal population for Reasons. He singles out Lia because she leads vampires. Lia points out that the leader of the Portland vampires--she's from Philly--is pissed because he's losing people.

His name is Adam. I do not know why this fills me with joy, but it does.

 They decide to bring in Jude, another vampire who has helped them before. Lia says that Adam will be pissed because "What's his is his". Okay. Whatever.

Utah points out that Adam needs a new enforcer for the vampires because he killed the last one, and offers himself as the new guy. I am absolutely positive this will end badly.

Lia drives Utah back to his apartment. They have a long conversation about why not just kill the Immortals--because they are immortal, duh. They can't be killed--and about how it feels to be a dinosaur in modern day Earth. Apparently it's hard:

“You have to understand pack. It might seem a long time to you, but it’s only been a few months since Rap, Tor, and I hunted together. Fin saved all three of our souls and brought us here so we could once again walk the earth, hunting as one. Pack. Now one of us is gone. Without pack, something big and empty sits right here.” He fisted his hand against his chest. “I might look human, Lia, but my soul is animal. And my beast screams for revenge.”

Every time I try to wrap my mind around this concept I feel things go Sproing. And that is completely alright.

Also, apparently Utah and Tor are twins. And Rap is not. And they have no idea how Fin arranged this. Okay.

Lia reveals that her mother was awful terrible awful and that Lia wants to be different once she's a vampire. WHY SHE ISN'T ONE ALREADY is never properly explained. Lia is going to be, like, the vampire Renaissance or something. And none of this matters because apparently she and Utah live in the same building.

This is not mentioned once until Lia decides to go to the fifth floor. And guess who else lives on the fifth floor. Aww, it's a small world. Also, Utah has trouble with keys. Barbs are exchanged again, because we need to establish that they hate each other so the fucking will be part of character evolution and not, you know, just plain fucking.

Utah wakes her up in the middle of the...day, because it is now four PM and she had no problem sleeping.

I spent two years working night shifts. YOU HAVE TROUBLE SLEEPING. Lia thinks she'll need blackout curtains when she's a vamp. Uh, Lia? YOU NEED THEM RIGHT NOW.

She invites him to sit on her couch while she gets coffee. The obligatory romance-novel ass-checking begins. Utah is gorgeous. We already know how he feels about Lia's legs. NEXT!

Jude is coming to pick them up. Adam has accepted Utah's deal, and Lia can't take her car because Zero turned it into a metal pancake.

They go downstairs and spend a few minutes upping the sexual tension.

Utah made her nervous, but not in an I’m-scared-of-you way. He made her aware. Of all six-feet-plus of him filling the small space. Of his hair with its shining strands tempting her to touch, to smooth, to feel. Of those predator’s eyes softened by ridiculously long lashes. Of his mouth . .  . She did a mental head shake.

They get into the car and discover that Adam, who we haven't met yet, has pounded the everloving shit out of Jude, a character we ALSO haven't met yet. Utah gets pissy, but we've already established that Utah is a big plate of flaming asshole, so we shouldn't be too surprised. The conversation implies that Jude thinks Adam has gone power-mad and is about to Take Steps. Goody.

Utah says that when he's done working for Adam, he'll kill him for beating up Jude. Because Utah is a flaming asshole, that's why.

So they drive to an abandoned art gallery-style building, nod at imposing vampires and head down to the basement, where they meet Adam.

Hey, we haven't addressed gender issues in this book yet. Well...look, I said it had issues, right? Here they are:

Personally, he thought Lia was a lot sexier. He almost grinned. She’d hate that. All she wanted from him was respect for her fighting skills and almighty toughness. But the urge to grin died an inglorious death. She’d soon be vampire, and he never wanted to find a vampire tempting. All he wanted to do was kill them. Except for Jude. He was okay. He’d proven himself.

Like I said: Utah is a flaming plate of asshole. We also have the same "Tough Girls have to be Tougher Than Guys" bullshit we slogged through with Anita Blake. It's not as relentless, but oh my fucking GOD is it there.

We just also have a heavy helping of Bella Swan's "Change me into a vampire" stupidity to go along with it.

What does Adam look like?

Finally, they reached the light source. A vampire sat in a folding chair in the middle of the tunnel. Must be Adam. He was about Utah’s height, with black hair and weird-looking gold eyes.

...Yeah. We've gone from LKH's pages and pages and pages about clothes and colors to "He had black hair and weird eyes. NEXT!" Yeah. That's it. 

Adam and Utah start posturing.  Adam mentions that there will be a "new partner" that Utah will be working with. Everyone is all like "WHA?" and Lia asks "So why are we down in the tunnels" and Adam says "Because we need to summon your new partner!"

And I am totally going to make you wait until tomorrow because, like I said, the crazy? It gets better.

Eternal Prey: Chapter One

Oh my god I forgot something important about this book. 

Eternal Prey is an obscure little book that is completely bat-shit insane.

I am not kidding. The last thing that brought me this much joy was Sharknado. It reads as if the author took Twilight, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and a random number generator and shoved it all into a blender. There is not one fucking thing in it that makes any sense, and BONUS ROUND, the plot revolves around the Mayan Disaster of December 21st 2012.

It's mid-August 2013 right now. This book is fucking dated.

In other words, every single thing about this book is wonderful. And while I am sure there are a lot of bad things in it, unlike Anita Blake, Gor, Mission Earth and The Wolf Gift, I do not remember this book being relentlessly offensive. Mind-blowingly insane with internet references that I did not know should never be used in a book, but not "OH GOD KILL WITH FIRE" level dreck.

I actually recommend reading along this time, because personally I think you need to read it to believe it. Just how insane is this book? Let me put it this way: Jeremy Irons needs to play either the lead bad guy or the head good guy, and I don't give a fuck which one as long as he chews on the scenery.

So let's get started, shall we?

Trapped. Freaking trapped. In the wrong time, in the wrong place, defending a bunch of dumbass humans.

This is Utah, our flaming ass of a male lead, and it's rather nice of him to get the whole insulting your entire audience thing out of the way this early in the novel. He complains about a guy who takes too long at a green light and contemplates casual murder. Quite the guy.

Oh, and this is the somethingth in a series, so we need a summery of past events. Hey, Utah, what happened before this?

And to think he’d really believed he could fit in here. Out of all the Eleven, he’d been the happiest, ready to put the past behind him and embrace 2012. Then the vampires had killed Rap, and he’d realized this time was no different from the last. It was just a different kind of jungle. Killing was still the only answer.

I bought this book in 2010. Oh, and the naming convention. Oh GOD the fucking naming convention.

See, all the guys in this novel are not men who shapeshift into dinosaurs. Oh no. That would be a little too logical. They are men possessed by the ghosts of dead dinosaurs who then shapeshift into the dinosaur form because EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS INSANE. So that "past" he's talking about? That's the Cretaceous Period, back before he had a brain capable of sentience.  Oh, and the dinosaurs are the souls saved from the last Great Extinction, an event that is about to repeat here on earth because Mayans. Their names all have something to do with the dinosaur they used to be. And I have to give Nina Bangs a cookie for not using Veloceraptors, and going with the lesser known Utahraptor instead. Because the Velosaraptors are actually fucking tiny, and Utahraptors are the movie sized version.

This is why we have heroes named Utah, Rap, Tor,  and Rex.

The bad guys? Well they are officially Team Evil. That's what the text calls them. I am not making this up. They are eleven immortals who get to play on earth every time the Mayan boctun winds down, even when the Mayans and their calendar don't even fucking exist. And they are named One, Two, Three, ect. Utah up there is running from Seven. There's also a Zero, who is the bad guy. Utah and his dino-buddies are on the side of Fin, which is short for Infinity.

Everything about this fills me with bubbling joy.

The guys can be tracked by Team Evil, unless they have a human sitting in their lap. These humans are hired to be the guy's drivers because the last thing you want in traffic is a pissed off raptor behind the wheel.

The drivers are universally women, universally hot, and Utah is doing his level damned best to avoid his because he's a cranky prick and we need to have this established. The driver is following him, and she's better at it than he is. Hey, what's her personality like?

“Pull over, you prehistoric jerk. I’ve been trying to catch you since you left Fin’s. Let me guess, you had to dump all the Cracker Jacks from the box to find your driver’s license. No wonder Fin wants me to drive you around. You’re a menace.”

...right. So we have two unlikable protagonists (who are obviously going to fuck halfway through the book) that I don't have to even give a fuck about. They were so made for each other.

The driver is Lia, and if you want to know what she's like, just think Bella Swan with a samurai sword and a blond perm.

The dialogue continues to be priceless: 

 “Not going to happen. And you absolutely need me. A human has to stay close— like inside your car— to keep this Seven guy from tracking you. Just an aside, but I feel stupid calling anyone Seven. Give him a human name like Bill or Tom. Anyway, that’s me, your designated human. Now pull over.”

Utah does what he's told just long enough to get a look at Lia's legs. Then he floors it and giggles to himself until his car randomly explodes.

NO. NO. I AM SERIOUS. HIS CAR RANDOMLY EXPLODES:

 Utah listened to his instinct. Shoving the door open, he launched himself from the car . .  . a second before it burst into flames.

Seven is up there somewhere, and he telepathically grabs Utah's brain and threatens to squish it. Utah tries to throw Seven out of his brain, while Seven monologues like there's no tomorrow.

Utah compares this immortal to the other immortals he's fought:

The guy had to be Seven. Only Seven would know this much about the Eleven. But if this was Seven, then they were all in lots of trouble. Utah had fought Eight, but Eight’s power hadn’t felt like this—

Seven. Eleven. Eight. It's like a gas station and a hotel married and had dino-babies.

Lia shows up! She hits Seven with her car. The bad guy vanishes.

Lia and Utah exchange barbs for a minute or two.  This gives Utah lots of time to look over her body and make snide side-thoughts about her breasts. Because this is a romance novel. They have to spend the next several chapters looking at each other's ass. It's in the genre checklist.

Lia's personal history is a little more logical than Utah's, which is like saying that Chernobyl now is a little less radiactive than Chernobyl was back in the 1980s. Lia is the daughter of a vampire, who was apparently a vampire when she gave birth. I think. Only Lia is fully human. And she wants to be a vampire. Because her mother was a vampire. This is her driving ambition.

Like I said. This is Bella with a perm and a sword. And maybe a spine.

Utah also had something to do with Lia's mother's death, which made Lia the human the leader of the vampires in the area, which she won't be if she remains human for long. He and Tor also rescued Lia and someone named Jenna from Eight after they were kidnapped.

Tor shows up! Utah's brother! It's very random. They leave the alley where the bad guy was and go somewhere that is also very random. Tor says something about bringing Rap, their brother, back, and Lia's all like "Huh?" So Utah explains:

“His body died. His soul didn’t.” Utah met her gaze, his eyes almost black in the darkness. “Fin can remove souls from bodies. That’s how he saved all of the Eleven. He sends the souls to a safe place near a strong natural power source until he can return them to a body. Rap is tucked away underground somewhere near Sedona, Arizona, right now.”

So basically not only are these guys men possessed by the ghosts of dead dinosaurs, but they come with a save point. Gotcha.

They go to Fin's house where the other eight members of the Eleven are--thus bringing the grand total of the Eleven to ten, because fuck your logic, and Lia gives a "be the biggest badass" thought-speach that wouldn't be out of place coming from Anita Blake. She looks at all the other men, though only Fin gets described.

Specifically, his hair. His shiny, shiny silver hair. Thank GOD it is not described as Christmas tinsel, but it DOES freaking sparkle.  Then we get his face and...

It was a face carved from shadows and dark places where normal people never dared go. It was primitive force, sexual power, and unearthly beauty all stamped with an aura so ancient it took her breath away.

Race? Naw. Jawline? Nope. Nose? Not important. Eye color? Well, I'm still recovering from Merry "Tricolor mood ring eyes" Gentry so I'll give this one a pass. Wrinkles? Pah-lease. But we DO know this guy is pretty and that his hair fucking sparkles.

Fin also introduces everyone because Lia doesn't know their faces. I don't either, or most of their names, and it's too fucking bad because all the book says is "he introduced them". Lia keeps their beasts firmly fixed in mind, because once you meet a rampaging triceratops, you never forget him.

This is a romance novel involving raging triceratops, cell phones, vampires, and ancient mayan bullshit prophesies. I have to giggle hysterically for a couple minutes. Excuse me.

Utah tells Fin what happened. Fin chews Utah out. Lia leaps to his defense because this raging asshole she only just met (ish) is the dude she's going to bone in a few more chapters, she needs to start that romance ball rolling right now. And of course, everyone is impressed that she stood up to Fin.

You know. The guy with this hair:

I would not be as impressed.

Utah goes off on Fin about how his last memory was eating something prehistoric with Rap and Tor, he's a killer animal and Fin had better deal, and Fin is all "YOU WILL CONTROL YOUR ANIMAL NATURE" and I am all like "DUDE. NEXT TIME PICK SENTIENT GHOSTS BECAUSE THIS HAPPENS EVERY TIME"

Fin kind of gives up, because again, these are things that have only been freaking sentient for a couple months, if that, and asks if the dude that blew up Utah's car had red, sparkly hair. Lia says "Yeah," and he tells them in big Drama Voice (TM) that they just met Zero...and survived!

End of chapter.
 

Incubus Dreams--81-END

I think I'm going to begin rating my work-weeks by "I didn't quit this week". I have literally ended days this week with my two-week's notice in my fucking pocket. This is not to say that I hate my job. It's certainly hate-able, but when everything works (which is rare these weeks) it fucking rocks. But if you ever wonder how I can read this shit and comment, it is because I still have to smile and respond to customers. I have perfected the ability (when not overcome by fucking heat stroke) to accept the most henious of ass-chewing behind the scenes and still sound perfectly sane and rational when on the floor. This requires nerves of steel.

If aliens and/or zombies ever attack the earth it will be retail and restaurant workers who save us all.

That said, I managed to get quite a bit of A Promise Kept, the next Gray Prince book, done. It currently stands at 4k words, which isn't a lot, but I've worked the plot out, and that's 90% of the battle. I have also decided that, due to the wheels within wheels of religious symbolism This Found Thing developed when I wasn't looking, there will be four "books" in that series, (as well as in the Exiles series) and that the first volume will comprise This Found Thing, Our Daily Bread and A Promise Kept.

 The official title for this serialized novel/omnibus is The Sign of Eagles.

 If you can guess the other three titles and explain where it came from, I will do something awesome for ya'll.

There is a clue somewhere in the above paragraphs.

...do I have to read this? I do? Okay. Whatever. Gimme a beer.

Anita apparently explodes in the first paragraph. I am not remotely kidding.

 We were naked in the water. How had we managed to get out of the jeans that fast? A piece of jean cloth floated by me. Oh, that’s how.

I am also puzzled by how deep this bathtub is. See, they are already in the water, and Anita is concerned that if they use missionary position, they BOTH will drown. I love a good bathtub soak, so I must insist: HOW DEEP IS THIS BATHTUB? I could understand Partner A drowning, as long as they are folded in half with their knees locked over the faucets (An adult human cannot lie flat in a modern bathtub, unless we are talking luxury hottub. I know this. As I said, I LOVE a good bathtub) but even in the most wonderful bathtub ever Partner B should be head and shoulders over the water.

We then get a repeat that clothes are ripped away. The jeans pieces gave me that impression.

It is also amusing to interprete "himself" and all use of male pronouns as being the entire male body and not, you know, a penis:

He didn’t try to angle upward, or enter me. He simply pushed himself between my thighs, so that the thickness of him brushed against all of me. He rubbed himself back and forth, using his body like another hand, to caress and play between my legs.

I follow most of the Amazon forum conversations re: Anita Blake, because they are amusing and I am a terrible person, and they brought up a good point: LKH is not a sexually liberated woman. Just based on both the language she employs and the situations she writes about, these are the sexual fantasies of a very repressed human being. The inability to call genetalia by anatomically correct names, the fact that not one sex act is 100% consensual--thus making Anita something less than a good girl--and the horrifically unsafe practices in every single sex scene point towards these being the responsibility-free fantasies of a prude, and not, you know, anything actively worth reading. The Ardeur is Anita's blank check for sex. Nevermind that simply being human is a blank check for sex if you want it. Nope, you have to have justification.

The fact that someone can be pushing these scenes as celebrations of the sexually liberated when they are everything but is reprehensible. GOD FORBID you actively consent to sex.

We also find out that Anita is not wet enough for Micah. Water is apparently not nearly enough lube.

It wasn’t the length that was the problem, it was the width. We’d found this out the hard way, and had had the rubby spots to prove it.

Please understand that this is a woman who finds being punched in the cervix by a penis to be sexy. Micah is too big, you dig? MICAH IS TOO BIG. 

 The Ardeur goes away. Then the Ardeur comes back. Then we have lots of metaphysical erotic things that are supposed to be a substitute for descriptions of actual sex. They fail. Badly. This is about as erotic as an autopsy.

Hey, we haven't had inapproprete religious connotations in about four chapters:

“If you are both powerful, and a true mated pair, then it’s possible.” 
“You say it, like it has a name.”
 “Shiva and Pavarti, or simply Maithuna, it’s Sanskrit for union, or coupling.” 

“Shiva, who would destroy the world with his energy if Pavarti didn’t constantly have sex with him and spill off the energy.”

...because Hindu is a better religion to borrow from than Christianity.

I do not know enough about Hinduism to call bullshit on most of that, but again: this is invoking the status of a major religious deity (or deities) to make it look like your main characters are doing something more sacred than magic-drug-induced fucking. I'm willing to bet this is as out-of-context as quoting the prayer in Gethsemane.

...OH MY GOD ANITA IS NOW HAVING CONSENSUAL SEX. WOW. THE WORLD WILL NOW END.

 And oh my God, blog readers, OH MY FUCKING GOD, the descriptions. The descriptions. Please. Oh GOD I AM DYING HERE OH MY GOD.

So there is this fan-fic that is simi-famous for being the worst fic ever, and it is called "My Immortal" and it contains the line "He put his thingie into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time."

Apparently, LKH was channeling Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way when she wrote this scene:

 

So we could finally put that in there, and it was wet and tight, and hard, and everything I wanted it to be.

This is copied and pasted from the Kindle version of the book.

That is exactly as written. 

 WE COULD FINALLY PUT THAT IN THERE. 

THEY PUT THAT.

IN THERE.

There are aliens and romance-novel virgins--who have probably had long and fullfilling sex lives of their own--who are now scratching their heads going what the bleeding fuck is she talking about. 

IT IS A PENIS. YOU CAN USE THAT WORD YOU WILL NOT BREAK. 

 Apparently the sex is so good the next sentence forgot to finish itself:

When I screamed his name and raked my nails down his back, when his body thrust one last time inside mine, thrust so far and so deep that it made me cry out again and arched his body above mine on the bathroom tile.

AND? AND? When you do this, it commonly follows that someone does something in respons--

Painted his body in flame and shadow above me, sent our hands into the candles, and spilled the candles into the water, to smoke and die, when all that was done, he looked down at me.

Folks, these are consecutive sentences. They put that in there. When she screamed and raked and thrusting happened. Painted things, sent hands, spilled candles to smoke and die. HOW DOES ANY OF THAT WORK GRAMMATICALLY. 

IS ANY OF THIS EVEN EROTIC.

 I said, in a voice breathy and panting, “Metaphysics, we don’t need no stinking metaphysics.”

This is apparently a joke so funny it makes Micah wet himself.

...also, apparently Anita went into the Marinaras Bathtub with all of her weapons still on her person. The next several pages are her trying to salvage her knives and guns after their lengthy dunking. She also decides that Basic Gun Safety (IE Putting the weapons she isn't actively using into various safes) isn't worth the trouble.

Yeah. Anita can go fuck herself. At this point I'm too appalled at her everything to be disgusted at her disreguard for basic safety protocols, but I am a Texan and you don't live here without absorbing a minimum amount of gun safety.This is almost as bad as, I don't know, going into a tub with your guns on your person.

 Then we get a long paragraph about where all the guns end up.I'd say "Twenty bucks these things get fired in the next chapter' but apparently I've run into the end of this book without noticing.

YES THIS IS THE LAST CHAPTER YES.

SUMMERY CHAPTER AHOY.

Have I mentioned yet how much I hate these?

The raid made national headlines. This resulted in Anita having to ignore her phone, because there are no other paranormal investigator teams in the nation receiving this level of attention.

They missed most of the vampire serial killers, and the cops didn't bother noticing until the DNA came back without a match. And where most cops would still investigate because fuck there are serial killers still out there Anita reacts with a big fat "OH WELL."

Vittorio's Girlfriend leaves him because he's too crazy. How remarkable, given that we never met this chick at all.

Anita wonders where Vittorio went.

Denis-Luc St. John is still in the hospital in New Orleans.

Who the fuck?

I talked to him on the phone, let him know what happened to the vampires that nearly killed him. He wants a piece of them when they resurface.

No. NO. WHO THE FUCK IS THIS? This was NOT a character in this book. MAYBE this was a minor character in a previous book but we are talking Gretchen level minor. DO NOT SPRING THIS ON US IN THE SUMMERY CHAPTER. WHO THE BLEEDING BLOODY FUCK IS THIS DUDE?

 If I thought I was the only one who could track them down and save the world, I’d do it, but I’m not the only cop in the country.

BAW-HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ah ha. Ah hah. Laurel. Anita. Are you implying that there might be someone more competent at cop-ish things than Anita? Surely you gest!

 The lack of blood oaths are bad. JC and the other vampires in the nation are considering doing something about it.

Marianne did another tarot reading that duplicated the last one.

Please never discuss Tarot again. EVER.

It being identical means we’re still working through it.

Okay, Tarot is subjective to the point of meaningless-ness, but while I've had duplicate cards pop up in frequent readings that could be interpreted as significant in retrospect (Long story. Let's just say if I ever see those cards and the Tower together EVER AGAIN, I'm investing in a fucking .45) I've never had a duplicate reading. I DO NOT THINK CARDS WORK THAT WAY.

Also, I think this is LKH saying "Well fuck. I can't make heads or tails of this shit" and moving from Tarot to runes for all personal divinationy---things.

The Browns sent Anita an apology card for hurting her. Remember them? You know, the people whose son was murdered, who hired Anita so they could find out who did it? You know, it'd be nice if we pushed that investigation as far as it could go. It might even result in a plot, and the redemption of Anita as a char--

I found orchids that were the same greenish-gold as Micah’s eyes.

Okay then. Moving on.

Nathaniel got a frilly white apron, like no one’s mother ever really wore, and a string of pearls.

...are. you. fucking .serious. WILL HE VACUUM IN THEM?

  Jean Claude gets white orchids, Asher gets yellow roses. Damian does sexy things. I don't give a fuck. Next.

I’d cap Vittorio in a heartbeat.

Alright. Time to bring this shit up.

So Antia killed Random Vampire Chick in the condo without hesitation, even though there's a REALLY big possibility that she was the condo owner and was possibly turned against her will. RF pointed out in the comments that when Anita does meet Vittorio in Skin Trade, she basically smacks him with her boobs until Vittorio acheives an orgasm, and her were-tigers kill him for her. (RF is currently grinding through Hit List, go support her) So yeah. That's not "cap in a heartbeat", is it?

The only thing I know for certain is that it isn’t my job to worry about how the poor bastard turned into a killer.

Only if you're a sociopath in your own right, you fucking cold-blooded--*sigh*. If you want to be a good person it IS part of your job to wade through the thought processes of the people you encounter. Especially if you kill them. Killing should not be taken lightly. If you kill someone, you should take the time to either make sure you were correct in your judgement, or that you take steps to rectify your error. In Anita's case, that'd be turning Vittorio into a bloody smear.

...She flagellates him with her boobs. That's not going to happen.

Murder someone in my town, and I’m the one that you get to see. Once.

Last line in the book, guys.

We start the Dino book tomorrow.
 

Obligatory Indiegogo Reminder

It's still ongoing!

We are halfway there, which is TOTALLY AWESOME, but we're still not 100%. I'm not going to overburden you guys with my personal stuff, but yeah, this is not "Gee I don't want to pay for this shit" fundraising.

PLEASE, if you have not already donated, please do. Donate and you get books. Lots of books.

(If you have already donated you are awesome and you may disregard previous message)

Incubus Dreams--chapter 80

Yeah, it's another short one, boys and girls. I still feel like utter shit. No collapsing, thank goodness, but I don't want to do another goddamn thing in this heat. I swear it is getting worse.

Also because...well, let's just get this over with.

Anita is driving home. I spent this entire segment expecting her to get launched off the road by hungry vamps, but all that happens is she feels sorry for herself because she's got vampire bits in her hair. Apparently if you really regret the amount of killing you've done, it makes everything okay.

It also take several pages for her to explain why she's going home and not to the Circus. It's because she wants to go home. Great.

Nate and Micah are pissed because she didn't let them know she was fine before she went home. She feels very sorry. This takes a few more pages. Then Jean Claude calls. He asks her when the last time she "fed" was. She realizes she hasn't fed the ardeur all day.

And this part? This next part? Yeah, the entire universe just shot itself in the face with the plot.

See, Jean Claude has been holding in Anita's chunk of the ardeur all day so it doesn't overwhelm her. Apparently it's been twenty four hours since she last had sex. I know. The math doesn't really swing, but there you go. Damian is still alive. This kind of negates all the smexing with Damian, so Jean Claude tells Anita that he gave the Ardeur to Damian so Damian could feed it.

Temporarily. He only lent it for a little while. Oh, and he gave it to Richard too!

So you can give the ardeur to another person the way you lend a t-shirt, but he can't take it back from Anita because....

 OH AND HER SORROW AND SELF DOUBT OVER HAVING KILLED A LOT OF PEOPLE TODAY IS BECAUSE SHE HASN'T HAD THE ARDEUR TO GIVE HER STRENGTH. THE ARDUER IS LITERALLY BLOCKING ANITA'S CONSCIENCE.

Jean Claude took it back long enough for Anita to do a crime scene and not get dead, and now he's going to give it back because (Let's face it) without it, she'd murder his ass until it was a red smear, and then move on to do the same to his crew. HOW IS HIM BRAINWASHING ANITA WITH SEX NOT CANNON. IT IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES SENSE.

The whole thing with the ardeur is that Anita can't control it and Jean Claude can't take it back. HE JUST DID. Why is this still a major plot point?

Anita takes Micah to the bathroom--which she is told to do three times, phrased the same way each time--and the chapter ends just before they start having sex, and THAT is why I'm going to bed now.

I REALLY HATE THIS BOOK.

Incubus Dreams--chapter 79

Yeah, just one chapter tonight. Why?

I got sick at work and passed out in front of my boss. That is how fucking hot it is in Texas right now.

I am tired, and I am really tired of listening to Anita.

So after ALL THAT SHIT last time, Anita decides that these were not the vampires they were looking for. Under normal circumstances the cops would be matching teeth to bite wounds to make sure of this, but in the Anitaverse the cops are all "the number's mostly right, and we lost guys, so we're done now."

Remind me again how respectful LKH is of the cops? Seriously, you LOST GUYS on this, and you're not going to make sure you got all the bad guys? YOU HAVE TOOTH IMPRESSIONS FOR FUCK'S SAKE. That's how they got Ted Bundy put away.

Hey, let's have some sexism!

“Go home, Blake, go home to your husband, or boyfriend, or fucking dog, but go home. Your job is done here. Do you understand that?”

Anita continues to argue because she, and ONLY she, knows they didn't get all the bad guys.

The cop recommends that Anita drop the criminal consultant part of her job for a little while, she's probably burnt out. They don't make real cops stick with it more than five years, according to this text, so Anita is past her sell-by date.

Response?

“My abilities with the dead are genetic, it’s like a psychic gift. No amount of training or practice will teach you how to see the invisible. There are less than twenty people in the entire country that have abilities even close to mine.”

You know, "I see things you can't" has been the running theme for this book. There was the "explaining color blue" sequence with Arnet, and then there was the pissing contest with the cop a little earlier. Now we have this. ANITA IS SPESHUL, boys and girls. She sees things. 

 It's the cop's turn to give her a speech:

“Look, Blake, take some advice from someone who’s been doing this longer than you have. You’re not God, you can’t save everybody, and the police work in this town has been running just fine without you to baby-sit. You aren’t the only cop in this city, and you aren’t the only one who can do this job. 

 YES. FINALLY SOMEBODY CALLS ANITA ON HER--

You’ve got to let go of that idea, or you’ll go crazy. You’ll start blaming yourself for not being there twenty-four-seven. You’ll start thinking, if only I’d been there, this bad thing, or that bad thing, wouldn’t have happened. It’s a lie. You’re just a person, with some good abilities, and good judgment, but don’t try and carry the weight of the whole fucking world. It’ll crush you.”

Anita has good judgement.

ANITA BLAKE has good judgement.

ANITA. The woman who basically had sex on top of Wicked and Truth back at the church. Who picked a cat fight with Jessica Arnet rather than coming out and stating up front that she and Nate were dating. Who went to a crime scene in a muddy pit in a miniskirt, thong and stiletto heels because proving you so-called liberation is more important than proving who killed who in court.

Who withheld critical evidence in a serial murder investigation so that she could get to lead an insertion team into an apartment, and managed to fuck that up by the numbers.

Stop kissing your main character's ass, Laurel. It only makes her fuck-ups that much more obvious.

Anita then figures that his advice is hard won--well, I'd say no shit, but it's so fucking obvious a rookie could have pulled it out of their ass on the first day--and decides...you know what? Fuck it. Read it yourself.

If I’d been a girl-girl, I’d have said something like, you sound like you’re talking from experience, but I’d hung around with the boys’ club too long not to know my manners. Hudson was opening up, and he didn’t have to, he was trying to help me; asking him personal shit would have made me an ungrateful wretch.

Bonding moments only happen between girls.

He tells her to go let her family know she's not dead. She tells him that the DNA from the bites won't match the vamps upstairs. Given that this. will take. for. fucking. ever. to process I'd go out on a limb and say that they'll be looking at bite impressions LONG before they get to DNA. Oh, they'll start processing it right now, but they'll get the results back in a couple of months.

The chapter ends.

I am going to bed now.

Indiegogo/Dragon Breath/Other Book Updates

First of all HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING. :D

We are five bucks away from the halfway point on the Indiegogo campaign. FIVE DOLLARS. We've got 24 days left, we can totally manage this.

The campaign is over here just in case you've forgotten. EVEN IF YOU CAN'T DONATE, please spread the word.

Dragon Breath has had probably the best book drop-day so far. I am very impressed. Reviews, good AND bad, are always welcome, but seriously, let's just go high five with how AWESOME you guys are, mkay?

Third and final point: I updated the publishing schedule. Dragon Breath is going to run until October, then another Gray Prince, and then we'll be doing another Starbleached book. Exiles is still going to be ongoing (four novel sized books and we only just finished the first one. Fuck) and will probably go when the next Starbleached book ends.

Plan things accordingly.

Oh, and once more: YOU GUYS ROCK SO HARD.

Incubus Dreams--chapter 76-78

The reason why you have not seen much of me lately, my lovelies, is we have had an honest-to-god fucking disaster at work, and I have been working my ass off to compensate. The depressing thing is, my lack of ass will not result in a higher paycheck. That's how shitty my job is.

The good news is, I have started on the next Gray Prince book Re: Drafting, and I'll probably shoot for 1.5-2K a day while I'm editing PT 2 of Dragon Breath.

I try very hard not to air my spirituality out on le blog, because I know a lot of ya'll either aren't Christian or just plain aren't. But given that I told you why I self published and most of you are still here, I figure you can kind of deal.

Spirituality and writing are, for me, really hard to separate. I think this is because when I write (I'd love to say "when most people write" but I don't know how most people write) my subconsious is on "low boil" and a lot of things come to the surface that would normally be that white sediment on the bottom. I've found a rather strange cycle with my books. Starbleached is not very spiritual. I don't think I could inject much God stuff in there if I tried. Dragon Breath, I'm going to categorize with Starbleached, though there's a couple chunks of spiritual stuff in there. Exiles is this very weird in-between, a fifty-fifty mix of what I guess most people call sanity and what I call spirituality.

And then there's Gray Prince. I really, REALLY hate to break this to you, kids, but it's about 75% esoteric Christianity. I do not intend to do this. I fully intend to write a relatively rational fantasy story about a nominally white dude empire building (...and I try hard to make that not problematic, but that's totally what I intend to do, for Reasons) and somehow three quarters of the way through I realize I've written parts of the Bible into the book that I find very, very weird, and they fit WAY TOO WELL for me to take them back out again. 

This gets especially weird when I use Tarot cards to break writer's block. Welcome to CW's universe.

(One day I am going to write an entire blog post about how the Streingth card in the Major Arcana fits in with the story of Daniel in the Lion's Den. That's going to be FUN)

What made this especially interesting is I started today fully intending to write at least three thousand words on A Promise Kept (my working titles suck) and instead wound up going to town, where I acquired (in this order) a MUCH NEEDED backup battery for my computer, a copy of Be Here Now, a brand new Tarot deck, and a collection of C.S. Lewis's favorite George MacDonald quotes.

(By the way, fantasy fans, if you have never read Phantasies, go get a copy and read it. George MacDonald is kind of the John the Babtist to Lewis and Tolkien's Jesus. You cannot fully appreciate LOTR and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe if you don't have Phantasies and the Curdie books as a background. They drew heavily on his shit. Bonus points: copyright has run out. Macdonald is FREE)

(Seriously. Phantasies is one of my favorite fantasy books ever. It's worth the read just for the beech tree. I may love him and all that jazz)

In other words, I feel locked, loaded, and mentally revived. Physically, I want to find a cool shadow to die in.

...this means I have to go from thinking about George MacDonald to reading about Anita Blake, don't I?

Okay. Compromise. I'm going to give you a kick-ass McDonald Quote, and then I'm going to read LKH's nonsense. Okay? Okay.

Quote For Truth:

It may be infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion; the latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.

I've been doing this shit for over a year, boys and girls, but tonight is the first time reading this garbage has actually left me feeling contaminated. Make of that what you will.

(Athiest friends: Please do not feel excluded. And if you do feel excluded, discuss, so that I know what not to do or say in the future. Just note that I found that quote profound enough to want to share.)

 Let's see. Last time we met Anita, she was witholding the address of a murdering vampire so that Special Forces would have to take her along for the ride. What kind of advice is she giving them?

AT MY SUGGESTION they put the sniper where he could see the windows, not at the front door.

...do I really have to explain why this is so stupid? Do I?

Fuck. It's the first fucking sentence, guys. WHY DOES THE LAW-ENFORCEMENT FAIL HAVE TO BE THE FIRST FUCKING SENTENCE.

This unit is St. Louis's version of SWAT. SWAT stands for "Special Weapons And Tactics". This means that this division has one job. And it is not understanding the finer points of executing a warrant--though they probably understand that better than you ever will. ALL this unit cares about are their guns and how to use them. And by that, I don't mean "point and shoot". I mean "be able to shoot well enough to shoot the gun out of the suicidal moron's hand" (NOTE: DISTURBING VIDEO)



This also includes knowing how to deploy assets advantageously so that when SWAT goes in, the situation is over. This is knowing how to go into a building. And most of all, this is knowing where to put the sniper so that the sniper can make the bad things stop happening before they start.

So LKH expects me to believe that the idea of good vantage point is so fucking foreign to snipers in St. Louis that ANITA has to explain where they should sit?

AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE, THERE SHOULD BE MORE THAN ONE FUCKING SNIPER.

Also: if we ARE involving a sniper, THE SNIPER SHOULD RESOLVE THE ISSUE. THIS IS WHAT SNIPERS DO. I refuse to believe that Anita Fucking Blake could end this situation sooner than someone whose entire purpose in life is to make the impossible shot. We're talking about somebody who can do intense algebraic equations involving wind sheer and target motion inside their own skull, in the heartbeat it takes to decide to inhale. Somebody who's got no problem wetting themselves if incontinence means they make the shot. Blog-readers, if your choice is to stonewall a sniper or surrender, FUCKING SURRENDER. The motherfucking court system will be more forgiving than the sniper. DO NOT FUCK WITH THE SNIPER.

  Anita goes on to discuss how the sniper can't "Just shoot vamps" because there might be good-guy vamps in the building. Anita. WHEN YOU INVOLVE A SNIPER YOU GET ALL THE NON-TARGETS OUT OF THE WAY. Seriously. You are talking about somebody who can hit a fucking postage stamp from across a fucking football field. DO NOT EVEN BEGIN TO THINK YOU CAN DO THIS BAMF'S JOB FOR THEM.

Oh, but what's Anita's logic for choosing windows for the sniper?

But anyone that flew out of the windows of our condo, they would be bad guys, and the sniper could drop them with impunity. Green-light city.

I have no words. Actually, I have plenty of words, but they're all coming on so fast it's gonna take me a second to sort them all out.

First off, I assumed that "Go for the windows" means "you can look into these, as opposed to a door, where you can't". So that, you know, the sniper can watch the hostage-taker make gestures into the phone line until he finally steps far enough away from the hostage that any through-and-throughs can't take the innocent out too. BUT APPARENTLY IT IS SO THE SNIPER CAN PICK OFF THE FLEEING BAD GUYS GOING OUT THE WINDOW.

THIS. IS NOT. WHY. YOU. EMPLOY. A SNIPER.

Second: Your sniper is not going to wait for Mr. Dracula to go through the window, because bullets are what go through the window. Your sniper is going to wait until he has a clear shot at Mr. Obvious Bad Guy, preferably while he is on the phone with Mr. Negotiator, and Mr. Sniper is going to put a very large hole in Mr. Bad Guy's head as soon as everyone agrees it is safe to make Mr. Bad Guy go bye bye. It is not a sniper's job to take out the strays. The sniper's job is to end it. 

The most decisive thing Anita could do, realistically, if a sniper is in play, is make sure Mr. Bad Guy stands in the middle of that pretty picture window for about thirty seconds. 

 But of course the sniper's only job is to take care of the people Anita can't manage to shoot. That's why they went through all that training. It's so they can shoot the people running away. 

 I was still in the vest, even though I’d pointed out that nothing we were about to go up against would be shooting at us, and vests were useless for stabbing or tearing.

This is why we have stab vests as well as bullet proof vests. And that's probably what you're wearing right now.

It was like going up against Superman, and thinking Kevlar would keep you safe.

Here's the thing, Anita. COPS ARE GODDAMNED GOOD AT WHAT THEY DO. They don't go up against Superman with Kevlar. They go up against Mr. Gangster with Kevlar, and they also go up against him with stab-vests, because they understand that when the gun stops working, the knives come out. This assumption that the cops don't understand vampires implies that the cops have no idea what their job is. Vamps aren't new to this universe. Taking vampire gangs down would not be a new concept. THE COPS WOULD UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY NEED TO DO.

 But there is a bigger issue here: ANITA HAS NO BUSINESS BEING HERE. 

How do I know this?

BECAUSE SHE'S A MOTHERFUCKING CIVILIAN:

Finally, Sergeant Melbourne said what few special tactical units will ever admit out loud, “We’re using bullets. Bullets can ricochet, and we’d just feel better if we knew you were safe from friendly fire.”

Anita Blake is a civillian consultant. FUCK the marshal grandfathering clause, she does not have the training or the skillset to be anything more than a civilian consultant and every single motherfucking thing she does proves that the ONLY place Anita Blake needs to be at a crime scene is BEHIND THE MOTHERFUCKING YELLOW TAPE. You want to know why the miniskirt at the crime scene bothered me so much? BECAUSE CRIME SCENE TECHS DRESS LIKE THIS:

Anita does not dress like that at a crime scene. Anita does not think the way an investigator thinks. Anita cares less about a crime scene than she does about her PRETEND gender solidarity. Anita is a civilian pretending to be a cop because it makes her ego feel nice. THEY WANT YOU IN A VEST SO THEY WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR A MOTHERFUCKING CIVILIAN DYING.

Hey, how does the victim Anita's going in to rescue get treated?

They had a picture of her up on their Web site and we’d all seen it. It was a publicity shot for a stripper bar, so we tried to look at her face.

...These chapters are going to take for. fucking. ever. to flog, aren't they?

ONE: way to slut-shame your victim, Blake. I mean, WOW. HOW DO YOU DO THIS SO CASUALLY.

TWO: There could be identifying marks on places other than the face. I know of one case where the only identifying mark on a victim was the videotaped tattoo on her ankle (The victim survived, and identified herself via said tattoo.) You shouldn't exclude vital areas of information just because you don't like the victim's job. 

But surely, SURELY, LKH CANNOT piss me off more than she already has.

...you guys have been reading this blog long enough to know I'm going to follow that up with a god-awful quote. Brace yourselves:

I didn’t ask if the men had a harder time looking at her face than I did. She was covered by hands and a few well-placed pieces of cloth, but the illusion was that more skin was showing than really was. Distracting, and meant to be. I’m sure if Ms. Morgan had been told she’d be kidnapped by murderous vampires, she’d have left us a nice, less glamorous face shot.

I. Hate. This. Book.

Most of the tactical team seemed to think I was a civilian and treated me that way.

YOU ARE. YOU ARE A CIVILIAN, ANITA. YOU FUCKING ARE A FUCKING CIVILIAN WHO HAS NO FUCKING BUSINESS BEING ON THE FRONT LINE OF A SPECIAL FORCES INSERTION, ESPECIALLY NOT WHEN THERE IS A MOTHERFUCKING HOSTAGE WHOSE LIFE YOU COULD END BY FUCKING UP JUST ONCE.

Hey, let's take a break to address something else: 

My thighs rub together when I walk, thank you very much.

 Due to Lots of Reasons, I put on a lot of weight when I started working at my current job. I'm about 5'6, and I didn't start having the thigh rubbing issue until the last 20 or so pounds. I'm currently about 170.

I'm a B cup. Possibly a C.

Anita, as proved by Affliction, is a triple-E cup size. She's very short, and (being very generous) probably about 140 lbs. (I think cannon is more like 125, but like I said, I'm being generous.)

Most of Anita's body weight is boob. 

And that's assuming that she's 140. If she's the idea 125, Anita literally does not have the thighs to rub together. It is physically impossible for Anita to have thigh meat if she has EEE size boobs. 

I mean, I have no intention of judging, but if you're 125 and EEE, having thighs means atrophying a couple of kidneys. Maybe you can count Anita's ribs under her boob-meat. I don't know.

GOOD FUCKING GOD. PARAGRAPH BREAKS. (It's all gun paraphanalia. None of it involves a gun-bra. I am unimpressed)

I think we're supposed to go "Anita knows guns". All I go is "Anita knows how to order things from gun catalogues".

Finally, after describing the number of places Anita can put a gun, and letting us know that Anita doesn't get snipers at all, the chapter ends with them moving into position.
 

Next chapter:

IT WAS ONE of those buildings downtown that had been rehabbed until outside it was an architectural wonder that had been saved from demolition, but inside it was ultramodern, ultrasleek, with carpet and almost empty halls, as if once they agreed on the two-tone paint job, they couldn’t agree on anything else.

Jesus Christ, and the woman lives in this city. She lives in this city, and this is the best she can do.

Guys, I've lived around or IN Corpus Christi for over ten years. Fuck, it's been almost twenty years since my family moved here the first time. And ever since I've been here, we've had the old Courthouse. EVERYBODY in Corpus, or near Corpus, knows the Old Courthouse. We can rant about the Old Courthouse. About how we don't want it destroyed, we want it fixed, and WHY THE BLAZING BLUE JESUS FUCK can't the city pull its head out of its ass and manage to fix the goddamned old Courthouse before it implodes, it was a very nice job they did on that southern entrance a couple years ago, but it's been YEARS since anybody TOUCHED the goddamned thing, so why--

Then you have that other old building that got turned into trendy condos (I don't like the trendy condos because they fucked with the windows when they remodeled the building) and there's the Many Lighting Fixtures on the Lexington (WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE FLUORESCENT BLUE) and that AWESOME LED light show on the Harbor Bridge, and DO NOT GET ME STARTED on what happened to the Columbus Ships (seriously. It's a train wreck with international reprocussions. Short Version: Corpus Christi pissed off Spain. The entire nation. And they're still pissed.)

...so I would think that someone who has lived in their city as long as LKH has would manage to find an interesting story about this building beyond "It was one of those buildings". This kind of remodeling job would be a big deal to long-term residents of St. Louis. (...in fact I remember friends of mine suggesting condos that resemble this very much way back around the time this book was released, so I think whatever LKH is talking about here was actually a REALLY BIG DEAL to St Louis residents at the time)

I'm beginning to understand why we focused on sex.

Anita decides that the condo's owner is undead. Not Dead-dead, but undead. And Evil undead. Because she called in sick and then stopped answering the phone.

Anita. If you re undead you can still place phone calls.

LKH really sucks at describing Special Forces insertions. It's not fucking ballet already.

Thanks to the briefing, I knew the layout of this condo almost better than my own house.

BULL. FUCKING. SHIT.

Let me remind you guys what Anita did during that breifing:

They went back to their briefing, and I went back to counting the minutes and wondering if there was going to be anything alive in the condo by the time we hit the door.

That's the end of chapter 75. You were not paying attention, Anita. You were sitting above it as Miss Know-It-Better-Than-You.

Fuck it.

They find a horrifically raped, spread-eagled body on a kitchen table. Anita's first reaction is "It's another stripper." Mine is, it's the condo-owner. But apparently her panty-hose indicates she's a stripper. Somehow.

It is implied that she died via sodomy, via a wine-bottle.

And then the hostage starts screaming, so everybody rushes the hallway, end chapter.

Next chapter.

Please let Anita do something competent. PLEASE let her do something competent. PLEASE--

 OH GODDAMN IT ANITA.

So she rushes down the hallway and ruins her night-vision, because OF COURSE special forces wouldn't know how to manage that. And somehow the vampires manage to not only kill and eviscerate the cops, but strip them out of their body armor in the time it takes for Anita to get down the hallway.  Okay, whatever.

And then...things get confusing.

Holy objects go off. We lose all pronouns for a while, but I think Anita pinpoints the bad vamp and demands that the other cops turn his chest into a very large hole. They agree to do so.

So things eventually resolve to the hostage bleeding to death on the bed, and a female vampire--probably the condo-owner--pleading for her life.

Guess which one Anita Blake focuses on:

Mendez had glanced away from the vamp to me, then farther back to his sergeant. “I can’t shoot someone who’s begging for her life.”

 “It’s okay, Mendez, I can.”

It's kind of telling to me that we didn't come here to save the victim. We came here to kill the vampire. So now the victim is dying and Anita, once again, does not give a flying fuck about that.

They debate the morality of Anita shooting the tiny female vampire to itty bitty pieces. In fact, let me show you excactly how this death is described:

I fired into her face from less than two feet away. Her face vanished in a spray of blood and thicker things. Her body sat up very straight for long enough that I pulled the trigger into the middle of her chest. She was tiny, not much meat on her, I got daylight with just one shot.

She's tiny and fragile and female. This is repeated over and over. And then we debate how morally right it was for Anita to kill her for three kindle book pages. Meanwhile, the other victim is bleeding to death on the motherfucking rape-bed.

FINALLY they get the girl out of there, and the chapter ends with some nonsense about how the dead aren't leaving. 
 
This was three straight chapters of ungodly suck. HOW CAN THIS WOMAN STILL BE CALLED PRO COP. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

Incubus Dreams--chapter 73-75

God, I feel like I hate myself for forcing my way through three chapters at once.

So business first, boys and girls.

I am AMAZED at your response to Dragon Breath. Yes, I figured you guys would like it, but there's "hey, this is a cool book" and there is the sales response, and also this:

 I did not expect thisGuys, I have every faith that you are awesome people, but I am not used to asking people for things. I do not expect people to give me things. I know I probably should feel satisfied and smug or something, but in reality I just feel really small, because you guys are generous to the level of AWESOME and I'm just kind of "WOAH" right now.

Seriously. How did I wind up with such awesome people?

...I have to follow this up with Anita Blake, don't I?

THE EMTS, EMERGENCY medical techs, had given Ronnie a blanket. They seemed to think she was suffering from shock. That wasn’t it. She was sobering up. Sobering up in the middle of a murder investigation, when she’d drunk more in one night than she’d consumed in the entire six years I’d known her.

LAUREL. YOUR MAIN DEMOGRAPHIC IS THE SAME GROUP OBSESSED WITH ANNE RULE BOOKS. WE KNOW WHAT AN EMT IS. 

ALSO: YOU DO NOT SOBER UP THAT FAST. YOU VOMIT FROM ALCOHOL POISONING THAT FAST, BUT YOU DON'T SOBER UP. ALSO-ALSO--THE EMERGENCY MEDICAL EMT TECHNICIANS  SHOULD BE TAKING RONNIE TO THE HOSPITAL FOR ALCOHOL POISIONING BECAUSE ACCORDING TO HER VOMIT THAT IS WHAT SHE HAS.

Now, let's address the medical fail here.

First off, detoxing off alcohol isn't something to laugh about. If you use large amounts of booze habitually and you attempt to detox without medical assistance, you will die. Not "might", sports fans. YOU WILL DIE. So the first question any EMT worth their salt would ask is "how often does she drink this much".

Two, and I have no intention of slut-shaming here. People have the right to indulge, to sleep with multiple partners, and to visit strip clubs if that's what they want. I drink way too much to throw stones in this department. But we've just managed to cross LKH's stupidity with actual medical conditions. Ronnie has drunk until she pukes. No bullshit, this is a dangerous situation. Our bodies are made to hold onto nutrition. Vomit wastes nutrition, therefore puking is a choice of last resort. You will only vomit if your body has decided it is better off without whatever lies in your stomach and trust me, it takes a lot to convince your stomach that it doesn't need that rib-eye. When you drink to the point of physical illness, the body is not puking because it "can't hold it's liquor" or because it's weak, or some other bullshit. It is puking because puke is suddenly critical to its continued well-being. It isn't safe to drink until you vomit and/or pass out. Especially if you pass out, because you're not asleep, you're unconscious, and that means something's gone wrong inside your brain and you won't wake up on your own. Aspirating your own vomit is a primary cause of death among heavy drinkers because if you pass out? You will not wake up if you vomit. If a friend of yours passes out while drinking, the VERY least you should do is call the nearest hospital/poison control and roll your friend over onto their side so that they won't inhale their puke, and that's not "good friend" behavior, that's "Basic human being" level shit.  The best thing you can do is take them to the ER, NOW, because their body is in the process of shutting down forever. Just based on her behavior inside the club and her vomiting outside of it, Ronnie has mild to moderate alcohol poisoning and god only knows how much she drank before Anita got there. Her last drink could have been an hour ago, or she could have just downed five shots in the back room with Dallas (Which would be MASSIVELY FATAL. Seriously. As a bartender and a person raised around info about addiction, DO NOT DRINK MORE THAN FIVE DRINKS IN AN HOUR.) Any EMT worth their job would be racing her back to the nearest ER so she can drink activated charcoal and, you know, not die. It's not the booze in the system they give a fuck about, sports fans. It's the stuff still sitting in her stomach. Seriously. This could kill Ronnie. Why are they not taking her to the ER?

...because the novel revolves around Anita. Right.

The Anita Blake Series, ladies and gentlemen. Where Anita's friends can have life-threatening medical conditions and Anita will never give a shit. 

So while her best friend is potentially dying of alcohol poisoning, a cop walks up to Anita and says 'I didn't recognise you with so many clothes on."

I shit you not.

 Sheriff Melvin Christopher’s opening shot to me had been, “Almost didn’t recognize you with more clothes on, Miss Blake.”

 Well, it can't get any wors--

I smiled sweetly and said, “That’s Marshal Blake to you, sheriff, and you are awfully interested in women’s clothing for a heterosexual man in a rural area.” It had gone downhill from there.

Anita Blake needs to go die in a fire.

YOU FOUND THE DEAD BODY OF A SEX WORKER AND YOUR BEST FRIEND IS DYING OF BOOZE AND YOU ARE TRADING HOMOPHOBIC BARBS WITH SOMEBODY YOU TECHNICALLY OUTRANK WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS.

Christopher gets so pissed he has to go for a walk around a parking lot. This allows Anita to watch Micah try to convince a cop that he doesn't work at the strip club, and neither does Nathanial. She decides to shove in and get up close and personal. This quickly descends into yet more homophobia. Because it's not like cops are expected to take sensativity training before they go on the job.

(I had to take sensativity training before I could make fucking doughnuts. OF COURSE THEY DO.)

They exchange barbs for a while, and finally Micah explains that he's a liason for were-whatevers, and this involves him taking off his glasses and showing off his kitty-cat eyes.

The cops freak out. Christopher reacts thusly:

“Beastiality and coffin-bait, that is pretty damn low for a white woman.”

I think this is a kind of strawman zen, you know? Everybody in this book is a stuffed shirt, including Anita's triple-E bra, so it kind of comes back around on itself in this mobius strip of wanton stupidity. Yes, the sheriff is a moron for saying that out loud, but look at everything else around this.

It'd be pretty if it weren't utterly fucking repellant. 

 The pissing contest continues until somebody's radio declares an Officer Down. Then everybody forgets that they're a racist POS for a second and piles into the cars. Anita tells Micah and Nate that she loves them just before she drives off.

I, for one, really hope Ronnie is okay.

(CAN I EMPHASIZE HOW NOT SAFE SHE IS RIGHT NOW? PLEASE, BLOG READERS, DO NOT DRINK UNTIL YOU PUKE, AND IF A FRIEND DOES, SEE THAT THEY GET MEDICAL ATTENTION, PROMISE ME THIS THANK YOU.)

Next chapter: The cop is still alive, though it takes a lot of posturing before we discover this.

The cop tells them that a vampire came and abducted a dancer from a club he was watching. How and why is entirely immaterial, because we've only got so much book left and we wasted most of it on criminally boring sex. Anita realizes immediately that this is a trap. Vittorio has abducted this dancer so that Anita and Co. will have to strike early, while it is still dark, rather than at dawn when the vampires are dead. She decides that they will have to spring the trap anyway, because the girl's life is at stake.

She gets the Special Forces dude on the line, discusses things, and Christopher is all like "WOW SHE REALLY IS TALKING TO SPECIAL FORCES I GUESS SHE IS A COP."

To which I reply that it is less sexism, though I'll give points cause that is there, and more Anita's inabilty to look professional, ever.

Next chapter:

There is a dry erase board. It is full of diagrams.

I could care less. Why does this have to be explained?

Also: if Anita has declined to give these dudes the address, how could they have reconned it this thoroughly? It reads like they've been planning all night.

We are info dumped a lot of fucking useless info, like how the owner of the condo at the address has no furniture.

Again: I. Could. Care. Less. GET BACK TO THE STORY.

Anita gives this speech:

“Dawn Morgan may still be alive in there,” I said. “But every minute we wait cuts her chances of survival. You can hate that your captain let me come, you can fucking hate me, I don’t care, but let’s get this done. I’d like to get to Dawn before it’s too late, Sergeant Hudson. Just once, I’d like not to be the cleanup crew and be there early enough to have something left to rescue.”

I would find this moving if the trigger had not been the question "are we boring you, Miss Blake?", implying that she was ignoring critical information during the breifing. I'd also be more inclined to find this "You can hate me" speech more moving if I did not know (through personal use of it) that "Fine, hate me" is Passive Aggression at its finest. (For the record, when I used that speech I was very wrong and I am very sorry for using it). (It was the Worst Thing I ever Did On The Internet) the "hate me" speech is also an admission of guilt. You know on some level that you've done something worthy of hate, and you're trying to head things off before they get there.

I'd also be more moved if Anita hadn't spent many chapters ignoring a friend's medical and mental crisis because it was a little inconvenient. You know, right up until the dead body.

...OH GOOD FUCKING GOD LAUREL. PARAGRAPH BREAKS ARE YOUR FRIEND.

(I can't reproduce this, but I hit an ENTIRE KINDLE PAGE-AND-A-HALF that is one big paragraph. My eyes crossed. Given that this is the paragraph that would justify the "hate me" speech, this is a bad move.)

And the depressing thing is? There is not. one. sentence. in that paragraph worth reading.  We go from one cop's hair, to Anita's hair, to how if Anita cuts her hair Micah cuts his, to how insecure having long hair makes her feel, to how she's just a little girl (...you die instantly for that one.) just a "voodoo dabbler" in this great, wide world of MEN and somehow this becomes another debate about how well Anita does her job vs. how well the cops do theirs, and as we've already covered, ANITA REALLY SUCKS AT HER JOB.

That's kind of what all my issues with this series boil down to. Anita doesn't suck at this job because she's a woman. She doesn't suck at this job because she sleeps with people. She doesn't suck at this job because she challenges gender roles. She sucks at the job because she doesn't give one flying fuck about it. She doesn't bother protecting the chain of evidence. She doesn't put on protective clothing when she arrives at a crime scene--clothing that is aimed at protecting the crime scene from the investigator, and not the other way around--she wastes time on pissing contests that ought to be used processing evidence, and when she has evidence the police desperately need, she uses it to leverage special treatment out of the investigators. Anita is not an investigator in any way, shape, or form because she doesn't bother, and she hasn't for several books. She hurtles from one event to the next like a sex-propelled grenade, but the instant something in the job requires self-restraint she crashes harder than a bumper-car shoved into a Tunnel of Love ride.

ANITA BLAKE IS A DEFENSE ATTOURNEY'S DREAM.

Of course, it's not about how Anita fails at her job. It's about how she's a dangerous girl:

“You-are-a-fuck-ing-assassin.”

Reproduced verbatum from the book.

Anita treats this like it's a point of pride.

In the end, Special Forces refuse to take her along for the ride, so Anita decides that it's her warrent, she's going in without them.


Of course, showing that she's got balls that big proves to all the other men that she's the real deal, and they all decide that they WILL go in with her, because she's proved she's the biggest bad-ass of them all.

RIGHT.

END OF CHAPTER THANK YOU GOD.

Incubus Dreams--chapter 70-72

It's out! It's out! It's out it's out it's out it's out!

GO GET IT.

Meanwhile, back on the farm...

It's probably TMI but I spent most of today contemplating self-evisceration via half-dead batteries. The next person who tells me that it's the media telling me periods suck is going to experience very severe pain. If I become excited by dental emergencies because that means I'll get another prescription for pain killers I can horde JUST FOR MY PERIODS, that means the goddamn things fucking hurt. This is not a gift from the Moon Mother, I am not enjoying my femininity. I hurt. Severely. 

This is why you have seen very little social media stuff from me today. OW.

So how's Anita doing?

...She's gone home. Apparently, if vampires are a meth lab and the cops are doing a raid, Anita is Haz-mat.

Neighborhoods everywhere are now screaming in terror. WHAT DID HAZ MAT EVER DO TO DESERVE THAT COMPARISON? Two random members of Haz Mat do not collapse into a puddle of oral on top of the battery-acid-and-nasal-OTC decongestant mixture.

Also, she's sitting on Vittorio's address until dawn.

WAY TO WITHHOLD VITAL INFORMATION FROM THE COPS THERE ANITA.

PLEASE don't let this chapter devolve into a sex scene PLEASE don't let it devolve PLEASE.

Anita is shaking because of what she did to the vampire. GEE I WOULD HOPE SO. She literally blew his head off. She shot him, and then kept on shooting him, until the top part of his head was gone. Micah is here to comfort her and tell her it is alright that she just shot a vampire into tiny pieces while a few thousand other vampires watched in horror. She meant well.

Micah asks why she killed him. She says that he was a serial killer and he says "Well, you had to kill him."

Fine. But she didn't have to torture him with bullets first. YOU DON'T DO THAT SHIT AND STILL BE GOOD, ANITA. YOU JUST DON'T.

Oh, Ronnie's called. She's at a strip club called Incubus Dreams. She just broke up with Louie because of the whole "marry me please" thing and she wants to "do something he'll regret in the morning." But she's too drunk now and she needs a ride.  Nate tells Anita that ID is the club where you get "happy endings" if you know what I mean, so they have to go rescue Ronnie from herself.

Anita literally calls having sex with a male stripper "a fate worse than death".

I. am. not. kidding.

End chapter. Next chapter: We get a description about a strip club. It's not quite a description of the strip club because we don't get anything beyond "It sits by itself beside the river. It sits by itself beside the river. Have I mentioned this yet? It sits by itself. Beside the river."

We get two pages dedicated to how the music is too loud.

Anita keeps looking for Ronnie.  She meets a man who thinks that Micah and Nate are gay and who ignores her until she offers him money for wherever Ronnie is. Apparently somebody named "Dallas" has taken Ronnie to the back room, because they don't get a lot of pretty girls there. They pay this dude forty bucks to take them to Ronnie.

Anita spends the entire time talking about how this club doesn't measure up to Guilty Pleasures.

Also: apparently Anita cannot handle the Full Monty:

They did total nudity across the river, how could I have forgotten? What I wanted to do was run screaming, but instead I let Owen maneuver us toward the black-draped area across from the bar.

Yeah, but it's the prudes who are ruining LKH's career. They can't handle the mountains of sex. Her main character wants to run screaming from a stripper's penis that isn't even pointed at her, but it's the prudes reading the books that are ruining her career.

The chapter ends. Next chapter:

We get a legal definition of a lap dance. Okay...

Whoever this Dallas is, I really hope he's on the up-and-up, because I'm getting that "We're saving a mundie from torture" vibe and I really wanted Ronnie to be okay. She's still mostly sane.

...I take it back. Ronnie is well past the cut off stage of drunk, and she and Dallas are pawing each other and maybe having fun? (does it count if you're so drunk you can't remember it?)

People keep trying to pay Micah and Nate for sex. I think we're supposed to find this funny. What I find funny is how very, very akward Anita is around scantily clad people. YOU ARE DATING STRIPPERS AND YOUR MAIN SQUEEZE OWNS A CLUB. YOU SPEND THE ENTIRE BOOK CRITICIZING PEOPLE FOR HAVING MORALS. THAT GIRL YOU JUST DESCRIBED IS WEARING A SEE-THROUGH-DRESS. BIG. WHOOP.

The prepositions get more frequent and forceful until finally Anita has to pull her gun and badge out. Well, so much for traveling incognitio. Nate mentions that the dude trying to get them to go off for a fivesome in a hot tub is a guy who recruits VERY young male prostitutes. Anita gets fed up with all this and drags Ronnie out of the back rooms. Ronnie protests very loudly until they make it outside--no real mention if Ronnie gets her clothes back on before they make it out--and Ronnie starts retching. Anita holds her and thinks about how this is true friendship.

...Anita, it's kind of telling that she only called you when she was so drunk she needed the ride.

 And that's when Anita finds the dead body. Male, but a stripper who fits the profile.

She calls Zerbowski. He realizes that it's bad news that the state cops will get there before he does, because Anita is on real thin ice with them and I am sure the stuff at the CoEL is not helping. He warns her. She blows him off.

The cops show up, and I think if this book had been rather longer in the plot department I'd understand why Sherrif Melvin Christopher is bad news. But I don't give a fuck, because the chapter is over and I can go to bed now.

Sleep tight, my lovelies.