Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 44

EXILES 3, changes for summer plans, and other things

 First up: Review. As in today we will be absent one. My free time is gone today, due to certain co-workers calling in sick on my day job. The choice is either we make or deadline or we visit Anita Blake. And nobody wants to visit Anita Blake.

I will make up for it tomorrow, I swear.

Exiles. We are still on track, and that is all I will say on the matter.

In other news...I like selling books off of Amazon. I really do. The problem is...I don't really sell that many. And because I have set absurdly high goals for myself these next few months, I'm going to put Starbleached back on KDP Select. Another three months. Just to see if I can't keep sales of the other books up somewhere over "two."

It should be for sale at Barnes and Noble for the rest of today, but I make no promises. If you want an .epub copy and you haven't gotten one yet, you can get it on Barnes and Noble or on Deviantart. Or you can e-mail me at christwriter AT hotmail DOT com, and we'll see if we can't work something out.

NOW. OTHER THINGS. The sequel to This Found Thing is going to drop sometime in the next two months, I promise. I've gotten all of my writing for the next four months done and past done, so I should be able to push more out. I do not have an exact date--I'd like to get Black Hounds done first--but it's finally coming. Not that anybody's asked, but, you know, just in case somebody's been waiting patiently, it'll be here by the end of June. Probably before the end of May.

There you go. There's your update for the day. Now. Please excuse me, I have to go edit things.

Cerulean Sins--chapter 31

So today's pre-review rant is all about music. Specifically, Lindsey Stirling. I have only recently discovered her awesomeness, and only more recently located her MP3s on Amazon.

This is my favorite of her sons so far. Start it, and it might make the rest of this chapter go easier.



(BTW, in case you haven't figured it out, the easiest way to get me to heart a musician forever is to give them a fiddle and let them kill it in awesome ways. Heather Alexander, Emilie Autumn, and now Lindsey Stirling. I heart them.)

I should also mention tonight that I am drunk. I had the customers from hell, it was the only way to medicate. This is the only way I can explain how much I like the opening bit for this chapter. Maybe it's the booze, maybe it's the fact that I love non-linear narratives, or maybe it is that LKH, when she has her act together and she is writing with both hands at the same time, is actually a halfway decent narrator and writer. But there is something about the juxtipositioning of Anita running for Jean Claude and Richard chasing for prey that is actually kind of pretty.

And then she uses the word "asnooze", as in all of the vampires in the city save for JC are asnooze in their beds, and that kind of kills it dead. Sorry. If ever a wrong choice of a word there was...

Seriously. I don't get how you can do something that pretty and then fuck it up with one damn word. Do you not read it through a second time?

...we're talking about LKH, who sent her latest book in without bothering to edit. Right.

You know, I hated Under the Dome when it came out? I hated it. I enjoyed reading it but the writer in me wanted to take a weed whacker to it. That was fucking poetry. That was Fatal Interview compared to this. I will never understand how any author can send the first draft of anything to another professional. That's like showing up to an interview dressed in a bra, ripped jeans and a see through top. You don't do that.

LKH then compares the death of Richard's prey, a deer, to champagne opened and left to go flat. And I have an issue with this, because "champagne going flat" is not a positive in my business. Flat champagne means a loud lecture from my boss and Sangria, which means more work for me. LKH needs to consider the plight of the waitress in her food based murder metaphores, is what I'm saying.

And yet, everything about this chapter could still work. If LKH had taken three seconds to polish it up and take the burs out, this would be gorgeous. Seriously. Dead fucking serious. There's a rush and an urgency that, if properly framed with a good plot, written by an author who gives a shit about craft, would blow my fucking mind.

In Sunshine, (WHICH YOU HAVE ALL READ NOW, RIGHT?) there is a scene involving Rae, the main character, Constantine and, by virtue of a blood transfer, a doe. It is my favorite scene in any book ever. This had the potential to come kind of close to that in awesomeness. And it didn't, because everybody attached to this book decided that they just didn't care.

And then Jean Claude sheilds Anita from Richard's feeding, and the potential for awesome ends.

I am sad panda.

She and JC make out. Anita quotes that bit about "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" and I am reminded of Shakespere in Love, which is not one of my favorite movies. LKH is being paid a lot of money for these books. You'd think she could come up with her own revolting sex dialogue, you know?

So the problem, apparently, is that Jean Claude can't get an erection without sucking blood, and no matter what Anita says he won't set fang and feed on her. So she decides to give him a blow job.

I am about to read about a blow job involving a permanently flaccid penis.

Somebody thought this would be erotic.

You need to send me more booze. That's the only thing that will ever make this okay.

I will also never understand the description of a male's genetalia as "all of him." A guy is more than a cock and balls, just as a girl is more than a vagina. It's not romantic. It's demeaning. Use your words. Even if they sound silly. Find a way to make them sound not silly. Or else stop writing erotica that isn't erotic.

I mean...this?

It was the most amazing sensation to be able to hold him, to flick my tongue on the loose skin between his testes, to roll the delicate eggs of his body against my teeth and cheeks.

 Yeah. That is not sexy. That's more snort-soda-up-my-nose.

And eventually Anita drives JC to orgasm without an erection.

I got nothing, folks.

And then she goes off on how she loves Jean Claude because he's a political son of a bitch, because:

if I took away the Machiavellian plottings, the labyrinth of his mind, it would lessen him, make him someone else.

Okay. Whatever. You're attracted to a guy who would sell you for sex if he thought it would advance his political career, and you wouldn't change that because it would make him less attractive to you. Big fucking whoop. You need therapy. MOVING ON!

So now, with the ardeur sated, Anita insists that JC take blood from her.

This is also known as the fourth mark of a vampire servant. The thing it would take to keep Anita forever safe from Belle Morte's politicking. Antia says it's because it's the one thing she's never held back from JC and it's only fair she give it up now. the fact that this would SAVE HER OWN ASS is never brought up.

But Anita is wearing her cross, and JC says he can't feed on her when she's wearing the cross. Anita says that it's never reacted to JC before and they discuss this for a few minutes, because breaking every bit of world building lore ever is, you know, important.

And then Asher shows up and the cross goes off like nova because he rolled her mind during their sex thing earlier ,and once again the chapter ends without anything being resolved. 

I hate this book.













 

Cerulean Sins--chapter 30

So I split most of yesterday between editing Black Hounds and working on a top secret project. This project will only be announced when we are go for launch. But it will be awesome. As close to it as I can get, anyway.

I'll give you a hint. The new magical word for the day is typesetting.

(Also: MS Word 2007 was programed by drunken monkeys on a bet. The programers actually wanted the complete works of Shakespere, but they were giving the monkeys absenthe, not whiskey, and they wound up with an unusuable chunk of software instead. Yesterday was one part WHEE EDITING and one part WHY IS THIS HERE I DON'T EVEN DOES THIS WORK NO DELETE DELETE DELETE IT WON'T DELETE THIS IS WHY I DRINK, BLOG-READERS THIS IS WHY I DRINK!)

So. Anita Blake.


When I was just learning how to knit, I sucked at it. A lot. So my mom bought me a bunch of knitting books because when you are homeschooling "My daughter wants to learn how to knit" counts as home ec. Anyway, I decided that I wanted to do intarsia. Intarsia is where you have many colors of yarn and you knit pretty colorful patterns with them. This is how come argyle socks are a thing.

I did not make argyle socks, because socks were beyond me and I kept on introducing more color in the desperate hopes that eventually a pattern worth repeating would emerge, because I'd jumped immediately to the pretty chart, and I'd left the basic, ugly, beginner charts alone.

This is what this book reminds me of. LKH started out with one plot thread, the dude in her office at the beginning of the book (I read the wikipedia summery of the book. That's a plot thread) and introduced her second (Musette) her third (Anita's sex life) fourth (the effects said sex life is having on her men) fifth (Gross murders) sixth (Belle Morte wants Anita) seventh (Anita is being followed by weirdos) and now eighth (The Mother of all Darkness is...uh, a thing). Not only has she done this without CONNECTING any of the threads, she's done it without ADVANCING any of them. Anita is still having trouble with the ardeur, Nathanial is still weak, Musette is still locked up in her bedroom, the murders are still murders...NOTHING connects.

Part of writing is knowing when you need something to happen. If you can't do that, you can't write. Keeping the reader interested is essentially all that writing is, if you really think about it. That's why Micheal Bay is still getting paid to make things explode and film the burny bits, and why a trilogy about people literally walking from point A to point B so they can throw a ring into a hole is the thing that launched a thousand fantasy franchises. But for fuck's sake, the answer to "something needs to happen now" shouldn't fucking be "INTRODUCE A NEW THING" every single time your plot starts sagging. And it is EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. None of the things I mentioned up above us connect. A couple intersect, but none of them have resolved into a single thread.

So they pull over the car and lay out plastic because of bleeding, and then get back into the car. Anita theorizes, based on one singular encounter with the MOAD's thoughts, that the MOAD is a sociopath.

Yeah. Yo, Laurel?

Oh, you think I'm kidding, my loyal blog readers?

“If you don’t feel love or friendship, can you be lonely?” 

He raised eyebrows at me. “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

 “We’ve all just brushed up against the Mother of all Vampires, and she’s more like the Mother of All Sociopaths. Human beings are rarely pure sociopaths. It’s more like they’re missing a piece here and there. True, pure sociopathy is really pretty rare, but Mommy Dearest qualifies, I think.”

No. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Human beings might rarely be murderous sociopaths, because that perfect storm of antisocial behavior and need rarely happens, but sociopaths are common. Like, 1 in 24 level common. A sociopath is not someone with precious pieces missing. A sociopath is somebody who is incapable of caring about the rules or other human beings outside of what those people can do for them. Not missing care. Incapable of care. It's different. Mostly because "Missing" implies that eventually, you can put that piece back.





So Anita thinks about eating Caleb for a few minutes (and compares the thought of biting into his jugular veign to eating a piece of hard candy) and then realizes that the car that was following them earlier is still following them. So the great vampire exicutioner decides to call somebody else and see if they ought to evade the jeep or try to catch the jeep.

Because making your own choices is hard!

Seriously, I get that part of this is "We need to sit down and make a plan, and if we want to catch them we need backup", and that's actually kind of reasonable, but Anita hasn't elected to do ANYTHING in this book, except maybe raise a zombie at the beginning and tell Random Dude In Her Office no, I won't work with you.

 And then, before calling the circus, she and a shapeshifted Jason decide to try to eat Caleb.


And RICHARD COMES TO THE RESCUE AGAIN!

And then Anita gets a vision of Richard in the bathtub! And this happens!

Jamil being a good Hati (sic), making sure his Ulfric didn’t drown.

What? Random racism what? What does Jamil being Haitian have to do with keeping Richard from drowning? WHY THE FUCK IS HAITI MISSPELLED IN A FUCKING PROFESSIONALLY PUBLISHED FUCKING--

It was what Jason had done for me earlier, minus the sex. Richard was a little homophobic. He didn’t like men who reminded him they liked men, especially if that man was himself.

My brain has hit fail overload. Seriously. HOW DO YOU DO THAT? How do you manage to fail that hard in just three fucking paragraphs?

So Richard tells Anita that he's sent her his hunger for some reason, and that she can turn the hunger into sex.

 And then they have a psychic conversation where Anita is all like "You're okay with me fucking him?" and Richard is all "Well, the other option is eating him." and Anita is all like, "Well, you didn't let me fuck Jean Claude" and Richard says "We're not dating anymore, remember?"

And then Anita says this:

“Jason is in wolf form Richard. I don’t do furry.”

...my theory is now that Anita wrote this book to test Penguin's will at honoring her "no editing" clause. Because that is the most unintentionally hilarious line in the entire book so far, and that was a whole truckload of fail.

And then Anita sends the Ardeur into Richard because this book has no idea what it's doing anymore and I don't think this suck is going to stop anytime soon send help please. 

 And then Jean Claude is awake and Nathanial tells her they're like five minutes away from the circus, can you hold off on the sex-feeding until then? Anita decides she can, and the chapter ends.

Cerulean Sins--Chapter 29

And we're off! Note my supreme confidence in my editing abilities: The countdown to the next Exiles book is going!

It feels relatively important for me to mark that this time last year? Yeah, I was at what I thought was the lowest I could possibly get. And then things happened and I really did find out just how low I could get, which was very, very, very VERY scary.

Everything is different this year. I'm encouraged and excited and I really cannot wait for this summer. I think it's going to be a blast. A lot of work, but worlds away from where I was last year.

...right. Sucky book time. What chapter are we on?

*reads*

Oh. Right. It's the plot dump chapter.

Can I go back to talking about my own books please? How about self publishing stuff? No? Trade publishing stuff? Kittens? Dryer lint? Actively good books? How about movies? I've addicted my stepfather to Lord of the Rings, to the point that he actively gives up his wrestling matches to watch them...

I have to review this chapter, don't I? Aw, fuck.

Yeah, so Anita had some kind of posessed-sex-fit in the car while it was barreling down the highway at speed, forcing Jason, the driver, to sling her around the passenger compartment by yanking the wheel really hard. And the chapter ended with "OH I AM SO POPULAR AND IT SUCKS SO HARD."

And then Nathanial puts a cross on Anita and it gets better.


Yes. Big strong empowered expert vampire hunter. Has to have Designated Victim save them using lore they already know. Seriously. EVEN THE TEXT admits that Anita not wearing a cross right now is stupid.

And then we walk straight into CHRISTIANITY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY:

Theoretically, he could live forever, and with the fourth mark, so could I. So why had I refused it so far? One, it scared me. I wasn’t sure as a Christian how I felt about living forever. I mean, what happened to heaven, and God, and the judgment thing? Theologically, what would it mean?

Uh...that you miss out on heaven and the whole judgement thing, except that eventually the Earth is going to die and, unless you've got a space ship, that means that you'll die too. It'll just take you a long time to get there. And I love how on one hand she's depending on religious symbolism to protect everybody she loves and at the same time she's using it as an excuse to chicken out on taking her relationship with JC to the next level.

Honey, I'd be less worried about the sin and sex part, and be a little more worried about how you're pretty much crapping on your own dinner plate at this point. God's really forgiving about a lot of things, but disrespecting Him and His Things is kind of the deal breaker. And right now is borderline "God is the great Slot Machine in the Sky! Put in enough Faith Tokens and you'll get a pony!" territory. Seriously. The question is not "Will God still provide his support and protection if I take the fourth mark". It's "Will I still get all my faith brownie points and go to heaven?"

Oh, and then they find out they're being followed, and head off into some poor innocent neighborhood that never did anything to anybody to make sure. Only the car turns off into a driveway, so it's totally not a threat, you guys.

Yep. Because it couldn't be a car full of people trained in how not to be noticed while tailing people, now could it?

And they decide to park in this neighborhood because Belle is back, and Anita is now confident that she's protected from Belle because she believes, and her cross begins to glow.

Question: IF a vampire believes in God and walks past a cross, do they flash themselves?

Caleb asked how could I believe. What I always wanted to ask, is, how can you not believe?

These paragraphs are just dripping with this veneer of specialness that reminds me of nothing so much as the Left Behind series. I hate the Left Behind series. The writing is awful, the fastest way to die in the series is be female and/or brown (I think the Token Brown Female got crushed by flying cars, actually) but the biggest issue I had with it was how the Christians did petty stupid shit to their enemies through the entire series, and then talked about how Great God Is and how there are armies of angels protecting them.

Belief is great. Vampires are believers. Demons believe. This is basically saying that merely acknowledging God's existence is enough to force him to protect you. Like he owes you for saying "hi" once in a while. And I need to get off the subject because oh boy, is there a big deal on the horizon.

So Belle Morte hovers and pouts because Anita's wearing a cross, and then she looks past Anita in some kind of dream-vision-mirror thing and sees:

Darkness. Darkness like a wave, rising up, up over me, over us, like a liquid mountain towering to the impossibly tall sky.... Darkness absolute, darkness so black that it held shines of other colors, like an oil slick, or a trick of the eye. As if this blackness was a darkness made up of every color that had ever existed, every sight that had ever been seen, every sigh, every scream, since time began. I had heard the term primordial darkness, but until this moment I had never understood what it meant. Now I understood, I truly understood, and I despaired.

It's the first appearance of the Mother of all Darkness. Which Anita dispels by saying "Hail Marys"

So The MOAD breaks the universe's rules and uses shapeshifting abilities she should not have to attack Anita.

WHY? WHAT? WHO IS THIS? WHY ARE WE BEING ATTACKED BY THE WALL OF BLACKETY BLACK BLACKNESS? Oh, these things are unimportant. Anita has to tame a total stranger's beast now!

The boys help her, and just like with the battle with Belle Morte, Anita is dragged into the MOAD's room, and the Mother of all Darkness is asleep under a blanket. Attempts at being creepy are made, and Anita goes back to the car.

The chapter is not done yet. Why is the chapter not done yet?

Anita infodumps about what the fuck this is via Jean Claude's memories, which is rich because this thing has never been mentioned before and it reads like she's just been dropped in because LKH knew things with Belle Morte were getting repetitive.  This is going to be the Big Bad for many many many books. This is all the introduction it gets.

The book ends with Anita calling the Mother of all Darkness "Mommie dearest" and that's the end of the chapter.

Hey, remember how Mr. Oliver in the third book was implied to be the Oldest Vampire Ever because he was actually homo erectus and not homo sapiens? Yeah. I have the feeling that LKH forgot that part.

On recent events.

I try really hard to keep curent stuff off the blog, unless it's book related. I don't want to be one of those band wagon "GEE SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED AND I NEED TO BLOG ABOUT IT" bloggers. So I was going to work out the Boston Marathon thing on my own.

And then I opened the Ms. for the next book and realized I'd started it off with this paragraph:

Broken glass sparkled like ten thousand diamonds, flashing red and blue with the light of ambulances and fire trucks and more police cars than Casey had seen in her entire life. It was almost like magic. Explosions, danger, violence…yes. It was definitely like magic.

For the record, I wrote that over two months ago. I read it five times and realized I couldn't get past it.

The bombing yesterday is a terrible thing. And the part that disgusts me about the things we talk about--the part that has always disgusted me--is that we're going to spend the next several months talking about who did it and why they did it and if it is fair to accuse Ethnic Group Y of doing terrible things, and in the process we're going to turn the terrible thing into A Political Issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with what actually happened.

We haven't done that yet, but it happens every time.

Here is what actually happened: Somebody decided that their political and/or religious ideology was more important than the health and lives of other human beings. That ideology is unimportant. When you make the move from ideological discussion to violence, your ideology becomes unimportant. People who build bombs don't build bombs because of their ideology. They build bombs because they want to, and they find an ideology that will justify their bomb-building.

Whoever did this? They're watching the news and waiting for themselves to be mentioned. They hear "hunt for the bomber" and they get a thrill of excitement. Because in the end it isn't the politics or the ideology or the number of dead people this person used to justify killing more people. It's about how their pulse raced when they put the bombs down and walked away. It's about realizing that they are now world famous, that they did that. They blew up the Boston Marathon. It's like they did their own art installation piece, in their mind. Dead people? They're not thinking about dead people. They're thinking about how great they feel. How alive. Marc Hoffman blew up two people in Salt Lake City before accidentally blowing up himself (he kinda sucked at the whole bombing thing). During the preliminary hearing they brought bomb parts out that had to be removed from a victim's chest, and when he saw the pieces of his bomb every single witness agreed that Marc Hoffman had a goddamn orgasm.

That's what this is about. One bad person, or an entire group of bad people, deciding that their political ideology justifies killing other people and getting their rocks off in the process.

One sociopathic nutcase has now managed to capture our attention, our feelings and our thoughts. Not because he has a great point to prove, but because he can.

People with great points to prove do not do this. They become orators. They learn how to speak and write and capture the public's attention, or they ally themselves with people who can. They build movements. They don't build bombs.

Human failures build bombs because they can't accomplish anything else, and they don't care.

Now it is time for the rest of us to stand up and say that behavior is completely unacceptable. This isn't an issue of race or religion or politics or rights. It's an issue of a bad person doing bad things because they want to. And it doesn't matter if you'd agree with them over beers the night before, the only right reaction is to say this thing was unjustified and wrong.

Because it is.

Because other people died so that one individual, or one group of individuals, could feel better for a handful of days.

The thing is, what prompted me to write this wasn't the fact that I'd opened my next book with a bombing. What prompted me to write was going to a writing forum for advice on how to handle it, and finding this instead. It's from the facebook of Patton Oswalt. I have no idea who he is, but I recognize the truth when I read it:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem -- one human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.
But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in a while, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evildoers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will." 

At 9/11 humanity proved that it is mostly good. When Christians rise to Muslem's defense, we prove we are mostly good. When Muslems rise to Christian's defense, we prove that we are mostly good. During natural disasters, people still walk towards the danger, not away, because other people still need them. When we value other lives even over our own religious beliefs and political ideals and personal health and welfare, we as individuals prove that we are mostly good.

When we attack other human beings just because we can? That's when you find that isolated evil.

Let joy and innocence prevail.

I'm going to leave this movie quote here, and then I'm going to walk away.

Cerulean Sins--chapter 28

The next two months is going to be a marathon of editing. The good news is, if I hit every goal I'm going to release three books in the next two months.

The bad news? That's an awful, awful lot of work. 

Ah, well. We shall press on.

Uh...work went great? Um...artwork! Cats! Other...cool...stuff...


...yeah, this chapter starts off with more Richard. Which is kind of why I haven't reviewed anything in two days.

I didn’t know what to do for Richard anymore. I could help the pack as a whole, but helping Richard seemed beyond me. He needed healing, and I didn’t know how to do that.

Okay, let's go over Anita and Richard's relationship once more, for the record, to show you just how wronged Anita has been. Wrongity wrongity wronged.

-Anita met Richard in the third book, when he was ordered to basically fill Jason's role as Jean Claude's wolf to call (gag) before there was a Jason. He was ordered by the effectively psychopathic Alpha, Marcus, and his lets-add-sadism-to-the-murder mate Rania. Unlike most wolves, Richard was converted by blood transfusion and not by bitey-ness, which is weird because he is like the most POWERFUL WEREWOLF EVAR!!ONE111!one!
-He kept this secret from Anita and everyone else in his life because he works as a teacher in a highschool and discovery of his wolfyness would get him fired.
-Jean Claude gets miffed that Anita and Richard want to date in spite of the now revealed wolfy, and he demands that Anita date both of them equally, or else he'll kill Richard. Anita agrees.
-At some point Richard proposes marrige and Anita accepts
-Anita spends three books pressuring Richard to challenge Marcus for Alpha. She insists that she will always accept his beast and never run away from him, no matter what he does.
-Richard doesn't want to kill Marcus, because despite his wolfy, he is a non-violent person.
-Marcus and Rania spend three books effectively reenacting 120 Days of Sodom and selling the resulting videotapes for money. They kill several of Richard's friends and almost kill Anita.
-Antia continues to insist that Richard fight Marcus. She insists that she will always accept his beast and never run away from him, no matter what he does.
-Richard finally says "Fuck it" and kills Marcus. He shapeshifts on top of Anita, covering her in goo.
-Having just murdered a person and exposed his beast for her to see, he is now at his lowest and most vunruable. He turns to her for support, because she promised to accept his beast and never run away from him no matter what he does. The pack starts to eat Marcus.
-Anita rejects his beast, runs away from him, and gives Jean Claude a blow job.
-Richard dumps Anita.
-Two books and minimal interaction later, Richard is framed for a murder. Anita comes to his rescue. They have sex. They are now together again. He's decided that he loves Anita, and even though she's proven that she can't accept his beast or support him no matter what he does, he still loves her and he wants to be with her.
-Anita drops off the face of the planet for six fucking months
-Anita decides she wants to talk to Richard again, because one of her friends has been kidnapped and she needs help. Anita is also Lupa for his pack, and he's having political trouble because of the whole "We've dropped off Planet Earth for six fucking months" thing. Dispite all this, He goes to her rescue.
-Anita is raped by Micah in the shower. Nothing will ever justify that. However, she reports this as consensual sex, and mentions it as such to Richard. Then she promptly has more sex with Jean Claude, Asher, Nathanial and Jason, and while Jean Claude is a manipulative fucktard, she agreed to the foursome in the first place. In the process, she discovers that she has aquired the power of sex vampirism by osmosis.
-Richard politely tells her that she fucked up by dropping off planet earth without giving him so much as an e-mail, and that being fed upon is one of his hard limits, can she please not ever do that to him, okay, thank you very much. He'll discuss their relationship when his pack isn't trying to kill him and/or set him up with a brand new girlfriend.
-Anita pouts because he doesn't want to talk about their relationship.
-Richard is told that a new wolf he was attempting to educate on being wolfy has just eaten her human lover during sex. He goes to Anita's place for comfort because, thanks to the shitstorm the pack is now, he's got nowhere else to go.
-They have happy fluffy romantic sex.
-Anita then tells him the sex-vampirism is in play and she needs to feed. He tells her please no, please respect his limits and give him five minutes to get anybody else on the planet into her room, if she loves him she won't do it, don't do it, don't feed on him, oh no, please don't.
-Anita rapes Richard anyway, because he should accept her beast and never run away from her, no matter what she does.
-Richard dumps her raping, hypocritical ass for the second time.

In short, boys and girls, YES, Richard needs healing. And NO Anita cannot heal him. But this is less "I am helpless before his fucked-uped-ness" and more "I AM THE AXE THAT BEHEADED HIM" kind of "I can't help him". Their relationship, and to be real specific, the way she stomped all over it, is the reason why he needs healing. Both directly--she should be glad he didn't kill himself after the whole eating-Marcus incident--and indirectly, by assuming the role of Lupa, a role is was not in any way, shape, or form ready to accept. Richard's problem now is that he keeps going back.

Of course, that's a survival mechanism battered spouses have, because they can never be sure that their abuser won't come back and kill them for leaving. He does need to grow the fuck up, and possibly move to the other side of St. Louis, but there's a psychological principal involved, is all I'm saying.

 So Anita and crew pile into a car and head to the circus, and halfway there Anita smells roses.

At this point I am not sure which I hate more, the clinging to Richard or the invasions by Belle Bella Morte. All they ever amount to is vore-fetished sex.

We are given a description of an orgy that could not possibly exist as described. This is implied to have happened several centuries in the past, and it comes to Anita via psychic dream vision...thing. Several of the men Bella has fucked to death using the Ardeur. Because we absolutely need this plot point. Then, while posessed by Bella's power, Anita starts licking Nathanial. They figure out that Bella has raised blood lust and not basic lust, and then Anita starts literally going for everybody's throat. Caleb and Nathanial have to restrain her so that Jason can get off the highway.

This is starting to get to me, almost as much as Bella Swan's constant helplessness. Mostly because this is the same damn thing, only with sex involved. Anita doesn't fight this. She doesn't even make an effort to fight it. She's just thrown around and has to constantly be rescued by everybody around her, and of course, they're always men. And I say that not because it's a sexist thing (though it kind of is) but because LKH is writing this for sex partner count and not, you know, actual storytelling. Because the point is not developing characters or forwarding the story, it's fucking. That's the entire point. Just like how the whole point of the entire Twilight series was to watch Bella and Edward paw each other.

Seriously. While Anita is posessed by blood lust she gets thrown around the car like four times, just by Jason's driving. And Jason is really fucking lucky that there isn't a traffic cop around with an itch to arrest somebody for DWI, because to throw Anita into doors and floors and ankles that often he must be driving by the Braille method.

Anita figures out that Richard spent all fucking day fighting the bloodlust, and that Bella Morte has a hold over her that she didn't have over Richard, and we finally find out why Caleb is involved in this mess, because Anita attaches herself to him like a Limpet.

Note: Nobody says "Don't suck the blood of this guy who has not given his consent, it would be wrong and bad, especially because you're posessed by a vampire at the moment". No, it's all "Nathanial's too weak for you to feed on, and I'm driving" which leaves Caleb by default.

I cannot tell you enough how that dialogue exchange squicked me out.

There are a few books that I have literally worn out from reading so often. One of them is The Sagittarius Whorl by Julian May. It was a new copy when I bought it. I read it so much that pages started falling out two years later. (I now own the e-book). I recommend the entire Hundred Concern series because DAMN, that is hard sci-fi done awesome (and her unrelated but still fucking awesome Jack the Bodiless series is the first sci-fi series that presented same-sex marrige as the same thing as heterosexual marrige) (Seriously. Go read Julian May), but the relivance here is that there is an...well, I can't call it an attempted rape scene because rape is never actually attempted, only discussed. But this moment happens during the build up for the climax:

 Alistair Drummond put down the empty champagne flute and lifted the Ivanov. “You’re a very lovely woman, Joanna. I’d like you to share my bed tonight.”

 “No, thank you,” she said politely. “I’m afraid I’ve just started my period.”

May, Julian (2010-12-15). The Sagittarius Whorl: Book Three of the Rampart Worlds Trilogy (Kindle Locations 6182-6188). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

To provide a measure of context, Joanna is the narrator's ex-wife and currant love interest (it's complicated) and Alistar Drummond is the series's big bad, and he's currently holding Joanna and the Narrator by gunpoint. The point is that Joanna defends herself from a truly awful human being by making herself an unsuitable sex partner.

(She then throws a plate at Alistar's head, because he really is a fucking awful human being, and manages to escape the threatened violence, because Joanna really is one cool lady.)

My point? Jason is saving himself and Nathanial from Anita by making them both unsuitable sex partners.

Anita is the heroine for this series.

This is not okay.

If you are dealing with a reasonable human being, the whole lack of consent thing? Yeah. That should be enough. If the first thing I think of is rapy dialogue in an unrelated book? And the person doing the rapy-ness in one book is the bad guy and is the heroine in the other? You're not doing something right. Admittedly I *kind* of like this because it shows what being posessed would be like without tresspassing into omnescient territory, but Anita isn't resisting this. At all. There are no "No, this is wrong, I shouldn't be doing this, I had to fight this" moments. There are no "Jason, turn the wheel now!" moments. Nope. Anita is going along with it. She asks Bella why it has to be blood a couple times, but she's not calling this event wrong.

...I have to go back to Cerulean Sins now, don't I?

So she starts pawing Caleb, and this part literally made me laugh out loud:

I could feel Caleb’s chest under my hands, feel the roughness of the hair that traced the edge of his nipples, and finally the nipples themselves, growing hard and firm under my fingers. The tiny metal barbells that pierced them were a distraction. I wanted to roll his nipples between my fingertips, and the metal interfered. Like a toothpick in your sandwich, they got in the way.

STOP WITH THE FOOD METAPHORES THEY ARE NO LONGER SEXY.

So then everybody except Caleb understands that Anita, WHILE BEING POSESSED BY A VAMPIRE, wants to drink someone's blood...and she's settled on Caleb because the other two have managed to manufacture a really good excuse for exclusion. How do the other guys react to this?

“It looks like it’s your turn to take one for the team,” Jason’s voice from the front. ...“You’re going to get munched on,” Jason said.

I've really tried to avoid the "if the sexes were reversed" argument, but I'm about to hit that one hard. Because if Anita were a dude? And that was another girl saying the chosen victim had to "take one for the team"?

Yeah. I can't go any further down that road. ANITA SHOULD NOT BE ON ANYONE'S TEAM, SHE IS NOT A GOOD PERSON.

Then Bella Morte declares that the tri-whatever between Anita, Jean Claude and Richard (Ya'll remember that, right? That thing which has not been relevant to the series for THREE FUCKING BOOKS NOW?) is incomplete because neither living member bears the fourth mark, which I cannot remember for the life of me (it involved drinking blood.) and so Bella will force Anita to take the marks from HER and make Anita become HER servant and this is basically the entire fucking plot from the second fucking book, isn't it?

*checks wikipedia*

Oh. The third book. I'm sorry. You're still recycling old material, Laurel. Bad author. No cookie.

Anita tries to resist Bella Morte by reaching for Jean Claude. But Jean Claude is still dead to the world (You know, a series has to really suck to make me long for Sookie fucking Stackhouse's blond, self-righteous ass) so Anita turns to Richard.

I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to find a .gif that would fit my feelings, and I've decided it is time to bring out an oldie but goodie:




Somehow Richard manages to come through and keeps Bella Morte from giving Anita the second of the four marks--somehow the giving of the first mark happened off camera, isn't that nice--and Anita is protected from Bella Morte's terrible advances by the sheild of Richard's love and innate goodness.

This book has fucking schizophrenia, I swear to God.

The chapter ends with Bella Morte insisting that she'll get her, my precious, and her little dog too.

Too bad I can't melt this book with a bucket of water.

Cerulean Sins--chapter 27

So I found an old notebook the other day that had my self publishing plan scribbed down in it. Basically, this thing was my goal sheet, if you can call a few lines scribbed with a pencil a goal sheet.

And I met every one of those goals, including the "Sell 100 books by the end of the year" goal.

Which is fucking awesome.

I also must report now that it took me five months--July to December--to sell 100 books. It took me three months--January to March--to sell another 100.

The thing I keep reminding myself about is that the books I really want to release are here and waiting and not released yet. This is all still just build up. I want to have an audience (that's you guys) before I drop the big, important ones. And what I've been watching for is momentum. I've been very hesitant to say "Yes, we're doing this. This is what I want" but I'm starting to see it.

My next goal as of right now is to break 300 sales by the end of June.

I am counting on all of you to help me do this. I'm still not excited yet, but if we make 300 by July? Folks, I will start dancing fucking capers.

Also, I have not forgotten about the tattoo--I haven't gotten it yet, but I will. Soon as I find a good artist--or about the "we're going to do shit to mark this" thing for the 200 sales. I will arrange all that soon. I promise.

...right. Sucky book. 

So with the hair crisis out of the way, we move on to the kitchen and Caleb.

Caleb's only sin seems to be being a natural born victim that doesn't worship Anita. For this crime, he gets the following description:

He was cute enough in a young, boy-hooker, MTV sort of way...He routinely went around with the top button of his jeans unfastened, his explanation was that the waistband irritated the belly piercing. I didn’t believe him, but since I had never even pierced my ears, I couldn’t really call him a liar.

I am thoroughly skeeved out. Thanks, Laurel.

Caleb is apparently on good behavior, though, and he took a message from Zerbowski. Apparently Dolph got two week's suspension for dragging Anita through the crime scene. On the one hand, he should have that because no sane cop would act that way. On the other hand...yeah, justifying Anita's behavior right and left is getting really sickening really fast. I mean...can't we just let the heroine be competent without constantly fawning over how good she is? Honor Harrington gets way more Sue points than Anita, and the characters are usually content to mutter "The Salamander is pissed" once a chapter before moving on with, you know, the fucking plot.

 Anita then muses over how Caleb liked Chimera, and how that makes him a fundamentally bad person because Chimera was a sadist. Given that dudes like Chimera play favorites like nobody's business, I do not find that justification for calling Caleb a bad boy. Stupid? Yeah. Easily manipulated? Yeah. The psychological equivilant of a walking bullseye? You betcha. People like Chimera can literally pick their victims out from across a crowded room, and I've seen it happen. But Anita should have Caleb in therapy, not in the dog house.

And then she finds out that Caleb has to be stuck with her all day long, because Merle, Micah's second in command, ordered it, and threatened to rip out Caleb's new penis piercing out if he disobeyed.

You may now have that image in your head for the rest of today.

The chapter ends with Anita deciding to take Caleb along because Plot. Which isn't here.

Cerulean sins--chapter 26

An issue I have found with reviewing  this series is, nothing happens from chapter to chapter.

The fact that I have admitted this should alert you to how this review is going to go.

I GOT DRESSED. I couldn’t remember if I’d gotten around to using shampoo on my hair, or only gotten it wet, and I didn’t care. I had an image of Richard’s face burned in my mind. Eyes closed, that perfectly square jaw with its dimple. But there had been no spill of that glorious hair around his shoulders. That wonderful hair that was brown shot with gold and copper, so that it almost glowed in the sunlight. He’d cut his hair. He’d cut his hair.

Tonight, we had every table loaded at work. Every. Single. Table. Yes. I left with over two hundred dollars in my pocket and this TECHNIALLY should have made up for the table from hell wanting more butter. I did not ask if the guy who had five rum and cokes was the driver. I was more concerned with saciating their butter habit. LKH expects me to care that, after an unspeakably long shift, Richard has cut his hair.

More power to him. We can has plot now? No?

Anita then bitches that, Because Richard is here, she has forgotten to use Shampoo AND conditioner. Boo fucking hoo. Our busboy is quitting. I couldn't really be moved to give less of a fuck about your bathing habits.

At this point, LKH needs to invest in a good councelor. Not another book. That's all I'm going to say about the latest Richard incident. Anita hates herself because she can't force Richard to love her. Okay. Whatever.

You know, a running theory about Ted Bundy is that his fiancee rejecting him is what sent him over the edge. Just saying.

 Anita decides to leave until Richard is free--which, I might add, is normal SOP for rapists--and the chapter ends with them deciding which set of pretty lacy underwear Anita will need to take with her to the circus of the damned,

Never let it be said that Anita is not a class act, folks. She has lacy underwear. At all times.

Irony: a definition

So it hasn't rained in South Texas in three months.

Last spring we had flooding. This spring? Nothing. De nada. The whooping crane preservation people? They're sweating because the wetlands the birds need are going up in steam and cracked mud piles. Lawns? Chrispy. Deer? Thirsty. Water rationing was put into effect last week, telling us we could only water our lawns on designated days between designated hours. My work has been saving "gray water" meaning water people have drunk out of and leftover tea so that we can keep our out door potted plants alive. And it's really clear that having reached Defcon 3 we are quickly moving into Defcon AKA Condition 2 of the rationing program in which we can only water things once a week and god forbid you let any water run into the gutter, because then you get a fine.

Yesterday my boss decided to have her roof redone. And because this process created three inch gaping holes between the rafters she decided to close the restaurant and have everybody mop the floor.

Which we did.

Every fucking saltio tile in the dining room was scrubbed. My back hurt. My body hurt because I've got Coldzilla on top of seasonal allergies and I feel dizzy and awful for reasons that have nothing to do with my inner ear and everything to do with having sinuses clogged worse than Austin traffic. And we still made that floor gleam. She was proud of us. Gave us free margauritas and a pat on the head because everything looked just like new.

Last night it rained. Hard.

We're not opening the restaurant today.

Cerulean Sins--chapter 25

I am severely tempted to do Guilty Pleasures on the blog, because I'm having trouble believing that the book could have been half as good as I remember. But then I read this little bit, and I was like...well, maybe it was:

I LOVED THE new shower that I’d had installed in the downstairs master bathroom. One of the bear lycanthropes in town turned out to be a plumber. I’d still paid full price, but at least I knew he wouldn’t be asking stupid questions about my living arrangements. I liked a good long bath when the occasion called for it, but at heart I was a shower girl.

It isn't much on the surface, I know. It's not a great dramatic moment or even a particularly well written paragraph. It's normal, and that's why it's good. It gives you the idea that it is completely normal for a were-bear to work as a plumber, and be hired by a necromancer because the were-bear is less likely to ask pointed questions about the woman's personal life. It gives you a frame of reference, in this case plumbing, to understand the scope of this world's insanity. You don't get that scope with vampires being sexy sexy villians and werewolves howling at the moon. You get that by having vampire tax accountants and were-bear plumbers.


LKH can do that. She's always been able to do that. This could have been a good book, guys. Think about it.

Anita rambles on for a couple paragraphs about her "moral decay" because having harsh truths pointed out to her bothers her more than the sex did. Yeah. Having sex with people does not = moral decay. Going against your morals indicates moral decay. If you are doing that, you either need to reconsider your lifestyle or re-prioritize your moral system. Also, I don't remember any "harsh emotional truths" being discussed, other than Richard. It was mostly about where Jason's dick registered when compared to Micah, Jean Claude, and Asher's fangs.

And then it goes back to Richard. And her fiancee, who dumped her for not being white enough. And her stepmother, who never let her forget that she wasn't white enough. Laurel, I read the comics that you approved of (in the store. I read them in the store) and I have to say: either Anita is white, or she passes well enough that it doesn't matter for shit. And then it goes back to "The author is working out her issues in her public, professionally published novel series" with this little gem:

People had spent my lifetime rejecting me for things I could not change about myself.

Yeah. No. Sorry. You don't win the door prize on this one. I am willing to buy a great many things in Anita's past, because also in Anita's past is a nine-book streak of awesomeness. Maybe she has been rejected for being mixed race, which for the record is a terrible thing to do to a person. Maybe she has been rejected for her necromancy, which she was born with and can't help. But this is about recent rejection. Anita not only betrayed Richard during his moment of need--the whole "eating the former alpha" thing--and had oral sex with his romantic rival, she fucking straight up raped him. You know what a good indicator of moral decay is? When you fucking rape your lover and then blame them for not being able to cope with you being their rapist. That's it. That's how you know you've hit bottom and there's nowhere left to go. The only thing preventing Anita from being arrested for rape is that forced envelopment is not a thing, legally. So yeah. Not being 100% pureblood white? You can't change that. Being a sexual predator? That's not people's prejudices running against you, sweetie pie. That's humanity's instinct towards self preservation kicking in.

And then, when Anita is huddled on the floor of the shower going "WHY DOES EVERYONE LEAVE ME?!" the wolf pack brings Richard into the house!



The stages of reading an Anita Blake book.Yeah, Musette's drain on Jean Claude, the one that backfired on Anita? You know, the plot of the whole book? Yeah, that was on Richard all day too. So now he's passed out and cold and the crew needs to stick him in Anita's hot tub to warm him back up.

Anita tries to tell them no, but the pack convinces her there isn't another hot tub in the entire city of St. Louis that they could take him to. Because, you know, it's not like needing a hot tub is something the pack commonly...oh. Well, it isn't like the pack is full of eight hundred individuals, some of whom are professionals with big salaries who could afford...oh. And it's not like the people who don't have big paychecks couldn't pool their funds and...yeah, you get the point. This is LKH's excuse for akward plot development, and it works about as well as you'd expect.

Anita backs out of the bathroom so she doesn't have to look at Richard. She even gets her petty last word in by refusing, dear blog readers, refusing to turn the water on so that Richard won't die of energy exhaustion the way she almost did a few hours ago.

End of chapter.