I see Laurell K Hamilton has another Negative Reader Rant up on her blog… Bless….
For those who can’t be arsed to click on the link, here’s some of what she wrote:
Let me say that all of you that hate the books, and have decided not to read them anymore, I am happy for you.
I know that when a book series that I read takes a turn I don’t like I stop reading it. I put it down and I walk away, and that’s that. If you’re unhappy with my books, and have decided you never want to read another thing that I write; great. I mean that. Life is too short to read books you don’t like, so if you’re not having a good time, stop doing it. I’m sure there are other books out there that will make you happier than mine.
There are books with less sex in them, God knows. There are books that don’t make you think that hard. Books that don’t push you past that comfortable envelope of the mundane. If you want to be comforted, don’t read my books.
They aren’t comfortable books. They are books that push my character and me to the edge and beyond of our comfort zones. If that’s not want you want, then stop reading. Put my books away with other things that frighten and confuse or just piss you off. I have my list of stuff like that. So good for you, you’ve decided not to read me anymore. Good luck, God speed.
I’d say she was a little annoyed wouldn’t you? (g)
And if you don’t think you are the minority, well, sorry, guys but you are. I have the sales figures to prove it. Each book’s sales are more than the last. The vast majority of people standing in line love the books, love the series, and tell us so. Some people even ask for more police procedural.
Yep, she’s pissed, alright.
As for the people who keep suggesting that I simply start killing characters because Anita has too many men in her life . . . The characters aren’t real to you. They are real to me, and to a lot of other people. I, and a lot of readers, would feel an emotional loss if some of these guys died. Obviously, you, negative reader, do not feel anything for the people you would urge me to destroy.
I guess that tells you Bam, heheh.
I must admit, this particular paragraph got me a little worried for her sanity:
My characters are real to me in a way that makes me miss them. For God’s sake, I’ll be in the mall and see something, and go, “Oh, it’s the perfect gift for (fill in the blank).” I’ve been in line with the present in my hand, before I go, “Wait, these are make believe people. I can’t buy them a Christmas present.” I guess I could, but there’s no way to give it to them.
I mean, come on, buying presents for her characters? Seriously? Isn’t that a little…. ya know… weird?
Just sayin’.
Anonymous
January 1
10:44 pm
Good God, she’s totally lost it!
Its just as well she’s selling so many books, she’ll need the money for future psychiatric treatment.
sallahdog
January 1
11:39 pm
There are books with less sex in them, God knows. There are books that don’t make you think that hard. Books that don’t push you past that comfortable envelope of the mundane. If you want to be comforted, don’t read my books
That was the part that completely cracked me up… The problem I have with her books is that lately they have become bloated simplistic (how freaking deep is a book that has 4 scenes, three of them sex scenes ) horribly edited messes..
To a certain extent, I do understand and even agree with her blog.. I used to post on her message board, back before Incubus Dreams (my personal breaking point) and when I finally broke my addiction to her books (I havent bought anything since) I quit going to the rah rah board. Others go there and constantly ask the big question (WTF have you done to this series) and she has finally answered… She likes it this way and she has slipped into the delusion that these people are real… oooookayyyyy….
Kate R
January 1
11:52 pm
Hell, I wish she’d listed the items she picked for the characters. Dog collars for micah? Dildo/butt plug/ball gag combo for Anita? (Plug up with something other than monsters, dearie!)
Now that would be a fun contest. Christmas shop for an imaginary character.
Jane
January 2
12:02 am
Hee. I love the LKH rants. She shows her true colors with each successive blog post. The fact that she is thinking of buying presents for her characters is just priceless.
But, you know, I would like to see more police procedure too. Or any police procedure. Any any any any type of plot would be welcome.
I do disagree with the idea that there are other books out there that won’t make you think that hard. Because her books require absolutely no thinking. Really. I don’t know if there are actually books out there that make me think less than hers.
Anonymous
January 2
12:33 am
She started off well. I don’t know why she had to get so defensive and all only-dumb-readers-don’t-get-it. If her sales figures are good, why not just let the criticism slide off?
BTW, I did manage to read a few pages of Anita. I went straight for the rude bits, since apparently that’s all she has left now. I must say, I wasn’t terribly impressed – in fact, it was a little…ick. But still, I feel left out not having, as sellahdog put it, my own “personal breaking point”. It’s like a club I can’t get membership to. Well, I can, but I’m too scared to sign up.
katieM
January 2
2:15 am
I loved the first few books of her series. I even went to some of her personal appearences and had her sign some books. But then, the plots disappeared from her books and boring, poorly written repetitive “sex” scenes took their place. She began ranting and raving about so-called haters who didn’t get her vision and claiming she needed a body guard to protect her from fans who just wanted too much from her…. She emascualted the male characters and turned Anita Blake into the ultimate crotch driven Mary Sue in the entire realm of fiction.
It was really sad to see a series with such promise turn into a big cut and paste orgy. It was even sadder to see how the author became so angry and defensive about it. She surrounds herself with people who never criticize only praise her. How sickly egomaniacal is that? A person is only that defensive and insulting to readers if she knows she’s wrong and can’t figure out how to fix it short of having Anita step out of the shower, seeing Bobby and asking if it was all a dream.
I don’t read her crap anymore because there isn’t anything to read except badly written pointless gangbang after pointless gangbang. There’s free bad porn all over the internet if that’s what I want to read.
Bam
January 2
3:40 am
… that is so fucking crazy.
I don’t even know what to say.
I’M GOING TO KEEP READING YOUR BOOKS, LKH, I DON’T CARE HOW CRAZY YOU GET! DO YOU HEAR ME?!?!?
it is so my prerogative to hate on her and her work if i enjoy it, right?
Anonymous
January 2
4:12 am
Wow. Just…wow.
Okay, did anyone else giggle when reading: “There are books that don’t make you think that hard.”
Heh. Heh. She said “hard.”
Bam, you WILL tell us about what she does to Edward in HARLEQUIN, won’t you?
Anonymous
January 2
5:09 am
oh for the love of all things shiny.
*shudders*
This just makes me feel even better of not trying to like her books or understand the attraction.
Anonymous
January 2
5:10 am
oh for crap sake. See how freaked out I am by her? I can’t even type.
This just makes me feel better FOR (not of) not trying to like her books ….
Sarah McCarty
January 2
11:18 am
Erin,
I just love that expression, “For the love of all things shiny.” I’m stealing it. *G*
sallahdog
January 2
3:26 pm
A friend of mine, whom also used to like LKH but her breaking point was Narcissus in Chains ,(she is much less a glutton for punishment) said to me recently that the problem is that LKH has started writing fan fiction, rather than a novel.
When you think of it, its true, usually fan fiction is little vignettes written to accompany what is already happening in the novels they are based on, but with a twist in characters or love interests (I am a Severus/Hermione shipper from the Harry Potter world).
The problem is that fan fiction isnt meant to stand on its own, it needs a story context to make sense, and LKH doesnt give us that anymore… Its just, here is a sex scene for the Nate shippers, here is a sex scene for the JC shippers, etc, etc, ad nauseaum.. There is no real plot, other than who is servicing Anita and whatever weak threat is introduced as a plot point, is easily vanquished by some new power pulled from Anitas coochie(thanks karen, my new favorite word) of terror…
sallahdog
January 2
3:29 pm
LOl, Bam… You arent alone… there are entire websites devoted to reading and snarking on the Anita books… Its almost a passion for some folks, because they have become such a ripe parody ground…
Dr Dan H.
January 2
4:21 pm
Is it just me, or does the bulk of that message board look like something generated by a fairly simplistic Perl script? Looks to me like there’s about three or four actual people posting there, a couple of generations of the LKH Auto_Fan Script and LKH herself.
The reason she’s getting all this stick from the fans is that the Anita Blake series actually started out fairly well; you had a nice heroine with just enough supernatural power to play with but not to steamroller the opposition, some nicely ambivalent villains and enough room to play around in for a while.
Then she started up-levelling Anita, adding power on power until you had a heroine who was pretty much invincible and in a poof (pun intended) about 90% of the plot evaporated. So, now that all that difficult work of thinking out the plot has gone, the books turn into derivative and fairly mediocre fan-fiction, of the one-handed read variety.
What’s next? Well, we could have non-stick waterproof pages, say?
As for the plot of the series, its dead. There’s pretty much nothing you can do in the context of that series to rescue the plot at all, short of a mad super-villain contaminating the water supply with hormone-suppressing bromides then running amok with a chaingun loaded with silver bullets. Alternatively we could always ask Simon Green to lend us John Taylor for a chapter, to find the original plot again, but that may be beyond even the justly famous Mr Taylor’s skills.
FerfeLaBat
January 2
8:44 pm
I want that entire blog post out of my head.
Anonymous
January 2
9:04 pm
Having read her blog in the past I can’t say that any of that surprised me. I used to read that blog up until about a year ago, and she posted crazy blogs like that frequently I’m afraid.
I LOVED that series once upon a time.
I didn’t really love Narcicuss in Chains or Cerelean Sins, but the deal breaker for me was Incubus Dreams.
It’s not that I don’t like reading about sex, it’s that her sex scenes are really boring and repetitive. Those books once had a lot sexual tension, and some good sex scenes IN ADDITION TO THE PLOT, but now…..lets just say I saw a blog entry from her once that stated she looks in sex manuals for ideas, because she is having trouble thinking of new ways for her characters to have sex without repeating previous scenes in the same book. *rolls eyes*
I read her blog and occasionally glanced at the MB after Incubus Dreams, because I found it amusing that a grown woman could be so self-centered,arrogant, and clueless about how poorly written her books had become and there were still rabid fans that bought them (once I saw a few of them announce that they were going to buy multiple copies of the next book to make up for those that no longer buy them,lol).
I stopped even paying that much attention though; eventually it got too boring because even her rants about negative fan reaction and her deep emotional atttachment to her characters became as repetative as her books have, and because my Mama always told me you shouldn’t make fun of the emotionally unstable and mentally ill.
I really do think she has become so self-centered that her grip on reality is ……very weak lately.
-Helen
Shelly
January 2
10:15 pm
Ooookay, buying the presents for imaginary freakin’ people is a little weird. Oh, who am I kidding, it’s verrrry weird, but whatever.
I am okay with all the sex. Anita could (and frequently does) have sex on every page but I miss a freakin’ plot! I don’t want a 450 page book to span three freakin’ days like the Merry Gentry series. I want the mystery to return. I want an actual story and if that means sex with 18 different men, I’m cool with that. Just give me a damn PLOT woman!
Shelly
January 2
10:17 pm
Oh and I forgot. If the books are selling so well, then why do bookstores like Borders, put the hardbacks on sale for 40% off barely three weeks after they are released? Right now Mistral’s Kiss is 40% off and Strange Candy is at 50%.
FerfeLaBat
January 2
10:57 pm
They are book segments. It’s a new genre. Karen Marie Moning is doing book segments also. When the series is complete – you will have one full plotted story … hopefully. Only 7 books to go and it will make sense!
FerfeLaBat
January 2
11:04 pm
They used to call it serial novels publishing the novel in a magazine or periodical in sections. By the end you had the whole novel. Here you get it in a series of $20 to $25 hard cover segments. When you have bought all 14 (LKH) or all 7 (KMM) and paid the required ransom of approximately $280 to $140 – you get egg roll! Yay us! I love it. I do. It’s like being in a cult with out drinking the purple kool-aide at the end. I realy, realy LOVE it.
FerfeLaBat
January 2
11:05 pm
Did I mention how much I love it?
sallahdog
January 3
1:00 am
OY… You HAD to mention Dark Fever… I lost another author… I used to love Karen Marie Moning, but that book was such a blatant.. Lets jump on the bandwagon…
Honestly, I am getting a bit sick of serial books, especially those that can’t stand on their own.. If an author is good, I will read their other books, serials end up feeling like the author has only ONE good idea and has to stretch it for her whole career.. I am still sucked into a few of these, but I seem to lose patience about book 6…
FerfeLaBat
January 3
2:16 am
Could be Writers ADD. They are writing .. and writing … and then … they stop. The segment gets bound in hardcover and put on the shelf … and they start writing and writing and … they stop. Could be a serious disease. I mean … what if … what if this is a sign of lead in the water or a canary in a coal mine? What of this is the beginning of the end of fiction as we know it? Clearly it’s contageous.
I still love it. I said that, right? LOVE IT.
FerfeLaBat
January 3
2:23 am
Remember when publishers made the books bigger with less words to charge more? Maybe this is a new way to make more money off of a book. It’s a marketing strategy. LKH was right. She is breaking new ground. It brilliant. Less nuts in the candy bar. Reduce the weight. You get less for more money. Once you are addicted to the chocolate you will pay whatever it takes to keep the supply lines up.
Still – Whip me. Beat me. Make me write bad checks. I can’t go to bed without that beating from LKH. “Bad fan.” ::Smack on nose with surprisingly light hardcover copy of her latest book::
Sigh. Book segments. I just love it.
FerfeLaBat
January 3
2:28 am
Diana Gabaldon’s probably pissed she didn’t think of it first.
FerfeLaBat
January 3
2:38 am
The cat keeps walking across the keyboard. Forgive the typos. I’m just very very … sigh …
I’m gonna have nightmares. I just know it.
I love it though. Honest injun. love*it*like*a*fat*kid*loves*cake.
Jane
January 3
4:07 am
I can’t really tell what you are trying to say Cindy. You like book segments? How interesting.
FerfeLaBat
January 3
4:11 am
Oh sure. Kick me while I’m down. Fortunately my insurance plan covers therapy. I checked.
Book segments are the bleeding edge of literary innovations. It’ll be all the rage with the short attention span Gen-xers who can’t sit and read for more than five minutes. Soon all novels will be in text massage codes.
How can you not love it? It’s the bomb.
::Mixing the purple kool-aid with cyanide::
Sarah McCarty
January 4
7:25 pm
*Rolling on floor with laughter, holding sides, trying to breathe* Stop please. I can’t take anymore book segment humor.
And yet *perking up after getting breath back* The possibiities… think how many segments I could get out of Promises Prevail! 130K. that’s go to be at least 3 or four.
Honestly, I never read continuation series precisely because I don’t like things to not be wrapped up, but I alwasy understood they had to be stand alone. I didn’t realize things had changed so.
Desiree Erotique
January 5
7:31 am
Laurell K. who??
lol Just teasing.
FerfeLaBat
January 5
8:09 pm
It haunts me still … the story … it just … stopped. They escaped the forgotten neighborhood (Dublins’ version of East St. Louis?) bad faeries pouring through the gates of hell to destroy mankind. The heroine looks at the hero and says, “What’s up with the dead guys’ car? You keeping it?” Hero answers, “Yep. It’s not like he’s using it.”
And that’s it. I’ve been drinking heavily ever since.
FerfeLaBat
January 5
8:13 pm
She says on Amazon that at least one segment will contain sex. I’m saving up.
Kate R
January 6
2:25 am
ferfe.
Who the HELL is she?
FerfeLaBat
January 6
4:20 am
Kate. You’re gonna have to keep up. There is a new Book Segmenting Society. Charter membres are LKH and KMM. It’s the next new thing. Soon everyone will be segmenting. My concern at the moment (and this is after a long day at work thinking about nothing else but the art of segmenting as it relates to my paycheck) … where was I? Crap. Anyway. My concern is that LKH is repeating segments … over and over again.
Yet another nights’ sleep escaping me like a roach racing down the crack of the bathroom door and under the bed.
Karen Scott
January 7
12:28 pm
Ferfe, you still taking your meds? (g) I totally lost the gist of this conversation a while ago, lol
FlannerySC
January 8
8:22 pm
OK, I know some of y’all hate her stuff. For me I like it. AND I refuse to feel guilty about it. And what is so boring about her sex scenes, might I ask? They pretty much read like something you’d find in erotica… but much better for the lack of the prerequisite “dirty words”… Tho she does say “fuck me” alot, I gotta admit *g*. And if you ignore the sex (ha!) she is developing the Anita character. Personally I think that doing the pregnancy scare addressed some rather disgusting, but realistic (in her world) issues.
“Then she started up-levelling Anita, adding power on power until you had a heroine who was pretty much invincible” – Dr. Dan
She’s not so much invincible, as she’s been mucking about with weres and vamps more that normal people that use guns. The metaphysics work against them better.
and sallahdog- “and whatever weak threat is introduced as a plot point, is easily vanquished by some new power pulled from Anitas coochie(thanks karen, my new favorite word) of terror…” LOL
See I like ’em- ALOT, but I retain my sense of humor re. them, and also pray for a return of an actual outside (of her personal circle of studs) plot in The Harlequin.