The Works of Laurell K. Hamilton

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'I have to write Anita as a sexaholic! I have no choice! She makes me!'

Does she really think we don't know that Anita (and Merry, for that matter) is just an enormous Mary Sue, and that therefore this Anita who makes her write her is REALLY JUST LAURELL K. HERSELF? She's really become the classic adolescent badfic author who writes pages about how gorgeous she is and how gorgeous everyone who fancies her is, and then pages of sex acts she doesn't sound like she's ever actually participated in.

I really liked the earlier ones. They're not great literature, but they were fun, and they entertained me, and they had freaking plots where stuff happened. But now it's just endless bad porn, and she literally loses the plot. Incubus Dreams - she starts this entire plot, and it literally gets lost in the sex. I don't even know what happened to the serial killer at the beginning.

I was even okay with the porn up to a certain point. It was getting quite excessive in Cerulean Sins. But at least I knew all the players already, and I could kind of see it becoming a plot factor. Then came Incubus Dreams, and she started introducing characters for the sole purpose of fucking them, and the whole plot was "Anita can't stop doing it...what? There's a killer on the loose, you say? Oh screw that! Anita is fucking!".

Somewhere there was a fanfic which rewrote Incubus Dreams, and it was way better and had way less porn and made sense. I wish I could find it again.

[Deleted]

Laurell K Hamilton has HAD ENOUGH of you negative nellies who just don't GET her!

The poor dear. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Also, I finished the most recent Merry Gentry book, and YAWN. Nothing much happened, but there sure was a lot of talking about all the nothing that had happened.

[iceblink]

Laurell...sweetie...it's "ardeur", isn't it?
She does make some good points re: the people who claim they quit reading, then seem to have complex opinions on the later books anyway. And the negative fans. Can we get her to give a variation on this talk to some of the TWOP posters?

[Deleted]

The letter does have some good points, but I find it hard to swallow this bit:

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.

So if you don't like her books, you're a close-minded prude who doesn't like to be challenged by her brilliant masterpieces. Yeah.

[Sunnyhorse]

Yeah, you're just a mundane. Sound like anyone we know? CoughCrazy Rosecough ...

[LurkerNan]

God Yes. Ijust read Stroke of Midnight on a long plane ride, and all I could think about was Rose. Rose, Rose Rose, and her gallant knight Tristan and her copper tresses and her multicolored eyes. Blegh.

I guess I should be grateful Rose never Mary-Sued into describing sex with Prince Triscuit like LKH does.

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LKH is crazy, and deluded. I had read somewhere though, on her old discussion board I think, that her descent into batshitcrazy-dom began right around when she divorced her first husband...anyone has the scoop on that?

[Deleted]

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.

You know, this whole "omg, my books make you think" thing is irritating me. I just read Danse Macabre, and to be sure, I thought quite a lot during it. I thought, "Wow, this is not good." I thought, "Anita, you're a fucking idiot." I thought, "Is that even physically possible?" I thought, "It is not right for sex to be this boring." I thought, "oh Jesus Christ, MORE SEX?" And I thought, "What the fuck happened to writing an actual plotline?"There were others, along the same lines.

She's not exactly a challenging writer, intellectually. Even when she wrote plots, she wasn't a challenging writer. At her best, she was trashy fun. I guess that no one wants to admit exactly that to themselves, but still. She really thinks she makes people think? NO ONE reads those books to think. They read them so they don't HAVE to think. So what is this "push you beyond your comfort zones" shit? Cuz lady, I'll tell you, I've never been pushed outside my comfort zones with your crappy books, except that I am discomfitted by bad writing.

I think she's just not very bright.

And yeah, yuna, I think she broke up with her first husband and hooked up with the second, and went a bit nuts. Supposedly Richard represents the first one and Micah the second, which explains the character assassination of Richard. I think she's also changed religions - she mentions something about being Wiccan up there, and I'm pretty sure if she'd been Wiccan at the beginning of the series she wouldn't have made such a big fuss about Anita being a Christian. Not that you can't convert from Christianity to paganism without losing your marbles - I did - but she's apparently lost sight of the fact that Anita is not Laurell, and there's no reason for Anita's life choices to reflect all of Laurell's.

[iceblink]

And husband #2 was a fan of hers when they met, I've heard, which may explain why Laurell immediately remade herself in the image of Anita after hooking up with him.

[Mierin]

I like Laurell Hamilton's books, but I take them for what they are, which is basically faerie porn. I do not read them to be made uncomfortable, they're my guilty pleasure reading. It seems someone takes themselves a little too seriously.