The Works of Laurell K. Hamilton

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LKH reminds me of when I first discovered that people wrote erotica and put it on the net. I'd find something that started out well, with interesting characters and plots and hot sex, and then at some point it would be like the author got bored with the whole thing and suddenly it's 'Bart kissed Laura tenderly and left her sitting on the park bench. Then, out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, 15 guys came around the corner and dropped their pants and..."

Really, Anita and Merry aren't far off from gangbanging strangers in the park for no reason at all.

[iceblink]

Poor LurkerNan--now that's taking one for the team! I hope you have something really awesome to read after that nonsense.

[LurkerNan]

I was determined not to buy the hardback for the stupid fairy porn... but I wanted something brainless to read to distract me from the stomachache I had yesterday. So I swung by Borders on the way home sick from work.

Now I feel fine, but kind of disgusted with myself for relenting on the hardback thing. So Stoopid.

[iceblink]

I think a return to Borders with the receipt and "I bought this for a friend as a gift, but she already has it" excuse is justified in cases like this. Not that I've ever done that or anything...

[Margo]

This is something SwanFlake said about a horrible fanfic author in the Cyberspace Weirdos thread

swanflake said:

And she was so proud of her every story, and she always posted something at the beginning like "If you don't like this, well tough! Deal with it! That's life!" like you're the one with the problem for finding her fan fiction terrible.

and I immediately remembered Laurell's rant on her website. This is exactly her sentiment. So sad.

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Laurell is really wasted on professional writing. She'd be a great screaming loony in fanfic, writing horrible porn, and then defending it in twelve page screeds about how she's totally oppressed, and answering every single comment in great detail, and never being more than three feet from her computer. She'd also write twelve page screeds about all the things in fandom and the world which offend her personally. And if she was writing all this crap for free, someone who could remember how to plot could have all her readers.

[Deleted]

Check out her website - you're spot on about the horrifically long answers and rants about fanfic.

Of course, anyone who comments on her characters, storyline (or lack thereof), or incredible amount of furry porn is attacking her. How unfae.

[Deleted]

She's up there with Anne Rice and her wanktastic temper tantrum about bad Amazon reviews. Same huffy dismissal of criticism and insistence that people just don't understand them. I'd love to see a cagefight between them.

[Dr. Freude]

I cannot stand how deluded and self-important LKH has become. It was bad enough when the books switched to hardcovers with embarrassing pictures, but the "plot' of the last few books (all of which I checked out of the library) caused me to abandon reading her work. I have never seen another author unintentionally make his/her protagonist so unlikeable. It's a problem when you think, "God, will someone just please kill Anita and focus on Jason or something?" every time the narrator opens her mouth. There is fan fiction out there that is 100x better than anything she writes. Her style of erotica is not sexy, and her attempt to make herself a real-life Anita is pathetic. I also feel bad for her daughter, who I think is an adolescent/teen. How embarrassing is it to have your mom not only write smutty books, but to regularly blog about her sex life? The whole series is a mess, and even if LKH wanted to go back to how things used to be in the AB series, I think she has written herself into a corner; only a "Dallas"-style "it was all a dream" could erase the past 4 books.

End of rant

[LurkerNan]

I've been reading the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher, which has recently been made into a tv series. And I also recently read the Tanya Huff Shadows series, about a policewoman who teams with a vampire to solve mysteries, which I just saw that Lifetime is making that into a series also. It appears to be a good time to be writing supernatural mystery books.

But I realize that LKH is actually shooting herself in the foot by making her stories all about sex... Because who's going to want to turn her stuff into movies and television shows? Nobody, because Penthouse and Hustler won't pay for fancy special werewolf and vampire effects.

Authors like Janet Evanovich can drive characters like Stephanie Plum all the way to the bank, but I don't think Anita Blake or Merry and the Skittles with bring in that much coin.