Heard back from the car people. It was the alternator in my Accord. Apparently it broke. The strange whining noise we heard was the bearings humming and whirling around where they shouldn’t be. It cost $560 to fix. Ugh.
Finished reading Incubus Dreams. LKH has definitely made her writing much more erotic and much less horror and mayhem of late. The plot parts did pick up toward the end, but she didn’t wrap up the crime case she’d opened, just jammed a sort of placeholder in, not exactly a cliff-hanger, but not a proper “it’s done” resolution either. I prefer there to be more storyline in 650+ pages. There were juicy sex scenes, but there were so damn many of them that I ended up feeling rather jaded from all the various and sundry Anita boinking, not to mention my suspension of disbelief was pretty put upon. Plus, one of my favorite characters is Asher, and he didn’t get any screen-time at all.
Still, it was fun. LKH continues to write well enough to keep me sucked in, but there’s a decided diminishing in quality to this series. Sigh. Pretty par for any series, so I guess I shouldn’t be disappointed. And yet . . .
Writing Stuff:
I’m up at Critters. Words have been elusive.
With Obsidian Butterfly she lost her spot on my ‘Must Buy Hardcover’ list, so I’ve been working through the Cerulean Sins paperback recently. I agree with you that her quality seems to be diminishing. Sex is well and good, but her plots are getting thinner to compensate. Ah well, I’ll see how I feel after I read Incubus and go from there I guess. Though I think it is time to hunt down new writers for me to read.
I also read her Merry Gentry series, and I thought maybe that series was her way of getting out all the hot and steamy otherworldly sex that she was panting to write about but couldn’t in her Vampire Hunter series. Apparently not. It’s all become the boink and bop stuff. I mean, I’m all about hot and steamy otherworldly sex, but I also like plots . . .
Sigh.
Gotta second Sylphon. Obsidian Butterfly was the break point for me. From that book forward, she’s concentrated solely on the sex aspect of Anita. Which, while acceptable for Merry Gentry, just ruins the character for me. Before OB, I was religious about buying LKH’s stuff. Now… I just can’t be bothered. And that really does make me sad.
My loyalty towards a series tends to linger longer than the quality of it. I need to break myself of that rather expensive tendency. Glargh.
No Edward? ;_;
Nope, no Edward. He’s mentioned, but he gets no screen time either.
I just finished that book a few days ago also and was disappointed by the massive lack of plot- the crime seemed entirely secondary to the pages and pages of sexual romps. If that book had been a meal, I would have felt unsatisfied and bloated when I finished it. :/ I’m dreading the next Merry Gentry novel since, of course, I’m going to read it and, of course, it will probably be just as seedy as her Anita Blake series has become. *sigh*
That’s an excellent analogy. Definitely bloat and dissatisfaction have plunked down in LKH’s writing. Fooie.
My favorite character is Damian.
You might like Dreams better than. Damian gets a lot more page-time.
Oh, I’d already finished the book as of this posting. Still not enough, and I don’t like him being all dependent.
hear, hear.
It was at the point where I started counting, for my own disbelief-o-meter, how many times Anita had had sex in one night. When I got up to SIX, I just kind of gave up.
I like some of the ideas of the characters, but I think there’s a point where you’re in their bedroom just too much to be respectful. And then there was the feeling that we were skipping some actual solving of the crime so that everyone could get boinked some more….aarg.
“And then there was the feeling that we were skipping some actual solving of the crime so that everyone could get boinked some more….aarg“
Totally. At which point it just became gratuitous.
RE: Dreams
I’ve been hearing a lot of similar comments about Ms Hamilton’s work and other series. Why do you believe it’s so difficult to stay fresh? Is it just the fatigue?
Joel
waywriter.blogspot.com
Re: Dreams
There seems to be an inherent weakness to series, whether they be movie, television, or book. I can’t think of a single series that managed to stay as fresh and just plain good as the original work. It might be fatigue, but I think after a point, there’s nothing left for a writer to say about the same characters without them changing so utterly that they are no longer the people that fans initially fell in love with. So they’re either stagnant or lessened.
In the Anita Blake series, Anita has changed a LOT. But a lot of how she’s changed, while it makes sense for the character, decreases what made her interesting in the first place. That’s my $.02 in any case.