verushka70

I know! I think LKH for me is like Twilight-crack for others. It's so bad it's good. Or at least it's so smutty it's good. (Frankly I've read better polyamorous porn in fandom, but not involving weres and vampires.)

I have a love/hate relationship with LKH's Anita Blake books. From the very start, I was like,

(1) Tell me more of this Jean-Claude, and please leave your personal opinions out, because he is way intriguing and yes, you should give him the time of day, what, are you an idiot???
and
(2) "Oh, this character has such a big chip on her shoulder, I'm guessing it's the author's chip." It just seemed so obvious to me that this author was workin' out her issues via the protagonist. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I think everyone who writes does that to a certain extent.

I got past it, but I found Anita unbelievably uptight in the first few novels. Color me super-surprised when she became polyamorous and kind of a femdom to the submissive weres -- yet somehow still managed to be wank wearing LKH's issues on her sleeve, and still kind of whiny and annoying.

Now, I have nothing against people working out their issues in fiction writing. I think pro and amateur writers do this all the time; it stems, at least in part, from the adage "write what you know." Hell, I worked out some issues of my own while writing a Fraser/RayK BDSM story series.

The difference is, neither Fraser nor Ray "was" me. I let them be, as much as I could, their otherwise canonically plausible selves in the stories. I tried to write what I felt was believable for each man, which was that both would also have some issues with and conflict about doing BDSM with each other (Fraser rather more than Ray), and each would (or wouldn't) come to terms with that in very different ways. I didn't impose my world-view or issues on either character: I was neither as guilt-ridden as Fraser, nor as occasionally self-serving as Ray.

Then later I found out just how much LHK was working out her issues via her fiction. I was kind of amazed at how unable she was to take criticism about what she'd done to certain characters (like Richard, who is the fictional stand-in for her ex-husband). What really irked me was her response to the fans. (From what I read, like SMeyer, after she got her big-girl pants back on, LKH removed some unflattering blog entries she'd hastily made that slammed some of her fanbase. To be fair, I had not read them myself when they were posted because I didn't read her blog or anything about her, I just read her books, up until about '07... I'm perpetually a few/several years behind on LKH's Anita Blake books.)

Apparently, when some fans raised the issue that Richard had become a one-dimensional, axe-grinding asshole/thorn in Anita's side, LKH's reaction was that those fans was were slamming/criticizing her "lifestyle" (which I guess is polyamorous/swinging*).

No, man, they're criticizing your writing. There is a difference... or, at least, there should be...

(I found all this out WAY after the fact, on Amazon reviews/comments/forums. I'd already continued well down the path of post-Narcissus In Chains porniness even after Richard had become the asshole ex in the books, so it wasn't like I had stopped reading/buying her stuff. But that's kind of my point: I paid for it. When it sucked, I felt I had the right to think, let alone say, that it sucked, and not be slammed by the author.

But every once in a while, I stop in a bookstore or pass by one of her books in a mass market book rack at a grocery store or duty-free shop and I can't stop myself from buying it. It is sometimes crack-tastic.



* This seemed to confirm something I had read and heard a while ago, which was that St. Louis has both more churches per capita than anywhere else in the US, and also has more swingers than anywhere else in the US...