Blogflog - Why I Threw Out Everything I Wrote Yesterday

[blogfloggery.livejournal.com]

Link: Why I Threw Out Everything I Wrote Yesterday
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's blog. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.

So many of you wrote in and feared for the lovers in Anita’s life. They are in peril. This promises to be a very hard book, but two days ago it wasn’t that kind of trauma for Anita and me. She did her duty. She stayed at her post. She made the hard call in the midst of death and violence. She was a good cop, a good soldier, a good . . . she did her duty. She did not panic. It ended up with her in the hospital and it cost her the life of someone she valued. It also cost the lives of good men and women who stood shoulder to shoulder against the great bad thing. There are losses that aren’t about romantic love. There are losses that are about a different kind of love. The people that will go into the bad place with you and not panic, but stay at your side shooting, fighting, risking it all for the goal, the objective, the mission, but there will always be moments that come down to just surviving. The men and women who stay with you through something like that – you love them. They love you. It’s not romantic love, but it is a bond that will make you answer a phone a decade later and say, “What do you need? What can I do?”

It’s also the kind of emotion that will make you not answer the phone ever. It is a level of pain and trauma that makes you want to forget. You don’t want to relive it. You don’t want to look at it, or talk about it. You want to move on; forget. sometimes in that effort to push it away you will destroy everything in your life to avoid the pain of it, the truth of it.

I have had the privilege of knowing men and women who have served their country, worn the badge, and come away with the real deal. I have dated, and been friends with men that are still haunted. I know when they share their stories with me in any way that it’s a privilege to be trusted with those moments of truth. a lot of them are told with laughter, but every once in awhile their eyes grow haunted and the pain comes too close to hide.

Anita had one of those moments and I spent the next twenty-four hours trying to ignore the pain. I was willing to blow up my imaginary world and throw all the hard work that Micah and Jean-Claude had done to bring together the preternatural community so that we could have a crisis and Anita and I wouldn’t have to deal with what was really bothering us. We were willing to ruin our relationship with Micah. Willing to ruin our relationship with other lovers. Anita and I tried to sink ourselves into sex. Nothing worked yesterday. Some of it was good pages, but really I was blowing up my world, destroying books and books of relationship building. It was my husband, Jon, who told me not to do some of it, that it made no sense. I was angry with him, though we didn’t fight, because I knew something was wrong with me and how I was reacting.

This morning when I woke up I understood what I’d been doing. I also knew what I needed to write today. I have to look at what happened in the shoot out. I have to let Anita feel the pain of what she had to do, and what it cost her and others. I was willing to blow up my world, Jean-Claude’s world, Micah’s, sacrifice Damian, hurt Nathaniel, or try to just skip to sex and comfort. I fought with myself all day and at midnight I called it, because I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I just knew it I wasn’t thinking right.

This morning it was so clear, even logical. I’ve spent twenty years writing Anita. I’ve interviewed people about what it feels like to take a life in the course of their duty. I have been blessed and trusted with the stories, without them this series would have been so much weaker. I wouldn’t have understood, and there are things that I will not understand because this is fiction for me. I’m not there. I’m not going through the real doors. I’m not having to look down the barrel of real guns and make choices that will be irrevocable. In real life there is no rewrite, more’s the pity.

Today Anita has to wake up in the hospital with that moment of confusion of “where am I, what happened,” and then the memory will return. She’ll remember the moment. The gun, sighting down the barrel, pulling the trigger and watching him drop. She would make the same choice, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be haunted by it. You can be right. You can be brave. It is some comfort, but in the end the people still died, and you couldn’t save them all, and sometimes killing the killer is just one more trauma.
There are losses that make you weep, that drive you from sleep to pace the darkened house, because sleep is full of dreams, nightmares, or sometimes it’s just too quiet and alone with our thoughts isn’t that great. I should have remembered that yesterday, but it took me time to work it out – to remember.

I’m just lucky that what I do is fiction. That I didn’t ruin my actual relationship with the man I love, and I have a chance to rewrite the fictional mistake. That I didn’t blow up the political structure of our country for real, but just on paper and I had a smart man to tell me, “This isn’t logical.” Thanks, my husband. Lucky for me, and for Anita, there is a do-over today. It won’t be pleasant, in fact it will be emotionally pretty horrible, but when she’s faced it, worked some of it through, then she will still have the loves of her life, the men she depends on, and the careful political structure that Jean-Claude and Micah have worked so hard to make will still be working. I am dreading writing this, but I feel strangely peaceful about it, too. This is what comes next and the days when Anita would destroy her love life, her friendships, to avoid the pain of what she’s had to do in her job are past. I’ve had better therapy than that, and so has she.

As I write today I will think of my friends who have done, and are doing, this for real. To the men and women who put on a uniform and do their duty, thank you for your service.

Comments

[rebootfromstart.livejournal.com]

...this entry is not healthy. If your writing is so traumatic for you that you almost have a fight with your significant other, that you're comparing it to what police and the military do in the line of duty, there's something wrong.

LKH doesn't have a relationship with Micah; Micah is a fictional character. I'm really uncomfortable with the way she kept saying "we" in this. I'm not psychoanalysing her here, but when I talk like that, it's because I'm in the middle of a psychotic episode. If she's just being ~dramatic~ and doing that thing that some writers do where they talk like their characters are real people who talk to them and get traumatised in actuality rather than in the story, fine, but it makes me seriously uncomfortable. She said it herself; this is fiction for her. Fiction, especially fiction that you're in control of, shouldn't affect someone this way. Hell, I say that as someone who writes and gets emotionally invested in their writing, to the point of it being unhealthy sometimes. Your own writing should not traumatise you.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

I am DYING to know what this is really about. Because it sounds like she started writing some interesting stuff, killing off a sweetie or two, messing up Anita's world, *in reaction to something not good in her own*, AND THEN woke up in the morning and decided to return to her safety place of Anita and her Pokemon lovers all being sooo happy together etc.

[world-dancer.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I really want to see who she killed and why and how stuff changed because that would be interesting.

[ex-naomi-ja.livejournal.com]

I cannot even begin to parse all the crazy in this entry.

[ex-naomi-ja.livejournal.com]

I am assuming she wrote something that might actually have had some decent ramifications for the series and been, you know, interesting, but that was too traumatising, so now it'll just be, "I woke up in hospital, everyone is fine, I learned a valuable lesson that will never be referred to ever again, yay."

[fangedsekhmet.livejournal.com]

Jeebus, what a drama queen.

I recently had to rewrite something that had been playing on my mind for about three years, but I didn't make a song and dance about it. My character had something done to her that just didn't sit right with me and felt like too much of a cliché, so I went in and fiddled.

I certainly didn't equate it to every war ever played out. She needs to step back and write about kittens for a while.

[queenmeow.livejournal.com]

She was making plots and that was too hard so she fell back into the same ol' with a blog justifying her actions as brave. When she turns in the same sort of crap to the publisher again, I hope they understand how hard it was for her.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

"I tried to make a plotline but it drove me to nearly cheat on my husband and all my characters were SO UPSET so I went back to more of the same!"

[snarky-imp.livejournal.com]

Dear LKH: We were willing to ruin our relationship with Micah. Willing to ruin our relationship with other lovers.

Yes. Yes please. Because at least it would be something different.

I'm going to sit in the corner and pretend she realized what she'd done to Anita over the last however many books and lost her mind at the ramifications of Anita's actions. And then poof! All back to normal and the ignoring of Anita's lack of being a heroine.

[luscious-words.livejournal.com]

I get that as a writer you can come to love your characters and want life to be all roses and chocolate candies for them, but dude, get a grip. If your love for your characters causes you to have a throwdown with your SO, then it's time to tell the characters to take a step back. Of course, when you're in total Mary Sue mode in writing your characters, then I can imagine just how hard it is to take a step back. All the more reason to do so.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

I was willing to blow up my world, Jean-Claude’s world, Micah’s, sacrifice Damian, hurt Nathaniel, or try to just skip to sex and comfort.

This sentence makes my soul hurt. I'm weeping because imploding everything that Anita has worked for over the last several books is the best goddamned thing that could happen right now, in regard to both plot and characters. Because it'd mean that at long fucking last, Anita has to face some consequences for her actions.

But no! It's too haarrrrrd and somehow not logical! So it probably won't happen! Or it's only a big deal in LKH's head because she lacks the ability to convey how epic it should be on the page.

And of course there'd be comfort-sex. Because sex solves everything! I'll also be in the corner staring at that scene from Casino Royale where Bond and Vesper are huddled in the shower together because that moment right there? Far more powerful than all the chapters of comfort sex that LKH can write.

Looks like I had a side of extra bitterness with my Christmas luncheon today.

[ex-naomi-ja.livejournal.com]

I blame Jon, her husband. Sounds like she was about to do exactly what her fans have wanted her to do for the past umpteen books and then he stepped in and was all, "Stop! Think of the imaginary children!"

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, to hell with ~logic. It's not like it's ever had a place in this series before, so why start worrying about it now?

[shadwing.livejournal.com]

If that is true...if Jon stepped in and stopped her from making some serious changes....

YESH he did her NO favors, and did his gravy train even less favors. Maybe LKH heard that when Jim Butcher KILLED OFF HIS LEAD...he sold about a bazzilion books and got some kudos for being crazy enough to do it...and pulling it off.

[ex-naomi-ja.livejournal.com]

Wild speculation here but if Micah/Nathaniel really does represent Jon and if LKH really is reflecting her own personal life in the Anita books, then one could conjecture that her relationship is in trouble and that's why this is a particularly angsty dark-darkity-dark book for her. She's writing something nasty that might affect relationships in the book, and Jon sees this as indicative of their relationship. So he steps in and insists his avatars must be saved, thus circumventing any real-life relationship damage.

Like I said, wild speculation, but I can't help chewing it over, given how much LKH seems to tangle her real life with her fictional one.

[polymexina.livejournal.com]

This. I'm thinking that Jon read what she wrote, and flipped out because of its fictional implications for Anita/LKH and Michah/Jon, AND that he thinks pissing off the true fans will impact their lifestyle.

[lady-fellshot.livejournal.com]

The thing is that LKH probably still has enough name recognition that she probably could blow up Anita's world (YAY!!!) and start some writing project she actually enjoys (also yay) and still make money.

However, I think that this blog post indicates more than the rest that LKH isn't separating reality from fiction and neither are the people around her.

[shadwing.livejournal.com]

Bonus Meta for the Bond/Vesper scene...at least one version had her naked in the shower...and a rumored other had sex involved. Both were nixed early on since various people believed it wouldn't be IC for the chars.

[world-dancer.livejournal.com]

"I was willing to blow up my world, Jean-Claude’s world, Micah’s, sacrifice Damian, hurt Nathaniel, or try to just skip to sex and comfort.

This sentence makes my soul hurt. I'm weeping because imploding everything that Anita has worked for over the last several books is the best goddamned thing that could happen right now, in regard to both plot and characters. Because it'd mean that at long fucking last, Anita has to face some consequences for her actions."

Yes.

I feel cheated now. Like maybe there was hope that something interesting would happen and things would change ... and then she yanked it away.

I was actually somewhat enticed to consider looking at her new book by the idea that someone important died (though it sounds like it was Damien, which I don't think would solve anything).

[dwg.livejournal.com]

One thing I've learned from reading the last couple of books is that the moment it looks like something interesting is going to happen, immediately adjust your expectations to the opposite. It's like we're not allowed to have something that may make things difficult or the emphasis of Anita being the centre of the universe away from her.

(Yeah I don't think killing Damien would solve anything either. But hooray LKH has remembered that he exists? My headcanon is that he was living in the basement, hand-painting Lord of the Rings figurines and having epic D&D nights with whoever stayed over at Anita's and wasn't currently involved in the orgy upstairs. But apparently he has a girlfriend now? How'd he stay alive long enough to leave the house to meet someone?)

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

At least she has openly admitted that she is unwilling to let anything of interest or consequence happen in the upcoming book. SO if anyone who reads her blog was thinking about paying money for the book, they won't need to now.

I too was thinking 'yes please knock Anita and her world on their collective arses'. I would have possibly had a real stroke if she'd brought plot and real danger to the series, but it might be worth the shock.

[igenlode.livejournal.com]

Playing devil's advocate as usual, but... if LKH has decided that the version where she tried "to sink ourselves into sex" and "skip to sex and comfort" wasn't working and actually scrapped it in favour of having Anita wake up next morning and deal with whatever-trauma-it-was like an adult human being... isn't this potentially great news?

(Although I admit that, re-reading more carefully, the suggestion that Anita's harem might actually have been disposed of en masse is also potentially promising... it's just that it sounds as if what LKH had actually written, far from being a plot improvement, was Anita producing yet another sex-partner out of a hat and having some kind of wild fornicatory scene that would leave all the rest of them with hurt feelings...)

[dwg.livejournal.com]

That's kinda what I got out of it the first time I read the blog and I stared in utter disbelief before going back to make sure this is what I just put in my eyeballs. I would honestly cheer if Anita got rid of Damien and/or Nathaniel if only because the secondary triumvirate makes no fucking sense - it hasn't served any purpose other than to ensure that Nathaniel can never ever ever EVER diiiie because then Anita will die! But everyone forgets about Damien so he falls down if someone looks at him wrong and Anita has to have sex in order to save him. And then it was conveniently forgotten for like...seven books.

But then I remember the massive song and dance she had about killing off Haven, and it's like...so? Dude was in maybe two books and not all that important but we're all horrible monsters for not caring that she killed someone other than nameless canon fodder since Guilty Pleasures.

Worst case scenario, this will be another Flirt situation where Anita "does what she HAS to" in order to save the people she cares about and then everyone gathers around to comfort her on how terrible it was for her to have to do that (never mind whoever dies). And then later she'll angst about it for a little bit and then shove it aside because ultimately, the great and terrible life implosion will have little to no lasting impact. So while there's the potential for this to be a good thing, the reality will probably be something else entirely. ALAS.

[lady-fellshot.livejournal.com]

Both triumverates always seemed like a liability to me. If someone wanted to do in Anita, all they would have to do is take out one of four other people who weren't as well guarded. Of course at this point any villain who wants the cause chaos in Saint Louis could probably do so with a decent rifle, a spotter, a really good marksman, and one clear shot.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Lord what I wouldn't give for that to happen. Especially with all the folks bound to Anita via the ridiculous mystical means. She's got, what? Five or six animals to call now? And she's basically the lynch pin upon which the entire supernatural community relies, so a decent sniper ought to be able to cripple St Louis with a single shot that nobody would see coming.

...now I want this to be Edward's plan all along.

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

Oh see now I need to read it again to try to parse it better, because what I got out of it was "I was GOING TO write something with plot and danger for the characters, but then I had so much wangst from 'Anita' and my hubby, I decided not to." Sheesh I'm hoping I read it wrong the first time and admit to be confused by her post all together as it was all over the place.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

It almost reads like LKH treats the Anita novels as some form of talisman where, if she keeps writing a holding pattern, her relationships will not collapse.

[allthingspoison.livejournal.com]

This. It's freaking bizarre.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

That just adds a whole new level of creepy that I don't want to be thinking about when I read the book. D:

[watersheerie.livejournal.com]

I don't understand why LKH keeps writing. Every time she blogs about writing she talks about how it's such a chore and how she's 'fighting the muse' or she makes it sound incredibly painful both physically and emotionally. I definitely understand how writing can be difficult (even the emotional part for sure) and it is a job and jobs tend to involve hard work. But LKH goes beyond that, it feels as if she is no longer getting any sort of enjoyment out of writing at all. I almost get the feeling that she hates writing and she's starting to hate these characters. Sure she clings to them and claims that she loves them, but reading these entries about her fighting with her imaginary friends and world is like watching two people stuck in a relationship that is falling apart. The constant fights and battles start to strain the love, the sex becomes formulaic and boring, and attempts to liven up the dying relationship with something new end up falling flat every time. They stay together out of habit, like being stuck in a deep groove running through your life, but at some point the stress becomes too much or the fights reach a breaking point and manage to surpass the overwhelming fear of being alone. And then it all ends.

You guys, in all seriousness, I think we are starting to see the end of LKH here.

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

In addition to all the batshit wtf here, exactly how does this relate to people in the real live armed services and their very real sacrifices, trauma, and losses? Her tying this to that seems kind of offensive.

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

And I only say "kind of" because I can barely even make out from this mess whether she is or not. If she is, there's no "kind of" about it.

[duamuteffe.livejournal.com]

So, what I'm getting here is that some minor character we haven't seen in several books is going to go rogue, take some hostages, and Anita's going to shoot him and then wangst about it for pages and then it will never be mentioned again. Just like what has already happened with that werelion- What's-His-Guts, the grumpy one.
Authors shouldn't be going through this much trauma, period, but they really really shouldn't be going through this much trauma for a scenario that they've already written at least once.

[plastraa.livejournal.com]

OK so other than being confused as all hell with her post what I got out of it is..."I wrote some stuff that might actually bring back tension, plot, drama, and consequences for actions to the series, but then I decided not to. Cuz I suffer when my FICTIONAL character suffers, and stuff."

Am I wrong? Is that what you all got as well?

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

Yup, and it's freaking me out.

[ilucifel.livejournal.com]

All I really took away from this (given that I only read the first paragraph) is that she didn't kill a boyfriend - She killed Edward. Then again, I haven't read a book since Danse Macabre, so what do I know?

[astronauta.livejournal.com]

I felt that she didn't kill a lover, either, but someone who is fighting by her side for the greater good.

There are losses that aren’t about romantic love. There are losses that are about a different kind of love. The people that will go into the bad place with you and not panic, but stay at your side shooting, fighting, risking it all for the goal, the objective, the mission, but there will always be moments that come down to just surviving. The men and women who stay with you through something like that – you love them. They love you.

Dolph? Zerbrowski? :C

[ilucifel.livejournal.com]

All I can think about is the monologue Edward had in Obsidian Butterfly about how he and Anita were soulmates and that he loved her, but he could never be IN love with her in a romantic way.

[astronauta.livejournal.com]

Ahhh. Good memory. I hope it isn't Edward. He was one of the few redeeming characters in the series.

Though I'm not too worried. I feel that he is far too popular with the fans to be killed off. LKH herself even knows this. She did a little poll awhile ago (or a long time ago? can't remember) about who fans want to see more. She was surprised to see Micah and Nathaniel get the least amount of votes, and Edward get the most. Jean-Claude was somewhere on top, too.

I'm trying to find this, but clearly, the fans love the Edwardz.

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Yes, my immediate thought on digging through the crazy was that she's topped Edward.

[nightwalker.livejournal.com]

Am I the only one who finds this entry kind of condescending? "My fictional character's pain is totally the same as the PTSD and survivor's guilt suffered by war veterans! My fictional character is grieving the loss of another fictional character! Just like when your friend died!"

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

OMG that IS what she's saying! Yes. Condescending and tacky.