There can be more than one awesome female character. There is not a finite amount of awesome in the world, you don't have to horde it all for one character. I see this a lot in urban fantasy, the female main character is often the only female character that is allowed to be strong. All others have to be weak, petty, backstabbers, or damsels in distress. LKH is a big offender when it comes to this. Downgrading all the other female characters does not make Anita look better by comparison; it just makes LKH look like she hates her own gender.
Make sure your female characters have female friends and spends time with them. Most people have friends that are the same gender as them. Most people spend time with their friends, even if it's just to get together and gripe about how much work sucks. And on this note, make sure your female characters pass the bechdel test. Love lives are not the be all and end all of existence. The scenes with Ronnie and Anita going jogging and talking about cases did a lot to develop Anita's character and make her more real. Getting rid of those was one of the worst choices LKH has made.
Little mundane moments of life are a great way to ground the reader in the universe. Make sure you have them sprinkled thoughout the story. It's also a great way to show how the supernatural affects the everyday. LKH used to be good at this in the early books. The scene where Anita is trying to get the blood off her penguin collection is a particularly memorable one. Also, what happened to Anita's angelfish? I don't think we've seen those since the early books. I remember a scene where JC was staring at her fish and they had a conversation about them in the Laughing Corpse. Also little details about checking holy items in the entrance to some of the night clubs really gave you a good sense of how vampires being out in the open changed the world setting. There's a huge lack of effective scenes like these in the latter books and while you know what everyone looks like and what they're wearing they might as well be walking around in a void. You know the setting is analogous to present day, but you have no real sense of anything else. You know Anita spends a lot of time in strip clubs, but you don't know if they're seedy or high class. Is the police station well funded or are they trying to scrape by with their budget?
Protagonists are characters that move the story forward. If your character is merely reacting to the events around them, they aren't being good protagonists, they're being passive. Passive characters are very difficult to make interesting and it's really difficult to have an interesting story with a passive character. Those kinds of stories tend to drift aimlessly and things happen around the character since they're not actively engaging in most of the events. This is the core of the problems with the newer Anita books. Everything interesting happens off screen when Anita isn't there because she's busy reacting to the aurdeur, or drifting from pointless event to pointless event. Things take forever to happen because something has to be contrived to get Anita there because she won't do it on her own. She won't take care of herself, others have to do it for her. The bad guys have to pretty much kick down her door to be noticed. Anita does noting to move the story forward on her own. She just stands around and talks about how awesome and edgy she USED to be.
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Make sure your female characters have female friends and spends time with them. Most people have friends that are the same gender as them. Most people spend time with their friends, even if it's just to get together and gripe about how much work sucks. And on this note, make sure your female characters pass the bechdel test. Love lives are not the be all and end all of existence. The scenes with Ronnie and Anita going jogging and talking about cases did a lot to develop Anita's character and make her more real. Getting rid of those was one of the worst choices LKH has made.
Little mundane moments of life are a great way to ground the reader in the universe. Make sure you have them sprinkled thoughout the story. It's also a great way to show how the supernatural affects the everyday. LKH used to be good at this in the early books. The scene where Anita is trying to get the blood off her penguin collection is a particularly memorable one. Also, what happened to Anita's angelfish? I don't think we've seen those since the early books. I remember a scene where JC was staring at her fish and they had a conversation about them in the Laughing Corpse. Also little details about checking holy items in the entrance to some of the night clubs really gave you a good sense of how vampires being out in the open changed the world setting. There's a huge lack of effective scenes like these in the latter books and while you know what everyone looks like and what they're wearing they might as well be walking around in a void. You know the setting is analogous to present day, but you have no real sense of anything else. You know Anita spends a lot of time in strip clubs, but you don't know if they're seedy or high class. Is the police station well funded or are they trying to scrape by with their budget?
Protagonists are characters that move the story forward. If your character is merely reacting to the events around them, they aren't being good protagonists, they're being passive. Passive characters are very difficult to make interesting and it's really difficult to have an interesting story with a passive character. Those kinds of stories tend to drift aimlessly and things happen around the character since they're not actively engaging in most of the events. This is the core of the problems with the newer Anita books. Everything interesting happens off screen when Anita isn't there because she's busy reacting to the aurdeur, or drifting from pointless event to pointless event. Things take forever to happen because something has to be contrived to get Anita there because she won't do it on her own. She won't take care of herself, others have to do it for her. The bad guys have to pretty much kick down her door to be noticed. Anita does noting to move the story forward on her own. She just stands around and talks about how awesome and edgy she USED to be.