lkh_lashouts | Facebook flog

Link: Jan 24 2014, 14:06
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's Facebook. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.

I know my characters. If I could draw I could give you their faces. If I could magically let you feel what I feel, I know the difference in their skin when my character runs her hands across their bodies. I would know the smell of Micah's skin, as separate from Nathaniel's in the dark. I could hug most of them blind-folded and tell you who it was by the way they would fill my arms. I know the taste, texture, smell, of them the way I know real life lovers, and in some ways better, because my characters don't hide, or withhold like real people can. I know that special smile Nathaniel has the way I know my husband's, it's not the same smile, but it's special to both of them; the real and the not so. (Please do not let that last contribute to the rumor that Nathaniel is based on my husband, Jon, because it's not true, but I know my husband better than anyone so he springs to mind for such analogies.) I know the way Jean-Claude turns his head, how his hair falls when he looks down, how he fusses with the cuffs of his shirt when he's nervous. I can "see" the movement of it in my head, to the point where it seems almost wrong that they only exist in my imagination and in my books. There are moments when I think if they reached out and touched me for real, I wouldn't be scared, it would almost be a relief, a "oh, there you are," moment.

Thanks to Michelle Belanger, another author, whose comment on Twitter helped inspire this post.

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I can roll with the feel of their skin thing so far, because LKH comes across as a very tactile person. She's blogged previously about needng to pet things/people to calm herself down or having a swatch of fur or fabric that she can feel when she's writing. The problem is that she never expands it beyond her own personal tactile experience into those things you mention -- it's about how she feels things, not how they exist beyond the moment she touches them. There's zero thought put into the how or why these things are the way they are, we're just told that they are. It's lazy, and frankly amateur.

And the more I think about it, the more offended I get as someone who aims to be better in their craft. Like, after twenty years of publishing, LKH should have fluked a better book by now. That she keeps getting worse takes a really special talent.

The tactile is even kind of nice, because the sense of touch can be neglected in a lot of descriptive writing. But she doesn't really give us these descriptions in the books. We know she knows, but she doesn't show us.

And the reasons why? I love figuring that stuff out! Plot can be a pain in the balls sometimes, but to realize a quirk of a character, and why they have it? I get a kick out of that; it's so fun.

It does seem to be laziness, though, which is why the books are getting worse. It feels a little like, since she knows all this stuff, she doesn't have to bother including it in the book (a problem that could be fixed with beta readers). But then she includes, almost verbatim, the same info about who's who in the first chapter of every book. (If she really feels that's necessary, she could have a glossary of characters.)

I sorta get the endless regurgitation of the same information because it's justified as "if someone who's never read one of these books before picks up this book, they need to know these things." Except her version of 'important information' that we need to have is the exact shade of green that Micah's kitty-cat eyes or how he's her Nimir-raj, leopard king, every time he walks into a room. There are better ways to integrate this information. (So many of LKH's problems could be fixed or at least dealt with if she had better beta readers and an editor willing to tell her NO.)

;__; I love figuring out reasons why characters are the way they are SO MUCH. I admit to being more of a character-driven than plot driven writer, I'd rather have things unfold through character action rather than because I need it to happen so the characters do it, so figuring out the hows/whys turns out to be super important to me.

Which is probably one of the many, many reasons why LKH irks me so much because she spends so much time with convoluted justifications and warping the universe as to why Anita or anyone "has" to do something. Anita "has" to do something because the author's decided she should do it. I can't even say "because the plot demands" because there'd have to be some kind of plot for that to happen. This would probably be a completely different series if Anita had some agency.

That's the thing. So much of her "first-time readers need to know this" consist of a who's who, specifically who she's dating/sleeping with. A glossary (in the front or back) could cover those details, and then in-story, it'd be a few details about what had happened recently. We wouldn't need any "I am dating X, but sleeping with A, B, and C. And I was almost engaged to Y, but I say him eat a guy. Z is a friends with benefits, and N didn't want to share so 'we' sent him away."

Character-driven plot is my jam. =P And the confluence of personality, behavior quirks (that aren't simply random behaviors!), and major plot points is a wonderful thing.

The "Anita has to do this" argument LKH makes is so strange, at least partly because her characters are so real to her that they apparently dictate how they will behave. (I could swear she's said something like this on more than one occasion.) Characters feeling so real they say what they will and will not do should mean they have tons of agency in the story, but instead we read these books (or book flogs) where the characters are constantly pushed to do things that don't want to do, for very little reason.

GOOD LORD YES. It's hard enough for a long-term reader to navigate Anita's sexual geometry even with the infodumps, I hate to think of how someone picking up one of these books for the first time fares. Hell, I skipped three or four of the later ones and still get "...who?" over side characters. But after going back to read other people's sporks for context, it turns out that I wasn't missing anything in the slightest.

I FORGOT ABOUT THE CHARACTERS DICTATING THINGS. And yet, Anita is still the most frustratingly passive character I think I've ever come across. It's bad when your so-called heroine can't even feed and clothe herself without help.

The feeding herself. Oy. She's had the ardeur for how many books? At what point can she just remember to feed it by actually eating a sandwich without someone needing to remind her? (I kind of picture Micah following her with a ledger and a forced smile, "Yes, ma'am"-ing her and keeping track of when she needs to eat, sleep, bathe, etc.

I haven't read any of it since...Cerulean Sins(?), and my memory of the side characters starts to get fuzzy around Incubus Dreams/The Harlequin. The first 8-10 books I know like the back of my hand. Then there was the hunky guy explosion and you can practically switch any of them out for another just by changing the name, and sometimes the hair (one guy talks very formally and poetically, but that's about the only discerning characteristic, and I can't even remember if that's Byron or Requiem because neither of them does anything).

And the more I think about it, the more offended I get as someone who aims to be better in their craft. Like, after twenty years of publishing, LKH should have fluked a better book by now. That she keeps getting worse takes a really special talent.

I would agree with this. I'm really thinking it will take either a contract refusal or a serious downgrade for her to get it... and maybe not even then. At that point, I can see her blaming them because she's a woman who "writes sex", or some other evil jellus hater reason, not because HER work has lost its spark.

Is it wrong that I'm really, really hoping for some kind of epic tantrum about either a contract refusal or downgrade?

Like, right now I'm popcorn.gif over the idea of her missing the end of January deadline for the Merry book and getting penalised for it, then just kicking back and waiting for some rambling blog about how the publishing industry doesn't understand how subversive she is, how she's pushing boundaries and writing about such edgy topics as poly lifestyles and bdsm. And now she's suddenly free of publisher constraints to write under her own deadlines and share all the Anita stories she hasn't been able to do on her previous contracts via self-publishing with the help of Jon (her husband) ala Shutdown.

It's borderline obscene just how much I want this or something like it to happen. >_>

No, there's nothing wrong with that because it's going to be epic, I think.

I can see her trying to jump to self-publishing, but I don't think it will go so well because she doesn't seem to have a huge audience of readers who are into the e-thing, buying the backlist, etc. Maybe self-pubbing and selling on the website might have some success, but that would also require someone with more business savvy, and she doesn't ever talk about that.

I'm sure that edginess and THEY JUST CAN'T HANDLE LKH will play heavily into it, though.

Also imagine the terrible MS Paint/clipart covers! It'll be like Darla never left.

Facebook flog - Jan 24 2014

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