LKH's Seattle Q&A for A Shiver of Light

[blogfloggery.livejournal.com]

Many apologies for not posting this sooner, Lashers:

If the embed doesn't work, the link is HERE. For those who don't want to sit through 90mins of LKH talking or have issues with the audio, mod has done a thorough transcription: DOC and RTF format. It's too long to post to the comm in its entirety but we wanted it to be available.

Highlights of the video include:

● seven minute sexist monologue intro
● 4/24 questions relate to Merry Gentry and one doesn't count because it's a spoiler.
● LKH's opinions on body positivity, polyamory, pregnancy, therapy, Guy Zen, the French, Crocs footwear, and softcore porn. This is in addition to answering questions about the books/characters, writing, research, inspiration, and rejection.

Book/character discussions:
● LKH has notes on Anita going home to her family for Thanksgiving.
● She has no favourite book that she's written, she prefers character arcs and development.
● She has notes for a book about Nathaniel, his traumatic childhood, and giving that some resolution.
● Olaf will probably die. Also LKH does not think Olaf/Anita shipping is cool.
● Apparently Asher has always been a bag of dicks and LKH has no plan on Anita "fixing" his scars. Also he's not ambitious enough to try for a Council position.
● Bernardo Spotted-Horse and Peter will return if/when LKH writes about Edward's wedding.
● Belle Morte may come to America but struggle to adapt there.
● Anita will not willingly get pregnant. If Nathaniel could do it, LKH would go with that.
● There are plans for more books set in Merry's universe; two ideas include stories about Barinthus and Rhys. Merry is "content" so LKH isn't sure where to go with her story.
● The preternatural branch of the US Marshal Service may become its own entity. It has too much power and may go horribly wrong.
● LKH struggles to find myths in order to include more reptillian shapeshifters.

Comments

[jessica collett (from livejournal.com)]

Hate.

Haaaaaateeeeee.

HAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

[snarky-imp.livejournal.com]

Belle Morte may come to America but struggle to adapt there
Is it wrong that I kinda want to read the fanfic of this? The comedy version that's still bound to be a better idea than whatever LKH comes up with is particularly alluring.

I want to spite 'ship Olaf/Anita but I can't manage to hate myself enough to pull that trick off sadly.

I feel I may have missed something on the Asher front since I refused to read the last Anita book.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to run away before I die of laughter trying to figure out what she considers "development" or even a proper character arc.

[deadsong.livejournal.com]

I feel the need to break this out again.



ETA: ...I think I just threw up in my mouth a little at the jacket-strip and the whole "they're men" bullshit. Yes, we're men. We're also not rabid beasts. We have enough MRA assholes making horrible excuses for our collectively generalized bad behavior. We don't need Laurell adding to it. Good god, that was about five degrees from drifting into the land of rape apologism.

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

Wow, love the great big slut-shaming rant she starts with. Yeah, men being inappropriate is just totally women’s fault. We should never ever wear anything we like if it might possibly be the least bit sexy because men just can’t help themselves. See, guys, she understands! She’s one of the COOL girls! Love her, dammit!

I enjoy how she openly said there’s not boundaries between her writing and life. I mean the way she followed it up shows she doesn’t mean it like THAT, but…yeah.

I get putting her self-image issues into Anita, I really do. I feel so much sympathy for her there. But with Anita, it truly is obnoxious, firstly because Anita herself so clearly doesn’t believe it with how she’s always comparing other women negatively to herself (even the ones supposed to be “prettier” than her ala the tall thin blondes are still actually always bashed as fake, boyish, etc.), secondly because she doesn’t change. In real life, yes, this sort of thing can last a lifetime, as evident by LKH herself, but when it comes to characters in a book, evolution is necessary, and it comes off as patently ridiculous for Anita to still be at the same place when she is hailed as the hottest woman on earth by almost every character she encounters. Which brings me to my third point---it feels very hollow, even insulting in a way, to read this coming from someone who isn’t simply “not ugly” but seems to in fact by objectively the most attractive women in her universe. Anita is never NOT someone’s cup of tea, and she has no actual physical flaws besides her super-kewl scars that she makes a show off to someone once a book. I get that the message is probably meant to be “even really beautiful women can be made to believe they’re ugly” but it’s kind of grating for me as a perfectly normal woman to read this knockout goddess repeatedly lamenting her awful deformity of being PETITE and CURVY and BRUNETTE book after book, especially since this is such a common thing among heroines in general (though that last bit isn’t LKH’s fault) I think a better message would be for Anita realizing some people don’t find her attractive, sure, and that’s FINE, it doesn’t mean she’s objectively hideous, and beauty isn’t that big a deal anyway, and some people DO find her attractive too…as it is, it seems the tragedy is supposed to be “oh no this beautiful woman thinks she’s UGLY!” as if her self-hate would be just fine if she actually were conventionally unattractive or anything less than the impossible ideal figure she actually is. It really, really comes off as “beauty is the most important thing, so she should realize she’s beautiful” rather than a more positive message like “There is no universal beauty, and it’s not like it’s that important anyway so I’ll try to grow beyond hinging my self-esteem on it” I don’t demand that all heroines come to this conclusion and work through all their issues to a perfect state of emotional wellness---that’s just not human---but I think Anita is highly symptomatic of an author that never even got close to this, and that’s why she’s got to be the most universally beautiful woman in her world and every man must believe so. Which brings me back to what I said before about me feeling sorry for LKH.

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

I like how she talks about Trinity just to work in that her teenage daughter is jealous of her ass.

Edward can’t be from New Mexico because she’s never been there? Look, LKH, I think you’re taking “write what you know” a little TOO literally

Oh please just stop calling Nathaniel a “kitty” of any type, please, ugh

How does lots of women with one man not make “biological sense”?

What the fuck does she MEAN it was “not my choice” for Olaf to be a werelion? YOU ARE WRITING THESE BOOKS. Like maybe she meant “I didn’t really want for that to happen but then I found that the way I’d written things it made the most sense” but even that doesn’t hold water because it was made clear early on in the series, wasn’t it, that feline therianthropy is WAY harder to catch and you could be practically MAULED and still not get infected? Versus the mere scratch it takes from, say, a wererat? There is no reason Olaf had to become a werelion, LKH, stop lying

She may not want Anita and Olaf to hook up and I’m with her on that, but I guarantee you she DOES like the idea of him being hopelessly and disgustingly infatuated with her, especially in victim-blaming ways that emphasize how Not Like Other Girls Anita is

“I don’t think a male’s been set up with any kind of power related to it” I do not understand this as an answer at all

You may think Asher’s beautiful, but you’ve just said he doesn’t, so doesn’t it make MORE sense for him as a character to choose to try something like that, even if it could fail? She seriously just can’t handle the idea of her toys changing in any way.

Really fed up with her calling Belle Morte and other villains (usually female, ho w about that) “crazy” when what she means is “evil”.

Maybe the reason people would “get upset” at describing a woman as “well-hung” is because the only way that can be interpreted is as someone drawing really rude attention to the genitals of a transgender woman, which is a common way to emphasize the idea they’re not really women. I guess maybe what she means is that you can describe a guy more sexually and get away with that, but I think that’s because people routinely boil women, real and fictional, down to their looks, and it’s not done with dudes as much so when it happens it’s not part of a shitty objectifying pattern like it is with women and thus it’s not going to be as offensive. Sorry to spoil your white-knighting for THE PRECIOUS MENZ again, LKH. Also, in this case in particular, YOU are the one who made “big dick” one of his main character traits and draw attention to it in every book he’s in, so yeah.

“The men are stubbornly not bisexual enough” I love how she goes from sobbing about the poor men being talked about sexually to complaining about them not altering their sexualities to suit her and Anita.

I thought it was merely annoying how she kept saying “we” to mean “I” but when it got to asking her if she liked Frost or Doyle better and she said that “we can’t pick” because “I’m polyamorous” I realized it was so much more than that, holy shit

So she literally just admitted she wanted JC to be Spanish but made him French because Anne Rice had French vampires, lol

Oh, so that’s her idea of therapy.

It’s kind of funny how she says not to get your ideas of sex from porn but a lot of commenters have noted in my sporks that she seems to have done just that.

I don’t really see why she thinks there need to be legends of were-reptiles IRL to justify having more were-reptiles in the Anitaverse

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

She is so shallow that if she were a character in a book/movie/video game, I'd disbelieve her character and say the writer was strawmanning.

Why do there have to be legends of reptilian transformation for her to make up more reptile shapechangers? I think she just admitted that everything she writes is fanfic and she's incapable of original ideas.

[pidgin-english.livejournal.com]

Anita will not willingly get pregnant.
Am I the only one very, very concerned about this?

[wanderingworlds.livejournal.com]

My favorite thing is that she's slut-shaming and victim-blaming, but then she's not exactly dressed conservatively herself.

Granted, I'll take this "gothic"!Renaissance dress to that mini-skirt from that one con...

[rodentfanatic.livejournal.com]

Just thought of this---does anyone feel it was kind of inappropriate for her to discuss whether or not her teen daughter has body image issues? I know that if my mom talked about that regarding me with even her close friends I'd be really embarrassed and I'd be upset at her because THAT IS MY BUSINESS, let alone telling a room full of strangers. I mean, for all I know she discussed this with Trinity beforehand and she's 100% okay with it, but I got the impression these questions weren't scripted?

How did she even GET on most of this stuff? I read the transcript but I sort of skimmed past stuff like Crocs because I don't care, but now I'm wondering, is she just the queen of tangents, or...?

[quizzicalsphinx.livejournal.com]

Her talking about not really understanding what genre of book she's writing and wondering why things are being difficult because of that actually makes a whole lot of sense to me. I've done that, and I know a few other writers who've had the same problem: they start off wanting to write an epic fantasy and try to incorporate all those elements, only to realize that what they're actually writing is a romance with fantastic elements and that the writing would go better if they stopped trying to force it into the mold of another genre. That's actually pretty sophisticated advice. Four for you, LKH. You go, LKH.

But the way she talks about how she didn't know she was writing an epic fantasy, plus the references to GoT, gives me the unsettling suspicion that she's about to pull the same trick she did when the Southern Vampire Mysteries was getting more attention than the Anita Blake series. I was doing hot sexy epic fantasy series before GRR Martin was ever a thing! LKH seems to feel that doing something first equals doing it best.

Face it, Laurell--even if you were the first to write in this genre, which you're not, you're basically the Internet Explorer of vampire novels.

[miss-maggpie.livejournal.com]

Damn it. Laurita, you are a charismatic speaker. I want to like you. Why must you say such terrible things?

She really is quite a good speaker. Her accent is so bizarre though! I've never heard an American speak like that. Where is it from?? I feel like she's a cast member from clueless. But not nearly as well dressed.

From the way she talks about her daughter, it seems like she has real envy of the girl. Why would her daughter be envious of her?

Don't get me started on that INTRO.

Another though: If she could get a were-seahorse, maybe she could get him pregnant. YES, PLOT FOR NEXT BOOK