Tag Archives: Anita Blake series

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To Anita Blake or Not to Anita Blake, That is the Question!

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Crimson Death, the 25th installment of the Anita Blake series, came out in December. I’m usually one of the faithful when I read a series. I have a hard time putting a book down, even if it’s horrible. Any one of my friends can tell you this about me. This part of my personality drives Ross CRAZY. He’s taken books away from me (and hidden them) when I complained but refused to stop reading them. Somewhere in the back of my head, I always think the book can get better.If I just read another chapter, maybe that’s where it gets good. I’ve been disappointed every time, but there’s always hope.

This brings me back to my point. I’ve read all the previous 24 Anita Blake novels. All of them. Within the first week of the release date. I’ve been disappointed A LOT over the last many. There has been so…much…sex. I mean like so much sex in so short a time period that I’m not sure how Anita gets up and walks around. There are only so many orifices and for fuck’s sake, you can’t hit all of them, at one time, four or five times in a 24 hour period and still function or walk properly. Ya just can’t.

Plus, there’s been so much expansion of the “relationships” between Anita and about 15 other people. I don’t care about those other people. I just want some Jean Claude. That’s it. We started the series in Guilty Pleasures with Jean Claude. I’d like to go back to Jean Claude. The glimpses I get of JC are not enough. I miss him.

Below is the blurb from Amazon for Crimson Death:

“Anita has never seen Damian, her vampire servant, in such a state. The rising sun doesn’t usher in the peaceful death that he desperately needs. Instead, he’s being bombarded with violent nightmares and blood sweats.

And now, with Damian at his most vulnerable, Anita needs him the most. The vampire who created him, who subjected him to centuries of torture, might be losing control, allowing rogue vampires to run wild and break one of their kind’s few strict taboos.

Some say love is a great motivator, but hatred gets the job done, too. And when Anita joins forces with her friend Edward to stop the carnage, Damian will be at their side, even if it means traveling back to the land where all his nightmares spring from…a place that couldn’t be less welcoming to a vampire, an assassin, and a necromancer: Ireland.”

The blurb doesn’t sound like there’s any Jean Claude. At. All.

This brings me to my dilemma. I haven’t purchased Crimson Death. However, it is available at the library on audio book. With no wait, I might add. That thing is 24 hours and 12 minutes long which equates to 720 pages. I’m teetering on listening to it, because I have a sickness. But I know:

A) there will be minimal JC, if any.

B) there isn’t that much character development left after 24 books that could justify 720 pages.

C) I don’t want to be sad again after finishing it.

But maybe I won’t be sad, or angry, or let down at the end. Maybe this will be the best of them all.

Help!

 

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Info Dumps and other things writers are told not to do…

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I’m re-listening to Sherrilyn Kenyon‘s League Series. I’m preparing for the release of Born of Vengeance which is dropping on February 7th. I’m super excited because I love these books. They’re dark, brutal, and apologetically graphic.

Listening to them back-to-back though, I’ve noticed something that I wouldn’t normally notice if I were reading them one per year. She does a lot of info dumps. For those of you asking; what the fuck is an info dump? I and Google will enlighten you.

in·fo dump
noun
 a very large amount of information supplied all at once, especially as background information in a narrative.
An info dump is the first thing they tell writers not to do. Any editor, critique partner, published writer, and agent will give you a giant lecture about how this is a HUGE faux pas.
You’ll get advise. Reveal it slowly. Work the information into the narrative in stages. Express information through dialogue. These are all ways of working backstory into your narrative.
Sherrilyn Kenyon has incredibly dense info dumps but in a sneaky almost genius way. There are quite a few…”I don’t understand” statements in her novels. What this means is a character is presented with a vague or cryptic piece of information and then responds…”I don’t understand”. What follows is the explanation of the whole history of this person/event explained in wide sweeping paragraphs. You don’t really notice until you’re listening to seven or eight books, one after the other, and you keep hearing the same device used again and again.
Another issue I’ve noticed in my binge listening stint is something Laurel K Hamilton fell into somewhere after the The Killing Dance in the Anita Blake novels.Maybe this is just a product of long series and you can’t avoid it. I don’t know but as the books go on; these feel less and less about the atrocities and fascist tendencies of the League (the over arching ruling body of the 9 worlds) and more about cultural norms of a particular species. I get it. You created this amazing race of people with cultural norms that, I’m gonna be honest, sometimes blow my mind. I wish I were that awesome to create something like that. Maybe one day I will be.
I get there has to be character development but there also has to be plot development. And in a series, this becomes particularly difficult. There has to be series plot development, always moving the over arching story forward. But there also has to be book plot development. I too find this difficult, to always be moving the larger story along as well as the smaller individual book plot ahead. I’m not complaining. I still love this universe she created and will follow it until the end. There is, however, an issue of getting lost in the trees.
I am a writer and a reader. I understand that no book is perfect. Mine sure aren’t. In the first few Blushing Death novels, I might use too many metaphors. This was pointed out to me by a goodreads.com review. Thank you to that person, by the way. I now go through and eliminate unnecessary metaphors and similes in my edits.
I guess the lesson we take from this is that the rules don’t really matter. You can break any and all of them, if you do it well.