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How I love the Style Invitational. A recent contest was to update lines from literature with product placement. As is often the case, I found the first runner up much funnier than the winner: "And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the amazing Ginsu knife to slay his son, and the angel of the Lord called out, 'But wait, there's more!'"
Not done with the new Laurell Hamilton, Incubus Dreams (shut up, you know you want to), but I had to write now and say: So, I already read a chunk of this, as described here. Many of the typos have been cleaned up, but there are still apostrophes popping out where no apostrophe should go (wasn't the name of Anita's firm Animators Inc. back in the beginning? At least Animator's Inc. makes marginal sense, whereas it's for its is just annoying). The real problem is that this puppy clocks in at 658 pages, and I'm on page 249. So far we've had a wedding (not a main character's), sex and near sex with bonus violence, a visit from Ronnie the ex-best friend and another from Richard, and now a nasty client. What made me stop reading to rant was the misspelling of "privilege" twice in one paragraph (she's quite likely wrong about the legal analysis in that paragraph too, since lawyers' conversations with third party nonlawyers can so be privileged from discovery by opposing parties, but whatever). That's spellcheck, for God's sake, not even something a human being has to pay attention to like it's and its.
But that's not the basic problem, which is that girlfriend needs an editor. Cut out Anita's angsty musings about how hard it is to have these hot men panting to service her -- one of them is even defined as "the wife" by himself and several others -- and we could have gotten all the action, including infodumps, done in 50 pages tops. I checked at Amazon, and the reissued Guilty Pleasures is 272 pages in paperback, 320 hardcover, making Incubus Dreams twice as long. The last thing Hamilton needs is to go Stephen King on us; she's not that good.
Reading the book has been making me think about sequels. The standard line is that the sequel is a troubled animal because what the reader wants is, ideally, the same thing, only different this time. It is this, not just laziness or lack of new ideas, that can so fatally infect series novels -- the way that the audience demands new adventures in which nothing changes. In fan fiction -- and maybe in a way in tie-in novels -- you can get that pleasure in repetition through variation because each new story has its own reset button at the end; nobody expects the story to become part of official, acknowledged canon. But Hamilton is stuck between offering change and comfort, and while psychologically Anita's perpetually whiny internal monologue makes sense to me, because people do get trapped in patterns even as their lives change around them, it's just no fun to read. Plus, at this point, the lady has been protesting too much about her discomfort with fucking multiple guys for several novels now. Anita's making noises about growing up, but so far it's just talk. And nearly-explicit sex, which also makes me nuts -- if you're growing up, use a frelling noun to describe a penis, because "ripeness," "width" and the like just make me wonder what it is, exactly, that's ripe -- a peach perhaps? Weird mental image, for sure. This tension between giving us the pleasure we experienced in the original and making it different perhaps suggests one attraction of the trilogy/five-year plan: by conceiving of the story as one single entity spread across multiple books, you can let the characters live rather than relive.
The book is quite a contrast to the other gotta-have-it-now book that arrived in the same Amazon shipment, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. Pratchett lacks Hamilton's series troubles for a number of reasons, not just because he's a better writer. For one thing, Going Postal centers on a completely new character, Moist -- which I sort of think is supposed to make us think "Moishe," or Jewish, because he's also got a Germanic last name. Moist is a habitual swindler, saved from execution by Vetinari and put to work as the new postmaster. (Sadly, Vimes is only name-checked, but in a way that's entirely in character.) The job has been vacant for decades, and the old post office is full of tons of undelivered mail and staffed by two wackos, plus Moist's parole officer, a golem working his way to freedom. Vetinari has resurrected the post to deal with the problems posed by the new communications monopoly of the clacks system, whose owners have increased prices and decreased service in order to treat the clacks as a cash cow.
There's not much that's funny here, as opposed to quirky and charming. The plot is hackneyed, as the bad guy forced to play good learns that good has rewards of its own and confronts the kind of bad guy he used to be on behalf of the common people. That sounds like I didn't like the book, though I did. The pleasure is all in the execution, the way in which the plot unfolds rather than the directions. As always, Pratchett's strength is in making his characters feel like real people, no matter how ridiculous their behavior or their circumstances, and I have to admit I teared up at the end. There's a reason plots become hackneyed, after all; when done right, they can make you feel a connection to the characters and to what is good and bad in humanity generally. And "redemption despite yourself" is a much more flexible plot than "Anita fights monsters, fucks monsters, gains new powers," so Pratchett can reuse his more easily than Hamilton hers without annoying me.
Not done with the new Laurell Hamilton, Incubus Dreams (shut up, you know you want to), but I had to write now and say: So, I already read a chunk of this, as described here. Many of the typos have been cleaned up, but there are still apostrophes popping out where no apostrophe should go (wasn't the name of Anita's firm Animators Inc. back in the beginning? At least Animator's Inc. makes marginal sense, whereas it's for its is just annoying). The real problem is that this puppy clocks in at 658 pages, and I'm on page 249. So far we've had a wedding (not a main character's), sex and near sex with bonus violence, a visit from Ronnie the ex-best friend and another from Richard, and now a nasty client. What made me stop reading to rant was the misspelling of "privilege" twice in one paragraph (she's quite likely wrong about the legal analysis in that paragraph too, since lawyers' conversations with third party nonlawyers can so be privileged from discovery by opposing parties, but whatever). That's spellcheck, for God's sake, not even something a human being has to pay attention to like it's and its.
But that's not the basic problem, which is that girlfriend needs an editor. Cut out Anita's angsty musings about how hard it is to have these hot men panting to service her -- one of them is even defined as "the wife" by himself and several others -- and we could have gotten all the action, including infodumps, done in 50 pages tops. I checked at Amazon, and the reissued Guilty Pleasures is 272 pages in paperback, 320 hardcover, making Incubus Dreams twice as long. The last thing Hamilton needs is to go Stephen King on us; she's not that good.
Reading the book has been making me think about sequels. The standard line is that the sequel is a troubled animal because what the reader wants is, ideally, the same thing, only different this time. It is this, not just laziness or lack of new ideas, that can so fatally infect series novels -- the way that the audience demands new adventures in which nothing changes. In fan fiction -- and maybe in a way in tie-in novels -- you can get that pleasure in repetition through variation because each new story has its own reset button at the end; nobody expects the story to become part of official, acknowledged canon. But Hamilton is stuck between offering change and comfort, and while psychologically Anita's perpetually whiny internal monologue makes sense to me, because people do get trapped in patterns even as their lives change around them, it's just no fun to read. Plus, at this point, the lady has been protesting too much about her discomfort with fucking multiple guys for several novels now. Anita's making noises about growing up, but so far it's just talk. And nearly-explicit sex, which also makes me nuts -- if you're growing up, use a frelling noun to describe a penis, because "ripeness," "width" and the like just make me wonder what it is, exactly, that's ripe -- a peach perhaps? Weird mental image, for sure. This tension between giving us the pleasure we experienced in the original and making it different perhaps suggests one attraction of the trilogy/five-year plan: by conceiving of the story as one single entity spread across multiple books, you can let the characters live rather than relive.
The book is quite a contrast to the other gotta-have-it-now book that arrived in the same Amazon shipment, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. Pratchett lacks Hamilton's series troubles for a number of reasons, not just because he's a better writer. For one thing, Going Postal centers on a completely new character, Moist -- which I sort of think is supposed to make us think "Moishe," or Jewish, because he's also got a Germanic last name. Moist is a habitual swindler, saved from execution by Vetinari and put to work as the new postmaster. (Sadly, Vimes is only name-checked, but in a way that's entirely in character.) The job has been vacant for decades, and the old post office is full of tons of undelivered mail and staffed by two wackos, plus Moist's parole officer, a golem working his way to freedom. Vetinari has resurrected the post to deal with the problems posed by the new communications monopoly of the clacks system, whose owners have increased prices and decreased service in order to treat the clacks as a cash cow.
There's not much that's funny here, as opposed to quirky and charming. The plot is hackneyed, as the bad guy forced to play good learns that good has rewards of its own and confronts the kind of bad guy he used to be on behalf of the common people. That sounds like I didn't like the book, though I did. The pleasure is all in the execution, the way in which the plot unfolds rather than the directions. As always, Pratchett's strength is in making his characters feel like real people, no matter how ridiculous their behavior or their circumstances, and I have to admit I teared up at the end. There's a reason plots become hackneyed, after all; when done right, they can make you feel a connection to the characters and to what is good and bad in humanity generally. And "redemption despite yourself" is a much more flexible plot than "Anita fights monsters, fucks monsters, gains new powers," so Pratchett can reuse his more easily than Hamilton hers without annoying me.
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Re: 50 pages tops
Yes, train ride back sounds very plausible to me. See you next week!