Yesterday I donated blood.
For most people that means a stop at the Red Cross, fifteen minutes to donate, ten minutes to eat and drink while the kind and experienced nurses make sure that the donor doesn't keel over from blood loss, and then a nice premium like a movie ticket, ski pass, or gift card of some sort. It's all very civilized, and can done be easily enough in a bloodmobile; that's actually where I first donated, courtesy of the good people at a science fiction convention a few years back arranging for a blood drive at the con hotel.
It's a bit more complicated for apheresis donors like me.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the process, apheresis is the procedure used to separate whole blood into its component cells, with only a specific type of blood product collected for medical uses while the rest is returned to the donor through the IV line. Formerly this was done by taking whole units of blood and spinning them through a centrifuge to separate the blood, but today it's done via clever little machines that spin the blood and return the red cells, white cells, and plasma to the donor while the donation is actually going on. The process can take over two hours depending on how many units of platelets the donor is willing/able to give, and requires the donor to lie back with the donating arm immobilized to prevent a vein puncture (they're called "infiltrations," and let's just say that the bruising is spectacular, shall we?).
I've been donating my platelets for almost three years, ever since I gave a unit of whole blood and learned that I'm negative for a common virus that produces flu-like symptoms in the healthy and can be fatal to anyone with a compromised immune system. Add in that I have what the blood techs at my local hospital swear are the best veins they've ever seen, and a better than average platelet count, and you can see why I'm one of the regulars down at my local hospital.
I had the day off yesterday to do some Christmas shopping and run errands, so I decided to start by getting my monthly donation out of the way. I made sure my Nook was charged, ate a decent breakfast, and by 8:30 or so I was lounging comfortably next to my usual machine, iPod playing Sun Valley Jump, left hand squeezing a rubber basketball, right hand clicking the page turn on my e-reader. My blood bank has a TV but it's usually turned either to fluffy morning shows or closed circuit stuff about baby care and post-surgical diets, so I didn't really pay much attention.
I finished up around 10:30, drank a glass of milk (always milk, since the anti-coagulant they use to keep the IV line clear bonds to the calcium in the bloodstream), and hied me off to the local Barnes & Noble. My thank-you gift for donating this month was a $10 B&N gift card, and since I had presents to buy, I figured I'd use my gift to buy something for someone else. A few hours later I'd shopped, had lunch, and was on my way home to take a nap and work on this diary, well content with my day's labors.
Then I turned on the radio.
It's too familiar, what I heard: a solemn voice talking about body counts; the local police confirming that yes, the shooter has taken his own life; terrified bystanders all but sobbing into the microphone as a superficially sympathetic reporter asks them what they saw; the announcement that the President had/would issue a statement; the news that innocents, so many of them too young to know what they faced, were gone before their lives had truly begun.
I sat stunned, controlling the car by sheer muscle memory as I drove a route I've driven thousands of times. Again? Again? Wasn't Colorado enough for this year? Wasn't the mall earlier this week? Would there be another mass killing in this year of alleged grace, or had we finally seen the end of the bloodletting for this spin around the sun?
A voice that was far too loud, too powerful, too wounded to be mine screamed as I approached my exit. A hand that might have been mine smacked the steering wheel over and over again as the voice howled the same question over and over again: why? what was wrong with this country? this world? when would the killing end?
I had given my own blood to help save lives only a few hours earlier. All I could do as I pulled into my driveway was pray that somehow, some way, my donation would find its way to Connecticut instead of Springfield. I couldn't prevent the deaths and the loss and the horror, but my heart's blood might help the wounded live to see the new year...and if my blood was stay in Springfield, then at least it might free up other donations that would make a difference in Newtown.
As the above makes clear, I'm pretty serious about blood donations. My dad was a blood donor for the Red Cross for many years, and though I go straight to a local hospital instead of the Red Cross, I proudly carry my blood donor card in my wallet. I also have an organ donor card and a bone marrow donor card in my wallet alongside my driver's license (it makes me look like a Mob enforcer from Southie), my library card, my lifetime member of the Alumnae Association of Smith College, a picture of my dad, the usual collection of preferred customer cards from local and national merchants, and a copy of the Seven Principles of Unitarian Univeralism. A peculiar mix, granted, but for as long as it works, I have no complaints.
Alas, the same cannot be said for the books I bring you tonight. Blood is a serious business, whether in the body or freely given for the benefit for others, but you'd never know it from these two series of Vampire Books So Bad They're Absurd. One concerns the perfect love of an annoying, whiny teenager for a vegetarian bloodsucker who may or may not be a religious figure in a clever literary disguise, while the other is a series that started decently before its heroine became the ultimate Mary Sue:
Twilight, its sequels, its spin-offs, its movies, and the truly astonishing amount of ancillary merchandise (not to mention the careers of Kristin Stewart and Robert Pattinson), by Stephenie Meyer -
Imagine that you have a dream. Not an ordinary dream, the kind you dream of your relatives or co-workers or friends. Not a nightmare either, the kind where you wake up screaming and the cat is halfway across the room yowling because you dreamed of intruders and pitched everything on the bed at the intruders who only existed in your mind.
No, this dream is different. You dream of two beautiful people, a boy and girl, sitting in the fields. They're young and in love, sitting gazing into each other's eyes, and they are flawless in every way, especially the boy, who is so lovely he actually seems to sparkle and glow in the golden sunlight. It's as perfect, and wholesome, and beautiful as a Thomas Kinkade painting, the very image of young and destined love -
Except that the boy is a vampire, and he is torn between his deep and abiding love for the girl he loves, and the overwhelming desire to rip out her throat and drink her down like a football player chugging a Gatorade at an August exhibition game in Phoenix, Arizona.
Imagine no more, true believers, for this is exactly what happened to a woman named Stephenie Meyer in 2003. She dreamed this dream, and after she woke she wrote it down. And then, unlike most people who record strange or odd dreams, Stephenie Meyer decided that her young lovers deserved more, and so she kept writing, and plotting, and writing more, and more, and more. Three months she labored in what free time she had when she wasn't caring for her husband and children, and at the end she had a novel for young adults.
For most of us, this would be the end of the story. Novels are not easy to write, as anyone who's ever tried can tell you, and normally it takes a lot of failed drafts, research, and heaps of unreadable print-outs before there's anything that approaches an actual book. There's a reason why most writers are advised to start with short stories and gradually work their way up to longer works, and authors who are naturals at structuring and writing novels are not common.
Stephenie Meyer is the exception that proves the rule. A big fan of Jane Austen, Orson Scott Card (?), and LM Montgomery, she decided that she had learned enough from reading her idols that once she finished her book and polished it enough to smooth out the rough spots that are inevitable in a first draft, she sent it off to respected Boston publishing house Little, Brown & Company. There an editor named Megan Tingley saw it, opened, and began to read....
And realized that she had a future bestseller on her hands.
Not being stupid, Tingley immediately signed Meyer to a multi-book contract worth - are you sitting down? - $750,000. That this sum, which someone with a very, very dry sense of humor termed "unusually high for a first novel," would have bought five or six other books, some by established authors with proven track records, didn't matter; JK Rowling was nearing the end of the Harry Potter series, which meant that children's and young adult publishers everywhere were seeking
The Next Big Series to fill the Harry-shaped debris field that the last Potter book would leave in its wake. Little, Brown, which had been a name in children's publishing for decades, decided to gamble on Meyer's book, now named Twilight, to fill that gap.
Guess who won the crap shoot?
Twilight came out in 2005 to mediocre reviews and the sort of sales that make accounting departments leap to their feet and spontaneously go into a Busby Berkeley-style precision dance number while the soundtrack to Happy Days Are Here Again plays at earsplitting volume in the background. The tale of startlingly passive Bella "The Human Doormat" Swan, her sparkly vampire boyfriend Edward "I Snuck Into Your Bedroom and Watched You Sleep For a Month" Cullen, and their buddy Jacob "The Sexy and Laughably Inauthentic Quilete Werewolf" sold so well that Twilight and its three sequels (Eclipse, New Moon, and Breaking Dawn) were soon topping the bestseller lists, being translated into nearly forty languages, and spawning catch phrases like "Team Edward" and "Team Jacob."
So great was the longing for Twilight, Twilight, and yet more Twilight that Meyer had to spin off a minor character from Eclipse into her own (short) book, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, which sold briskly despite being unsuitable for a series (SPOILER: the titular character dies on the last page!). The first book was filmed starring rising actress Kristin Stewart as Bella and Harry Potter alumnus Robert Pattison as Edward, and if Stewart rapidly became known for a seeming inability to move her facial muscles while emoting at Pattison (who bore a striking resemblance to a smack addict thanks to the slightly glittery makeup that was intended to make him look suitably bloodless), it didn't matter to the hordes of fans who stormed the Heck Piazza Dodecaplex at midnight showings across the world.
There was more to come. Twilight t-shirts at the local Hot Topic, Twilight mugs at the local Barnes & Noble, Twilight jokes and imitators and (of course) fan fiction, Twilight-themed vacations to Forks, Washington, a hitherto obscure town where several of the books are set, Twilight jokes and imitations and spin-offs, even Twilight quotations carved into the flesh of the truest of believers....
Is it any wonder that Stephenie Meyer was soon spoken of in the same breath as JK Rowling?
Of course the comparison isn't exact; JK Rowling has won numerous awards, including the Hugo for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, while the best Stephenie Meyer can boast is a British Book Award for "best children's book." Rowling has also managed to avoid having her manuscripts leaked, unlike Meyer; the first twelve chapters of Midnight Sun, Meyer's attempt to rewrite Twilight from Edward's point of view, somehow ended up on the Internet and were received with such universe scorn that Meyer abandoned any plans to finish the book.
There's also the inconvenient similarity between Twilight and The Book of Mormon, which is more than can be said for anything JK Rowling has ever written or dreamed of in her entire life. This was first pointed out by actress/blogger Stoney321 in what she called the Sparkledammerung series on LiveJournal. Stoney is herself a recovering Mormon, and her insights into Stephenie Meyer's magnum opus are, to say the least, fascinating.
Perhaps the most damning of all, at least for those of us who enjoy good books, is that with the exception of right-wing Christians who are convinced that the harmless British wizards of Rowling's imagination are actually evil devil-worshippers determined to hack the Body of Christ into unrecognizable gobbets of stew beef, most critics and readers see JK Rowling and her books as positive influences on children's fiction and the culture at large. The same cannot be said of Stephenie Meyer or her sparkly dream-spawn.
Think I'm exaggerating? Well, let's look at some of the plot points:
- Bella's father, allegedly a police officer, doesn't notice when Edward creeps into his house every night for a month to watch his daughter sleep.
- The Cullens, Edward's vampire family, play baseball for fun, and send their unaging teenagers to high school over and over and over and over again.
- Edward decides to commit suicide by standing in bright sunlight in front of superstitious Italians in hopes that they will tear him to shreds out of horror and disgust at his unnatural sparkliness, even though the more likely reaction would be "hey, nice glitter makeup! You get that on Via Tornabuoni?"
- Edward performs literature's first (and, dear sweet Jesus on a popsicle stick, ONLY) c-section via vampire fangs.
- Jacob belongs to an allegedly real tribe of Native Americans who can all turn into werewolves.
Need more evidence? Let's turn to the experts:
"..the real difference [between J. K. Rowling and Meyer] is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer, and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good."
Stephen King
"the characters, such as they are, are stripped down to a minimum, lacking the texture and idiosyncrasies of actual people….Twilight would be a lot more persuasive as an argument that an 'amazing heart' counts for more than appearances if it didn't harp so incessantly on Edward's superficial splendors."
Laura Miller, Salon
"Meyer's prose seldom rises above the serviceable, and the plotting is leaden….Good books deal with themes of longing and loneliness, sexual passion and human frailty, alienation and fear just as the Twilight books do. But they do so by engaging us with complexities of feeling and subtleties of character, expressed in language that rises above banal mediocrity. Their reward is something more than just an escape into banal mediocrity. We deserve something better to get hooked on."
Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post
The books are "robbing [teen girls] of agency and normalizing stalking and abusive behavior."
L. Lee Butler, Young Adult Library Services Association, admitting why he was reluctant to stock the books in his library
It's perfectly possible for a bestseller to be poorly written, as anyone who's been reading these diaries well knows. But this last point - that Bella is not precisely a healthy role model for young women - is particularly troublesome. Despite Meyer's insistence that these books are actually classic modern American feminism because Bella voluntarily chooses to be with Edward, it's hard not to shriek with horror at the thought of one's teenage daughter reading about a girl who has no life, no dream, and no ambition except becoming the bride of a blood-sucking monster.
Worse, Edward, for all his physical beauty, is scarcely the stuff of which dreams are made (at least for anyone who isn't Stephenie Meyer); he alternates between stalking Bella and treating her like a child, leaves her bruised and bleeding after a wedding night that basically destroys their bower o' bliss, and impregnates her with a child that slowly kills her until he saves her life by turning her into a vampire.
Isn't that romantic?
The Anita Blake series, by Laurell K. Hamilton - The Anita Blake series, by Laurell K. Hamilton - the Anita Blake series of urban fantasies began well. Anita, a tough, no-nonsense professional who later becomes a US Marshal, lives and has adventures in a noirish St. Louis that's one good universe away from our own. The main difference is that magic is real, were-animals and vampires exist and have some limited citizen rights, and it's perfectly possible to make a living as a necromancer and executioner for vampires who get out of line.
You read that right: Anita Blake is not only a US Marshal, she's a necromancer, a zombie animator, and a vampire hunter. She's also a martial arts expert, a whiz at crime scene restoration, an expert detective, a healer, has a BA in preternatural biology, part of a triumvirate with a vampire and a werewolf, and can call upon vast reservoirs of psychic and magical power.
She's also well on her way to becoming a succubus, but that is neither here nor there.
Anita began as a tough, strong, no-nonsense female answer to all the tough, strong, no-nonsense male adventure characters out there. The first few books in what is now twenty volumes and counting were a breath of fresh air in a genre that had not particularly kind to female characters, and Hamilton soon found herself with a large and loyal following that found her blend of adventure, noir, and the supernatural enormously appealing. It didn't matter that Anita seemed to picking up more knowledge, and abilities, and - ahem - admirers, as the series continued; the same could be said about male equivalents like Harry Dresden (or any long-running series lead).
And then Anita acquired the ardeur, and what had been a series of adventure novels…wasn't.
The ardeur, for the uninitiated, is a supernatural ability that gives the bearer enormous magical/psychic power, to the point that s/he is all but unbeatable. There's only one teeny, tiny, weeny, itsy, bitsy problem: maintaining it requires the bearer to have sex several times a day, usually with a different person, sometimes in groups.
Now, lots of sex means lots of lovers joining the cast, and a larger cast means more room for plot twists, more complications, and many, many, many more story arcs. Thanks to these, Anita is now the lupa (senior female) of a werewolf pack (even though she isn't technically a werewolf, just playing hide the chew toy with one on a regular basis), has knowledge of nearly half a dozen types of lycanthropic viruses, exhibits enough vampiric abilities that she has now her very own sexual/vampiric thrall (even though she isn't technically a vampire, just playing hide the blood bank with one on a regular basis), and has become the target of Marmee Noir, the "Mother of All Darkness," who basically tricked her into having sex with a virginal teenage weretiger in hopes of her becoming pregnant so Marmee Noir (and doesn't that sound like a brand of Cajun-style blackened citrus conserve?) can possess the baby, or something. All the while she keeps having sex to boost her ardeur, almost always on stage because Laurell K. Hamilton seems to believe that service to one's fans means describing these frequent, power-boosting orgasmathons in explicit and loving detail.
That all this thoroughly described erotic play, a lot of it non-consensual to the point where it's one step removed from rape, doesn't leave much room for actual plot seems, well, to be beside the point. Add in that Anita has lately begun manifesting sexual powers and abilities heretofore unknown to mortal (wo)man (she's now a "rainmaker," which means that she evidently is able to ejaculate during orgasm to the point that whatever she's on will be dripping wet, and not for the reason you might think), and the reader is tempted to wonder if Laurell K. Hamilton might not be happier writing for Torquere, Circlet, Riptide, or another on-line erotica house.
Needless to say, this development has not exactly been received with open arms. Some reviewers have carped that instead of hunting vampires Anita seems to spend much of her time either having sex or wondering if all the sex means she's now a slut. Others have complained that there's just so much sex that it's about as arousing as watching wheat sprout, with the Kansas City Star commenting archly that "eroticism [has] become[s} mere description." Worse, Publishers Weekly stated flatly that recent entry Blood Noir had a "growing air of ennui, which longtime readers can't help sharing as sex increasingly takes the place of plot and character development."
Hamilton responded with a blog entry entitled "Dear Negative Reader" wherein she brushed aside the growing chorus of disappointment by stating that "life is too short to read books you don’t like." She then went on to tell her readers that if the substitution of sex for plot upset them by pushing them "past that comfortable envelope of the mundane" then it was time to "stop reading." She then wondered aloud if some of her fans who claimed to have given up after the 15,000th amazing Anita orgasm were either "closet readers" (ooo, she said closet! CLOSET! Heh heheh hehehe!!!!!!) who still read her books even though they swore they'd stopped, or were just pigpiling on her thanks to negative comments on other people's blogs, LiveJournals, etc.:
And if you don't think you are the minority, well, sorry, guys but you are. I have the sales figures to prove it. Each book’s sales are more than the last. The vast majority of people standing in line love the books, love the series, and tell us so. Some people even ask for more police procedural. I want more, too. If the person asks nicely, not rudely, or in that tone that seems to imply if I don't do what they want the series is doomed to failure, I listen. The ardeur is a pain in my, and Anita's butt, too. But I believe in my world. I've done this major metaphysical event. I won't just 'fix it' because it's hard to write around. God, knows, sometimes it is. But the ardeur is moving along. I've got my fix in mind, but it's logical, not something that's merely convenient, or because some people hate it. But the ardeur is not going away. If that's what you guys are wanting, then it ain't happening. Leave now, because more ardeur awaits. The ardeur is evolving, as are Anita's powers, but I don't see the ardeur going poof.
Needless to say, this was not well received in some circles. Not only did
the fans react poorly, no less an Internet figure than John Scalzi used Hamilton's rant as an
example of how not to make a public spectacle of one's self when dealing with negative criticism.
Hamilton, who's sold around 6 million books by now, simply sniffed, went back to her computer, and published another seven books (and counting) about Anita Blake, Kinky Sex Goddess. Despite her claims to be looking for "the fix" for the ardeur, there's no sign of it (or the series) stopping any time soon.
Whether Anita will soon have flame powers to go along with her rainmaking is unknown, but it sure wouldn't surprise me....
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So, my friends - do you donate blood? Read about rainmaking hunters? Were you dragged to a Twilight movie? We'll never tell!
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