And I’m not talking about dashing werewolves or evil serial killers. Today I’m talking about writer jealousy.

Between rejections and trends and opportunities we never see (and people who started the publishing game before us) it’s hard not to be jealous. And really, why bother? Jealousy is a valid emotion, as much as depression or elation and let’s face it, none of us is perfect. So it’s okay to feel frustrated or depressed or even jealous. What you can’t do is let these feeling override your professionalism.

First that’s because they very often go hand in hand. Many times jealousy sparks because right when you’re facing a new batch of rejections someone else posts on their Facebook or blog or Twitter about their latest sale. While you struggle to get full reads and get noticed by editors at the big wigs of genre publishing someone else is boasting hundreds of credits. But jealousy is as much genuine jealousy as a new face of frustration and self-doubt. Its always helpful to step back and ask why you’re jealous because it could just be that you’re overwhelmed and frustrated with your own career.

Second there’s also a HUGE chance that there is nothing to be jealous about. This is a twofold point because sometimes you need to remind yourself that just because someone’s sale LOOKS effortless doesn’t mean it is. I know a few authors like this that simply don’t talk about how hard it was to get published. One bestseller I know spent over ten years trying to sell, and had to deal with a completely horrible agent experience (hmm, come to think of it I know many authors who could tell this tale) before they ended up with a contract. Just because you don’t see them doing blogs online about how hard it is doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard (see my What They Don’t Tell You About Writing post for an idea on how things change after people think you’ve “made it”). Point is, it looks effortless when you see the product and not all the work behind it. And just because someone lands a sale doesn’t mean they haven’t worked every bit as hard as you have for it.

The second side of this one starts similar; don’t be jealous because you don’t know the full story of the sale. But it continues with the knowledge that presses close all the time. And projects bomb all the time. And there is a massive pile of really low quality magazines and anthos out there. I won’t name names (and the sad fact is that the lower the pay scale the more likely it is that these projects will end up filled with stinker stories. In my last post Maurice Broaddus, editor of the acclaimed Dark Faith mentioned that for every 100 stories about 2 were good. High paying markets attract crap fiction and good fiction, a lot of both. Lower paying markets tend to attract less of the good stuff. Not that they don’t attract any, just there are fewer good stories proportionately.) but I will give you possibly the best piece of advice I’ve ever learned writing: It is better (career-wise) to be rejected than to be published poorly. Rejections do not hurt anywhere as bad as being embarrassed of your fiction or the company it keeps.

So take into consideration where these sales are coming from, what they’re doing for their authors–if anything. A lot of people see some measure of success and end up spending some times spinning their wheels at a level they’re comfortable with and have seen some success with. It’s hard to decide whether to aim for something you might not reach, or go for the sure thing, but if you want to advance, you have to always aim for higher than where you are.

Furthermore writing careers are not set advancement paths. Writers and careers do not mature at the same pace or time. I know several artist types who put in a lot of work, then were forced to take a break, then came back to some success. Some hit big with their first book, some with their fifth. Tor’s (well-deserved for being so awesome) darling Cherie Priest published six novels before hitting it bigger with Boneshaker. Clearly some readers and publishers saw her skill and continued to buy her work until the rest of the world caught on last year. And it happens like that all the time. The fiction force that is Charlaine Harris had two whole series before the Sookie Stackhouse hit real big.

Careers take different paths, influenced by things completely outside of the realm of a writer’s control. One more example from my own favorite genre; There’s no doubt that Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake books contributed to the rise of urban fantasy. But Hamilton and Blake can’t be given credit alone for the popularity of the genre because the series was joined quickly by a number of other really good authors, some of which only copied Hamilton’s work, or outclassed it completely, or connected with readers looking for something different. You can’t separate Hamilton’s career from the rise of urban fantasy, but neither can you give it all the credit.

The truth is that the only thing your career can be compared to is your goals. Those are the only standard that matter.

So next time you feel jealous take a step back, rant to a friend who won’t repeat what you say, then look at what’s making you jealous again, because you might see something new. Or you might be able to reshape your own reactions so that every sale of a friend is a triumph you can share in. Life is more fun when there are more triumphs and celebrations rather than crushing blows. How you take the sales of the writers around is one way to make your writing career smoother, easier to handle, and more satisfying.

My third topic for this week is on the politics of editing and invitations to anthologies. I’m not linking to online flame wars (um, this time) but the topic has come up elsewhere. I do not know the full scope of that other fight, I only know what a casual person sees looking in from the outside.

One more thing that makes having a writing career hard is the flexibility of the roles. The fellow writer you’re drinking screwdrivers with and gossiping to tonight might just be putting out a call for submissions for an anthology or landing a job editing for a magazine tomorrow. Unlike many other fields there’s a lot of flexibility in publishing as editors become agents, or writers become editors or publishers themselves. The relationship is especially more fluid in the small presses and genres and it can, obviously, be VERY hard to deal with. This snake’ll bite you in the ass y’all.

It’s impossible to wear a single “hat” (though I hate that analogy, it’s largely understandable) and not piss people off with so many egos involved, much less someone who you meet as a writer, but you also know works as an editor. On the editor side people will expect you to invite them into your project just because they’ve been friendly to you. People will expect a nudge up in the slush, if not a guaranteed place. And as an editor you can’t help thinking every time you meet a writer that this is what they want from you. (Also common, the “Hey look at where all the stories you rejected got published” method and the “You’ll be sorry when I hit it big” folks. FYI: No agent or editor is going to regret passing on your work because you hit it big later. They’re in this for the love, the passion and for the individual project too. They have to accept the possibility of passing on a JK Rowling because they don’t believe in the story just like writers must accept rejection as part of the process.)

On the writing side of things you expect people who know you, who you’ve helped and promoted and loved to give you that chance. The thing is, sometimes they can’t. If you don’t know why, look back at my post Monday on rejection. It does hurt when an editor says they liked your work, but they don’t invite you into an antho. But they are NOT under any obligation to invite you. Hell, I can’t stand Stephen King’s style and if I was editing an antho and the King offered me a story for it I’d be under no obligation to accept it.

An invitation to submit is like a letter of interest. “I’ve read your work and am interested in working with you on this project.” That’s it. The idea that certain people should have been invited, or worse, guaranteed a place, just because they have a recognizable name (potentially) is ridiculous. Bashing the editors and saying there are personal reasons there instead of taste is deplorable–even if it might be true.

I’ve had the “be careful what you review because the people you’re criticizing now might be your peers later” conversation quite a few times. Some people I know have chosen to give up reviewing once they could write full time to avoid conflict. I’ve feared that someday I might be faced with the same choice. The fact is that I review in part because it encourages me to read, widely, and to think about what I’ve read. I want to remember that I’m a reader first, and a writer second. At this time it’s a risk I’m willing to continue to take. (Besides, if Charlaine Harris can still post the occasional review, why can’t I?)

Would it hurt if someone refused to accept my work because I’d given them a review they didn’t like? Well yeah. That could be the point. Sure people exclude others and reject people at times just to hurt them. But that’s childish and petty and those who do that are sooner or later figured out because they do that to everyone. Not to mention I wouldn’t want to put my work in the hands of someone who would do that in the first place. But it could also happen because the editor recognizes that we don’t have the same vision for a story, or a theme, or a genre, and decides to spend their time working with someone else.

And in the end, does it matter? Do you really want to force yourself where you aren’t welcome? Can anything good come of you demanding to be included?

Books, anthologies, magazines, there are invite only projects all the time. It saves the editor time, allows them to more tightly focus the book toward their vision. The best projects, in my opinion, are part invite and part open call. But not everyone thinks so. I fail to see how throwing a fit (and flinging accusations) online or even just in private makes anything better. If anything you just make it perfectly clear to a wider audience why the editor didn’t want to work with you in the first place.

I have been lucky to have been invited to a few (5 or 6) anthologies. I have made it into exactly one. Invitations aren’t guarantees of acceptance either. In the end no one owes you an invite, or an acceptance. That’s the hard truth of turning art into commerce based on subjective taste. If you can’t take the fact that there are invite only anthos being put together all the time in this field then reconsider sticking around. It’s hard enough without your meltdowns and mudslinging. And furthermore there are MORE markets open to general submissions and many of them (Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Apex, Tor…oh hell, just go to duotrope or ralan and look it up for yourself) are nothing to scoff at.

And of course, good luck!

This isn’t the blog you expect it to be. I’m not about to talk about why I write, or ask why you do. I just want you to think about it so you’re in the right frame of mind for where I’m going.

Last week a Twitter friend of mine who edits a zine discovered a person he’d bought several stories from–for 1st English rights–had blatantly lied to him about those rights being available. The submitter had sent the editor stories that had already been published–multiple times–and said they were unpublished. This launched a discussion about professionalism in writing, of which this submitter clearly had none. Rights can be a tricky business (one of the reasons authors get agents). When you are agentless you have to navigate this on your own, but most markets understand this and are pretty upfront about what they ask for. No reprints means they want a story that has never been published before. So if your story has already appeared in a magazine, much less multiple magazines, it’s clearly a reprint and submitting it as original is very, very unprofessional.

Then, as these things go, someone pointed out that the zine in question only pay $10 for stories and said something along the lines of “if you want people to treat you professionally pay professional rates”. And in the comments of that little spin off convo someone else mentioned that writers should be happy for anything they get for their fiction, even a pat on the back.

All three of these things could be separate rants, but they came out together (and the last two often appear together) so together I’m keeping them. Which brings me back to this little rant’s title: Why do you write?

There’s lots of reasons to write, and lots of seemingly pretentious reasons people give (let’s face it “I write because I have to” sounds pretentious. It’s not, and any artist will immediately understand, and they probably wouldn’t have asked you why in the first place. But to a non-artist it’s not really understood.) But let’s focus on the two reasons that come down to money matters; writing for hobby and writing for career.

Let me first note that in either one professionalism should not come into question. You might not be trying to build a career in writing, but others might be, including the editors and publishers you might be dealing with.  You still need to respect guidelines, be courteous to others, even if you never meet them face to face, and always send in your best work.

To a hobbyist writer it’s about writing, or being part of genre fandom. It’s about putting words on a page, having them make sense and be entertaining, and the pleasure of seeing your byline in print. And let me tell you an obvious secret, we’re all hobbyists at heart. Writers who don’t write for the pleasure of it, for the fun of it, for the moment we get our contributor copies or a kind word from a reader, don’t stay writers for long. This passion is what makes it possible to send out our work after rejection and get past that point in a project where we’re convinced it’s all utter shit and should be burned as to not infect other people’s projects. (Even Neil Gaiman, writer superstar, feels this way, so who are we mere mortals to be different?)

But at some point some of us decide we want more. We want to do this professionally. We want a career in writing, knowing how hard it is, and knowing that it will probably be a second or even third job. A career is different than a hobby because there writing is not its own reward, advancement is. Success is the reward. Success is defined in many ways. Money, more contracts, audience recognition, awards, professional reputation…it’s these things that make a career. It’s the hobby bits that make it a satisfying career. But choosing to build a career brings other goals into mind. Writing is no longer the end goal, but publishing well, building an audience and a name become just as important as writing those words. (Luckily good words help in the whole getting published and building an audience thing.)

The zine in question, again which only pays $10 a story has been fired at for not being professional itself. That depends on how you define professional. The editor has every right to expect others to hold up their end of the contract, as he is expected to hold up his. Submitters know how much they pay, and if they don’t like that they shouldn’t submit. Writers who can reliably get semi pro or pro rates for their work have no real reason to accept $10 for first rights to a story, neither do they have any obligation to submit. It would be nice if all markets paid pro or even at least semi pro rates. But that’s not the purpose of all magazines. Not all magazines want to get to the level of Asimov’s. For some it’s just about being entry level, being part of the genre. And let’s face it getting to the level where you have to think about business things (advertisers, tax forms, growing your market) can take a hell of a lot of the enjoyment out of things.

I don’t blame people for not wanting to strip away those things from something they do for the love of it. It’s not easy to turn a hobby into a career. Emotionally it can be absolutely devastating. The fact is that most people never make it when you have to make it about business rather than enjoyment.

There’s nothing wrong with being a hobbyist, as a market or as a writer. In a way I sort of envy those who don’t have to worry about, for example, what being more successful will mean for their taxes. In high school I took a journalism class and was crushed to realize that most of the work in putting out a paper is getting ads. I wanted to be a writer, not an ad seller. Choosing why you’re writing is essential because you’re defining what it is that you want to get our of writing.

Now, the idea that writers should be happy with whatever they get, even if it’s only a pat on the back is utterly ridiculous. As in every profession AND hobby, writers have the right to demand a certain price for their work. If a hobbyist baker makes you a wedding cake you can expect it to cost less than a professional bakery, but expecting it to be made for a pat on the back is outright silly. No one would expect a hobbyist carpenter to work for free, or a hobbyist leatherworker, or even a hobbyist musician. At conventions and fairs and online you see people who make a few extra bucks doing something they love and when you’re looking down at handmade jewelry, even if you know the person will be at their “real job” as a bank teller tomorrow morning, it never occurs to you that they should just give you their jewelry because you like it. So why do we expect even a hobbyist writer to submit to that?

There’s nothing wrong with a hobbyist market or with writing for fun, with profit being a cherry on the top. But there is something wrong with devaluing a person’s time, effort and WORK making it only worth what crumbs of appreciation people can be bothered to toss at the maker. If a writer sets a low price for their work in exchange for better odds at getting published or less work required, that’s their choice. But demanding that all workers accept a certain level of pay, or that all markets give a certain level of pay misses the point for which these markets and writers work.

Finally, tossing out accusations of elitism and snobbery to those who are working toward different goals and demand a different pay scale in turn is no better than those who are dismissing low pay markets as scum. No, token pay markets aren’t going to get you noticed by big editors or get you a big publishing deal. But sometimes all you want out of something is encouragement to keep going.

You have to know why it is that your write, what your goal is when you send out that story, what you want from your words. Once you decide that then you take the path that’s right for you, not the one that everyone else says you should take.

This kicks off a week of writing-related posts. Rejected, how could I not make this about writing? Here’s my picture:

You hear a lot about rejection from newbie and aspiring writers because to them it’s a big deal. There is no way to completely divide your emotions from your work. Yet the world demands that we suddenly stop caring about our work once we submit it. We can’t help thinking about how we’re going to spend that money or how good it will feel to have that credit, to see your name in print whether for the first time, or again. And we believe in our story with that shaky belief that we think it’s as good as the stuff we’ve read, so hopefully the editor will too.

So rejections are crushing, because we only see it from our side, from the point of view of what that sale would mean to us.

Now I’m going to ask you to see it from the other side with a nifty little analogy. Let’s say you have a fierce craving for a sweet snack, so you head out to the grocery store to pick something up. Now “sweet snack” does narrow what you’re looking for down some. You know you can skip the meat isle and the condiment aisle, and the cleaning supply and pet food aisles. But it’s still really vague when you get to the store. I mean, there’s candy, or fruit, or yogurt, or even breakfast cereal or granola bars, ice cream or bottles of juice.

So you browse, because you had narrowed what you were looking for, but there’s just so much in the slush pile I mean, grocery store. Something you know right off aren’t right for you. I don’t like nuts in my ice cream, and most candy makes me sick to my stomach after more than a “fun sized” portion. I can toss out anything the store has priced too high (though that part of the analogy doesn’t apply to markets, who usually put their pay rates out front and center), or that looks sketchy, is in packages too big, or that I know I won’t enjoy again later (let’s face it most packages and stories both should be good for multiple servings).

I still have way more options than I could possibly buy. And yeah, I don’t have to just buy one thing, but I can’t buy it all. The idea, when you’re on the end putting out the money–even if it isn’t your own–of feeling obligated to buy or guilty for not buying everything that fits the description of what they’re looking for is just silly. You don’t feel guilty when you grab the Oreos and not all the cookies on the shelf. You can’t. (Although, let’s face it there are some commercials and such that do operate on guilt and pressure.) And you certainly don’t feel guilty if you pass a nice thick T-bone that looks delicious, but doesn’t suit the purpose of your shopping trip. No matter how awesome it looks, it’s just not a sweet snack.

Yes, we start out with out hearts on our pages, desperately wanting that validation that we’re not wasting our time writing. But there comes a point where it just clicks and rejections are just like a consumer passing you up in your nifty packaging on the grocery shelf for something they want more. It doesn’t stop being a bit of a bummer, because you submit to places you want to be published by. But it’s not just not personal. It’s not just “a part of the game”.

Rejections usually mean nothing other than “Not this market at this time”. They don’t mean “This is shit” or “You suck” and lots of big magazine and major projects give form rejections. Notes and rewrite requests are a nice little bonus, but it’s not something everyone has time for. (Heck, sending rejections period isn’t something all markets or agents have the time for. Two books of mine queried two years apart showed a massive difference in nonresponses, even among agents who claim to answer every email on their website. And yes I sent follow up emails as well, which also went very unanswered.)

Rejections are nothing because they do not define your work, and unlike the snacks on the shelf your story isn’t going to go bad. A little spit shine can freshen up a story that’s been sitting around, even after years. Your product is done, and shelf stable, and even if no one wants to buy it now, a few years will change everything. Even if you aren’t in higher demand, tastes and markets change too.

Rejection is part of writing, part of life. Under the dazzling, squee-worthy strength of even one or two sales the rejections mean nothing but “Try again”.

The Witching Hour is one of about a dozen books that I reread every so often, thought I must admit usually I just read the sections on the history of the Mayfair Witches. When I picked it up this year (Futile Flame by Sam Stone sparked that need to reread) my husband asked why I only read that part. I told him it was because I didn’t like the lead in the rest of the book, Rowan Mayfair, but then I asked myself if that was true, since it had been a few years since I’d read it. So This time when I read all thousand pages, I kept notes about my likes and dislikes. This isn’t exactly a review, and probably isn’t professional enough to be an essay, so I’m sticking to ramble.

My copy of The Witching House is yellowed. It’s been with me through high school, early high school if not before, since Ann Rice was one of the first adult section authors I picked up. Odd, now that I think of it, that The Witching Hour has been more of a reread than any other Rice book, in fact there are many Rice books I haven’t made it through.

Likewise the cover of my copy is long gone, though, worried about the wear it would get on another read, I took the time to give my copy a new cover. Mine is less sexy, but at this point I doubt “Spoiler Alert” should apply.

My copy is from the 28th mass market printing which puts it around 1994 or 95. The Witching Hour is about, in about equal parts, a creepy old house in New Orleans’ Garden District, Rowan Mayfair–a powerful witch and heir to a massive, and possibly cursed fortune, and Lasher–the powerful, possibly malevolent ghost haunting the Mayfair family.

Reader who decide to pick this one up should be warned that while Rice’s style is lush, erotic and gorgeous, it’s also, when looked at closer, purple, repetitive and wandering almost to the point of ineffectual. My copy clocks in at 1038 pages, and it easily could have been half of that.

What I’m not as sure about is: Would it have been as effective?

The book begins telling about Deidre Mayfair, an invalid living in the old house, who has a mysterious, one might say ghostly, visitor often at her side. It becomes almost immediately evident on this storyline, that Deidre is being medicated into incoherence and might (probably) be completely capable and sane under he haze of drugs. But someone is making sure that even doctors don’t have the choice to take her off the meds. So this is a major Tragedy, as well as foreshadowing and a ceaseless source of character guilt later on. Almost everyone guilts themselves for not doing anything to help Deidre throughout the book, almost immediately after each guilt trip the reader is reassured that there was probably nothing they could have done anyway.

So Rice builds up a tremendous amount of emotion surrounding this character that is doing nothing, and that no one, really, is trying to help. Yes, this sets the mood for the whole book.

Next readers are introduced to Michael Curry, a wealthy, possibly crazy contractor, who drowns at sea, but it miraculously found and revived by Dr. Rowan Mayfair. When he comes back he remembers a very strange afterlife experience and he possesses the ability of psychometry (the ability to read impressions from objects). But Michael’s gift is completely out of his control and he becomes a recluse. Conveniently he shares lots of memories of Deidre Mayfair, the house in New Orleans, and of Lasher, this mysterious ghost who completely isn’t a ghost yet, though he obviously is.

Through Michael we also finally meet Rowan Mayfair, who is also rich without having done much but benefit (a lot) from being filthy rich. Like new cars and houses and boats where she can really be herself rich. She’s aloof, beautiful, a neurosurgeon who is damn near perfect. Seriously blood doesn’t run in her veins, awesomesauce peppered with humbleness does. And even though Michael is like twenty years older than Rowan (at least) she is so very hot for him because Rowan has an extreme hunger for big rough sexy hero-like men (because she’s hiding some seriously deep guilt about being totally evil and buries herself in hot hero men to try to be a good guy, but we’ll get to that later).

Michael is, of course completely flattered that this hot, brainy, beautiful chick wants him and much obsessing about each other commences. (You’ll hear a lot about how sexy arm hair is.) What follows is a lot od half-drunk ramblings about the nature of Michael’s power and about all his memories of that house at First Street and about how very hot Rowan thinks Michael is.

Michael decides to go to New Orleans to figure things out. Rowan remains at her home (where her stepdad and adoptive mother just died) because of a super secret promise she made to her adoptive mother never to go to New Orleans. (So mysterious right?) In New Orleans Michael learns that Deidre has died. He drinks himself sick, and a strange man finds him outside the First Street, taking him to be cared for. Michael learns that this man is Aaron, from a super secret organization that watches and records cases of paranormal beasties and powers. Aaron was going to California to meet Michael (because of his psychometry) but instead he too, heard that Deidre had died and is in New Orleans to record her funeral for the Talamasca (which readers might recognize–as well as Aaron himself–from Queen of the Damned, making The Witching Hour almost a spin off from Rice’s vampire series.)

Meanwhile in California Rowan gets a strange late night visit from a ghostly man. The next morning she gets a call for her adoptive mother and subsequently learns that her birth mother is dead, and she is now the owner of the exact same house in the Garden District that Michael loved. Against the caller’s wishes and her adoptive mother’s wishes Rowan decided to go to New Orleans for the funeral, and knows she will never return to her California life.

In New Orleans Michael is given the Talamasca’s file on the Mayfair family (which of course, Rowan is a part of) and spends a few days reading it. Rowan arranges for a flight, packs and flies to New Orleans. On the flight the ghost has sex with her.

The History of the Mayfair Witches is usually the only part I read. It starts about 270 pages into the book (yes, the story so far has been nearly 300 pages) and runs to page 668, making this section a novel on its own. This is the part I read because this is the only real part I find to be atmospheric but not overdone, and lovely, but to the point as well. almost every character is fleshy and realized without tons of redundancies. In this section as a reader I find I can properly enjoy the depth and richness of Rice’s style without yawning.

This section ends with Rowan arriving to her mother’s funeral and, in shock, meeting her family for the first time ever. Aaron is also here, standing in for Michael (who is still reading). The whole huge mysterious secret that the first third of the book is focused on is now completely revealed, except the reader already knew it. Rowan is a witch with real powers. Her family is haunted by Lasher, who isn’t a ghost, but is something else, she is Deidre’s daughter and Deidre’s great aunt, Carlotta, is an evil bitch who somehow, against all odds, managed to keep Deidre drugged into nothingness for like 30 years. All on her powers over evil-old-lady-ness. (And yes, she’s a lawyer. If you haven’t guessed yet every single person of importance in this book is rich and white, powerful in every single way or a terribly tragic victim of said powerful people.)

The next section is the most la-la-land fantasy of it all. Here Rowan and Michael decide they want to restore the old house (which somehow miraculously has nothing big wrong with it despite being completely not maintained for about sixty years, meanwhile our house had some pretty big problems from being empty for 9 months before we bought it, and we’re not considered subtropical, environmentally like New Orleans is.) Anyway, so Michael restores the house, with a completely limitless budget, because not only is he a millionaire in his own right, Rowan is like rich rich. Like Bill Gates thinks Rowan Mayfair is ludicrously rich. Readers are told a lot how rich Rowan and all the characters are, if not directly, then by little things, like Rowan paying cash for two Mercedes.

Then after another three hundred pages of shopping, house restoration and “I think something bad is going to happen, remember the ghost”, “Why hasn’t the ghost done anything bad yet?” and such Rice remembers that all this foreshadowing needs to lead up to something. So Rowan begins to talk to the ghost trying to find out what it wants from the witches, and from her in particular. Meanwhile she also proceeds to have violent, crazy ghost sex with it while Michael closes up his old house and business in California and worries because Rowan isn’t as obsessed with him as she had been.

Finally despite being three novels in length Rice can’t even come up with an actual ending and leaves the book pretty much on a cliffhanger, which Rowan giving birth to the ghost and vanishing and Michael nearly drowning in the pool.

And the thing is, all this doesn’t even approach the crazy of the next two books wherein a thirteen year old girl seduces and gets pregnant by Michael and gives birth to another ghost-thing (after about 3 months of pregnancy).

Now, keep in mind that Rice’s prose really is gorgeous. She spin out the mood of desolation and madness very well. But by the time I was finished there was just so much build up, so much foreshadowing that never happened, so much crap about Rowan shopping and Michael having a limitless budget, and them obsessing over each other when I, as a reader never got attached enough to either one of them to even like them, that the complete lack of any kind of resolution and all the damn hints and teasers about mysteries that never, ever come to fruition that I was just so very done with it.

Why don’t I like the book? It’s too repetitive. It’s too long. Michael and Rowan do little but lead lives that the rich and powerful only dream of, obsess about each other and complain (about their wonderful lives), and worry endlessly about the ghost (and remember Rowan’s pretty much fucking the thing the whole time.) The ending is off, and there is this really overblown insane obsession for incest. Seriously, everyone is related to the person they’re married to in this book and it’s so casual that the Mayfair family picks their mates from the family with the same casualness as most men pick out their shoes.

So why do I love the book? It’s dark, slick, sexy, vibrant and a twisted, masterful tale that spans three hundred years and thirteen generations. every setting is like watching a movie, you wonder the whole time whether the money and power is worth the Tragedy(exclamation point) and whether Lasher is totally evil, or the loyal servant he claims to be. Rice gets the idea of alien creature, and witches falling prey to the spirits they deal with because spirits and humans don’t think or define things the same and they certainly don’t see things on the same time line. But this victory achieved doesn’t feel like the one that Rice is actually working toward. It seems almost accidental, the glory and beauty of the book stumbled upon in a hot mess of drama and chaos.

Reading The Witching Hour is like thinking while you’re doing an unpleasant tedious chore, where you have some good thoughts, even a few revelations in that time, but it’s still mired in tediousness and a million other less pleasant thoughts. It’s still on my list of rereads, but now that the itch has passed I’m very glad I can put this tome back on the shelf and point myself to this ramble when I wonder next “Why don’t I read the whole thing?”

Okay, I’m cheating. This isn’t mine. But it is bizarre.

• Here’s a good (short) article I found about “The Clean Plate Club” that includes some interesting facts about when and why it started.
• Here’s the zucchini bread recipe I use (I omit the cinnamon and walnuts, and use wheat flour when I can)
• And speaking of food, the 10 Principles of Intuitive Eating are the best “diet” I’ve ever encountered.
• If you think small press signed limited are expensive, check out these high priced limited, $75,000 but they mixed the author’s blood into the paper pulp.
• 11 Blockbusters that are on record as losses. (And why you seriously need a savy agent/lawyer if you get into movies.)
• And Rot is now only $2.99 at The Merchant’s Keep. This version includes the interior artwork by Mechelle Sizemore

Horror Mall has Skullvines books on sale for $8. Now’s a good time to get Rot.