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?”

So, long story short, a BP pipe has been gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico for almost forever and BP has been reaction with the speed of a turtle on pause. Everything they have tried has failed, so now they’re trying to keep all media out of the area, using the local sheriffs and coast Guard as their own personal force of bullies. The good news is, hey it’s create in job in the area still suffering from Katrina. The bad news is this might just destroy the world. (Okay, so I’m skeptical of that, but no one can say that this spill is a good thing.)

Obama let his balls drop a bit, sending BP a bill for $69 million in government clean up costs. As awesome as that is, most of us are sitting around, hundreds if not thousands of miles from the Gulf, wondering what the hell we can do.

So here’s some answers:

Donate. Here’s some places helping.

• The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana
• Defenders of Wildlife
• Emerald CoastKeeper
• Greenpeace International
• Louisiana Wildlife Rehabilitators Association

Donate hair (pet and human) for spill clean up materials. Try to get your local salons and pet groomers involved.

Boycott BP brands including Castrol, Arco, Aral, am/pm, Amoco, Wild Bean Cafe, Safeway gas.

Reevaluate how you use oil period. There are free things you can do, like turning off appliances and lights, lowering your car and heating uses. Also consider the “hidden” ways you use oil, through products like plastic (storage containers, plastic utensils, plastic wrap) or even home products like siding and roofing materials. NatureWorks is a company that manufactures plastics without using oil. Consider buying from them, or getting their products stocked at your store.

I’m not a fan of consuming more as a way to be green, but there are a lot of things you should think about when buying. I’ll never advocate buying a new appliance or vehicle just because it’s more energy efficient, but if you do need to replace something anyway, get the best you can. Water heaters, furnace, dryer, washers, whatever it is. If you use plastic storage bins (for food or what not, they certainly do have some benefits over other types of storage) use the hell out of them. We get plastic containers when we order chinese, and they go right into the dishes to be washed and reused later. We get the more permanent form of food storage containers, and even those kinds that are supposed to be disposable get used for as long as they function.

There are lots of better articles out there on conservation, and even some that don’t tell you to go out and buy electric cars and push lawnmowers. I advise you to really think about what you’re being told and your own personal life style. Taking actions, in the form of lifestyle changes is a process and it’s about evaluating your own actions and what’s available around you. It helps if you know what products you are using because of their availability or out of habit, your own buying and waste habits and the misinformation and poorly covered information out there.

The “green” movement very often focuses on buying something, usually something expensive (new cars, new appliances, even those canvas bags can be expensive!) because we are trained by society to consume. To make a lifestyle change to have to step back and ask “Do I need that? And do I want to buy that?” No one should feel guilty because they can’t afford a hybrid car, or because their lifestyle (hello kids!) demands plastic dinnerware instead of metal. Remember that if you have to replace broken dishes constantly that’s just as bad, from a consuming point of view, as having a set of plastic dishes that don’t break when a child drops them.

Also keep in mind that what you see isn’t always what you get. For example ebooks versus print books. Ebooks don’t use paper, but readers are made of plastics, many of these devices (like cell phones) are designed to be replaced/upgraded every few years, and who knows how environmentally friendly those batteries are. And yes, paper books are made of trees, but trees that grow for years, counteracting CO2 in the air. (Another bonus to having a home garden is that vegetable plants are plants, oxygen producing, healthy, GREEN plants.)

But there is a lot you can do that might not help with the oil spill directly, but will affect the oil consumption you might be taking for granted right now.

-It doesn’t stop being a fight.

You think it’s a fight to get words done and get submissions out and get an editors attention? This fight doesn’t magically stop when you’re published, it just shifts. Before you fight to get words in, but after that sale you might have contract, which legally binds you into delivering the next book on a set schedule. Yeah, lots of publishers are understanding, but writing isn’t about stolen snatches of time anymore, it’s about a second (or third) job. And you might be getting read now, but that also means everyone and their mother has the right to judge your books (and often they think they have the right to judge your life too, and many authors can tell you about the completely off base hate mail they’ve received because of a comment on a board, or a blog, Twitter, or just something from their book, or worse something someone told them about the book.) There’s also the Lost effect, where your book or range of work has wowed readers so much that they come to expect the utterly mind blowing from you, and eventually almost nothing you can do is as good as the “good old days” when your audience was experiencing your work for the first time. That’s not even getting into things like trying to promo, and watching your sales numbers.

-It gets lonelier the more successful you get.

It’s a really sad fact, but when you’re a newbie you can waste tons of time on message boards and blogs and writing sites, in crit groups and writing fan letters. You can openly talk about your insecurities and your small victories, your irritations and disappointments. Then you sell something and all of a sudden you’re an author, and a few things happen. (Oh, they will happen. In varying degrees, but they’ll happen.)

First, you’ll run into people who now want your time, your opinion and your help. Most will be nice about it. Some will be asshats and just demand it, often because they bought your book and think that means you owe them. But almost all had very little to no time for you, if they even knew you at all, before your big break (or little break).

Second, you’ll run into people who were friendly/your friend before. But if you aren’t at the same place in your career as them, or you are focused on meeting contracts or other obligations, you’ll become known as an elitist, too good to hang out with them anymore. Most will just let you go with some sadness (and believe me, you get a little sad too, when you don’t have the time to decompress and talk/vent). Some, however, will get angry at you, or bitter at your position (because success is relative, one book does not a career make). They might go so far as to demand something from you for supporting you and being your friend for so long, or they might get upset and furious because you aren’t submitting to the same places as them, and aren’t after the same kind of career as them. Unfortunately I’ve seen this be much worse in the small press and epresses, where there can be a strong attitude of loyalty, to the point of silliness, and you can be accused of all manner of things if you don’t submit solely to the small presses, blindly support every person you know who opens their own magazine. The truth is, some projects are meant for the small press. And some are meant for the large press. But in some heads loyalty doesn’t allow for that.

Third, you’ll run into people who don’t care. Which can be refreshing. Unless they don’t care because you’re not Dan Brown, so why should they give a damn about you.

Fourth, you’ll run into people who don’t see you as a person, but as a name who can give them a short cut. You’ll never be a person to these people, just a challenge and then either a conquest or a failure.

Fifth, you’ll run into fans (may the gods love them). They won’t always be fans of your work (Hi crazy “The Anita Blake books were written about me” lady!) but most will love just sharing their passion and knowledge with you. A few though will go too far. These are the “I’ve got a story idea you should write” (which I’ve already gotten a lot of and I’m only a baby writer), the “On page 46 you did this but what you should have done…” people, and the people who subsequently expect all your future work to be exactly like the book they fell in love with you over.

Some days you’ll long for the time when you were only trying to get editors to read your work, and those editors, at least, were professional to deal with.

- Working from home sucks ass.

Yeah, I can sleep in. Yeah I can write in my pajamas. But I also sit down to write and am interrupted by someone needing a ride, or a kiddo fight that needs to be broken up, a friend who has to be somewhere five minutes ago and needs me to watch their kid for a few hours until the other partner gets off work, the “I’m not going to make it in time, can you pick my kid up from school” person, the “why haven’t you blogged today” person, or the plumber, or the cable company or just some jerk teasing your dog outside. Jobs that you have to get up and go to are for a set time, and you know you’re supposed to be working during that time. Jobs at home become “Oh she’s just playing on the computer” or “She’s just reading and I’m bored, I’ll chat for a bit”. (By the way my career entails writing and reviewing, and my backlog pretty much means that even if I’m reading a book by an author I love I’m also reading it for review, and there are a dozen more waiting in line behind it. Which means reading IS still work, and DOES still need to get done, just like everything else on my to do list.)

In short, when you work from home you’re the one that’s always called upon to drop everything for other shit (true, it’s sometimes other important shit), and because the other people have set schedules and you don’t both other people and you yourself will say “Oh you can just work later tonight” or “while the kids are at school tomorrow”. Except the interruptions DON’T end, and you are just as likely to get asked to put off writing tomorrow during school time as you were today.

-You can’t be yourself anymore, you have to be “[Name] Professional Author” now.

As you get more of a following you will find yourself under more criticism for everything you do. Before when something angered you, you could make a vague reference about it to online friends, but now everyone and your mother are your Facebook friends, and not only will the person in question know you’re referring to them, but half a dozen other people will think you’re referring to them and send you mails about it.

Even if you’re just complaining in general about something (low paying markets, classic mash up novels, whatever) someone will think you are talking about them and react in kind. So you find yourself needing to be online, to have a presence and interact with established and potential readers, but you also find yourself completely incapable of actually being yourself anymore. You censor yourself, so as not to offend anyone. Then you get mad because you can’t speak your mind anymore, and because none of these people are really your friends if you can’t be yourself around them. And you want to choke on this teeth-baring sense of shut the fuck up and be nice to EVERYONE, when they are completely open to ripping your work apart, and making assumptions about your life based on what you chose to write about. Or you just pull back and stop interacting, at which point you’re elitist and disloyal to the fans who put you where you are.

- You forget why you started this.

Then you get wrapped up in all the things above, all the disappointments and frustrations and the natures of people. And you forget that this isn’t about the fan reaction. This isn’t about winning an award. This isn’t even about getting your next contract. You write because you love to. You love the words, the spinning of a plot, the slow reveal of characters. But all that get buried in publishing. It gets buried in your sales numbers, and dealing with people and you forget why you’re doing it, outside of the contracts, and the fan demand and the money.

So let me remind you; you’re doing it for the stories. For the process of putting words together and making them beautiful. You’re doing it for the nagging characters in your head that wouldn’t exist if you didn’t give them a voice. For the part of you that wants to know “What would happen if…” or even “Can I get away with…” You’re doing it for the amazement of how a line becomes a paragraph, becomes a page, becomes a chapter, becomes a book. Of how your own prose can still surprise you and grab you. Your doing it because you love it and you need to remember that, because there are times that all that bad stuff will overwhelm and disappoint you, and you fight back by knowing why you’re there in the first place.