Thanks S'tan, that's real nice a you ta say.
Messy, last night I dreamed that the Vampire Mafia was comin' to get me. A gloomy troupe of dour beings surrounded me on the mesa, muttering threatening imprecations at my many scandalous blasphemies. How dare I not worship and adore their Goddess... yes I have said baaaad things against that big blind larval Queen Mother... but I was able to disperse them with a gallant wave of my stubby red pencil, a pencil yes that was handed down to me from my Bob Daddy-o, the meanest and crankiest editor in the business of red-penciling...
As the gang of vicious venomous vampires were dispersed, it was then in my dream that an apparition as big as an elephant, as huge as a house, as monstrous as a monster, came gallumphing forth in a blind rage. Trumpeting her rage, seething at mine umbrage! I in defense could only hold up in mine leetle paw the talismanic familial stubby red pencil... with this poor weapon I slashed and I slashed at this monstrous thing, but I could not make a dent in it. This Beast roared in triumph... this Beast was .... MESSY ANNE RICE!!!
As the gang of vicious venomous vampires were dispersed, it was then in my dream that an apparition as big as an elephant, as huge as a house, as monstrous as a monster, came gallumphing forth in a blind rage. Trumpeting her rage, seething at mine umbrage! I in defense could only hold up in mine leetle paw the talismanic familial stubby red pencil... with this poor weapon I slashed and I slashed at this monstrous thing, but I could not make a dent in it. This Beast roared in triumph... this Beast was .... MESSY ANNE RICE!!!
S'tan - LOL!!!
*applause* and brilliant!
*applause* and brilliant!
Hmmmm thanks hons but thank the Beast 'twas she who inspired the purple!
At the urging of my boyfriend, Chi Chi and numerous others, I've finally started reading Ms. Rice's magnum opus, THE WITCHING HOUR. I've never read any of her witch-related books, only the vampire ones.
In my own (unfinished) novel, I stand behind my recent decision to leave out a large backstory section on my principle character. All that backstory was self-indulgent, it slowed the action and my manuscript is now much better as a result of cutting the fat. Besides, it's the mark of superior writing to weave in relevant backstory details in more subtle, interesting ways during later chapters.
So imagine my surprise then at being confronted with some 40+ pages of mostly irrelevant backstory on the character of Michael Curry no less than thirty pages into the book. What was Anne Rice thinking? It became clear that she never wasted a SINGLE SENTENCE of her rough drafts, no matter how much it weighs down the art like an anvil strapped to the reader's ankle. Of course not having finished the book I can't say for certain which details of all that flatulent backstory are important and which aren't, but there is no way all that minutia can possibly be pertinent to the plot.
Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I am. Mind you I do enjoy melodramatic, wordy, flowery prose and soap opera. But come on.
That said, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the descriptions of the old New Orleans townhouse/mansion (its crumbling beauty -- how gorgeous!), the Garden District and San Francisco. Ms. Rice really loves these places so much that the locales become characters themselves in the story. I really admire that and emulate that quality in my own work.
Now, when do I get to meet Lasher? ....
(to be continued)
In my own (unfinished) novel, I stand behind my recent decision to leave out a large backstory section on my principle character. All that backstory was self-indulgent, it slowed the action and my manuscript is now much better as a result of cutting the fat. Besides, it's the mark of superior writing to weave in relevant backstory details in more subtle, interesting ways during later chapters.
So imagine my surprise then at being confronted with some 40+ pages of mostly irrelevant backstory on the character of Michael Curry no less than thirty pages into the book. What was Anne Rice thinking? It became clear that she never wasted a SINGLE SENTENCE of her rough drafts, no matter how much it weighs down the art like an anvil strapped to the reader's ankle. Of course not having finished the book I can't say for certain which details of all that flatulent backstory are important and which aren't, but there is no way all that minutia can possibly be pertinent to the plot.
Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I am. Mind you I do enjoy melodramatic, wordy, flowery prose and soap opera. But come on.
That said, I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the descriptions of the old New Orleans townhouse/mansion (its crumbling beauty -- how gorgeous!), the Garden District and San Francisco. Ms. Rice really loves these places so much that the locales become characters themselves in the story. I really admire that and emulate that quality in my own work.
Now, when do I get to meet Lasher? ....
(to be continued)
Oh, you'll meet him. And he will be NOTHING like you think he will be.
THE WITCHING HOUR ended up consumming a large part of my summer reading. Having finally met Lasher, he turned out to be a footnote to the whole action at the end and ultimately took a backseat to the great dynasty of witches themselves, the Mayfairs, a family I wish I'd been born into! I loved, loved, LOVED the Talamasca file on the family tree, the personalities like Julien, Mary Beth, Katherine, Marguerite, Stella, Antha, Diedre, Cortland, etc and the luxurious evil that unfolds like the petals of a poisonous rose. Their escapades and vast wealth, Julien's trade, Mary Beth's ruthlessness, the endless cousins and scandals, the parties .... I really enjoyed that part. You're right Daddy, Lasher was nothing like I expected ... thought I'd get another Lestat rip-off, but still did not find him as interesting as the witches themselves.
I also loved Micheal Curry's restoration of the great house on First Street. Like reading a series from Architectural Digest.
Not sure if I should continue on with books 2 & 3 (Lasher & Taltos), but will decide after taking a break to read something else.
I also loved Micheal Curry's restoration of the great house on First Street. Like reading a series from Architectural Digest.
Not sure if I should continue on with books 2 & 3 (Lasher & Taltos), but will decide after taking a break to read something else.
Lex, don't stop now. books 2 & 3 will continue to thrill you and there is a great big surprise ending that you will die for.
And if you can find it, read " Cry to Heaven". an early paper back she wrote under the other name.
And if you can find it, read " Cry to Heaven". an early paper back she wrote under the other name.
Lex, I agree with Bobby. The first couple o' chapters in Lasher will raise your eyebrows, to say the least, and make you love Mona.
And, Bobby, I think I read Cry to Heaven and Feast of All Saints within days of each other after having found and finished Witching Hour. I must have been 15 or 16 and soooo angry that I had to wait for her to publish what happened to Rowan. Reading the other books certainly let me know that there was wide world that I could get into after high school. The funny thing is is I was more agog at the relations in Heaven (read: men of the cloth) than any of them in the Witching Hour series, excepting the escapades with Mona - I love her. And What's-Her-Face, that blond hillbilly relation with the big boobs and the violet eyeshadow. I love her, too.
And, Bobby, I think I read Cry to Heaven and Feast of All Saints within days of each other after having found and finished Witching Hour. I must have been 15 or 16 and soooo angry that I had to wait for her to publish what happened to Rowan. Reading the other books certainly let me know that there was wide world that I could get into after high school. The funny thing is is I was more agog at the relations in Heaven (read: men of the cloth) than any of them in the Witching Hour series, excepting the escapades with Mona - I love her. And What's-Her-Face, that blond hillbilly relation with the big boobs and the violet eyeshadow. I love her, too.
I haven't read Anne Rice since Servant of the Bones, but this sounds like it could be quite good.
The Gospel According to Anne
The queen of the occult has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God"”and writing her most daring book yet.
By David Gates
Newsweek
Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Sometimes Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end"”and neither would you. Glass doors open onto a terrace that looks over the red-tiled roofs of La Jolla, Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in staffer brings meals to the table at the foot of her ornately carved wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone fireplace. She exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and enough books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The New York Times every morning"”"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me""”watches news "till I can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a half a day e-mailing with her extraordinarily faithful readers.
They've been worried about her. After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there"”and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and"”under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure"”of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.
Meeting the still youthful-looking Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill"”except that on a warm October afternoon she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing. And if you were expecting Morticia Addams with a strange new light in her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee," she says, beckoning you to where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth. "We're from New Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels"”three, she thinks"”could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."
To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship"”some of which she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it"”or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.
Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan"”smiling, then weeping, then raging"”Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.
Rice already has much of the next volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk about it.") But what's she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the best lines.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
The Gospel According to Anne
The queen of the occult has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God"”and writing her most daring book yet.
By David Gates
Newsweek
Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Sometimes Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end"”and neither would you. Glass doors open onto a terrace that looks over the red-tiled roofs of La Jolla, Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in staffer brings meals to the table at the foot of her ornately carved wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone fireplace. She exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and enough books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The New York Times every morning"”"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me""”watches news "till I can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a half a day e-mailing with her extraordinarily faithful readers.
They've been worried about her. After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there"”and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and"”under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure"”of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.
Meeting the still youthful-looking Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill"”except that on a warm October afternoon she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing. And if you were expecting Morticia Addams with a strange new light in her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee," she says, beckoning you to where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth. "We're from New Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels"”three, she thinks"”could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."
To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship"”some of which she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it"”or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.
Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan"”smiling, then weeping, then raging"”Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.
Rice already has much of the next volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk about it.") But what's she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the best lines.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
Well it will be interesting to see if she can persuade her following to follow her to church on Sundays.
Well it is just a baby step from muttering Hail Satan to Halleluiah'ing Jesus, isn't it.
Oh S'tan. Hail S'tan!
After writing about vampires, witches, ghosts and the Devil for so long (even mummies!), I suppose there was really nowhere else for her to go except to Jesus himself. (has she ever written a werewolf story?) I'll be interested to read her next effort. I think writing 25 books in 25 years is pretty awesome.
And FINALLY -- the gastric bypass surgery. Gorgey, hon.
And FINALLY -- the gastric bypass surgery. Gorgey, hon.
Hail Madge, Hail Lexxy,
Lexxy if you had a staff of 40 + people you would probably write a book a year too.
Barbara Cartland wrote 500 before she kicked off.
http://www.goodbyemag.com/may00/cartland.html
"She invariably wore huge pink dresses (pink 'helps our brain' she said), did her eyelashes with boot polish (which would not run, despite tears), sported thick coats of makeup, and carried a lap dog while riding in a white Rolls. "She grew old in a unique style that she thought graceful," the Times said. "Perhaps she simply did not understand the idea of caricature."
Now THAT's a writer!
Now that Ms. Rice n' Beans has glutted the alt.culture folks with her flatulent blather, now she can suck up to the Xian market... and sell millions and millions and millions more pages!
Maybe she will reach her orgasmic epitome of cashflow, and become required reading at Bob Jones University!
What a bloodie waste of trees.
Hail to the Gastric Bypass!
Hail to the Voided Bowel of Reason.
Lexxy if you had a staff of 40 + people you would probably write a book a year too.
Barbara Cartland wrote 500 before she kicked off.
http://www.goodbyemag.com/may00/cartland.html
"She invariably wore huge pink dresses (pink 'helps our brain' she said), did her eyelashes with boot polish (which would not run, despite tears), sported thick coats of makeup, and carried a lap dog while riding in a white Rolls. "She grew old in a unique style that she thought graceful," the Times said. "Perhaps she simply did not understand the idea of caricature."
Now THAT's a writer!
Now that Ms. Rice n' Beans has glutted the alt.culture folks with her flatulent blather, now she can suck up to the Xian market... and sell millions and millions and millions more pages!
Maybe she will reach her orgasmic epitome of cashflow, and become required reading at Bob Jones University!
What a bloodie waste of trees.
Hail to the Gastric Bypass!
Hail to the Voided Bowel of Reason.
"Hail to the Voided Bowel of Reason"!!!!!
Oh Stanley, she is not on your level that's for sure. But I just read about four pages (I'm saving it for Mexico) and it's good. Jesus is the new Lestat. The only prob is that it is about 200 pages of huge print. She probably wrote it in a week. I know I'm cheap but $30.00 is a lot to pay for an essay.
Bah!
Oh Stanley, she is not on your level that's for sure. But I just read about four pages (I'm saving it for Mexico) and it's good. Jesus is the new Lestat. The only prob is that it is about 200 pages of huge print. She probably wrote it in a week. I know I'm cheap but $30.00 is a lot to pay for an essay.
Bah!
Wow 200 pages of enormous print?
Is that to accomodate her new audience,
the born-again feeble-minded? I wonder.
Too much fame in this culture seems to destroy writers. I prefer her early work. I read "Interview" at least once a year.
Is that to accomodate her new audience,
the born-again feeble-minded? I wonder.
Too much fame in this culture seems to destroy writers. I prefer her early work. I read "Interview" at least once a year.
There is always the hope that Ms. Rice's effort will return the story of Jesus to the fiction shelves... where it belongs.
Well, I finished it. (in about an hour) I liked it. Of course I love that period of herstory. It's really not that much of a stretch for her. The Veil Of Veronica", "Servant Of The Bones", "Memnoch The Devil" this is not really that different for her. I don't know what all the hub bub is about. It's not at all "preachy" It's a typical Anne Rice historical novel. It's not her best writing and not her worst. What she does REALLY well is bring the day to day world of first century Jews to life. I loved that aspect of it. The biggest problem, obviously, is that we all know the story. There are no surprises. Of course we all know how it's going to end but even the little plot twists I knew from Sunday school. The only mystery in the book (and it's a pretty good one) is seven year old Jesus slowly trying to figure out who or better, what he is. I mean everybody goes through this but not everybody kills the neighborhood bully with the blink of his eye and then brings him back to life when his family gets upset. It's hard for little Jesus to figure out why he can cure a blind man or make it snow at the drop of a hat. And finding out that you are the begotten son of God by age eight is enough to make anyone crazy. It's all told in the first person by Jesus.
Very clever.
And if I'm spoiling the story for anyone...
You must have lived your life under a rock not to know this story.
Very clever.
And if I'm spoiling the story for anyone...
You must have lived your life under a rock not to know this story.
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quote:I mean everybody goes through this but not everybody kills the neighborhood bully with the blink of his eye and then brings him back to life when his family gets upset.
Well, they don't bring him back, that's for sure.