In preparation for the release of Sucker Punch in August, I recently completed a reread of the entire Anita Blake series. Every time I do this, I find myself wondering about different questions and I pepper my friends who are also fans with questions AND go on rants about primarily Richard but some of the others as well. There are books i seem to fly through and others where I slog through. Each time those books change, so I am not going to say which ones read slow or fast. So, here for your consumption is a list of things (passages) that spoke to me this read through not necessarily in order so you will have to search to find them: The practicalities of life do not cease needing to be done just because other things are going wrong. Love’s hard to come by, Edward; you should never throw it away just because it’s a bad idea. Either choice was a bad one. Multiple choice should have at least one right answer, but some people only come with wrong answers. Some people are like rigged tests where you can only fail. It can always get worse. The love of a lover, of friends, and of partners, of people that I never wanted to lose, and damn day. It was about home. Home wasn’t a place, or a building, or a tropical night full of flowers and rain. Love made home not out of boards and walls and furniture, but of hands to hold, and smiles to share, and the warmth of that body cuddled around you in the dark. comforting hands, our bodies that had made us all home, and the craziness of having too many people, too much going on, but what would we give up, who would we give up, and the answer, in the end, was not a single thing. Love is never about the object of our love, but always says more about us than them. no one knows you as honestly, warts and all, as the people who love you, truly love you.’ ‘True love means you love the real person, not an ideal that you have in your head and superimpose over them. I’d grown to understand that love, real love, is full of choices that make no sense, that should go horribly wrong, but you make the choice anyway. Why? Because love is different. I opened my mouth, closed it, and then shook my head. There was as sure where “here” was anymore. Because I had had a nasty shock and was all emotionally vulnerable; that usually made me want to either run for the hills or get angry and stay angry. You can experience trauma without getting stuck as the victim forever. You can choose to work the shit and rebuild yourself, or you can sit in the ruins and mourn forever. Sometimes there isn’t enough therapy in the world to fix a person, and that’s when you have to find another cure. There are so few true villains, just other screwed-up people who pass the damage on. The elderly will also begin to decline faster if they don’t have anyone to touch them. Patting someone’s hand, or shoulder, a hug, all of it is necessary to be happy and healthy for most people. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with sex; in fact, most of the touch that keeps us all going is as innocent as a newborn lamb frolicking on the spring grass, the thought of how close I must have come to losing the man in my arms scared me more than anything else. Sex was not a fate worse than death, because with life there was always hope. Hope that the big breakup wasn’t permanent. Hope that the issues that drove you apart might bring you back together again. Hope that you’d see their smile again, even if they were with someone else. Only death was final, and without hope; short of that, there were options. There’s a lot of ways to be smart; the kind that gets you straight A’s in school is only one way. It was like someone who is so used to being made fun of that they say the mean things first, try to make it their joke, so the bullies don’t get a chance to cut them up. It works, in a way, but it means the person saying the words internalizes the message more, because they’re the ones saying stupid, clumsy, fat, ugly —whatever the bullies might say. being in love makes people beautiful, and falling out of love makes you see the truth. It may set you free, but it’s going to fuck you up before it does. It was like someone who is so used to being made fun of that they say the mean things first, try to make it their joke, so the bullies don’t get a chance to cut them up. It works, in a way, but it means the person saying the words internalizes the message more, because they’re the ones saying stupid, clumsy, fat, ugly —whatever the bullies might say. being in love makes people beautiful, and falling out of love makes you see the truth. It may set you free, but it’s going to fuck you up before it does. love could be a cup that you both filled up with love, kindness, joy, sex, all the things that made you a couple, but if you could fill the cup up, you could also drain it dry with cruelty, sorrow, pain, jealousy, and anger. “Sorry, Damian, but it doesn’t make sense to me when I do it either. If something makes you happy you should just enjoy it and embrace it, but I’ve got a whole list of things that make me happy and I fought like hell not to enjoy them, not to want them, not to do them, because they didn’t match who I thought I was, or who I thought I should be.” Just tell me what she’s done, Anita. That should be awful enough to help us appreciate whatever happiness we can find. we must trust each other, for we are built link by link into a chain that is stronger together than as a pile of individual links. Your first lover gets a piece of your heart until you have enough therapy to take it back. But one thing I’d learned in therapy was that just because a feeling made no sense didn’t make you stop feeling it. “As much as I’d prefer the world to be black and white, yes or no, right or wrong, Nicky’s right: Sometimes you can be both,” Fear will bind you closer than love, or hate, and it works a hell of a lot quicker. So many traumatic events and your time sense screws up. Too much happening in too short a space of time. The trick would be to decide whom to be grumpy at, and what to do about it. I had been running on fear, adrenaline, and stubbornness for hours. In the quiet hush of the car I could feel my body. It was not happy. The hour after dawn is the most private of all. You’d think I’d get used to not knowing what the hell is going on, but I never do. It just makes me grumpy, and a little scared. If you keep the gun in your purse, you get killed, because no woman can find anything in her purse in under twelve minutes. It is a rule. Most people choose to think of themselves as white hats, good guys. A few people wear black hats and enjoy it. Grey was Bert’s color. Sometimes I think if you cut him, he’d bleed green, fresh-minted money. There was something a little frightening about a man who knew he was not a nice person and didn’t give a damn. It went against everything America holds dear. We are taught above all else to be nice, to be liked, to be popular. A person who has set aside all that is a maverick and a potentially dangerous human being. It takes real breeding to make a person feel like shit with one word. When in doubt, change your vocabulary. There was something a little frightening about a man who knew he was not a nice person and didn’t give a damn. It went against everything America holds dear. We are taught above all else to be nice, to be liked, to be popular. A person who has set aside all that is a maverick and a potentially dangerous human being. there are days when I think you can’t save anyone. When in doubt, take a deep breath and keep moving. Murphy’s law is the only true dependable in my life most of the time. I was the closest thing Edward had to a real friend. A person who knows who and what you are and likes you anyway. I did like him, despite or because of what he was. He had bet his life on my integrity, and that pissed me off. I hate to be used. My virtue had become its own punishment. Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. We had saved each other’s lives; it is a bond that sticks with you. Most hatred is based on fear, one way or another. Yeah. I wrapped myself in anger, with a dash of hate, and at the bottom of it all was an icy center of pure terror. A zillion brownie points for me. Women may get to wear lots of pretty colors, but men get the comfortable shoes. You never really filled in the hole. It was like a piece of you gone goes away. You deal with it. You go on, but it’s there. Only inhibitors in the brain prevent us all from destroying ourselves. No one had ever attacked me at home before, not like this. It should have been against the rules. You should be safe in your own bed. She had broken a rule. One I hadn’t even known I had. Thou shalt not attack the good guy in his, or her, own home. Coffee was my comfort drink. But I’ve been stared at by experts, so I was careful not to flinch. Sarcasm is one of my natural talents. Freud is so often at work in our lives. Hope is a lying bitch. It felt wet, like it had soaked through to the skin, but it hadn’t. It was a sensory illusion. People are seldom just one thing. There are fires that last for all eternity. Fires that make napalm look like a temporary inconvenience. I notice all sorts of things that go unnoticed during most of life. I could taste my calm, orderly pulse in my mouth like a piece of candy. For tension release laughter beats the hell out of tears. I had the urge to giggle, but that was the pain medication. I never giggle on my own. some drugs don’t give a shit if you need your body. You belong to the drug until it wears off, period. staying alive was the goal. Everything else was gravy. Best friends, a concept that most women never outgrow. If I ever managed to get married and my husband cheated on me, it wouldn’t be me to go missing. If you’re not ashamed, you don’t need to look away. hysteria gets you nowhere but dead. Worry about the things you can control; the rest will either work themselves out, or they’ll kill you. Either way, no more worries. you can be embarrassed or you can be aggressive. Truth, justice, and the American way certainly didn’t work within the legal system. Money, power, and luck were what worked. Anita. No matter what you do or how bad you feel about it, life just goes on. Life doesn’t give a fuck that you’re sorry or upset or deranged or tormented. Life just goes on, and you gotta go on with it, or sit in the middle of the road and feel sorry for yourself. I never doubted God. I doubted me. But maybe God was a more generous God than I allowed him to be. I felt that measure of calm that I sometimes got when I prayed. It doesn’t mean you’ll get what you asked for, but it does mean that someone is listening. If you can’t impress yourself, then no one else really matters. Why is it when you have a sure thing to bet on, there’s never anyone around to take your money? it used to bother me that I could be in such confusion, such pain, and the world just didn’t give a shit. The world, the creation as a whole, is designed to move forward, to keep on keeping on without any one individual person. It feels damned impersonal, and it is. But, then, if the world stopped rotating just because one of us was having a bad day, we’d all be floating out in space. I’d learned long ago that if you’re feeling unloved by the man in your life, the best revenge is to look good “The heart wants what the heart wants, Dolph. You don’t plan on making your life complicated, it just happens, and you don’t do it on purpose, and you don’t do it to hurt the people who love you. It just turns out that way sometimes.” I thought of several smart alec remarks, but you should humor crazy people when you’re at their mercy; it’s a rule. You can’t shovel other people’s shit for them, not unless they’re willing to pick up a shovel and help. There’s only so much emotional super glue in a person’s soul, after that everything just stays broken. It was a little like being in shock. Shock is nature’s insulation, the thing that shuts you down so you can heal, or sometimes so you can die without hurting, or being afraid. I guess you can’t undo all your upbringing, no matter how hard you try. sometimes guilt or habit makes you listen to those other voices—the ones that beat you down. Sometimes you just can’t shake them. “You ate the living darkness, Anita. It has given your own necromancy a power jump of near-legendary proportions. You raised every cemetery and lone body in and around the city of Boulder, Colorado last year, while you chased down the spirit of the Lover of Death, one of the last members of the now-disbanded vampire council who did not bend knee to Jean-Claude’s rebellion.” “You say rebellion. I say killing crazy motherfuckers to save the world from their plans to spread vampirism and contagious zombie plague across the planet.” “It would have been an apocalypse for the human race.” “But not the apocalypse.” “You mean the biblical one?” he asked. “Yeah, as in the apocalypse.” “You say that as if there is only one.” “There is only one.” “You have prevented two on your own. We have prevented more events that would have destroyed the planet, or at least the human population. Some of us lived through the last great extinction and the coming of the great winter.” “You mean the Ice Age, as in the real Ice Age.” He nodded. I took in a deep breath, let it out slow, and said, “Okay, some of you guys are old as fuck. Make your point.” “My point, Anita, is that apocalypse as in the great devastation or second coming of some religious significance has happened before and will likely happen again.” “I’m not sure we’re defining it the same way,” I said. “Perhaps not, but there really does need to be a plural for apocalypse .” A few years back I’d have argued until either we had a fight or the cows came home, but therapy had helped me realize that I could just let some things go. Real love is about consistency over time, battles won, battles lost, the pain, the pleasure, the sharing. Strength shared is strength multiplied. She just looked happy, and nothing makes someone as beautiful as happiness and being in love. No makeup or youth serum can come close to that beauty secret. Who wanted to be around a constant stream of negativity? I knew he would shield me with his own body, and the strength that would have scared me under other circumstances now became the ultimate comfort. I knew that all that energy and strength was now aimed at keeping me safe. The difference between prince and beast is often just a matter of how a man uses his strength and rage. Aimed well, it is a shelter that you can hide behind no matter how great the storm. Turned against you, it makes shelter into a trap.
Sometimes you need to embrace the suck and just go along for the ride, but sometimes you need to tell whoever is making your life suck to stop being a dick and do better. Tyburn was now on my you-almost-killed-me-so-do-better-or-let-me-drive list Part of wisdom is being honest with yourself,
Kill the queen Summer queens are fine and fair, With pretty ribbons and flowers in their hair. Winter queens are cold and hard, With frosted crowns made of icy shards. —Bellonan fairy-tale rhyme
I’d learned long ago that someone was always ready, willing, and eager to take away what little that I had. Not because they needed or wanted it, but just because they could, just because that sort of pettiness amused them
Sometimes in the arena, you killed your opponent in an instant. But other times, most times, you had to wait and plot and plan. You had to cut down your enemy one small, shallow slice at a time. Playing the long game meant being patient, inflicting the wounds you could along the way, and waiting for that perfect moment to strike and finally finish off your enemy.
Protect the prince
I knew exactly how important it was to spend time with the people you loved before they were taken away. I didn’t want to stand in the way of Sullivan reconnecting with his father, especially since Heinrich was so ill.
I wondered who would win in the end—or if the currents, people, and agendas that went along with them would suck me under and drown me for good.
Even though Gemma had survived, she had the same sort of scars on her heart as I did.
Whether you were rich or poor, noble or common, royal or not, someone always coveted what you had, even if they already had more than you. That was just the way the world worked, Because life can be a cruel, heartless bitch,” Helene snapped. “Because we should hold on to the happiness we have and not worry about what other people think of it, or especially of us. Because caring about someone occasionally means compromising something about yourself for their benefit and not your own. That’s what real love is,
Sometimes, the only thing you could do was decide who you could hurt the least.
In the interests of honesty I received an ARC through Netgalley. I read a lot of young adult books and was familiar with Sara Shepard from the Pretty Little Liars series. I read the first one and thought reading her first foray into adult fiction might be a good match.
Surprisingly, I did not enjoy the book. It seemed like it was just a slightly different story from Pretty Little Liars. Instead of high school students in a small Pennsylvania community it was set at an Ivy level university. Instead of text messages from a “dead” classmate it was a hack publishing emails from the university’s server. But the story was very much one I had read before from Sara Shepard.
I read a lot of adult mysteries and thrillers and enjoy having surprises and plot twists. This seemed overdone and was not really very exciting or thrilling. Just too overdone in my opinion.
I am in a pretty bad state medically, and WAAAAY behind on my reading, which has lots of people who know me extremely concerned as they know what a big deal it is that I am not reading, because I am definitely a book addict. I had one family member recently tell me on the phone that he knew how badly sick I was and that I was downplaying my medical situation because he could not imagine anything making me so sick I wasn’t reading. But I have to admit I gave a fangirl scream when I found out Jacqueline Carey is going back into the world of Terre d’Ange…
The last time I gave that particular squeeling noise was when I found out that the Pini’s were writing The Final Quest which was as much a source of sorrow as celebration. But I have a feeling that once the Pini’s finish this particular run, there will still be irregular publications keeping the universe still relevant and giving us all the portal into the world of two moons…. Ayooooah
Since the next book is currently in arc form I decided to do a reread…these are the things that spoke to me…
Touch the Dark
I usually did the Goth thing, or as close as I could get without looking truly awful—strawberry blondes don’t wear black well—but that was when I was working. I found out pretty early that no one takes a fortune-teller seriously if she shows up in pastels. But on my days off I reserved the right not to look like I was going to a funeral. My life is depressing enough without help.
My parents were an obstacle to his ambition, so they were removed. Simple.
. I was like some kind of poison—get anywhere near me, and you’re lucky if you just die.
My only thought was that, in a room full of vampires, it would be my luck to get killed by the only other human.
… it wasn’t a surprise. Where my life was concerned, I’d learned long ago that everyone wanted to use me for something.
Claimed by shadow
gave myself a mental slap. At the rate things were going, I was going to need therapy.
At this rate, I was going to be the youngest person ever to die from a stress-induced stroke.
“The only thing I want is a nice, uncomplicated life. With no one trying to kill me, manipulate me or betray me.” And where, if I messed up on the job, I didn’t get anyone killed
Embrace the night
Tomorrow there would be trouble and danger and pain, and I didn’t know if I would be smart enough or strong enough or capable enough to handle it all, especially now that I understood what I was up against. But I knew one thing: today, finally, something had gone right.
Buying Trouble
Gamelans don’t merely speak the truth, they rip away all the happy little lies we tell ourselves to mask it, forcing us to acknowledge it deep in our very souls. They make us face the raw facts about our lives, and most of the time, they’re not pretty.
Death’s Mistress
, I just stood there, swaying a little on my feet and wondering how paranoid a person had to be before she decided the toys were out to get her. But in the end, I shrugged my shoulders and just
. I realized that I wanted it to be real, all of it, wanted him to have cared about her, wanted him to care about me. And I was so very afraid that he didn’t. It was easier not to ask, to let the possibility last a little longer
A Family Affair
A lot of people believed that John had a death wish. Even some of those closest to him acted like they suspected it, despite denying it when anyone else brought it up. But it had never been true. There had been times when he could honestly say he hadn’t cared much, either way, but he’d never been suicidal.
Ride the Storm
You have to let go, Cassie.” Yeah, people had been telling me that all my life, too. To the point that I’d started to tell it to myself: don’t care, don’t love, let everyone and everything that matters slip away. Let life take them, let it have them, because it’s going to anyway, because that’s all it does: take and consume and destroy. It lets you feel happy so the pain hurts more, lets you have hope so it can crush it, lets you have loved so it can rip it away. You can fight against it, but it’s a trap, the whole damn thing. Better get used to it. But I wasn’t used to it. I’d never gotten used to it. I was tired of it, sick to death of it, and furious, so furious I could barely see.
So, most of the time I restrict myself to books 📚 because we all know that is my first love but every once in a while I come across something so amazing that I have to share it. For those of us who have long hair, it used to be that we would wrap a towel around and create our own turban. Then, someone came up with the idea to make a special towel and the turbo twist was born. There are a couple of variations, one with a button, another you could put in an elastic on the back and they have changed a little since it all started. There are microfiber or all cotton ones, some come in flannel.
But for the most part, they have stayed pretty much the same. This is actually an extremely large change. This product, which I bought at Walmart was totally worth the cost. Its made out of T-shirt cotton and it works well and is so soft … I higly reccomend it to anyone with any length at all. And just in case one of you doubts my veracity and my ability to judge this…
so as i was searching the internet for something entirely different i kind of stumble on a few things that i think some of you guys me like some of you guys may not and that’s o k because not everybody has the same opinion on about anything because then it would be a pretty boring world
For those of you who don’t start your day by checking there major paranormal authors blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook series pages, tumblr feeds and/or email lists and whom I have let down during my illness, I apologize.
Laurell K Hamilton’s Serpentine is announced for August 7, and given the long wait and the fact her posts on the blog seem to imply edits have been completed I’m pretty sure it will happen…
Katie MacAllister released the first book in a new series today with Fireborn and given that her books are always full of laughs and sarcasm, I cannot wait to get my hands on it… Oh and a Happy Book Birthday to her— may copies fly off the shelves and travel through the air with great speed to ereaders around the world allowing her to keep writing the books we readers adore…
Today is supposed to celebrate women around the world… And it’s a tough time to be a woman but hopefully we can make it a better world for our daughters… I have a dream of a world where women don’t have to work twice as hard for equal pay, where paternity leave is as common as maternity leave, and where women are celebrated for the fact that they give life and aren’t told that math and science are too hard to worry their pretty little heads about. A world where people look back in amazement that in 2018 1 in 6 women have survived an attempted or completed rape in their lifetimes… And to honor all that I hope you watch one of my idols and a person who inspires me…
If you don’t have the time to hear it live maybe the transcript will speak to you
I am a nasty woman.
I’m not as nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheeto dust. A man whose words are a distract to America; Electoral College-sanctioned hate speech contaminating this national anthem.
I am not as nasty as Confederate flags being tattooed across my city. Maybe the South actually is gonna rise again; maybe for some it never really fell. Blacks are still in shackles and graves just for being Black. Slavery has been re-interpreted as the prison system in front of people who see melanin as animal skin.
I am not as nasty as a swastika painted on a pride flag. And I didn’t know devils could be resurrected, but I feel Hitler in these streets—a mustache traded for a toupee; Nazis re-named the cabinet; electro-conversion therapy the new gas chambers, shaming the gay out of America turning rainbows into suicide notes.
I am not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege.
I’m not as nasty as using little girls like Pokémon before their bodies have even developed.
I am not as nasty as your own daughter being your favorite sex symbol—like your wet dreams infused with your own genes.
But yah, I am a nasty woman?!
A loud vulgar, proud woman.
I’m not nasty like the combo of Trump and Pence being served up to me in my voting booth.
I’m nasty like the battles my grandmothers fought to get me into that voting booth.
I’m nasty like the fight for wage equality. Scarlett Johansson: Why were the famous actors paid less than half of what the male actors earned last year?
See, even when we do go into higher paying jobs our wages are still cut with blades, sharpened by testosterone. Why is the work of a Black woman and a Hispanic woman worth only 63 and 54 cents of a white man’s privileged daughter?
This is not a feminist myth. This is inequality.
So we are not here to be debunked. We are here to be respected. We are here to be nasty.
I am nasty like the blood stains on my bed sheets. We don’t actually choose if and when to have our periods. Believe me, if we could, some of us would. We don’t like throwing away our favorite pairs of underpants. Tell me, why are tampons and pads still taxed when Viagra and Rogaine are not? Is your erection really more than protecting the sacred messy part of my womanhood? Is the blood stain on my jeans more embarrassing than the thinning of your hair?
I know it is hard to look at your own entitlement and privilege. You may be afraid of the truth. I am unafraid to be honest. It may sound petty bringing up a few extra cents. It adds up to the pile of change I have yet to see in my country.
I can’t see. My eyes are too busy praying to my feet hoping you don’t mistake eye contact for wanting physical contact. Half my life I have been zipping up my smile hoping you don’t think I wanna unzip your jeans.
I am unafraid to be nasty because I am nasty like Susan, Elizabeth, Eleanor, Amelia, Rosa, Gloria, Condoleezza, Sonia, Malala, Michelle, Hillary.
And our pussies ain’t for grabbin’. Therefore, reminding you that are balls are stronger than America’s ever will be. Our pussies are for our pleasure. They are for birthing new generations of filthy, vulgar, nasty, proud, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sheikh—you name it—for new generations of nasty women. So if you [are] a nasty woman or love one who is, let me hear you say, “HELL YEAH!”
I am a survivor in many ways. I’m a survivor of rape and the fact that just typing those words made me pause and wonder how my friends will take that admission and feel even the slightest bit of shame, tells me how far we have yet to go…
Please help me make a world where women are celebrated… And one(ok it’s really two) last thing to inspire you… Have you heard Patrick Stewart speak on violence against women? I was a trekkie (always gonna love me some star trek the next generation) but I fell in love with the person behind my favorite captain when I heard his response at comicon take the time to watch these speeches… It is time well spent
