Anne Rice, what are you ON?

I nearly fell off my chair in disbelief at Anne Rice's reaction to critical reviews of Blood Canticle on Amazon. She replies, in a big fat tantrum the like of which I have rarely seen, to the people who have posted 'outrageously negative' comments:

"You are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective. Indeed, you aren't even reading it. You are projecting your own limitations on it."

Sorry, you can't say that, Anne. You can't say that people are reading your books the wrong way, or that they should only read them with the correct perspective snapped firmly into place, like a set of swimming goggles.

"And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself. I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status. For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance."

No one is that good. Still, it gave me a badly needed laugh after a morning spent in a seminar on focus groups.

ETA: although it strikes me that laughing might not be entirely fair. On second reading her diatribe suggests that she's not quite right, somehow, mentally.

Recent GO drabbles

The Tortoise - Good Omens, for daegaer


Aziraphale kept it in a wooden box packed with wool and straw. Cold and wet outside, it slept till winter left then woke to blink with black fruit-pip eyes at the light, and to chew on expensive salad leaves that the angel poked into its mouth.

'Why do you bother?' Crowley asked every spring, always at the same time passing a finger over its quilted and whorled shell, over the little claws on its feet. 'It can't talk, or do anything.'

The tortoise had reached 110 years and it pierced Crowley with a sour stare.

'I love it,' Aziraphale replied.



Sex and death - Good Omens/Sandman, for for enigel


Sex and Death: Crowley knows them both intimately, now.

She's getting ready to leave. He can't feel her skin very well-- it’s as slippery and elusive as the trickle of silk over his fingers.

Still, he strokes her naked back as she pulls socks on.

'Stay a bit longer?'

Playing it cool, but her smile tells him it’s not working. Death leans over and kisses him, slowly and thoroughly.

'It's Destiny, I'm afraid,' she says, eventually.

'Oh. Him.' Deflated.

'We won't meet again,' says Death. She goes, with a sweet, childish wave.

'Not ever,' he says, to his empty bedroom.



The reason why Crowley had to get out of bed at the end of the 19th C - Good Omens/Sherlock Holmes, for daegaer


A letter fell to the doormat, the name and address smudged and splotched: the work of an impatient hand.

Crowley ripped it open, curious. Reading it, he laughed, a high-pitched breathless sound of disbelief.

'You were surprisingly easy to find. It took me only an hour. Take more care ...'

Holmes had warned him on that warm night in Paris: 'I shall keep one eye fixed firmly on you, always.'

But it didn't matter, did it? Holmes would soon be gone.

His stomach twisted, remembering how it felt to be the focus of such brilliance, examined minutely.

Found wanting.

***

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