I have been posting a bunch of stuff under access lock, but I didn't want to ONLY do that, so

[cimorene]

• We've had a very stressful vacation, and so has Anubis, because his chemical castration implant wore off and he apparently has a ton of testosterone. He's going crazy: he's peeing on everything, up to like ten times a day, there's pee EVERYWHERE, he even peed on the bed with Wax in it and on the headboard above my head; he's upset and clingy and sad all the time; he must be tortured by horniness, but he doesn't really know what it is and he hasn't ever even seen or smelled an unfixed female cat since the onset of the hormones, so it's like an existential torment. Poor little guy. But our house has become unlivable because it is entirely made of water-vulnerable surfaces. He is going to have to go back to the breeders this weekend, and we don't know if he will be able to get over his aggressive hate for Tristana when he's fixed: we hope he might, but knowledge of the Cat World suggests this is a bit unlikely.



• Wax is back at work as of this week and as a result of the above, we finished very little of the home renovation stuff that we urgently needed to get done. Most urgently, there are windows that are nearly falling off the house, particularly some hard-to-reach second floor ones, that urgently need to be removed and restored before the glass panes fall out of them, but it's impossible to remove them from inside the house so... that's not great. We knew this as early as last winter, we've just been putting off trying to get them down and restore them because we're not sure how we can get up there with a ladder, if it's even possible, and we've never restored windows before and it looks hard.



• I have two months left of my work contract and I'm taking anxiety meds almost every day. Also terrified because I don't really know what to do next, or what's the best work to try to look for next, but I think we have decided the most urgent thing is getting a driver's license. I missed that thanks to all the above - we had it marked down for this summer vacation. So I will do that first.



• I have started reading the Mayfair Witches trilogy. It's not that it's more interesting to me than the vampires are, but after watching seasons 1 and 2 of Interview with the Vampire, I was afraid the events were too fresh in my mind and might feel a bit boring if I read it right away. (I know there were lots of changes from the books in IWTV, of course - Wax and I have discussed it extensively, as these were some of her teenaged favorite comfort reads, and she reread them all last year. Except not the later crazier ones, you know, meeting Jesus and the devil.) Anyway, we also started watching AMC's Mayfair Witches, and I was intrigued by obvious bad adaptation decisions. Wax herself was pointing out changes and saying she couldn't figure out the motivation for them. Also the screenwriting is just a lot weaker than in IWTV (I say this after 3 episodes, so if it gets better later, I haven't found out yet). But anyway, I decided to start there. The Witching Hour and Lasher, published in the early 1990s, are the first Anne Rice books I've ever read, and there are a lot of things to interest me there - I can babble more about it some other time. But the overwhelming dominant impression from these books is unexamined and incoherent Catholic obsessions, in ways that are very, very weird, and often very hilarious. The first book is so full of all these horrific images and motifs associated with abortion and stem cell research, an anxiety which was very of the moment in Catholic political rhetoric in the period, which I remember well, since I was a teeny and then a teenager and very politically engaged at the time. But they're ludicrously overblown and because they're so incoherent they really emphasize how inconsistent (contradictory) the anxiety and the underlying purported theology/ideology itself is, although you'd think that by being vague and half-allegorical it might instead have covered up for that some. The other thing is that it's really obvious that Anne Rice wasn't allowing copy editing, not just because the books have that vibe of fanfic posted with an author note that the writer stayed up all night writing it the night before just for fun (though these are longer so it must've been a binge of days or months, so presumably she did eat and sleep...), but because there are a lot of little homophone substitution spelling mistakes of the kind that a spellchecker can't catch but a copyeditor can. So weird to not even allow COPYEDITING! This is a woman who's been a successful novelist for decades at this point?! What was the copyeditor going to do to her sacred text? They're not there for critiquing your lazy, messy structure or incoherent themes. Like you can't even take 'Hey, it's not shear, it's sheer here, you're referring to its transparency'?

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I read some of those books when they first came out despite my vampire squick. I remember them being extremely atmospheric and weird and was impressed by how much Rice clearly loves New Orleans. But I don't remember much else about them. Because of said squick I never watched any of the movies or shows.

She really kicked off a Vampire Era in fantasy for sure.

Wishing you all the best with the cats and the job. Hurray for meds.

[cimorene]

Lol. Well, the Mayfair Witches doesn't have vampires, but I can't say I recommend it.

[torachan]

I never got as into the Mayfair series as I did Vampire Chronicles but I loved them back in the day. I think when I started reading them only the first book was out and I read the second and third as they were released.

[cimorene]

The writing does remind me of Mercedes Lackey and Ante McCaffrey, whom I liked at the same time, but being set within the contemporary real world is a big difference. There are some really fun and compelling things mixed up with some absolutely unhinged things and some awkward kinks and weird hangups showing, which is also similar to those writers' work. Though maybe a little more of the weird hangups in Anne Rice.