Mostly Rambling about RotS and Anita Blake

Still feeling a little down but not too bad.

I called my mom and dad yesterday. I really don't call them often enough. It had been about two months since I last called but I saw them in person mid-Oct so it hadn't been that long since we talked. I called because it occurred to me that I didn't know if they knew I wasn't living in the same place anymore. So I called and let them know. When I told Dad he seemed to want to say something when I mentioned staying with friends until I found something more permanent but I interrupted him and changed the subject to how they were doing. They're fine though Dad's arthritis has been acting up due to the changing weather. Mom mentioned that my sister had called them but hadn't mentioned that we weren't living in the same place or that we weren't living together anymore.

I watched Revenge of the Sith again last night. Meh. It's still the best of the prequels but still doesn't come close to the greatness of the OT. How would I fix the prequels? I sometime think about finding copies of the shooting scripts and doing a rewrite but I'm trying to work on my own stuff so not going to happen. The first thing I would do is pull out all that Chosen One crap. The whole "bringing balance to the force" stuff is the main thing weighing down the prequels because it doesn't mesh with the OT. If you watch the movies in numbered order, it gets a lot of talk time in the first three movies and then in the last three no one mentions it. I would make the prequels about Anikin Skywalker, a hot shot pilot who was also a Jedi trained by Obi-Wan. He would just be a Jedi who gets seduced by the dark side and ends up destroying the Jedi order. The most important thing to me would be for Anikin to become Darth Vader in a way that flowed into the OT. Right now as the prequels stand I have a huge disconnect between Anikin and Vader. They just don't feel like the same character to me. I could go on but I think I'm in danger of ranting.

I've started rereading Blue Moon by Laurell K Hamilton. It's the eight book in her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. It's not as good as I remember. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I can see the slide toward more sex based stories. I really liked Anita Blake in the early novels. She was badass killing vamps and raising the dead in her day job. She wasn't falling into everyone's bed and when she started dating a guy he was a stand up guy who wanted to wait before having sex. Then she rejected that guy and went for the guy she had been rejecting from the first book. The began a slow but steady shift from her day job and police side work to vampire politics. This shift also brought with it an increase in sex. Sex is fine if it's there from the start. I read her Merry Gentry books, which had sex in them from the start, and enjoyed the sex in them. I read Anita Blake books for the badass vampire hunter who worked with police on supernatural crimes. That character has mostly stopped existing in the books after the ninth book. Now vampire politics drive the story with lots of sex thrown in. It's not the story I want to read. And I haven't been reading them. I read the tenth book and skimmed the eleventh and just couldn't connect with the story anymore. It's saddens me because I really did like the first nine books. So when I see a new Anita Blake book I want to read it and sometimes I peek inside but it's just so much vampire politics and sex that I just can't get in to it.

Ok I think I've ranted enough about that. Till next time.

Gilly