Reality of a Prison Writer 27 E.C. Theus-Roberts
One of my favorite contemporary authors is Laurell K. Hamilton. Laurell’s Anita Blake series is an evolving, imaginative tale capable of achieving the same enrapture as Anne Rice’s “Interview with a Vampire”. The world Laurell created makes you long to be collected by Anita to battle nefarious Master vamps and rogue alpha lycanthropes. Whether under her nickname “the Executioner” or her guise as “War” of the Four Horsemen; accompanied by the lunar challenged or permanent liquid dieters. Each novel adds complexity to a fictional world strangely real and human.
This is one of the reasons she is one of my favorites. Anybody with a half-decent grasp of literary mechanics and an optional MFA can pen a good story. Memorable, enchanting writing requires love and passion. You can breathe the passion in her writing, for each character—villains and heroes and lovable sidekicks—their lived experiences and its entirety. It’s easy to see Laurell lose herself in each novel just as every reader does.
It’s love that allows a writer to turn a novel in an over-abused genre into a genre defining work. When Anita Blake is no more thousands will mourn. Every novelist should aspire to such. Writers become transcendent when the literary landscape, for absence their contributions would be noticeably less and dimmer in a real yet unquantifiable way. The revered authors, our true literary Olympians, aren’t those who dedicated a lifetime solely to fail at producing the ever-elusive, one perfect story. Rather the greatest writers of all time have simply put all their love and passion into their work, be it one novel, play poem or dozens of works.
Prison Writers Support Organization 