I'm surprised an actual condition could underlie her obsessive description of minor physical details, reactions, and trivialities. Actually, the MORE surprising thing is that it's linked to her emotional disconnection, of all things.

I think your reason for why LKH has problems with Merry Gentry makes a lot of sense.
Merry just has fewer issues in general. Almost as importantly as the lack of sexual issues, she doesn't have Anita's social hang-ups because she COMES from a culture where the way her mind works is the norm (and is 'far too Seelie', if anything).

I'm just wondering if this book will arrive VERY much after deadline, self-published, or not at all. I don't know if someone so focused on turning her stories into her fantasy-life blogs can yank her head out of that mindset enough to write a character with strong differences from her current self, even if the character is her self-insert in most every other way.


(...The retroactively funniest thing in the Merry books is that Andais is essentially a more intelligent Anita several centuries down the line. She obsessively keeps a harem, tortures any men who resist into compliance, takes disproportionate offense at minor slights, thinks Merry is ruining her darkity-dark sithen with her vanilla Seelie magic, displays an insane jealousy of any women who get near her men, occasionally uses her sexuality as a threat against those under her power...

Irony indeed.)

In the Anita books, LKH writes like someone defending doing something she really doesn't want to do. I hope that's because Anita really doesn't want to do this stuff.
*grimaces* I hope that Micah and Nathaniel's increasing creepiness is because they're 'receiving character development' for much the same reason. I really don't want to think about the implications of LKH's fictional avatar being consistently manipulated and taken advantage of Jon's fictional avatars otherwise.