Wicked Wenches

(Argh. I’ve just lost a nice post I was writing. So I’ll try to recreate it. *sniff*.)

All authors are readers. If we didn’t read, we wouldn’t be able to write. It’s that simple.

Occasionally I will review a book, good or bad. If you want to read any of the reviews, they are here.

That said…

Have you ever read a book and then wished you hadn’t? One that gave you mixed feelings once you put it down – or even before you picked it up?
I just did. (You can read the review here. No spoilers.)
And I wish it for none of the usual reasons.
I wish I hadn’t read it, because… Reading the story was like finding out about a dirty secret you knew existed – and then not knowing what to do with the knowledge once you have all the gory details.
Acheron (Sherrilyn Kenyon) is the book I wish I’d never read, even though I desperately wanted to read it, and I truly like the book.

I fell in love with Ash the first time I ran into him in Sherri’s Dark Hunter series. He was dark. Awkward. Mysterious. Larger-than-life. Even mischievous at times. But lovable. There was a secret hanging over him and throughout the series you catch glimpses, but never anything more than that. You kind of get the gist of what he is, but you never know for sure.
Well.
Now I know.
I’ve had the book sitting here since last Monday. I kept looking at it. Wanting to read it desperately and yet… I didn’t. It’s not a book for the squeamish, it’s full of torture, pain and heartbreak. You get to see into Ash’s head and get to know him. It was a difficult book to read, for me. Not because it’s badly written, or the story is bad. It was because it took down the wall around Ash. The trouble is, knowing him destroys the mystery about him. He’s still awkward, guarded and mischievous – but the mystery is gone.
I read the book in one (almost one) long sitting (736 pages!), only put it down when my eyes started to droop at 2am, with 200 pages to go, and I was up with the chickens to read the rest. I resented needing to go to the bathroom (with the book…), hated to go eat (with my nose in it), but us mere mortals need to get some shut-eye when the lids can’t even be held open by matchsticks.

And even while I read, my thoughts were, dang… I don’t want to know all this.
I liked the heroine. And I resented the hell out of her. She took Ash away, and that’s why I resent her.
(I did mention I’m nuts, right?)
Well, you know what I mean, right?

Do you ever review books? Or do you rather keep your opinions to yourself. (I’m biased about Sherri’s books, so I don’t normally write down what I think about them.)

I’ve written some vitriolic reviews that tore books apart. Lindsay McKenna is one of the authors I refuse to read. "Unforgiven" was unforgivable to me. I hated it, I even threw the book at the wall while reading it, and let me tell you… I don’t normally do that. I have 2 more of her books on my shelf. I glanced at the first one and put it back, because it was more of the same tripe. Never even opened the third. The only reason I have it is because I wanted to collect the entire Nocturne line. Even so, I might make an exception if there is another one and not buy it.

Then there are books where I’d love to laminate every page for posterity, because I love it so much.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café (Fannie Flagg) is one of those. It’s not romance, far from it. I guess the term would be Chick Lit, but I abhor that label and it doesn’t belong on that book. If it were up to me that term would be stricken from existence.
Fried Green Tomatoes is a book about survival. It’s about life, about growth, about midlife crisis, about women. And about BBQ Sauce. It’s one of those books where you cannot help falling in love with the characters and rooting for them, and laughing with them, crying with them. Be that the 80 year old telling the story, the bee charmer, the middle aged woman trying to find herself, or anyone around them. I rooted for all of them, loved all of them and wanted to take them home with me.

So, what is your favourite book?
Did you review it?
Do you get books based on reviews?
Word of mouth?
Or just blindly pick them off the shelf because you like the cover?
Or the blurb?

I do all of the above, actually.

I try to add a new author every now and then, and I occasionally drop an old favourite. I got bored with Christine Feehan’s "Carpathian" series, but I picked up Gena Showalter’s books about some cursed guys purely from a blurb. I love Kresley Cole’s books, too, that one I picked up because of a combination of cover and blurb. I picked up Anne Bishop’s Jewel series because someone recommended it to me. I bought her Ephemera Series… because I loved the Jewels.

I dropped Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita series a long time ago, when the sexual tension turned into depraved sex, instead. Haven’t read another one since, and I’m not interested in reading any again. All it took was one book too far. Same with Stephen King. I dropped Jude Deveraux from my list of favorites because I didn’t like the books she wrote anymore. Her (and Johanna Lindsay and Judith McNaught) books are still on my keeper shelf though.

Well, that’s how I feel about what I read. J

How do you feel about it? How do you pick your books? Why do you drop authors? And if you do — do you ever go back?

A few years ago, a critique partner suggested I give the YA market a try. She said I had a youthful voice and it came through in my writing. Now since I loved writing the hot stuff as much as the sweet stuff, it took me a little bit to think about what she said. Then all of a sudden, I had this idea about a teenage sorceress written in diary format that I knew would work as a young adult tale. I wrote it, and found it was much fun for me to write as the grown up stuff .

Now as a teenager myself, I read a lot of Judy Blume. I loved the fact that she didn’t shy away from the taboo subjects, like teenage sexuality. In most of her teenage geared books, with the exception of Forever, sex was mentioned, but the main characters just didn’t do it. Her main characters were very real to me because of this. Because they went through all the same emotions I went through. Currently, I’m reading her Fudge and Peter books to my son now, which are geared towards younger kids, and I’m happy to see that the work still holds up. It’s as much fun for me to read now as it was when I was a kid.

I think I was about sixteen when I discovered the work of Christopher Pike. His teenage paranormal tales were fantastic and I still love reading them. The Remember Me series written from the POV of a teenage girl ghost are all fantastic reads. Maybe that’s why all of my young adult tales seem to lean more towards the paranormal, because reading his stuff inspired me to go that route.

My current project is actually inspired by my son, PJ. The little man asked me why I never write anything that he’d want to read. I told him about my uncompleted manuscript about a teenage boy vampire slayer, and he said that would only be fun to read on Halloween. Leave it to PJ to be so honest and blunt . Then I got to thinking about what PJ likes. He loves space, science, rockets and wants be a rocket scientist when he grows up. So, I came up with an idea for a Science Fiction Young Adult Romance with an alien princess heroine and a fourteen year old hero, who like PJ, wants to be a rocket scientist when he grows up, and I told the idea to my son. He loved it. We read the first chapter together after I completed it, and PJ loved it too. He even gave me some great suggestions.

I really think the key to writing a great young adult tale is to not overload with slang, but still keep the attitude young. And really a great young adult tale is something that people of all ages will enjoy. Just look at Pixar Studios and their movies. Yep, they are animated and generally geared towards kids, but hubby and I have seen all the Pixar movies at the theater and loved all of them, even the ones that came out before we had our son. That’s what I want to do with my writing. Write a fun tale set on Earth and worlds beyond that transcends the age boundaries. I hope I’ll get there, because if I do, I can get one or more of my tales published .

I used to write vampires. A lot. I got deep into it all, did research, read everything I could get my hands on.

Which Vampire stuck out for me?

None of them. All of them.
Even Vamps have the good, the bad and the downright horrible. There’s Sebastian, in Michelle Hauf’s Dark Rapture. The musician… and, oh, he’s SUCH a fiend! He’s not nice. Not really. I love him to bits.
There are the vampires in J.C. Wilder’s series. Damn, I loved them. I really did.
There’s Nosferatu. Now, that fiend couldn’t be called romantic or nice, or sexy by any stretch of the imagination — but I still like him.
Laurell K. Hamilton’s Jean-Claude… I will never forget that bathroom scene. But alas, here is a writer who has gone too far for my tastes. I used to read everything she put out — then I read Narcissus in Chains (I was already apprehensive after the previous one) and that was the end of it for me. I just couldn’t get into it anymore. Where earlier there had been sexual tension, we now had the other extremes which looked too much like orgies. It turned me off an otherwise very well written series.
Silhoutte Nocturne has a series within the series — Bewitching the Dark — which puts a great slant on what hurts a vampire.
Kreseley Cole’s Vamps are kinda cool too, but her books span so much more than just vampires.

There are a lot of facets to Vampires, I haven’t really found one I didn’t like and I can’t wait what others will develop. I don’t really have a favorite, other than I like them dark and a bit nasty. Vampires shouldn’t be nice. They should have an agenda. They are predators after all. It’s a bit like taming a wild beast, with a bloodsucking evil minion from Hell being possibly the most dangerous of all the beasts you could try to tame. It might just end deadly.

But if I absolutely have to pick one… At the moment it would be Michelle Hauf’s Nikolaus Drake, who got suckered when he drinks from a witch who got drenched in a love potion. The whole concept made me giggle, and watching a lovesick vampire try to romance a witch who’d rather kill him… oh my. LOL.