Book to Film - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

A lot of voracious readers I know have problems with film adaptations. They have their own ideas about how the story should play out, or want to see faithful versions in live action, or have very specific ideas about casting. I'm not one of them. Films are my second love, which pushed me to be a film major in college, so for me the two media are very, very different. I have different expectations from each, partially because I'm intimately acquainted with the film process, partially because they satisfy different needs in me.

Take The Hunger Games. I love both the books and the film franchise, but I know people who have problems with both. Some book lovers rebelled against the casting--Jennifer Lawrence, though wonderful, is not the physical type of Katniss at all, just as Josh Hutcherson isn't--while some film lovers preferred the plot choices made onscreen rather than those on the pages. I love both because I'm not trying to compare them to anything, which is where I think a lot of people fail.

But sometimes, movies manage to capture the beauty of the book. Last week, I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for the first time. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a French movie released in 2007 based on Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography of the same title. Bauby was the editor for French Elle when he suffered a stroke at the age of 43 that left him completely paralyzed except for his left eye. His brain was fully functional, putting him in what the doctors called locked-in syndrome. He learned to communicate by spelling out words by blinking his left eye. In fact, he dictated his entire biography like that.

It's an amazing story, but the film was just as magnificent. In order to recreate the feeling of being locked-in, the director, Julian Schnabel, shot the first thirty minutes from the perspective of Bauby, after we wakes up from the coma he was in from the stroke. He can't move, so people move in and out of camera. We hear his internal monologue, but we're as mute as he is when the people around him answer their own questions to him. When the doctor has to sew his right eye shut to keep it from going septic, we're there, in his head, watching darkness fall as it's stitched together.

It's a stunning choice. We don't even see what Bauby looks like until a half hour into the movie. By that point, you're so much a part of him, it's as jarring for us as it is for him when he sees his reflection.

The book is so much about communication and how we do or do not succeed at it that I wondered how a film would capture that quality. It does so in a myriad of ways. Through Bauby's internal monologue. In flashback scenes where we see the pieces of his life before the stroke. In the occasional dream sequence where he tries to recapture some of the sensations that are now denied him. Every single element works.

I can't recommend the book and movie highly enough. Both are beautiful, gut-wrenching pieces of work. They resonate on universal levels without becoming maudlin. Get the book. Watch the movie. You won't be disappointed.

Book Rec - Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

I don't tend to read YA. I don't seek it out unless specifically pushed to, because most of the themes explored don't really interest me. When I do read books that are classified as YA, it's usually because my daughter has told me to.

We saw the movie for Warm Bodies on DVD when it came out, but she didn't read the book until this past spring. Then, she thrust it into my hands and said, "Read this!" I didn't want to. We'd already seen the movie. I don't like zombie books. So I stalled.

I wish I hadn't. I haven't been this surprised by a book in a long time.

First of all, it's not YA. I don't care what anyone wants to classify it as. People who are trying to qualify it as a romance or a zombie book are missing the whole point of it, too. It's about the search of who we are and the lengths we'll go to retain the status quo because the whole world is too scary to deal with otherwise. Wrapped up in a tidy zombie package.

But let's get back to that. For those who aren't familiar with the story, it's about R, a zombie who lives at the airport. He's having a bit of an existential crisis, wondering who he was, what they're doing as he and the other zombies make a pseudo life for themselves at the airport. The Boneys, the skeletal zombies who seem to run things, make up families by pushing men and women together, then giving them children to complete the unit. R is a part of this but not, choosing to live inside a plane that he's filled with mementos he's scavenged from the nearby city. 

On an eating run, they corner a group of young people and he eats one of the men, a young guy named Perry. Since they get their victim's memories when they eat the brains, R starts experiencing Perry's life, as well as gaining a new fixation on Perry's girlfriend Julie who is also part of the group. R defends Julie, then smears her with his own blood to mask her scent to take her back to the airport to keep. But for what purpose, he doesn't know, and more, once she's there, they both start looking at the other person differently.

The book has been labeled a Romeo and Juliet/zombie mash-up, which in all honesty it is. The naming conventions (R=Romeo, Julie=Juliet, Perry=Paris, and their friends have the same correlations) are the strongest, but that's where the comparisons fall apart for me. Some people have focused on the romance between Julie and R, but that didn't strike me as nearly as central to the story as R's discovery of himself. He spends over half the book either talking to himself, experiencing Perry's memories, or interacting with a dream Perry inside him. This is about R's journey, not the fact that love somehow "fixes" him.

Plotting is not its strong suit. If you lay it out, not a whole lot happens. But what makes it transcend its stifling labels is the author's voice. Simply put, this might be one of the most beautifully written YA-classified stories that I've ever read. His voice is poetic and visceral, and I caught myself over and over again either gasping or sighing over his prose. It's wrapped in the zombie package, which means there's gore and violence, so if that bothers you, you might not enjoy it as much. I don't mind, so it worked for me.

But it's passages like this that sucked me in early: I dream my necrotic cells shrugging off their lethargy, inflating and lighting up like Christmas deep in my dark core. Am I inventing all this like the beer buzz? A placebo? An optimistic illusion? Either way, I feel the flatline of my existence disrupting, forming heartbeat hills and valleys. 

And this... if these staggering refugees want to help, if they think they see something bigger than a boy chasing a girl, then they can help, and we'll see what happens when we say yes while this rigor mortis world screams no.

There's so many more, I could go on for hours.

If you want to read this because you love romance or zombie books, you might be disappointed. But if you're interested in falling for a zombie in his search to be something other than what he is, I can't recommend this highly enough.

A Childhood Favorite - A Wrinkle in Time

One of my favorite books as a child was A Wrinkle in Time. I read it the first time when I was seven, and it quickly became a perennial favorite. I identified a lot with the awkward Meg, and the combination of family adventures, science, and philosophy called out to me in ways no other book ever did. I devoured the whole series. It was one of the first sets I bought in its entirety when I was an adult. It still holds a huge place in my heart.

Yesterday, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal about pages that L'Engle's granddaughter uncovered that had been edited out prior to publication. The pages elaborate on more of L'Engle's personal beliefs that add a more nuanced perspective on what she meant to convey with Camazotz. They're fascinating to read. If you have even a passing interest in the book, I highly recommend checking it out.

Meanwhile, I'll be pulling out my copy of the book so I can reread it this weekend. I believe I'm overdue.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Older characters in genre fiction

Romance is about the fantasy most of the time, which is why characters tend to be young and on the prettier side. That's not to say there's not diversity within that group, but finding protagonists that fall outside the norm isn't an easy task. Like having people in their 40s, 50, and upward as the central characters.

The same holds true for urban fantasy. I think the rationale is they need to be younger and fit to handle the badassery that usually comes with books like that, but it sounds like rubbish to me, mostly because I can think of plenty of people in both age demographics that defy that expectation.

So when I saw this article about why Harry Connolly writes what he dubs "attack novels," I kind of fell in love. He has an urban fantasy book with a heroine in her 60s. Guess who owns that now?

I adore protagonists that defy common tropes, especially if they're older. They bring wisdom and maturity that younger characters often lack, though in some cases, they can be more impetuous because they don't have the patience for stupidity or incompetence any more.

Do you have any favorites you'd recommend? I don't care too much about genre. I read everything from sci-fi to romance to mystery to western. What I care about is a good story and unforgettable characters.

Rec away!

Trash by Dorothy Allison

In 2009, I attended a night called Writers with Drinks in San Francisco. It's an event with a mix of writers that basically get in front of this crowd in a bar and read some of their work for ten or fifteen minutes. The only reason it caught my eye in the first place is because Adam Savage was presenting, and since my husband and I both love Mythbusters, it seemed like a fun date night. And it was. But not just because of Adam.

One of the authors there that night was Dorothy Allison. I'd never heard of her before then, though I'd heard of her biggest book, Bastard Out of Carolina. Adam was predictably funny, but she was the one I walked away most intrigued by. She was funny and smart, and from the second her Southern accent rang out through the room, I wanted to know more about her. I went looking for some of her work not long after and picked up a collection of short stories called Trash. Then it promptly got buried on my TBR pile (which really is that scary).

Until I was packing for EPICon. I took it with me to read.

Trash is a collection of short stories that all read like memoir. Allison has been blunt about her poor Southern upbringing, the abuses she suffered, and it's all reflected in these tidbits. The stories aren't overtly long, but each one reads like a new chapter in this young woman's life as she grows up surrounded by poverty, violence, ignorance, and shame, with momentary glimpses into true beauty, and then moves out into the world. They aren't easy reads. She doesn't hold back on anything. But her language is provocative, and her fearlessness in exposing everything, the good and the bad, is breathtaking.

There are a lot of stories about various stages of lesbian relationships. Allison came out in the 60s and was a part of the feminist movement in the 70s, so be prepared for those influences to permeate each of the stories. Sometimes, it's hard to keep each one separate, because the natural response is to string them together and create a single narrative (since the women in each are so strikingly familiar), but I'm not sure that's a detriment in the long run.

If you haven't read any of her work, I highly recommend seeking her out. She's a Lambda Literary Award winner and well worth it.

Cookbook Recommendation - Thug Kitchen

I'm a bit of a cookbook junkie. I love to cook, I love to try new recipes, and if something is pretty, I'll grab it. Seriously. I just recently did a culling because I was running out of room, and I still have 72 cookbooks I'm not ready to get rid of.

So when somebody recently suggested Thug Kitchen to me, I shouldn't have listened. I should've plugged up my ears, started whistling, and pretended I hadn't noticed. Except I did. And I went to Amazon. And I hit buy within sixty seconds of scanning the reviews.

It's a vegan cookbook, but I bought it anyway because my family and I are trying to get more vegetables in our lives in more interesting ways. It arrived while I was away, so I wasn't able to start trying any of the recipes until Tuesday. First on the docket was a simple quinoa oatmeal. I've been craving oatmeal lately, and I hadn't tried steelcut oats yet. It made the choice easy.

Verdict? Good. Easy. Try another recipe.

I picked out a recipe to fix for dinner last night that would require minimal shopping on my part. The winner was this roasted chickpea and broccoli burrito. It was a little heavier on the spices than I usually can tolerate, but I figured if it was too hot, I could just bury it in sour cream.

Turns out, I didn't need to, a fact I picked up on when I nicked a piece halfway through roasting:

Everybody devoured the burritos when they were done, even my thirteen year-old son. I am totally making these again. 

We already picked out the next recipe to try, a mushroom and spinach lasagna. I have high expectations.

But what makes this cookbook so much fun isn't just the recipes. It's the tone. For those unfamiliar with Thug Kitchen, it's unpretentious and no holds barred, definitely R-rated for language. I sat and actually read the first twenty pages of the cookbook (before the recipes) and laughed/smiled through the whole thing. It's a refreshingly blunt way of looking at vegetarian/vegan cooking, bringing it back to the food rather than the holier than thou atmosphere that often permeates this type of cuisine.

How can you not love a cookbook that calls salads, "plant nachos?"

Thorn Birds rant

I'm going out on a limb here by admitting until this past weekend, I had never read nor seen The Thorn Birds. I knew it was one of those beloved mini-series/stories that romance readers hold fondly in their hearts, and that Richard Chamberlain played a priest who had a love affair. That was it. So when I was sick Friday and Saturday, I curled up on the couch to watch it, in hopes I'd see what everybody loved and fall in love with it myself.

Wow. I couldn't have been more wrong.

I hated it. Well, maybe hate is a strong word. For the overall production and story, it was okay. What I hated, what made my skin absolutely crawl, was the so-called love story between Father Ralph and Meggie. It's not the performers' fault. It's the story's. I can honestly say, I just don't get why more people aren't completely creeped out by this relationship.

I have zero problem with priests battling their sexual demons. I'm not religious, I've written more than a few of my own religious figures who give up their calling for love, and frankly, I find forced celibacy a ridiculous, antiquated notion.

My issues arise with the fact that theirs is not a healthy relationship. In the slightest. Ralph forms what is obviously an intense relationship with a ten-year-old girl, and while he doesn't encourage or acknowledge any physical interaction until she turns eighteen, he has still spent the last eight years making himself the center of her world in a lot of ways. The feelings she develops for him in return are based on a child's adoration. There's definitely the feel of an Electra complex going on there, because her fixation on him never goes away. And I'm sorry, I just can't find romance in any relationship where one of the parties is only ten years old and the other is a fully grown adult who is very well aware of his physical appeal (because everyone under the sun needs to tell Father Ralph how beautiful he is, including Vittorio, Ralph's superior and friend) when it launches, whether it's platonic or not. In the movie, there is never any doubt Father Ralph has supplanted her own parents' role in her life. How can that ever be healthy?

Mary Carson, who is presented as a bitter old woman, sees the truth, and yet she's completely dismissed as being vindictive and jealous of their youth. We're supposed to dislike her for being the only one to recognize how intense and inappropriate it turns into? Nope, don't buy it.

All of that is a shame, because without that element, it's actually a very moving idea about mothers, their children, and the struggles between them as mothers fight their own feelings versus those they should have toward their kids. It's just too bad it's locked within this so-called love story.

Knowing the Basics

I hate to end the week on a rant, but I got one. I had a book that was a DNF yesterday, and the reasons frustrate me. I won't tell you which one it was because it doesn't really matter. It's a small book, with a tiny press, and I got it free on Kindle, so naming it doesn't do any good. It has its supporters with some positive reviews, but I'm not one of them.

See, I could barely get through the first three chapters. Not because the idea wasn't interesting (it was), or because the prose wasn't pretty (it wasn't, but then again, it wasn't that sort of book), but because of all the technical errors in it. More than just typos. More than stylistic choices we all might make for the sake of a voice. This was about glaring verb tense shifts, often more than one to a page, that made it impossible for me to get into the story. So I didn't waste my time. I gave up on it and deleted it from my Kindle.

What I honestly don't get is...why? Why do some authors think that it's okay not to know the basic tools of their trade? Don't tell me that's what an editor is for. I don't buy it. Editors are wonderful for a lot of different reasons, but their job description should never include, "Teach authors what verb-agreement is," or anything that includes basic grammar lessons like verb tense. Honestly, editors have enough to do already, and putting that burden on them as well is lazy, selfish, and unreasonable. Typos? Sure, we all make them, though I'd hope you'd send in a manuscript as clean as you possibly could. Occasional lapses in POV? It happens. But the fundamental tools of the written language should be the author's responsibility to know, and nobody is ever going to convince me otherwise.

This is your work. This is your craft. Every job has basic requirements, and writing is no different. Being able to come up with compelling characters and stories is only part of the package, and sure, there are people who don't care or can't tell when a story is riddled with easily fixable grammatical errors, but why is settling for that enough?

If you don't know basic grammar, learn. The resources are out there. If it's still too hard for you, find someone who does understand to go through your manuscript before it goes to your editor, and then--and here's the hard part for some people--listen to them and fix what's wrong before making your poor editor do half your job for you.

No Life for Pi

I had another DNF over the weekend. Life of Pi. It's one of those books that I always knew I should read but was never intrigued enough by what I saw to bother. I never saw the movie, either. I just couldn't muster enough desire to do it. But last week, I pulled the book off my TBR shelf and decided to give it a go. I lasted about fifty pages, which tends to be my marker on where I decide to continue on or give up on a book if I'm on the fence about it.

It's not that it was bad. It was interesting for the first few chapters. But as soon as he started in on the religious chapters, analyzing and exploring the various types and absorbing them into his life, I got bored. Very bored. Having long discussions about spirituality and religion is a major turn-off for me. It's not that I can't read about religious things - I'm currently reading Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan which has a Catholic priest as its central character - but that I don't want to be lectured or have it shoved in my face.

It's the lectures and dictating of morality that throws my hackles up. It just so happens that it occurs a lot with religious issues.

Sometimes I can overlook that kind of thing if I'm really into a character or the plot or the writing style, but I wasn't in this case. So I set it down and moved onto the next book.

Life's too short to waste on books that I don't care about.

DNF Books

Like a lot of readers, my TBR pile is insane, and it seems to only get bigger as I get older. I used to be able to whip through a book a day, but with kids, that doesn't happen anymore. No more curling up in a corner for hours. Now, it's constant interruptions - "Mom, braid my hair!" or "Mom, can I get on the computer?" - not to mention all the added responsibilities that suck away my free time.

Another thing that's changed? I'm a lot less tolerant on pushing my way through books that aren't working for me. It used to be I'd read it no matter what. Someone invested time in the book, so I owed it to them to see it through. I don't think that anymore. My time is too limited to waste it on books that I can see early on are going to annoy/bore/trigger me. I usually give a book a couple chapters to really hook me, and if I'm on the fence, I'll push through.

But my DNF pile has more books in it than it ever did before. And I seem to have a hit a slew of them recently.

The most recent one was a title called "The Yummy Mummy." It got great reviews, it's British humorous women's fiction, and it uses new motherhood as a platform. It seemed like a perfect fit.

It wasn't. I gave up after four chapters. I hated the narrator. That's not an exaggeration. Where other readers seemed to either find her funny or could identify with her, I found her self-centeredness attitude toward her child and the way she treated her partner absolutely appalling. I'm all for unlikable narrators - hell, I've written a few - but then the story needs to compensate in other ways. This one didn't.

I give up on books for other reasons, too. For instance, too many mistakes drives me absolutely bonkers. If I find more than a couple in the first chapter, forget it. It shows a lack of care for detail which I don't think is excusable.

So I'm curious. What makes you put a book down?

The Reference Shelf - Gay by the Bay

Like a lot of authors, I have a huge reference section on my bookshelves. Sometimes, I buy books because they catch my eye at the store. Other times, I get one for a specific topic. The problem is, once I use it for whatever purpose I get it, it goes on the shelf and I often forget about it. I got reminded yesterday when I had to go look something up and saw a ton of books that I've loved that I haven't looked at in too long, so I've decided to start a weekly post about my reference library, picking a book a week to share.

This week, it's a book called Gay by the Bay.

This isn't really meant to be a reference book. It's more a coffee table style book, with a ton of great pictures and minimal text, about the history of the LGBT community in the Bay Area. As a transplant, I didn't have the good luck to learn about it through osmosis, so when I saw this, I knew it was a must have. It's one of the best buys I've ever made.

It starts out with a short section on LGBT history prior to WWII. This was my very first exposure to Jack Bee Garland, a trans man who found ways to exist as a man, and illustrates how I best use this book. I knew nothing about Garland, and because this means to just give a very brief overview on its topics, I had to go off in search of more information. That's the gold mine here. As the history unfolds through the pages, old posters and photographs spark my curiosity, and I find myself digging around online to seek out answers about some of the names I find.

Even better, it's pretty inclusive. It's not just about the white gay male experience. It mentions the Gay American Indians (the first gay American Indian liberation organization) and the Gay Latino Alliance, there's extensive coverage of the lesbian community, and like the Jack Bee snippets, trans identities are well represented. Because it came out in 1996, it doesn't encompass current identities or terminology, but that's not what this is about.

What I love best about this book, however, is that it's not just about the politics. Yes, there's a few pages on Harvey Milk, and a whole chapter entitled "The Plague Years" about living with AIDS, but the vast majority of the text is dedicated to the people and cultural signifiers. There are private photographs, public posters, book covers, art exhibits, and so much more to paint a rounder picture than the usual political agenda. Because life is more than a headline. It's about how they exist from day to day, what they took pleasure in, how they found meaning in their identity in a world that didn't want to acknowledge they existed.

I highly recommend it.

Tons of Outlander goodness

I don't know about you, but I was hungry for the snippets that came out of ComicCon about Outlander. My sister keeps messaging me, sharing how excited she is about the show's premiere, which only makes me more excited. But how can I not be? The more I see of Sam Heughan, the more he seems like Jamie to me. Look at him!

So I was excited to see that they put the panel up on YouTube, too. I'm devouring every little tidbit of this show I can!

NPR Headlines

Two articles showed up in my NPR feed that I long to share.

First, there's the piece on how a beauty contestant has decided to wear her insulin pump on full view during the bathing suit competition. Yes, she's in a pageant, and yes, pageants aren't exactly forward-thinking, but put those aside to consider what it's actually saying. This is about acceptance for everything that she is. Having the courage to not hide what is a very real part of her life. This is to be applauded, regardless of the venue where her pump is on display.

Then, there was the Fresh Air interview about the book Trans Bodies, Trans Selves. I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. As soon as I did, I ordered the book. The information it contains looks incredibly valuable, regardless of whether you're a part of the trans community or not. Understanding what others go through is a big part of the battle in making sure they get the acceptance from society they deserve. I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

The Fault in Our Stars

My daughter left for her summer course yesterday. Before she left, she wanted us to see The Fault in Our Stars together, but that required me to read it first. So that's what I did last week.

I was unspoiled for it, but I suspected in the first chapter what would happen, so when I was proved right, I was prepared for it. My daughter expected me to bawl my eyes out, but that just didn't happen as I was reading. It did, however, happen on the last page with the bit about the eulogy. It wasn't the gut-wrenching experience she kept telling me was going to happen, but it was still a good book.

I didn't expect any of that to happen for the movie, and it didn't. Not that the movie wasn't good, but in all honesty, I just don't think Ansel Elgort is that good of an actor. I didn't particularly care for him in Divergent, either, and when his character is so pivotal, it meant I was emotionally disconnected from most of the movie. I don't find him very cute, either, so I can't even be superficial in appreciating him. Shailene Woodley was pretty good, and I was all right that they Hollywood-ized the ending. It still had tremendous impact and made Van Houten more palatable.

The scenes that did get to me? Laura Dern's. She played the mom, so it makes perfect sense that her anguish over her daughter's illness, when I have my own daughter sitting next to me, would resonate the strongest. The dad's pretty throwaway, which is a shame because I loved that he was portrayed as a man who could cry in the book, but Dern more than made up for it.

So I would still recommend the movie. It's pretty well done. My problems with Ansel are just my bugaboos, and not one person I've talked to about him or this movie has the same issue. The book is still better, though.

And reading it let me cross off the "book with a blue cover" space on my reading bingo challenge, which was proving to be a bear. :)

Recent reading

When I'm not really engaged in stories, it takes me forever to get through a book. After devouring the Corine Solomon series, my reading has ground to a near standstill. It took me way too long to finish two recently, though my binge of Solomon and the Divergent books over spring break still has me ahead on my goal of 52 books in 2014. That number makes me sad. I remember when I could've easily read triple that in a year. I just don't have the time right now.

Anyway, the two that took me forever to finish:

City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley: This one had me written all over it. Female detective set in 1940 San Francisco. It's meant to be hard-boiled noir with a female protagonist. Miranda's an ex-prostitute turned private detective with a slight detour as a war nurse where she lost the love of her life. So much potential, right? While the mystery was pretty good, it just took too damn long to get through it. The book could've easily lost a third without missing anything. It would've dramatically helped the pacing. But the author was too in love with long sections where Miranda just sits around or walks around musing on 1940 San Francisco or how miserable her life is. A little bit is good. A lot becomes redundant. Normally, I would give up after a couple chapters of this, but the problem with this book was that it would get really good for a couple chapters, and then grind to a dead halt with the navel-gazing. By the time I realized it wasn't going to improve, I was halfway through and needed to see how the mystery played out.

Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood: This is a flashback type of story about a woman who is nearly killed in a car accident who slowly rebuilds her life and tries to come to grip with the losses she's endured. Literary fiction and it got rave reviews, but while the prose was pretty, it was soooooooo slow. I would've given up after the first chapter if I hadn't been so intrigued by the premise (she'd been taken away from the priest uncle who was raising her after her parents were killed when there were charges of abuse, and thought him dead but then believed she saw a vision of him at her bedside when she was in the hospital). Others might enjoy it more than I did. The reviews are pretty uniformly very good at Amazon. It's probably just a not-for-me style. Pretty prose but bored me to tears for the most part.

Petals on the Wind

All right, I'll confess.

I watched Petals on the Wind last night.

I'm not proud of it. In fact, I'm very embarrassed that I succumbed. I didn't watch Flowers in the Attic and I didn't even know that they were capitalizing on the high ratings by putting the other books into production until two days ago when I saw Petals on the TV guide. Then, I snorted in disbelief, rolled my eyes, and forgot about it.

Until at 9pm last night, I was flipping through channels looking for something mindless to watch.

The Dollanganger books were the thing to read when I was in junior high. The Twilight books of our generation. Instead of sparkly vampires and pining werewolves, they had gothic horror and incest. I devoured them, I must admit. I related to Cathy in a lot of ways. Living in fear of your domineering grandmother while having no choice but to reside in her house? Check. Absentee mother you craved time/affection from? Check. Being responsible for younger siblings? Check.

And Petals was my favorite, probably because it was the soapiest of them all. Confession: I grew up on soaps and still watch General Hospital every day. The medium entertains me. The soapy aspects only bother me when I try and explain it to people who don't watch soaps because I know 100% how silly and extreme they are.

Worst part was, it wasn't even that good. Too much happens in the book to make it easy to condense, which means huge jumps in the plot and slippery characterizations.

Am I the only one who got suckered?

Vive la Difference Pax

On Sunday, the Vive la Difference Pax will be released at Amber Allure. I've got a rom com called What the Heart Thinks that's part of it, but there's another reason the pax should interest you.

Pepper Espinoza has a story in it, too.

For those not in the know, Pepper and I wrote together as Jamie Craig for five years, but Pepper took a large part of the last couple years off from writing to concentrate on real life stuff. This will be her first pax story in a few years, so that's definitely reason to celebrate.

On top of that, we're doing a little bit of writing together as well. Nothing long right now, but there will be a Jamie Craig story in the July pax.

But seriously. A Pepper story in less than a week. A western, which she excels at.

Get excited. I sure am.

Book rec - Encrypted by Lindsay Buroker

I got surprised by a book on my Kindle the other day. I try a lot of new to me authors when they have Kindle deals, but often forget about what I've got so I don't often have any idea about what a story is like when I start it. Encrypted by Lindsay Buroker was one of those.

Turned out it's a mishmash of sci-fi, fantasy, and maybe a little steampunk thrown in on the side. Tikaya is a linguist who helped her island people win a war against another race (that sees their advanced science as magic) by decoding their messages and giving them to their enemies. After the war, she goes into hiding until she gets kidnapped by their defeated enemy, for the purpose of decoding some artifact that has fallen into their hands. What unfolds is a very action-driven adventure, on sea, over mountains, through ice, with a little romance thrown in for good measure. I started out unsure about the author's style, but Wednesday, when I was a third of the way through its 100k, I hit a point where I just couldn't put it down and basically shirked other responsibilities most of the day to finish the damn thing.

I got on Amazon to find out if there's a sequel and discovered it actually has a sequel and a half, but more importantly, those two (and a half) books are actually prequels to a longer series that starts eighteen years ahead of this one.

Which means I now have ten books to read. Oops.

Anyway, if you like plot-driven sci-fi/fantasy with a geeky heroine and non-stop action, give it a try. The romance isn't that heavy-handed and it's highly compulsive reading.

Update on my Reading Bingo Challenge

My reading challenge for 2014 is going pretty good so far. I tasked myself to read 52 books this year, one a week, which works well for me because that gives me a cushion if I end up having a string of DNFs. So far, I've read 13, eight (or nine, if I use my free space) of which I can mark off on my Reading Bingo Challenge.

The books/squares I can cross off:

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas – non-fiction

600 Hours of Edward by Craig Lancaster – Number in the title

Origin by Jennifer Armentrout – one-word title

Nor Iron Bars a Cage by Kaje Harper – heard about online

Vertigo by M.L. Rhodes – non-human characters

Picture This by Michelle L. Levigne – female author

Best New Romantic Fantasy 2 edited by Paula Guran – short stories

Rose, Exposed by Afton Locke – second book in a series

This Is What Happy Looks Like by Jennifer E. Smith –  free space

I wrote a review of A Three Dog Life after I read it, but the other real standout for me was Nor Iron Bars a Cage. I think Kaje is one of the most talented m/m authors publishing today, and this story is a long (over 100k), wonderful m/m high fantasy with some great world-building. Even better, it's a freebie so you have no excuses not to try it. She wrote it for a Goodreads giveaway, and it's stunning what she managed to accomplish in the short time she had to write it. Her prose is lyrical without losing accessibility, and the characters in this are three-dimensional and glorious. A real angsty, slow burn. Highly recommend.

Legos and books

I saw this link over at Dear Author and just have to share, because it combines one of the things that has been all over my life this last week with my daughter's birthday, with my favorite thing in the world: Legos and books!

With the release of the Lego movie, the staff at Waterstones created famous scenes from books with Legos to put on display. Some of these are just so much fun, especially Pride and Prejudice. Go check it out!