Between the Letters--Christine Pope's DarkAngel Book Tour

I discovered I'd gotten ahead of myself in posting letter-themed posts, so today I'm going to do a little D-love.  Prizes are Amazon gift cards--which are always the right size and the right color. Get the details of the giveaway here along with paper and ebook copies of DarkAngel, the first in Pope's new series about "the witches of Cleopatra Hill."

Here's the blurb:

As the future prima, or head witch of her clan, Angela McAllister is expected to bond with her consort during her twenty-first year, thus ensuring that she will come into her full powers at the appointed time. The clock is ticking down, and her consort has yet to make an appearance. Instead, her dreams are haunted by a man she’s never seen, the one she believes must be her intended match.

But with time running out, and dark forces attempting to seize her powers for their own, Angela is faced with a terrible choice: give up her dreams of the man she may never meet and take the safer path, or risk leaving her clan and everyone in it at the mercy of those who seek their ruin.

the giveaway ends tomorrow night so be sure to stop by.

N is for Nordic Noir

I have never been to any Scandinavian country, but I love the sub-genre of mystery known as Nordic Noir. I am particularly fond of the "Harry Hole" books by Jo Nesbo (N is for Nesbo) and Jussi Adler-Olsen's Dept. Q books.  I'm not alone in my affection for these mysteries. There's a list of almost 300 titles in the genre on Goodreads and some of my favorite books aren't even on there. If you're looking for a place to dive into the chilly waters of this genre, the Goodreads list is a good place to start.

M is for Michael Malone

Michael Malone wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Handling Sin. It is an absolute joy of a book, a story about friendship and family, and it has a wonderful sense of place. it's a book that would make a great movie and I think that David S. Ward, who wrote The Sting, has done a draft of the script.

I also like Malone's mysteries featuring Cuddy Mangum and Justin Saville V. Like Handling Sin, they're set in North Carolina (Malone was born in Durham) and he nails the Southern thing.  Malone's characters are really
wonderful and his books are a pleasure to read. And in looking him up for this blogpost, I discovered he wrote a book a few years ago that I didn't know about. So now I have the pleasure of reading something that promises to be a pure pleasure.

M is for Murakami, Haruki

Haruki Murakami has been criticized for his "surrealistic and nihilistic" fantasy by some Japanese critics, but for me, that's what makes his work so wonderfully original and engaging. Also, my first encounter with the novelist was through Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which was a lovely story filled with hope and beauty. It's a book I recommend to friends who don't really read "lit fic" and they've enjoyed it. I know a producer who's trying to bring this novel to the screen and I hope he succeeds because it would make a really beautiful movie. (I was not a huge fan of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, but wasn't it gorgeous? The right director could turn Murakami's work into something visually stunning to compete with the superhero movies and the giant robots.)

L is for Lee, Tanith

I like my name. "Katherine" is a great name. It pairs well with almost any last name and it's been pretty popular throughout history. But the first thing I thought when I encountered Tanith Lee's writing was that she had one one of the great writer names. How cool is the name "Tanith?" Who wouldn't want to be named after a sky goddess? According to Wikipedia, Tanith has written 90 novels and more than 300 short stories. I found her about midway in her career, and was just stunned by the many different kinds of fantasy she wrote. The first book I read was her novella, To Kill the Dead, which came in a double-book from the Science Fiction and Fantasy book club. (I loved all those mail order book clubs, especially with the "get ten books for a dollar" come-ons.)

To Kill the Dead was my gateway drug to the Lee's work and over the next year or so, I read pretty much every book she'd written. Then I started tracking down the short stories. When Joy Sillesen, Joanne Renaud, and I started Dark Valentine Magazine, Tanith was one of our inspirations and the first issue featured an illustration of her namesake goddess. 

I love Tanith's gorgeous writing style which in other hands could have been just so much purple prose. I love some of her titles--Drinking Sapphire Wine is a particular favorite. I don't remember the plot of that book now, but I do love the title. And a lot of her covers are gorgeous. The book that I've most often wanted to see turned into a movie is her book The Silver Metal Lover. It was YA before YA was really a "thing.' And what most fans of the book may not know is that there's a sequel to it. If you're a fan of dystopian futures and star-crossed lovers, check it out.

K is for Katherine Kurtz

Now that Game of Thrones is a huge success, and in the wake of the tremendous success of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movies, I want someone to finally take note of Katherine Kurtz' Deryni Chronicles. I loved those books and read everyone of them, including the offshoot novels about Camber of Culdi. Here's a site where you can see cover art and read synopses of the books which have all the intrigue, magic, and complicated family relationships you could ever want.

I'm also a fan of Kurtz' lesser-known novel Lammas Night, which is set during WW2 and deftly mixes magic and the mundane in a story that feels real, even though it's about a coven of witches who band together to save their country from a German invasion. Read the book and imagine Prince Harry as the novel's heroic prince.

K is for King, Stephen

There are people (usually people who haven't read much of his work) who get snarky about Stephen King. They like to pigeon-hole him in genre categories (because they think people who write horror or any other genre fiction aren't really very good writers).  These people are missing out. 

I believe that King is the Charles Dickens of our time and I especially admire him for his amazing characters. I could list dozens of memorable characters but I think anyone who wants to understand the art of making an unsympathetic character sympathetic should read Green Mile. If you know the story, you know that one of the characters is a child murderer (and worse). And yet by the time he suffers his terrible fate, I was crying. Yes, Stephen King made me cry.

I'm glad I started reading him when I did because his body of work is now so large that I'm not sure I could ever catch up. And when he announced his retirement a few years back, I was one of those who raised a chorus of "OH NO!!"  He really is the hardest working man in fiction. And speaking of, his book about writing (On Writing) is a must-have, but the notes he writes in his short-story collections are really fascinating.

Silly as it is, I always kind of liked the idea that his birthday (September 21) was like mine, only backwards (September 12).

J is for James Joyce

I have read James Joyce's masterwork Ulysses. And honestly, all I can remember of it is Molly Bloom's joyously sensual "soliloquy of yes." I saw it performed as part of a one-woman show called James Joyce's Women and it was amazing. Hs novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his short story collection Dubliners are much more accessible. I'm pretty sure I've read Finnegan's Wake also but it's been erased from my memory as completely as if it was never there. Pity. Because I'm pretty sure I'll never revisit it.

If you don't know the soliloquy, here it is.

J is for Jackson, Shirley

I revere Shirley Jackson. I think "The Lottery" is a dandy short story but for my money, The Haunting of Hill House is the best haunted house novel ever written--and I've read more than a few.  And just in case you're looking for some haunted house stories, here are some I've read and recommend:

Stephen King:  The Shining

Okay, technically, it isn't a haunted HOUSE story, but let's not quibble.

Susan Hill:  The Woman in Black

I was a bit  disappointed by the movie, although I thought it was wonderfully eerie and atmospheric. And Daniel Radcliffe is picking interesting parts post-Harry Potter.

Dorothy Macardle: The Uninvited

I saw the movie version of the book (which was published in 1941) and the ghostly special effects were terrific.

Alexandra Sokoloff:  The Harrowing

I'm a big fan of Sokoloff's writing, and I enjoyed this haunted college story tremendously.

But we were discussing Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House.  I went looking for an imaage of the novel's cover and found a whole lot of them, some of which seemed wildly off the mark, like this one that looks like it might be an English comedy of manners. (The cover at the top left is the cover of the edition I remember reading. I bought it used for ten cents at a local library sale.)

The writing in this book is just so beautifully done. Chilling and simple (like "The Lottery") and yet also poetic, especially in the final words.  If you've never read this book, read it.

I is for "I Hear America Singing" by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman and his friend  Peter Doyle

I don't read much poetry now. Just about the only poetry I've read since leaving college is the poetry of Pablo Neruda--I was introduced to his work by a poetry placard on the bus--and Seamus Heaney's gorgeous version of Beowulf.

When I was in school, though, I had a really interesting course in which we read John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Studs Terkel's book Working (I was a big fan of his kind of journalism) and the poetry of Walt Whitman, specificlly "I Hear America Singing." (We also read Carl Sandburg's poem about Chicago.) I liked Whitman because he wasn't sing-songy. He used words like a painter uses pigments and when his masterwork, "Leaves of Grass" came out, it was labeled obscene when in fact it was simply sensual.

H is for "His Wife's Deceased Sister"

I ran across the short story, "His Wife's Deceased Sister" a few years ago when I was participating in Brian Lindemuth's "Short Story a Day" challenge. It was written by Frank R. Stockton.  If Stockton's name sounds familiar, it's because he wrote "The Lady or the Tiger?" one of a handful of short stories that almost all American kids read as children. ("The Most Dangerous Game," "The Ransom of Red Chief," and "To Build a Fire" are several of the others.)

"His Wife's Deceased Sister" is about a writer whose life is ruined when he writes a story so popular that no one thinks anything else can live up to it. Read it here.

G is for mystery writers Tess Gerritsen and Elizabeth George

Elizabeth George

There really aren't enough women writing crime fiction but there are two writers--whose work could not be more different--who have made their mark on the genre. They are Tess Gerritsen, who writes medical thrillers and created the series Rizzoli and Isles and Elizabeth George, who is an American but writes very "English" mysteries.
Elizabeth George has written a number of mysteires "starring" Inspector Lynley, and they have been turned into a BBC crime series. Her older brother Rober is also a novelist.
Tess Gerritsen was a doctor before she started writing fiction, part of a tradition of writing doctors that includes Arthur Conan Doyle, Robin Cook, Michael Crichton (he earned his degree but never practiced medicine) and James Rollins.

Tess Gerritsen

G is for Gutenberg

I grew up in a house where books were appreciated. There were always books around and you could expect that birthdays and Christmas would bring special books--hardback books. My father collected history books, particularly about the Civil War, and my mother loved mysteries but she also had a set of those gray, clothbound "Mocdern Library" editions of the clasics. The only one of those i remember reading was the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, but she had the Russian novelists as well. i am way behind on reading the Russians, except for Pushkin. (But I digress.)

My point is that in my family we all bought books and sometimes that meant spending a significant chunk of money. Even when I was in high school hardback books cost a lot and you didn't buy them on impulse. the idea of free books--even books that were in the public domain--was just a lovely fantasy.  FREE BOOKS!!!

And then came Project Gutenberg. On the project's landing page you'll find the slogan, "the first producer of free books" but really, it's so much more than that. For me, it's the equivalent of the "seed banks" that are preserving our genetic heritage and the DNA of species on the verge of extinction. If civilization collapsed today, Project Gutenberg's repository of past literature would allow us to carry on with the accumulated wisdom of the past. There's probably a short story in that. There are more than 45,000 books in their data base and it's growing every day. And think about this--Johannes gutenberg was born in the 14th century. Seven centuries ago...the past is prologue.

F is for Francis, Dick

I discovered Dick Francis in high school. By that time his career as a crime writer was well underway so that  once I read his first novel, Dead Cert, there were plenty of books for me to catch up on. (He would eventually write 40, most of which became international best-sellers.) A former jockey (he rode for the Queen Mum), he set his mysteries against a backdrop of horse racing, an arena I wouldn't normally have cared very much about. Most of the books were one-offs, but a couple "starred" Sid Halley, a one-handed investigator who was played by Welsh actor Mike Gwilym in the television adaptation. Gwilym is retired now, but in his day he did everything from Shakespeare to tough guys and Jason Statham reminds me of him a lot. 
Francis died in 2010 but his son Felix has followed in his footsteps with mysteries branded with the Dick Francis name. There's one coming out later this year that features the return of Sid Halley. I haven't read any of Felix's books, but I may have to pick up that one.

F is for Fairy

Fairy. Faery. Faerie.
The Fay. The Fey. The Fee.
There aren't nearly enough fairies in urban fantasy to suit my tastes.
There's Wicked Lovely, of course. And there's Tinkerbelle.  Throw in Oberon. And there's Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series (which I'm about to start reading). But otherwise?  I'm coming up blank. Anyone know of any good fairy stories?

E is also for Etsy

Books and Bling.  It seems to be becoming a thing with me these days.

I have a YA book coming out this summer, a science fiction romance and for the giveaway, I want a particular thing--a piece of jewelry that looks a bit futuristic but is still something you could wear in your everyday life.  I had found the perfect thing (PERFECT) on Etsy but for reasons I don't remember, I didn't snap it right up.  And when I came back to the site--somebody had bought MY piece of jewelry.  I was ... QUITE annoyed.

I like this item from Red Ava Designs. It looks sort of like something an alien ambassador to earth might wear in a Star Trek movie.  I like that it's copper, which always seems warmer than silver to me. I like the sleek industrial design of it. My heroine (Luz) runs a farm on a planet called Frontier, and even though things are automated and she's not out there digging in the dirt herself, I don't think she gets dressed up much, so this might be the thing.

but I keep coming back to it.  And I'm thinking if that slow-paying client who aggravates me so much actually tops up my PayPal account over the weekend, I should take it as a SIGN that this is meant to be the piece of swag I give away when I'm ready to promote the book.

E is for Eudora--that's Miss Welty to you...

Eudora Welty wrote lit fic mostly, but my two favorite books of hers are The Robber Bridegroom, which is sort of a fairy tale based on the Grimm fairy tale, and The Ponder Heart, a hilarious book about "Uncle Daniel Ponder," a wealthy old man who ends up on trial for the alleged murder of his white trash teenage bride.  It's a short book, barely more than a novella, and it's got a lot to say about family,  a topic that also was at the heart of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Optimist's Daughter, which was published 42 years ago.

The Robber Bridegroom was turned into a Broadway musical in 1975 starring Barry Bostwick as the title character. The book and lyrics were written by Alfred Uhry (himself a Pulitzer Prize winner) and the music by Robert Waldman.  The show is popular in high schools, and you can find the original cast album here.

Eudora was one of a generation of writers who defined what's now called "Southern Literature." She was born 12 years after William Faulkner, and 15 years before Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote.If you enjoy regional literature, you really should check her out.

D is for Davis, Lindsey

Mystery is my favorite genre and I love historical mystery most of all. Some of my favorite historical mysteries are set in Roman times. I love Kelli Stanley'sRoman Noir  books Nox Dormenda and The Curs-emaker, andthe books by Steven Saylor. But the first historical Roman mystery I ever read was Lindsey Davis' Silver Pigs, published in 1989. It was not her first novel, but the first in her "Falco" series of historic mysteries. Read her biography here.

If you'd like to explore historical mysteries set in Rome, check out the website The Detective and the Toga.  the first listing in the events section mentions Lindsey Davis' new book Enemies at Home. Wikipedia also has a really good article on the mystery subgenre. Read it here.

D is for Darkangel

My friend Christine Pope writes romances in a number of different flavors--contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, and science fiction--and I like all of them. She writes strong heroines and her supporting characters are memorable as well. I'm very fond of her fairy tale series, Tales of the Latter Kingdoms (the most recent book is her retelling of Cinderella, Ashes of Roses), but I also have a soft  spot for her "Sedona Trilogy," with its UFOs and men in black.

This week Christine unveils the first book in her new series. It's a paranormal romance called Darkangel, and it's about a young witch whose search for her soulmate is complicated by clan politics and her own desire to meet the man who has been haunting her dreams. But first, she has to survive a nightmarish series of encounters with an evil that seems to be targeting her.  It's great stuff and there are two particularly engaging male characters that I wouldn't mind meeting.

I was never really a romance reader--mysteries is my genre, but with Christine's books, there's always something to enjoy. That's doubly true in Darkangel where the "game of thrones" playing out among the witch clans is just getting interesting as the book ends. (Never fear, the sequel is coming soon and a teaser chapter is included.) 

C is for CraigsList

As I have mentioned before, I get a fair amount of work from CraigsList ads. I trawl through the listings often enough that when someone repeatedly posts an ad, i notice it. (There's a YA writer in New York who's been offering "an intriguing proposition" for a young and hungry writer that has me intrigued, although I am pretty sure I'm not what he/she is looking for. But it IS a bad sign that the ad has been running on and off for a couple of months now. Is the poster just REALLY picky or is there something that's not being said in the ad?)

A lot of strange gigs end up under the writer/editor category and some are just annoying. I get why translation jobs are there--there's no other category that really fits--but when I see the jobs for office work or hotel clerking, or other non-eriting/editing jobs, I get kind of cranky.

A lot of people complain that many of the writing "jobs" and "gigs" are actually unpaid but oddly, that doesn't bother me that much. I've been known to take on unpaid gigs if I thought they sounded interesting. That's how I ended up editor of Astonishing Adventures Magazine, a job that opened up many doors for me.

My favorite job offer this week was the person who wanted a Klingon speaker to translate a poem into the alien language for $50. Why not? Good luck on that.

Reading CL postings can occasionally be like sifting through the messages in your email spam folder. You have to weed out the million dollar offers and the great deals on cheap meds, and the greetings from lonely Russian girls who want to be your pen pal. This is a headline I saw today:
 2,500-10,000 Overnight NO SCAM (NYC/NJ)

I know what you're thinking. WOW!  Let me get a piece of that. (Or not.) CraigsList i love you but seriously, you need to rewrite your policies.

C is for Collins, Suzanne

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games was one of those books that hit the zeitgeist like a bomb. Pegged as a YA dystopian author after Hunger Games, she was formerly known for her fantastic quintet of books in her Overland Chronicles series. It's a quest story, a story about finding and fulfilling one's destiny in a strange world beneath New York City. Gregor and his little sister (called "Boots") are terrific characters, and the way Boots bonds with the giant cockroaches (they love her and treat her like a princess) is endearing. The series goes on maybe one book too long, but if you love fantasy, you owe it to yourself to check out the Underland Chronicles.
YA, it pretty much blew up the genre and set off a publishing frenzy that supercharged the movies based on the trilogy. But before Collins wrote

When I was reading Hunger Games, I found myself thinking about readers and why some books succeed while others fail. Dan Brown wrote a couple of novels before hitting it big with The DaVinci Code. Now the Robert Langdon books make up one of the top ten best-selling series of all time. Something to think about when your books aren't selling and you're contemplating going back to grad school or taking that job with your sister-in-law's accounting firm.

B is for Bling

I like jewelry, I always have. I used to sell and buy (or really buy and buy) jewelry on eBay and I ended up with a really nice collection of Matisse copper and enamel jewelry to go with the pieces I inherited from my mother and grandmother. But once I stopped working in an office, I got rid of most of my bling because it felt kind of silly to be sitting around in a t-shirt, bicycle shorts and a silver charm bracelet. But I still love looking.  And I especially love looking at Etsy, where you can now buy vintage stuff as well as hand-crafted items.  And the way I justify buying things is that I'm looking for swag I can use to promote my writing. (Yes, I can justify anything.)
Yesterday, on Twitter, one of the Etsy shops I like put up a lot of four vintage (60s) rose brooches for a really good price. And the moment I saw them, I thought of Fairy Story, one of the short stories I used to have up on Amazon.
I've taken the story down to rework it into something longer and I've been thinking about what I might offer in the way of promotions. And then I saw the ad for the four roses and KNEW.  It was destiny. It was kismet. It was a really good reason for cruising Etsy. so I bought the roses and when Fairy Story is rebooted, there will be promos.  The roses came from a shop called Grand Vintage Finery. Check it out.

Be is for Beardsley, Aubrey

I grew up a writer in a house of artists. I can't draw a straight line with a T-square. But I've always (mostly) been content to claim the writing niche for my own because there aren't that many people who are good at more than one thing. Aubrey Beardsley was an artist and a writer. His illustrations (like the one from Le Morte d'Arthur here) were memorable. Then he wrote The Devil's Dictionary, which is as snarky as they come. (I image Aubrey was rarely short of dinner invitations.) But more than that, he wrote one of the most memorable short stories ever, "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." That story is right up there with "The Most Dangerous Game" and "The Monkey's Paw" and "The Lady or the Tiger." As long as there are English classes, that story will be remembered. And he was only 25 when he died. Doesn't that make you feel like a slacker?

B is for Book 'Em

Another indie bookstore is closing!!  This mystery bookstore in South Pasadena has been open for 24 years but now the owners rae retiring. The store will close on April 30th and they will host a "farewell signing" on April 6 for three writers--Naomi Hirahara, Wendy Hornsby, and Sue Ann Jaffarian. Naomi won't remember me, but I met her at Book 'Em when Kelli Stanley was there signing her books. If you're in the area, go by and buy!  Sales on everything. check out their site here.

A is for Alcott, Louisa May

Like so many other girls in America, I devoured Little Women when I was a kid, and then went on to read the whole series, Little Men, Jo's Boys, and all the rest. I loved those books. But when an unknown book  by Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase, surfaced in 1995, I found it almost unreadable. It's basically a supernatural thriller but for me it wasn't particularly thrilling. What I did discover, though, was that Alcott wrote a lot more than just books about families. Who knew she was a secret thriller writer? (You can find a collection of her thrillers in Behind a Mask.)

Look at this portrait of Alcott. She has the same haunted eyes as Edgar Allan Poe. What if she'd only written supernatural tales? What classic would she have left behind in that genre?

A is for Amazon

Up until a few years ago, if you said the word "Amzon," I'd picture someone like Wonder Woman. But now, it means the megasite where I publish my writing, spend my money, and while away my time browsing. I found myself wondering why Amazon was named "Amazon," and I did a little Googling around to find out. According to Wikipedia, the site was named after the Amazon River, which was named after the Amazon tribe of warrior women. (Under the file "I did not know that" is the factoid that the company was originally created under the name "Cadabra.")

The April A to Z Blogging Challenge

I started out in January with the intention of keeping up with my blogging and what with one thing and another, I've fallen behind. Not that the world is dying for daily updates from my little corner of the blogosphere, but I find that keeping to a regular schedule on the blog helps me meet my other deadlines as well. And since I have a backlog of projects waiting for my attention, I really need some more structure in my writing life. Otherwise, it's much too easy to let the day-to-day bill-paying stuff take over.

 I thought that the A to Z blogging challenge sounded interesting, so I've signed up. My "theme" is going to be writers. I hope you'll find it interesting.

Saturday Self-Promotion ... Suicide Blonde

Speaking of frugality, I'm a big proponent of free books.  I get all those newsletters DAILY offering freebie books and I just snap those bargains up.  (You do not even want to know how many books there are in my kindle.)
And every once in a while, I want to do MY part to feed your e-reader. Right now I'm running a free promotion for my collection of short stories called Suicide Blonde. It's been well-received, and I'm pretty proud of the stories.  If you enjoyed True Detective, I think you might like this collection. (And wouldn't it be kind of cool if the producers solicited stories for an anthology, the way the makers of the game L.A. Noire did?)

Anyway, Suicide Blonde is free for the next two days. You can snag it here. And if you enjoy it, I'd love a review.

Waste not, want not

I was raised to be frugal.
Living in Los Angeles sometimes sabotages that intent--I pay nearly $2K a month for an apartment so small, I also rent a storage unit for where some of my furniture lives--but basically I live by my granmother's philosophy, which was "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
I admit I'll spree-spend on things my grandmother would have considered needless luxuries, but when money is tight, I do what I have to do.
That's a lot easier to do when you work at home. You don't have dry-cleaning bills or commuting costs. You don't have to deal with business lunches or office birthday celebrations. (My sister nearly went broke one year buying birthday presents for colleagues she didn't even like because the corporate culture at her job STRONGLY encouraged people to participate in community events like birthday parties and Christmas gift exchanges.
I abhor waste of any kind and living in an apartment building, I see a lot of waste. Whenever anyone moves out, pieces of perfectly good furniture suddenly appear on the easement between the building and the street. Most of the time, this furniture is snapped up by the urban gleaners who cruise the neighborhood, but if it stays otu there too long (more than a day or two), someone always comes along to wreck it. And what once might have been a perfectly serviceable side table is suddenly just a few pieces of splintered wood; and what used to be a nearly brand-new mattress is suddenly soaked in dog piss. 
That makes me crazy.
It doesn't take that long to call and arrange a pick-up from Goodwill or Out of the Closet or some other charitable organization. And while a lot of places don't take mattresses for sanitary reasons, This Green Life offers some suggestions on how you can donate and recycle them.

The best hummus I've ever bought

I love hummus. I never had it until I moved to Los Angeles and I've been making up for lost time ever since.  I have a friend who makes me batches about once a month and in between I've tried a bunch of different brands. This week I stumbled across Fountain of Health's roasted garlic hummus.
O.M.G.
It is the pre-made hummus of my dreams.
For one thing, it's really garlicky, which I like.
There are no preservatives in it.  It's light on the salt.
And it hasn't been blended into the consistency of library paste.
I'd say it's actually the best hummus I've ever had, but then, I'm still trying out other brands. Highly recommended.

Free book and More!

I'm running a free promotion on Whipping Boy, so if you'd like to snag a free digital copy, go here.

But this is not just a shameless self-prootion post.  I used to review books for the paranormal romance site Bitten By Books. One of the features that now shows up regularly is a massive "Free Read Friday" list of books in all different genres.  Here's the link to last week's list, which gets updated and augmented weekly.

If you write in the genre (or just love it), you really need to check out Bitten By Books.  They're constantly running contests and promotions and author launch parties. It's a great place to hang out.

Earthquake Country

We had a small earthquake in Los Angeles yesterday. Well, small compared to the Northridge Quake of 2004, but still the largest quake in the area since 2008.  It was a sharp jolt that registered 4.4 on the Richter Scale. It was centered in the mountains between Westwood (home of UCLA) and Encino, which is in the western part of the San Fernando Valley, a couple of miles west of where I live.

A 4.4 is, in earthquake terms, relatively minor. You might have a knick-knack fall over (a friend posted a picture of one such knick-knack on Facebook) but there were no reports of damage or injury. But throughout the day, people I know who live elsewhere checked in with me to make sure I was all right. I assured them I was but the truth is, I was actually a bit unsettled. Because to live in Los Angeles is to live in denial. The city is criss-crossed by earthquake faults and one day those faults are ging to go off like a bomb. I've seen the movie Earthquake. I've read the script for San Andreas (soon to be a movie near you with Dwayne Johnson). And more to the point, I have a minor in geology. I know EXACTLY what happens when a couple of tectonic plates slide past each other. (Up until the Northridge quake, most of my knowledge was theoretical, but once you've actually heard the sound of the earth grinding against itself, you don't forget it.)

Anyway, the quake reminded me of Lee Goldberg's book The Walk, which begins "one minute after the Big One."  If you haven't read it, you should check it out.  It's a dandy survival story and would make an excellent movie.

Pictures that are worth 80,000 words

I did not think ahead when I purchased the images used for the cover of Whipping Boy. I had already planned several sequels, but for some reason, it didn't occur to me that I should buy several images of the same models at the same time so that the covers images would be related. Now I'm going through hundreds and hundreds of photos and it's kind of like looking at books of murder suspects. It was pretty easy to find the female model in a variety of poses that will work. The male model though? He's proving to be a challenge. For one thing, when you type in key words like "handsome, dark-haired man in suit" you get back images of teenage boys in t-shirts twirling red umbrellas like they're auditioning for a remake of Singing in the Rain.

If you type in "handsome businessman," you get pictures of en with bags over their heads (!) as well as pictures of guys contorted in ways that their bodies were never meant to contort. (That's true of the female models as well, but we're kind of conditioned to women in unnatural poses thanks to years of photoshop and Jessica Rabbit-style images of impossible body proportions.)

I used to oversee cover shoots for a magazine I edited, so I'm used to working with photographers and models who turned out fabulous work. A lot of what I'm seeing on these sites reminds me of Derek Zoolander's "looks" in the movie Zoolander. It's like the photographer told all the guys to give their best "Rico Suave smoldering glance.  The results are ... not pretty.  Sigh. But I press on. There are worse ways to spend an hour or so than looking at photographs of good looking men.

Positive and Negative Book Reviews

I read a lot of books and I try to review as many as I can because unless a writer is a brand name and reviews are irrelevant, reviews are important. My reviews are always honest. And when I'm being paid to review a book I don't like, my review will explain why I didn't like it. I don't get snarky and I don't get personal. When I'm reviewing a book "on my own time," it's because I really liked a book and want to share it. That's why I rarely post a negative review on Amazon or GoodReads or here.  If I don't like a book I'm not being paid to read, I stop reading it. I don't feel the need to waste my time writing a review telling  someone how bad the book is because reading taste is subjective. (I'm on the record as really, really liking Moby Dick, so there you go.)

Turns out the new book editor at BuzzFeed has a philosophy similar to mine only a lot bigger readership on his blog. Read about the fuss it caused when he announced he'd only be publishing positive reviews.  The thing is, there are plenty of places a reader can go to find a selection of good and bad reviews. If BuzzFeed just wants to share books their reviewer liked, I'm all for that. That's what I like doing. I've shared books with friends since I was old enough to pass my NancyDrew books around.  (Those books were the gateway to a lifetime of mystery reading.)

The problem with a lot of reviews you see online, especially in individual blogs, is that the reviewers often have an axe to grind. I know one woman who hated, HATED, really, really HATED Hunger Games and wrote a  rambling rant of a review that went on for thousands of words. I wanted to say, "Dude, it's just a book." She didn't just dislike the book, she went after the writer personally to the point where it was kind of ... crazy.

I just don't get crazy about books I don't like. I know the writer didn't write the book just to piss me off. Books I like though? I can't wait to tell everyone about them.

Q is for Quincunx

I never quite outgrew the childhood love of silly words that began when my parents first read Dr. Seuss stories to me. I have a particular fondness for words that begin with the letters Q and Z and X. For some reason, they just sound interesting to me. And bonus points for words that use two or more, like EXQUISITE.  That's a word with texture. One of my favorite words of all is QUINCUNX and for a long time, I didn't even know what it meant. (Although it sounded kind of dirty.) turns out a quincunx is a pattern of five arranged with points at four corners and one in the center. IN its simplest form, imagine a quincunx as the five-spot side of a die.But they can also be quite fancy, like this one, which is an ancient alchemical symbol.

The reason I'm thinking of words is that I'm in the planning stages for my novel Zhanghai, which is part of the sci fi series about a planet that's been colonized by a group subsidized by a Chinese trading consortium.  I've been building the world out in notes for about three years now and now that I'm actually sitting down to write, I'm having a good time naming alien species and technologies and artifacts. One of those artifacts has found its way into the hands of Qing, my heroine, and while it looks like a shiny little bauble of no practical purpose, it turns out that it's really quite a valuable thing. I'm calling it the Quincunx because it's a piece that is inserted into a larger piece to ... do something. What that something is, I have no idea, but the whole idea started with a Q.  And a silly word.

Feminist Fiction Friday

I love Sharyn McCrumb. First of all, I love the way she spells her first name, which makes it more interesting without being so quirky it calls attention to itself. I first came to her writing through her "Ballad" series of mysteries in which contemporary crimes are juxtaposed to things that happened in Appalachia a long time ago. (It's basically the same idea behind the Clive Cussler novels.) I've read all the Ballad novels, but The Rosewood Casket is probably my favorite. She has several other series, and has also written some wild sci-fi books.

I am a huge fan of her book St. Dale, which is filled with NASCAR racing lore (McCrumb's a fan) and love for the late, great Dale Earnhardt.  I've been pitching St. Dale to my clients for years because it would make a GREAT movie. But alas, it does not have a giant robot in it.

I love that the "ballad" books have a real sense of place. McCrumb is from North Carolina, so her dialogue is authentic and her love for the area is on every page. The Appalachian Ballad series has a cast of characters that recurs, and you will find yourself falling in love with all of them. If you don't know her work, you should.

Sign of the (L.A.) Times

I grew up in a news junkie's household. When I was a kid, Washington DC had two main papers, the Washington Post and the Evening Star. When I was in high school in Richmond, there were also two daily papers, one in the morning and one in the evening--the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the News-Leader. There was also the Richmond Mercury, and Richmond Style Weekly, a freebie paper I wrote for after college.

In addition to the local papers, my father subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and, off and on, to the Christian Science Monitor. On weekends, he'd made the drive out to a hotel near downtown to buy out of town papers--the NY Times, the L.A. Times, etc.  When I moved to L.A. there were three main daily papers, the Times, the Herald-Examiner and a paper that was then known as the Valley News and Green Sheet.  (Among staffers, the Valley News was often referred to as "the green shit" and if you were overheard saying that, it meant a pink slip.) The Her-Ex folded some years ago but the Times and the Valley News are still around, along with a handful of hyper-local papers.

I grew up reading newspapers in  cities where there were a lot of papers covering the news. And from the time I moved to Los Angeles, I had a subscription to the Times.  But in 2007, with the WGA Times now costs $1 a copy, which used to be what the fat Sunday edition cost. And I realized I couldn't remember the last time I sat down and read an actual newspaper. Probably around the last time I looked a number up in the actual Yellow Pages and dialed it on my land line.

strike looming, that subscription was one of the first things I chopped out of my budget, along with cable and eBay browsing. I would occasionally pick up a single copy from a newspaper vending machine but eventually I transitioned over to online news and I haven't really looked back. Until today when a newspaper headline caught my eye and I looked closer and discovered that the L.A.Times now costs $1 a copy, which is what the fat Sunday edition used to cost. Wow.
I can't remember the last time I sat down and read a newspaper. It was probably around the same time that I looked something up in a paper Yellow Pages and dialed the number on my cordless phone. 





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Washington's Spies!

I had never heard of TURN, AMC's new historical series, until yesterday when I saw a billboard for it.  It's based on the book Washington's Spies and it looks like it could be a lot of fun. The Brit villains aren't very subtle unlike the Jason Isaacs' character in The Patriot) but they're VILLAINS.  Here's the trailer for it: