I Read a Book Today...

I know, right? The truth is I've read at least a book a day, if not more (if they're short & fluffy) for a long time now. But this one was so.... Yeah.

It really needs a write-up, if only to try desperately to straighten out the confusion in my head. Several sessions of fine-tooth-combing the sections involved didn't help clear up a few timeline issues I was having. And the worst part? The first time I read this was several years ago, so this is an older reread for me. I don't remember noticing these problems the first time through. I must have changed and grown or something...

Anyway, the book:

Causing Havoc by Lori Foster

Blurb (from author's website): Sexy, sculpted extreme fighter Dean “Havoc” Connor has knee-melting good looks-and thick skin. But not from his brutal sport’s enclosed rings. Orphaned and torn from his sisters as a boy, he has no family. That is, until he gets a letter revealing how much the once-little girls want him back in Harmony, Kentucky.

To stop his sister from marrying a man as sleazy as he is wealthy, Dean finds himself teaming up with her pretty-but-smart-mouthed friend Eve — who’s heard of “Havoc’s” reputation and doesn’t need some hunk trampling on her heart. Now all Dean has to do is protect his sisters, win Eve over, and expose a devious criminal.

And he thought winning the heavyweight cage fighting belt was hard.

Now, me... and it will be behind a cut, because... Here there be spoilers, yo!

More thinking-out-loud about girly parts and sexual content of books and what doesn't bother me.

We seem to have a new kerfuffle which is really just an old kerfuffle revisited around the community in which I read and interact. We'll just call it the OMGLADYBITS!! problem and move on from there.

I'm just going to make a brief rebuttal of some things that were said on a site which shall be nameless (if for some reason you don't know but want to, email or something and I'll tell you but you will probably be all head-asplodey) and which I have since removed from my blog feed because really? I don't need that shit in my life right now, and anyway, as a review site it was becoming less and less relevant to my actual INTERESTS, y'know, because of how books that I thought sucked donkeywater were given highest accolades and books that I thought were funny/cute/interesting/otherwise pushed some boundaries in an opening-up-the-mind kind of way were dismissed as lame/trite/blah/whatthefuckever.

ANYway.

I read. I read a LOT of stuff, yeah, some "Literary Fiction" and some nonfiction, and mystery and science fiction and fantasy and and and... yeah. Most of what I read, though, is romance. Or one of the other things with strong romantic elements.

People like to put things in boxes.

Boxes are OK, sometimes. I mean, I like to have a box (basket, drawer, whatevs) to keep my cheeses separate from my eggs separate from my condiments in my fridge. I have a nice little box in the pantry which I keep full of approved snack items for my kids where they can reach, and I have another nice little box out of their reach where I keep the "Only Occasionally" treats. I have a box for the kitty litter, because, let's be honest, you *don't* want that just spreading out all over the floor.

You know what I don't put in boxes? Books.

Piles, yes. Shelves, naturally. Randomly stuck down the side of the couch so I can pick it right back up in the morning? Oh, HELLS yeah. Boxes, though? Not so much. Only when we're moving. Or I'm mailing them to someone. For a while, I kept some in a box under my bed, but then I decided I wasn't ashamed of it, I just didn't want my 7YO boy reading b/c Holy Inappropriate, Batman! So I put all that stuff on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in my bedroom where no one but my mom and my sister ever look, and they're grown-ups and if they go poking and get shocked, SO NOT MY PROBLEM.

Also, do you know what paper books don't have that a lot of ebooks (especially from small presses) do? Warning labels. To me, that's like the Darwin Awards-worthy labels on push mowers warning the user not to pick it up & try to use it to trim the hedges. I mean, really. They should all say "Warning: Thoughts Ahead. Make Sure Mind Open, Or Put Down NOW."

So, when I read romance, I don't go into it with any expectations, beyond the expectations of a minimum of typos. And that I will be entertained (unless I'm reading for some reason other than entertainment. Even then, entertainment is a plus). And if I'm reading a romance written within the last 20 or so years, I do generally expect sex. Particularly if it's an erotic romance, when I expect LOTS of sex. Hopefully well-written sex, but I will settle for cliche and throbbing parts and excessive dampness. The point is, though, I don't look for a particular TYPE of sex. I'll take girl parts, boy parts, alien parts... in whatever combinations and numbers. I've never been "blindsided" by menages, or het sex in a gay romance, or gay/lesbian/trans* sex in a het romance. In fact, one of the reasons I gravitated AWAY from het romance is that it has been feeling too confining. There's a formula for sex, and a formula for characters, and a formula for story. I hoped by moving over toward more of a LGBTQ-friendly reading space, I would come across different types of relationships, characters who didn't fall into the same old stereotypes, new takes on old tropes...

For the most part, I've found that. There's been less of the -LBTQ than of the G-, granted, but I'm digging a little deeper and seeing more. I'm seeing more interracial romances, some May-Decembers where the balance of power is a bit different. I'm even seeing more babies -- with fewer Plot Moppets, although still plenty of those -- which I love (side note: I've seen some people despairing that some of their favorite series are moving toward the baby-crazy, despite being m/m pairings. I'm all like, YES PLEASE MORE OF THAT! because you don't have to be ovaried to believe "Families should grow, not shrink." (quote from Strawberries for Dessert by the lovely Marie Sexton).

So, dear authors who might accidentally read this, Give me girly bits along with the man-sex! I'll read it! The only place I demand to know what to expect sexually is the space where I'm sharing said sexual content with my very own husband in our very own bed. I don't object to warnings about dubious consent because my enjoyment of that is dubious, at best, but I also don't refuse to read it. And I only DNF if I can't actually connect with characters or plot -- some of those stories would probably have been improved by more sex! Give me variety! Give me interesting people doing interesting things! (It doesn't have to be save-the-world interesting; I'm a homebody, so domestic weirdness interests me.)

And, hey, if I ever run across ACTUAL heterosexual intercourse in a romance with gay male protagonists, maybe I'll be shocked enough to actually review it!

Please don't do this to me!

Foodies beware!

I love food. Not all food, but lots of different foods.

I also love to make food.

Granted, I'm not great with fussy, complicated dishes (I tend to get distracted) or with "presentation." I like my food hearty, simple and filling.

That said, I do tend to be a bit more willing to experiment with breads -- fussy ones, hearty ones, ones with interesting shapes or tetures or flavors.

But, see, here's the thing: Even the easiest, quickest, least hands-on recipes take, at a minimum, two hours from pulling out your materials and ingredients to pulling it out of the oven and letting it cool for a few minutes before you start cutting.

So when an author writes a character who's a "foodie" I will NOTICE. When a character first spends the night at someone else's place, they don't usually go check out the kitchen for bread-baking staples before heading back to bed. Yet the next day (or later that same day, depending when they're gettin' it on) Foodie will make a quick store run, come back, and, in the time it takes to make a fresh pot of coffee, have a complicated meal, including fresh, homemade yeast bread, on the table and ready to eat.

I call bullshit.

Unless you're making it from a mix, soup is gonna take at LEAST half an hour, minimum, to wash, chop, saute, and simmer everything.

And the bread? Well, mixing and kneading and measuring is gonna be at least a good 15-20 minutes, unless you're using a mixer with a dough-hook attachment, and no one in books uses one of those, because, let's face it -- your new flame back there in the bedroom isn't gonna have one if he isn't into cooking, too. Or if he does, it's gonna be super-loud & it'll wake him up Too Soon. Then, there's the 45 min to an hour the dough's going to need to double in bulk. Punch it down, shape it, put it in or on the appropriate baking container, and give it another half-hour or so to proof (and don't forget to start warming up your oven!). Then 20 minutes to an hour to bake, and then it needs to cool for a while before you can even start slicing it and we're already up to, what, 2.5 hours, MINIMUM.

Now, there are a few recipes which skip the kneading step, and even a couple which skip the proofing, but really, that only knock maybe 45 minutes or so off the length of time needed. And some of those recipes call for sponging the dough, which means instead of that initial one hour rise, you may be waiting for three or more.

And even with frozen dough, you need to wait for it to come to room temperature and double in bulk before you can start baking it, and that takes a good hour or so.

So, no, unless it's a pretty damn complicated soup recipe, you're not going to be starting the soup first; your bed-buddy's probably NOT going have live yeast just lying around, (let's face it; probably not the appropriate cooking pans, either)... and, no, you're not going to have fresh, homemade bread in under an hour.

Unless, of course, you're God (in which case, come see me.)

Therefor: Unless you have baked bread and know how long it's gonna take, unless you're going to reflect that in your text, please, please don't write characters who can do it in less than a third of the time it takes to make your average pot of soup.

Up All Night

I stayed up late last night finishing up A.L. Turner's "I Just Play One on TV." I reviewed it on GoodReads, immediately I had finished, from my new Sony PRS-T1 (which I shall probably be blogging about in the next day or two, after I've played with it a bit more. But honestly, how awesome is it to be able to read a book, love it, and be able to say something about it *right then and there*!? *giddy squees*).

This is one of those books that make me wish I could lend it out to friends a little easier than I actually can.

*Highly* recommend this one!

(& I'm hoping that as I get hopefully slightly less sleep-deprived, I can maybe go back through and write a more coherent and comprehensive review.)

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/273557488

about my eReader...

I feel the need to rant and rave today about my eReader. I have a Sony Touch (PRS-600)--NOT the latest model, but the next-to-latest. Choosing it involved about a year of dithering, researching, comparison shopping, and acknowledging that a Kindle would bleed me dry in a week, as I have a tendency to GLOM backlists. My darling Sony limits that somewhat, in that I have to actually physically hook it up to a computer in order to download books onto it (although it's still ridiculously easy to shop at all my favorite sites: Diesel, All Romance EBooks, Samhain, Torquere...the list goes on.) And just because, I kind of want a Kindle, too. Just because (sorta).

So anyway. Today, my lovely red Reader decided to be a little B*tch today, when I hooked her up to the computer. I kept getting the message that the computer could not read the USB device (or something along those lines, anyway...) so I visited the Sony support webpage for help. I downloaded firmware. I tried uninstalling the device driver. I uninstalled/reinstalled software, I restarted the computer (like, a million times). I poked around on my external hard drive, trying to make sure I'd successfully backed up all my books when the other laptop (MY laptop; I'm currently sharing the DH's) started having issues. As it happens, I didn't. (boo) Luckily, however, I tend to mostly buy direct from small pubs, and was able to re-download everything, so I only lost one book. It was a "free limited time" offer, and now it's regularly priced, so I may one day get busy with the malfunctioning computer and see if it will cooperate long enough to try and rescue that one particular book...

Turns out what had to happen was a hard reset of the Reader--which means, dumping *everything* and restoring it to fresh-outta-tha-box factory settings. Like I said, I still have everything I wanted to keep, minus the one book, and now (for now, anyway) everything works fine. I need to get on to getting everything on memory card, though. That's why I picked this particular reader--it has memory card slots, so I can categorize my books, and hide the "Inappropriate Content" from the Ravening Barbarian Horde, and have an extra backup of everything  (without having DRM hissy fits) if this ever happens again. The downside to the memory cards? They can slow down certain functions, like deleting individual books from the reader/card itself, and it can be slow catching up when you first insert or remove the memory card. But I haven't noticed any real difference in, for example, battery life. Which is less than I was led to believe but I hear around the internet that those guidelines for battery charge are based on the "average" reader, and, let's face it, I am well above average in terms of the amount of time I spend reading on a weekly basis.

Also, regarding the sucktastic-ness of my old computer--it's the second HP I've had problems with in a year's time. It's supposed to be still under warranty, but it's been dinged a bit so they won't fix it under warranty. I can't afford a new one right now, so for the foreseeable future, I will be using the DH's. And come tax refund time, when I can get a new one? I'm SO getting a Mac. (That's right, I'm going over to the Dark Side.)