Lusty Wenches and Book Club Favorites

Ciara here, hoping you east coasters made it safely through Irene, and are warm, dry, and reading a good book. Nothing like a power outage to make a person appreciate paper books again, right? :P But seriously, stay safe out there. I'm sending you mellow weather vibes from the Pacific Northwest.

One of the things I've loved most about joining this community of book bloggers is having people to gush about romance novels with. I came late to the genre and started blogging about books because I didn't have any friends who read romance (except for my college roommate, but she's too busy doing sekrit spy stuff to gush with). I instantly found this amazing group of women who love these books as much as I do, and who recommended a ton of excellent ones (leading me astray from grad school to write full time!).

The Lusty Wenches Book Club
I've been fortunate to find a few Seattle friends who also read romance since then, and we've started a book club. There are five of us, four writers. It is SO much fun to get together with girl friends over tea and frittata to dish about the latest fabulous books we've read. Our original intent was to analyze what makes the good ones work and the bad ones fail. We started off reading all the RITA finalists for best first book, plus Meredith Duran's debut because we needed a historical. Bloody hell, that was a bad year of books. Duran's was the ONLY one we liked, and we've since read all her new releases. So the next year we branched out and suggested books we'd heard were good. This means mostly I suggested books I'd heard were good from you lovely group of book bloggers. Much more successful! We've been trying to let all members select a book and trying to keep a well-rounded list of historical, contemporary, and paranormal. The list has slanted heavily paranormal, but the ones we've liked best have been historical.

After a lackluster run of books, this year we are trying something different. We've made a list of our FAVORITE authors, and we are going to read their new releases. First up is Richelle Mead's BLOODLINES, which is a Young Adult paranormal and a spinoff from her super popular vampire academy series. (On a completely random note, I dreamed last night she had her baby, but it was a girl. Neil Gaimen was there too, and he had a baby who looked just like Garrison Keillor. Weird, I know.) In November we will be reading Meljean Brook's HEART OF STEEL, because I loved the Iron Duke and made everyone read it. It was a big hit. Also on the list are Lisa Kleypas, Meredith Duran, Loretta Chase, Karen Marie Moning, Kristin Cashore, Joanna Bourne, Nalini Singh, and Julie James.

Do you belong to a book club? How would you organize it? What books would you pick? What fabulous books should we add to our list?

A Rant About Editing: Authors Should Revolt!!

Yes, that's right!! I am on a tear!! As a book reviewer, among other things, I spend a lot of my time reading. I always have. Books are so much a part of my life now, as they have always been, that I have developed some serious feelings about the quality of writing, the attractiveness of the cover, the cost of books (especially ebook novellas and short stories) and so on and on. I think all this stems from my previous life as an English teacher and having to grade junior high and high school English essays. Even when I was in graduate school I taught part time and there were many occasions when I was sitting up at 2:00 am grading English essays and term papers. Believe me, I have seen everything from sentences that are strangely assembled, creatively misspelled words, and essay papers that were filled with cut and paste paragraphs that had little if anything to do with the subject assigned or the title of the paper.

So I come to the reviewing task with a fairly hefty set of prejudices about writing and publishing, and to be entirely truthful, I am thankful for all that experience. The down side, however, is that I spot some glaring difficulties in books, especially ebooks, that just drive me absolutely CRAZY! And my greatest concern is that I think authors are getting the "short end of the stick."

I feel deeply for authors who sit at their computers day after day, at the expense of their family involvement, losing sleep when deadlines approach, etc. I think authors work just as hard at their craft as do construction engineers at theirs. They then turn in their manuscripts to the publishing company editors and often there are two or three steps to that process. It is for the fact that editors appear to be working through a manuscript several times that heightens my upset over the sloppy editing I encounter in books. Either the editors are just letting a book lie in their in/out box and then returning it to the author or they are reviewing these manuscripts late at night and when they are not their sharpest, or for a variety of other reasons.

One ebook I read recently was so poorly written that I could hardly stand all the grammatical, spelling, and tense errors. OK, so I'm picky, but for crying out loud!! These are authors and editors who are supposed to be knowledgeable about the English language. If the author is that poorly versed in the fine points of writing in English, then it is the editor's job to make it look good, so someone really fell down on the job with this one. In a flash of pique that I usually don't give in to, I printed off a couple of chapters and got out my trusty old red pencil from teaching days, and started making corrections. I was absolutely appalled to see the number of errors I found.

Now I happen to know from conversations I have had with some blogger pals and other reviewers that this is not an isolated situation. My concern is that authors are being short-changed!! I know some publishers are better than others and I have found that Harlequin, Carina, Siren, Berkley, Kensington, and others in that class of publishing do a very good job. Yet even there I find extra words in sentences, bad tense use, possessives (there really is a difference between "there" and "their"), poor spelling, messy use of quotes, etc. It is really, as my grandmother used to say: "Enough to jar your mother's preserves."

So my feeling is that authors should revolt and insist on quality editing. After all, it is the author's persona and reputation that is hanging out for all to see. In the case of self publishing, I am not really sure what the process is there. But even then, I have found some self-published books to be very well done grammatically. If a writer spends the amount of time writing that they do, then editors owe them the time and effort--and I think courtesy is a part of this--to do a careful and comprehensive job of editing, not just to make the story flow better, or re-writing an erotic scene to make it hotter, or whatever the concern with the story may be. The words, the sentences, the tenses and possessives are all the packaging for an author's work. And it would be so much nicer for the readers, too.

Thanks for listening . . . I don't intend to step on anyone's toes specifically. I'm just tired of very good stories being showcased poorly. Nevertheless, keep those noses in those books.

Why Does It Have To Be "In With The New And Out With The Old"?

So who of us isn't interested in upgrading? I'm perfectly comfortable with new cars, new clothes, new houses, new computer programs, and new and improved products of varying kinds. From what I can tell, over 50% of the society are upgrading their spouses as well. But that's another discussion. (lol)

The same seems to hold true for books. OK, I am just as prone to want the next new novel an author is writing, and I get just as excited when the new addition to a series comes onto the shelf or the ebook publisher. But I have been discovering some of the books that authors have written 3-10 years previously, some of which have turned out to be really good and I, for one, am just a little distressed that they seem to Perhaps this is a characteristic of my naturally generous nature (Ewww) or it might just be driven by the realization that I am not among the "new and improved" humans anymore. Whatever the cause, I have been deliberately seeking out some of the older, sometimes forgotten earlier works by authors. As a fan of second-hand book stores, this is easier with print books. But discovering ebooks that have been around for awhile isn't all that difficult, espe

cially when searching through clearance sale stashes online.

Morgan Ashbury is an author I discovered some months ago and I have come to really enjoy all of her writing. Lily in Bloom is a novel that was released in 2007 so has been around for a while. Yet its core issue is just as contemporary as any found in romance fiction.

It is a May/December story of a 43 year old woman who finds herself divorced and living on a rural property left her by her uncle and one that is quite valuable. Lily Martin had a mother who hated her, an ex-husband who still thought he could control her, and children who treated her as a servant and in an overt disrespectful way. The truth was that she had allowed this, all in the name of pleasing a mother who would never be pleased, trying in the worst way to find love and acceptance.

Enter Ryan Kincaid, a man over a decade younger than Lily, and

one she had first met when he was 16 and skinny dipping in her neighbor's pool. (Lily didn't think Ryan saw her watching him.) He was beautiful then; he is magnificent now. And unbeknownst to her, Ryan has been in love with her for nearly as long. He is single and now so is she. All during the years of his university experience and his decade of traveling around the world, he matured into a man who is comfortable in his own skin and knows that loving an older woman is no different than an older man marrying a much younger woman. And as their affair grows more intense and Lily allows Ryan to help her see herself and her relatives through a different set of inner lenses, she begins to allow herself to grow and "bloom."

It is a woman that will have readers cheering Lily on as she takes on her disrespectful children, her controlling and intrusive ex-husband, and her mean and nasty mother. And readers will appreciate the deep kindness and sensitivity of a man who accepts Lily's love as a precious treasure, an experience she had never had previously.

Speaking of treasures, some of the older works of our favorite authors are just that: treasures. Yes, they mature and grow in their writing style and their list of interests and subject matter changes and grows with time. Even so, we owe it to them and to ourselves to appreciate their work, even if it has been sitting on shelves for years.

Review: Paradise Found by Hunter Raines

Paradise is just an illusion . . .

Or so Philip thinks as he vacations on exotic Anguilla. He should be celebrating the end of law school and the start of his successful career, but he's tired of living a lie for his family's sake. For just one night, he lets down his guard with two men he thinks he'll never see again.

He isn't the only one with secrets. For years, Cameron Drake has suppressed his need for dominance, afraid of hurting his lover, Mark Wilder. But when Cameron's hand meets Philip's ass, there's no more pretending. Mark can't face his conflicting feelings about the ménage; does Cameron want more than Mark can give?

The three of them may have been perfect together but consequences follow them back to their real lives. Will their desire for another encounter shatter the illusions they've built to protect themselves or clear the obstacles to paradise?

Those who know me well know that reading, much less reviewing M/M novels has been a journey of discovery for me. I just hadn't come into close contact with M/M stories previously and we all know that in the past few years there have been a literary avalanche of M/M and F/F stories published and made available on ebooks. So finding this book on Net Galley was a bit of a challenge to myself to take it and read it and try to find the underlying issues that drove these characters and why this story played out as it did.

All that being said, I found these three men to be compelling characters as each was allowing deep fears to motivate them in their relationships. Obviously Cameron and Mark had moved past the fear of "coming out of the closet" and were in a committed relationship for several years. That wasn't the issue for them at all. Yet their relationship was foundering, emotional distance between them was growing, and frustration over this was almost at an unbearable level in light of the fact that they continued to love each other dearly. Perhaps a vacation--a trip to Paradise, if you will--would help to re-connect and mend whatever was slowly killing their relationship.

Phillip didn't have the luxury of having come out regarding his sexual orientation. His ultra-conservative, starchy, steel rod up the butt Father was driving him crazy with his expectations both professionally and personally. He was living a lie and he was royally tired of it!! Now he had completed his law education, taken his state boards, and was now all ready to become a productive member of his dad's law firm. But that entry into the firm also included finding a socially acceptable wife and begin a family. No gays allowed!! And Phillip had to continually live with this prohibition, the realization that owning up to his gay-ness would put him in the sewer with his dad and family. How was he to live?

Cameron and Mark decided that a "one night stand" with a stranger would bring some needed spice into their relationship and they hooked up with Phillip. But some things happened that threatened all three. And in the months that followed that night together, all three made some decisions about themselves and each other that changed the course of personal history and the nature of their relationship.

I have read some of the reviews for this book on Goodreads and I have to say that I found this novel deeply moving. I was drawn into their individual pain as well as the sense of frustration that seemed to cloud Phillip as he tried to live his life to please everyone except himself. Cameron and Mark didn't fare much better and their relationship was still headed for the dumpster if something more wasn't changed. About half way through the book I felt that the obstacles to resolution for any of them were almost insurmountable. I have to hand it to the author for managing to pull this threesome out of the deep emotional holes in which they found themselves.

This novel is really about honesty--the kind that doesn't let anyone off the hook, including one's self. All of the 12-step programs counsel that " . . . there is no recovery without honesty." And it was certainly true for these three--honesty about themselves and their own inner needs, about their willingness to be open with each other, and in Phillip's case, willingness to live to please himself rather than everyone else. Cameron and Mark needed to learn that no love, no matter how genuine and caring, can flourish and be sustained in an environment of dishonesty, driven by fear and resulting secrets. Phillip knew that his hidden life and inner needs to be himself in every way could only be sustained for so long. The constant badgering of his dad to "bring home a nice girl" could only be tolerated so long. His secret life, his hidden need, his true self could only flourish in honesty. Once he faced himself, Phillip also had to face his hidden and long suppressed his attraction--actually his love--for Cameron and Mark. In the final analysis, only honesty would do.

I really got into this book and am so glad I read it. I'm not nearly so concerned at how people live their lives and how they relate to one another as long as it is done with honesty, caring, a willingness to give more than take, and a desire for the well-being for everyone in the relationship. As I traveled the literary "journey" toward that kind of realization with these three characters was one that made this novel come alive for me and one that turned out to be so instructive for me personally. Can a heterosexual female be instructed by the fictional experiences of three homosexual males? I think so, and found that I was challenged to be more honest in my own relating to husband and family as well as good friends and colleagues. For me, this makes for a fully satisfying read. Add to that the good writing, good editing, and the work of an author who obviously knew how to put together good characters with a good plot and storyline, and you have an entertaining as well as an instructive book. The best kind, in my humble opinion.

This book was released in June, 2011 by Carina Press. I think those who like good M/M books will find this a book they don't want to miss.

Men

How about some men to keep us occupied while we're waiting for the next blogger?