Happy New Year!

It seems hard to believe that the first decade of 2000 is coming to an end.  It’s been a decade of change for me, for my family, and for our country.  Perhaps one of the things I remember most clearly, other than 9/11 when I stood on the roof of the building where I worked watching New York City disappear in a cloud of dust on a beautiful fall day, is a moment of personal clarity two months later.  I worked for decades in corporate America and had a job I used to like.   The changes within the company caused me so much stress I had to have a thallium stress test on my heart just a month or so before 9/11.  I had planned to skip the rest of my vacation days that year so I could finish a project I was working on for a product launch.  Though I lost no family or close personal friends, I knew far too many who did.  I decided life was too short and I was taking off.  Thanksgiving 2001 found me sitting in a lovely large villa on the island of St John in the US Virgin Islands.  It was a real last minute arrangement and many people had canceled their vacations, which is how I ended up with that villa.  I recall sitting there dividing my time between reading and gazing at the beautiful view of Chocolate Hole.  I was puzzled because I felt something was missing.  That’s when it hit me – for the first time in nearly a year I had no chest pains.  I slept well and for more than 5 hours a night.  I didn’t even realize it then, but I had decided to do what I had longed to do for several years, quit my job and go to work for myself. 

Authors After Dark – In Retrospect

Well, it was quite a weekend.  There were a ton of authors and what a great group they were.  Unfortunately, Bianca D’Arc didn’t make it due to a sudden issue with her mother, which I gather was not good.  Then Jacquelyn Frank went dashing down the hall, caught her foot somehow and took a bad header.  She was taken to the hospital and spent the night there.  When I left around noon today she hadn’t made it back, but they were expecting her to be released.  I skipped all of last night thanks to a horrible headache triggered by the smell of the chemical sanitizer used in the hotel bathroom.  I understand I was not alone in developing a nasty headache, so maybe it was something in the ventilation system.

Author’s After Dark Weekend Starts Today

Hi all!  This afternoon is the start of the first Authors After Dark Paranormal Weekend hosted by Jacquelyn Frank and Bianca D’Arc.   Joey W. Hill will be there with several other authors I’ve read and many I haven’t.  Though I’m just starting on Ms Frank’s Nightwalker’s series, what I’ve read so far in Noah was interesting.  I’ve read most of Ms D’Arc’s books and some of  Joey W. Hill’s work, and bought Georgia Evans Bloody books because I was tired of waiting for them on Paperback Swap.  I’m pretty sure I’ll come away with more books – just what my To Be Read pile needs – MORE books – by some new to me authors.

The Paperback Swap Chronicles Vol. 4 – Games

OK, so I’ve had good, bad and indifferent experiences with Paperback Swap, the online book swapping site.  My initial impressions were posted in Book Swapping Online:  Is it worth it? then an Update after switching swap tactics in April, and the most recent third installment on my ongoing experiences with the Forums in July.  I mentioned I hadn’t tried the games and honestly didn’t understand them.  We’ll, I got invited into a beginners game and launched myself into a frenzy of white elephant swaps and three Virtual Boxes.   Now keep in mind, I don’t even play Bingo, and still don’t understand tricky trays, though I understand things like raffles and lotteries – I lose – but I have never participated in a white elephant swap before.  I know, I lead a bizarrely sheltered existence.  Here are my experiences.

In Retrospect – Part Two: The Keeper Shelf – The Price of Cleaning

My taste in books is widely eclectic, even though it seems I review a lot of erotic romance.  I think I do it because the usual romance sites largely ignore it, other than a few authors, in favor of mainstream romance and those dreadful ‘category’ romances from Harlequin that are so very popular.  Or maybe that’s because the vast majority are quick easy reads – or so tedious I skim.  The year is far from over and the fall is a big release period for publishers looking to cash in on people’s holiday spending, but I’ve been editing my selves.

I have hundreds of books, mostly hardcover, on my bookshelves.  Hundreds more piled about.  I need space, so time to edit the keepers and reference books I haven’t used in over a decade.  Cookbooks are rarely on the discard pile, but history is, along with literature and many old series – from David Eddings’ The Mallorean to Stuart Woods’ Stone Barrington novels – I have no interest in rereading.  Keeper shelves are mostly a matter of taste, and tastes change, or the reader’s wants change, and books get dated or supplanted by something even better.  I find I have to edit my keeper self, but I confess I have enough book selves (a whole wall) that I keep far too many.  I hate getting rid of books, but it MUST be done.

The Pecuilar Morality of ‘The One’

You see it time and again in romance novels, ‘The One’, a Heart Mate, ‘Life Mate’, an inescapable destined mate – and more often than not, there can be only one.  Werewolves do it on an almost universal basis.  Dragons do it, especially shifter dragons.  Vampires do it, though it’s less universal.  Even some cats do it, though more often than not cats with just one mate are seen as the family oddball. (Nik Vorislav in Shelly Laurenston’s hysterically funny Here Kitty, Kitty)  But the morality around securing ‘the One’ seems to get a bit flexible.

The idea that a male has one true mate to exclusion of all others and is destined to monogamy with that One is remarkably attractive to women.  That makes it a very attractive trope in paranormal romance.  It might not insure they’re loved for themselves, but it does insure a faithful, caring male.  In the majority of the books I’ve read, the ‘One’ is often the only one capable of acting as breeder as well.  Occasionally, breeding is separate, but it is usually an exclusive right of the One. So now you have a male (on rare occasion a female) with a biological imperative that’s two fold, the need to secure a desirable mate and the need to procreate.  This makes the female irresistible.  It also provides the stability and emotional security for the female – the guarantee he will remain exclusively yours and value you as the prize you are.  A seductive idea with great appeal, but one that often comes at a price.  To reap the benefits, your mate must be a True Mate or Life Mate, as opposed to a mate (lower case), because otherwise it might well go the way of broken marriages in the human world.