Sunday Soup - March 8

Sunday Soup is... Girl Scout cookies, Shiloh Walker's backlist, lots of series catching up...

Soup Dish:  on my mind this week
✽So March may mean shamrocks and green beer to some of you, but at my house it's all about the Girl Scout cookies.  For the past 6 or 7 years, I've been the troop cookie mom for an enormous "super troop" of more than 30 girls.  Thankfully, starting last year, we've figured a way to split it up so it's gotten a bit easier.  Still, it's pretty much eating my brain.


What I'm reading
I haven't done a Soup in so long!  I have a HUGE backlog...actually, it's been so long, let's not even talk about catching up.  Let's just talk about lately. 
 
✽I spent quite a few evenings during the holidays catching up on Shiloh Walker's The Hunters series.  I had actually read one or two of the later ones but I hadn't realized that the first ones were mostly novellas and mostly more erotica than PNR.  Lately I'm finding that novellas and shorts are suiting me very nicely.  It probably means bad things about my attention span and brain function, but in the meantime, I am liking shorter pieces more than ever lately.  These definitely follow a distinct pattern, but as it turns out, I like the pattern so I pretty much inhaled these.  I was sorry to come to the end.

✽After enjoying The Master so much by Kresley Cole, I nabbed The Professional, which was handily on sale at the time (I love this trend of discounting book one in a series, it's so smart, and it hooks me EVERY TIME.) The Professional was, if possible, even hotter than The Master, although I will say the hero made me want to smack him around a little bit. If you don't like controlling alphas, this one might strike a wrong note for you, but the sex scenes burned up the page.


✽Quite a lot of my reading over the past few months involved series that I've already talked about here and still adore -- Tiffany Reisz' The King, Moira Rogers' Crossroads (Arcana #2), Chloe Neill's last two Chicagoland Vampires series (I gotta get me that new one set in NOLA), and tons more.  I would like to publish this while it's still Sunday in my timezone, so I'll have to come back later and talk about some of my reading detours.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for the RETURN of Jamie and Claire onscreen.

This was pretty cool:

 

Sunday Soup - July 27

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  on my mind this week...
✽I've been on vacation in small-town mid-America, and it's been a low-tech kind of week.  I know that a huge chunk of my book community is at RWA but I have not been following  much of the goings-on, except:

✽Carolyn Crane won a RITA!  I'm so happy for her.  She was one of the first book bloggers to befriend me and Alpha Heroes when I got started, and I will never stop laughing at The Unfeasibly Tall Greek Billionaire's Blackmailed Martyr-Complex Secretary Mistress Bride. Her fiction is still characterized by that same quirky humor and fresh imagination.

✽If you are a lover of 80s pop culture, you might enjoy Tiffany Reisz's latest freebie: Erotic Charles In Charge fan-fic. When you stop giggling, you should read it and bring ice.


What I'm reading

✽My big project this week was a re-read of Outlander.  Although I consider myself a fan, and regularly list this title as one of my all-time favorite books, I've never been much of a re-reader and this was only my second time through it. I have to say it holds up as well as anything I've ever read.  I remember when it came out, it wasn't always easy to find it in the bookstore -- I have seen it shelved in romance, sci-fi-fantasy, and general fiction.  And I feel that's really true: it defies genre conventions.  What struck me the most about it was the precarious position they found themselves in at the end of the book -- truly a "happily for now".   After turning the last page and taking a few deep breaths, I remembered that there are another nearly 7000 pages published of Jamie and Claire's story (setting aside the Lord John books and other shorter works), and felt reassured, but in the midst of this story, even knowing that things eventually turn out more or less ok, I was completely immersed in the ups and downs of this roller-coaster book. I loved it all over again.

✽A Good Debutante's Guide to Ruin, by Sophie Jordan (ARC). Releases this Tuesday; a solid Regency for which I owe a real review. A nicely constructed situation, likeable characters, and good chemistry. I loved the erotic tension and the villainy was kicked up a notch in a good way. My one nitpick is that the language sometimes sounded too contemporary to my ear, especially one of the key secondary characters.

✽Going Under by Jeffe Kennedy. Absolutely loved the premise here and the heroine. This is an erotic romance and they do get up to some fetishy hijinks; you may want to kick the air conditioning up before you dig into this one.  I sort of felt that the ending was a bit rushed and that she forgave him a bit too easily, but I really loved the tech element here. (Kennedy's inspiration was a true story that made a huge impression on me as well when it broke). You'll have to decide if a ginger-flavored Tom Hiddleston-esque hero is a plus for you.

✽Wild Card, by Moira Rogers - this was a quick paranormal read, fairly hot, though I personally wouldn't peg it as erotica. In a post-apocalyptic future that resembles the nineteenth century west with wolf shifters, a lone female rancher finally meets her match.  I liked it and will probably read on in the series.

✽Razing Kayne, by Julianne Reeves. I went to this contemp cop-romance as a "something completely different" follow-up to Outlander. So it had a tough act to follow.  I'm not really sure what made me pick this one up-- random Twitter mention? Kindle freebie? Something like that. I have mixed reactions - I thought the suspense plot was really good - tight, unusual, a couple of crazy twists; and I liked the love scenes too.  Characterization wasn't quite up to par, IMO; there was just a real lot internal angsty descriptive narrative to tell me what was going on with the main characters.  Still, this is the sort of thing that can get better as a writer gains experience, so I might pick up another title.  The small (ish) town had an interesting population of secondary characters, too.  Has promise.

That's all for this week's soup.  Hope you're having a delightful summer.

Sunday Soup - July 13

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  on my mind this week...
✽A lot of interesting links about the ongoing Hachette vs. Amazon battle and where the author and reader interests lie. There is a ton of rhetoric out there about who is the bigger monster, and I cannot claim to understand all the nuances.  But the most compelling article I've read lately on the topic is this one from Joe Konrath. In particular, the information he exposes around one reason that Hachette *may* be digging in on terms is the issue of retail discounting:

If you want to understand what a party is doing in a negotiation, a good place to start is with their public statements. In this case, we know exactly what Hachette was planning to do in this negotiation because they published their strategy. In a letter to the federal court in the ebook antitrust case, believe it or not. When the proposed final judgment for Apple was announced, it included a provision that prohibited Apple from entering into agreements that would limit its ability to offer retail discounts.

The Big 5 are saying that as soon as the two year "cooling off" period is over, they want to get rid of retail discounting. Literally their only objection to the Apple settlement is that it will leave one ebook retailer who must maintain the ability to discount. The Big 5 have been waiting for two years for a chance to get rid of retail discounting. And take special note of that word "unilaterally". That means that the Big 5 each have to negotiate independently with their retailers.

I don't know about you guys, but I really like being able to bargain shop occasionally for e-books.  I do pay full price on release day for some authors that I love, but I also am more likely to try an unknown author for 99 cents than I am for $7.99.

✽I am not lovin' Bloglovin. I've followed links to several blog posts lately that were somehow(?) syndicated with this app, and it pops up a large header that consumes about 20% of my available vertical reading space.  Presumably this would go away if only I would sign in to a service I know nothing about and cannot find out about unless I log in. I'm feeling cranky about the sheer number of services/apps I need to log into lately and I am not automatically creating accounts for everything.  So if you are using this service, be aware that it is an obstacle for cranky people like myself.

✽And while I'm at it, those of you who use jumps in your articles are putting up another barrier for me.  I read most of my blogs in a feedreader (Feedly), and I only click through maybe 5% of the articles that I get a teaser for.  I know you have your reasons for doing that -- ad revenue and clicks are one -- but that is a big reason I love the feedreader. I get all those annoying flashy-blinky-scrolling ads filtered. Just so you know.


What I'm reading

✽I have been loving the Kit Rocha series so much, I don't know why it didn't occur to me until recently to check out the books by the same team under their other nom de plume, Moira Rogers. I picked up Crux early last week and positively devoured it. I'm pacing myself on new purchases, considering the staggering size of my TBR pile, but that series just jumped high up on the list. Absolutely loved it.  

✽This review at Herding Cats and Burning Soup (great name!) caught my eye, and I've added The Bottom Line to my "to be acquired" list. I'm always on the lookout for a good contemp author to try. (disclosure: link goes to the original blogger's affiliate link, seems only fair.)

✽I bent my "no review copies" policy for Memory Zero by Keri Arthur. This is book one of a new series and I totally loved it. It does bear a strong resemblance to the Riley Jenson series in pacing and pattern, which in my mind is all to the good. The heroine is a tough police detective with latent paranormal abilities, and after attending a couple of sessions at RT14 with Diana Rowland, whose bio includes similar police work and also writes UF, and I couldn't help kind of picturing her as the heroine, Sam Ryan. It is available for pre-order, and if you liked Riley, you'll be a fan of this series as well.

✽I was on such a good roll with paranormals that I decided to pick up a physical book that had been gathering dust on my shelf: The Last Mermaid from Shana Abe. I love Abe's writing soooo much. It's been a bit slower read, partly I think I just read physical books more slowly than e-books, and partly because the language is worth lingering over.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.

With the premiere of the TV show less than a month away, the buzz is really heating up. First up, the scoop about when and where from Entertainment Weekly. Next, a very nice photo gallery from Yahoo TV (although I was a little disappointed in the lack of really new images). Finally, an interview with Starz' CEO, who is hardly impartial, but it's nice to see that kind of excitement.