Groundhog Day Rewind!

I'm trying to imagine the pitch for the movie Groundhog Day.  Really?  Same day, over and over? Trying to get something right but you don't know what you're doing wrong? And why Groundhog Day? Why not, oh, I don't know, Arbor Day, or Pi Day, or something? (you could make a good argument for the numbers in pi not repeating, but maybe you'd need to be a math nerd to think so...)

Is it the 2? 2/2? like a repeat? or a... rewind?  That gave me an idea...

I have to admit that I like the Old Skool romances.  I do.  I'm not sure what I'd think about a newly published one, with all the heaving and dying and whatnot, but I have a fondness for the real Old Skool ones that actually does stand-up to the repeat read.

About a year ago I got ahold of a couple of Rosemary Rogers titles and really enjoyed them.  So I think I'm going to seek out some of these old skool re-reads.  Keep an eye out for them on the second of the month.  Like... today?*

Oh, Bertrice Small... I loved her books so much when I was the same age as her heroines (13? 14?), and none more than Skye O'Malley.  Will I still?

Answer: Oh yes.  Yes yes yes! and then I fainted.

Poor Skye faints a lot, especially after a good orgasm.  There is lots and lots and lots of sex in this book and I wouldn't say that it's not graphic, but it's not as...erm, detailed as you generally see in the "hotter" modern offerings.  Two to three paragraphs, max. I love this story with my whole heart, but I will concede that the sex scenes may have been written by a virgin. No matter how bad it starts out, it almost always ended up OK.  PTSD had yet to be identified, much less understood, and so Skye, like any good Old Skool heroine, shakes off the odd rape or pirate attack with a good cry and a complicated revenge plan.

Small's villains are completely vile, indulging in such horrors as incest and anal sex.  Also they hit women and tend to have thin lips.  This is your best bet for distinguishing them from the heroes, who, just like the villains, pursue the sweet, virtuous but proud and tempestuous beauty, helpless against their baser desires, driven to possess her by fair means or foul. The villainesses are promiscuous and generally batshit crazy in one way or another. 

The other difference, besides the thin lips, is that the heroes (and there are more than one), are not cruel at heart and always genuinely fall in love with Skye.  In this book (there are sequels) she has 4 husbands and 7 children and still looks like an ante-bellum Scarlett O'Hara.  Those 16th century women sure had a lot of stamina.

I've always been puzzled by assertions that romance readers actually identify with the hero.  If that's you, you probably aren't going to like Skye O'Malley at all.  She's hard on husbands.  Jennifer Crusie says this about romance:

Seventy percent of book buyers and eighty percent of book readers are women, and like me, those readers are tired of serving and losing and waiting and dying in their fictional worlds. The romance heroine not only acts and wins, she discovers a new sense of self, a new sense of what it means to be female as she struggles through her story, and so does the romance reader as she reads it.

And that is Skye O'Malley to a T.  You might even say this isn't even a romance-- it is perhaps three romances, but it IS the story of the heroine and her struggles to act and win.

One thing that I found interesting about Skye is that it is no Cinderella story.  Skye is pampered and bejeweled and privileged from the first page to the last, and there is lavish descriptive detail about the lifestyle -- the food, the furnishings, the rich clothing, fabulous jewels, festivals.  The point of view is far more omniscient that current standards, with little introspection or inner dialog.  PoV travels easily from one head to another but it's nearly all in the service of describing the action and setting up the plot. 

It's epic and adventurous and while I could probably rip it up on technicalities, it's just too much fun to read.  It's a slice of lush fantasy, a moment out of time where I imagine myself fabulously wealthy, fabulously desireable, and clever enough to outwit  my jealous enemies.

Next up: I think maybe Shanna, by Kathleen Woodiwiss.


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*Oops.  I flubbed the scheduling bit so it went through a little early.  Oh well.  It's the second in most time zones...

I Swear

Because I'm a word nerd, one the things I've been noticing lately are the words that an author chooses for a character to swear with.  These are the words that come out of a character's mouth when emotions are at the highest, when the action is peaking.  They can add period authenticity in historicals and subtly reinforce elements of a paranormal world.  In a contemporary, they can serve to peg the character into a class, region, or ethnicity.  Swear words have a lot of power and they tell you a lot about a character. James Lipton likes to ask his famous interviewees what their favorite curse word is.

The book that sent me down the path of this post is Meljean Brook's The Iron Duke, and Mina's favorite oath: "My blue heaven." It just fit so perfectly into the world where the skies are clouded with smog; and there's this one moment when she sees an actual blue sky, possibly for the first time:

Rhys watched her face as she stepped down from the car, and saw that her first glance was in the same direction as everyone else who journeyed from London-- up, where the sun hung high in the brilliant blue sky, rather than shining like a dull coin embedded in a shark's belly.  Her lips parted and her face softened, and Rhys vowed that he would see that expression again.

I swear I'm not that old, really, but I knew that "My Blue Heaven" was the name of a song; I thought maybe from the 40s or 50s, but when I looked it up, the original is even older than I thought -- 1927.  Not quite the right era, but it does kind of evoke the motorcars and early era of technology that fits in with the steampunk aesthetic, yes? No? OK, maybe that's a stretch

.
I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it's just one of those little authorial choices that seems to add so much to the story, at both a character and world-building level.

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Then came Anne Stewart's, Reckless, which opened a bit shockingly:

"Move yer bleedin' arse," Miss Charlotte Spenser's maid, Meggie, said to her.

The contradiction of formal title and the rude language and particularly that the maid says it to the lady, is a great hook and pulled me in to the character quickly.  Unfortunately, it ended up being a bit gimmicky as the whole schtick about the "Bluestocking Ladies" learning how to swear was dropped right away.  It was a decent introduction but it could have added a lot more to the story if the author had wanted to work it a bit more.

But... I can't let this one drop without observing that it can't possibly be a coincidence that it's exactly the same line that Eliza Doolittle lets loose with in My Fair Lady, can it? (Well, technically, Eliza says "bloomin'," rather than "bleedin'". Still.)

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I already talked a bit about how Kim Harrison uses the phrase, "By the Turn" in her Rachel Morgan/Hallows series.  I found it a bit heavy-handed (though that could be a cumulative effect of multiple books) and it lacks the delicious subtle layering of Brook's "my blue heaven," BUT it does reinforce the otherness of the Hallows world and the cultural magnitude of the event that "outed" all the paranormal beings.

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So tell me about your favorite use of profanity in fiction - how do authors use it to make a point about their characters?  For you writers lurking out there, feel free to jump in with any of your own favorite examples.

And finally, I leave you with this, just because it's hilarious (it's heavily bleeped but you might want to have headphones on if you're at work or have rugrats in earshot)

Thursday Thirteen, Edition 23: Stuff I Do

Thirteen Things I Do Other Than Read, Blog, or Read Blogs....

1. Work. I have a good job, and it's fairly consuming. Add in the commute and it's a good 10-11 hours/day.
2. Parent. I have two kids in grade school.  They require a certain amount of upkeep -- food, clothes.. you know how it goes.
3. Girl Scouts. I was a leader for 4 years. This year I've stepped back from leading but we still do a lot of Scout activities. (Want cookies? Call me).
4. Quilt- it's actually been quite a while since I did anything on this, but I finally got going on a project for my niece who'll be two in May.  Hoping to have it done by then.
5. Scrapbook - photos, papers, stickers, albums, oh my.  I swing both ways: traditional paper and digital. 
6. Internet forums - when I want to kill 10 or 20 minutes online, this is where I go.  I'm a member of several different once and they each have different "personalities."  I've made a lot of friends this way over the years --I've been a member of one of them for going on 13 years!
7. Facebook... need I say more?
8. Social director - I manage a list of folks that all used to work together for happy hours every other week.  It's a fantastic bunch of people and has evolved into a fairly powerful networking group--we genuinely know, like, and look out for each other.
9. Other networking - I keep an eye on LinkedIn and try to make it a point to jump in with something that's hopefully helpful to a contact, usually around 3-4 times per month.
10. Begin home improvement projects.  I have trouble finishing them, though.
11. Housekeeping.  Oh man, do I hate this.  And I do a lot less than some people (mymomcoughcough) would consider a bare minimum.  But I haven't figured out how to avoid entirely, so.
12. Drink coffee.  I do live in Seattle, after all.  The first time I ordered a drink with more than two descriptors, I had a funny little moment, but I got over it.  Double-tall non-fat vanilla latte, if you please.
13. Play puzzle games - if I can't read, I might be playing sudoku or spider solitaire, or this facebook game called Combine that I have found oddly addictive.

But really, after #1 and #2, reading is my first love and I'd always rather be doing that than *almost* anything else.  So even when the blog is quiet, you can assume that if I'm breathing, books are getting read.

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Bloggiesta 2011 - Finish Line

OK, I'm a little late with this but I was all worn out from the fiesta yesterday.

Here's the original list with updates

• Write reviews. Drafted/outline two reviews; completed one for publication this week.
• Write backup posts for a rainy day. Drafted two thinky posts
• Write that great post idea from three months back.  See above; also noted some ideas for future and uploaded to google docs.
• Create template posts for your future reads. This doesn't really work for me since my format is very loose.  I did do one for the Thursday Thirteen posts that includes the header pic and the footer text.  It took me less than 10 minutes.

• Clean up tags & blogrolls - Blogrolls-DONE; labels not so much
• Fix the favicon - DONE
• Work on any specialized projects (Friday Fantasy Feature) - not so much
• Put out invitations for guest posts for above - Opened up some dialog with fave fantasy bloggers
• Master the art of the feed reader and blog subscriptions. Researched a bit.  Did not really have any "a-ha" moments.
• Make business cards (eh, maybe).  Nah.
• Back up your blog. Nah
• Participate in some mini-challenges. I read most of the challenge articles but didn't really do the exercises.
• Learn more about blogging, read great articles, get inspired. Yes!  thanks fellow participants!
• Make sure you have properly copyrighted your blog and know what to do when somebody reposts your material. Sooo, as near as I can tell from the decidedly non-actual-legal advice I found on the challenge and elsewhere, your own material is copyrighted whether you put the special little symbol in your footer or not; registering with the copyright office (for a fee) may give you more protection. Opting out of that for the moment. 
• Help other bloggers, answer questions, share your expertise (let’s face it – this is the best part of Bloggiesta!) Yes!  I can't really say "Done" because how can you be "done" with something like that? but I did chip in my 2 cents here and there while I was hopping around.  Good thing there was a challenge for this because I am known for being shy and retiring online.

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Things I did that I didn't expect to:

• Added social networking buttons to the post footer template.
• Went down a rabbit hole researching fancy ways to organize labels on the Blogger platform; decided to leave any major re-org for another time, but collected a list of reference links.
• Discovered a book with associated challenge that sounds interesting (The Heroine's Bookshelf).
• Thinking about glomming onto the Sunday Salon meme.
• Updated my "About" page.

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So all in all, a very productive weekend.  I managed about 12 hours over two days, perhaps a bit more if you include the bloghopping (loved the participant feed reader!)

Many thanks to Natasha at Maw Books for hosting and organizing; I found the whole event to be a great motivator for those "tune-up" items that are easy to procrastinate on.

Bloggiesta 2011 - Almost Done

Today's been almost a bust.  I completed a post for later this week and meandered around some other blogs.  Added one to the blog-roll.  It's been a puttering kind of day.

I'm clearly not going to make it to 20 hours.  Maybe I'll get a second wind after dinner.  *yawn*

Right now, I'm thinking: siesta.

Bloggiesta 2011 Check-In

Halfway Mark
It's really more like 2/3s over, but since I didn't start until today, I'm 1/2 done.

How am I doing?  Not too bad.  I've spent about 8 hours on Bloggiesta, interrupted by a shopping trip for craft supplies (school project for the kid, quilt project for me) and a school play-- just spectators; my girls had several friends performing.

I pruned back my blogrolls for those that are no longer active (*sob*); updated the "About" page and debugged my favicon.  Sites that provide free hosting for .ico files seem to come and go; my favicon has been MIA for awhile now.  I found a new hosting site for it (IconJ) and it's working again.  Took awhile though; and I fiddled with my ISP account for a bit to see if I could host the file myself but it was too much of a PITA to set up.  Of course, I made that call after spending close to an hour on it.  Grrr.

Those are the visible changes; for the rest I have drafted about 4 upcoming posts to varying degrees of completion and jotted down ideas for 3 more.  I also checked out this year's mini-challenges -- unfortunately none of them really resonated with me so I don't know if I'll participate.

Research
I poked around on a couple of different stats counters.  I've had people tell me that my numbers look too low, but two different programs are showing approximately the same numbers, so *shrug* I guess I'm what you call a "boutique" blog, lol.

I did some research about ways to categorize/group labels in Blogger -- I'm very jealous of the two-level organizational capability that Wordpress has.  Ultimately I decided not change anything at the moment because my options (that I could find) appear complicated, difficult to maintain, and yet still not quite what I want.  Toying with the idea of moving all my author labels to a page though, since the label list is getting long and I'll probably always have a lot of authors with only one link.

Hopping
Outside of my own blog content, I've hopped on over to a couple of random Bloggiesta-ers to check out what they're doing, and left a couple of comments.  I wish I had time to visit everyone, it's such a candybox to have a couple hundred blogs to choose from -- you never know what you're going to get, but your odds are good of finding something tasty!

Bloggiesta 2011

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It:
A blog-improvement marathon.  Hosted by Natasha at Maw Books, this is an event that she has run a number of times.  Officially it goes from 8 am today (ie, NOW) to 8:00 am Monday morning.  However, there is flexibility -- not many of us can expect to start right at that moment or to work continuously all weekend.  Click on the emblem in the sidebar to see the announcement post with the rules, sign-up, and suggestions.

I did this challenge about a year and half ago, in the summer of 2009, and my goals are going to look remarkably similar now as they did then.  Thing is, some things you can do once and forget them; some you need to pay constant attention to, and others, well, you can let them go for awhile but it's good to spruce them up every now and then.  The Bloggiesta challenge is good motivation/inspiration for me to do that kind of maintenance and  maybe to look at my long-term strategy.

This Year's To-Do List
Because Natasha has gotten so good at these lists, I've done a cut and paste from her post (credit where it's due!), deleted the ones that I'm not interested in or have completed, and modified a few to suit me:

• Write reviews.
• Write backup posts for a rainy day.
• Write that great post idea from three months back.
• Create template posts for your future reads (ie: title, images, linking, tags, etc,) so you can open up, write review and post without being bogged down with technicalities (interesting idea, no?  worth a try!)

Notice that these all pertain to making it quicker and easier to get good content out of my head and into the blog.  I have a notion that I might outline a few ideas I've had -- I could write them later but there are a few ideas I've had knocking around for quite a while.  What I've learned after three years of blogging is that at this point? if I don't do something pretty soon, they'll fade away.  These ideas don't need more mental percolation time to gel; they need butt-in-seat, hands-on-the-keyboard time to make it happen.

Some housekeeping type things, to do in between the heavy-duty content generation:

• Clean up tags & blogrolls
• Fix the favicon
• Work on any specialized projects (Friday Fantasy Feature)
• Put out invitations for guest posts for above
• Master the art of the feed reader and blog subscriptions.
• Make business cards (eh, maybe).
• Back up your blog.
• Participate in some mini-challenges
• Learn more about blogging, read great articles, get inspired.
• Make sure you have properly copyrighted your blog and know what to do when somebody reposts your material.
• Help other bloggers, answer questions, share your expertise (let’s face it – this is the best part of Bloggiesta!)

I'm not going to have much time to work on this today, and I have some other stuff to do here and there over the weekend, but I figure I could probably get in 15 or 20 hours.  Let's call 20 the goal.  I'll be checking in here and there, and be sure to visit Natasha for the linky -- do some bloghopping and get some ideas for your own improvement program.