Noble Romance

This publisher is offering advances and asking for anything, literally anything. Click submissions once you get there if you are writing romances, and us women if we are not writing them, we are reading them.
I gave some thought to the idea that we have to support our authors by buying books. I usually get my books at the library but I bought Dean Koontz's new book, Shadow Street. The book was the usual from the master of disaster and murder however after reading his newsletter and his website I think sometimes he should write comedy. An author who always works hard, this book still reminded me of someone else, Stephen King. Harlequin sent me some books but I found the language stumbling and the heroines a bit stupid. I am wanting a heroine who is smart and can make things happen! Those are the ones I love. Happy reading.

Preston and Child

I have read every book by these 2 authors I can get my hands on. I've always been interested in science and these guys are up to the task in their writing. I, who have perhaps read too many books, have grown bored with books in which I know what is going to happen. With these guys you can't guess usually anyway.
They created a sort of James Bond character named Pendergast, but he really isn't like Bond. He reminds you of Bond with his abilities and the fact that he is wealthy and an F.B.I. agent. He is not handsome for one thing and young women don't fall all over his path. What he does is bring the quality of brains to the story.
In one story he meets a girl in a hick town who is the town "Goth" and the town's reject. What can you expect when her mother is a drunk and she has no father and a filthy trailer to call home? At the end of the novel he tells her how he has registered her for school and giving her money which she at first refuses. He then tells her the money was obtained illegally by a member of his family and he wishes to help the family name by doing good deeds with the money. But I am a freak! she cries and he tells her that he is one too and he did well and so could she, but she had to get out of this town, the town was killing her.
I thought it was art, the way he summed everything up that way. Yes Pendergast is a freak, an albino with snow white hair and strange ways and who finds it difficult to say thank you to anyone but he has found a way to live with it. Intelligent people are often freaks. I think he is alluding here to the fact that people tend to pigeonhole you, and she needed to get out of the town to start a new life because you can never get away from your box they put you in. I live in a small town and they have their ways and one must adapt of course. It can cause the worst kind of claustrophobia, my daughter couldn't wait to get out of town in spite of the fact she has dear friends here.
Pendergast chasing murderers, and I am bit tired of them it's the only fiction I can find much of that I like. The attraction is I think that people find it tantalizing that someone they know is in disguise, for someone among them was capable of murder. It's the social mask, what evil does it hide? It appears from the many murders that go unsolved, it hides a lot.

Arabic Lots

Dreamhouse Attic is a site with a great deal of the arabic lots, this is a sort of formula using the Ascendant of your astrology chart. Finding money in the chart is a pastime I seem to never tire of, so my fav is the Lot of Wealth. Destiny seems to have plowed a course and left this birth chart of mine to remember it by, for it seems all things were foreshadowed and if the ancients thought one day they could predict everyone's life, well millions have been spent trying to predict the weather. What we find is that the weather cannot be predicted, it can be linked to probabilities and that is exactly what astrology is. To be sure I have felt the jealousies of Venus in Scorpio and a great deal of puzzlement has been with me as to why I, the least jealous of all people should find myself so fiercely jealous when it comes to my love life. It has been said the percentage of correct prediction is 84 percent, which isn't bad. I try to change myself, self-improve myself and have been ever since elementary school when no one liked me. Yet with this comes the question of why, since these things were not linked to my personality or some lack in myself although I do have lacks of course but rather to my family messing up my life with great impact and ignorance of that fact. Still a malignant mother and a teacher getting her revenge on my family is not good luck, is it? Authority of all kinds has failed me, parents, teachers, policemen, bosses. I do not see this in my astrology chart but somehow I don't doubt it is there. With astrology everything is explained, and it does so beautifully.
Those who follow astrology usually do so because their lives are so very bad that they start searching for answers. It seems horrible to have such bad luck, but it is better at least to feel you understand it. I myself have planets without essential dignities which means to talk without tact, to be quarrelsome, to be always butting ones head against authority. So it has been, but I still feel that is right to do so. It seems sad somehow to blend in and yet I long for it like sunshine in the winter. It is sad to melt into the crowd and be forgotten, but somehow I think we are forgotten anyway.

Writing

As joyful as it can be to write when you want to the opposite is true if you don't want to. It seems that everyone wants to do it and to learn how to do it but it is about a huge investment in time, discipline, and faith. Where does one find the confidence to chose a path anyway? There are so many options.
They tell me the public brought paranormal to the fore, but the many half vampire, half werewolf, half of somethings make me cringe. It's almost as if we've got this new material but we've got to do the same things with it. We go for newness but somehow we can't arrive. Newness must arrive with the person themselves, who they are and what they think and what they write cannot be separated. I get these impressions from the huge amount of reading that I do, almost a book a day and no, I am not joking. What I get is a tiredness of this glut of stories, a sense of sameness, that I'm reading the same thing over and over. What I want is unpredictability in story even as it is in life. The thing that books did for me when I was between being a child and an adult doesn't happen now. This overwhelming sense of possibility.
Being a writer is an odd thing, people study it and even so I don't think it has parameters. The simple telling of story seems to be enormously complicated.
NEVER start a story with a character waking up.
NEVER change point of view
NEVER start with It was a dark and stormy night unless you are Snoopy the dog.
NEVER have the main character be the murderer or an awful person.
NEVER tell a characters dream in detail
NEVER use the passive voice, actually this is very useful.
NEVER use exclamation points.
NEVER have the answer be aliens did it unless things are exceedingly odd all around during the story.
NEVER forget to enclose a self addressed postage paid envelope
NEVER call editors constantly or make a pest of yourself. I'm told publishing is a small world.
NEVER use colored paper or confetti or perfumed paper.
NEVER have characters on drugs or depict drugs in any other way than dangerous, deadly, and unsavory
NEVER say love does not exist. Make those dreams come true at least on the page.
I think it wise to remember that people who do read like some wordplay and things of that nature because they love words. That's why they are reading.
This is a list of advice I've read or been given. It is not I who is wise and know these things. I do however, cook a mean fried chicken.

Life by Keith Richards

This book is like a very long interview with the rocker and guitarist for the Rolling Stones. The strangest thing about it are the things he says about drugs and his drug use, and how they kept throwing him in jail and two years later they were naming streets in his native part of London after his songs. He says that he wrote the music and Jagger would do the words, which didn't suprise me. I was suprised that Jagger can play, he just doesn't do so onstage. As for Brian Jones in this memoir he comes off looking not so good, a man who was violent with his girlfriends and often so stoned he couldn't contribute to a recording session even if he did manage to get there. As for his death Keith says that he was so self-destructive that he himself was to blame for his death regardless of all the theories that maybe the guy he hired as a contractor killed him. For anyone who does not know, Brian was found dead in his own swimming pool the same night there was a party at his house. He is perhaps most known for playing the sitar on "Paint It Black" Keith has shown regret and shame in interview but not over his drug use, but over the fact he took Brian's girlfriend Anita away from him sometime in the late sixties. I see it that way, the way he stares defiantly at the interviewer. Somehow he is ashamed. In his new book he says he rescued Anita from a violent Brian, but it is odd how Anita goes from Brian to Keith to Mick. Anita was with Keith the longest, for many years and supposedly with Mick only once. It is like that song "You're So Vain" where she sings "You're with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend." I used to think for that reason that song was about Mick Jagger, but now it seems to be about Warren Beatty. Beatty says it is about him, just as the song says. Marianne Faithful, singer of "As Tears Go By" and Mick's girlfriend claims she went to bed with three of them in an interview. Perhaps most telling of all, Keith writes Gimme Shelter while Anita is filming Performance with Mick and he suspects having an affair with her. Looking back on it, he says maybe that song had something to do with that though at the time he didn't make that connection. I rather think these proper English boys are so out of touch with their feelings, and when Keith writes about Mick he leaves out a lot. He says that Mick is his "mate" but on one tour they refused to talk to each other at all so had to speak to each other through other people. I can imagine people running back and forth with "messages" So perhaps this book, as very thick as it is, leaves a lot of unanswered questions after all. I have an idea that Keith is not very introspective and perhaps doesn't know exactly how to put things into words at all. I was suprised how much of the book I already knew. Perhaps that is why Keith writes songs, to say the things he cannot say.

Shadowfever by Moning

I have followed this series and this book is the last one I'm sorry to say. The Fae care nothing for humans and are so sensual and beautiful that it is more than a poor human can stand. Yet stand this heroine MacKayla or "Mac" must for to fall under thier spell is to lose oneself entirely and become a sex slave or "Pri-ya".
In the first book she meets Barrons and who he is exactly is never explained but he is so powerful even the Fae fear him. Lost in the dangers that the shadows of Dublin, Ireland hold she sees a bookstore with all it's lights lit up where she meets Barrons. He never lets the lights go out for shadows hold creatures who would suck the life out of you. She meets Barrons and immediately they are attracted to each other and start to argue with each other. They can't stop fighting with one another even though the attraction between them is so strong. This love or hate relationship is the center of the story.
The books are sort of ghoulish, sort of like a book about zombies might be. She kills a lot of creatures in these books. The books they also say are very sexy, but if you read them there is very little sex in these books. There is sexual tension so tight I wanted to shout at these characters, get together already!! There is so much action that it is hard for these two just to keep up with each other and they lose each other entirely sometimes.
This is most of all a romance and a sensuous one at that. I hear it is very successful. That is as it should be. This is what I did last weekend, all weekend, is read Shadowfever.