Review policy: I only post reviews on my blog for books I feel strongly about, good or bad.
Title: STILL LIFE WITH STRINGS
Author: L.H. Cosway Read more
La Bodega
I’ve been thinking about the way I eat (for various reasons) and how/why my eating habits are so bad, why I fall back on banal comfort food, why I’m not adventurous in the least.
As I was writing Paso Doble, I kept finding myself associating my characters’ meals at tapas bars with romance. Small bites in small dishes. Tasting. A meal of hors d’oeuvres, eaten slowly, from a lover’s hand. I wanted to be able to do that.
Musings on the “placeholder” heroine
I.
Except for those little moments relieved by the occasional huge moment, everyday life can be a drudgery. Whatever you are engaged in, be it work (no matter how glamorous or lucrative it is) or raising a family or fulfilling your calling at church or attaining some long-held goal (usually all of them at once), at some point, you’ll find yourself slogging through it and wondering where the magic is. Read more
The Mamba
A friend wrote something on her Book of Faces, and instead of taking up all her comment space, I thought I’d put it here. I felt impressed to say a couple of words, but then it went into many words and then paragraphs. OMG I take a lot of words to say a thing.
On reading – links roundup
One day I saw somebody say, “Links roundups are lame.” Well, I like them, but I have minority opinions more often than not. You know what? Fuck that. I like ’em and this is my blog.
Is ‘devouring’ books a sign of superficiality in a reader? Amongst romance readers, of course, this question is fightin’ words. Read more
Rook Takes Queen
So I dug an old manuscript out wondering how/if I should rehab it. I wrote it so long ago, head-hopping was still acceptable, although on its way out. It’s 84,000 words. And there are no f-bombs. (IKR?!) The thing about headhopping, at least for me, is that I could tell a story in so many fewer words with it.
This story has a story.
Paint the corners
My 10-year-old XY TD can’t wait to see Pitch. He wants to watch it because it’s something that’s never been done before, a woman pitching in MLB.1 He doesn’t see a girl. He sees himself. In her. The underdog2,3 misunderstood, not wanted or liked, basically alone with too few allies, too different to have as smooth a ride through malehood as his peers.
- Or, as Dude pointed out to me last night because we’re both kind of fascinated with XY’s reaction to the series (whereas 13-year-old XX is so not) (she already knows she’s a badass), a 17-year-old girl struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game and a woman hasn’t been in the MLB since. ↩
- “A girl will never be able to throw hard enough to compete with boys. It’s biology and we can’t change that.” My dad told me a girl would never be able to throw a curve ball because their elbows are constructed differently from a boy’s. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m not interested enough to find out. But I was kind of shocked to hear it from someone else. ↩
- I introduced him to Rocky last year. He’s now a devoted disciple of underdog movies. He gets it from his mom. ↩
What are you doing RIGHT NOW?
Stop.
What are you doing right now? Right this very minute.
Stop for a couple of minutes and answer that question.
In defense of ugly jackets
(Or, if I were Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter.)
Do you see this jacket? It’s an Armani jacket. [beat]
What do you think it retails for? $5,000? $7,000? That’s what Donald Trump pays for his designer suits. [beat] [audience boos]
$10,000? No. It retails for $12,495.00. [beat] [audience boos]
But I paid $12.50 for it. Why? Because it’s ugly. I went to Goodwill and I had so much to choose from, an abundance of jackets, but I chose this one. Why? Because it was the most attractive one there. [beat] [audience laughs]
Would you wear this jacket outside the house? No. Nobody with good taste would. It’s warm, I’ll give you that. And roomy. Look how roomy it is. It’s well made. It is an Armani, after all. But it’s ugly. Not only wouldn’t you wear this outside the house, you wouldn’t wear it to a job interview.
Yet that’s what most of you, our working women today, have to choose from: ugly, uglier, and ugliest. [beat] [audience laughs]
The perfect bookstore v.3
Eight years ago. EIGHT. 8!!!
I wrote this: The Perfect Bookstore.
Six years ago, I wrote the followup: The Perfect Bookstore
Today, my good friend Nate Hoffelder, digital maven and my occasional partner in crime, pointed me to this:
Paris’s first on-demand-only bookshop.
Point-by-point similarities:
- The concept itself
- The coffee shop
- Its location near a college
Best part?
Meriot said he needs to sell about 15 books daily to break even.
That’s a margin even I didn’t foresee.
Come with me, will you?
—into a deep, dark well of pain, obsession, and love; corruption and murder; lawyers, guns, and money; politics, sex, and lies.
There are no monsters here but flawed and wicked humans. There is no magic here but dark love and aching desire. There is no alternate universe here but an imaginary county in a very real city operating under its own rules.
There are no helpless, hapless ingenues here, but beautiful, mature, brilliant women who kick ass. There are no alpha male billionaires— Oh, wait. Yes, there are. My bad. They’re bad, too. Dominating, one might say. If one were saying.
Come with me, will you?
—into a world you may love or you may hate.
Hopefully both.
What is it about this game
that compels people to reflect and grants epiphanies like a fairy godmother?
Thirty years ago, I was at the KC Royals parade after they won the World Series. You know, George Brett. Bret Saberhagen. Those guys.
I didn’t care about baseball much before or after that, not that I was ever anything but a fan-in-name-only because I didn’t understand the game. A childhood watching Little League and trying to figure out radio announcers’ jargon tends to blunt one’s enthusiasm.
And then there was college and life and the strikes and the juicing and the Congressional hearings and who wants to get into baseball when they threw a big temper tantrum for a game that’s all fake anyway? You want more money for your steroid injections? Fuck you.
The value of knowledge
And this is where slogging through Number One’s crazymaking was worth this gem: “You paid for your training in sweat, money, tears, and sometimes blood. Why are you giving it away?”
As some folks know, my day job is formatting ebooks and designing print books, and otherwise helping authors get where they want to go in the world of self-publishing. I consult with nonprofits, corporations, and churches to manage their in-house publishing divisions.
Bas relief
Yesterday I threw out karate belts I earned between the ages of 18 and 20. They were musty. Hidden away, like all the stuff I haven’t found places to display yet. I like space. I value space. Open, empty space and shelves that say, “We don’t need to be filled to feel important.” What they need to be filled with is essentials for survival, but that’s another story.
A friend on Facebook asked me how I could bear to throw them away because I earned them. I see her point; they are a trophy and I did earn them. All these years I have not wanted to throw them out (if I thought about it), but something’s been changing in me for a while now, about carrying baggage and grudges.
Of malcontents, futility, and funny prostitutes
We are Sisyphus.But the truth is that I am just really tired. Perhaps the vacuum in affect attested to by the accumulation of emoticons and emojis has little to do with the flattening effect of digital communication. Maybe feelings are simply exhausted.
Father’s Day Swineapple Phase 3
Well, Dude and my mother liked it. I can’t stand pineapple, so I was having none of it. Neither was XY TD, who ate about two cans of green beans by himself. XX TD had some but she’d been noshing all day and wasn’t hungry (also, she ate all the pineapple I carved out of the middle).
Depending on how you define “hit,” it was one because the person I made it for liked it. A lot. And he is grateful for a plethora of leftovers.
no images were found
Note: The smoker instructions called for 5 hours. I roasted mine, checking at 3 hours expecting the thermometer to register 120F or something, and shot to 180F before I pulled it out.
My mother felt the need to say to me, “Oh, c’mon, just one bite. If I tell you it doesn’t taste like pineapple will you have a bite?” “Mom, I MADE this. I can turn my nose up at it if I want to.”
I will not be making this again, so if you do, good luck. Also, invite Dude. And my mother.
Father’s Day Swineapple Phase 2
Father’s Day Swineapple Phase 1
I don’t know where I ran across the “Swineapple” recipe, but it got posted to Reddit not too long ago and immediately went semi-viral.
Raspberry
She wasn’t the worst cat I ever had, but the worst one was the one I hand-raised, and apparently human hand-raised cats are psychopaths.
Razzy peed everywhere. She sprayed me once. Maybe twice. On purpose, looking at us, she’d squat and pee on the carpet if she knew we couldn’t catch her.
Anyway, I knew something was wrong with her. Read more
Dude Review – Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love
Title: APOCALYPTIC MONTESSA AND NUCLEAR LULU: A TALE OF ATOMIC LOVE
Author: Mercedes M. Yardley
Publisher: Ragnarok Publications
Genre: Horror
Year Published: 2014
Number of Pages: 175
Format(s) Available: ebook, paperback, audiobook
Amazon Kindle ASIN: B00HWMK298
Reviewed by miztrniceguy aka Dude*
Originally posted on Amazon
burn baby, burn!
This story is very dark and twisted, but at the same time it’s a sweet love story. I was surprised at the tenderness between Lulu and Montessa. I was hoping for a different ending and was surprised by it.
This is my first book I have read by Mercedes Murdock Yardley, but won’t be the last.
*Note: miztrniceguy aka Dude is the guy Moriah sleeps with. He reads a lot of books, but has only lately gotten into the reviewing game because he started hanging out with Moriah’s writerly type friends who aren’t quite as storied as Stephen King.