Jennie Hansen is a respected reviewer/writer in Mormon fiction. She reviews at Meridian Magazine and (I believe) is a judge for the Whitney Awards.
She is also a LIAR. Read more
Author: Moriah
No.
“Heroine decapitates someone in the first scene”
I am proud to announce my first 1-star review for Dunham, which you can find here. But I will quote it in its entirety for your convenience.
This book contains some shocking and gory scenes of violence that, for me, were difficult to get past. It seems more like historical fiction masquerading as romance, which isn’t my preference as a reader. I found little to recommend the heroine (she decapitates someone in the first scene), and the hero’s introspection was clouded by odd lines that were stream of consciousness? Bad poetry? I’m not sure what it was, other than that I didn’t like it. I’m surprised that kind of thing got past an editor, as it should have been punctuated or scrapped entirely. In all, I just didn’t like the book–it seemed a little too in love with itself and was weighed down by too much needless dialogue that I couldn’t be bothered to wade through. This one was a DNF for me, unfortunately.
(bold is mine)
Dunham: The Past
It is finished. I will now wring out my brain.
Now, you! Go go go! Get it and enjoy Revolutionary War swashbuckling on this Independence Day!
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READ THE EXCERPT |
Side note: A bit of this book occurs on the Barbary Coast. Celia, the heroine, has spent some time in Egypt. So I am finding the Egyptian uprising today particularly poignant. Independence Day for Egyptians too?
Not that I blame them …
After hours and hours of XY Tax Deduction running his mouth and being told repeatedly to be quiet:
Me: “Look. You need to get some imaginary friends and talk to them.”
XY: “I don’t have any.”
Me: “Make some.”
XY: “Well, I did have some, but they ran away.”
Me: “Why?”
XY: “I talked too much.”
A professional milestone
It may or may not be common knowledge that, under my real name, I run B10 Mediaworx, an author services / digital formatting company, which I’ve been doing for the past … mmm … four years. I think. Anyway, before that, I was an at-home medical transcriptionist for six years. I haven’t worked out of doors in ten years.
Well, doing this with babies/toddlers isn’t easy, let me tell you, but once they started going to school, my work life got a lot more productive. And it was so blessedly QUIET. I love(d) working at home. Free and breezy. But a couple of years ago, I found I had a lot more work to do AND I was slacking on the internet during the quiet time. So I started going to the UMKC library on Sundays to work, Read more
Back to blogging, maybe
- Dunham’s wrapping up and going into production, which means I’m right on track for my July 4 release date.
- I have the attention span of a gnat, and I’ve always thought/spoken in bullet-point lists. It just got worse since I fell in love with Twitter oh so long ago. 140 characters is just about perfect.
- I had a midlife crisis recently when I turned 45, realized I might not actually die young like a lot of people in my family do, AND realized I’d done everything I intended to do and that Dunham is the culmination. It’s the book I’ve worked on sporadically since I caught the idea in 1990 and had no idea what to do with it. That may have been a miscalculation.
Crashing my own kitchen
The making of Dunham
And so begins a post (or series of them) (you know how wishy-washy I am) on Dunham, the privateer-heroine and pirate-hero Revolutionary War swashbuckler, which, for those of you not following the serial, will be available for sale JULY 4, 2013.
To kick it off, here’s the final cover for the official book: Read more
Veni, vidi, vici.
I had several ideas for this post’s title:
“I’m not one of you.”
“Repeating myself”
“Tired of the sound of my own voice”
“Being silent”
“Serial starter”
Anyway, all of them are pertinent to my point, but they all mean different things. I’ll take them one by one.
“I’m not one of you.”
Of artists and assholes
Orson Scott Card doesn’t make a hill of beans’ worth of difference to me. I never read him until I was an adult (and haven’t read Ender’s Game), I was underwhelmed with the Alvin Maker series, and aside from his strong views on homosexuality, he has some other truly whacko ideas that also thoroughly and completely offend my libertarian sensibilities.
I weighed in on the controversy over his short story “Hamlet’s Father” because I can’t stand it when people rant about books they haven’t read. That is intellectually dishonest, and the people I saw doing this promote themselves as intellectually honest. Sorry, nope. Get off your fucking high horse and read the fucking book, then come back and talk to me. Read more
Magdalene and Publisher’s Weekly
For an author, a Publisher’s Weekly starred review is one of the holy grails of reviews. It’s one of those things that, for a writer, is right up there with The Call (“Hi, Mojo. I want to offer you a contract for your book.”). I’ve had pretty close brushes with getting The Call, which (three times, to be precise) ended up to be “I love this book and I want to buy it, but I can’t because of Freak Things 1, 2, and/or 3.” What I have never dared aspire to (especially once I started down the self-pub path) is a review in Publisher’s Weekly at all, much less a starred one. But then Tuesday, this happened: Read more
Look at me! Look at me!
[[07/15/2025: This’ll teach me to use an embed plugin instead of screenshots, and also not to put in the text.]]
So this morning around 10:13 a.m., I read a piece in HuffPo about a possible alternative chronology to the New Testament that puts a new spin on things. I thought it was an interesting concept. I RTd the link, though I forgot from whom I lifted it. Read more
Economizing
…as the folks in Regency romances would say. With an “s.”
I’ve hosted a bunch of websites for years and never really thought much of it until I started listing how many and for how much money. It was the first time I’d seen it in one place before because they’re all spread out through the year and I get the bill and pay it.
So I’ve consolidated a bunch of my websites down to two: moriahjovan.com and b10mediaworx.com. The site where I had planned to host the serial was theproviso.com, but it wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify keeping it. Yet I still wanted a site where all my Dunham-related work was consolidated. Ah, the beauty of subdomains.
When you go to theproviso.com, you will be redirected to moriahjovan.com/talesofdunham. I’m not quite finished with it yet (is one ever?), but I’m happy with the clean look and the ease of editing the theme. Now, there are three links out there to free downloads that were hosted off theproviso.com. I have no idea where those links are, but as of last night when I canceled the hosting, they were still getting hits. Sorry about that, but money’s a little tight. No, not that tight.
Meh. The truth is my head got a little scattered and I had to declutter, consolidate, and reorganize.
I have assimilated. Sorta.
I have/had a Dell laptop I’ve had for 5 years. That thing has been a workhorse, but it had been having a couple of problems I either found a workaround for or put up with. It was on and cooking 12-18 hours a day every day. It had been reformatted twice, hauled around on vacation and to the library to work on it.
I go through keyboards like crazy because eventually the letters wear off and the fingernail grooves get too deep. That’s not why I get rid of them. I wear them out until they stop working. But I have an external monitor and wireless keyboard and mice. The most vulnerable parts of the machine were protected. Read more
Comfort foot: Barbecued beans
There’s nothing special about this and there is no weird story behind it like yesterday’s; it’s just a childhood favorite I haven’t made in years. However, we had a block party Saturday and thus I bade Dude to purchase the dreaded pork’n’beans.
64 oz. pork & beans
hot dogs or sausage (sliced)
2 large onions, chopped
1/2 c. brown sugar
2 Tb. molasses
1/2 c. barbecue sauce (I use Gates. Do NOT use Bryant’s!)
3 tsp. liquid smoke
bacon
Combine all ingredients but bacon. Put in a 13 x 9 and cover with bacon. Bake at 350 for 1 hour.
hot dogs or sausage (sliced)
2 large onions, chopped
1/2 c. brown sugar
2 Tb. molasses
1/2 c. barbecue sauce (I use Gates. Do NOT use Bryant’s!)
3 tsp. liquid smoke
bacon
Combine all ingredients but bacon. Put in a 13 x 9 and cover with bacon. Bake at 350 for 1 hour.
Comfort food: Trouble salad
Okay, it’s really macaroni salad and about as ubiquitous as can be, but there’s a story behind the title.
It was 1980. In Kansas City. In the summer.
The 1980 United States Heat Wave was a period of intense heat and drought that wreaked havoc on much of the Midwestern United States and Southern Plains throughout the summer of 1980. It is among the most devastating natural disasters in terms of deaths and destruction in U.S. history, claiming at least 1,700 lives and because of the massive drought, agricultural damage reached US$20.0 billion (US$55.4 billion in 2007 dollars, adjusted for the GNP inflation index). It is among the billion-dollar weather disasters listed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [ … ] In Kansas City, Missouri, the high temperature was below 90 only twice and soared above the century mark (100 °F/38 °C) for 17 days straight [ … ]
Creepy collective consciousness is creepy
It appears I’m not the only writer with her knickers in a twist over The Book That Shall Not Be Named, and not only that, but it appears the writerly collective conscious had gotten its knockers knickers in a twist somewhere between Sunday night and Monday morning. Usually when the twist in my knickers gets too tight, I simply avoid the source. In this case, I can’t. It’s everywhere, including my snail mail box after my 70-year-old aunt in Salt Lake took the time to cut an article on it from Deseret News and drop it in the mail to me. I can’t get away from it.
Between this and the incessant banging on the marketing drum, I’ve pretty much had all I can take of the business side of being a writer. (Note: Being a publisher is an entirely different thing.) Read more
“A book a year is slacking.”
This sentiment got some traction in writerland a couple of weeks ago, but since the beginning of this digital publishing surge, it’s been a (sometimes unspoken) maxim. No, actually, it’s been around a long time. Way back in the day when I was a member of RWA and went to all the chapter meetings (MARA), there were two prolific category writers in my chapter. They worked for both Harlequin and Silhouette and put out three titles a year minimum. Then you have the James Patterson-type book mills wherein a team of ghostwriters is assigned to an idea and a title and off they go. I now know of many writers, especially erotic romance and erotica writers who espouse this view. Read more
Men who hate women
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Dude and I went to see this movie for his birthday. I haven’t been interested in reading the books because a) I’m not a thriller/mystery fan and b) haven’t had time to devote to sampling genres I’m not usually interested in. I’m still not interested in reading the books, because I either read the book or see the movie, but not both. (I got burned in the Bonfire of the Vanities.) I am interested in seeing the Swedish version. Read more