I was going to wait until I read all three books in Elizabeth Hoyt’s trilogy before I commented on it but as I’ve bitten the bullet and gotten back to Udolpho it might be a while before I get to the other two books, and so here I go, gushing about The Raven Prince.

Right around here is where I would start squealing, because this book was just that good. I usually find myself disappointed by romances, as some authors are still afraid of calling a cock a cock and a pussy a pussy, but not Ms. Hoyt. Not only was this unfuckingbelievably erotic but it left a huge smile on my face.

Synopsis:
A widow takes a secretarial position to an elusive country Lord. He yells a lot, has pockmarks on his face, and he’s looking for a wife who will provide a child and is not grossed out by his face. Insert sexual tension, blackmail, scandal, and melt-your-eyeballs fucking.

Sex:
The last romance I can remember reading was by Liz Carlyle. I was shocked when the hero started masturbating before fucking the heroine in the barn. Don’t ask me why, I seem to be under the impression we don’t live in a world where I can see James Purefoy’s penis while watching The History Channel and I can buy Emma Holly in Walmart. The word cock is not so much shocking anymore, but if I see the word pussy in a romance I’d floored. Wet pussy, I’m out for days.

The first love scene between Edward de Raaf and Anna Wren has her disguised as a prostitute. Hoyt is very descriptive without being either flowery and boring or clinical and crass. It takes a lot of talent to describe the inner muscles of the vagina contracting without sounding like someone writing bad Hermoine/Malfoy fanfic. And later during a fellatio scene I was literally sitting there, jaw hung open, thinking, No, she’s not … oh my god, she’s not … no way … she is! It was so erotic and startling that days later I realized I had been so floored I never noticed whether the heroine spat or swallowed.

Story:
Usually when you throw blackmail into the mix you get a weepy heroine who has to be saved. I won’t spoil you, but Elizabeth Hoyt turned this standard on its ear. Anna Wren is no one’s little victim and because of this she might just be the most adorably plucky heroine I’ve encountered in a long time. And Edward … as I said he yells a lot. I love cranky heroes, and Edward was good and cranky. Pairing him with Anna was perfection. Just the back and forth between them regarding the naming of Edward’s dog will make you smile.

There’s nothing I don’t like about this book and its characters, main or secondary. For a less talented author, cramming so many characters into a story would be a disaster but for Hoyt, each enriches the story in a way I would have thought impossible, and I’ll be very pleased to see at least some of them again in the sequels.

Awesomesauce:
So I get to the end of book and I’m all giggly, yet I’m not off the hook yet. Turn the page and there is Romance Hero Rule Book, in which Edward de Raaf, hero of The Raven Prince, responds to ten rules:

6. Heroes always keep their temper

Edward: I do not have a temper and anyone who says so—(censored)

Pure win.

So in closing – read this! Even if you cringe when you read romances, read this!

Labels: reading

Last night I discovered that I was past the 100 page mark for the full length story I’m working on. This is usually my milestone. If I get this far and I feel like I want to keep going I’m in a pretty good place. It’s also when I start to think about what just slid off my brain and onto the computer screen and I either cringe and put it aside or I keep plugging away.

At this stage the characters are pretty much operating without any help from me. They’ve spent months or years bobbing about in my brain waiting for me to find somewhere to put them and either it’s a success or it’s a giant fail. They’ve probably gone through 10 career changes before popping out of the end of my fingertips or they just appeared in a place I had no idea what to do with, but either way they've found their home.

I’m a control freak, so sometimes when the characters start exercising their independence it leaves me flailing, but in a good way. An example of this is the last full length I worked on, still trapped on a Kensington flash drive waiting for me to put on my Really Serious and Ambitious Editorial Hat. This was one of those flukes where I didn’t actually write anything down before hand but just came up with a first line that really worked, but nonetheless I developed an outline in my head of what happens. Things are moving along swimmingly until I shocked my own pants off. Heroine is off somewhere crying in the middle of the night and realizes she’d gotten herself lost. “OHNOES! HALP!” she cries, and to both our astonishment the guy who comes to rescue her is the Sniveling Little Fucker I had intended to be only a piece of furniture with a talent for cunningulus. Is he there to fuck her? we both wonder, and again are knocked on our arses when he makes a genuine attempt to help her.

It’s quite the experience when you’re as startled as one of your characters and doing the whole WTF-face along with her and I burned through the next 100 or so pages just to see what he would do next.

Ok, I sound like a raving lunatic, but it’s true. This character railroaded me so much that I wondered if it would even make sense for the heroine to find her way back to the hero. On one hand I thought, “You know what? It’s your bloody story, and it’s porn. So long as someone’s coming …?” But on the other hand I remembered how I felt when I had the rug pulled out from under me by a couple of authors.

About a year or so ago I read Cleo Cordell’s Senses Bejeweled and before I say anything more let me just say that this was damned hot and I’m sorry I didn’t read the first book before picking up the sequel because I might not have been so harsh in judging it if I had known that these characters already had a bit of a history and it wasn’t a big, “Oh, by the way, this happened ...” Nonetheless, something about this book irked me in a big way – Cordell pulled a literary cock-tease on me. She introduced a character who was enigmatic and sexy as hell, flawed, somewhat deformed, and a real mean fucker when he needed to be. I waited and I waited and I waited for the heroine to finally fuck this guy, even though his deformity affected him sexually (didn’t stop him from getting a blowjob complete with money-shot, though …) Then, all of a sudden, he was gone. Gone where? He went away on business.

The fuck?!?!?! He creates this elaborate plot to lure the heroine’s lover to his palace and make him his sex slave, and then he just leaves. Poof. Gone.

I’ve been trying to find out if there was a point to this but I can’t find enough about Cordell’s work on the internet to get a blurb for her later publications and see if there’s a third book. If this was it, if Hamed the … pirate (is that what he was? I totally should find the first book …) just took off, I remain ever so pissed. I felt like she got me all worked up and then left me hanging with a “Oh, he’s gone, but here’s a couple of people fucking up against a tree …” It had me worried enough that when I picked up another Black Lace title and started to get into it I flipped to the back to see if there were any loose ends that would drive me crazy, and which point I’d probably have sent it back to the publisher with a nasty note. Just because it’s erotica doesn’t mean you can get away with big giant plot holes of doom.

Aside from that snag in an otherwise decadent book, Cordell did a good job. Unlike a popular fantasy author I’ve read … Sara Douglass. She was poised to be one of my favourite authors. I read Hades Daughter and I was probably one of the only people not outraged by the fact that the pissed off Trojan raped the Greek princess and two chapters later she was seriously into him (one, if she was going for an authentic mythological fantasy she passed, if you examine the love-lines of someone like Achilles; two, it set up the mother of all I’m-gonna-fuck-you-up moments by the heroine at the end of the book.) Then I made the mistake of beginning The Wayfarer Redemption.

I hate like hell to bitch about what an author does or doesn’t do with her own characters, since as I just explained they tend to get away from you, but this was just too much. The book seems to center on two characters, Axis & Faraday. Faraday is supposed to marry Axis’ half-brother, but of course falls in love with Axis, and vice versa. Because of a prophecy, Faraday comes to the conclusion that loving Axis would lead to his death and goes ahead with her marriage to the brother. She sacrifices her happiness for the man she loves. He moseys off into the sunset in search of his real family (weird-looking winged creatures or some such shit) and thinks about Faraday, worries about Faraday, and still loves Faraday. I’m convinced that love will conquer all. After all, what would be the point of putting me through Faraday’s sacrifice if she wasn’t going to find happiness with the man she loved?

At this point in the book Douglass makes my fucking list of people I’d like to hit in the head with a sock full of pennies. She introduces this completely unlikeable character by the name of Azure. She kills someone and is dragged off by Axis’ real mother to the land of the freaky angels so she doesn’t get lynched. Now, if Douglass had explained right off the bat that Azure killed because she had been horribly abused for years she might have won me over but she didn’t. Instead she drops Azure into the action halfway through the book and decides that she’s going to be awesomesauce.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Axis gets a raging hard on and MUST FUCK AZURE BECAUSE IT IS HIS DESTINY? Ok, fine. I’ll go with this, because Faraday is still waiting for Axis to come back and in his defense, if I remember this correctly, he thinks she’s dead. I was literally in the middle of the sequel to The Wayfarer Redemption when I realized Axis and Faraday were never going to be reunited and I’d been screwed by Douglass.

I ended up surfing the net to find out what the hell happened and as it turns out a lot of people were just as pissed as I was, and after getting a rundown of the whole series from someone I discovered that Axis & Azure have freaky angel babies and that Faraday not only continues to get screwed but when she dies she’s reincarnated as Eve (you know, as in Adam and Eve—yes, it’s more irritating than The Da Vinci Code), thus dooming her to be scorned by a whole new set of assholes. At one point someone directed me to the FAQ on Douglass’s website. Among other things, she talks about why Faraday was made to suffer so much. This is an excerpt from the FAQ:

Is Faraday ever going to have a happy ending?

I would dearly like to squash her under a huge pumpkin studded with rusty twelve-inch nails so that she dies a lingering, painful death from blood poisoning and a badly leaking belly, and I reserve the right to do so any time I feel like it. (Of course, by the time you get to the end of "Crusader" you'll see that that is not quite the fate I've given her ... nevertheless, I've been nasty enough ...)

I say for the second time in this post – the fuck?!?!?! What is the point of creating a character as sweet and as benevolent as Faraday, make your readers sympathize her, root for her, set her up as the main character and then continue the rest of the series with a completely insane attitude like this? And it is insane, not to mention insulting to the reader because it comes with no justification other than “because I can.”

Yeah, because you’re a Mary Sue writer, Miss Douglass. Azure reminds me of those non-canon characters that get stuffed into fan fiction all the time. She’s the poorly explained new castaway that makes Sawyer forget about Kate. She’s that girl Mulder meets in a bar and takes home to get over his burning loins for Scully and ends up falling in love with. She’s the meat in the Sam and Dean sandwich. She’s the sub that finally allows Dr. House to reach his full potential as an S&M god who spanks his woman with his cane before telling her that her love has made him complete.

I was going to point out Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and how Louis ends up meeting Lestat again instead of staying in Armand’s Theatre of Sexy Emo Vampires as an example of resisting temptation to make the story work, but then I remembered she Mary Sued me in the Mayfair Witches when Michael screwed 13-year-old Mona and everyone was cool with it, including his crazy wife. I was also going to use Bridget Jones as an example but in case you didn’t know this, in the unpublished continuation Bridget breaks up with Darcy, gets pregnant by Daniel and they end up raising the baby together … I’ll so I’ll shame Douglass by using some other popular fiction examples. I’ve only read two of the In Death books by Nora Roberts (writing as J.D. Robb) but this I know: Eve Dallas is going to be with Roarke for the rest of her life. I know this because Roberts is a smart cookie and she knows that if she fucks with her own canon her readers will tear her apart. Similarly, in the Stephanie Plum books it’s clear that in spite of constantly making out with Ranger, Janet Evanovich’s heroine is OTP with Morelli. If Evanovich kills Morelli in the line of duty and Ranger steps up her devoted fans, while a little tickled that Ranger will be doing all the good touch/bad touch from here on out, will be nonetheless be left going, “Wait, what? He’s dead? No, seriously, he’s going into hiding, isn’t he?” (meanwhile, Morelli/Stephanie shippers will Dixie Chick Evanovich’s ass …) Don’t believe me? Look at Laurel K. Hamilton. I’ve only read one of her books so I don’t really care, but there are some pissed off Anita Blake fans out there lately and she really has no one to blame but herself.

… ok, that was a bit of a rant but I do think I’ve made my point. Letting your characters exercise a little independence does wonders, but at some point you have to bring them back and tell them, “Um … hello. Remember me?” So even though I dreamily imagined OHNOES! HALP! Realizing that the Sniveling Little Fucker is actually a good guy and makes her happy I’ve made a commitment to get her back with the hero. With the 150 or so pages that came before SLF I set it up—she has to be with him, it's mean to be, it's fate. It’s canon. I maketh be, peons. Everyone learns something, everyone grows, and if this book is published and read I won’t be screwing over the reader by having the hero conveniently die or become Lord of the Assholes in order to make way for SLF. Screw him. If he wants it bad enough he can pretty-please me into a short story to wrap things up for him.

This is what I’ve learned from other authors about writing. For the most part everyone gets it, but occasionally you get some dickhead who breaks tradition and has to suffer the wrath of their readers. Not like they care, since by this point they’re rolling in a big heap o’ money first thing in the morning, but it makes it no less insulting to the readers.

Labels: reading, writing

I'm a total whore. I realized out of the blue that my graphics over at Livejournal would magically come back if only I pressed that button that turned my account from "basic" to "plus." Not that I'm crazy about having a big add for custom glitter graphics over my Livejournal, but I'll put up with it if I get to keep my sex toy banner that I heart so much. As you can tell, I'm over the LJ tantrum of 2008.

I'm a bad bibliophile! I haven't read anything. Granted I have been writing a lot but still, I'm ashamed. Lucky for me fate gave me a kick in the arse by introducing me to a used bookstore just two minutes from work. I had no idea it was there, and I had my reservations when I went in. Some used bookstores are utter crap and only sell utter crap, but this place was a perfect little nook in the wall. I was in there 15 minutes and came out with a bagful, and he begged for trades. This has me squealing in delight, as it's so hard to get rid of used books, but also concerned. If he has to beg for books, does it mean my perfect little lunchtime escape might be doing bad business and I'll be left wandering around the liquidation store buying more useless crap I need? I already have enough coaxial cables!

I picked up Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and I admit, it's entirely because I've been seeing pictures of the BBC treatment all over the place and apparently starring a very yummy man (who I just realized is in the Robin Hood TV series I rejected when I noticed one of the wenches was wearing eyeliner - must be strong! Yummy man!). I managed to get myself a copy of the film but I've been refusing to watch it until I read the book, but I haven't been to Amazon or Chapters since just after Christmas. I started the first few pages and I have to say I'm completely charmed. It has a bit of a Lucy Maud Montgomery feel to it and with summer coming that's the atmosphere I'm looking for.

Of course, Udolpho is still on the back burner. It's quite sad how quickly I lost interest, but how long can one stay interested in a traipse up the Alps and then down the Alps, and then up again. Good God. I'll get back to it, but for now I think I belong to Gaskell and Thomas Hardy, with a stop-over with Sophie Kinsella. I've also kept Brian Keene at bay. I keep opening the book I mentioned in my last post, but no matter what page I flip to someone has an erection. Good enough, but the fact that they seem to be hiding their erections behind books and such is a little disheartening.

I have a few things to say on the writing front but the wireless keyboard hasn't been working lately and I can't be bothered to crawl under the desk and start fiddling with wires, so perhaps next time.

Labels: north and south, prattle, reading, teh internets, writing

*chants* I will not comment on the Canadian government regarding the Cadman affair, Bill C-10, or the continued presence of Stockwell Day in cabinet. I will think only non-political thoughts and not accuse the Prime Minister of bestiality, nor will I dedicate an entire post to complaining about Tim Horton's Roll-Up-The-Rim contest.

No longer moving. Instead, renovating! It's like moving only with ten times the insanity. Also, I have this radio commercial in my head in which some girl sings Rhianna's Music and I'm starting to wonder if that's the single thing keeping my sanity this month.

I'm a little miffed at Livejournal, as are many. They're obliterating the basic accounts. Existing journals can stay but there will be no new ones. This, coming on the heels of my discovery that the filters I applied to my account aren't working, has me a tad irked. It's all about ad money, and it's piss poor reasoning. Basic accounts have no advertising on them, and neither do paid. However, as a paid member when I click on someone who has a sponsored account I see ads. Also, no one actually views the journal. People on my friends list have their own accounts and they view my posts via a friends page, which may or may not have advertising depending on their account. So I pay Livejournal so I can see ads and so other people can see ads while reading my posts? Something's not right there.

Anywho, with the moving/not moving my life and my brain are in a state of total chaos. Udolpho has been permanently placed on the backburner until summer vacation rolls around, and my attempt to read Anne of Green Gables for the umpteenth time in my life has not worked out, so Brian Keene is getting his chance to entertain me.

Brian Keene is known, in my books anyway, for writing zombie fiction. Oh-Holy-God, Never-Leaving-The-House-Again zombie fiction. I read his The Rising last year and now I cry whenever I watch a zombie movie because it will never match up to what Keene has churned out. The basic plot of The Rising is this: man is stuck in his y2k hole, alone after his pregnant wife died. He gets a call from his son by first marriage asking him for help, but his cell dies. ZOMG gotta leave the hole. This, of course, leads to a gory meeting with his dead wife and the daughter they never had a chance to have. To be completely spoilerish, the dead baby is still attached to the mother and running after the father. As if I needed another reason to be childless. Now the threat of zombie babies is rotting my insides.

There's also an old preacher and a prostitute. And the US Army, who has gone apeshit since the president ate the vice president. The way this is depicted is more frightening than the zombies. This I won't spoil on, because it's just too twisted and stomach churning to simply summarize.

I have City of the Dead, sequel to The Rising, on the shelf, calling to me. I won't read until I'm ready to dedicate a full day and night to reading straight through. What Keene has me for now is a book called Dark Hallow. One thing made me reach for this over all the others in the horror section: cloven hoof.

The blurb describes the hero of the book finding a cloven hoof in the forest at the same time women are going missing and people are going crazy. Whatever owns the hoof "is far worse than any ghost. It has been summoned ... and now it demands to be satisfied."

*orgasms*

It's been years since I've read horror fiction steadily. I think reading The Monk put me back on it. I'm steering clear of vampire fiction, at least until something fresh is introduced. I made the mistake of reading the first of the Laurel K. Hamilton Anita Blake novels and I wept for the love of all that is dark and macabre, but I won't use this as an opportunity to bash the book except to say to aspiring vampire writers: evil vampire child is so over. Move on. Find another super villain. Also, Lilith has been done to death. I don't care how cool it comes off in your head (unless you write for Supernatural, in which case carry on.)

I also recently jumped headfirst into a British series called Hex. It's about demons and witches. I was a little startled halfway through the series when I discovered that this took place at a high school and not a university because the show is heavy on the sexual content in a way Buffy might have been if Buffy had met Angelus instead of Angel (oh shit, is my geekdom showing?) and Willow wanted to have sex with Buffy while wearing sexy panties and stockings. Anyhow, it's very cheesy but put demons and sex in the same cup and I'm foaming at the mouth (as is evidenced by my unending and probably annoying love of The Monk.) When things don't progress the way I think they should I turn into a horrible fangirl and sulk, such as I did with the last book I read in which no less than 5 hot male demons/demon hunters have to save a girl who is in no position to enjoy any of it because as it turns out she's a lesbian.

It gets me thinking that I should try my hand and something supernatural, but anything I come up with is either recycled or goes the Clive Barker route which I don't think I could pull off. Take, for instance, Haeckel's Tale. If you've seen the Masters of Horror series you might have seen this. It was adapted from Barker's short story and it's all about the zombie sex. Who else could possibly make zombie sex truly erotic and disgusting all at once? (well, not the way it was on television, but the short story was pretty blow-your-mind.) I'd just squick myself out trying to describe an insane woman squatting over a grave while the rotting tongue of some dead fellow goes to town on her. I'd be considering having my head checked after I write it and be worried I crossed a line and the next step would be alien/hentai sex and eventually only the kind of weird shit that gets published on a certain anything-goes erotica site.

Of course, if I left the sex out of it and went for the full gross-out, I imagine I'd have something I could be proud of, but where is the fun in that? There's just not enough demon sex in the world, at least not good demon sex in which the demon-hero doesn't turn into a puppy dog after getting the heroine's panties off. And believe me, I've been hunting this stuff for years.

Labels: brian keene, clive barker, prattle, reading, television, writing

I've been published twice on O&C and I have to say I love this site. It was always well designed, had great content and there was no catch - they both paid their authors and offered the content for free (not to mention the great communication with Jordan and Samantha is always stellar.) I always got the impression that on pay sites it's usually other authors who are buying the memberships, which bothers me as a dabbler. I'd rather suffer through a little advertising if it means people can read my stuff for free.

So after a glitch that I expect knocked ten years off the lives of the aforementioned editors the new site is up. It abandoned the monthly digest format and is now ongoing with new stuff. Not only that, but you now have the option to comment on the content, rate it, and bookmark on del.icio.us & reddit. You can also see how many views an article, etc, has, which as an author I think is fabulous.

But to be honest, I find myself wanting to click away from the site as fast as possible. Why? Because it's just too damned yummy. The colour scheme reminds me of chocolate-covered strawberries. It's the same scheme as before, but for some reason it just looks more delicious than before. That background is like the really good chocolate that comes in the gold wrapper and just melts on your tongue.

*drools*

I'm going to go make a cup of coffee and stir some dark chocolate ice-cream topping in it.

Labels: publications, reading, teh internets

First of all let me point you in the direction of another Phantom artist I discovered after making my last post: Allison Smith. Her Phantom cartoons are fantastic.

So I'm in the midst of planning a move and my brain has accordingly overloaded with planning before blowing its daily fuse and shutting down. Having given up completely on Atonement I started To Reign in Hell, found it far too complex for my pea brain, and read Cecelia Ahern's If You Could See Me Now instead. It was mush. Lots of mush. And I hope that when Hollywood churns out the version with Hugh Jackman they tear it apart because I was not satisfied with the ending. It was very charming, but for one I wanted the Hollywood ending.

I'm not a romantic person by nature. I crinkle my nose at gestures meant to make me melt and when first getting to know a guy I tend to cringe my way through his grand seduction and patiently wait for things to get casual and comfortable enough to be bearable.

I can't stand mushy music. Celine Dion makes me want to kill myself and while I've developed a weakness for the very pretty Keith Urban listening to that bloody "Making Memories of Us" makes my ears bleed out.

Movies and TV are no different. I'm not a shipper and I'm the asshole who laughed during Titanic. Books will get me, though. No matter how cheesy or epic, I'm a total sucker for book couples and if I think it's going to end badly I'll stop reading immediately (Coleen Gleason's The Rest Falls Away, for example - saw that ending coming a mile away and depressed myself out of reading for a month.)

The ultimate exception to this noromo rule is Disney. I'm such a sucker for Disney Princess movies. My favourite up until recently has been Beauty and the Beast. The prince is the hottest of all the princes, bumping Sleeping Beauty's Prince Philip out of the top spot in spite of the fact that the Beast never slew a dragon. (by the way, Oh Holy Christ have you seen David Kawena's gallery? I so want to do Prince Eric.)

Recently I watched Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. After seeing Bambi II I decided that Disney could be forgiven for their sequel to The Little Mermaid and I must say, it's one of my favourite Disney movies now. One of the things I always hated about early Disney movies was the lack of personality amongst its princesses. Snow White irritated me even when I was little and Cinderella bored me - she didn't do anything but get dressed up and go to the ball.

In Cinderella III she kicks ass. She's like Cinderbuffy. All by herself she manages to get out of a jam and fight for her man. It's got a great scene where she's trapped in a disgusting, rotten pumpkin coach driven by a human Lucifer and she kicks her way out of it and ends up saving her little mice friends before riding the horse back to stop Prince Charming from marrying an impostor. Not to say Prince Charming doesn't get his opportunity to redeem himself from being completely wooden in the first movie. After getting a few chuckles by talking to the mice he races off to save Cinderella from being banished via ship (or, in my mind, eventually sold to white slave traders as a sex toy, but let's forget I said that ...), leaping from his horse, over a cliff, onto the boat to save her. Yay!

Plus, look at the way the princesses looked in the golden age compared to now. Cinderella's face is pretty much looking the way a face is supposed to look. Her eyes aren't huge and her body is fairly natural looking with wide hips and chunky calves, and when she's mussed up she looks all sexy.

So I'm getting to my point, which leads me back to Deviantart. A little while ago I was on Livejournal when I came across this post, which led me to Brianna Garcia's gallery on Deviantart. I've always loved Disney's Alice In Wonderland. It was hands-down my favourite Disney movie when I was a kid, so I did a double take when I saw her Alice and The Hatter romantic-comedy style cartoons. Squee! A new Disney heroine and hero!

From what I can gather, Alice and The Hatter, Reg, came about when Garcia saw the character actors at Disney interacting with one another, bickering and whatnot, or maybe dating (I saw the story on one of her sites but for the life of me I haven't been able to find it) and inspiration struck. I'm pretty sure the concept is that Reg & Alice aren't in Wonderland but actually at Disneyland, thus allowing for other Disney characters to make appearances. Now she has a huge following and has turned me into a ridiculous fangirl who checks her gallery every day hoping for new posts.

She's also inspired other artists, like Lily Fox, who also has an amazing Labyrinth & David Bowie gallery. Since these artists can't actually sell their Disney art without risking having the bejesus sued out of them, I had to print up a copy of her Down at the Penney Tea Supply because I thought it would look so great in the kitchen.


To show how much of a fangirl I've become, while at work this week I checked her gallery on an hourly basis to see the latest in a three-part serial in which Alice falls through the ice while skating. Today it finally appeared (left - love the Alice cheek-pudge).

Every time I see a new work by either Lily Fox or Brianna Garcia I also get bummed because this amazing storyline will forever be in still/comic form. Of course, Disney could probably rip it off and get away with it but they won't, because it's not canon. Disney's Hatter is not a young man, and Alice is still a girl. But wouldn't it be great? They have that great chemistry I loved from Beauty in the Beast ( if the Beast had ADD, that is.) And he's a little goofy looking, infuriatingly immature, and really sweet. Kind of like Mr. Bean only with boyish good looks.

In spite of the fact that I've written (and published) adaptations, I've never been able to get behind fan fiction - I'm also the asshole who cheered Anne Rice's hissy-fit over fanfic - but basically it's stuff like this, and like the artists from the previous post on Deviantart, who have made me change my tune. There's a lot of crap out there and it's hugely popular to the extent that fan-fiction for public domain works gets published and makes scads of money, but there are also some real gems out there if you find them, or they find you.

As someone who dabbles in writing, there's something to be said for looking at someone's work and developing your own ideas about where these characters are going or where they've been, but what usually is done is using it as a jumping off point for a whole new story and new characters. In the news just this week was an article on a new adaptation of the Anne of Green Gables story. My initial reaction was to scream and run from the room when I read this, but when I recalled how outstanding Road to Avonlea was I forced myself to open my mind (the same cannot be said for the upcoming film version starring Barbara Hershey and Shirley MacLean.) While I tend to be wary of adaptations to books I adore, I find myself surprised by what I find. Lin Haire-Sargeant produced an adaptation of Wuthering Heights involving the years in which Heathcliff is away from Wuthering Heights and I applaud the result. I have yet to bring myself to read adaptations of DuMaurier's Rebecca or even the Gone With The Wind sequels, but I'm working up to it.

Unfortunately once you've read a bad adaptation you can't undo the trauma, whereas the multitude of fanart can be very forgettable or unforgettable and you can just click away, like the examples I've linked to, and there are stories I'd like to see re-imagined, secondary characters or even main characters I'd like to get more of. If something is done well, whether it be fanart, fan-fiction, authorized sequels/prequels, I'm willing to give it a chance.

Labels: reading, teh internets

I feel so ashamed of myself. When I took a break from Udolpho I decided that I would read Atonement, since everyone's talking about the movie and being a complete freak I'm unable to see a buzzed-about movie if I know there's a buzzed-about book attached to it.

I was so looking forward to it. The cover is so pretty, with perfectly air-brushed Keira Knightly on the cover with her dark hair and rosy cheeks, and James McAvoy who is just yummy. Plus there's a character named Robbie. I can't explain it but that name makes me go girly and giggle all over myself. Not Bobby, Robert, or Rob. Robbie. Like Naughty Highland Stable Boy Robbie. I expected to be blown to bits by epic romance from page one.

Not quite. I'm past page 100 and I'm wondering what in the hell all the fuss is about. The characters are irritating as hell and I really don't give a crap about Briony's outlook of the world around her and inside her head. And I have a feeling I know where this is going: creepy house guest is going to molest some kids, and this will somehow lead to Robbie getting fucked over.

But worst is the wordiness. Oh. My. God. The scene I finished with was Robbie in writing a letter to Cecelia and I'm ashamed to say that three pages into it I had forgotten that he was actually writing the letter.

What is wrong with me? How can I dislike this book? I feel like a freak. It's like that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine is ostracized for disliking The English Patient. Shouldn't I be as moved by this as everyone else?

I can't even say it's because I'm too into genre fiction. I've read and been moved by some serious stuff. Immediately coming to mind is Ann Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees - I went into a week-long depression after reading this. And anything by Margaret Laurence has me wanting to write something as amazing as The Diviners.

Atonement? FAIL. The characters don't so much feel as they suppress their emotions and then think about it at length later on. Creepy (soon-to-be) molester guy has been more intriguing than Robbie, Cecelia and Briony put together because we don't have to hear about how he feels about his actions for pages and pages afterwards.

Maybe this is a case of "The movie is better than the book." Thank God for Wikipedia. I'm going to try and finish the book just in case I'm wrong and it sucks me in sometime before page 200, but if it doesn't I'll just read the online summary and be done with it.

Edit: Caved and went to Wikipedia. That's IT?!? Good God. I'm going back to Udolpho and putting Atonement in the giveaway bag.

Labels: atonement, reading

I'm getting used to the idea that in classic literature, if you're a woman and you're good and kind and innocent, you're doomed. At least that seems to be the case with the ones I’ve read in the last few years.

It typically goes like this: young woman, usually orphaned or surrounded by assholes, falls on hard times and becomes the prey of a man who wants nothing more than to get between her legs. The man goes to ridiculous lengths to get her but she fends him off with a sickening amount of virginal resolve, and so she’s raped, killed, or raped and killed.

The Castle of Otranto (1764) – Matilda’s attachment to Theodore gets in the way of her father’s evil plan and is killed off

The Monk (1796) – Antonia attracts the attention of Ambrosio, is buried alive, raped, and then stabbed to death by him.

Clarissa (1748) – Clarissa falls in love with Lovelace and is disowned by her family. She runs off with him and is eventually raped. She’s thrown in jail for running away from a whorehouse and dies. (and to be clear, I’ve never read Clarissa, only seen the mini series with Sean Bean. Given the size of Clarissa I doubt I’ll ever read it.)

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) – Tess, coming from a poor family, is raped by d’Urberville, loses her baby by him, is rejected by Angel, ends up back with d’Urberville and then kills him, is hung for his murder.

Variations on this involve a secondary female character, who finds happiness only after the primary female character is killed: In Otranto, Isabella gets Theodore after Matilda is killed. In The Monk, Agnes is spared death (though she deserves it, having been shut up and starved beyond recognition with her dead baby). But in the end the good girl is killed off and she’s happy to go, either looking forward to salvation or dying in the arms of a man she wasn’t sure loved her.

So, 150 pages into Udolpho I’m pretty sure that Emily isn’t going to make it to the end of the novel. She’s perfect. She’s pious, she's beautiful, she's a loving daughter now orphan, she’s found true love and now comes the pain.

I’m resisting the urge to sneak a peek at the novel’s Wikipedia entry and just going with it, but I’m 99% sure that she’s going to be subjected to 500 pages of misery and then be reunited with Valancourt on her deathbed.

I think maybe this is why Emily and Charlotte Bronte are so popular in the genre. Sure, Cathy dies in Wuthering Heights but she didn’t exactly fit the mould (if the story belonged to Isabella Linton she’d be right on track with her predecessors.) and besides, the story was Heathcliff’s and man oh man, he was awesome as a miserable, long-suffering bastard. Jane Eyre not only makes it to the end of the novel but her true love is a guy who locked his first wife in the attic. Plus, remember when she threw a hissy fit at the beginning of the novel? That’s probably what saved her life.

All this is like the reverse of those stock characters of old school horror movies: the virgin is the hero, the slut is the first to die, and the horny teenaged boys usually end up holding their intestines while blank-staring at the killer. It’s a tad disenchanting—I was a terrible English major because I never gave a crap about the deeper meaning, I just wanted to be entertained by a good story, and so expecting Emily to die after months/years of misery deflates my anticipation.

Labels: mysteries of udolpho, reading

(This post rambles on and on about books and has no real point but to show what a complete dork I am. You've been warned.)

I'm a horribly book snob to myself. In mid-September following a very drastic I want to quit my job and be a bohemian! outburst I began to look at my once flourishing bookshelves and sighed. It was very pitiful compared to its former glory:

• Books 1-12 of the Stephanie Plum mysteries - not that there's anything wrong with these. Stephanie Plum rules and Morelli me tingle in all my special places. But any book that doesn't make me suffer makes me feel guilty.
• Jane Eyre & Wuthering Heights - Seriously, I cannot read these again. I'll never have another relationship again because deep down I'll be wondering, "Hrmm ... if he loved me as much as Heathcliff loved Cathy he'd make my life more miserable, wouldn't he?"
• A few random romances, some read, some not, some I'd rather kill myself than part with (Jane Feather, for one.)
• Mary Stewart's Merlin series - So good it put me off Arthurian adaptations forever.
• Daphne DuMaurier - Goddess of Contemporary Gothic Literature, I bow to thee. I love DuMaurier so much I once stole one of her books from a hotel I was staying at.
• Porn - Again, some read, some not. Emma Holly's Prince of Ice holds a special place on the shelf. I haven't read it yet, but I bought it at Walmart and walked around telling everyone I bought porn in Walmart for about month.
• Coleen Gleason's The Rest Falls Away - I don't know why I did it, but I glanced at the back of the book and ruined the experience for myself. Now I have to wait ten years in order to get over the trauma my actions caused.

And a few other odds and ends I keep for sentimental reasons but probably will never read again.

So, moving on. I went on this whole book-geek quest in mid-November/early-December when Rhett Butler's People was released. I decided to go with the spend-$40-get-free-shipping deal at Amazon and ordered Susan Kay's Phantom at the same time (phenomenal, btw--I now have fan art from Deviantart adorning my walls), but with a few bucks left to get me over the $40 mark I started browsing the cheap Dover editions.

And there it was. Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk. I added it to the list and when it came I put it aside, only to pick it up just before Christmas. It has since become my obsession.

If you've never read (which you probably haven't, who reads this stuff after graduation but me?) it centers primarily around Ambrosio the monk. He was left anonymously at a monastery or abbey when he was a small child and raised by the churchfolk. He's the epitome of piousness, kindhearted and cruel all at once.

And of course it all turns to shit for him. He discovers one of the nuns with a love letter and lets the cruel abbess have a crack at her, and the poor girl disappears. Meanwhile her brother is in love with Antonia, who is incapable of believing anyone could be deliberately sinful. While all this is happening Ambrosio discovers that one of the young men living in the abbey is actually a woman, Mathilda, and she professes her love for him. There's much angst to follow, and ultimately Ambrosio gives in and he and Mathilda fuck for days on end.

Once he has her, though, he doesn't want her. He's really conflicted by that virgin/slut thing that deeply religious boys are prone to suffer from. He starts to perv over the women in his church but he's so scared of being found out for a fraud he keeps his hands to himself, until he meets Antonia, and he gets a woody that would have killed a lesser man.

Not Ambrosio, though. He goes to ridiculously elaborate lengths to get into her panties, and almost succeeds before her mother walks in and busts him. And so Mathilda helps him along (she also cuts him off, which turns him into a sex-starved madman.) As it turns out Mathilda is a devil worshiper and convinces him to make a deal with Satan to get his hands on Antonia.

"NoooooOOOOoooooo!" cries the monk, until he's shown a reflection in a magic mirror of Antonia taking a bath, at which point he makes a deal with the devil to have the power to fuck Antonia -- while she's sleeping.

In the creepiest sex scene ever he steals into her house using a magic branch of myrtle and makes for the virgin upstairs. While in the midst of getting her clothes off her mother walks in again (and in spite of the whole date-rape thing being abhorrent I was highly disappointed, as it seemed as though in her sleep Antonia was kind of into it.) To shut the mother up he wraps his hands around her neck and accidentally kills her off.

A ha! Antonia is his! (insert Muahahahahaha! here.) But Ambrosio gets wind that the nun's brother is about to propose. This calls for an even more elaborate and ridiculous plot! Once more with his trusty sidekick Mathilda he manages to make it appear as though Antonia has died. And how did he achieve this? Well, Antonia is pretty but not very smart. Remember how I mentioned that she can't imagine anyone doing something terrible? It appears as though while he was trying to molest her the first time she presumably mistook that thing sticking into her hip for his Bible or something, because she continues to let the horny monk into her house and chooses him as her confessor on her "death bed." And so poor Antonia "expires" and is buried.

Meanwhile, for reasons involving the missing nun that I won't get into, all hell has broken loose. Amidst the carnage above Ambrosio is in the tomb digging Mathilda out. He waits for her to wake up and as soon as she does *cue dramatic prairie dog music* her honour is ruined.

And this is where I stop with the spoilers because it's at this point they start leading up to THE BEST ENDING OF ANY BOOK EVER.

Or maybe it isn't. Who knows. I've always had a thing for evil monks/priests. Ever watch Most Haunted? I do a happy dance whenever Derek Acorah starts talking about evil monks and priests and the black arts and whatnot.

Suddenly my crappy Dover edition with the bad type-setting looked unclean to me. It has a horrible cover. What the hell is that supposed to be in the background? It looks like some sort of monster that's part tree, part ass coming on to that gaunt chick. Chapters has an Oxford edition on sale for $4.99 that I must have. Not only does the cover look like Ambrosio is off to deflower some virgins inside the chapel there, but it has a forward by Stephen King.

Dear Jesus, you can take me now.

Having been exposed to something so affective out of something I expected to be as exciting as watching paint dry I decided that I was going to read as much of the early Gothic literature as possible. I scoured online bibliographies and recommended reading lists and added a few things to my wishlist. For Christ's sake, what have I been depriving myself of? I've had a copy of Melmoth the Wanderer on the shelf for 5 years and I only read a little bit. I took a freaking course on Gothic literature and I read none of this shit.

Unfortunately I also discovered Cecelia Ahern when I was struck down by the sight of Gerard Butler (aka the only man who can make me ovulate just by existing) on the cover of P.S. I Love You. Loved loved LOVED it. Thus my passion for girly-lit was also renewed.

There is now a big stack of books at the foot of my bed. I've rediscovered my love of reading. I even have a bulletin board with a list of books I must read in 2008. Seriously, I do. It's blue and it has Tinkerbell on it. It's even divided in half - "smart" books and "fun" books. Inspired partially by the OMFGPONIES!!!! thrill of The Monk and partially by the Canon Fodder section of The Ampersand at The Globe and Mail (in which a blogger vows to read only classic works of western literature for a year) I'm going to be getting to know the Gothic masters. I made a deal with myself - read half of a "smart" book and I get to read a "fun" book. Thusfar it's a painful process.

Currently it's The Mysteries of Udolpho. The reason for this should be clear to anyone who's done any kind of research into the Gothic genre - Ann Radcliffe is the grandmother of it all, and I feel like a total poser for not reading it. Also on the list, in addition to Melmoth is The Italian, Ann Radcliffe's answer to the "obscene" The Monk. Once I get to the end of part one of I'll be giving myself a break to read something from the fun list and giving my opinion of Udolpho to this point.

Labels: reading, the monk