Thirteen Kids Books Everyone Should Read

Actually, this came up because I was chatting with Emily about the upcoming Where The Wild Things Are movie. During the discussion it occurred to me that there are some kids books that have such amazing things to say that everyone should read them. So, I’m listing 13 I think hit that bar. If you haven’t read them, do. And if you have ones you think are better – post them. Maybe I need to read them.

1. Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney

2. The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

3. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

4. The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss

5. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst

6. Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems

7. Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

8. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

9. From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

10. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss

11. A Light In the Attic by Shel Silverstein

12. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

13. Kitten’s First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes

No Time for Seconds

Neve closed her eyes and pillowed her face in the crook of her arm, listening to the ever-present hum of the Mercy’s engines.

Her bed-mate kneaded a knotted muscle between her shoulders and murmured, “You’re still tense.”

“You’re looking for a reason to go again,” she mumbled. “No time for seconds.”

“Sex is a proven relaxant.” Dr. Richmond West worked the heel of his palm over the muscle. He succeeded at loosening it but the physical relief did nothing to distract her from problems she had to solve outside his quarters. And now that she had allowed them back into the front of her mind, she couldn’t shake them again.

Continue reading No Time for Seconds…

Changing Thumbelina Now Available

Read all about how Thumbelina kissed a Frog and liked it!

Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

I’ve been reading and re-reading a number of old favorites recently. I’ve also been thinking of movies. The truth is that there is a lot in common between good books and good movies – character development, dialogue, tension, plot, research, execution, hawwwt shmexiness. It made me think a good bit about common tropes in both film and books – and particularly the Lie that Ate the Plot. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but you know what I mean. The little lie that turns into the plot of the book (or film) [or at least a big chunk of the plot]. And sometimes, this works well. Sometimes, not so well.

After a bit of thinking, I came up with a couple of examples of books and films I thought did a good job with this trope.

[side note to any Smart Bitches reading this blog - yes, I know, forced seduction BAD, but... but... well, no buts. I still love these stories.]

Without further ado:

Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss. The Lie: Daddy, I married a wealthy aristocrat, but he died tragically after our wedding night. boo hoo (not). The truth: Daddy, I married a condemned criminal from the gaol who was supposed to hang but is still alive because one of your employees is a rotten dirty cheat (oh, but he’s actually innocent and an aristocrat anyway).

A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole. The Lie: Honey, you aren’t really my mate, I just need you to get me back to Scotland. The truth: Oh, baby, you’re my mate and I’m gonna convince you.

Silence of the Lambs. Okay, maybe not the whole plot, but a great piece of it. The Lie: If you cooperate, we’ll get you moved to a federal piece of land where you can even SWIM – under SWAT team surveillance, of course. The Truth: There is no deal. We lied.

V for Vendetta. The Lie: You’ve been captured by the government! Tell us about that guy V! The Truth: You haven’t been captured by the government but I’m torturing you so that you find your own strength.

What about you? Do you have favorite books or movies featuring this trope? Share!

Sex Music

Here’s a secret: before I buckled down and started to write “for serious”*, I exercised my creative mind via chat-based role playing games. Yes, they did include cybersex – or in the elite roleplayer’s mind, “character-developing sexual scenes.” I’m beyond the elite-roleplayer mindset now so I’ll go ahead and use the c-word.

I have fond memories (um, are they fantasies at this point?) of a character I “played” with another player’s character. Angst-filled, emotional, sexy scenes full of tension and want and avoidance for whatever reason (usually the other player’s tendency to vanish for long stretches of time and bail when things started heating up). I’ve been thinking about that period of my life today because my new iPod (shiny! pink!) arrived today and I need to fill it with sexy music.

I’m not the writer you’ll see with a playlist for every book, but I do have songs I identify strongly with sex and edgy emotion, usually because they’re songs that cropped up during scenes written in a book (Rob Thomas’s “Smooth” for my first, terrible, novel draft), or because they’re songs I drew from while creating characters for either RPGs or stories.

Hawksley Workman’s “Smoke, Baby” reminds me of characters sitting on a porch in the long hours of a summer night, silent with one another because the words they have to say are too painful.

Nick Cave’s “Do You Love Me” takes me back to 10 a.m. American History classes, which I survived by outlining a medieval gothic paranormal in the margins of my lecture notes. I wanted to tell a story that could have inspired NC’s lyrics, which are…very dark.

Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”? Believe it or not, inspired “Jesse’s Hands.” Um, well the song and a trucker I knew, but that’s a different story.

Tell me about your sex music. Do you pick the song because it’s sexy, or does the song pick you because it’s the right kind of sexy for the moment? Do your sex songs transfer from one book to the next? (For example, Journey would not fit at all into any other story except “Jesse’s Hands” for me.)

Tell me. Go on. I told you about cybersex, after all. It’s only fair.

*I use the word “serious” very loosely in regard to my writing “career.”

Chain of Command

Captain Tania Fielding faced her Executive Officer across the extruded table. The metallic chill seeped into her warm fingertips, a small discomfort remedied immediately by the ship’s climate control. “We took delivery of the new engines at Kedis. I expected them to be installed immediately. The longer we delay getting them online, the more likely it will impact the mission.”

“Have you spoken with Commander Steesk?”

Despite the slight draft of the air cleaning system, Xu Scholen’s snow-white hair swept back from his narrow face and fell in unnaturally still sheets down his back, the tall points of his ears the only interruption to the smooth flow. It always amazed her that he looked so perfectly put together in the most stressful situations.

Continue reading Chain of Command…

Oh, the Bitchery of it!

Okay, so over the next few weeks – and ongoing – I will be putting up reviews of craft and research books. Em and I have talked about this and discovered that there aren’t very many sites that review the craft and research books/sites, so we’ll be doing that some.

In this installment, I’m having a look at the much-anticipated, heavily-bandied-about Beyond Heaving Bosoms by the Smart Bitches, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan.

Now, you might wonder why I would lump that in with craft and research books. You’re going to have to trust me on this – it’s both.

There’s a lot of good, not-so-clean fun to be had in this book. It being the Smart Bitches, you can count on a good bit of profanity and a heavy dash of snark – amusing snark, for the most part.   There are a ton of fantastic fun extras – a board game, a choose-your-own-adventure-esque bit, an erotica author pseudonym generator, and many others.  For that stuff alone, the book is worth the price of admission.

But wait! There’s more!  Actually, there’s a lot more.  Sarah and Candy spend a good bit of time and effort discussing the role of the heroine, the role of the hero, plot devices, the shortcomings of the genre, cover art, good sex, bad sex, buttsex, and everything remotely related to romance novels.  The discussion of the hero as the shadow-self in the Jungian tradition, particularly, fascinated me. The other discussion that – as authors – should NOT BE MISSED is the discussion of where sex occurs in the story.  It isn’t a huge amount of text, but it’s important.

Sadly, though, I did have some non-happy moments.  My first non-happy thing is that the tone got old.  Really, the information was good, but man was I over the droll, snarkalicious tone. Truthfully, this could be because I read the thing cover to cover in one fast bite, so maybe it’s like candy (the food kind, not the Bitch kind)- you can only eat so much at a time without becoming slightly ill.  My second non-happy moment manifested in the “Bad Sex” chapter – which dealt with the “rape” mythology in romances – particularly in older romance novels. I’m good with turning a beady eye on this – it needs it. I’m not so happy with chunking all forced seduction and ambiguous seduction in the rape pot.  It’s not so clear that this is an accurate depiction of the goings-on, but it’s not something I’m going to kick up a fuss over, since this is one of those spots where it’s pretty much a perception by the reader issue – and because the authors acknowledge that there can be some gray area (though that acknowledgment seemed reluctant to me).

Moving back into happy-making bits, there were several parts where I very literally laughed out loud. I’m not going to share them here because.. well, the punchline should be a surprise. I will, however, include a quote from a different text, one which I hope Sarah and Candy will appreciate as the fine purple erotica it is.

¹³Your channel^* is an orchard of pomegranates
with all choicest fruits,
henna with nard,
¹⁴nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,
with all trees of frankincense,
myrrh and aloes,
with all chief spices—
¹⁵a garden fountain, a well of living water,
and flowing streams from Lebanon.

–Song of Solomon, Ch. 4, verses 13-15 (from the New Revised Standard Edition)

Note that the * indicates that the meaning of this word is uncertain. Oh. I think I can figure it out.

Two types of readers? (Maybe more!)

Victoria Janssen blogged about two types of erotic romance today. I encourage you to read her blog because it’s regularly thoughtful and interesting, but to sum quickly for my purposes, Victoria posits that there may be two (or more, she’s still formulating) kinds of erotic romance – one that’s largely about the sexual encounters the characters have, another that’s an erotic book complete with erotic undertones woven into setting, theme, and plot beyond the romantic relationship succession. I’m intrigued that she’s put the division into words, and pleased that she still included both under the “erotic romance” category.

To link that up with the reader corner – while my husband and I were walking back from the library (beautiful day in Maryland) my mind wandered away from his rambling dialogue about the CR14 red dragon his Dungeons & Dragons group recently slew and into the land of habit examination. I had two stacks of books, one in each hand (reading list below), and was pondering the return date of May 8 and the deadline to read two of the books for a blog book club this week coming.

I’m not a fast reader, but I’ve recently come to terms with my reading habits – the approach that keeps me reading for pleasure on a regular basis. This is me confessing: I don’t read every page. Or every scene. Um, or every chapter. I’m a flipper-through, like the person in the doctor’s office waiting room who thumbs through the magazine only pausing here and there instead of reading cover to cover. Even with books I absolutely loved (Colleen Gleason’s THE REST FALLS AWAY, Ann Aguirre’s GRIMSPACE, Elizabeth Hoyt’s THE RAVEN PRINCE), I skipped. The real test of whether I really like the book isn’t whether I read cover to cover, but whether I go back later to read the parts I skimmed or flipped past the first time.

Continue reading Two types of readers? (Maybe more!)…

Serial Introduction

The serial isn’t really intended to be so much a true serial as it is a group of connected short stories set in the same world, using the same characters, and probably involving some larger story arcs.

We envision the serial as something we update regularly, and we hope other authors will contribute as well. Some entries will be purely story. Others may be character vignettes, panoramic treatments of setting, or tidbits of worldbuilding. Expect that some story entries will include steamy, sexually explicit material.

Welcome to GMS Mercy.

Testing, testing…Is this thing on?

Well, here I am, back in Virginia. Florida was fun, but I’m tired and ready to get back to my routine. I’ll be working on getting the stuff together for this site as well as my own WIPs.

Also, my daughter will be registering for kindergarten this week. How the devil did that happen?