why must otherwise decent books have stupid lines in them? Is it the curse of the darling? Does the author think 'my god, this is the best line ever, the editor will cut it over my dead body?"

Cause, I'll tell you, I'm very careful with my darlings, as i don't want to be so in love with a line that I ignore the fact that it just doesn't fit. I have some wonderful lines. But if they don't fit, they don't fit, and beauty won't change that.

The culprit this time?

"Her eyes were hazel syringes of truth serum, searching for an injection site."

Yeah. Just...there...in the story, where anyone could trip over it. Nothing else in the book--NOTHING--would lead you to believe that there would suddenly be a sentence like that, hidden in an otherwise innocuous paragraph.

I'm speechless, really.

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

Also, this has the worst bad-boy love interest ever: He is a pack leader were who pimped out his (now-murdered) late girlfriend for a while, until they decided to get married and move back to Russia, whereupon she was freelancing for a nest egg. When the main character was all "aw, he's kinda hot" while looking at the mug shot/rap sheet, I hoped desperately that she was just joking. Except she so wasn't.

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

So, I'm reading Night Life. It is...not very good. And yet, i am still reading it.

How bad is it? I'm glad you asked.

The fact that the werewolf is named Luna, that's bad enough. I mean, thank god the talentless girl got bitten, not the cousin with witch skills named Sunny. Who ever heard of a werewolf named Sunflower?

But that's not the really bad bit. Thus far, the worst bit is that the werewolf girl has a bikini wax.

Oh, wait. the bit about her eyes going all werewolfy--her pupils "changing from human black to animal gold." That's a author who has never looked at an animal in her life. This is the new worst science ever. It has exceeded both the were math in Charlaine Harris's books *and* the 'mineral rich rain' in Yasmine Galenorm's farieland.

I am still reading it.

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

I just had to turn the light on and open up google maps because moments before I'd had to throw down a book in disgust and turn the lights off. The trashy romance I had *just* started reading has a fancy con related prison break from Lewisburg Penitentiary (incidentally, no escapes from the maximum security since like, 1974.). And they took off down Roger Miller Drive, and I couldn't imagine what the hell the author was talking about since there is in fact no road that leads 'straight' to the town from the prison. There is are two roads from the prison. One leads into farm land behind the prison. No one in their right mind goes that way. (it is, however, the big truck way.) The other way is the road in front of the house I grew up in which is very much NOT Roger Miller Drive. (Amusingly enough, as part of the not the big trucks way, we have been treated to a fair number of semis backing up the road a quarter mile till they get back to a point where they can turn.

Okay, so Google maps does say that the road on the other side of the reservation fence is Roger Miller Road. The author is still ON CRACK. They forced a car into the creek. Okay, the fence is right at the creek, so they could do it there. That's technically doable, but there's way too much discussion of trees there, since there are no trees around the prison, not surprisingly. Then she turns back towards the prison. Okay. And then goes off road? and drives through 'farmed land' up to the trees around the stream again, up stream from where the car was forced into the creek. There are no farms there. It's prison property, and there is a road which goes through the creepy boggy bits and along the creek. It's on the same map that she clearly used to discover the name of the road into the prison (okay, maybe not that one, but it's on google, and who doesn't use google for current maps these days?

I used to ride there. I cleaned stalls across the creek, and when I was done sometimes we'd saddle up the horses and take them down to the creek, through the trees, and up onto the prison property. It was not fourwheelable, not if you ever wanted to get the vehicle back out of there. I used to ride my bike on the road inside the prison along the stream. I CAN LOOK ON FREAKING GOOGLE. I want to rip the pages out of the book, and mail them back to the author with a note.

Dear Penny McCall:

I realize you thought it unlikely that anyone who actually came from Lewisburg would ever read your book--there are only 6K in the town, or 36K in the county, after all--and even less likely that someone from Lewisburg *AND* from that street would read your book, but OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO WRONG. I shouldn't care, I really shouldn't. But you went to all the trouble of using details. Where they're driving, where they're stopping, that after they got back on the road, they made three left turns and drove for a half hour. AND THE DETAILS ARE ALL WRONG. SO WRONG. SO WRONG I want to stop reading the book.

But I won't, because there is probably more wrong in the book just waiting to be found.

I would go on, AT LENGTH, but I have to go to sleep now.

Love, Me.

And then I would attach an annotated map. Most of it would just say OMGWRONGWRONGWRONG.

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

No words tonight as I was doing my production editor job and making a new issue. I am ever so very proud of myself because I outsmarted the website. Also, after spending 3 hours using Adobe GoLive, I totally understand why they bought Dreamweaver.

My desktop keyboard died. Luckily I have the back up or there would have been no PE work, that's for sure. I will have to pick out a new one, and I'm actually okay with that, since the mouse is also cranky and they were at least nearly 3 years old. I would have liked them to last longer, it's true, but they had a tough life. I will get amazon or newegg to send me something new, as soon as i pick it out. Also, Amazon hates me today because they completely blocked my attempts to get the Patrick Park live album (mostly I want it for the un-skippy version of Saint with a Fever, but it's only $6 for the album, so why not?)

So, you know I'm not one to deal with superlatives, well, other than BEST DAY EVER, and I've always been a little undecided about negatives superlatives. They seem like oxymorons. Anyways, I was reading a book today and they had the [Superlative of your choice] sex scene involving a sliding glass door ever. I mean, seriously. It's not like there was ever the need for a contest. God knows, I was happy to let Moening have that award as part of her collection just by virtue of the one with the living room windows. But no, someone read that scene and said, 'pfft, I can do better than that." where by better read 'even more impractical and potentially physically impossible. I was reading Kelley Armstrong and there is a sex scene which is a) totally like she read the first draft and was like, "Damnit! I forgot to have them have sex. Let's see....ah, here, they could just randomly have sex instead of going peacefully to their own beds after a fairly traumatic day." and b) the sex scene INVOLVES A SLIDING GLASS DOOR. A mostly closed sliding glass door. And a werewolf, but frankly, that was not the scary part of the scene. And i mean, most of the scene was just a flirting/teasing/heavy petting kinda thing. But then no, they started to have sex through the 6 inch gap in the door, and OH MY GOD, WHY?

So, yeah. never let it be said that I don't suffer for you.

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

"this warm, romantic holiday story of a widow who finds new love in the arms of the area's new UPS driver."

Alas, the holiday is Christmas in Maine, so there will be no running around in short-shorts in this romance.

Tags: actually i'm looking forward to this one, i suffer so you don't have to

Worst line in a sex scene, possibly ever: (i paraphrase because i have forgotten the first half of the sentence) "he came, showering her with his soul."

(what's sad is that the rest of the book really wasn't that bad. It's a regency romance by an author I really like, and it was a good book. But MY GOD the copy editor who missed that should be shot.)

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

Okay, so, here's how you should not start a new series of books: as a continuation of the previous series. I'm assuming that's the case here. I didn't actually finish reading the last Mercy Thompson book (Hannah suffered enough, I didn't think it was necessary to verify her opinion of it.), but if it involved Charles being shot by someone in Florida, then yes, this book starts right after that. If not, I can only say that this is an even worse book than I suspected. It basically starts in media res, with a girl werewolf being moved out of her house to go back to Montana with Charles because she's an omega, and that's somehow very important, even while it doesn't actually *explain* what that is, just that the previous Alpha treated her very badly (where 'very badly' seems to be code for pack gangbangs, but that's not actually said, just implied. repeatedly.) There was also enough mention of submission and submissiveness in the first few pages that I decided I would not be able to stand it for the whole book, even if I had known the back story enough to follow along. (also, if you're going to have someone presented as submissive, perhaps they should actually live up to that, body language wise. but no, they're all "She's totally submissive," and sure the first time she encounters the other wolves, she drops her eyes, but then like a page later, she stares them down, and enters a room before them, and all I'm asking for is a little consistency of behavior and characterization, people. Is that so much to ask for?) (okay, I'm also asking Patricia Briggs to STOP IT, RIGHT NOW. Before anyone else gets hurt.)

Oh, wait, I forgot. It starts with someone up in the mountains--unnamed male protag living in the woods (incidentally, talking about 'Uncle Sam' in the second paragraph of a story might be the time to specify that you really do mean the military, and not some person, particularly since I apparently did manage to remember that there was a Sam main character in the original series.), and saving some grad student bear researcher from a wolflike creature. He of course gets mauled, it fades to black, and the story starts.

So, yeah, that's a big old NO. Should have brought along one of the other nearly-overdue books I have on my desk, but instead I just brought a new romance.

Oh, and on the opposite side of suffering for the sake of you all, I also read The Re-Gifters yesterday. It was very cute, and totally made up for the fact that the first Minx book I read, Clubbing, was stupid.  Not bad, just eh.  Girl Genius was possibly okay--I enjoyed it, but seriously, different girl turns out to be extra super special?  Could we all be a little less 'I'm a special snowflake' in our literature?  That one, though, was fun at least because I could see where the influences came into it, and where they went out.  (I'm looking at you, Shari.)  (I had a very clear idea of where the influences came in from as well, but i totally forgot it, possibly because I never paid attention to how old it is.) 

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

Okay, so this weekend I did a fair bit of book reading, and I read what is possibly the worst 'erotic romance' I've ever read. Forbidden Fantasy, which I keep trying to type as Final Fantasy, which would probably be a *much* better erotic romance.

It's not that I require my romances to have explicit sex scenes. However, if you're going to claim it's an erotic romance and then be lacking in the erotic-ness *and* the romance *and* the plot, maybe you need to think about your marketing strategy. Seriously, the sex scenes were like a paragraph each. If I were to summarize them as 'then they took off some/all of their clothes and went at it like bunnies," I wouldn't be cutting much detail. So it could be a romance instead, except that there isn't much romance. It's mostly 'and they have sex until they realize they have deeper feelings for each other." and maybe I'm a prude, but I don't *really* think that counts as romance.

As for the non-sex related plot, the story line is that a girl has been dumped in a previous book (oh, yeah, it's a trilogy. With two other ________ Fantasy titles.), and her basically uncaring parents have engaged her to a friend of her father's, who's like, mid-60s to her 25 (it's a regency, this bit is pretty much status quo for not very good regencies, and even some that rock). So, she goes to the (hawt) illegitimate brother of the guy who dumped her and asks him to ruin her so she can't marry the old guy. He, of course, refuses and they just fool around on and off for part of the book, and then he ruins her, and they move on the singularly un-hot and very fast sex for the rest of the book. Meanwhile, her mother is plotting for her to marry the old guy, and gradually lets slip to the reader in very unsubtle ways that the old guy is actually the girl's biological father. Her supposed father is off flirting it up with a girl who seems to be a, you know, good vicar's daughter or some such, fallen on hard times but who is actually a newly retired 'actress' (which, regardless of the time spent on the stage, is pretty much code for someone who doesn't get paid directly for sex, but instead is given nice things in exchange for sex.) trying to get as much as she can from him. This side plot thing goes nowhere as the mom finds out Dad wants a divorce so he can marry the good girl/actress, and so she goes to the woman's lodgings and poisons her. Daughter tries to tell mom she can't marry the old guy because she's ruined, mom beats her while screaming "you have to marry your father, I've planned this for too long." (Oh, side note, the old guy is also a pedophile, and had planned on asking the dad to marry her when she turned twelve (not to marry her then, but sometime fairly soon afterward, like 16 or 17), but she was instead promised by Dad to someone her own age-ish then, and they were engaged for like the next 12 years before he dumped her. He's looking forward to the marriage, because there will be daughters that look just like her in the house as a result of that. EWWWW.) Daughter completely misunderstands this (which I suppose is logical, because it's not like one assumes one's mother is trying to marry one off to one's own father automatically. At least not in most books I read.) and just keeps saying, "but I'm not marrying dad, I'm marrying old guy." She's not all that smart, really. Hijinks ensue, she ends up at the altar with the old guy (after mom threatens the life of the hawt guy, and tells her she killed the actress), hawt guy rushes in to save the day, mom lets the dirty details slip, everyone is appropriately creeped out, mom goes off to a mental institution, old guy gets shunned by polite society for nearly marrying his own daughter, etc, etc. and they all live happily ever after.

So, yeah, fails on the plot level too. On the pro side, though, it was very short. And thus I actually did read the entire thing, to see if it got better anywhere. I believe that possibly the author wrote the bad plot, put in like, placeholder sex scenes, and went off to play Peggle while waiting for inspiration to expand them, and then tragically, then her deadline got moved forward and she was forced to whip through the manuscript and remove all of the [real sex scene goes here] notes and such.

Tags: i suffer so you don't have to

So, I realized a few months ago that the reason my computer won't handle video correctly probably traces back to the bad windows install that it's running. (which is why it took over two weeks of daily emails with tech support to get my Zune to communicate with it as well.) Specifically, it appears that when it installed the WMP stuff, it totally messed them up, to the point that I can't run DVDs on the computer except through other programs (no auto play, basically, I have to start up VLC to watch them. Which is fine, but I shouldn't have to.). And I suspect this may also be why I CANNOT get the video conversion programs to work at all. I really don't want to reinstall windows (particularly since I've temporarily misplaced my backup drive--I suspect I was trying to reanimate the laptop again.) So once I'm back on the webs, I may see about completely uninstalling WMP, right down to all the hidden/shared files, and see if the reinstall cleans up some things. Eventually I'll probably just give up and reinstall windows.

I may have fallen in love with the new dell ultramobile, which isn't even out for at least a few weeks, possibly ages and ages. Do I need it? No. Has that argument ever worked with me? Also no. It's so tiny and cute and most importantly, cheap. Since I've killed my last two laptops in less than 2 years each, cheap is important. And Tiny! My brother's MSI Wind is apparently 2.3 pounds, and this is even smaller. It's not just an ultramobile, it's very nearly a pocketbook! It is alas, linux. But better that than vista. I would cope. (I would prefer XP, but needs must.)

Ooh, new CD from the Avett Brothers out. I will now need to walk to Borders today.

so, there's a really bad line of erotica novels out there, involving animal-human hybrids. We all know what the most distinctive feature of cat penises is, right? Here, have a wikipedia link for reference. Who, upon reading that, thought, 'man, that's hot'? In a related note, Andrea has decided that maybe she wouldn't be able to proofread romance novels, and definitely not animal-hybrid dominance porn. I don't know why. She's such a wimp. (There is in fact a wait list at paperbackswap, which is probably the scariest thing about the book. Well, after the blowjob scene, anyway. )

Second round of transitional employees leave the company next Thursday. This means many of the editors. So sad. I hate this company right now. Everything's falling apart, and no one's telling us anything.

Tags: happiness is a new cd, i suffer so you don't have to
Current Music: Podcast:Music - Avett Brothers: Bella Donna