What's Black and White and Red all over?

The NY Times has an op-ed piece from Ann Brashares, the Young Adult (YA) author. In the piece, Ms. Brashares starts with a discussion of a rating system for young adult books:

"So what's the best way of telling you? Should publishers put a ratings system in place? It seems to work effectively for movies and electronic games. It's a fairly simple solution. If a book has obscenity, sexual content, drugs and drinking and violence, publishers could put an M for "mature content" on the cover.

This seemed at first like a good idea, but the more I thought about it, the more tangled it became. For example, with books it's tricky to separate the content from the quality. Can any ratings system express the subtle things that make a book valuable or potentially harmful? It's not so much the difference between M for "mature" and E as in "O.K. for everybody." The more salient distinction is between R for "rewarding" and G for "gratuitous." EE for "edgy and enlightening." SS for "sensational and stupid." It is easy to get carried away. What about scary books? S for "scared the pants off me and my kid." BD for "gave him bad dreams for a year." And sad ones? BH for "breaks your heart." AD for "at least one animal dies." One likes to be warned."

At one time, there was discussion in the Romance Writers Report, (the RWA industry mag), about implementation of a ratings system. The suggestion went nowhere, for exactly the same reasons that Ms. Brashares notes. The publishing industry likes to think there are more variables than just sex, language, violence, nudity, and drugs. (I don't think there is, but I don't want to see ratings on books, either). Eventually, Ms. Brashares hits on the revolutionary idea of segregating books by content:

"What if books for 13- to 19-year-olds were developed, marketed and sold by adult trade publishers as a category, like science fiction or romance novels? Maybe that would spur the growth of a new book market for under-served 13- to 19-year-olds, who may like to read about themselves but won't go near the children's section. "

What's fascinating to me is that we naturally choose to segregate on interest. It's a very practical solution; there are too many books for a reader to have to search among all the books for the ones that interest them. A grocery store has a frozen food aisle and all the soft drinks are one in place. But books? Would a gay romance go in romance or gay fiction? Is it discriminatory to have a "gay fiction" section? And multi-cultural? Does that get its own shelf, too? From a reader perspective, I see the reasoning, but I remember when de-segregation hit my elementary school, too.

I'm not trying to answer this one, because the question is: where is the line between what's "acceptable" and what's "wrong?"

In New York, they recently began bag searches on the subway and Paul Sperry, a Hoover institution media fellow, wrote a piece about the idiocy of not using racial profiling in the searches. Again, on the surface, searching the bags of Middle Eastern men seems reasonable. But, oops, that nasty "anti-discrimination" argument rears its United Colors of Benetton head. This was written a few days after British police shot and killed a Brazilian man they had assumed was a suicide bomber. Shoot first, it's the Israeli way. Again, if the man had been a suicide bomber, the police would have saved countless lives. But he wasn't.

In the days when Martin Luther King still had a dream, things were black and white. There was no perceived right or wrong. Segregation, every day, all the way. But that's not the world we live in, and there's no more black and white. Now there's gray stuff, like Tiger Woods and gay romance. Stuff that fits into a lot of different boxes. And the brain is wired to put things into boxes.

I have no smart answers, no funny answers, not even stupid answers. I'm not sure there are answers. But I think we should ask the questions.

Quote of the Day

Like this one:

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
-- Abraham Lincoln 16th president of US (1809 - 1865)

Idle Hands

Here's what happens when Kathleen has too much time on her hands and reads too much Dr. Seuss.


(WARNING: BAWDY HUMOR AHEAD)

Romancing the Blog

I'm up at Romancing the Blog. Looking for book recs.... Any takers?

Quote for the Day

Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy

And I finished....

I finished HP 6 over the weekend and thought it was the best so far for two reasons. 1. It was the most obviously adult book of the series and 2. It was the romanciest. I have to say that I don't believe that 'The Killer Who Shall Not Be Named' who killed 'He Who Was Killed Who Shall Also Not Be Named ' is not truly bad. I think he's a tortured character and I think we'll see him making a big, bad choice in Book 7. An absolute choice between good and evil. And I think he's going to choose good (this is why I write romances).

Loved the romancey stuff, although I HATED the Spiderman moment at the end when Someone who Shall Not Be Named broke up with She who shall not be named because "it would be too dangerous for her." PUH-LEASE!!!! Can you say 'cliché'? I knew you could. Didn't buy it, didn't buy it, didn't buy it. Buffy took her role as battler against all evil, still had time for a little sommin-sommin' on the side. And she's a GIRL!!! Anyway, I still loved the book, and if parts made me yell, well, that's a good thing.

I loved the newer opening in the Prime Minister's office, it was a wonderful setup to the changes of the world. A colorful, very active way to incorporate backstory into the book. Also, I liked the way she colored in Draco. I think authors have a tendency to just plomp a black hat or a white hat on a character and think that's enough, but the characters that come to life are characters who are multi-faceted, that contain both good AND evil.

One fascinating thing I noticed was that HP6 was a conversation-starter wherever I took it with me. My daughter swims and I sit and watch in the stands while she's in practice, and no less than five people (absolute strangers, all five of them), pointed to the book and asked if I liked it, and then shared their own comments: "I'm in the middle," "Just finished it last weekend," "The ending was a SHOCK," etc. The most notable comment was the 20 year old male cashier at Panera Bread, who told me he cried buckets at the end. All these people were adults and pretty much an even split between male and female. Book-reading became a shared experience that overcame the normal boundaries that strangers keep. A shared camaraderie based on an abstract object. So question for the readers here. If you saw a stranger carrying a book that you loved, would you comment? What if the stranger was scary, or does the inherent fact they're reading HP6 make them "unscary?"

Sherlock Holmes? A Murderer?

According to the Independent , speculation is rife that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a dastardly attempt to cover up his own idea-plagerism, bumped off a journalist who thought up the idea for the Hounds of the Baskervilles. Where is Jessica Fletcher when you need her?

GCC: Nice Girls Finish First by Alesia Holliday

Alesia was nice enough to write up a blog-esay about what prompted her to write about the character Kirby Green in Nice Girls Finish First. Without further ado, HEEEEEEEERE'S ALESIA!:

(cue Johnny Carson music):

NICE GIRLS FINISH FIRST

So one day I was thinking about today’s woman, as I often do, considering that I write funny books about the everyday (and not so everyday!) things we all go through, and I was wondering about that perpetual dilemma – the Myth of the Nice Girl.

Somehow, through a peculiar evolution of the professional environment, women today are finally recognized (mostly) as equally competent, ambitious, and dedicated as men in the workforce. (We’ll leave the “we have to work smarter and harder” argument aside for now.) But yet, we have an added burden: we have to be NICE.

Now, this isn’t really tough for most women, most of the time. We were raised to be nice. That’s what little girls do, right? “Play nice!” “Be nice!” Except, well, there are times when you can’t be all that nice . . . Boyfriend cheating? Kick him to the curb! Um, in a nice way? Opposing counsel trying underhanded tactics? Notify the judge and get him sanctioned! Er, nicely?

The idea of a character who is very ambitious and a great person, but a little bit of a tough chick on the surface, really intrigued me. And I had the perfect character in Kirby Green, newly-hired exec at the Whips and Lace Co. She’d pretty much stolen every scene she was in in AMERICAN IDLE (Double RITA finalist, how cool is that??). Then I wanted to compare and contrast Kirby with a character who was so nice that she was in danger of becoming a doormat. Brianna sprang to life. My good friend who is an opera singer (no, really!) provided some great background for her. Then I set the two of them loose to play on the pages – each helping the other learn something about life, and about herself. That’s how NICE GIRLS FINISH FIRST was born.

Can we be successful as women today and still retain some of that niceness that was so valued in earlier years? I think so. But nice doesn’t mean dumb, and today’s nice girls DO finish first. They might just have to kick a little ass along the way.

Nicely.

Thanks for helping me celebrate the release of my second novel!! – Alesia Holliday

Brave New World

In lieu of the recent havoc on the London tubes, New York has instituted a policy of searching every fifth bag on people entering the subway. Now, it's not that surprising and according to the people being interviewed on the radio, everyone is taking it in stride. However, Gawker has collected some colorful responses from craiglists, the community message board for people who have WAY too much time on their hands (and probably never even ride the subway, either). Just wanting to share, because if anybody writes suspense set in New York, take note! Plot fodder.

Pirates of the Potter-ian

This article from Wired about JK Rowling's refusal to release an e-book for Harry Potter made me snicker a bit. I like the experience of having a book in my hand personally, but I don't think anyone can ignore that electronic downloads have a place in the world. (IMHO, audio is going to trump electronic, although they'll both co-exist nicely in the longterm future), and the imagery of a poor Russian slogging over the scanner, ripping books, well, I think it could be another Tim Burton movie!! JK Rowling and the Fantastic Scanning Machine. I do feel for Rowling, but I wonder if this will make her reconsider her stance....

Time (or Xerox), will tell.

Speaking of News

From Publishers Marketplace: Julie Kenner, Kathleen O'Reilly and Dee Davis's BOYS FROM HELL and GIRLS FROM HELL, two anthologies about the sons of Satan in a fight for the keys to hell and the woman that will get in the way and the follow-up featuring the daughters of Satan, in a pre-empt to Susan Allison at Berkeley, by Kimberly Whalen at Trident Media Group (world).

For those of you who don't yet realize, Julie and Dee are my critique partners, and best friends, and we've never done a book together. Should be lots of fun.

$2.99 Paperbacks, Get 'em while they're HOT!

Publisher's Weekly (subscription required, sorry) has a short blurb on Penguin Group's plan to sell $2.99 paperbacks. Holy Frijoles, $2.99? What is that going to be? Well, according to the article:

The program will feature short stories, 92–128 pages each, by Nora Roberts, J.D. Robb, Jayne Castle, Christine Feehan, Sherrilyn Kenyon and Maggie Shayne that have been culled from anthologies. Kaye hopes the low price will entice people to sample new authors, and is counting on customers buying more than one title at a time.

Would I pay $2.99 for a short story from an anthology? I don't know. I'm not a huge anthology dilettante, but I suppose if I knew a story was good, I might. I'll be curious to see if this is the start of another something new. I have definitely picked up books that were marked at a lower price point. When Dell offered one of Karen Marie Moning's Highlander books at a $3.99 price point, I picked one up. I bought The Curious Incident of the Dog In The NightTime because the audio CD was offered at special promotion of $14.99. I don't think I'd buy a book because it's cheap (i.e. I'm usually the first to pass by the remaindered table), but if there's a book that I've been wanting to read, a lower price can put me over the edge. What about you? Does price affect your buying decisions? And an offshoot of this discussion, do you ever give up on an author if they move to hardback? I usually give a hardback author two chances (Kathleen's Two Strikes and Your Out Policy). If they don't keep me entertained, no more hardbacks again.

Good Grief: A Bookreport by Kathleen O'Reilly

I just finished Good Grief by Lolly Winston and thought it was really well-done. Here's the synopsis from Amazon (you can tell I suck at synopsis, can't you?):

Some widows face their loss with denial. Sophie Stanton's reaction is one of pure bafflement. "How can I be a widow?" Sophie asks at the opening of Lolly Winston's sweet debut novel, Good Grief. "I'm only thirty-six. I just got used to the idea of being married." Sophie's young widowhood forces her to do all kinds of crazy things--drive her car through her garage door, for instance. That's on one of the rare occasions when she bothers to get out of bed. The Christmas season especially terrifies her: "I must write a memo to the Minister of Happier Days requesting that the holidays be cancelled this year." But widowhood also forces her to do something very sane. After the death of her computer programmer husband, she reexamines her life as a public relations agent in money-obsessed Silicon Valley. Sophie decides to ease her grief, or at least her loneliness, by moving in with her best friend Ruth in Ashland, Oregon. But it's her difficult relationship with psycho teen punker Crystal, to whom she becomes a Big Sister, that mysteriously brings her at least a few steps out of her grief. Winston allows Sophie life after widowhood: The novel almost indiscernibly turns into a gentle romantic comedy and a quirky portrait of life in an artsy small town.

I've heard good things about the book, and was captivated by the pink bunny slippers on the cover (who says covers don't sell books?). The book has a fabulous detail of life quality to it, that makes Sophie very much alive, and the author does a wonderful joy of cataloging Sophie's grief and the emotions that she feels. Sophie is a strong heroine, very giving, very healing, very resourceful, and she adopts strays at will.

The idea of facing grief with humor, one of the sharpest weapons in the emotional armor, is a great one, and the author pens some very dark humor at the beginning. We've all gone through the loss of a loved one, and the author captures the pain of losing someone you love very unexpectedly through her marvelous use of details and description:

"I think of the white-haired lady in the grief group whose husband drove her everywhere. I picture them in a Chevy Impala driving forty-five on the freeway, two cottony heads peering over the dashboard."

I had two quibbles with this book: one, everything was SO neatly tied up. There are some very dark emotional moments in the first few chapters and those disappeared as soon as she met a new man. If this had been anything but a book about a woman trying to cope with the loss of a husband, I'd have forgiven this one, heck, it'd be a romance. But sometimes the heroine should end up without a man. Is that a spoiler? Sue me. The book's been out a while.

My only other quibble is the excessive similes at the beginning. Now, like a reader needing that first cup of coffee in the morning, I like similes. They can flavor a story, the extra cinnamon and spice that can give a book an extra kick, like Jack Daniels mixed with Coke. However, just like mixing cinnamon and spice and Jack Daniels and coke, they can take you out of a story faster than a T-Bird on the I-10, cruising through Louisiana at 2am, when you know the helicopters aren't buzzing around to capture you on film.

To be fair to Ms. Winston, this disappears after the first 1/3 of the book, and we're back to a respectful rate of simile.

The book is truly excellent, a great summer read. It's not a huge hanky book, so feel free to read while commuting. Highly recommended. I scavaged around Ms. Winston's website to figure out what was next, but no hints are forthcoming. We'll just have to wait and see, but I'll be checking that one out, too...

Texas A&M - World's Top Animal Cloner

According to this news report, TAMU leads the world's academic institutions in cloning -- six species in six years. All sheep jokes aside, (A&M used to be an all male farm college way back when, and there were jokes aplenty), I'm very proud of my alma mater. I'm just wondering if the omission of a sheep species is deliberate.

Really?

More Harry Potter info, but my favorite line is this:

"Oh for a timely spell of reality," Roland White wrote in the Sunday Times. "Let's keep things in perspective. Until Friday, the Harry Potter series had sold about 270 million copies worldwide. Which is considerably less than the one billion shifted by the late, rather unfashionable, Barbara Cartland."

And the Reviews Begin!

The NY Times has a wonderfully complimentary review. Makes me want to run out and buy it! (And no, I'm not a pre-orderer. I must lay my hands on fiction.)

Recapturing Lost Magic

The New York Times has an article which starts out talking about the kids who are rereading Harry Potter and goes into this:

As it happens, Ms. Colt's mother, Anne Fadiman, has become something of an expert on the rereading phenomenon. Ms. Fadiman, an author and former editor of The American Scholar magazine, is the editor of "Rereadings," a collection of essays on the subject by 17 authors, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September. The book resulted from a standing feature in American Scholar, in which writers took another look at books they had loved when they were young.

"I expected the most frequent response to be, 'Gosh, I missed so much the first time around!' " Ms. Fadiman said in an interview. "But the rereading experience turned out more often to be one of loss: the unrecapturable ecstasy of first love. So the tone was often elegiac."

Elegiac, here, an adjective stemming from the word elegiac (the Times is the only newspaper I read where I have to keep my online dictionary open).

Rereading books from your childhood is fascinating to me. I was a compulsive rereader as a kid, I reread some of my comfort romances before I had kids, and now I'm lucky to finish books one time ago, and the TBR pile is like going into a diner and ordering off the 8 page, 8 pt type menu.

My most often reread was 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. We had a mandatory reading time in the 4th grade, and we had to pick off the bookshelf in the room. I reread this book probably 40 times, and will never forget that Perdita means 'lost'. I'm not sure if I'd try and reread it again. I loved the Chronicles of Narnia (can't wait for the movie), and reread the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a child, as a teenager (I did my high school thesis on the allegorical aspects of the series), and lastly as an adult, when I admired the word-play of the author.

Favorite romance reread was Ravished by Garwood.

Have you tried to reread a book you loved as kid? Does it survive well, or are you slipping into elegiac mournfulness?

GCC: The Halo Effect by MJ Rose

Looking for a great read?

"Potentially explosive… Rose's latest is not for the squeamish... [Dr. Morgan Snow] is an engaging guide to the world of dysfunction that Rose painstakingly constructs." –Publisher's Weekly

"The Halo Effect is tense, engrossing, and sometimes so real it's frightening."
- Linda Richards, editor of January Magazine

"Dr. Morgan Snow is a refreshingly vulnerable character whose spunky decision to go undercover in the demimonde is both believable and hair-raising. THE HALO EFFECT will have you on the edge of your seat from page one"
-Katherine Neville, New York Times bestselling author of The Eight

Book synopsis:

The first book in the Butterfield Institute series featuring sex therapist, Dr. Morgan Snow. In each book she struggles with the conflict of preserving her patient's privacy and the dangerous and sometimes criminal things she hears. She sees everything from the abused to the depraved, from the couples grappling with sexual boredom to twisted sociopaths with dark, erotic fetishes and the Butterfield institute is the sanctuary where she helps soothe and heal these battered souls.

And the fun part:


On July 5th, coinciding with the release of THE HALO EFFECT, Mira Books has teamed up with "VidLit" to produce a short film that uses animation and the latest in digitial multimedia illuminate the world within the novel. Rose has secured pledges from real-life supporters - her publisher, agent, family and friends – who will collectively donate $5 to the nonprofit literacy organization, Reading Is Fundamental, for each website or blog that links to Rose's THE HALO EFFECT VidLit before July 19.

Rose's goal is to get 500 blogs to link to the VidLit and raise $2500+ for the charity.
Check it the link!!

Quote of the Day

A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body.

Seeing the World Through Google-Colored Glasses

I was having a discussion yesterday with my DH (dear husband, for those not officially knowing the geek-lingo. You're forgiven.) and we were discussing the myriad of choices that are facing the consumer every day. 250 television channels. 25 movies just playing at my local megaplex alone. A gazillion books. Three gazillion CD's, etc. You get the idea. The more choices we're provided with, the more we need a filter. I told him that I thought conventional wisdom, or popular opinion was becoming that filter, and then he said: "Yeah. Like Google." Apparently, in their search acronym, google provides a ranking based on number of sites that are linking to the pages that contain the words in the search box. If you google "Kathleen O'Reilly," my site comes up first because more sites list "Kathleen O'Reilly" as a link to my homepage than any other pages containing "Kathleen O'Reilly". By Google's rules, popular opinion is the filter that I see the results by.

So, for instance, when I go into Barnes & Noble, or Target, or FYE (music store), the records that are placed up front, the one people are drawn to, is the choices made by millions of consumers before them. It's American Idol everywhere you look. According to the US General Accounting Office, the American household is provided an average of 88 different channels, yet the average viewer only views 17. More choice doesn't change the outcome of what you watch. So how does the consumer respond to this cacophony of demands? By picking out what other people watch, buy, read or listen to. Our brains are getting googled.

Recently, the Discovery Channel had a poll about the greatest American ever. The answer? Ronald Reagan. Right there above Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Now, I like Ronald Reagan, but I think Mr. Lincoln did a heck of a lot more for the country. And MLK. Apparently 2.4 million people voted, and I can't find the actual number of votes for Pres Reagan, but I can't help but wonder if those people were guided by conventional wisdom rather than facts.

What role does conventional wisdom play in your decision-making process? I admit, even being the individual that I am, I want to find out more about the books on the besteller list and I'm more inclined to buy music that other people are talking about. With television, I'm my own couch-potato, although I do love Lost and 24.

I haven't decided whether decision by group-think is a good thing or bad. It's obvious that the average consumer can't wade through 100 gazillion choices every day without help, but I've always marched to my own drummer, and it worries me that we're turning into the Borg, a world-wide collective, where the individual is silenced.

Giving up Madonna's Ghost

According to Page Six (a publication almost Biblical in it's reliability), Madonna has a ghostwriter for her children's books.

Lotsa de Casha was not written by the sexily-fingered hand of the Material Girl herself? Zut Alors! What's next? Jenna Jameson not ACTUALLY writing How to Make love like a porn star? The Bible, not ACTUALLY written by God? I feel the light dimming before my eyes when I can no longer trust the veracity of the written word.

From Forbes 2003 comes this article, which quotes a book publisher as saying: "getting a ghostwriter is like booking a flight to Los Angeles." My favorite line is this:

Ghosts, awash in celebrity egos, often are happy to forgo fame themselves. Novelist Quinton Skinner moonlights as a ghost and says a cowriting credit brings a smaller fee. "I'm telling someone else's story," he says. "Frankly, I'd rather have the money."

Taking out the Potter Trash

Robert McCrum from the Guardian (a UK paper) trashes the Harry Potter books, saying, "...try reading her aloud to an eight-year-old and you quickly discover that her prose is deadly - automatic writing, over-literal description and lazy dialogue. Perhaps The Half-Blood Prince will prove me wrong, but the series so far does not hold out much hope."

Rather interesting is the Amazon review from HP 4 by Mr. McCrum: "[T]his is storytelling of a high order indeed. It draws the reader in with a riddle and a letter. It proceeds through a series of trials to a great confrontation. And it concludes with a death and a climactic resolution. E.M. Forster famously observed that, 'Yes - oh dear, yes - the novel tells a story'. HP IV is the apotheosis of 'story.'"

(For those unknowing of the word apotheosis, it means "exaltation to divine rank or stature.")

Hmmm, storytelling of a high order or automatic writing, Mayor McCrum, tell us, which is it?

This message is a reminder that once words make it on the Internet, they are there in perpetuity, the word 'perpetuity' in this case meaning, 'long enough to come back and bite you'

Stalking Kelly Ripa

Natalie Collins is the author of Wives and Sisters and also the author of the Stalking Kelly Ripa blog. Okay, I think the idea is a hoot, but one of the reasons I'm linking to this is because the other night I had a dream. A dream about stalking Kelly Ripa. I was there with two of my college roommates that I haven't seen in a couple of years, and we were trotting about NYC, following a Kelly Ripa itinerary, in hopes of meeting her and telling her about my book. We had pretty much given up hope until around midnight, in a TGI Fridays, in walks Kelly Ripa and her entourage (they were filming something). It was all very surreal, and I blame Natalie for it :)

Speaking of Good Reads

If you don't find it in fiction, check under sci-fi. That's where my Barnes and Noble has it.

The perfect home library

We're in the middle of major home renovations, and alas, we're not having a library done, but if I were to have a library done, this is what it would look like:



Isn't that fab? All the books in the world, and a marvelously quiet, comfortable place to read them. It's raining here, and I always want to read when it's raining. What makes you want to read?

I think that I shall never see, a muggle as beautiful as a tree

From the NYT, an article about how the dastardly publishing villain, Scholastic, rejected a policy of using more recycled paper in its Harry Potter volumes. Fornicatus Sequoia sempervirens!

More fun with pictures

From www.tomcruiseisnuts.com

Remember that book in the drawer?

I was listening to an interview on NPR with Bob Woodward about his new book, The Secret Man, the book that tells the untold story of Deep Throat (the Watergate version, not the XXX version). I like listening to Bob Woodward. He's very old-school reporter, a profession canonized in black & white Hollywood movies, long before we ever knew the name Jayson Blair or Mitch Albom or Stephen Glass.... One thing he said in his interview was that he wrote The Secret Man three years ago and stuck it in a drawer, because he wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to publish it. I thought about that. Here's a man who gets paid very highly for his words. A man whose time is very expensive. And he wrote a book that he knew might not ever see the light of day. Talk about the book of your heart.

Playing with Pictures

I was reading an article recently on how Hollywood is going overseas to find manly men for leading roles. Aussies and English (English!!) leading men because Americans just don't cut it. I don't know. I just don't get it. American men aren't manly enough? Brad Pitt, in peroxide and leather? What's wrong with that? Three circles and a snap. Definitely. :)

p.s. I actually was just testing out the new pictures button on blogger, but thank you for playing.

GCC: Grave Intent by Deborah LeBlanc

An interesting mix into the GCC line-up. A horror novel! Grave Intent by Deborah LeBlanc. I picked this one up today at B&N, and it looks eerie....

The story: In all their years at the funeral home, Janet and Michael Savoy had never seen anything like the viewing for nineteen-year-old Thalia Stevenson. That's because they had never witnessed a Gypsy funeral before, complete with rituals, incantations, and a very special gold coin placed beneath the dead girl's hands...

When that coin is stolen, a horror is unleashed. If the Savoys don't find the coin and return it to Thalia's grave before the rising of the second sun, someone in their family--perhaps their little daughter--will die a merciless death. The ticking away of each hour brings the Savoy family closer to a gruesome, inescapable nightmare. Only one thing is certain--Gypsies always have their revenge . . . even the dead ones.

The praise:

"A powerful, haunting tale." --Tim Lebbon, author of Desolation

"Grave Intent is a first-rate novel, filled with genuine dread. I defy you to put this down after the first two pages--it can't be done!" --Gary A. Braunbeck, author of In Silent Graves

The excerpt

OMG!

:snarkalert.
I have the Spooky Art, and My God, somebody else thinks like I do!!: I thought I was an idiot because I didn't get into it, and I mean, Mailer's got a Pulitzer, and you know, I'm very proud of my Romantic Times nomination, but geez, it's not a Pulitzer. Well, the plot thinkens, because apparently, Msss. Kakutani is an idiot, too. Or at least,according to Mr. Mailer, she is. I believe his actual, more erudite words were: " one-woman kamikaze...a token." Now, I'm thinking that Mr. Mailer could have done better. A 'token'? PUH-LEASE. How prosaic. I would expected something more descriptive, more biting: 'a sloe-eyed vixen determined to fly her rackety contraption into any newspaper she could crash into'. But what do I know? I'm a mere romance writer. Unless, I'm not an idiot, any more than Ms. Kakutani is a token. I prefer to believe in the latter. I think Ms. Kakutani should kamikaze a pair of chopsticks right up Mr. Mailer's Pulitzer-prize-winning ass.
p.s. Note to all reviewers, as a card-carrying member of PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Reviewers), I would never actually subscribe to the idea of punishing a reviewer, either verbally or physically. All above was written purely in fun, and for those of you who review for AAR, RT, Mrs. Giggles, or Kirkus, I didn't mean anything by those earlier remarks. Swear.

:endsnarkalert.

Beginnings

I love to write beginnings. It's a blank canvas, a new world, it's a star-studded party where you get all the best lines, and meet all the hunkiest men. Can you tell I'm starting a new story? (Actually, it's two at the moment).

And speaking of star-studded parties, there's an opening on the guest list at the US Supreme Court. I like following the poltical process, but the Supremes bore me. They come down from the mountain of the US Supreme Court, and issue their verdicts on big stone tablets. (Note here, I didn't like Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments, either. Yul Brenner was the one that fascinated me.) What is interesting is that the number one candidate for the opening is Alberto Gonzalez, a good ole boy from Texas. Now here's a guy who has pissed off everybody on BOTH sides of the fence. That alone scores brownie points with me. It'll be interesting to watch the process. Another point to ponder, O'Connor announced her resignation when the Daily Show is in reruns for the holidays. Coincidence? I think not.

I'll have some news shortly. Fun news.... Stay tuned....

Let the Potter-Mania Begin!

Okay, on most days, I like to make fun of Mcsweeny, however, this one is funny, McSweeney's Things You Can Learn About the Plot of the Next Harry Potter Book Just by Looking at the Cover Art. I have pre-ordered the book, but I am looking forward to reading it. I've got about ten books on my to be read first. Expect many book reviews this summer!