Where Fairy Tales Come From

First off, I have done A Thing: my short story "Candy, Shoe, and Skull; Sallow Flowers Plucked Like Chains" appears in this month's issue of Niteblade Fantasy and Horror Magazine.

And yes, it's the dark fairy tale issue.

If you know me, you understand why that is perfect.

I've read the magazine and there are some delightfully wondrous and oh-so-dark retwistings of fairy tale in these digital pages. So far my favorites, other than my own story (because: of course), are Eric J. Guignard's "A Kiss and a Curse," a Beauty and the Beast retelling of dire consequence, the narrative poem "Et je ne pleurais jamais les larmes cicatrisantes magiques; c’est seulement un mensonge joli: Arne-Thompson Index No. 310" by Elizabeth McClellan featuring a Rapunzel with agency and engineering on her side, and Rhonda Eikamp's "The Men in the Walls," which is also very, very dark. Well, they're all dark. This is, after all, the dark fairy tale issue. But there's a delight in these dark stories that my brain keeps turning over and over. I love the twists and shapes of these tales.

My piece, "Candy, Shoe, and Skull; Sallow Flowers Plucked Like Chains,"really came about because I kept picking at the notion of where fairy tales come from, then applied that to the modern world.

We're all just dark and twisty beings who don't understand what's going on.

There are two main theories in folklore studies about the origins of these stories of the people and the fact that so many cultures developed the same basic tales seemingly independent of one another. One notion is that these tales arise from the collective subconscious.

Read the rest of this post . . .

The Putty-Theory of World Building

As a teenager, I attended a local day-camp for writers with several friends in what would turn out to be my first creative writing workshop ... workshop-ish. The lead instructor was perplexed (and yet fascinated) as to why my three friends and I all wanted to write fantasy, only occasionally dabbling in realism. None of the other workshoppers dallied across genres that summer, and he'd never seen teens so adamant about fantasy fiction. (Note: this was the universe pre-Harry Potter.)

We told him that the fiction we enjoyed reading the most was fantastic in nature, but this answer didn't appease him as we all admittedly read across many genres

It wasn't until I told him why fantasy was, at the time, easier for me to write that he seemed enlightened. At sixteen, I had (perhaps) half-a-clue as to why people behaved the way they did. Oh, I was engaged in social groups, but half the time I wasn't able to predict how I would react in a situation let alone how other people would. I didn't understand fully what motivated people or how they expressed those emotions, but I cared about getting it right in my fiction. And I just wasn't able to. But when I wrote second-world fantasy, I  could make up some cultural/magical reason for my character's behavior. Having a malleable world let me fill plot holes with fantasy putty.

I've since come to what I hope is a more sophisticated understanding of plotting and world building than I had at sixteen, but the putty or plaster-and-paint-over of fantasy writing was necessary to keeping me writing for years as I came to understand better how humans worked and how the adult world worked. I suppose I could have solved the same problem by setting all my stories in a high school, but that approach brought its own risks (and still does): anytime you write about a setting that too closely resembles your day-to-day life, people assume that you're writing about yourself / people you know. Getting caught in such a situation in high school can be the end of the world. Post-high school it's still pretty damn annoying.

Recently, a discussion came up about which genre was more "freeing" for a writer, science fiction or fantasy. As in, in which of these speculative sub-sets does a writer have more freedom to "just make stuff up." The initial question was posed with a predisposition toward sci-fi as freer, which given my experience, struck me as a goose of strange feathers: I would have never been able to use fantasy as putty if it hadn't been freeing.

As as teen, I also tried writing sci-fi, but like urban fantasy, sci-fi rests on the presupposition that our current society has developed into the story's society. So I'd still have to understand people to build the story. Unless the story was full of aliens, then rock on. But for fantasy set in a secondary world, even if it was pseudo-medieval, it was never actually "earth," so I could wend as I wanted.

Classic (i.e. mid-century) science fiction was open to a lot more possibilities. Recent trends in sci-fi suggest that it should be bound by known physics ... which has led us to lots of post-apocalyptic Earth-based stories since so many scientists believe that faster-than-light travel was impossible (although that opinion might be changing), so we couldn't have space operas or alien encounters (the odds of humanoid life developing independently on another planet are ... minuscule), or space federations or Death Stars, or ray guns, or living ships ... in short, it got serious about its science, which curtailed the freedom of writing sci-fi while sucking the fun out of reading it.

Similarly, there's been a movement in second-world fantasy fiction to make the worlds more rule-based and harshly criticize any novels that don't make rigid physics-like rules for their worlds. Destroying the freedom of bending fantasy into any shape you want and -- to make a personal appraisal -- giving us fantasy novels like Game of Thrones which has a pseudo-medieval setting but very, very few traces of magic and speculative wonder in it. And what magic there is, is disapprovingly scrutinized.

Anecdote: I once heard that a reader, upon meeting George RR Martin, questioned him on why he had a giant wall of ice in his novel as it was physically impossible. GRRM (not pleased by the question) responded, "it's magic."

Personally, I think it's a question GRRM set himself up for by having a world that was so rule based, so seemingly real that the presence of magic sat with the reader as ... odd.

But the notion that science fiction should be bound by physics and fantasy should be bound by a rule system as rigorous and rigid as physics is only one school of thought.

There's another school of thought out there that writers should reclaim the fun and freedom of science fiction and fantasy. That says let magic be magical, not so rigorously studied and understood that there could be a Wikipedia page on it. See N. K. Jemisin's beautiful piece where she asks "Why Does Magic Have to Make Sense? A piece she opens with the Arthur C. Clarke quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's a revival of this fun and freeing fiction going on. I feel it's more noticeable in science fiction as editors and writers take a stand against the dark depressing overtones and produce works like Far Orbit: Speculative Space Adventures, which is coming out in spring 2014.

I say hurrah! to putting the fun and freedom, the mystery and magic, the awe and wonder back into science fiction and fantasy. A novel should, of course, always make sense, but I say that having a malleable world is a beautiful thing, and so long as a writer is willing to sand and paint after they've plastered some strange magic into their world, then bravo!, it need not be one continuous, unblemished piece of drywall. Why take some beautiful, wondrous, unexplained but unblemished creation like an energy field created by all living things that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together ... then go and kill the wonder and restrict its freedom by quantifying it into a threshold number of midichlorians?

Top photo credit: "Students' notice board, 1973," LSE Library via Flickr.

A Year in Reading, 2012 Edition

For the past couple of years, I've posted my end of year reading summary. It's not necessarily books published only in 2012, it's simply what I've read in 2012. It's not even the best of what I've read in 2012. It's simply a reading retrospective with a few words about each. Since I've read about 75 books or more this year, this list will be a bit more summary than in previous years. (Which will probably be a good thing because in 2011 I don't believe I finished my retrospective — oh my!)

The most awesome book series I read in 2012: Grave Witch by Kaylana Price (Series title: Alex Craft, Grave Witch, Grave Dance, Grave Memory). These are great, fascinating, urban fantasy novels featuring a witch PI in a world that's not really comfortable with the overt magic it's soaked in. The fae are omnipresent, but humans would rather believe the glamour they see than reconcile the creature beneath — ditto for the witch-made charms. Top that off with the personal struggles of Alex Craft — she's estranged from her family, barely making rent, and the only thing she's good at monetizing is her Grave Sight, an ability that leaves her night blind and sometimes worse. Oh, and there's a love triangle that gets more and more and more tangled as the series continues. The closer Alex Craft gets to accepting a relationship, the more alone she finds herself.

I actually read these books before I read Kim Harrison's The Hollows/Rachel Morgan series (more on that later) but once I had, I found Grave Witch extremely similar yet much more mature in world and premise. The Grave Witch world and character development leaps into the arena that the world of the Hollows only achieves in books six and on.

Favorite YA series of the year: I was surprised to fall in love with the YA sci-fi Cold Awakening Trilogy by Robin Wasserman this year. In this not-too-far-future dystopia, a rich, spoiled, self-centered teen ends up in a near-fatal accident that leaves her “skinned” — her brain is sliced, scanned, and uploaded into a synthetic body. I have a problem with whiny teenage characters (even if the whining is realistic) but the fascinating science and technology milieu pulled me through Frozen, and once we got into the larger social and political issues of Shattered and Torn, I found myself staying up way past my bedtime to gobble up this series.

Series that made me gain over 5 lbs. in a month: I read Janet Evanovich's One for the Money because the movie looked cute. Truth. I loved this book and snapped up Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly, Four to Score ... all the way through Fearless Fourteen before I stopped because I realized they were all awesome, but they were all the same. I have no doubt I'll go back and visit the Berg and the Plum family, Morelli, Ranger, and Stephanie Plum's inexplicable ability to destroy cars and read through the latest Notorious Nineteen. But I had to stop reading and take a break. Take a breath. Stop my constant reading about doughnuts, fried chicken, and pot roast — a devastating trio to have on the brain in the middle of winter.

Although the endless pot roast discussion did lead me to find a great, easy, pot roast recipe for crock pot: trim roast, place in a crock pot that's been lightly coated in PAM (for clean up), and then for every 2.5 lbs. of roast add one can cream of mushroom soup and a half-packet of powdered onion soup. Cook on low for eight hours. Don't add water! The roast will create its own gravy from this concoction. And it comes out super tender. The pot roast wasn't as debilitating a factor in my Evanovich inspired weight gain, it was more the doughnuts and fried chicken cravings that did me in.

So later, when I came across The Haunted Housewives of Allister, Alabama by Susan Abel Sullivan, I immediately recognized the protagonist Cleo Tidwell as a Southern, thrice-married Stephanie Plum. The humor's spot on, the crazy-but-lovable family is there, the zany problems that emerge in the course of solving the mystery and staying alive in the process — all the things that made Janet Evanovich's novels something which I felt like I read without breathing, were there in deep fried package from Susan Abel Sullivan. I highly recommend The Haunted Housewives of Allister, Alabama to anyone who's read and enjoyed One for the Money and the other Stephanie Plum mysteries.

The series with the devastating emotional roller coaster: JC Andrijeski's Allie's War, Book Four Shadow. I've posted before about this series. Everything I know about fiction tells me this series shouldn't work, yet oh-baby does it work. I read the first three in a madcap dash then waited for book four — a whopping 200,000+ words in length — and kept biding my time to start it because these books are an emotional roller coaster. I have a copy of book five, Knight, but every time I go to start it, I take a deep breath and ask myself are you ready for this? So far, I've not been prepared. Part near-future dystopia with some aspects of a tech thriller, part paranormal romance. These books are — and this doesn't often get said about PNR — epic.

Holy hell, how did I manage to ignore this series this long? Actually, I know how. Book one of Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan/The Hollows Novels, features cover art of a half-naked red head with handcuffs dangling off the belt loop of her hip hugging leather pants. Excuse me? You want me to believe your urban fantasy is a strong ass kicking chick when she's depicted wearing a bandeau bikini top on the streets of Cincinnati? Yep. That's the idea. Except the funny part about this depiction (and my subsequent reaction to it) is that Kim Harrison actually writes the character Rachel Morgan as dressing in precisely this fashion ... and then having people try to proposition her because they think she's a hooker. Oops! In later books in the series, Rachel's vampire friends and roommate try repeatedly to class her up. Her taste level is constantly in question and Rachel's not thrilled to hear it. So I zipped on through this great nine book series (book ten out this spring) starting with Dead Witch Walking of the bikini top infamy, then up through The Outlaw Demon Wails before I took a break from the series for a bit. Even then I caught myself saying "crap on toast" anytime something went wrong in my life.

After (not a spoiler) one of the main characters dies, Rachel loses a sense of focus, and I lost a bit of my interest. But after reading a half-dozen other novels by other writers, I started to wonder what happened next. So I happily turned back to the series and cruised on through to Pale Demon. These more recent titles bring Trent back more interestingly into the picture and I actually loved the cross-country road trip which allowed us to see just how different this post-genetic-crisis world is from our own — not something we were really able to see in the previous urban Cincinnati and touristy Mackinac locations. I'm looking forward to Ever After coming out January 22, 2013.

Because fairy tales are pretty. Opal is a YA fantasy by Kristina Wojtaszek that features multiple, nested fairy tales (some of which you'll recognize) within a fantasy world. The prose is lyrical and rich. Fans of Patricia McKillip take note of this new voice in the world of fantasy and fairy tale retellings.

Books I re-read. Elizabeth Vaughn's Warprize is just an absolutely stellar example of romantic fantasy (second-world setting). The rest of the books in the trilogy don't live up to the awesomeness of this first installment. I've not read the further books set in the same world, but might yet one day.

I also re-read the Others Series by Jess Haines as Stalking the Others was coming out during summer 2012 and I could remember that I liked the series but I couldn't remember what all the rules of that particular urban fantasy world were. Hunted by the Others (book one) was just okay. It took me two years before I bothered looking around to see if there was more in the series. Books two and three get more interesting. No longer does the main character think all vampires are Evil and most werewolves are okay but really the only species you can trust are humans — sorry, but that sort of thinking in a book is boring. Anyhoodle, book three ended with a doozy of a cliffhanger: the heroine might have been changed into an otherworldly creature against her will! So I was going to relish the fourth book, damnit, and that meant re-reading, re-skimming the previous three.

Promising beginnings. Silver by Rhiannon Held is an interesting, slightly grittier, werewolf urban fantasy. The two main characters aren't your typical heroine and heroine a la paranormal romance, rather they remind me of The Fifth Element's Corbin Dallas and Leelo. (My full review of the novel can be found on NewMyths.com.) Book two, Tarnished, comes out this spring. I'm hoping this series delivers on its promising beginning.

I used to love the Katie MacAlister series with the dragons. Actual, this is her third series of books featuring the same world/characters just switching narrators. But Sparks Fly completely lost me. Maybe I skipped over the previous book, because I constantly felt like I didn't know what was going on. Maybe it'll all make sense to me if I go back and re-read all ten books...?

Another promising beginning that's petered out, is Thea Harrison's Elder Races novels. Romances set in a modern world with were-creatures that can shift into giant animals like dragons, griffons, and thunderbirds. Dragon Bound, the first in the series, was awesome. Loved it. Read Storm's Heart, the second in the series, and it was okay. Read a novella out of order that I really had no idea why I finished. Sadly, I'm done with this series that had previously shown so much promise.

Matriarchal fantasy world — a bit like Scott O'Dell meets Anne McCaffery. Shards of History by Rebecca Roland is a fresh new fantasy world where the main civilization puts one in mind of southwest Native American cultures. The heroine, Malia, finds out a truth about the hated and feared creatures that live on the fringes of their civilization, one that can save them from the dragon-riding army that's poised on the edge of the valley, waiting to kill, capture, and enslave Malia's people. Of course, if she can't get her people to believe this newly discovered truth, it'll be their destruction. Time is running out before the sky — literally — falls down on them.

A return to Jeaniene Frost. I adored the first two Cat and Bones books. Halfway to the Grave was so good it made me want to hate Jeaniene Frost for her storytelling ability coupled with her writing skills. But as the series wore on, the spin-offs and one-off novels appeared, and the vampires become and and more powerful (an annoying problem that means they have to go to extreme lengths not to have other vampires in a half-mile radius overhear their conversations), I sort of slipped away. Since Cat became a vampire, I let the series go on without me. But then along came Vlad. And more importantly, Leila. I like Leila. And I like that she's not becoming an all-powerful vampire. She doesn't know much about the vampire subculture she's been sucked into, so we get to go on the journey all over again. I'm down with that. Once Burned brought me back to the Night Huntress franchise. I look forward to Twice Tempted coming out in late-March.

Non-fiction. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a fabulous braided narrative of Skloot's research and her research process into the life of Henrietta Lacks — the African American woman from whom HeLa research cells were derived — and her surviving family. Henrietta never knew that she was "donnating" cells, and it would be decades before her family knew that their mother's cells had been instrumental to 20th century health science, having been key to producing a functional polio vaccine among many other advances. Skloot keeps a human interest angle to her book even when she's discussing science and legal precedents. Eminently readable and jargon-lite in spite of its science rich content.

Books I picked up for free and was happy to have found! Delilah S. Dawson's Wicked as They Come is vampire, steampunk romance FTW. The dialog is quick and witty (sometimes too quick as I love a good angsty brood), the heroine is spunky and capable, and the world of Sang is fascinating. An alternate dimension where the reasons for steampunk are simple: there's magic and vampireish Bludmen so you better lace up that stiff collar and cover your neck! Not to mention the hero is equally fascinating as our tour guide through the world. I'm willing to forgive this book its trespasses because reading it was just plain fun. The teaser scene from Blud Book #2 shows us a different first person protagonist in a different city, which saddens me only because Criminy and Tish's storyline did not feel finished. I'm holding out hope for Criminy & Tish the Sequel! I've also picked up the novella in this series, The Mysterious Madam Morpho, which is a cute, brief tale of the traveling caravan show that Criminy runs. Liked it. Will likely pick up Wicked as She Wants this April. Bludbunnies — now there's something I can't get out of my head!

The Scottish historical romance, Claire Delacroix's The Beauty Bride, was a free ebook download (I think it's still free at most major retailers and is the first in Delacroix's series). I admit that I judge books by their covers, especially in the age of free and cheap ebooks, a shoddy cover is often a sign of shoddy writing within — but don't let this cover fool you! Delacroix's writing and historical research are fabulous. I believe this ebook version is a reissue of an earlier title which was published by a major publisher, and since it went out of print the author has brought it back on her own (that's my speculation at least). I didn't expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. I didn't expect to stay up reading all night only to look at the clock and say, "How the hell did it get to be 5:00 AM?" I'll likely be seeking out the rest of the series in 2013 when the historical mood strikes me.

Books I picked up for free ... and sort of wish I hadn't. Waking Up Married. Harlequin is promoting this book as the banner carrier of their new KISS line. From all the hype I expected something youthful and fresh, like if the KISS line was a dessert, it would be a crisp and sassy, low-cal dessert. With citrus. Instead I got a Diet Coke. With lime. At the very least I expected it to feel more "youthful" because that's how it's being promoted. But except for the fact that the heroine isn't in a work/family position where she's subservient to the hero (he's her boss, etc.), this felt exactly like the PRESENTS novels I used to read. The heroine has a career. Bravo. But she didn't feel any more like a modern twenty-something than any other Harlequin heroine does (Harlequin's selling point for KISS). And I happen to be something of an expert on modern twenty-somethings: I am one.

Nora Roberts. Yes, Nora Roberts is her own category of reading. Her shelves are my go-to section of the library whenever I'm feeling glum or overwhelmed by life. I know that I can escape into her worlds and that the books are always satisfactory — they'll never rock my world, but I know they'll never disappoint me either. In 2012 she wrapped up her Inn BoonsBoro trilogy with The Last Boyfriend and The Perfect Hope. The cool part about these books? A hefty component of each is running a small business (bookstore, pizzeria  bed-and-breakfast) and decorating/building the inn. So it's a bit like reading a romance and simultaneously leafing through a home fashion magazine. Still not as cool as the Bridal Quartet which was like reading a romance and leafing through a bridal magazine.

Also in the Nora Roberts category this year, I read the Key Trilogy and most of the Dreams Trilogy. The Key books involve three women helping otherworldly creatures free three women who are sort of trapped in a sleeping beauty spell and was among the more memorable of Nora Roberts stuff (although when it comes to her novels with paranormal elements, my favorite is still The Jewels of the Sun trilogy).

The unmemorable odds and ends. I picked up The Wrangler as part of a free promotion. I'd never read a western romance before. It's not likely to become my genre of choice. Marked by Elisabeth Naughton is another title that I only know I read because I wrote it down on my list of finished books. I vaguely recall something about the Greek gods. Another paranormal romance that's selling well that didn't catch my fancy. Ditto for Goblin King  and Kiss of the Goblin Prince by Shona Husk. I will give these goblin books props for choosing a more original  paranormal creature (the goblin) than the majority of casting for paranormal heroes and heroines out there.

There were other books I read in 2012. I've recently started but not finished Clean by Alex Hughes which seems promising. I can't forget to mention all the ghost stories I read in 2012, published and submitted for publication, as I worked on editing the anthology Specter Spectacular: 13 Ghostly Tales. There are books of poetry such as Jay Nicorvo's Deadbeat and the poem a day I get to open courtesy of NPR's Writer's Almanac, along with numerous short stories from Daily SF and other magazines and anthologies.

What of note have you read in 2012? 

Bridging gaps and weaving worlds

Today I'm the writer of the guest post for Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine. Read here to see me make the obvious connection between Rumpelstiltskin and starting a small press.

Meanwhile, writer and blogger Elizabeth Twist is visiting World Weaver Press. her guest post tackles the genre of horror and whether or not it's really a genre or something more pervasive. Her article may just have you rethinking how  you define "horror."

End table dilemma

I love/hate having a great stack of great books to read on the table beside my couch.

That's where they live while waiting for me to read them, by the way. My TBR or "to be read" pile doesn't live beside my bed or on my nightstand. Oh no. It lives on the end table beside the couch. That's where they wait for my attention. Because let me tell you, it's only when a book grips my interest enough to keep me from sleep that I invite it into bed for a little pre-slumber reading.

Right now, the end table poses a delimma. I have an assortment of books I want to read and must pick who I read next.

The book that's been sitting on my end table the longest is Stephen King's Gunslinger. I've never read The Dark Tower series and I want to! But at the same time I don't know much about the series other than that it's good. And that lack is the difference between want to and really want to.

I also have a beautifully fluffy novel called Sparks Fly by Katie MacAlister. The impetus to read now is simple: this is a library book with multiple holds on it. Other people want it and if I hold onto it too long I can't renew my checkout. The novel is the third in the Light Dragons series which itself is the third series in Katie MacAlister's dragon world which I previously wrote about here.

But the fourth book in "The Others" series by Jess Haines is coming out July 3! And it's been sooo freaking long since I read the three books previous -- okay it's been about a year -- that I'm thinking I should really reread them before I jump into Stalking the Others. And trust me, before I jump into Stalking the Others I'm going to want to reread the three previous novels.

Oooo, and look at that pretty book cover? Doesn't it just want to leap into your shopping cart? Major, major improvement over previous covers, particularly book two where the heroine looked more like a stripper.

Regardless of their bad covers, I need to revisit books one through three before embarking on this beauty. ... and hey, I was planning to write all of this out for the O post of my A to Z challenge which I never reached. Correction: have not yet reached ... because I'm not done. I'm just a snail. A busy, easily distracted snail.

Book one, Hunted by the Others, was just  an okay read, in fact I was disappointed that it wasn't trashier than it was despite having a hot werewolf and a hot vampire character, nonevermind that the main character is freaked the fuck out by the evilness of the vampire. I read it shortly after it came out and then forgot about it for a while. Then, more than a year later, I was in the mood for an urban fantasy and I was at the point where I was caught up on all my favorite series and I was down to the point of picking up a mediocre urban fantasy that I knew a bit about or an urban fantasy that I knew nothing about which could be mediocre or could suck or could be pretty good. I went with the evil I knew -- and I was not disappointed. While Hunted by the Others was just okay, it set up a really cool world that books two and three engage with in a hot damn! sort of way. The main character's relationship with the vampire world (previously seen as soulless evil) gets a bit more gray, and her relationship with the werewolf world gets ... complicated. The end of book three leaves us with one helluva cliffhanger. The kind where I'm enthralled and pissed off and salivating for the next book all at the same time. So I want to make the most of book four, and that means rereading books 1-3 to remember everything from character names to places and relationships, because frankly, it's all gotten fuzzy in the intervening months.

Stripper cover, yes? Anyone care to argue that its not? She's even carrying her own pole. Sorry art department, that's not a crime fighter, that's a receptacle for one dollar bills. 

So now, here I am, mid-June with a reading dilemma on my hands or, um, on my end table.

Plum crazy

As I mentioned in my previous post, all non-essential activity in my life has stopped while I've been on my book-reading bender. I'm currently ensconced in book eleven of the Stephanie Plum series. (I skipped Visions of Sugar Plums but am considering the other "between the plums" as the library has copies of them.) What I've discovered in reading these books back to back to back is that there is a strange suspension of disbelief that is asked of the reader.

The first book in the series was written in 1994, with the first ten books coming out one per year. In the first novel, the main character is thirty years old, one of the characters has a car phone, no one has a cell phone. Slowly, over the course of the books, the technology upgrades. First some of the characters get cell phones and pagers. Then everyone has a cell phone. The car phones fade away to be replaced by GPS tracking and onboard navigation. The "seasons" pass.  It's summer, it's winter. There's pumpkins on the Plum front porch. It's spring and the paint job looks sickly in the drizzle. It's summer and the smog is heavy on the freeway. Secondary characters get pregnant and give birth. The main character gets a computer ... but she's still thirty.

O! to be Stephanie Plum! Stuck in a type of suspended animation where life marches on but you need never fear turning thirty-one, or thirty-two or any other age!

I'm completely on board with the technology upgrading faster than "time" is passing in the novels. So what if it's only been ten seasons in the course of the story instead of the ten years that passed in the real world? But where my desire to believe snags is when the character never ages.

But the novels are laugh-out-loud funny -- I daily scare the cats from sudden bursts of laughter when they thought I was just sitting calmly -- I'll continue to suspend disbelief. But it's weird. A bit like knowing you've stepped Underhill and into Faerie

Book bender

For the past week or so, I've been fully consumed by a book bender. Which is a lot like any other bender. You overdo it. You spend all of your waking hours that aren't at work, working on your bender progress. And some of your non-waking hours become waking hours all in the pursuit of finishing another page, another chapter, another book. More. More. More of a good thing can't be bad? you ask yourself. And the bender replies, Of course not.

Th book bender even has the same hangover feeling as a regular bender. Although with fewer lasting effects on your liver probably. The same woozy head and need for water that you forgot to drink. The same stack of crud in your apartment that didn't get taken care of. Laundry. Dishes. Overflowing trash bin.

You took care of the basics. Mostly. The cats are fed, their litter box is clean. You showered daily. Or at least every other day. Or at least on the days you went to work.

First thing book I hit on my bender was Frozen by Robin Wasserman. I chose this book because I knew if I read Shadow, book four in Allie's War by JC Andrijeski, I would start on a bender. I love this series and knew I would read the entire 220,000 word novel in as close to one stint as I possibly could. (220,000 words, btw, would make this ebook almost 900 pages if it was published as a mass market paperback.)

And I wanted to avoid the bender.

So I resisted diving into the next book in what I knew was an all-consuming series. I picked up a YA dystopia that I thought I could put down after the first volume.

Unfortunately, I got kind of interested. There was some interestingly unresolved interpersonal stuff at the end of Frozen. So I checked Shattered and Torn out of the library's YA section and finished what's called the "Cold Awakening Trilogy" in a weekend.

These books have a scarily possibly future. We've screwed the world over with pollution, nuclear bombs and "accidents," as well as religious wars. Society has stratified itself to the uber-rich, the poor who live in work camps, and the even poorer who are too mutated or unfortunate to live in work camps and are therefore living in the nasty shells of former cities. The uber-rich pretty much live their lives on the network. Oh there's interpersonal interaction, but you don't define yourself in reality as much as you do in your "zone." Of course, all of this is background. The novel opens with the teenage main character's death and her subsequent rival into a mechanical body. True to form for a spoiled, rich, bitchy teenager, she spends the first 50 pages whining about being dead and/or a machine. It took me a couple of months of picking up the book and putting it down to get past those opening pages. But the premise was intriguing enough that I didn't give up on the book.

But I find my problem with YA dystopia -- YA fiction in general -- is that the endings do not make me happy. How do you plan to resolve all the juicy love triangles if  [skip to below the three the icy book covers if you don't want to hear any hint of spoilers] one or all of your love triangle participants is dead, reprogrammed, some sort of zen ball of energy, or an all-seeing eye in the sky, a beneficent Big Brother?

This, people, is why I read books that are clearly labeled romance. At least that way you know that one of the interpersonal relationships will have some feel of finality by the end of the book.
   

These books were previously released as Skinned, Crashed, and Wired with unpretty covers. They were recently renamed, rebranded, and rereleased. They have really pretty covers in this edition, no?

I was so pissed off that I knew I needed to start reading another book immediately to take my mind off how annoyed I was with the ending that was, albeit, the logical inevitable conclusion based on the world/characters/situation.

I needed to cleanse my palate. And in the process I pushed myself into an even larger reading bender than I ever could have done with one 900 page novel.

I'd requested a copy of One for the Money by Janet Evanovich from my local library after seeing a trailer for the forthcoming movie with Katherine Heigl. The book is hilarious! Absolutely amazingly funny and such an easy, engaging read.

I'm not normally a fan of crime fiction or mysteries, but I'm totally sold on the New Jersey bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum. She's not one of the many kickass crime fighting chicks of fiction. Oh no, she's working the gossip tree of Italian mommas and busybodies. Not to say that there aren't fight scenes, explosions, and gun play. Actually, the gun play is very, very dangerous if you're a roast chicken in this novel.



That may make the book sound more lighthearted than it is. But the end effect is that the gritty parts balance out the humor.

My copy of One for the Money said there was a sequel. Great!

I got it. Read it in a day.

Got the next one. Read it in two days.

I'm on Four to Score right now. If I finish it in the next day I'll have read seven books in eight days.

Definitely on a book bender.

Damn.

I keep thinking about stopping, but then Joe Morelli does something interesting and I want to read more. And then I get a hint that someone happens (maybe) with Ranger in book five, so of course I want to get to book five.

I've redefined what "laying in supplies" for what will likely be a long, snowy weekend means: a fridge full of chinese takeout and books four, five and six checked out from the library, on my coffee table and ready to go.

I looked to the series itself for some relief. I mean, even if I didn't have the willpower to stop this madness, the series had to end sometime. Right? There can't be an endless supply of Stephanie Plum novels waiting to suck me into a never-ending book bender. Right? There can only be a few more novels in this series, surely.

Eighteen.

Janet Evanovich has at least eighteen Stephanie Plum novels out.

At this rate I won't resurface til Groundhog Day.