Patti O'Shea's Blog, page 175

Baby, I'm Yours

The first Susan Andersen book I ever read was Baby, I'm Yours and it made her a Must-Buy author for me.

Catherine is a twin--the responsible, sensible twin. The hero, Sam, is a bounty hunter who thinks Catherine is her sister and he's taking her in. Via Greyhound because he's short on cash. The heroine does everything she can to mess Sam up and slow him down. At least until feelings start to develop between them. Over the course of the story, Catherine learns to let loose a little and not try so hard to be nothing like her twin.

There's also a secondary romance with the twin sister, Kaylee, who learns to be more responsible along the growth arc of her story. In all honesty, I skip the Kaylee stuff when I reread this book. The main romance between Catherine and Sam is just too awesome.

To say I loved this book would be understating things. I really loved it. Catherine is smart and she's no one's pushover. Throughout the book she goes toe-to-toe with Sam and frequently out-maneuvers him.

Sam is sexy and alpha and Catherine keeps him hopping. And frustrates him to no end, not just sexually either.

The book is light romantic suspense and has a lot of humor. I can't think of anyone who does humor with suspense as well as Andersen does. This book is probably lighter on the suspense than some of her other books, but it doesn't change how fantastic this story was. It's a character-driven story and the hero and heroine are completely awesome.

Highly recommended.

Where No One Can See

In preparation for my move to Atlanta, I began pulling bulbs this last weekend. I should have begun sooner, but between deadlines and life, I wasn't able to do it until now. We started with the tree lilies since there were only 8 of those. At least there were 8 when I planted them. It's been three years and I've had multiple stalks come up, so I assumed there'd been some replication going on. Little did I know what's been going on underground, away from my sight.

First, let me show you a couple shots of what the tree lilies looked like in 2010. This year wasn't the best year they'd ever had thanks to the deer coming over for a midnight snack. I used to like deer, but that changed when I planted flowers.

Tree Lilies at a distance [image error]
Closer view of the tree lilies [image error]
Because I knew I was going to have to dig the bulbs up, I hadn't bothered to cut down the stems yet so we were able to go right to the tree lilies instead of digging around the general area. Even knowing how lilies can spread, I was still surprised by what I found. There were roots going everywhere! At first, we thought the little roots were from weeds or the grass or something. It wasn't until we pulled the bulbs out that we realized those flowers had thicker roots below and many, many, many thinner roots above the bulb. That was a huge shock. But then I pulled them out of the ground and found monster bulbs.

A few of the bulbs that were pulled [image error]
Those are five of the bulbs. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say five bunches of bulbs. Look at the monster among monsters on the left. It left me stunned. Out of the eight original bulbs planted, I ended up with about 25 bulbs after three years in the ground. There would have been more except I didn't keep the really tiny ones and there were two clusters of 2 bulbs that I was afraid to separate since they were so merged together. Like conjoined bulb twins.
Close up of the bulbs [image error]

Chat Tonight!

Join me, Sharon Ashwood, Lori Devoti and Michele Hauf for a chat tonight! We'll be talking about our stories in Crave the Night over at Literal Addiction. If you've never chatted there before, it appears as if you'll need to setup an account.

We'll be there from 8pm to 10pm Eastern Time/5pm to 7pm Pacific Time.

[image error]

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Last week, I finished listening to a book by Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature. The subtitle for this book is Why Violence Has Declined.

I picked up the book on Audible and listened to it, which is a different experience than reading as I'm sure y'all know. My review is based on the audio book, not the paper version. I very much liked the narrator for the book, a big plus since it's an extremely long book. The paper version is listed at 800 pages and the audio version had 5 parts. Most Audible books come in 2 parts.

The premise intrigued me when I saw it. Violence is declining? In many ways, the world seems more uncivilized now than it's ever been. Right? But the author begins the book by explaining what everyday life was like in the past and what our ancestors considered normal.

Blood sports in ancient Rome--gladiators fighting to the death, starving animals set loose with Christians, two animals fighting to the death. Blood and circuses to use the term I've heard in my history classes. Torture was everyday practice in the medieval period and people turned out to watch. People cut off the noses of others and apparently this was quite common, as was stabbing people to death during a dinner. Burning accused witches. The Inquisition. Well, the list can go on and on and it did in the book. The author talks about the increased violence that began in the 1960s and continued into the early 1990s before reaching today.

The length of the book makes it impossible to summarize coherently and I didn't make notes, but Pinker doesn't offer predictions about the future. While he said things have been improving, events could send us back into higher level of violence.

Overall, I found the information and the way it was presented to be extremely accessible and interesting. There is one section that gets heavily into an explanation of statistics before presenting the actual data that got a little long, but it was brief. I also found the last few chapters to be dry as well and would have preferred it ended a bit earlier. The last chapter in particular where it's primarily a summary of all the rest of the book was particularly hard for me to sit through.

Another caveat is that the author gets quite graphic about what routine torture was like in the medieval period, and with my squeamishness, I was forced to remove my ear buds a couple of times. Pinker explains that he goes into this level of detail because of the way the past frequently gets glossed over or sanitized.

And squeamish or not, I think he was right about that. We've all heard of the iron maiden and the rack and breaking people on the wheel, but I didn't really give any real thought to these things being used on real, living people. I knew they had been, of course, but somehow in my brain, I disconnected the suffering/pain/death that these things caused from the devices themselves.

Pinker did a tremendous job using facts and figures to support his argument about the decline of violence. I didn't agree with everything I heard and some of it bothered me or made me uncomfortable, but I was able to disagree with some things without it toppling the premise.

But you know what? This book really made me think and it made me look at events--both historical and more modern--from a different angle so I'm calling the time well spent. I like having my world view knocked askew and I liked the fact it made me mull over things I thought I knew. Maybe the best part, though, is that I was left feeling hopeful about the future of humans. Maybe things aren't as bad as the media would have us believe after all.

Recommended, but be prepared to make a big time commitment.

End of the World

Yesterday while I was at work, my iPod shuffled to REM's The End of the World As We Know It and suddenly a story I thought was off the To Write list zoomed back on the radar. I'm pretty sure I mentioned the post-apocalypse romance I was researching a while back. Yeah, that one returned.

It was pretty unexpected although I had been picking up interesting bits and pieces that would help with the story over the last week or so, but it was a more distant thing. Certainly nothing like having the heroine show up and start talking. Again.

I have another story I'm supposed to be working on during my lunch at work, but this one is whispering oh, so temptingly in the recesses of my brain.

Among the interesting things about this return is that the heroine is telling the story in first person. I've had this happen before and the story has morphed into third person, but I'm getting the sense with this one that it might not make the shift. We'll see. I'm not a fan of reading first person and the idea of writing it, spending months on end trying to reduce the number of times the word I is used is overwhelming.

The other thing that was interesting was that my heroine looks completely different than I thought she did. Although, in all honesty, I did have a sense I'd picked out the wrong picture the last time around. I just didn't realize how wrong I was, though.

And just so y'all know, I did work on the story I'm supposed to be writing at lunch on Wednesday and I'll keep working on it when I can. But wow, I wish I could write more than one thing at a time.

Going With the Flow

One of the best pieces of advice I received on writing was that the process will change, and instead of fighting to do it the same way every time, I should go with how the story wants to be written.

This has turned out to be so true. Right after I sold, the process changed dramatically from book to book. Now, the changes aren't as drastic, but they still happen. Whenever I'd start to get all stressed because this isn't the way I do it, I'd remember the advice and stop fighting.

It continues today. Right now, I'm working on a trilogy idea set in the Blood Feud World and the information is coming in oddly. Maybe it's because the first two couples have been around for more than a year, but my thoughts are caught up on the third couple. Particularly, the hero, although I am getting stuff on the heroine now, too. I wasn't getting anything on her even a few days ago, so this is welcome.

The most recent information has been stuff that happens after the third book ends. At first I was wondering why. It wasn't after the book couple stuff, which I've gotten before even it usually came when the entire book was written and finished. This was stuff with the hero and his family. Including hours spent listening in on a conversation between the hero and his father.

I finally got the why of it over the weekend. The relationship stuff that I'm seeing after the book is all unresolved during the story. That means that all these issues I'm seeing him deal with after he's had his Happy Ending are going to be in play as his book unfolds.

Maybe I could have gotten this information in other ways, and maybe with another book, I would. But this is the process I'm dealing with for this book, and when I'm writing it, I'll have to consider how these family things will impact the hero's actions in his story. It would be so much easier to see it first hand, but no one ever said writing was easy.

Happy Halloween!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Guilty Pleasure: Decoded

There's a show on History Channel that I really enjoy watching. It's called Decoded and features author Brad Meltzer. He mostly does some commenting through the show, but the main figures doing the investigating are an attorney, an engineer, and a journalist/historian. Every week they investigate some new historical rumor. Some of them are pretty out there, too, which is why I consider this show a guilty pleasure.

Some of the topics the show has covered that I found especially interesting were the Culper spy ring from the Revolutionary War. I'd never heard of them before, but apparently they had quite an impact on our victory in the war. Well, at least according to the show. I didn't do any research on my own.

They also looked at Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) really committed suicide or if his death was a murder. Again, after watching the show, it sure would be nice if the US Government would grant the Lewis family's request to exhume the body and let a forensic anthropologist do some work. It sure sounded like he was murdered and the evidence for suicide was flimsy at best, fabricated at worst.

The show has also covered other topics like whether or not there's still gold in Fort Knox, what happened to the corner stone of the White House, DB Cooper (the hijacker who parachuted from the 727 over the Pacific Northwest), and investigated if John Wilkes Booth really was shot after he assassinated Lincoln, or if it was another man who was killed instead.

I'll admit to being skeptical about a lot of what they choose to cover in the show and some of the theories are out there. I still find it entertaining and even if some of it is ridiculous, it's entertaining.

To Epilogue Or Not To Epilogue

When I first wrote Ravyn's Flight there was no epilogue. My editor asked me to write one and what finally was published is the second version of it. Originally, I had the epilogue taking place on Earth and my editor wanted it on J9. She was right. In hindsight, the story did need to end on the planet where the story took place and I like this version best of the two.

Since then, I have almost always added an epilogue to my books. I'm pretty sure all my full-length books have epilogues, but I don't think two of the short stories do. Anyway, the reason I've chosen to add an epilogue is because I write action/adventure romance, sometimes there's so much going on in the story that I think the reader needs time with the couple when there aren't shoot-outs going on to see that yes, it is true love and to have that ahh moment. But this isn't something I've given a great deal of thought to in years. Until this week.

I've been reading on my lunch at work and the book had quite a bit of action going on. And then it ended and there wasn't an epilogue. As a reader, I wanted that epilogue. I needed the epilogue. I wanted to see the hero and heroine together without assassins lurking, without bullets flying.

I'm pretty sure the author thought she'd wrapped the story up just fine and didn't need an epilogue. I thought the same thing with Ravyn's Flight, but I was wrong and this author was, too. I'm still irked a couple of days after finishing the story that I didn't get to see the h/h six months in the future or a year or ten years. Anything would have made me happy.

The fact that I feel so cheated is interesting to me as a writer and it has me looking at this, analyzing it. I'm fairly confident that it does have to do with the amount of action in the story, that it nearly begs for a quiet, serene epilogue, but I'm mulling a little more, trying to figure out if there's something else going on. Writers really do read differently than normal people.

Before I really dedicated myself to the writing, I wouldn't have taken the time to think about this. I just would have complained about it and felt cheated for a while, until some other book pushed the memory of this one from my mind. Now, though, when something does or doesn't work for me as a reader, I find myself turning it around, studying it, trying to come up with whys.

Fall colors

- Posted using Mobypicture.com