Cindy A. Matthews's Blog, page 9

A 4 Star Review of Blood in Berlin!

I received an early Christmas gift today--a 4 star review of my vampire novella Blood in Berlin from To-be-Read-Pile reviews!



"It really is a unique and excellent plot. I didn’t want to stop reading and could hardly put the book (Nook) down. To sum up this book, the plot and characters are fantastic."
TBR book review link

Thanks, Bella!

A happy holiday to one and all!
Celine

BLOOD IN BERLIN is now available at eXtasy Books and where all fine e-books are sold online!

http://www.extasybooks.com/celine-chatillon/blood-in-berlin/

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but this excerpt is sooo delightful!

Santa's Big Little Helper
by Celine Chatillon
Mojocastle Press
http://www.mojocastle.com/erotica-writers/celine-chatillon/santas-big-little-helper.html

Be careful what you ask for—you just might get it! Suellen tells Santa she wants the cover model on her romance novel… And "Santa's helper" Carlos fits the build perfectly. Add a little snow and some fuzzy handcuffs and it's a very Merry Christmas!




Before Suellen could move, his lips descended and hungrily took possession of hers. Stars blazed and exploded before her eyes. Man, could this figment of her imagination ever kiss! Her protests died as she molded her curves against his taut, muscular form, opening her mouth for his further exploration. Their tongues met and danced as the kiss deepened. He plunged deeper as if drinking her very essence. She clung to him, her senses reeling at the pervading warmth and masculine scent of him. Her hands eagerly cradled his smooth, firm buttocks as he caressed his way through her tousled tresses.

“Mmm… You taste better than the diner’s apple pie,” he said at last coming up for air. “And I’ve always wanted to wind my fingers through your beautiful strawberry blonde hair. Why do you keep it pinned up all the time?”

“The health department makes us do that,” she explained, sighing. “How did you know I even had hair? I usually have that awful net thing over it.”

He grinned and pulled her toward the bed. “I’ve seen little stray hairs peeking out now and then. I love it when you push them behind your ears when you think no one is looking. I was looking.”

She sat next to him, her focus falling to his full lips. “You were? I usually feel invisible at work. I’m there, and yet I’m not really there.”

“Oh, you’re there all right.” He tugged her into his arms and together they fell backward across the mattress. His hand wiggled its way between the opening of her robe and began to stroke her nipples poking through the thin cotton material of her nightshirt. She gasped but didn’t push his touch away. It felt so good… so right… so perfect...
 
Santa's Big Little Helper

http://www.mojocastle.com/erotica-writers/celine-chatillon/santas-big-little-helper.html

And don't forget to read my other holiday erotic-romance...

Yes, Virginia, Here Comes Santa Claus

Stay warm by the fire!
Celine

Book Review: Time to Depart

Time to Depart by Lindsey Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time to Depart brings Roman sleuth Marcus Didius Falco alive once again for me after a rather slow ride in the last book in the series. Returned to his home town of the seven hills, political corruption, crime, theft, murder, and old friends and family members abound in this story. Falco is hired on to help solve the mystery of who is behind the robbery of an entire marketplace worth of goods after his friend in the vigils, Petro, sends a noted gangster up the river (or rather, gets the crime boss exiled from Roman territory). If Pius isn't the criminal mastermind, who is? Lalage, the brothel keeper, isn't talking, and neither is Pius's bitter wife or vacuous daughter. Add in the domestic troubles of being asked to officiate as a priest at his landlord's wedding (ugh!), discovering a baby thrown in a skip, "adopting" a mutt that follows him about, trying to find his missing niece, and learning that he's about to become a father with his lover Helena Justina, and Falco has more than his hands full. Time to Depart is fast paced and full of action, suspense and plenty of characters to keep readers entertained. Well done!

View all my reviews

Yes, Virginia Here Comes Santa Claus on sale today only!

Deal of the Day -- my Christmas novella Yes, Virginia... is only 99 cents at eXtasy Books. Hurry because this sale ends at midnight!

http://www.extasybooks.com/yes-virginia-here-comes-santa-claus/

Blood in Berlin--now available from eXtasy Books

Now available from eXtasy Books!




Blood in Berlin By Celine Chatillon
Book 3 in the Kindred series
http://www.extasybooks.com/blood-in-berlin/



    In 1938 London, the vampire Edwin Carstairs attracts the attention of British Military Intelligence. A Nazi scientist known as Madame V is creating super-vampire-soldiers in Berlin and must be stopped. Edwin accepts the mission, hoping to prevent another devastating world war. But what will he and his team do when Edwin’s lost love Ophelia Jones is discovered taking an eager part in experiments that risk the very survival of human and vampire-kind alike?

An excerpt from Blood in Berlin:
<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { text-indent: 0.2in; margin-bottom: 0.08in; direction: ltr; color: #00000a; line-height: 0.07in; text-align: justify; widows: 2; orphans: 2 } P.western { font-family: "Georgia", serif; font-size: 12pt; so-language: en-US } P.cjk { font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: en-US } P.ctl { font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; so-language: ar-SA } A:link { color: #0000ff } A.western:link { so-language: en-US } A.cjk:link { so-language: en-US } A.ctl:link { font-family: "Times New Roman"; so-language: en-US } </style> <br /></span></b><br /><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">As they entered the hall where the orgyists had gathered, Edwin quickly scanned for signs of Ophelia. Through the heat of the television lights positioned high above the fray and among the active bodies, white and sweaty against a back-drop of black and red satin pillows and low sofas, he saw her standing to one side. She turned around slowly and their eyes locked. The whole world seemed to narrow to just the two of them.</span></b></span></b><br /><br /></div><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><br /><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;"><i>Ophelia! It's been so long since I last held you!</i></span></b></span></b><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 0; widows: 0;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">Her smile hadn't changed. It still held that saucy impishness, that knowing smirk. Her dark eyes glimmered as they caught the golden glow of a candelabra, hinting at a promise of untold pleasures to come. Her black hair hung loose to her narrow waist, just tickling the top of the crack of her luscious, round ass. Her black leather corset pushed her ample breasts up, exposing the rosy points of her erect nipples. How delicious they would taste as his tongue encircled them! </span></b></span></b><br /><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;"> </span></b></span></b></div><b><span style="font-size: large;"><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">Did she still wear the same cologne, her favorite scent of lily-of-the-valley? Was her pussy hot and moist and tight and ready for him to fill it? Edwin sighed and licked his lips. He hadn't realized how much he had missed Ophelia until that moment.</span></b><br /><br /></div><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 0; widows: 0;"><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;"><i>I'll be with you soon, my first true love!</i></span></b><br /><br /></div><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 0; widows: 0;"><b>“<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">I see that Miss Jones has had her usual effect on the male of the species.” Veronique unbuttoned her lab coat, pulled her cashmere sweater over her head, and tossed it aside, exposing her firm tits to view. “Hmm, it appears Dietrich and Klaus are up for play already.”</span></b><br /><br /></div><div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 0; widows: 0;"><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">Edwin noticed his comrades had divested themselves of their clothing and were indeed highly aroused. He began to loosen his collar and belt.</span></b><br /><br /><b><span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;"> “I'll catch up with you in a moment. Feel free to start in on the fun, boys.” </span></b></div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YkeC55P-GRk..." imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YkeC55P-GRk..." width="320" /></a></div></span></b>

Blood in Berlin--now available from eXtasy Books

 Now available from eXtasy Books!




Blood in Berlin By Celine Chatillon
Book 3 in the Kindred series
http://www.extasybooks.com/blood-in-berlin/



    In 1938 London, the vampire Edwin Carstairs attracts the attention of British Military Intelligence. A Nazi scientist known as Madame V is creating super-vampire-soldiers in Berlin and must be stopped. Edwin accepts the mission, hoping to prevent another devastating world war. But what will he and his team do when Edwin’s lost love Ophelia Jones is discovered taking an eager part in experiments that risk the very survival of human and vampire-kind alike?

Book Review: You Are Now Less Dumb

You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself by David McRaney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I do indeed feel "less dumb" after reading David McRaney's You Are Now Less Dumb. As a psych major, I've always enjoyed learning about behavioral studies and other observations of the human mind. The great thing is that You Are Now Less Dumb is written on a level everyone can enjoy while exploring the fascinating world of psychology.

Probably the most fascinating part for me was actually becoming part of a "mob mentality" moment this past week after I finished reading the book. It is amazing how people on the Internet will use the anonymity it gives to act out in mean-spirited ways against others without fear of reprisal, believing that everyone in the group feels the same way and thus justifying their not-so-nice actions. If people really knew how others were thinking, would they join in the crowds that gather around suicidal people on bridges and start shouting, "Jump! Jump, why don't you?" Perhaps not.

And I've learned my lesson--never try to convince an online friend to switch his/her political viewpoint. Even if you post photos of bare, unadorned facts you are only making your friends' beliefs that much stronger because of the inborn need humans have to defend whatever it is we spend lots of time on. (You don't waste your time on "dumb things", right?) So, I'll no longer try to convince certain folks that allowing the elderly, disabled, and children to starve or go without health care isn't in our country's best interest, because to those who disagree with me on this topic it always will be. (One wonders what would happen to their attitude if their loved ones ever became part of the starving crowd.)

Yes, the world would definitely become a happier place if more read You Are Now Less Dumb and became... well less dumb!

View all my reviews

Book Review: Last Act in Palmyra

Last Act in Palmyra by Lindsey Davis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's been a few years since I read a Falco mystery by Lindsey Davis so when I finally got a hold of Last Act in Palmyra, I was happy to delve into the world of ancient Rome once again. Falco is the same sleuth as he ever was--resourceful, trustworthy, worldly, cynical, and madly in love with a senator's daughter, Helena Justina. The setting in the cities of the Decapolis is interesting, and the details of everyday life in the first century Roman world are fascinating, as Davis is terrific with bringing such historical things to life. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said for all the characters. About the only thing that spoiled this installment in the series is the tediousness of the storyline and how the various stock characters of the traveling theatre troupe in which Falco and Helena travel seemed to blur together in your mind. The story's pacing is slow compared with earlier capers, and I wasn't quite as excited to keep turning pages since I'd figured out who had committed the murder long before Falco showed signs that he even had a clue. I'm not a big mystery reader, so perhaps this wouldn't be a problem for most, but I missed the political intrigue and blood-and-guts action of the earlier books. Still, if you need a Falco fix, Last Act in Palmyra is sure to please.

View all my reviews

Book Review: Venus by Ben Bova

Venus by Ben Bova
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I somehow missed reading Venus in Bova's planet series a few years ago, and when I had to take a long trip on the road, I thought I'd give it a try. What was I expecting? Well, some good science, some interesting characters,and plenty of action. Venus delivers all this, but it could have used a bit more science about Venus itself and less of the "space opera" characterizations, in my opinion. Our hero, Van Humphries, has a lot of self doubts and fears, but he overcomes them and makes a good show of it by story's end. The female characters (and some of the male characters) come across flatter and less realistic. They fill their function in the story, but the reader never becomes emotionally involved in their plight, which is regrettable. Not a bad yarn and a pleasant, quick read overall, but I'd have to say it's not my favorite in the series.

View all my reviews

Elysium--Denying Healthcare as Crowd Control

 
Elysium: Denying Healthcare as Crowd Control

My husband and I are huge science fiction fans. We couldn’t wait to see Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium this summer. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium) Sure, there were other sci-fi action-thriller movies to be seen, but the enticing trailer for Elysium itself, and the fact of how much we enjoyed Blomkamp’s District 9, promised more for our always-stretched movie dollar.
Elysium as a film didn’t disappoint, but its premise posed many more questions—disturbing ones—than it attempted to answer. And, several weeks later, it keeps me awake at night.
First off, why would the near-future world posited in Elysium, filled with advanced technology that can cure disease and injury almost instantaneously, co-exist alongside a planet filled with such crippling poverty? It just doesn’t make sense. Or does it?



In my opinion, a near-future scenario of an Earth on the brink of collapse was last successfully realized on screen in the 1973 classic Soylent Green. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green)
 The Millennial Generation may laugh at
the idea of a heavily overpopulated planet, degraded and polluted by trying to
feed too many mouths and ruled by a small, secretive elite of the mega-wealthy, but they’ll have to realize that the Pill and abortion on demand weren’t freely available in the first half of the twentieth century. The assumption that we’d have way too many humans on the planet by the turn of the twenty-first century wasn’t so hard to put out of mind in 1966 when the Harry Harrison award-winning novel Make Room! Make Room! (which the film was based upon) was published. The thought of overpopulation and a dying planet posed a very real threat in the minds of the powers-that-be.

[image error]In Soylent Green, it is food—the very essence of how a living, growing organism stays alive—that is manipulated and managed to keep the masses in check. No food source—no living. Furthermore, the masses are indoctrinated by the elite that it is both noble and proper for them to commit suicide in order to thin out the ranks. There is no need for a heavily armed-presence or too much overt violence (although there are some telling riot scenes where police brutality is evident) to control the masses if the masses do the killing and self-killing themselves as they are slowly starved to death and talked into suicide.
After all, the elite classes only need a handful of human workers at any one time (who are much cheaper to “create” than androids or robots) to serve, manufacture things, run machinery, have sex with, etc. The poor, starving billions are as easily used, abused, and disposed of as paper cups—and self-destructing paper cups at that.

How convenient for the one percent! Give the poor a few guns, feed their prejudices against other groups who look or act differently, and they’ll take care of the problem for themselves. Brilliant.
Once the idea of crowd control, of implementing an efficient way for those at the top of the food chain to keep the masses in check, is discerned in Elysium, then more of
the unanswered questions present and explain themselves. Although it is set only
a mere one hundred-forty-one years into the future, Elysium hints that the advancement of technology in the fields of space travel, medicine, manufacturing, and computers has been able to solve many of the more pressing problems we experience currently in the world of 2013. With the advanced technology evident in the massive space-habitat ring of Elysium itself and the Med-Pod that cures all disease, obviously human beings in the future are capable of great things.




So, why would there be a need for slums and for little girls to die of leukemia? Why would there be a need for millions of workers working at
slave wages and under extremely unsafe conditions, as Matt Damon’s character Max
does? Why motivate these slave laborers with a carrot-and-stick promise that if they prove themselves “good workers” they might just be able to afford a ticket to go to Elysium one day just as Max has wished for since he was a boy?
Ah… could it be? It’s that control thing, yeah?





Once the motives of pure greed and a naked desire to execute absolute
power are eliminated from Elysium what else is there to explain the plot? Jodie Foster’s character, Secretary of Defense Delacourt, is painted as a military-dictator wannabe, a fascist-in-training, but there’s more to her—and her fellow citizens of Elysium—than pure greed and hidden-fascist dogma. After all, they all dress well, speak well and drink the right wines. In spite of their sanitized, movie-star-glamorous
lives, their motives to keep Elysium to themselves are much more base. They
want—no, it’s more likely need—to possess total control over the billions who dwell below them on the one planet where they receive the raw materials needed to maintain and grow their utopian world in space.

They, the elite, the one-percenters, secretly acknowledge that they cannot live without the input of the ninety-nine percent, but they dare not let on how dependent they are upon the unwashed and self-unaware masses. To do so could mean that the masses would demand equal access to all the blessings of technology and healthcare… and once the masses have access to healthcare and a decent lifestyle, would they consent to work for next to nothing?

Can it be that simple? How could the Elysium elite motivate their slave laborers without threatening them with the stick of no healthcare access? They do possess advanced military technology, and Delacourt demonstrates she isn’t afraid to use it. But like most fascists, Delacourt and the wealthy citizens of Elysium realize how difficult it is to maintain crowd control through the use of weaponry alone. Even well-paid mercenaries, such as Sharlto Copley’s sociopathic character Kruger, can’t be trusted to serve their masters all the time.




To maintain crowd control, the elite of Elysium have only one option: denying healthcare in order to convince the slave workers of Earth to keep themselves in line. The elite only has to indoctrinate the masses with the idea that if they become soldiers in the elite’s cause then they are dying for a greater good—not for increasing the profit margins of the one-percent. (Overtones of Soylent Green and suicide centers, but something else there rings a bell. Hmm.) 

[image error] The elite can dangle carrot-like promises in front of the masses, “You’ll only suffer for a little while if you go along with our plans,”
and expect most to believe the lie because it is as attractive as the beautiful green wheel in space rising above their dust-brown slum cities. “Some day soon you’ll become one of us and have access to the miracle of healthcare for you and your families if you keep your fellow slaves from agitating for equal access to it
now.”



[image error] Wow. And here I thought I was reviewing a movie. No wonder I can’t sleep at night.







My British husband calls it the “I’m all right, Jack” syndrome. As long as you keep your head down, allow your one-percent masters to call all the shots, encourage your fellow slave laborers to off themselves in desperation to survive, you’ve made it. You’ve survived long enough to gain a chance at joining the well dressed citizens of Elysium. (But there’s no real guarantee they’ll let you into their exclusive country club, is there?)  You’ve made it…but at what price?
I hope only the price of a movie ticket. Go see Elysium. Discuss it with others. And please leave your comments below.