M.J. Scott's Blog, page 31

A year in books #8

8 years! How did that happen? This blog is old ; ). Anyway, as I usually do, I will use my last post of the year to talk about my favourite topic…books! Or book and reading I guess. This year I have read less than usual, mainly because I got vertigo in August which meant a couple of months where reading fiction of the printed/e-book variety was limited (nothing like feeling seasick to ruin a good read). My saving grace during that time was audiobooks but the average audiobook is 10 hours plus and I can probably read 2 1/2 physical books in that time. Plus lots of my audiobooks are re-reads and comfort type listens, so not much new book ground there. I tend to listen to audiobooks of books I already know because audiobooks do tend to give the writer brain time to pick out any flaws, so I start with books I already like to minimise the chances of that. Plus I am, as previously stated, very picky about audiobooks narrators, so I re-listen to the ones I like.

But anyway, of the books I did manage to get through, here are some of my faves this year!

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – Good twisty (or twisted, maybe) suspense

Written in Red by Anne Bishop – A good urban-kind-of fantasy with a very interesting world…looking forward to the next one.

The One That Got Away by Kelly Hunter – Kelly, as usual, delivered some of my fave short contemporary reads this year (What the Bride Didn’t Know was another cracker!)

A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn – I’ve been a fan of Deanna’s Lady Julia Grey series since it started but this stand-alone journey to Africa was just as good.

Untamed by Anna Cowan – A vivid and beautifully written very different historical romance that sucked me right in

The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson – A YA paranormal mystery that was both funny and downright creepy at times

Untold by Sarah Rees Brennan – Another YA paranormal gothic mystery. Sarah writes great heroines and great funny dialogues while ripping out your heart.

Her Favourite Rival/Her Favourite Temptation by Sarah Mayberry – Two gorgeous short contemporary romances by Sarah, another of my fave contemporary writers

Coming to My Senses by Alyssa Harad – part memoir, part love letter to perfume, and all delectable. I don’t read a lot of narrative non-fiction but this is the kind I love.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman – Lovely, strange and also quite heartbreaking in parts. I listened to it and read it. I definitely recommend the audiobook as anything read by Neil Himself is great.

So there you go, some of the books that made me laugh, gave me feels, made me think and entertained and cheered me this year.  I look forward to discovering more in 2014.

What about you? What were some favourite reads this year?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, in other news

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season in whichever way pleases you most! I have consumed roast turkey, mince pies, christmas pudding and sparkling shiraz and had a lovely Christmas Day with the family. But there is no rest for the wicked (and writers seem to be on that list for some reason) so now I have to get stuck into the copy edits for Fire Kin.

But for those of you who don’t want to wait until May for the next M.J. book, and those who aren’t newsletter subscribers, a little Christmas surprise….next month I’m publishing the first book in a new Urban Fantasy trilogy. It’s called The Wolf Within and should be available mid-month but I’ll be posting snippets, the cover and more info as it comes to hand over the next few weeks. The plan, at this stage, is to do the e-book first and then a POD version.

To tide you over until then here’s the blurb:

Vampires, werewolves, warring couples. And that’s just the day job. Ashley Keenan is a normal girl in a world that’s left normal behind. She just wants to keep her head down and try to have a life. But she hadn’t counted on the reappearance of Daniel Gibson, ex-lover, now a werewolf and the man she’s never quite forgotten, even if she can’t bring herself to date a supernatural. Worse, he’s back because the vampire who killed her parents just might be coming after her. It’s a fight to guard her heart and her life and sometimes to survive you have to learn to love your inner monster…

 

ARRA chat

A few weeks ago I did a google hangout/chat with the lovely Sharon from the Australian Romance Readers Association and the vid is now live…so if you want to hear and see a bit of me chatting about my books and other random things…the video is on the ARRA blog below.

Thanks for having me, ARRA!

Little green things

I have been guilty of neglecting my garden for a while. The summer before last I broke my ankle and last summer I was settling into a new day job (and had been thinking about doing some landscaping that got put on hold for various reasons) so didn’t really do much. But this summer, even though I still haven’t done the landscaping, I figured I needed to at least revive some pots so that I remember to step outdoors occasionally and potter around. Might even help with the Vitamin D deficiency. (Pale celtic ancestry skin needs to avoid ozone lacking laser beam Aussie sun as a general rule but this results in sad Vit D levels).

I have no claim to a green thumb but I do like plants and flowers. And love fresh herbs for cooking, so am focusing on growing herbs and a few tomatoes and lettuces for now and seeing if I can get a couple of dwarf citrus going (I have had no luck with citrus in the past but hope springs eternal…). I’m going to try some potatoes in a grow bag if I can get some seed potatoes (December is about the latest to plant them where I live). Oh, and some succulents. I’ve managed to keep the terrarium I made earlier this year mostly alive and I love the colours in succulents, so need to try those.

So far my first batch of herbs are still alive (as is the tomato and the lemon trees) and I’ve just planted a few more things, so we’ll see. There was a minor hiccup with the first lot of basil I bought..I thought I’d try something other than sweet basil but the one I picked tasted distinctly like soap to me. Hardly a taste sensation. So it’s been replaced with some good old delicious sweet basil.

Gardening is relaxing and given my other attempts at hobbies lately have been thwarted as I had three short courses booked and they’ve all been cancelled! One is now rebooked for January and another I’m waiting to here if it will be rescheduled and I’ve decided to re-use the refund from the third to do a one day watercolour course in February  (I have no claims to being able to draw really either but I’ve always been intrigued by watercolours and wasn’t a total flop at art class in school so who knows). I don’t usually knit much in summer (too darn hot). In fact, I’ve barely knitted this winter due to the vertigo (which is thankfully mostly gone), so gardening will have to tide me over on the feeding the muse side. Maybe one of my heroines is going to end up with a garden….

The only downside is my Virgo brain always wants to buy ALL THE REFERENCE BOOKS on new things I try. So there have been a few new container gardening books winging their way to me but I think I should have enough now. Though I’m a sucker for the pretty pictures of beautiful gardens all those clever clever real gardeners have. So I may need one or two on succulents as well. (PS Gardening ebooks on iPad = good).

I shall try to report on my progress on keeping things alive. And take some pictures as proof. Here’s some from today and about four weeks ago.

Multiple herb planter…4 weeks ago (Italian and curly parsley, lemon thyme and some jalapenos)

 

Lemon thyme today (need lemon thyme recipes stat)

 

Jalapenos…they have embiggened, so hopefully they will fruit.

 

Sage (I love the furry leaves of sage..looking forward to pumpkin, bacon and sage risotto)

 

Non soapy basil (mmm pesto, pasta, pizza here we come)

 

Vietnamese mint (noodles ahoy!)

 

 

Last but not least…the Fire Kin cover

Behold the gorgeousness. I truly love the Roc art department! There’s no way I can pick a fave of my covers.  And now I have the complete set, I’ll have to get a print made and frame them or something.  And look, a heroine in a dress. Which is perfect because Bryony does not do trousers.

Fire Kin. Coming to all good bookstores May 6 next year.

Emerging

So I have been an absent blogger. Bad Mel. But I have a decent excuse because not long after my last post I developed a case of vertigo that has been limiting my screen time so that I’ve had to spend it on day job and writing mostly. Also limiting reading time (yay for audiobooks) and has meant no knitting (quelle horreur). Boo to vertigo. As someone who hates feeling motion sick and gets that way easily anyway, having the sensation for many hours a day is really not fun. Major boo!

But it’s mostly gone now so I shall attempt to remember I have a blog and do some updating. I have just handed in Fire Kin, the last book in the Half-Light City series, which was tough to write and sad to finish. I will miss my characters but who knows, maybe they’ll pop up again at some point. Now I’m getting stuck into my second contemporary and wrestling with the world of baseball and hot orthopaedic surgeons (tough job, I know) and thinking about the next fantasy book…a whole new world to play in!

Apart from that there’s been lots of TV time (for some reason vertigo brain can cope with a TV screen but not a computer, which says something about the focus demanded by writing versus couch surfing lol). So far my favourite new show is probably Sleepy Hollow (because Ichabod is adorable and hilarious, seriously, he had me at his donut tax rant). Am keeping an eye on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D which is still settling into its stride, I think. I’ve also watched Season 1 of Teen Wolf (conclusion, also amusing and lacking a shirt budget for the boys…but who’s complaining?) and been re-watching Grey’s Anatomy, the Newsroom, Smash and finally steeled myself to watch the last series of Fringe (didn’t want that to be over either) which was pretty good though somewhat heart-wrenching. Ditto the last season of Dance Academy (teen ballet angst for the win!). Hopefully all of that has fed the muse enough to keep her productive through the next six months in which I must write many words. Many many many words. Including on the blog!

On liking stuff

So last night I posted on Facebook that I get driven a bit crazy by articles like “10 books every woman/dog/man” should read because I think the only thing people should read for pleasure is the stuff that makes them happy. This morning I woke up to see that there had been yet another article (approximately the billionth such article) of the “Romance is stupid and the women who like it are stupid and why can’t you all just see the light and read literachoor that doesn’t rot your puny minds” variety. Over the last few months, I’ve been following the SFF blow ups about fake geek girls and other forms of “oh god, you’re doing it wrong and ruining it for everybody”.

Basically my take on this boils down to….hey, people are individuals. They like the stuff that pushes their happy buttons. The same stuff pushes individual folk’s happy buttons in different ways so that they react to it in individual ways (including the fact that it may not push their happy button at all or may actively push their unhappy button). Which is all good and is why the world is not very very very boring.

But the other thing that people are, thanks to the way we evolved as a species (or such is my in no way an anthropologist take on it), is tribal. We bond over stuff. We form groups. We align with others based on shared values or interests. Belonging to tribes validates us to a certain extent. Tribes are also good. Tribes help us survive the world in a lot of ways. But tribes (and individuals) that don’t recognise that their way is not the One True Way and therefore decide anyone not doing it that way is bad and must be stopped can be a problem.

Particularly when the thing you are going on a rampage about is a book/tv show/movie/genre of stuff aka entertainment and not something like racism/sexism/any other ism or big problem that needs to be overcome in society and deserves a bit of rampaging.

I get it. I know the feeling of loving something to the nth degree (and also being bored by or unable to see the appeal of other things). I’m a fan of many things. I develop geek crushes on stuff. I tell people about the stuff I love. Those of you who read this blog or interact with me know this already.

I’m a geek.

I was the smart, book loving kid whose parents loved SFF. I read LOTR when I was eight, I saw the original Star Wars movies at a drive in the year they were released (when I was about 7). Sunday nights we used to watch Doctor Who. I also read romance and girl stuff and classics and mysteries and most things I could get my hands on. Growing up I did ballet and calisthenics and played various sports badly and was in the school band. I wrote stories to entertain myself. I am an Australian who is largely bored by cricket and Aussie rules football and the cult of sport. I wasn’t the cool kid at school though I was lucky enough that I always had a bunch of good friends who were similar to me and and parents who supported me so that my teen years were no more than averagely teen angsty. I learned to kind of shrug off the fact that people didn’t always like the same stuff as me.

These days I am still a geek. I write books (both romance and fantasy and sometimes both together which, in the eyes of some people, makes me doubly deluded), I knit and do a few other crafty things (and that is a whole other group of tribes), I read a lot and I am pretty much a story addict so I watch a lot of TV and movies. I have a kind of nerdy day job and I’m a technical expert within that field. I still have a bunch of good friends (some of them those same high school buddies) and hey, none of them like exactly the stuff as me. But we’re still friends. We may tease each other a bit about the things we like or don’t like but then we laugh, eat chocolate and move on.

Take my critique group. There’s six of us. Any time we discuss a book/movie/tv show/actor/singer/thing, the reaction is likely to be a couple of us loved it, some thought it was okay, one didn’t like it or actively loathed it and one wasn’t interested enough to even try it. The relative percentages shift. Occasionally we all like or dislike something. Not often. (We don’t even all agree on the One True Chocolate. Shocking, I know.) There may be much dissection of why something works/doesn’t work for any of us is from a writerly point of view for books and movies (and from a relative hotness of dudes factor) but then hey, we shrug and move on to the next thing to talk about.

The thing is that consuming a piece of entertainment is not a binary experience. There’s not a right way to do it and there’s not a right response to it and the way I enjoy it doesn’t impact the way you do (unless I start screaming at you on the internet or I set fire to the only edition of a book in existence or I otherwise infringe on your rights). We should not react to the things we love by turning into the seagulls in Finding Nemo, screaming MINE MINE MINE MINE and fending off all comers.

If me enjoying a thing a certain way or not enjoying something that you do enjoy makes you get all “YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG”, then I suggest (unless you are younger than 18 in which case I may give you a temporary pass while you grow up a bit) that you take a good hard look at yourself and why you need the validation of feeling superior. When it comes to how I enjoy the stuff I love and which stuff I love, the only people who get to tell me I’m doing something wrong are scientists who’ve just made a breakthrough in something and proven I need to change (unlikely when it comes to entertainment), people enforcing a rule that protects my safety that I’m ignoring (again, unlikely when it comes to entertainment), or someone letting me know I’ve somehow caused a problem by doing something in reaction to the stuff I love. Which I try not to do but it may happen and then I will apologise and try and fix the situation. The reverse is also true. You go off and love the stuff that makes you happy and I will not interfere and will most likely be happy you’re doing something that makes you all squeee-happy (totally a word).

I like a good discussion about the stuff I love or even the stuff I don’t. I will listen to you about why you love something or how you react to it (as long as your reaction is not all “THIS IS STUPID TO ME AND THE PERSON WHO MADE IT IS STUPID AND ANYONE WHO LIKES IT IS STUPID” or some variation thereon). Your opinion may inform my views. It may change my opinion, make me think about something in a new way, it might make me try something new and either like or dislike it, or it may have no impact on me at all other than the temporary enjoyment of a good debate/rant. This is all okay. We may never be BFFs if the stuff I like and the stuff you like barely overlap or don’t even touch but that is also okay.

Humans spend a lot of time trying to teach young children and teens to share and get along and play nicely with others and respect differences. The ability to do these things important and if you’ve forgotten that, you may need (to badly misquote and paraphrase a few people, including the awesome Stephen Fry) to put on your big girl panties and get over it or receive a short sharp visit from the smack fairy. Wil Wheaton’s rule is “Don’t be a dick.” Listen to Wil. Trying to make people feel bad or inferior about things they enjoy, that make them happy and that aren’t hurting you or telling them that they shouldn’t even be allowed to like a thing because of who they are so that you can feel better about yourself/superior/all knowing and/or RIGHT breaks the rule. Don’t do it. Or Karma the vengeful elephant might just sit on you. Hard.

Tiger, tiger

Today, I had an adventures…here’s a glimpse and photos on the facebook pages for facebook peeps. Will post some here when I have time to resize some!

These sweeties are Sumatran Tigers (Hutan being fed and his brother Aceh joining him afterwards), weighing about 120kgs. Apparently Bengals are about 2.5 times that big (weighing about 270-300). No want to meet big kittehs in dark jungle or you would be an ex-human.

Bad blogger

So, it has been a busy month or two in chez Mel and that has meant a distinct lack of bloggage.

Things are still busy but things I have done recently include seeing Jesus Christ Superstar with these three.

Pretty much made of win. Not that I was biased due to having slight crush on Tim Minchin. No, not at all. *whistles innocently*

And also this, which was brilliant. Seriously. It’s on limited release on Australia, opening July 11. If you like Joss or Shakespeare or good entertaining movies, go see it. Then we’ll keep getting cool limited release films released here. Which makes us happy.

Coming up later this month. Pink. Tigers. And, as always, much writing.

More soon!

Still want some awesome books by awesome aussie authors

Aussie Author Giveaway!

Enjoy paranormal romance? Fantasy romance? Urban fantasy? Post-apocalyptic romance? Steampunk romance?

Would you jump at a chance or three to win a box full of these sorts of books?

Who, what, where, when and how can I win? – I hear you cry!

Well, 9 Aussie authors have banded together and each have donated books and swag from their latest series to go into the Aussie Author Giveaway - three huge giveaway packages which will be on display at some of the specialty romance bookstores here in Australia.

 

After the sterling job done last month by Rendezvous Books (Victoria), July’s giveaway is being hosted by the lovely Rosemary of Rosemary’s Romance Bookstore (Queensland). So Brisbanians and Queenslanders and anyone else in the general vicinity, hie thyself to Rosemary’s for a chance to win. Or you know, order from the website.

The third box of giveaway-fun will be with Galaxy Books (Sydney) over August 2013.

All readers have to do is order a book (or books) from these stores in the designated giveaway month – either in person or online. You’ll earn one entry per purchase in the Giveaway. The prize winner will be drawn at the end of the month and the Aussie Author Giveaway box of goodies will be posted to you.

NB. Due to postage costs, entry is restricted to Australian readers.

So, come on Aussies, come on! Support your specialty romance bookstores, get to know some local Aussie authors – and you could find a huge parcel of books in your mailbox at the end of July or August!

Participating authors (other than moi!)

And their websites (given WP is playing fast and loose with my caption links!)

Bec McMaster

Erica Hayes

Christina Ashcroft

Keri Arthur

Kylie Griffin

Kylie Scott

Rowena Cory Daniells

Shona Husk