Isabel Cooper's Blog, page 18

Announcement

Hello, BlogWorld! I hope everyone had a good holiday of choice. I did, and will write more about it later, when I’ve dug myself out from post-vacation laundry. (My socks are looking at me funny.) 

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting some questions about my next book. I’m thrilled that people are interested, and very excited that I can now announce Legend of the Highland Dragon, a slightly different path for me and one that I’ve found very interesting so far!

Blurb:

The MacAlasdairs are not like other men.

 
Descendants of an ancient alliance, they live for centuries, shifting between human and dragon forms. Some wander the earth; some keep to their lands in Scotland; and Stephen MacAlasdair, the newest lord of the family, must go to London to settle his father’s business affairs. He brings an object of great power and greater darkness. He finds an enemy from his past, whose wrath is still living and deadly. And he meets an ally he’d never have expected.
 
1894 London doesn’t provide an easy life for women of the lower class, but Mina Seymour has managed to work herself up to a position as the secretary of a famous scholar. When a tall, dark Scottish stranger demands to see her employer, Mina is irritated; when MacAlasdair’s departure leaves the professor worried, she’s suspicious. Determined to figure out the situation, she investigates further–and finds a world and a man she could never have imagined.

Sourcebooks will publish Legend of the Highland Dragon in December 2013. I’ll let you know more as it develops, and I hope you’re as excited about this new work as I am!

Pleasures and Guilt

First, a big thank-you to Annie’s Book Stop in Sharon, where I got to meet a lot of lovely people (including fellow authors Mia Marlowe and Ashlyn Chase). It was a pleasure with no guilt whatsoever, except maybe about the cake. Mmm, cake.

Second, I’ve been catching up on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour lately–excellent podcast, by the way, and great for mindless day-job stuff like cleaning up the desktop or copying and pasting spreadsheets–and the last episode I listened to discussed guilty pleasures at some length. Linda Holmes’s position is that there is, or should be, no such thing as a guilty pleasure: you like what you like, and anyone who has a problem with that can and should bite you.

This is a rough paraphrase.

On the one hand, I agree. As a writer of romance novels, which are all the freaking time described as “guilty pleasures”*, I completely agree, and thank you, Ms. Holmes.  Because, first of all, stereotyping an entire genre as cheesy/flighty/less than is dumb, but even if it wasn’t? I also enjoy Ke$ha, CarnEvil, and the occasional pre-packaged Swiss Cake Roll; I am fully capable of liking those things while simultaneously being fond of Ella Fitzgerald, Infocom, and the goddamn caramel apple tart that they sell down the street for too much money and I CANNOT STOP BUYING SOMEONE SEND HELP; snotty hipsters can go soak their heads.

That said, “guilty pleasure” serves two kind of valid functions.

One is a laughing, friendly way to say that you’re aware of this thing’s various failings, and you don’t want to hear it (buddy).  Yes, I know that Peeps are probably either cementing or corroding my various internal organs, but they’re tasty if I’m in the right mood. Yes, I know that “America’s Dumbest Fights” is not, you know, uplifting entertainment, because it’s right there in the title, and yet one episode features someone getting hit in the face with a frozen steak, and wow is that good times. Life without the occasional fit of doofy self-indulgence isn’t worth living, so spare me the lecture, That Guy.**

The other is a friendly, less laughing way to say that you’re aware of the work’s more serious failings, and you like it anyhow, but you understand why it really pisses other people off. (This, as you might expect, doesn’t generally happen with food, unless you hang out with a lot of very militant vegans.)

The best example for me is Gone With the Wind. This is a racist book, guys. Holy mother of God, is this book racist. Like, I don’t even know where to start, and I don’t want to start, and there are now passages I have to read with my fingers over my eyes because they are that bad. Also, marital rape that the chick ends up enjoying. I’m not excusing any of these things. I don’t want to excuse any of these things, because…they shouldn’t be excused. That said, GWTW has value to me, not for being a totally romantic sweeping love story, as it’s usually portrayed–because oh my God everyone involved is dumb as a sack of hammers where love is concerned–but for being a pretty interesting depiction of the way war and war’s aftermath will fuck up everyone in the vicinity, and how having to survive that situation really young will shape you in some ways that are really admirable and some that really aren’t at all, and also for showing a number of women who are pretty strong in different ways.

But I wouldn’t recommend it offhand, or without copious warnings. I don’t disagree with anyone who says that they can’t or won’t read it because dude, racist as hell, this stuff. Therefore, guilty pleasure. I feel like this is a reasonable definition; I also feel like if it came into broader use, the Internet would see perhaps a reduction in the horde of nerdy white boys who feel obligated to Defend! Heinlein! At! All! Costs!. Or maybe not: this is, after all, the Internet.

More thinking about these things to come soon.

Announcements:

No Proper Lady, the Kindle version, will be only 99 cents on Amazon from 12/2-12/22, as part of their Kindle Big Deal promo. The Nook version will also go down to .99 on 12/18, as part of their Daily Find program. I think NPL makes for good train/plane reading, as long as you’re not sitting next to easily-shocked relatives.

 

 

*And I don’t even want to go into the “romance will make you less satisfied with actual guys” people, except to say that a) that bears no resemblance to the experience of anyone I actually know and heard about, and b) I believe what you really mean is OH MY GOD WOMEN HAVE STANDARDS IT’S THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD, so c) shut up, and keep right on shutting up.

**Sometimes it’s That Girl, but a semi-lengthy spate of blind dates and mansplaining has swung my experience toward the dudes in this category. This includes one who asked what my favorite TV show was and then, on hearing The West Wing, said that he hated that show because “…everyone’s so bright and witty! It’s just not realistic.”

I think I deserve points for not giving him a fisheye and a “…well, clearly.“

Back! News! Exclamation! Points!

It’s been a crazy few months. Mostly, I’ve moved across Boston, a process that involved three flights of stairs at two separate locations, a minor car accident–nobody hurt, yay–and the realization that I had too much stuff by a factor of OH MY GOD SO MANY BOXES I HATE EVERYTHING.  Then there were weddings (friends’, not mine), elections, hurricanes, and so forth.

Also, I’ve had my head down for a little while working on an exciting new book. Soon I shall reveal more! (“Wooo” noises and occult jazz hands here.)

At the moment, I’m on a blog tour for Hickey. If you’re interested in the book, or in me rambling about myself, you should check out any or all of these links:

November 9 Interview
Michelle @ Mom With A Kindle
https://momwithakindle.blogspot.com

November 9 Promo
Monique Morgan
http://www.moniquemorgan.com/

November 10 Interview
Fang-tastic Books
www.fang-tasticbooks.blogspot.com

November 11 Interview
Roxanne’s Realm
www.roxannesrealm.blogspot.com

November 12 Guest blog
Celestial Reviews
http://cecesreviews.blogspot.com

November 12 Guest Blog
PW Creighton
http://www.pwcreighton.com/surveillance-report/
Paranormal Perceptions guest post series

November 12 Promo
Inkk Reviews
http://inkkreviews.blogspot.com

November 13 Guest blog
The Creatively green Write at Home Mom
www.creativelygreen.blogspot.com

November 14 Guest blog
www.mmshelley.com

November 15 Review
Publishing the Paranormal
http://jbridgerwriting.blogspot.com

November 15 promo
Cover2CoverBlog
www.cover2coverblog.blogspot.com

November 16 guest blog
http://www.moniquemorgan.com/

November 16 Review
bookbriefs.blogspot.com

In Englefield-series news, I’ll be signing copies of No Proper Lady and Lessons After Dark at Annie’s Book Stop in Sharon, MA this Saturday (11/17) for their Silver Annie-versary! I used to go to the Annie’s in Belmont quite a bit, and loved it; I’m looking forward to seeing the Sharon branch, and also to meeting some awesome readers.

More posts soon! I promise!

Stuff That Is Awesome

* Everyone who hosted me on their blog site, interviewed me, commented, and otherwise let me ramble about myself and my books. Yay! You can find the links in my past blog posts, and I’ll collect them soon.

* Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World. This is one of those books that splits my psyche neatly into the reader half and the writer half. The reader half squeals like an anime schoolgirl, because this book features a technomagical apocalypse, mind screws, badass women, excellent dialogue, and really amazing writing in general oh my God, plus mythological references that turn out to be appropriate on two levels. 

The writer half is aware that I will never write this. This is not a matter of competing–there’s a lot of reading time in the world, and a lot of people, and whatever–but rather, the fact that I will never write this, and even if I do, it doesn’t matter, because Harkaway has already written it. The writer half wants to kick him in the shins and then sit down and drink vodka and cry for an hour, because the writer half is kind of a whiny little dorkface. This happens to me a fair amount; I suspect it’s an occupational hazard.  

Anyhow, it is awesome and you should read it.

* Mass Effect 2. I am skipping the Mass Effect 3 controversy of doom for now, insofar as I haven’t played it and DLC and general wackiness. ME2, on the other hand, is great. On a story level, the plot works really well, integrating the central mystery, the nobody-comes-back-from-this mission, and even all of the recruitment sidequests. (The sub-sidequests are still a “…so, I’m trying to save the galaxy and also solving your relationship problems because I am the ONLY COMPETENT PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE, apparently…” but it’s a video game, so that happens.) The various romances work really well for me*, particularly Garrus (awkward buddy guy) and Thane (doomed ex-assassin guy), but again, some of the best moments were with people I can’t romance at all, like Grunt and Samara and Mordin. (Oh my God, Mordin. Tuchanka. Crying like a six-year-old who didn’t get a pony ride, I’m telling you.)

Also, this game contains Morally Shady Martin Sheen. The problem is that I keep wanting to agree with him, even when he’s suggesting severely wrong courses of action, because…he’s President Bartlett! He knows stuff! He rants in Latin and waxes technical about carving knives! *Clearly* I should do what he says. My gaming group suggests that this is actually an AU where President Bartlett, embittered by the events of his second term, sought immortality and founded Cerberus. I’d buy it.  

On a gameplay level? Awesome. So awesome. I know that there are people out there who took issue with the fact that you just buy upgrades and don’t have to compare thirty-seven different types of weapons/ammo/etc with no clear best option. Not to be judgmental, but these people are wrong and also dumb. If you want a game about non-intuitive inventory management, go download Nethack. 

* Raspberry M&Ms: So tasty! And, according to Wikipedia, M&M/Mars is getting on board with the fair trade/ethical chocolate thing, which is excellent. 

*As in Dragon Age, I do keep inadvertently hitting on people when choosing the “nice” option. Damn my inescapable charm!

And one more po…

And one more post in the blog tour! http://www.loveromancepassion.com/

 

More Blog Touring

Talking about the hero of Lessons After Dark over here: http://nightowlromanceblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/isabel-cooper-little-insight-contest.html

And an interview at Romancing the Book: http://www.romancing-the-book.com/

Blog Tour Continues

At Over The Edge, I reveal my cynical side, which should not surprise anyone who's ever read this blog, and also that I know perhaps more obscure Simon and Garfunkel than a modern girl should.

http://overtheedgebookreviews.blogspot.com/2012/04/contest-and-conversation-with-lessons.html

My launch party is also over at the Casablanca Author Blog. 

http://casablancaauthors.blogspot.com/2012/04/guest-launch-party-giveaway-lessons.html

Huzzah, as they say!

Blog: The Touring

At Fresh Fiction, I talk about my tendency to write academic settings, and why this is probably the Curse of the Van Wickle Gates.

http://freshfiction.com/page.php?id=4073

 

 

Blog Tour Continues

I'm over at Preternatura, talking about my books and others'!

http://suzanne-johnson.blogspot.com/

Here Comes Trouble

Another blog link! 

Eloisa James, writing for Barnes and Noble's Reading Romance, discusses Lessons After Dark here: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reading-Romance/Here-Comes-Trouble/ba-p/7399.

My characters? Troublesome? Really?