Really real randomness…

So yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “What the hell are you writing now that’s keeping your crazy ass so quiet?” Well I do have a project I’m working on, but this summer, the temperature has NEVER been stable, so I’m having a metric shit ton of fatigue attacks and brain fuzz to fight through. Where I normally bust out a book in three weeks, this one is likely to take me quite a bit longer. It’s also turning into a really big book. I mean, I’m 74K into it, and I’m only now getting around to the introduction of the bad guys. To add to my problems, I’m trying to do this whole series in one go, so when I’m ready to put out book one, I can promise the rest of the books are already done. Not that I think that’s going to help my sales numbers, but at least the few people who start the series will know I won’t leave them hanging.

So the new book is about a vampire princess and an alpha werewolf. It’s a lesbian couple, by the by. I wanted to do a story with real lesbians, since most of my stories where the women have sex, they end up being bi. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I realized I still had no L in my GLBT writings, and I thought, “I should fix that.”) I wanted this to be all dark and horror-y, and that’s not working out so well. I’m not really complaining, because I like the story. It’s just, I expected there to be more blood and bad guys, and instead, I’m getting Romeo and Juliet mixed with some romantic paranormal comedy. I even managed to turn a gory scene in a school restroom into something humorous, and I wasn’t even trying. I blame these damn teenage characters, always being so irreverent and stuff.

In reading news, I’m working my way through Brenna Yovanoff’s new book, Fiendish, which is awesome. I’m also reading Like No Other from Una LaMarche, but may very well skip the review and just go with a rating on Goodreads because this book is stroking my anti-religious buttons in all the wrong ways. The writing is good, and the story is too. But several of the characters have me thinking bad, bad things because of their views of women as breeding cattle with no rights. So…yeah, it’s probably best just to rate this one and walk away.

I’m also rereading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, and in what may be a sign of my lack of good taste, I’m enjoying it even more a second time through. But I’m also having some Gandalf moments with whole chapters where I think “I have no memory of this passage.” It wasn’t until today that I wondered why that is and then realized, “Right, this was one of the books I read on my first trip to Amsterdam.” I’d been smoking a LOT of marijuana on that trip, so certain chapters went into the brain while I was high, and they slipped right back out again. Funny how that works out.

I’m also reading The Wolf Gift by Anna Rice. I’ve been reading The Wolf Gift for SIX MONTHS now and I’m only up to page 180. I tell you what, I hear a lot of complaints on Twitter about me rereading Twilight and how awful Meyer is as a writer. (Usually from writers whose books will never sell even a hundredth of what she has. I’m just saying, it certainly sounds like sour grapes to me.) But let me tell you, Anne Rice’s writing style has really gone to shit lately, and after reading Twilight again, Meyer has ruined Rice’s vampires chronicles because at least Meyer can get to the fucking point before half the novel is over. Meyer is like, “The house had a nice garden, and was very green.” Sure, that’s bad to some of you, but it’s a damn sight more interesting than “And now I will proceed to describe every last plant in this fucking yard in excruciating detail for the next ten pages.” And even after that, the main character is likely to launch into a 200 page history lesson before the present day plot advances by two pages. If you’re lucky, that is.

I’m uncultured swine, I know. But really, The Wolf Gift is just awful. Where I’m stuck is just after Reuben the super duper wolf man seduces a woman by singing and dancing in wolf man form in her front yard. And she’s totally cool with him carrying her off to bed despite the fur and fangs and drool. She’s like “Be gentle with me.” And he fucking says, “Oh beautiful, beautiful, I won’t hurt you. I would rather die than hurt you. Tender stem. Little stem. I give you my word.”

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Bitch, I’ll take Meyer and her awkward teens making goo goo eyes any day over this shitty furry musical sex scene. Porn has better dialogue.

“But tell us how you really feel, Zoe.” I just may, if I make it through the rest of the book sometime next year. But I’ve got better things to do in the meantime. Like removing my facial hair with a rusty pair of tweezers, for instance.

Moving along, I STILL don’t know what to say in my review of Battleblock Theater. I want to say positive stuff about the early levels and the game makers using real humor instead of pop culture references, a major problem a bunch of indie studios have. The game is genuinely funny and fun. But those later levels…I hate them. I can’t get around that, and I loathe the ending. I also hate the bonus levels because I hate playing anything on a timer. I’ve said that often enough in past reviews, I think. Nothing grinds my gears like being told “Hurry! you must do this one sequence 2.6 seconds faster, or we won’t let you see the rest of the story!” I fucking hate that shit. And so I have very mixed feelings about the game, and I’m not sure I can do the game justice with a full review. I might just skip it.

I’m not done with Transformers: War for Cybertron, either, because it’s dull, dull, dreary, uninspired, boring and just not much fun to play. I have one final mission in the Autobot story left, and I just can’t bring myself to play it. I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 and Project Diva f instead, and since I already reviewed those, I don’t have anything else in the game review queue for a while. Which is a bummer, but them’s the breaks.

And lastly, I’m watching the DVD season box sets of Teen Wolf, and we’re up to the second half of season 3. What I love about this show is how effectively it balances the tense scary moments with humor, and how the characters all have a chance to develop over time. I wasn’t so hot on the alpha pack plot of the first half of season three, but the shadow monsters showing up in the second half are more compelling, and there’s no one in the current cast that I don’t find interesting. Hubby started out a little rough on season one because he didn’t like the Argents, but as of last night, he said, “The character development is really good, like on Buffy.” Buffy is hubby’s all-time favorite show, so it looks like I’ve made him into a convert. Huzzah!

Right, so that’s about it for now. I don’t have anything important to share, and this month’s sales numbers are really, really bad. But I figured I should post an update so you know I’m still here. Maybe in September I’ll have more reviews or something to post. We’ll see how it goes.