Q&A with Josh Lanyon discussion
note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
ARCHIVE (General Topics)
>
What Are you Reading?
KC wrote: Also reading something completely different - Love for the Cold-Blooded. Or: The Part-Time Evil Minion's Guide to Accidentally Dating a Superhero.. It's awesome. Thank you, Alison, for recommending it. :-)"I'm glad you're enjoying it. :)
Anne wrote: "Hambel wrote: "Anne wrote: "Hell and high water is the kind of book I like despite everything..... But like it I did ;) "Oooh, I'm intrigued, Anne. What did you think you wouldn't like about it?"..."
That sounds a pretty accurate summary to me :D Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Anne.
Hambel wrote: "Anne wrote: "Hambel wrote: "Anne wrote: "Hell and high water is the kind of book I like despite everything..... But like it I did ;) "Oooh, I'm intrigued, Anne. What did you think you wouldn't li..."
I do like Bruce Willis ;)
Mod
Still in process. Because it's a short sale it could be weeks before we even hear if our offer was considered. I keep reminding myself that I knew this going in. But because I now have the house hunting bug, I keep looking at other listings, and I increasingly worry that we are letting all the "good" houses escape while we hang on for this one.
Then I remind myself it's not even been two weeks since we made our offer.
Mod
I look a..."
Your dining room space would make a nice library. :-)
I had a quite intense working week but was surprisingly able to read a lot, too. Some books were freebies recommended here, others re-releases I had not read before. They made for a nice start of the "new reading year":
Mod
That's very true!
Mod
Oh, as well as three audios that totally count toward the challenge.
More and more books are getting released as audios, which makes rereading so much easier!
Varecia wrote: "I had a quite intense working week but was surprisingly able to read a lot, too. Some books were freebies recommended here, others re-releases I had not read before. They made for a nice start of t..."I enjoyed Marshall's book, it was fun. And i love the Dick Hardesty mysteries.
KC wrote: "And i love the Dick Hardesty mysteries."
Yes, I really liked that one. But at least at amz.de it is the only one available for Kindle, it came out this week. Now I just hope that I will not have to wait ages for the next ones!!
Varecia wrote: "KC wrote: "And i love the Dick Hardesty mysteries."
Yes, I really liked that one. But at least at amz.de it is the only one available for Kindle, it came out this week. Now I just hope that I wil..."
The author said the books will start coming out in both ebook and print one every month starting this month. He had some trouble with the previous pub house and so had only the first three books in e-version and then the latest ones. So he switched and the new pub house seems to work better. I'm waiting because i want to read them in order. One a month is a good pace.
KC wrote: "The author said the books will start coming out in both ebook and print one every month."Thank you for the information, KC! That sounds good to me too; I could parallel it with my Brandstetter challenge, where I also plan to read one book each month.
Varecia wrote: "KC wrote: "The author said the books will start coming out in both ebook and print one every month."Thank you for the information, KC! That sounds good to me too; I could parallel it with my Bran..."
It will be nice to read them in company :-) And i hope you enjoy the Brandstetters!
Sammie wrote: "thanks to Heidi Cullinan's excellect Love Lessons books and Anne Tenino's Frat Boy & Toppy (the best in that series), I am on a new adult kick, full of college age characters learning who they are."I liked those, too. I'm currently reading a couple of NA books - Off Campus and Take the Long Way Home.
A few of my favorite new adult stories: The Understatement of the Year and Mark Cooper versus America & Brandon Mills versus the V-Card.
The m/m sci-fi/fantasy group has a reading bingo game starting Feb 1 and running for five months, so that's what I foresee for most of my upcoming reading.
I'm reading A Storm of Swords, third of the A Song of Ice and Fire books. Or should I say I'm reading volume one, because it's so gigantic it's split into two 600+ page tomes. And once again I am grateful for my light and slender Kindle!Also doing the audio of A Study in Scarlet.
Hm, so thats ASoS and ASiS. What's going on here? :D
Mod
Well said Johanna!! I am nearly at the end of Conscious Decisions of the Heart and I enjoyed it even more than book 1. I have books 3 and 4 lined up. :)
Mod
Oh, how fun that you're currently reading the same book, Ije. :-) And I'm happy to hear you like it even more than the first one. The first one was so intense at times that it got me a bit worried if the story would carry itself as well in the later books (I know this is probably not the correct way to say it in English, but my language skills are failing me at the moment).
Anyways, I'm now 22% through Conscious Decisions of the Heart and in the middle of Ben's tireless efforts to learn Danish — and I'm enjoying it quite a bit! :-)
I'm currently reading Red Dirt Heart 4, and so far I love it as much as the first three. This has been a great series, with a gorgeous Australia setting and great main and secondary characters. And a wombat!
Mod
Sounds like something I might enjoy. One of my most beloved childhood stuffed toys was a wombat. I kid you not. :-D
Johanna wrote: "Sounds like something I might enjoy. One of my most beloved childhood stuffed toys was a wombat. I kid you not :-D I think you would like them. To be fair, the first book has a baby kangaroo. The wombat arrives later in the series. :-)
I have been reading Neil S. Plakcy Mahu the series and while I love it there are few editing things in book 4; Mahu Vice that really bother me. F.ex. suddenly his oldest brother is not 8 years older but 10 years older, and Arleen's son Brandon is 8 years old but was a baby in the last book. Such unnecessary editing faults but can bug the reader but would be so easy to fix.I'm still reading and enjoying it ;)
Mod
You would think.
This is why excellent copyeditors are worth their weight in gold. I think I've mentioned many times how in both the Loose Id AND MLR Press versions of THE HELL YOU SAY the villain's name changes in the last chapters and no one ever caught it until a couple of readers happened to notice. We're talking at least six people (including me) who missed it. Two copyeditors and two line editors -- whose specific job it was to catch that crap -- missed it completely.
As well as a number of other continuity errors.
Mod
I'd make a terrible copy editor!
I just finished a book where the name of the school was changed and a couple of the characters were flip flopped, but it was pretty obvious so I just did a mental correction.
Mod
And scanning house listings. Still no word on our offer. Our agent says it could easily be 45 days before we hear anything at all -- that's the tough part about a short sale. Meantime I see all these houses flying past. None of them quite as perfect regarding location, but almost all of them in better shape.
I have to remind myself we're not in a hurry. We're in the ideal position to wait.
Mod
I'm not a good copyeditor either. And even if I was, no one can copyedit themselves. That's an exercise in futility.
Josh wrote: "I'm currently reading up on legends and myths of the Pacific Northwest in preparation for Winter Kill. And scanning house listings. Still no word on our offer. Our agent says it could easily be 4..."
I love the promise of a house that needs to be fixed up. It's one of the reasons that I bought the house I did (plus it was what we can afford.)
Unfortunately the promise my husband made to fix it up has not happened. Twenty years later it's an even bigger mess.
I still love the promise of what the house could be. If only...
Not only copyeditors! There is a famous Regency Romance cover by Christina Dodd where the heroine has three arms. LOL It was pulled and change and the ones that remained are now collectors items. I recently caught a glaring typos on a cover quote for an author/friend-thank goodness it hadn't been released yet. Its amazing how our eyes are tricked into seeing things that aren't there-I'm a terrible self editor.
Mod
I think we're all terrible self-editors, and frankly that's okay. The temperament that makes for a terrific copyeditor does not tend to make a brilliant creator of fiction, frankly. Or even a brilliant editor of fiction -- the editor brain versus the copyeditor brain is the difference between big picture and little picture.
Mod
Is her snobbery any worse than the snarkiness so embraced by narrators of modern women's fiction? I find her a lot less tiresome than the typical chick lit narrator.
What she is really good at, what I genuinely admire, is her ability to cast real suspicion on a number of characters. She is very, very good at spreading the false clues because she knows exactly how mystery readers think. :-D
Josh wrote: "And I'm still reading Theodora du Bois before I fall asleep at night. She is pretty snobbish, I concede. It is the natural snobbery of her class and birth, and there doesn't seem to be any meanness..."You are making me really want to find these books! They sound fun.
I am all done with chick-lit snarkiness myself. Even if it does have that certain chick-lit sexy sensibility...
And... I despise the term Chick-Lit! ACK! That is a GUM, not a genre! Tilting at windmills against that one though.
I am sort of between books right now. I think I'll try Scarlet and the White Wolf OR Lord of the White Hell book 1. Sort of in the mood for fantasy. If that doesn't pan out, I have an Astrid Amara trilogy to try.I was thinking about Larry Niven vs Jordan Castillo Price. The science fiction and fantasy that I have read that are also m/m seem to be better than what is out there in mainstream. I think mainstream fantasy and science fiction are so constrained by genre tropes that it constrains the story.
Or I don't know what's good out there anymore. That's very likely. I've lost my taste for huge 1000 page stories. If you can write that much and not bore me, then all the better. But few can.
Josh wrote: "...The temperament that makes for a terrific copyeditor does not tend to make a brilliant creator of fiction, frankly. Or even a brilliant editor of fiction -- the editor brain versus the copyeditor brain is the difference between big picture and little picture. ..."This is such a key point, but one which many people overlook. They think that if they can do one aspect of a book they can do it all.
The other aspect of this is that authors are expected to do so much marketing when they are often temperamentally unsuited for it. And this is the case for many other professions, too. I used to say that if I had wanted to do PR, I would have chosen it as my career. Ditto endless committee meetings and other admin. Meanwhile, we have less and less time to do what we *are* good at.
Mod
Josh wrote: "And I'm still reading Theodora du Bois before I fall asleep at night. She is pretty snobbish, I concede. It is the natural snobbery of her class and birth, and there doesn't seem to be any meanness..."It sounds like that unconscious inborn and bred snobbery which used to be so much a part of the English upper classes (and still is for a very few people). I find it less objectionable that the snobbery of the nouveau riche, who measure others based on their wealth and the labels they buy. I cannot read the books which reinforce this attitude.
Mod
I have to remind myself we're not in a hurry. We're in the ideal position to wait."
Argh. That's such a long wait! After you first mentioned short sale I had to google it (and read the definition about five times before I understood any of it), but I still think the term short sale sounds like a joke — because it takes SO LONG!
I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for you guys and the dream house in bad shape! :-)
Josh wrote: "I'm currently reading up on legends and myths of the Pacific Northwest in preparation for Winter Kill. And scanning house listings. Still no word on our offer. Our agent says it could easily be 4..."
Heheheh. And on the other extreme, my mom just bought a house and the seller wanted a fast sale, so her escrow will only be two weeks! That's much faster than she was ready for, but she really wanted this house.
Barbra wrote: "I'm having a hard time finding Theodora duBois books. The few I found were very pricey. But, I love the hunt. :-)"I have found some at AbeBooks for normal prices.
I lied. Rather than fantasy, I started No Place That Far by L.A. Witt and Aleksandr Voinov.I have found it's hard to start a fantasy novel in the lunch breakroom. Too many distractions when you need concentration to figure out the rules of the fantasy world.
Mod
Started reading A Royal Affair and The Franchise Affair. Really enjoying the Tey one, it's both calming and intriguing.
Mod
There is no meanness in her observations. I think that's one reason it doesn't bother me.
Oblivious maybe. She occasionally makes a eyebrow-raising comment.
But I do think you're right about it being unconscious and inbred. She is a product of her class and upbringing and she lived in a time where people did not feel guilty about being wealthy or "well-bred."
It's most certainly a window into the past. The SO tried one of her books and while he was irked by her snobbery, mostly he was bored by the page time spent on descriptions of her domestic situation -- whereas I find that useful insight into the era.
Mod
And scanning house listings. Still no word on our offer. Our agent says it coul..."
Yes! When you really, really want the house you will do whatever you have to. Because I don't want to sell the current house, we're in a good position to wait or jump. Whichever it has to be.
But inside I am eager to jump. I REALLY am in the mood to jump. :-D
Mod
The Franchise Affair is, I believe, the book that really brought Tey to the public eye. It's clever. I remember not being able to put it down.
Mod
Yes! I had no idea what a short sale was until we started this process. I thought it meant the sale would have to move very quickly.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAA
So wrong.
So very wrong.
It means the bank is probably going to come up short in the sale because the home owner borrowed more than the house is currently worth.
And so it is in this case. Although according to my research very often the house brings in more than it's currently worth because people get caught up in these bidding wars.
This would be the case here. The renters (I'm guessing it was the renters) ripped out all the appliances. I mean everything. The built in microwave, the dishwasher -- the things that almost always come with the home -- and they took a section of the tile floor with them.
And the back garden has been unwatered for months now and is mostly dead or dying. The pool is heading into swamp territory.
But it's all fixable. It's all reclaimable. And at this stage, mostly it would require elbow grease. Six months from now...the pool and garden will be in a more serious state.
Mod
I think bringing Hansen to the attention of all of you, and then all of you proving to be emissaries for Hansen might be my real legacy. :-)
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.
Q&A with Josh Lanyon
Books mentioned in this topic
Subtle Bodies (other topics)Husband Material (other topics)
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night (other topics)
A Shattered Silver Crown (other topics)
A Shattered Silver Crown (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Jordan Castillo Price (other topics)Alexis Hall (other topics)
Katherine Fabian (other topics)
Iona Datt Sharma (other topics)
Cynthia Zhang (other topics)
More...
I look at every house wi..."
It's funny, but I keep looking at houses trying to determine where I'd like to live when I can afford a house, but every house I look at, even if I like it, I can't picture myself living there.
I think I'm a condo person. I would love to live in a condo with a washer and dryer in the unit (not four floors down like it is now), a medium to large livingroom with LOTS of book shelves and a fireplace. One bedroom, and an office (with a desk and a couch). No diningroom. I don't need that, but a kitchen with more counter space and space for a table would be good(right now my kitchen table is in my livingroom because my kitchen is too small.) I want a couch in my livingroom too, not just in my office. Right now I have one folding sphere chair and two others tucked away in a closet for guests.