Suggested Reading (Non-Romance)

Hey there, I’m busily not reading book six in the Sherrilyn Kenyon series. That doesn’t meant the book is bad. It just means I have a life. We’ll have to wait and see if the book actually sucks.

Anyway, I was thinking on the fact that most of the focus here is on paranormal romance. It is because that’s what I’m about to write and my attention is there. I was thinking however of some paranormal classics. Anne Rice came to mind as did a few others, but I want to focus on something edging on horror and something intellectually savvy despite it being a coming of age story.

Well, let’s talk about my favorite Stephen King book, The Stand. It’s a pretty large book and I suggest you don’t read it during flu season or anytime you plan on going on a large road trip. Trust me, you’re imagination won’t have the additional yardage on the playground if you avoid doing those two things.

Of course the book is a classic horror, post-apocalyptic journey into severe creepiness. It’s got disease, the end of the world, survival, love, betrayal, a journey, some mysticism some evil, some good and some bad that’s kind of in the middle. And it’s pretty spine tingling.

Anyone who says they like horror has to read it. Anyone who says they love paranormal can skip it, but man it will add to your world in a way that’s uh…worth the unease.

Suggesting The Stand is a pretty easy pick. It’s King, it’s a classic. The next book on my suggested reading list is quite different from The Stand, in fact I wouldn’t even put them in the same aisle in the bookstore.

The Society of S by Susan Hubbard was a real surprise to me. I admit I bought it because it sounded potentially kinky. It’s not, but damn it’s a great book.

The story is about a 13 year old, Ariella. She’s of mixed heritage and the book is essentially her coming of age story. It sounds simple, but the causal paranormal twist, the intelligent dialogue and the calm, easy, manner of Hubbard makes this a must read.

Skip it though if you’re expecting a wild paranormal romp or to be scared to the nines. This book won’t deliver that. It will deliver, soft smiles, a linguistic playground, meandering intrigue all dressed up in a unique, enticingly languid style.

So, these are my non-paranormal romance suggestions of the month. I’ll try to include some in my reviews as I plow through the seedy, underground of smutty paranormals. It’ll be hard to keep my hands clean, but like I said, I’ll try.

Kiss of the Night: Sherrilyn Kenyon-Book Five

I finished book five in the wee hours of the …afternoon. Well it seemed wee like as I sat on a stone bench plowing through the last thirty pages or so. But maybe they weren’t wee, maybe they were really big giant minutes squished into the impatience of waiting for my ride.

Ah, but was it good?

Yes.

I guess that’s all I need for the review right?

Okay, I will elaborate, elucidate and just plain tell you why I thought it was good.

First let me tell you that I didn’t think the book was going to get a “must read” attitude from me at all. Unlike the previous jaunts into the Dark Hunter world, Kiss of the Night didn’t get good until page 100 or so.

The first 100 pages go on and on and really make the heroine, Cassandra, seem like a spoiled kid and Wulf, our Dark Hunter of the hour, an overprotective oaf. Ms. Kenyon’s love of the word “predator” just doesn’t initially fly here.

This book in some respects is very playful. Wulf’s squire, Chris, is actually his great, great, great (add as many greats as you can sputter off for a 1000 something year old vamp-like dude), grandson and the only human who can remember Wulf after meeting him.

You see, Wulf is cursed. Humans can’t remember him five minutes after they leave his presence. So the dude has a lonely life. There are some of the supernaturals that can recall him, but of course we all know by now that Dark Hunters drain each other’s powers when they spend too much time together and, well, everyone else is mostly evil or somewhat intolerant of hanging with Dark Hunters.

But that’s not even the interesting part of the story. It’s poignant, but not the meat and potatoes of the goings-on in this volume. The fact that Cassandra is an Apollite is.

What does that mean to Wulf? It means he really shouldn’t be with her, in love with her, or even friends with her. He kills her people when they go Daimon. So what we have here is some interracial dating. How’s that for modern genetic diversity?

The rest of the story is gravy, like the sex, like the big bad coming after Cassandra for being not just an Apollite, but one that holds the fate of the world in her hands. In her hands? How ’bout with the threads of her very soul?

We also meet some new characters, like Stryker and Urian, two bad ass Spathis. Their tales are quite the curious ones and maybe even a surprise and who is this Kat? She’s got some duality going on. We have to wonder if that’s a good thing or not.

All in all Kiss of the Night eventually delivers in Kenyon’s grand DH style. You’ll have to crawl through the initial “dream sex” sequences and the boring university crap, but oh well. (You know she could have played on Chris’s attraction to the woman Wulf eventually gets, but oh well. How many pages can you actually burn on this stuff?) But it’s all worth it.
It becomes an exciting adventure with sex, mayhem and the best part of it? Kenyon actually creates a little uncertainty. There are few things that you want to happen, but will it? Can it be possible and if it is, should it be possible? What does Ash sometimes say?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

That was Ash, wasn’t it?

Have fun, creatures of the night. I will, I’m off for some Night Play!!!!!

© 2008

Research Bites

Research bites.

Right now I’m researching for my very first paranormal romance. That fact is basically why this blog has been focusing so much on that area of the paranormal. I won’t focus on the romance forever though because my super project is nothing of the sort, but since I’ve yet to finish a novel, I thought I would create a smaller world with less political intrigue and one that while it technically spans the ages, I don’t have to weave it too much into our history.

I have written some vignettes of my characters. I’ve found doing so lets me discover the person behind the concept and it leads me to cultural characteristics like slang, style of dress, and general world outlook.

I suppose it is possible to skip the vignettes and just work my way through these things as I write the story, but I don’t seem to work that way. I need a foundation before I start. Otherwise, I get caught up in the nuance and ignore the story line or vice versa.

In essence the pieces come out flat, without any texture.

Anyway, I’ve decided on werewolves and vampires. Yes, it’s been done a hundred times by now, but I have my own spin on it. It will have gods and lots of cool characters. I even have a freaking plot!!

It’s funny. I am a good writer in terms of quick stints, vignettes, and flushing out characters and dialogue. That part of it comes very naturally to me. But novels are different.

In a novel a writer has to captivate the reader page after page. You have to control the ebb and flow of the story. You can’t pile too much adventure into a story at once. You have to give the reader a break, before you continue pummeling him/her with excitement.

And you can’t be too boring either.

And you have to have reasonable motivation.

I read a book, a werewolf one in the recent past. Hmmm, when I say “read” that implies I finished the book doesn’t it?

I didn’t. I didn’t get past the first chapter and I sold it then next week. It was the worst book I’d ever read and I was offended that publishers dared to put that on the shelves and try to pass it off as literature.

Even paranormal romance has to be smart.

I think you can do whatever you want in a book. I can have pig men that get their strength from eating the toenails clippings of blonde females while they battle the Greek pantheon in order to save the world from demonic muskrats as long as I work within the parameters of my own created law and the characters never betray who they are.

I can do this story as long as it’s balanced between the fantastic and the logical, as long as it is balanced between adventure and the mundane. Essentially, you have to be able to identify with my pig men and demon muskrats. Otherwise, the whole damn thing is just silly.

And crap to boot.

So, I know all of this. I understand all of this, but knowing and doing are not the same thing.

I told my friend the other day that I was going to write a paranormal romance. She scoffed. “That’s junk.” She told me. Well yes, paranormal romance will never stand next to greats like Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, but the genre isn’t aiming for that. The genre has a specific target and quite frankly in this day and age, no market is full of dumbasses.

Readers of horror, science fiction, mystery, romance, and of every genre and subgenre are intelligent and expect a level of competency from the author, even if the basic story line is cliché.

So, even my “junk” has to be intelligent junk. It has to be balanced, have believable characters, logical motivation, a good story line and over all it has to be fun.

Fun.

That’s why we bother isn’t it? That’s why we’re not chomping at the bit to read Tolstoy at our lunch breaks. Don’t get me wrong. I read Shakespeare. I’ve read the Odyssey and the Iliad. I’ve read Dante’s Inferno and Little Women. I’ve done my time in the “real” literary world and I will go back again, but sometimes I want a hunk of man saving some soft piece of ….

Well, I want some fun. I’m hoping I can get it all together and write some of it, too. I’ve been doing a lot of research in the midst of reading the genre. I’m going to spend the rest of the month in that mode and I’m going to do NanoWrimo this year. I’ll be ready like I’ve never been ready before and hopefully I won’t stop at 30,000 words. Hopefully, I’ll stop when the story is ready too, not when I am. ~Lilia