Flight into Fantasy

Recently, it was announced that there will soon be a free, accessible e-reading device designed by Kurzweil Education, which already produces scanning and OCR software for the blind. Many of the blind people I speak to regularly on twitter are excited about the prospect, myself included. After all, I have written before about my feelings about providing accessible ebooks for those of us who want them.

I’m cautiously optimistic about this soon-to-be released ebook reader. I like that I can use it on my computer and on my mobile devices. I like that it will work with pdf and epub files, and mostly I like that it is free.

I do have a few concerns, however. According to the Publishers’ Weekly article I linked to earlier, people will be able to purchase ebooks from the e-reader’s affiliated store. But I hope that, if I want to take advantage of the programs already offered by Fictionwise or Books on Board, I will be able to do this and still have the software working. I also question the need for some of the features the PW article mentioned. Apparently, this ebook reader will read plays with different TTS voices for each of the roles. Aside from students, who is actually going to use this feature? Wouldn’t the coders’ times have been better spent making sure the device could, oh, I don’t know, read as many varieties of formats as possible rather than giving us silly features that we can honestly live without?

Also, the article states that this reader, which doesn’t have a name, will be useful for sighted as well as blind people. I wonder if this is true, and I also wonder who the larger number of downloaders will be.

So, in the end, I’m excited about the November release of this software. I don’t expect it to be the miracle that the blind have been waiting for, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction, and I hope that it will be as awesome as advertised.

One of my friends, whom I reconnected with on twitter a few months ago, has an expression. There are things in life that keep happening, over and over, that are annoying each and every time they come up. My friend has a number of these, and I do, too. My friend calls these his bowls of petunias, in reference to a quote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The one line the bowl of petunias gets in that book, if you’ll recall, is, “Oh, no, not again.” Which is generally the reaction that I have whenever my bowls of petunias come up. Naturally, I’m usually not quite as resigned as the bowl of petunias is in the book, and I’m more inclined to post repetitive blog rants.

So, let’s just talk about one of my particular bowls of petunias one more time. I am, of course, speaking of ebook accessibility, a subject about which I feel somewhat strongly, by which I mean it is the one topic guaranteed to make me want very much to punch people who disagree with me in the head.

Anyway, the latest development on this issue is that a journalism student at the University of Arizona is suing his university because the university is putting in place a pilot program in one of its classes where sighted students get to use the Amazon kindle. Darrell Shandrow, our blind plaintiff, naturally, does not.

I feel like I’m repeating myself, but it’s necessary. Equal access to books should be a right, not a privilege. It’s wonderful that there are resources out there for students like Shandrow, but you know what? They’re not enough. If everyone else in the class is using Kindles to read their course work and a blind student is not, I consider that to be a case of separate and unequal treatment. Presumably the kindles will be used for a specific purpose, and it will, at the very least, take longer for a non-kindle-using student to keep up with his classmates during class if they use another format.

There was and still is an ongoing conversation between Shandrow and several of us blind folks on twitter about this issue. Some people consider him to be an accessibility evangelist, whatever the hell that even means, and think he has been going about his crusade in a beligerent and undiplomatic way. Naturally, I am not one of these people. Being a university student myself, I can see the benefits of using the Kindle. I have also stated, more than once, that my money is as good as a sighted person’s. If this lawsuit is the only way in which Amazon will recognize this fact, then I want someone to sue, too!

Talking of ebook accessibility seems to step on a lot of toes in the blindness community. Even writing this, I find myself wanting to backpedal a bit to make sure that the people who volunteer their time for Bookshare or the folks at Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic know I’m not impuning what they do. I think any service that provides books in ways that blind people can read them is to be commended. Further, if we ever do get an Amazon Kindle that is completely accessible, the need for such services will hardly diminish. But those services are hardly enough. The day I can read any book I want, the same as my sighted peers, the instant I want to read it, will be the day that I consider myself as having equal access to printed materials as sighted people. Telling blind people we should be content with what we have is, I feel, a lot like telling black folks they should have been happy with separate schools, rest rooms, etc., or telling GLBT folks that they shouldn’t be so goddamn uppity and be happy with the domestic partnerships they can get instead of campaigning for marriage equality. Maybe that’s a bit of a harsh statement, but I won’t apologize for it. Too often, I feel that in general, disabled people are under more pressure than other minorities to be nice and not rock the boat lest we appear ungrateful for what we do have.

Well, being nice isn’t going to get us the services we need. I hope Darrell Shandrow’s lawsuit is successful, and if it takes a bunch of other blind people suing a bunch of other companies in order for these needed changes, then I hope they come through and do so in an unapologetic fashion. Because we shouldn’t apologize for wanting what we by rights ought to have.

I promised detes about our ebook week celebrations. Here they are.

I’ll be interviewing several of my favorite epublished authors about their thoughts on epublishing as a whole. Each of the authors I’ve spoken with has generously agreed to give away one of their books to people who comment on their interviews. I’m also giving away a $25 gift certificate to Fictionwise. at the end of this week, so there will be lots of opportunities for fabulous prizes.

Here is our lineup of guests.

• Samantha Kane

• Moira Rogers
• LB Gregg
• Kirsten Saell
• Lynne Connolly

These ladies write everything from historicals to paranormals to fantasies, with a variety of heat levels from the very sweet to the smokin’ hot. Some of them write M/F romances, some write M/M, and some write M/M/F or M/F/F. They also share the distinction of being some of my favorite writers, so you’re guaranteed a good story.

In order to be eligible to win, comment on any of the Ebook Week posts this week. The grand prize winner will be pulled from all the commenters. Winners will be announced next Monday!

Check back tomorrow for our first interview with the lovely Samantha Kane!.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to blogs lately has been aware of the huge dust-up about the new Kindle feature from The Author’s Guild. Hundreds of comments have been lobbed at the topic, among them what this decision means for blind people. So here is my take, as an actual, you know, blind person.

I think that all ebooks need to be available equally to everyone. The Kindle isn’t usable to me, but someday, I think it will be, and when that day comes, I want to be able to blow money just like every other person.

The arguments that have come out of the whole TTS issue from those who oppose it that I find most baffling have been the ones that would like to treat the needs of blind consumers as somehow a separate issue when it shouldn’t be. In the latest post on this issue from Dear Author, a number of arguments have been floated in the comments regarding the blind. First and most egregious is someone quoting a blog by an author who asserts that blind people don’t read her books, so she doesn’t care about our needs. I would like to extend a hearty fuck you to any of the authors out there who seriously think this, because it for damn sure means *this* blind person won’t be reading any of their books.

Secondly, I’ve seen the argument, not outright stated but very much implied, that there are already organizations out there that provide materials for the blind, so blind people and advocates for the blind should just shut up and be grateful for what we can have. Don’t get me wrong. I think any attempt to promote literacy on any level for anyone is a good thing, and my life would be extremely less enriched if it weren’t for several organizations for the blind. But charitable groups, Bookshare, and even the Library of Congress can only do so much. Why should I settle for the books those groups can provide when Amazon already has the platform to provide me whatever I want to read? To me, the attitude that I should sit back and not make noise and be grateful for what I have seems like one hell of a way to keep discrimination happening. Yes, I said the D word.

And I won’t even start in on the assinine argument about braille literacy I read in the comments of that post. Because if you would like me to rant about braille literacy, that would require a whole other thread and it hasn’t got a damn thing to do with the issue at hand.

Jane’s proposed solution, linked to in the Dear Author post I mentioned, would work for me. She proposed that certain Kindles could be registered to blind consumers and we’d have access to everything with TTS. If that is possible, I think that’s the best solution. It would leave the range of reading options open for the blind as wide as they needed to be while still letting blind consumers keep our dignity. It would also allow organizations like Bookshare to partner with Amazon, which could only increase the content available via those services so people who didn’t want to buy a kindle could still have the broad range of reading material open that the sighted world has at its fingertips.

As it stands now, what blind consumers have in the way of ebooks is quite limited. The only platform a blind person has to access ebooks that’s even remotely accessible is ereader, and accessible is, in this case, very much in the eye of the beholder. I can use it, but I don’t enjoy the listening experience, as I’m constantly fiddling around with my cursors. So I’m left with stripping DRM from books, which is illegal, or pirating books, in order to have the portability and ease of reading that I need. And let me tell you, stripping DRM from ebooks is not, as it shouldn’t be, an easy thing to do.

There are so many ways in which the disabled are treated like second-class citizens who don’t have any right to dignity and self-worth. Reading ebooks shouldn’t be one of them, and it’s yunacceptable to me to have an organization like the Author’s Guild try to infringe on that right.

The new text-to-speech feature on the Kindle is causing some concern for members of the Authors’ Guild. My reaction was and still is a resounding “WTF?” And, I find myself wondering what this could potentially mean for me as a blind consumer of ebooks.

I’ve long felt that New York publishing has done its damnedest to make sure that people like me never actually have a chance to be honest consumers. I guess my money as a blind consumer just isn’t good enough for New York. If it were, then books wouldn’t have the kind of DRM that actively prevents someone like me from reading whatever they want.

As it stands now, if I want to read a book around the time it is actually released, I have to either be in good enough with the author that they trust me with an ARC, or I have to hope that the book I want makes the New York Times bestseller list so that Bookshare will make it available quickly. (I’m not knocking Bookshare as a service, either! They do their best, and they provide a much-needed service for those of us with vision impairments. But they still don’t produce *every* book available. And that’s what I want as a blind consumer. I don’t want half-assed half-measures. I want to read anything available on ebook at anytime, anywhere. If a sighted reader has that ability, why the hell shouldn’t I? I’m even willing to pay exorbitant ebook prices to do it, for the sake of convenience.

The other thing about the Kindle issue is that some of the comments I’ve read seem to indicate that TTS software is this newfangled invention that has, up until the Kindle, never been a concern. Actually, this isn’t true. I have downloaded Text Aloud, which does essentially the same thing the Kindle TTS reader will do. It’s a shareware program that costs more depending on the kinds of voices you want to use, and it seems to me that the Kindle is just doing something similar. Incidentally, if you want to mess around with what TTS actually sounds like, you can go here and check them out.

Do I think there is room for improvement in text to speech software? Of course I do. Do I think the software will ever get to be so good that reading a book using it will be even remotely comparable to reading an audio book? No, I emphatically don’t. Machines just don’t have the human ability to express nuance and tone for one thing, and for another, no machine is going to be able to do such a simple thing as pronounce every word correctly.

I want the best for authors. I want to support them as much as I possibly can, and I want to make sure they can milk all the royalties they are capable of getting out of the publishing industry. But I think a solution needs to be found that will work for everyone, and especially the consumers. I want *more* access to the books I want to read, not less. Perhaps it’s latent paranoia, but what I don’t want to see happen as a result of this brouhaha is more restrictions placed on ebook formats that will make it even more impossible for me as a consumer to have access to them.

Today I upgraded Wordpress. No idea if this makes the site look any different, but I like some of the new features.

Later today, after I finish a few other things, I hope to have a review posted. But for now, mostly to test my twitter feed, have some linkage.

• Dear Author reports on Kindle 2.0. It has a text to speech engine now. Which still makes it useless for an actual, y’know, blind consumer. But, hey, whatev. It’s not like ebook companies actually want my money or anything.

• Dear Author also had a post about social DRM which was fascinating. Note that the two things these links have in common is the fact that I am in the comments, wanking on my soapbox.
• Not that I care overly much about book covers (the being totally blind thing sort of prevents this), but over in the fantasy blogosphere there’s been some wank about one. Me, I kind of want to read the book now. Because I like both epic fantasy and paranormal romance, and I love well-written strong female characters, and all of those tastes taste great together.
• And also via Andrew Wheeler, a hillarious review of a book I am never likely to read. And, hey, it’s from a Kansas City blog, and that’s… kind of local. I will let the author of the book in question speak for himself.
  

  “Killinger turned to face her. There was a definite interruption in the pattern of his white shorts.” (page 95)

  and

  “Killinger hung up quickly to cut off complaints and because Marja-Liisa had moved his hand to her golden grove and had begun quivering against his fingers and her sighs had become deep.”

  I’d have posted the bit about prunes, but, y’know, some things you just have to discover on your own.

One of the things I hoped would happen when I started reviewing full-time at The Good, the Bad, and the Unread is that I was hoping I would get to discover some buried treasures that people might not have heard of or might not be reading for whatever reason. Sometimes, those buried treasure books have been the worst bits of drek ever to cross anyone’s ebook reader. I wish I could get back the hours I spent on Friday with one such book, which was so vile I won’t link to it, because really, some people just don’t need the attention. But then, there are the buried treasure books that are genuinely wonderful.

I’ll be posting a more structured review over at The Good, The Bad, and the Unread later, but rfor right now, I’ll simply tell you all to go out and buy Life on the Move by Megan Reilly. I literally just finished it, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to get some flavor of A grade, because I immediately felt the need to go squee over it.

The blurb:

Home is where the heart is. Until the truth comes knocking.

Casey Smith and her dad move around a lot, so packing boxes, driving all night, and moving into a new apartment in a new town is nothing, well, new to her. While it’s weird that her dad is so restless, she’s never really minded before—after all, there’s nothing she can do about it.

But this time is different. This time they’ve moved to a place where she almost fits in. She’s even made some friends, including Ethan, a gorgeous guy who could turn out to be more than just a friend—if only she could be sure she’ll have time to really get to know him.

Just when her life is starting to have all kinds of possibilities, a knock comes on the door.

And everything Casey has ever known is turned upside down.

You can even read an excerpt here.

I didn’t expect to like this book, because while I’m not against YA books in general, they’re not really the sorts of books I read frequently. Besides, the last YA romance I tried was Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, which I hated with the fiery passion I normally reserve for right-wing talk radio. But Life on the Move doesn’t even compare. The characters are nuanced, and they are real, and the story manages to work extremely well despite its short length. And while this book does have a great romantic subplot, there’s so much more to it.

As I said, I’ll write up a more formal review later, but seriously, go forth! Buy the book! You can thank me later.

Title: Taming Heather
Author: Lorie O’Clare
Genre: paranormal erotic romance
Grade: C
Reason for Reading: I bought this ebook a couple of years ago on the strength of an excerpt I read on the Ellora’s Cave readers yahoo group, to which I no longer subscribe because OMG the traffic!
Synopsis:

Heather Graham had one thing in mind—furthering her career. And an exposé on the werewolves in her community would do just that. All she needed was to get up close and personal with one of them, and she could write an article that would give her front-page coverage across the nation. Her career would skyrocket! And Marc McAllister was just the man—and werewolf—to help her do it.

But when Marc realizes Heather’s flirty behavior exists solely so she can exploit werewolves in her newspaper, he decides it’s time to show little Miss Graham exactly how a werewolf behaves. And Marc McAllister isn’t just any werewolf, but purebred Cariboo Lunewulf—wild, strong, aggressive and the quintessential alpha male.

In a clash of wills, bodies and souls, Marc and Heather set off enough sparks to start a raging fire. Drawing the wild side out of Marc hits Heather with a bolt of lust that won’t go away. Unexpectedly for Marc, he may just have met his match in the little spitfire.

But their biggest hurdle may not be with each other, but from another direction entirely.

My Thoughts: Well, I imagine that the fact that I probably b ought this book two years ago and have only now actually finished it says a lot for the meh reaction that I experienced. It’s not a bad story, but neither is it the best thing I’ve read.

The characters were likeable enough, although Heather Graham kept dropping me out of the story because isn’t that the name of a pretty famous Harlequin author I’ve never read? And you know, reading along and thinking, ‘Hmm, Heather Graham. I have one of her books in the TBR. What was it about again? Let me pause and do a google search.” is not condusive to the fact that I am being rivetted.

Anyway, book Heather is certainly not the worst heroine I’ve run across lately, but I thought that the lengths she went to to cover her werewolf story were a bit TSTL. Her storyline also progresses the way I expected it to, with no real depth of characterization.

Marc was drawn slightly better. He was a dominant, sexual man, and I thought that the chemistry between himself and Heather was pretty intense. I also really liked the fact that he really does seem to be primally attuned to his inner beast.

I also liked the werewolves that are featured here. They seem genuinely fierce and primal creatures, not simply guys who like to run around on the full moon and howl. I didn’t really understand the politics of this particular werewolf pack, but that’s OK. It’s not particularly important to the story.

There is some sequel-baiting that was pretty obvious but not excessively annoying, and I’m not entirely certain if I’m going to fall for it or not and read th3e rest of this series. Overall, I think I could like the kinds of stories Lorie O’Clare tells, but this one was pretty forgetable.

I was going to post this review over at TGBTU, but I think I’ll post it over here instead since the book in question has already been reviewed by someone over there and I do have the second book in the series for review once I get around to it.

Title: Sunfire: Pure Wildfire, Book 1
Author: Lynne Connolly
Genre: Erotic paranormal romance
Grade: B+
Reason for Reading: I was assigned Ms. Connolly’s forthcoming release, Icefire, for review, and I prefer to read series in order.

Synopsis:

Rock meets classical. Paranormal meets mortal. Will anybody get out alive? The members of rock band Pure Wildfire are firebird shape-shifters. Manager John Westfall will sacrifice anything for the power they wield, even his daughter Corinne.

Corinne attracts Aidan in a way he’s never known before. He’ll do anything to release her from Westfall’s trap. He offers her marriage, but Aidan wants more from Corinne — he wants her heart. And he’ll give her his in return.

Classical guitarist Corinne is desperate to escape her father’s control. She loves Aidan but craves her freedom — can she trust him to give it to her? Can she trust the wild man of rock with her heart? There’s only one way to find out. Dive into the wildfire!

My Thoughts: I really enjoyed this book, and the primary reason I did was because of the hero.

Aidan Hawthorne, a name I absolutely adore, is the guitarist for the popular rock group, Sunfire. He also happens to be a shape-shifting firebird, and not only that, but he’s that rarest of all firebirds, the Phoenix. I don’t often go gaga over the heroes in my books, but I think a lot of that is simply because I don’t find a lot of them particularly sexy. Aidan, however, is totally the kind of guy that I would hook up with in real life if he showed up. He’s got a wonderful combination of tenderness and wild masculinity, and I just wanted to smuggle him away and take him home.

I was also pleased that, given how much I loved Aidan, Corinne worked for me as a heroine. She could have simply been one more martyr heroine, but she wasn’t. I loved watching her slowly realize just how much manipulation her father had done, and I was relieved that she didn’t choose to remain with him out of a sense of blind loyalty. Corinne also deserves some accolades, because I don’t think I could have remained sane with sisters like hers.

I really liked the romance here. We know from the beginning that there’s attraction between Aidan and Corinne, but they move gradually and at a reasonable, logical pace into love. What misunderstandings and conflicts that arise along the way are natural for the progression of their relationship, and the black moment near the end is quite emotional. The sex was hot, and really did enhance the developing relationships. The only caveat I had about the sex scenes was one near the end, where there’s some anal action and Aidan uses soap as a lube, which seems a bit uncomfortable and had me wincing in sympathy.

Connolly does tend to sequel-bait fairly heavily, not a huge surprise considering that this is a series about a rock band. For the most part she succeeds, giving us tantalizing glimpses of the rest of the band, but I never fully got a sense of who they were as people. Well, we learn quite a bit about Aidan’s brother, Ryan, but the rest were inigmas to me for the most part.

As for the non-romance plot, for the most part I liked it. My only real issue was that I felt that Corinne’s father was almost cartoonishly evil, and he was dealt with with such swift efficiency that I wondered why Aidan hadn’t just found some other way to end that particular threat.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a lot, and I’m very much looking forward to reading the second book in this series.

Shannon C.,’s note: My blogging partner, Jaliya, apparently has an adversarial relationship with Wordpress, so I’m posting this on her behalf.

So, I have been telling myself that while Shannon has been out living life to the fullest this weekend, I was going to keep all of you lovely people company. I’m the other half of Team Awesome, except that I have a whole heck of a lot to catch up on because Shannon knows how to give the content like nobody’s business. Also, as she said somewhere below, I keep geting distracted by shiny things. Maybe she won’t be home by the time I remember how to post again and then you all can say that I kept you from boredom the whole weekend long.

I am making an effort to try to be better. I put the pro in procrastination and am working on my follow through! One of the shiny things distracting me is this huge to be read pile. I was going to write out a list but I don’t know how to make it look all shiny and blogtastic, so I’ll mention it the next time around.

The lovely folks at Joyfully Reviewed has a very kickass interview of Lauren Dane whom I love like a kid loves candy. It also helps that she lives in my neck of the woods. Woohoo, go Washington state!

In the interview, she gives the best writing advice ever. It’s especially great for those like me who really really want to write an EBook but are procrastinating out the yinyang or have some serious confidence issues in their writing. “STFU and Write”

I can totally dig that. I have read her Witch’s Knot series and will be gobbling up the next one. I’ve loved that entire series and wish I could have sold the lovely Shannon on the awesomeness that is her books. Reading that interview was a great start to my weekend of which I essentially didn’t do very much. You know how it is…shiny things!

And now for my request. It is rumored that I wish a certain part of a time period which seems to be featured in many romance novels would fall off of a cliff. It’s true. I have tried reading novels set during Regency England. I want to enjoy them. I swear I want to devour such books and talk about the awesomeness that is Regency England. Except I can’t because I really, really hate everything I’ve read. Admittedly, it probably isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things. But there’s only so many virginal heroines yearning to be touched and then getting all pissy when our daring hero looks at them crosseyed. I hate the excessive amount of exclamation points because it really really bothers me. I am not a grammar guru by a long shot, but if I am noticing it then there’s something wrong. The women in the novels that I have read seem so very shrieky and angry and hateful and it makes me want to spit nails. Poor Shannon has had to deal with my rants over the phone.

So I’m asking you all to help me. Please give me some ideas of a novel with a hero and a heroine that I can love and want to take home for ravishment. Please make me love a genre that everyone else seems to squee over while I stand on the outside making a sour puss face. I will make you cookies. alright, so you might not want me baking anything that you’re likely to consume, but still, I will be a happy Jal. And then I’ll review that book and comment you up the kazba.

Alright, I’m done now. I always feel like I need to write some spiffy closing remark to these things. I can’t just stop. How do I end a blog post? Peace out? Catch you on the flip side? Word to my maternal unit? Happy trails on the internet express? Time to fizzle in the hizzle? This is really hard. I’m done now!

Title: Triad
Author: Lauren Dane
Genre: paranormal erotic romance
Grade: C-
Reason for Reading: I don’t remember how Lauren Dane wound up on my radar. I think a friend recommended that I try her, so I did.

Synopsis:

Lee Charvez is a witch in a family where all of the women are born with inherent gifts of power. She is a witch dreamer, she has the ability to walk in dreams and the subconscious and to work magic there. There is only one Charvez witch dreamer each generation and she’s the strongest in generations.

She meets the man of her dreams, literally, when she bumps into Aidan Bell outside their apartment building in New Orleans. He’s a three-hundred-year-old vampire with the face of a wicked angel, and he has no problem with claiming her as his own. As if that isn’t miraculous enough there’s another man, a powerful wizard, Alex Carter, who makes their partnership into a triad. Problem is, there’s no time to sit back and enjoy her newfound loves because there’s a demon out to destroy the source of her powers, and her entire family in the bargain.

My Thoughts: I could have enjoyed this a lot, and for the first quarter of the book, I did. It never would have been an A book for me, but it was headed toward B territory. Then the momentum just kind of fizzled and I ended up sitting on the book for several months without finishing it.

Lee Charvez is a powerful witch. She’s a witchdreamer, which means that she is even more powerful than your ordinary witch, and she is born of a long line of powerful witches who protect the city of New Orleans. This makes her come across as quite a Mary Sue. She doesn’t really struggle except in the basic sense that she has to control her power somehow, and I felt that everything pretty much fell into her lap.

Nowhere did things fall into Lee’s lap more than the romances. It looked like Ms. Dane was going to give a nod toward some emotional complexity involving the menage relationship, but she never quite does so. Lee meets Aidan, realizes that she has some kind of connection with him, and a few pages later they’re married… after only scant hours have passed. From there, there’s no real conflict between the two of them, and Ms. Dane pretty much dismisses any jealousy issues that Aidan might be having when Alex shows up. Apparently, in paranormal romance, good sex cures everything.

There was a lot of sex, and after a while, it got a bit repetitive. I was, however, disappointed that Ms. Dane didn’t quite do much with the simmering attraction between Alex and Aidan. I really thought she would, and I understand that in other series, she does explore the M/M aspects of her menage relationships in greater detail, but in this case I was disappointed.

As for the plot… Well, like I said, it felt too easy. I never got a sense that anyone was in real danger, so there was no sense of urgency during any of the pivotal scenes. The villains were of the typical moustache-twirling “Bwahaha, I am teh evol!” variety, which made them boring.

There were nice moments, though. I was intrigued by the relationships between Lee and her family, and I did like all of the characters. There were some lovely, sweet, tender moments that I enjoyed. I also did like that the fact that Lee is such a Mary Sue isn’t really all that lost on any of the characters.

I’m not sure that I’ll be rushing out to buy the next book, and I’m not sure I’d recommend this one, but it’s certainly not the worst book, or even the worst menage story out there.

One of the complaints I hear a lot around blogland is that a lot of paranormal romances are basically retreads of each other, even though the notion of paranormal romance ought to invite a lot more variety in the genre. This seems to be true for me–after all, how many times can I read about fated vampire mates or fated shifter mates or, hell, anybody’s fated mates without wanting to snap?

That being said, Alice Gaines isn’t writing the same old paranormals. In fact, my reaction upon learning, from my friend Jaliya, to the series I’m going to be writing about was pretty much, “What the fuck was she smoking?”

I am, of course, referring to the Mannhof,/a> series from Changeling Press. Normally, I don’t buy from them much because when I buy ebooks, I want to buy something that’ll last me a while. But this series had me breaking that rule, because it’s about shape-shifting motorcycles. Yep, you read that right. I was startled, too, and then intrigued. Could Ms. Gaines pull this off?

Surprisingly, the answer is: mostly. It’s not the shape-shifting motorcycles that I had much of a problem with. I don’t think shape-shifting inanimate objects will become the next trend in paranormal romance, although what do I know? But the premise is certainly not one I’ve read before.

The books in the series go in this order:

• One Owner, Lady Driven

• Driven to the limit
• Driven to Justice.

The problem with all three of these books, for me, is the problem I have with a lot of shorter ebooks. There’s not really enough story to let me get to know the characters. They are painted in very broad strokes, and though each of the women faces different issues in their lives, I thought that the healing process and the road to love required a bit more time than the space permitted.

One Owner, Lady Driven starts off the series when Claire Wilcox purchasses one of the horrendously rare Mannhof motorcycles at an auction. When the bike changes into a stud named Will, well, there goes Claire’s productivity and her sense of control.

To be honest, I didn’t ever warm up to Claire. I thought it was awesome that she knew exactly what she wanted and went for it, but she was kind of a shrill harpy, and I hate reading about those. I also felt horrible for her junior executive, Ted, who Claire never appreciates. She never really thanks him until the end of the book, and I thought she should at least give him a raise. As for the romance? It worked for me mostly except for one scene in the climax of the book where I thought the hero was being kind of a whiny, codependent jackass.

Driven to the limit worked slightly better for me. Lauren has come home from rehab, and now she’s back working for Dagger, a successful rock star who is into drugs, violence, and the whole party scene. Lauren’s only bit of solace is Dagger’s Mannhof motorcycle, Jake.

This book worked the best for me out of the whole trilogy, at least it did after I stopped fretting about why anyone would want to bear her internal struggles to a motorcycle. I know I wouldn’t. The nearest thing to talking to machines that I do involves cursing at them. But hey, whatever works for Lauren.

I liked watching Lauren recover some of her self-confidence, and I loved the climactic scenes in the book.

Driven to Justice rounds off the series. Cop Charlie Thomas’s job is being threatened because she insists on going after the men who raped her. With the help and love of Nick, another Mannhof motorcycle, she might just manage to do it.

I wanted to like this last story very much. But I thought that, yet again, everything was dealt with too quickly and easily as per the word count. Charlie could have been a great complex character, but she wasn’t really allowed to be. The thing is that at least in the end she is agreeing to go to therapy, which made me feel a lot better about the lightness with which the issue of her rape was treated.

Overall, I thought the series was cute. It’s nothing that’s going to stick around very long in my memory–well, the shape-shifting motorcycles pretense totally will–but it was a pleasant enough read. I would have liked for each of the boys to have had a distinct personality. They really didn’t, so it was hard not to see them as basically pieces of meat.

I think I might be interested in some of Ms. Gaines’ longer works, but for this series, I’m going to go with an overall grade of C+.

Emily Veinglory has been calling for bloggers to post something positive about epublishing this Saturday. And since I am all about the fluff over here, I’ll happily oblige.

I remember my first exposure to ebooks. A role playing buddy had gotten published with ExStacy Books. She wrote some pretty BDSM-y titles that I still haven’t managed to buy because I think she’s trying to move on to bigger and better things, and also, despite her being my friend, that type of story doesn’t appeal. At any rate, that got me curious about this whole epublishing thang, and so I started googling.

I can’t remember how I got from my friend to Dakota Cassidy, but somehow I ended up on Dakota’s Yahoo group, and from there I found Changeling Press, which introduced me to the notion of what it was finally like to have a TBR pile. (Incidentally, I didn’t stop buying from Changeling Press because of the covers, which are, of course, a non-issue for me. I stopped buying from them because I find really short quickie type stories somewhat less than satisfying.)

After my first few purchases of ebooks, I soon started reading little else. Sometimes this involves a lot of scanning, but hey, I know what I like.

Right now, I mostly still don’t pay attention to the publishers I buy from, because I have discovered Fictionwise. Because of them, I’ve discovered more authors and stories I never would have even considered reading, and my To Be Bought list has grown significantly lately. What I particularly like about shopping via Fictionwise is my exposure to e-authors who aren’t writing erotic romance. Hey, I love me some erotic romance, but I can’t do a steady diet of it.

So it’s all just a viscious circle designed to ensure I never have money again. First there are the ebook authors, then the publishers, then Fictionwise, and finally, my credit card howling for release. And I love every minute of it.

I meant to blog about my amusing discoveries at Fictionwise the other day, but every time I sit down to write a blog post, someone invariably distracts me with a shiny object.

Anyway, I was shopping over at Fictionwise last Saturday and came up with a shopping list of books I must have. I spent too much money there, because it turns out that thanks to the Internet, my ability to impulse shop is hard to curb.

That, however, is not the point. The point is that I did a search of the books on Fictionwise from longest to shortest. As I’ve said, if I’m going to spend over $5 on an ebook, I want something I can sink my teeth into.

Anyway, what I discovered was that the longest title they sell on Fictionwise is an audio book which doesn’t interest me in the slightest. The third longest book they sell at Fictionwise is the Bible.

What, you may ask, is the second longest multi-format book on Fictionwise, and did I buy it?

The second longest book on Fictionwise is Tempering, which is the second book in the
Jarheads series by Sean Michael.

So, yes, Shannon bought some gay romance. She may even read it one of these days. If I do get around to reading that book, I, too, can participate in Man Love Monday, which has suddenly become a goal in life. *G*

The thing that startled me about my experience on Fictionwise was that it was happening while I was chatting up some blind friends of mine, exactly none of whom realized that they could buy easily accessible ebooks from there for reasonable prices. Which really burns my toast, because if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, blind people would be damn good customers for ebooks. We should really be being marketed to way more than we are.

Title: Love’s Strategy
Author: Samantha Kane
Genre: erotic historical romance
Grade: B+
Reason for Reading: I love Samantha Kane. I even love her enough to read a shortish ebook, which is generally not my preference.

Synopsis:

Valentine Westridge and Kurt Schillig are lovers, and have been since the Peninsular War when lonely young officer Valentine let himself be seduced by the equally lonely Kurt. Now they’re back from the war and intent on beginning the future they dreamed of together, one that includes a quiet country estate, horses, dogs, children, and each other. Their plan, however, also requires a wife. At the suggestion of a mutual friend, Valentine and Kurt believe the financial security they can offer to impoverished widow Leah Marleston will help her accept the unusual sexual relationship they are suggesting.

Leah is at her wit’s end, creditors having taken everything she owns to pay off her late husband’s gambling debts. She must find a way to support herself and her two children, or be forced to marry her abusive and obsessive brother-in-law. In Valentine’s and Kurt’s arms, Leah discovers a passion she never knew existed. Brought together by necessity, bonded by desire, these three lonely people find themselves fighting against all odds for a love that was never part of their plans.

My Thoughts: I fee like I’m going to repeat myself here so this is going to be a shortish review. I really do love Samantha Kane’s books. I’m not bothered by the fact that they’re set in an alternate Regency England that never would have existed in real life. The characters and their connections and insecurities can make me ignore quite a lot.

Leah is one of Kane’s trademark sensible yet tortured heroines. But she doesn’t really struggle with her decision to marry Valentine and Kurt. She sees it as the only option she’s got at the moment, and I thought she was practical.

As ever, I could distinguish between Kurt and Valentine with no problems, although I thought that neither were quite as fully developed, again because of the length constraints, as some of her other couples.

The villain was a bit one-demensional as well, but I liked that I understood his motives even though I thoroughly detested the character. Villains who do bad things for all the right reasons are my favorite, and this one thankfully didn’t twirl his moustache.

All in all, I liked this a lot, and I’m sad that I’ve only got one more Samantha Kane book to be read.

Title: Dream Shadow
Author: Mary Wine
Genre: Erotic paranormal romantic Suspense
Grade: C-
Reason for Reading: I read a short story by Wine a few months back in an otherwise mediocre anthology. It was the one that gave me the most fits that I actually finished, and I was curious to see if a full-length novel would be better. It really, really wasn’t.

Synopsis:

Desperation can have you turning the most unlikely corner—and once you encounter what lies around the bend, your life will never be the same…
Sheriff Brice Campbell didn’t put much stock in psychics, but that all changes when he meets Grace. The Army’s best psychic tracker, Grace always finds her target. And when a child goes missing, she’s on the case. Only this time, her focus slightly wavers. The cause—Brice.

Desire blazes between Grace and Brice, sending them both up in a firestorm of passion. But even though Grace has amazing extrasensory talents, when it comes to matters of the heart she is a novice.
Brice is more than willing to teach Grace what it means to love, emotionally and physically, but first he must convince her that he has not been preying on the children. Then they must find the madman who has.

Plot Summary: A little girl goes missing in Benton County, and Brice, the county’s sheriff, is desperate enough to hire a unit of army rangers including their pet psychic. He discovers that Grace is amazingly good at her job, but in the vein of any female who is good at anything in romancelandia, she is a bitch and a half for no discernible reason whatsoever. Anyway, Brice decides that he wants Grace, and basically wears her down until together they live happily ever after.

My Thoughts: Karen Scott had a post the other day about heroines in books who are supposed to be kick-ass but aren’t. A few readers in the comments felt like the kick-ass heroine had basically immasculated their heroes, which is a whole other discussion.

Grace is supposed to be a kick-ass heroine. Not only is she part of an elite unit of the U.S. army (well, we do have S.E.A.L.’s, so I guess the other branches of the military need some love, too.) She’s also a brilliant psychic who can find anyone she is working for. But apparently, the army works her to death, a fact she doesn’t realize until she comes into contact with Brice’s mighty Staff of Power. For most of the book, needless to say, I did not like Grace. I didn’t understand how come, if she were approaching burnout like she’s supposed to be at the beginning of the book, nobody seems to know what to do. It also seemed to me that Jacobs, Grace’s commander who apparently has millions of siblings and relatives who will feature in other books, kept her on an extremely short leash. Jacobs is the only one, incidentally, who doesn’t think of Grace as some kind of witch (at least until Brice shows up) If Grace needed to get laid so badly, and he was supposed to be her friend, why didn’t he, you know, hook her up with someone else? In fact, I found the whole Grace/Jacobs dynamic a bit distracting in the fact that it made no sense to me at all.

As for Brice… Well… He’s an Alpha Man. A Man’s Man. I do admit that I thought he was hot, but honestly, if a guy like that were interested in me, I’d probably run the other way. I also thought that the author cheated a bit in order to give Brice a suitable background to make him worthy of being with Grace. He’s not just a sheriff–he’s also retired from active duty and outranks Jacobs, and appears to be able to read Grace like a book, even when it would make no sense for him to do so.

There were things I did like about this book. I liked the sex scenes, although they would have been a lot more interesting if the characters behind them hadn’t been a mess of cliches. I also liked the paranormal element here, mostly because it didn’t involve vampires, werewolves or whatever, and it was handled fairly deftly.

I also believe that there are some books that are just the equivalent of buying a tub of whipped cream just to eat it directly out of the tub with a spoon. This book was a total whipped cream book for me. It was bad in parts, kind of offensive in others, and lame in still others, but like all guilty pleasures, I gobbled it up.

So I could make a number of shortish posts or I could just compile a few of my scattered thoughts into a long, rambly blogt. Needless to say, I have chosen the latter.

Last night, I was browsing Ellora’s Cave as I am so often wont to do, and found myself thinking about an old anthology I read and reviewed back in October. Most particularly, I was thinking about the short story that left the longest impression on me, an offering by Mary Wine. If you click on the link to my review, you’ll see that I was less than overwhelmed with the story. The characters were both stupid, and neither of them reacted the way those of us who live on planet Earth would react to typical situations. But the author did do sexual tension liek whoa, and even though the characters were both fresh out of central casting, I was still curious about that. Because sometimes short stories are just not an author’s forte, you know?

Anyway, it turns out that Ms. Wine’s writing, it is like crack. I am usually not a fan of over the top alpha males who are all, “You’re mine, and I will press my body hard against yours several times so that you will accept this fact and give in to the inevitable.” But I want to read her books. She’s got some excerpts on her website that are really doing it for me, and my inner feminist is seriously considering going off and joining a commune or something like that.

In other news, I found the idea of a marketing guru writing a book for young girls that might or might not have product placement in it rather fascinating. The product placement question is interesting but easily answered for me. Don’t want it in my fiction. every time Butch had a name-dropping orgasm in Lover Revealed , for example, I wanted to smack him. But this is what struck me from the commentary on DA:

Tina said she was inspired to write the series because she felt it was important for girls to have positive books to read and to encourage them to make good choices.

As opposed to, oh, the 85 million books out there that are not providing girls with positive books to read and encouraging them to make good choices? I don’t read much YA these days except for the occasional revisit of an old favorite, but honestly now, isn’t that the whole point of the genre? I mean, for crap’s sake, even books like the Sweet Valley High books or the Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging books try to sneak in a few good life lessons in amid the random schlock. I’m sure that, had I kept reading the Stephenie Meyer books before I decided that there was a special place in hell for Bella and Edward, I’d have found some life lessons and positive choices in there. And how, precisely, do you come up with a character about whom the most important thing is, “She likes Converse?” I mean, what do you do with a plot like that and still have it teach about making good choices?

Third, guess what showed up on my bloglines while I was doing my daily blog reading? TGBTU, that’s what! I was so very stoked, as it’s been way too long since I’ve been able to read TGBTU without going to the site. So thanks for fixing everything, Syb, whatever you did. Mwah!

Fourthly, I am listening to the Folk Alliance awards on XM. I wish I had someone who could descend to my levels of geekitude and let me provide them with a running commentary. Sadly, I am probably the only one amused by that idea.

Bwahahaha! There’s an ebook that came out recently that I have to read, mostly because as a blogger I am curious about how it’s handled.

The book is Tort and Retort by Maura Anderson.

Here’s the blurb:

Ambitious and driven patent law attorney, Gayle Osborne, has a secret.  Her power suits and take-no-prisoners attitude hide a passionate nature whose only
outlet is reading and reviewing erotic romance. If anyone finds out that she is “Miss Retort,” the snarky and opinionated blogger from the Hits & Misses
review blog, she’ll lose everything—her reputation, her clients, her job and, worst of all, her gorgeous mentor and boss, Tyler Monroe.

Some bloggers really need to get on with reviewing this, stat.

So I am fixing to give my credit card a workout this morning. Shiloh Walker”> has a book out from Samhain that has received some awesome reviews. December quinn and Anna J. Evans have a book out from Ellora’s Cave that looks really awesome as well. And then I also found out that a role playing friend of mine has a book out, and so does a neat lady on one of my other Yahoo Groups. I will end up buying their books, too, because I think supporting my friends is a great thing, but here’s the problem.

If I’m going to be spending money on ebooks, I really do want a meaty story that I can sink my teeth into. After all, slow reader that I am, even I can knock out a novella in a couple of hours or less, and then I have no more story to read. Plus, invariably, my complaints about novella-length ebooks are the same–I want more from the characters, more about the setting, more everything, and I just don’t get that in a novella.

What about the rest of you? Do you like the shorter form of a novella? They are, after all, cheaper. And what ebooks are out there that you really sank your teeth into?