• The Twelve Days of Bigtime …

    My new book, Hot Mama, is coming out Nov. 6 and to celebrate I’m going to do a contest. But not just any contest. Oh no. In honor of the upcoming holiday season, I’m kicking off the Twelve Days of Bigtime! Excited yet?

    It’s pretty simple. The contest is like the Twelve Days of Christmas, but with prizes instead of partridges in pear trees. Seriously, what would you do with a partridge in a pear tree anyway? Bigtime books are so much more practical.

    The contest starts Nov. 5 and runs through Nov. 16. All you have to do to enter the contest is post the following on your Web site, blog, or MySpace page (once the contest actually starts):

    1) Either Fiona Fine’s letter to the media or the Hot Mama summary

    2) The Hot Mama cover

    Basically, all you have to do is copy one of the posts I’ll put up. Post the info once, and you’re entered to win all twelve days. Of course, if you want to talk more about the book on your site, that would be great too. 😉

    If you don’t want to post, you can leave a comment on my blog about your favorite superhero or villain. You’ll be eligible to win the autographed books, etc., but not the Amazon gift cards or grand prize.

    More to come shortly …

    PS I’ll post about the contest a couple of times, so don’t worry if you don’t catch all the info at once. Also, you can click on the Contests category on the blogroll to see all the posts.

    Happy reading! :ww:

  • Some good news out of Buffalo …

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    Many of you know of my love for the Buffalo Bills football team. Yes, I know they lost four straight Super Bowls, and they are no longer among the elite teams of the NFL. But I still like ’em. (In general, I root for AFC teams over the NFC).

    On Sunday, a Bills player, Kevin Everett, was severly injured — and doctors were saying he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life. But Everett voluntarily moved his arms and legs, according to this story from Yahoo. It’s a very positive sign, according to his doctors.

    Here’s hoping Everett makes a full recovery.

  • 824 and counting …

    Finished Lover Eternal by J.R. Ward. It’s the second book in her popular Black Dagger Brotherhood series.

    This one is about Rhage, a vampire cursed to carry a dragon-like beast inside his body for 200 hundred years. The dragon-beast comes out whenever Rhage’s emotions get out of control, so he uses anonymous sex and violence against lessers (the bad guys) as outlets to keep himself under control. But all that changes when Rhage meets Mary, a human woman who’s dying from leukemia. One look at her, and he’s in lurv, as my significant other says.

    I enjoyed Dark Lover, the first book in the series, and I was looking forward to another great read. But Lover Eternal really disappointed me. The main reason? I just didn’t like Rhage. I thought he was arrogant and cocky and bordered on being a psycho stalker, the relentless way he kept pursuing Mary.

    For example, Rhage calls Bella and basically tells her to set her friend Mary up with him. That he’s coming to get Mary one way or another, and Bella can either make it a nice date … or not. Yuck. Plus, there was an implied fact that this behavior was okay, that the BDB vampires can do whatever the hell they want to women as long as they kill lessers. This moral code did not sit well with me. I wanted to take that whip thing the brothers use on Rhage and give him some lashes with it myself.

    I liked Mary okay, but I thought she deserved someone a lot better than Rhage. Someone who didn’t try to control and bulldoze her into falling for him at every turn.

    Plus, I found myself much more interested in the other characters than I did in the romance between Rhage and Mary. For example, I loved the scenes between Bella and Zsadist, and John’s story was pretty interesting too. As for the bad guys, I didn’t get the sense they were up to anything in this book – they didn’t really seem to have a nefarious plan to kill all the vampires. The bad guys and their actions seemed like more of a stop-gap to set up Book 3 (Bella and Zsadist).

    I’m going split decision on this one. Thumbs down to the Rhage-Mary romance; thumbs up for the world building, advancement of the series, and other characters (especially Bella and Zsadist).

    Up next: Not sure yet. Something from my ever-growing to-be-read pile.

    Now, I’m bracing myself for the onslaught of comments from people who absolutely loved this book …

  • · ·

    Some early thoughts on Hot Mama … and books in general …

    4 Comments

    So, ARCs (advanced reading copies) of Hot Mama are currently going out to reviewers far and wide. (Nervous giggle.) I sent one of my ARCs to my pal, Edie, who blogs over at Magical Musings. Here’s what she thought about it:

    “I really like that you gave Fiona such a distinct personality, different from Carmen. You didn’t write the same characters with different names. And I want to be able to eat like her without gaining weight. Also, the fact that with every gift there’s a cost (I can’t remember the wording). Also, that it’s not “romancy.” The sex is hot but Fiona is hot. So you have hot sex without cliches. It’s really fresh and different — and fun! You’ve created a great world in Bigtime.”

    Pretty good, huh? :ww:

    Edie said a lot of nice things about the book, but mostly what caught my eye was the phrase not romancy. And I started thinking about the kind of books I like to read and write, and romance books in general.

    Romances often get a bad rep because people assume the love story is the whole point of the book — and that they’re just a series of sex scenes strung together. Well, that’s true in some cases. But in the vast, vast majority of romance books, the characters have more to deal with than the search for Mr. and Ms. Right. Problems at work. At home. Inner conflict and turmoil. Romance is only part of the story, part of the journey.

    I like the second kind of books the best, mainly because that’s how it is for people in real life. Sure, you might be drooling over your new, hot, ex-football player neighbor, but you’ve still got to get up and go to work every morning. Deal with your boss. Family. Pets. The woman across the street who wants the hot football player for herself (that shameless hussy!) 😈

    A couple of people have told me my books aren’t very romancy. There are probably a couple of reasons for this, the main one being I write in first person (most romances are third person, so you get the guy’s point of view too). But in my books, the focus is on the woman — and her journey to discover that makes her happy, strong, special.

    And I’m not writing shrinking violets. My women have gone to college. Have careers. Support themselves. They can be sweet or bitchy. Some are beautiful; some are not. Some have superpowers; some do not. Some are rich; some are not. They have hobbies, interests, obsessions. They might be looking for love, but it’s not the only thing they’ve got going on. I think that’s an important message to send — and how people are in real life.

    My books are also pretty different because they’re about superheroes, which most people think of as more of a guy’s genre. But mainly, I think my books are different because they’re just fun.

    Some reviewers and readers have ripped into me for not being more serious — about superheroes, about fantasy, about life in general. But I’m not trying to write the Great American Novel. I write the kind of fast-paced, fun, slightly implausible adventures I like to read and watch – James Bond, Buffy, Xena, The A-Team.

    This isn’t to say my books don’t have themes or deeper meanings. My heroines struggle with doing the right thing and coming to terms with their own personal demons. But I’m not going to beat you over the head with that kind of stuff for 350 pages. Angst gets old after a while, which is probably one of the reasons I’m not a huge Superman fan.

    So, does all this make my books romancy or not? I’ll leave that up to readers to decide. Romance, fantasy, comic books, whatever label you want to put on them is fine with me. All I want to do is entertain folks. Given the great response I got for Karma Girl, I think I’m pretty good at it. 😉

    What about you? Do you like romance books that are mostly about the romance? A 50-50 split? More action? Inquiring minds want to know …

  • 823 and counting …

    Finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

    There is so much stuff in this book that I will (very simply) summarize it by saying the book focues on Shadow, an ex-con who gets caught up in a war between the “old” gods (Odin, Easter, etc.) and the “new” American gods (Media, Technology, Credit Cards, etc.). It appears the new gods want to knock off the old folks, but nothing is really as it seems.

    Shadow takes a job working for Odin, and the two of them basically go from city to city, old god to old god, recruiting them for the upcoming war. There’s a lot of talk about blood and power and what sacrifices mean, interspersed with some stories about how immigrants brought the old gods to America simply by believing in them — and how those gods are all but forgotten.

    My significant other and I had a long discussion about this book. He absolutely loved it. I was a bit more ambivalent. My SO said Gaiman thinks differently from any other writer he’s read. I agree with him there. Gaiman sees the world in a unique way, which really flavors his writing.

    My main quibble is that there was too much of some things and not enough of others. Gaiman had some really wonderful descriptions (like comparing veins in a woman’s breast to those in blue cheese). But there are just so many dream sequences that meander here and there, they lose their impact after a while. Pages and pages go by, and nothing much seems to happen (except the dream sequences). I wanted him to pick up the pace.

    I also wanted to see more of the “new” gods. The book is called American Gods, but we really only get the perspective of the old folks.

    Gaiman also spends a lot of the book on characters that don’t seem to have anything to do with the main plot (the war between the gods). This really annoyed me until I got to the last 50 pages — and then he tied it all together with a big red bow in a clever twist I didn’t see coming at the end.

    I liked Gaiman’s short story collection, Fragile Things better, but American Gods is one of those books that will make you stretch your mind. And it’s always good to do that. 😀

    So, thumbs up.

    Up next: Lover Eternal by J.R. Ward.

    What about you? What are you reading now? Inquiring minds want to know …