Disclaimer: Jeaniene and I are BFF.

There are many Draculas but there is only one Vlad. Hehehehe.

Loved it. It reminded me of Halfway to the Grave in the best possible way: it has the same blend of action and intimacy. There is a lot of violence, but the focus is on Vlad and Leila. This book is like watching the leading couple lost in a kiss while things are blowing up all around them.

I really enjoyed it.

Tried reading another book in the genre and had to stop.  The hero was obviously a wish-fulfillment fantasy and it had a touch of Toby Keith flare for me.  Toby Keith gets on stage and gets all patriotic, “Yeeeaah, let’s go kick their asses.”  Toby Keith never served in the military.  Toby Keith never had to fish a fighter pilot’s helmet out of the bay with the pilot’s head still in it.  Toby Keith’s wife never had to deal with deployments and a horrible realization that a war started and your husband might die.   She never had friends come apart, because their spouse is in a thick of fighting, hasn’t called or emailed for a month, and his buddy came home in a coffin.  I remember one woman just started crying hysterically in the middle of an elementary school, and we had to very carefully get her out before the kids panicked. And an E8′s wife took her aside and read her the riot act.  You suck it up.  Your job is to hold it together.

Gordon was in when Toby Keith did his whole Chickenhawk song and dance.  The military spouses would sit together – we did a lot of bake sales to help the unit – and watch him on TV from across the hall and talk about how much we’d like to punch him in the mouth.

Anyway, I despise Toby Keith.

So back to the book: the author was never in the military, so his paramilitary outfit guys do some things that just go against the grain for me, like surrendering authority to a student during a lesson.  I got hung up on that and some other things.  I may come back to it.  Not a bad book, just not good right now book.

What was the last book you read and finished or not?

I thought we could take a week off. I said, please talk amongst yourself.

Haha!  Not so fast.

Ok we are ready for you to come back and talk to us…lol

Where are you?  You stopped posting…

I just want you to know that if something happened, we’re here for you.

Shiloh became concerned.

recovering?
hiding?
okay?

And the coup de grace

Are you dead?

We are not dead! We took a week off.  It’s called vacation.

So then we come back and load  a new theme.  The old one was creaking a bit under the strain of WordPress updates and those super long thumbnails kind of drove me nuts.  They look nice, but getting a new thumbnail image of at least 600px in width for every post proved to be too much work.

We load the new theme.  Oh noes!  We don’t like it.  Your paper stack isn’t perfectly stacked – it’s not meant to be, btw – and the sidebar is in the wrong spot and there is too much and not enough space in the comments, and fuss-fuss-fuss.  Cry-cry-cry.

If you don’t like change, just wait until you read the Edge 4.  We’re killing everybody.   You guys said there wasn’t enough angst in FATE’S EDGE.  :

:rolls up sleeves::

I’ll give you angst.  Just you wait.

On a more serious note, I’ve reloaded a different theme with the exact same images.  This one has a little more power under the hood.  The comment page link is now more clearly marked: it’s right where the comment number is.

Today will be the prep day – tomorrow we officially start on Edge 4, so today we need to get the synopsis down and the character descriptions.

And how was your week?

PS.  For people who asked: this theme is very slightly modified News Theme, which can be found here: http://themehybrid.com/themes

Test text:

“Andrea…”

“The next words out of your mouth better be work-related or I’ll drive to your office and shoot you in the gut.  Repeatedly.”

“Why in the gut?”

“Because it’s painful and not life threatening.”  He was a shapeshifter, he’d heal the bullet wounds.

He laughed.  He actually laughed at me on the phone.  My head was about to explode.

Mathia’s Gallery on Deviant Art: click here.

I am generally a very antisocial person.  Or at least I used to be.  I don’t really have speaking anxiety, for which I credit Russian education.  Over there, declarative reading, poetry and prose, is considered to be a talent and most Russian kids of my generation have recited poetry in class and often on stage.  If you can’t sing or play a musical instrument, you recite.

So, my social anxiety manifests itself in other ways.  A few days before an event, such as a formal dinner out or a signing, I start getting irritable and look for ways to weasel out of it. Strangely, I have no problems with going to dinner with friends or visiting to hang out and play cards.

I also get stressed out during the kids sleepovers, especially when our kids go somewhere else.

Apparently I’ve been cured of my anxiety.  We had four teenagers in the house for pretty much the entirety of the Christmas break.  Sometimes five.  I didn’t only survive, I actually didn’t put up any fights.  Sadly nobody offered to give me a Best Behavior medal.  I was pretty happy, actually, to have a bunch of kids over.  It seemed right for the holidays.

Birthday

This year both my father and Gordon’s aunt called me for my birthday.  My father always remembers it but doesn’t always call.  Gordon’s aunt never remembers it.  I usually get a card two months later, so I feel all special.

Gordon bought me The Relic, which is one of my favorite movies, Kid 2 bought me Gnomeo and Juliet (so I like anything even remotely Shakespearean, leave me alone), and Kid 1 gave me SWTOR, Star Wars The Old Republic Massive Multi-player Online Role-playing Game.  I promptly made a Sith warrior, Gordon made a Sith Inquisitor, so we could run around together, and we spent my birthday being evil.

Funnies

I was reading Shiloh Walker’s IF YOU HEAR HER – interesting romantic suspense, btw – and I got creeped out by the villain.  Usually I eat it up, but for some reason, I came to the part where there is a young woman who just got engaged and the villain grabbed her, and I just couldn’t take it that evening, which says volumes about Shiloh’s mastery of the creepy.  But anyway, here I was, in my bed with my Kindle Fire, looking for something to read.  Gordon is sick, so he had trouble sleeping and I wanted to stay awake out of solidarity.

I typed “something funny to read” into Google for the heck of it and came up with SPELLMAN FILES.  I read it in two nights and laughed hysterically into my pillow.

Here is my review from Goodreads.

A deeply hilarious book about Isabel Spellman, a PI in San Francisco, who works for her parents’ firm. The entire Spellman family is deeply weird but strangely functional. I loved it, the whole thing: the quirky anecdotes about the family, the list of ex-boyfriends, the younger sister addicted to surveillance.

One small warning: before you read this book, take the concept of plot, put it in a drawer in a closet, and don’t come back to it until you are done. It is a non-linear book, and it doesn’t have an ordinary crime-investigation-resolution progression. You just have to roll with it.

I really enjoyed it. As an aside, I really like Lisa Lutz’s website.  I can feel the redesign coming on.  :: listens to the screams of horror from the audience:: Aaaah, yes.  Your fear will make me stronger, for I am Sith, hahahahaha!

Well, I must work. 

Did you see where Tamora Pierce says she likes our books?

Okay, must work now.  But still Eeeeeee!    With all of the nice messages we received in the last 24 hours – I am not sure why, but we are loved - Head expanding and reaching stratosphere! Must do a really extra good job on this manuscript.  Thank you, Jennie!  Thank you , guys!

A gift is already free.  That’s because it’s a present.

Click me!

http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/X9PqqDeUq8flEtLb

So yesterday was a crazy day.  We dashed in just under the deadline on some additional things for GUNMETAL MAGIC, then we went to Best Buys to drop off the broken camera, then we went shopping and shopping, then we went to the grocery store, then we had to pick up the teenagers, then we went to dinner…  We finally went to bed at midnight and had to chase children out of our bedroom because that’s where they decided to wrap the gifts.

I do not want to go anywhere anymore.  I am going to sit on my butt right here.  I am going to finish things and start on GUNMETAL edits.

Oh, I have to show you the awesome thingie Shiloh Walker sent me for Christmas!

How about them apples?  I will be the slow cooking queen of everything.

Did you know you can make chocolate cake in the slow cooker?  I didn’t know that either.

Speaking of cooking, I get the Food Network’s food magazine, and someone snagged the dessert recipe booklet from it.  It really irritated me for some odd reason.  It’s not like I would ever make the kiwi jellies, but I got really annoyed there for a couple of minutes, mostly because I kept flipping the pages trying to figure out where the recipes from the pictures went.

Clearly the holidays are getting to me. 

So how are your Christmas preparations going?

Our editor, the incomparable Anne Sowards, gave us a green light for a project. To find out more, check the blog on Christmas day.

Goodreads peeps, you must check the actual blog on December 25th,not just the Goodreads feed.  Here is a link: http://www.ilona-andrews.com/blog/

Me: Because books are part of our cultural heritage and education and your father and I want you to have a well rounded education.

Gordon: We want to talk to you about books, but all you read is true crime.

Kid 1: But it’s fiction.  It’s made-up.  It’s not good.

Me: How can you make that judgement without trying anything else besides true crime? Pick a book, read 50 pages.

Kid 1, eyes lighting up with evil fire: Then I will read your book.

Me: Grrrr.

Kid 1: I will read Magic Bites.

Me: It’s not a good book.

Kid 1: But it’s the first one.  I have to start at the beginning.

Me: Grrrr.

***

Kid 1 reading:  I don’t get this.  She is talking to a vampire.

Me: She is talking to a navigator.  Vampires are mindless.  There are people who control them with their minds. They are navigators.

Kid 1: Why doesn’t she just kill the vampire?

Me:…..

***

Kid 1:  Who is Greg?

Me: He’s her guardian.

Kid 1: Does she have some sort of feelings for him?

Gordon cracking up in the background.

Me: It’s complicated.  She has problems with authority and she doesn’t want to do what he says but at the same time she respects him and is grateful because he takes care of her and he doesn’t have to.

***

Kid 1: What’s a girdle?

Gordon: it’s a tight piece of cloth overweight people wear to appear thinner.  No, you can’t have one.

Kid 1: Hehehehe, Oklahoma cowboys…

***

Kid 2 wanders into the room.

Kid 1:  What is these words? Is this a language?

Gordon: No. They are made up.

Kid 1: Sounds Arabic. So you have people running around and wrecking things with Arabic words?

Gordon in a thick, thick mountain accent: Oh no, your momma is going to be put on the terrorist list because of them foreign words.

Kid 1 and Kid 2 collapsing on the floor with laughter.

Me: You guys suck.

***

Kid 1, falling down dramatically: There! I have read fifty pages!

Me, sigh: Yes, and it almost killed you.

Kid 1: So why don’t you like this book?

Me: Because we didn’t have much experience when we wrote it.

Kid 1: It’s okay, mom. I am proud of everything you write.  Except if it’s porn.