Alison Kent's Blah Blog

Small town contemporary romances are all the rage. I’m not sure if we have Robyn Carr to thank for that, with her Virgin River series, or Susan Wiggs, with her Lakeshore Chronicles, or Debbie Macomber, with Blossom Street and Cedar Cove. Maybe Jan Karon started it all with Mitford.

Or maybe readers are responsible, ready for quiet streets without otherworldly creatures lurking in alleyways, allowing for Emilie Richards‘ Happiness Key, and Toni Blake’s Destiny, and Carly Phillips’ Serendipity, and JoAnn Ross’ Shelter Bay.

Though my gIRL-gEAR series was set in Houston, I think the group of books had a similar close-knit community feel because the characters were great friends and shared the goings-on in their lives. There were in-jokes and inside references, but nothing to put off a reader who hadn’t read the whole series. To readers who had, those easter eggs were great fun as they added another layer of involvement.

I have three small town ideas in the works. One I’ve set aside and will eventually turn into a single book that’s more women’s fiction than romance. Another is an erotic romance series that I haven’t decided what to do with. Both of those towns have names. The third I’m actively working on now does not.

This is where you, dear readers, come in. I’d love to hear your suggestions. The series will involve carpentry and crafts, cooking and caves and country music. There will be dogs and merino sheep and big Victorian houses. The setting is the Texas Hill Country. Think New Braunfels and the Guadalupe River and Austin and Gruene.

So put your brains to work and see what you can come up with. There’s no guarantee I will use what is offered, but I will mention you in the acknowledgments of the book I’m working on now if I do. (Notice how I assume this will sell, heh.)

And to make this more fun, I’ll give away to a random commenter his/her choice of 3 of my backlist books (subject to availability). I’ll choose the winner on Monday, July 5, 2010, at 9:00 a.m. CDT. (Feel free to share the link to this post. I’d love lots and lots of suggestions!)

Originally posted May 13, 2009

Today at Paperback Writer, Lynn Viehl is talking about poetry and Sage Cohen’s book WRITING THE LIFE POETIC. I know next to nothing about poetry, not about iambic pentameter or modernist and post-modernist, though I do love me a good Haiku and for awhile was Twittering in Haiku form. That said, PBW’s post reminded me of my discovery of Kim Addonizio. Her work is gritty and raw and real, and it’s the same tone that I find in many of my favorite fiction authors, where prettiness isn’t used to cover up the truth, but potent words are used to convey it.

Since I’m such a blogging failure these days, I thought I’d share a couple of her poems that are available online at Poets.org and PoemHunter.com, and urge you to check her out. (Disclaimer: The poems aren’t necessarily included in the covers of the volumes shown. I just grabbed those for illustration purposes.)

You Don’t Know What Love Is

You Don’t Know What Love Is
but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up
with an ache she can’t locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

What Do Women Want

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

When New York University sophomore Megan Gunther finds personal threats posted to a Web site specializing in campus gossip, she’s taken aback by their menacing tone. Someone knows her daily routine down to the minute and is watching her — but thanks to the anonymity provided by the Internet, the police tell her there’s nothing they can do. Her friends are sure it’s someone’s idea of a joke, but when Megan is murdered in a vicious attack, NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher is convinced that the online threats are more than just empty words.

With smooth, straight-talking partner J. J. Rogan at her side, Ellie tries to identify Megan’s enemies, but she begins to wonder if the coed’s murder was more than just the culmination of a cyber obsession. Phone records reveal a link between Megan and a murdered real estate agent who was living a dangerous double life. The detectives also learn that the dead real estate agent shared a secret connection to a celebrity mogul whose bodyguard was mysteriously killed a few months earlier. And when Megan’s roommate suddenly disappears, they know they have to find her before another young woman dies.

212 is steeped in the details of the crossroads between technology and prurience and proves once again that Alafair Burke “knows when and how to drop clues to keep readers at her mercy.”

A funny story about 212. I had Angel’s Tip (the 2nd in the Ellie Hatcher series) on my bookshelf, but ran across this one (the third) and loved the description so downloaded it. I never do that. I always read a series from the beginning, but broke my rule this time. I hadn’t yet read it when I streamed through Netflix the movie In the Electric Mist which is based on James Lee Burke’s novel In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. In the movie, Dave Robicheaux, Burke’s long running character, is talking to his daughter Alafair. And I was like, wait a minute. Alafair? Burke? I thought the author Alafair Burke had coined the name as a tribute, when in fact she is his daughter, heh. I can be so thick sometimes.

Anyhow, I liked this one a lot. There are multiple plots, well-layered, and tied together nicely at the end. I love thrillers and suspense novels that do that. I also really enjoyed Burke’s obvious familiarity with NYC. It’s so easy to tell when an author is intimately at home with her book’s setting. There are small bits and pieces one picks up when living in a city that no amount of research will ever reveal.

Ellie Hatcher and J.J. Rogan are great together as partners. They rank up there with Jack Kersley’s Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, and Tana French’s Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox. I love love love good detective teams, especially when they butt heads (as all these teams do). As with Coben’s Caught, in 212, Burke pulls no punches. Bad stuff happens, but every bit of it serves the story. I can recommend this one without any reservations. Good stuff.

17 year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, captain of the lacrosse team, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her. Which is why, when her mother wakes one morning to find that Haley never came home the night before, and three months quickly pass without word from the girl, the community assumes the worst.

Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission, to identify and bring down sexual predators via elaborate—and nationally televised—sting operations. Working with local police on her news program Caught in the Act, Wendy and her team have publicly shamed dozens of men by the time she encounters her latest target. Dan Mercer is a social worker known as a friend to troubled teens, but his story soon becomes more complicated than Wendy could have imagined.

In a novel that challenges as much as it thrills, filled with the astonishing tension and unseen suburban machinations that have become Coben’s trademark, Caught tells the story of a missing girl, the community stunned by her loss, the predator who may have taken her, and the reporter who suddenly realizes she can’t trust her own instincts about this case—or the motives of the people around her.

I read this one following SWAN SONG. I’ve read everything of Coben’s except his Myron Bolitar series, but I’m a total fan of his standalone thrillers. What I love about Coben is that he never fails to deliver an ending twist. My favorite of his books is JUST ONE LOOK, because I never saw the twist coming (and I’m hoping I’m thinking of the right one; I’m terrible at remember plots). CAUGHT was typical Coben – ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, many many cultural references to ground the reader in the here and now, and a plot, if not ripped from the headlines, that is totally contemporary.

I have to say I knew the twist to this one early, just not how it was going to play out. And since I really HATE the Dateline To Catch a Predator shows, I went into this story with a bit of trepidation, and that same Dateline hatred is probably why this wasn’t a favorite for me. I will say Coben pulls no punches and happy outcomes to criminal investigations are not guaranteed. His endings, though, are some of the best ever. I’ve always wanted to know if he plots backwards to get to that perfect resolution. Good stuff, and definitely recommended; not everyone shares my To Catch a Predator loathing. *g*

On the edge of a barren Kansas landscape, an ex-wrestler called Black Frankenstein hears the cry…”Protect the Child!”—In the wasteland of New York City, a bag lady clutches a strange glass ring and feels magic coursing through her—Within an Idaho mountain, a survivalist compound lies in ruins, and a young boy learns how to kill.

In a wasteland born of nuclear rage, in a world of mutant animals and marauding armies, the last people on earth are now the first. Three bands of survivors journey toward destiny—drawn into the final struggle between annihilation and life!

They have survived the unsurvivable. Now the ultimate terror begins.

My first Robert McCammon book was THE WOLF’S HOUR. When I reached the end, I was thinking what a great Spielberg finale it had and how much I’d love to see it onscreen. (I actually thought the same of Dan Brown’s ANGELS & DEMONS, which I read years before THE DAVINCI CODE was ever written.) If you love werewolves – real horrific werewolves, not romance werewolves *g* – hunt this one down now.

My second McCammon was BOY’S LIFE, one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. My third was GONE SOUTH, which was creepy good and weird. McCammon does creepy good and weird really, really well.

I don’t know why I never got around to SWAN SONG. I bought it, my son read it, and I know I started it. I think the first chapter dragged for me then, as it did for me now, but this time I was determined to stick with it. (I read it right after finishing up THE ICING ON THE CAKE, as I needed a break from sweet cupcakes!) Once past that, I barely put it down to sleep. In trade, it’s 864 pages long, but I read it on my iPod Touch with the Kindle app. Can’t even imagine how many page turns I made, but it was worth every one. I love books with multiple ongoing stories that converge at the end, and this one did not let me down.

SWAN SONG does feel a bit dated, the plot taking place in the devastating aftermath of a US / Soviet nuclear war. But settling into that mindset didn’t take long at all. I will say McCammon’s point of view flips make me nuts, but that’s the case with anyone’s point of view flips. He can also wax poetic with too long descriptions (::raising hand, guilty of same::), but the story of Swan (the Child), Josh (the Black Frankenstein), Sister (the bag lady) and the others is so compelling, I read every word.

The fact that the “good guys” have to face physical bad guys as well as unexplainable evil forces keeps the reader rooting for them to the very end. There are many many poignant scenes (loved Swan and the apple tree and the corn) but those are balanced by much grit and gore and spookiness. Bottom line, McCammon is an incredible storyteller. There’s a reason this book is still in print twenty-five years later. I loved it!

So . . . I haven’t been around much lately, though I’m sure I don’t have to point that out. After getting THE ICING ON THE CAKE written and turned in mid-April, I had revisions and page proofs and copy edits and two other rounds of questions / corrections to do. I’m really impressed by how thorough my editor and the HCI team have been. I believe there will be an article on the TRUE VOWS line in an upcoming issue of RT (we all answered some questions recently, so I’m assuming it’s in the works) that will offer more behind the scenes info on the imprint. The very cool news is that the release date has been changed, and the books will ship August 9th. Not sure what that means in terms of getting them into your stores, but they will be in Target and CVS, so yay! Also, new books for the spring are in the works, so it’s going to be great fun to see new faces announced and joining the TRUE VOWS team!

Since April, I’ve been doing a lot of reading – well, a lot of reading for me, and most of it ebooks (!), so I thought I’d at least do some mini reviews to give you some content!

Here’s a bit of foreign cover fun. Went hunting these down when I saw Thai advances on my recent Brava royalty statement. Not sure these looks quite convey what’s on the inside of the book (were there butterflies in The Bane Affair?), but then again. Who knows what’s on the inside since I don’t have copies to check and wouldn’t be able to read them even if I did. I love foreign covers. It’s such fun to see how a particular culture portrays the sense of a story. You can click the covers to see the publisher’s pages for both.

The winner of the THE ICING ON THE CAKE ARC is:

Christi Brown

Congratulations, Christi! Hope you enjoy Todd and Michelle’s story!