Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Did y’all hear that sound, about an hour ago?

Seriously, that huge, vortex of sound, maybe at about 5:30 EDT?

That was the sound of Sarah being SUCKED IN to the depths of To Love and to Cherish by Patricia Gaffney. I was hooked on page 4! I am unable to think of doing anything else but reading this book. DAMN. That’s got to be some kind of record.

Now I shall be hidden in our bedroom in complete silence torn between rushing through and savoring each and every word.

Do not be alarmed if you hear that noise again. It was only good reading. 

Candy and I are agog with the knowledge that we are a few hundred hits away from 10,000 visitors - a huge figure for a site that is just about 4 months old.

So! We have decided to launch a small contest, because we are Smart Bitches, after all!

The first person to send or a screencapture of the StatCounter at the bottom of the page registering you as the 10,000th visitor will win a $10 Amazon.Com gift certificate, and a chance to be a Guest Bitch reviewer.

Yes, that’s right, you’ll have almost enough to purchase your own romantic fiction novel (can you believe some of the prices these days?! It’s like gasoline, only with explicit sex!) AND you’ll get to review a romance of your choosing as a Guest Bitch reviewer. So start hitting reload like the obsessive-compulsive creatures we know you are. Good luck!

Update: Business as usual now, our fake front page has been moved to its own folder for posterity. Link is below, and feel free to bookmark it and enjoy the adorable bunnies as necessary.

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Hope you enjoyed the bunnilicous new front page. For those of you who missed it because you got here via a bookmark or some other link that didn’t direct you to the home page, you can see the diabetes-inducing horror here. Click on any of the bunny photos to get back to the blog.

I just tried to go to Longmire to check out the reader submissions page because I wrote to him about Dude, Where’s My Deodorant and he said he was going to add it to the collection, and I discovered that the whole site is no longer there.

Did we crazy romance readers just Slashdot the poor fool? OK, if we did, it was a slow Slashdot, and it was almost definitely spread over several different epicenters, but still. Anyone know what happened to the site?

I’m going to check my cache to see if I can at least retrieve Scottie McMullet....

The results for the AAR reader awards are in. I am so pleased to see Jennifer Crusie sweeping the votes this year because Bet Me is truly excellent, and of course it had to win Best Romance of 2004 because both Sarah and I loved it and as you probably have gathered, our taste is fantastic and impeccable so you should always allow us to gently guide you through the treacherous, crowded harbors of Romance Novel-dom like those cool-ass pilot boats you sometimes read about in old adventure books like The Count of Monte Cristo. (Woo damn that is one FIERCE run-on sentence.) Anyway, Crusie is on my short list of “Romance Authors Who Deserve Awesome Oral Sex While Being Fed Chocolate-Dipped Strawberries By A Shirtless Andy Roddick Into Perpetuity” for doing the following:

• Creating believable, awesome and multi-dimensional gay secondary characters, as in Charlie All Night and Bet Me
• Tackling controversial, divisive issues like marijuana legalization in a thoughtful manner (again, Charlie All Night)
• Creating adorable heroes who aren’t billionaire tycoons or billionaire tycoon wannabes, but who aren’t useless slacker asswads either (Manhunting and Anyone But You)
• Actually making a Republican sexy (Strange Bedpersons)
• Always having awesome animal sidekicks who make me laugh and remind me of dogs and cats I’ve known
• Creating heroines over 30 who don’t act like hysterical morons because they don’t have a precious, precious baby to smother in the maternal love that’s oozing out of their pores like some type of greasy post-fried-chicken-dinner discharge--in fact, some of her protagonists don’t ever want to have kids (Anyone But You and Bet Me)

And she wrote about all these things in category romances. CATEGORY ROMANCES. I mean, they’re not exactly bastions of progressiveness or innovation, what with books that often go something like The Virgin Mistress Secretary’s Secret Cowboy Baby.

A big shock while reading the awards list was finding out that The Real Deal won Worst Read. Apparently other people found Simon’s gunmetal gaze and Amanda’s endless whingeing about her hideously deformed (read: hugely be-hootered yet still underweight) body annoying too. What did I say about our taste being impeccable? Yeah, that’s right. Just call me Captain Candy.