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

Yesterday, I noticed the new Karen Ranney, An Unlikely Governess, is already out. SWEET! Then when I tried to pay for it, I realized I’d accidentally left my wallet at work. NOT SO SWEET! I had to drive back to the office to retrieve it, and then traffic ended up sucking a lot of unwashed monkey ass, and yeah. No Ranney yet, but I’ll hopefully remedy that tonight.

And then in early March, Loretta Chase’s Lord Perfect and Lisa Kleypas’ Devil in Winter are coming out. Yay yay yay yay yay yay YAY!

Speaking of Loretta Chase, they’ve recently re-released The Lion’s Daughter. Most people don’t seem to like it, but me? I LOVE it, especially the somewhat squickish aspects of Varian feeling attracted to Esme-in-drag--but then I love me some sexual ambiguity. It was the book that started me on the long, dark path to Loretta Chase fangirl-dom.

Note that the cover is only a marginal improvement on the original jheri-curled mullet hideousness. This book is just fucked when it comes to covers, I tells ye.

Another book I need to get my mitts on is Shana Abe’s The Smoke Thief. It came out last year, and I keep spacing it out every time I go to the bookstore.

And as I’ve squealed about already, I’m just about peeing my pants in anticipation of the upcoming Jennifer Crusie/Bob Mayer collaboration, Don’t Look Down. Sarah will probably be able to hear my happy shrieks all the way in New Jersey once I get my mitts on that book on April 4.

Now, if only some fool publisher would buy Laura Kinsale’s new book already and put me out of my misery, this will be a banner year for new books.

Oh, bundle of joy? More like, oh holy crap what is this drivel? We present the first of a two-part series looking at some horrid reader-submitted secret baby and baby-daddy romances. Are you excited? I am. I had to put Freebird in the other room so his fragile little mind would not be warped by any of this crappe.

Sarah: By virtue of spending a lot of time with a newborn, I have slowly improved on my ability to guess how old a baby is. And this man, he is scoring with more than one woman, because those kids are not the same age, and yet they appear close enough in age that they couldn’t have been born by the same person. I don’t know what kind of design we had for daddykins, but I think it involved more than one designing woman, if you know what I mean.

Either that, or they are fraternal twins, and the one hanging off the front is bogarting the boob in a big, big way.

Candy: Sorry. Can’t snark. Am too occupied by the incredibly disturbing implications of printing “WHO’S THE DADDY?” on a bent-over baby’s ass.

Sarah: Oh Lord. It’s never too early to teach your molestation skills, given that the little boy is totally trying to grope the girl. And both parents are like, “Aw, isn’t that sweet?” Jeez. Add that image to the title and you’ve got a Sarah with a major case of the skeevies.

Candy: Man, years of being on the Internet have given me entirely different perspective of what “Papa Bear” means.

I’m creeped out by the way the mama bear’s holding on to the little girl. “No, hon, you’re not done until Papa Bear is done.” Smile smile smile.

Ugh. I need a Silkwood shower.

Sarah: Act now and we’ll DOUBLE your order! You’ll not only get a Rent-a-Dad but you’ll get a PLASTIC ALIEN Rent-a-Dad! We’ll graft a head onto an alien’s body - because aliens don’t need sleep! All the better for you!

Candy: Why are there so many strange half-naked men toting babies on the covers of these sorts of books? To add insult to injury, these half-naked men look like they’re about to drop the goddamn baby. Does Harlequin have a shirtless-dumbasses-playing-basketball-with-caved-in-baby-skulls fetish?

Sarah: “Dude. I don’t know who the hell you are, and I don’t know which of us has on a more stupid-looking head accessory, but I do know this: you have bad breath. It seems you are the last stubborn cowboy who refuses to accept the benefits of good oral hygiene.”

Candy: This particular alien surrogate dad is about to EAT THE BABY’S FACE. Just you wait: his smiling face is going to split any second, revealing that freaky second-head-with-pointy-teeth thing like the xenomorph in Alien. Kids know, man. Kids know.

I cannot believe I am asking for help on a computer problem, but I’m going in circles and cannot figure out what my problem is:

I have a BUNCH of PDF eBooks that people have sent me. I also have a Treo 600, and I can sync it to my Apple PowerBook, or to Hubby’s PC. But I cannot get a PDF reader onto the Treo so I can READ the freaking eBooks! I have loaded the PDFs themselves onto an SD card, and yet I can’t get a reader onto the Treo to open them.

I’ve tried Adobe Reader for Palm: when I install it via the Mac, it doesn’t see the PDFs on the SD card. When I try to install on the PC, I run the .exe file and get… nothing. Not even a file to install on the Treo.

I’ve also tried PalmPDFReader, I think it’s called, and every freaking time it said, “Oh, I can’t find my fonts!” Well, I can’t install your freaking fonts either! GAAAAH!

So - anyone have any suggestions as to what program I should install and use to read the nice files I have to entertain me? HELP! 

Sarah posted this survey a while back, and work has finally slowed down a little, so what better way to squander it than to write about my best and worst reads of 2005?

Best author you discovered this year (Ok, you can name up to 3)

Without a question, Emma Holly. Her books are consistently entertaining and hottttttt OMG so hot.

Oh, and Frank Miller. Still lusting after the Sin City Library volumes I and II.

Best new book you read this year (again, top 3)

Mr. Impossible, because I’m a hopeless Loretta Chase fangirl, and Rupert is so adorable. Also, Angel Seeker and the Sin City series, though I’m not sure they count because they weren’t published in 2005. And I’m POSITIVE Slaughterhouse 5 doesn’t qualify for this category, though it was easily the best book I’d read all year.

Book you wish you’d skipped over and spent that $9 on a pair of Payless shoes instead.

Such an embarrassment of riches, but I’ll go with the book I actually paid for and select the shitstorm that is Rainbow Party.

Book off your keeper shelf most likely to be re-read in 2006

Anything Kinsale, Holly or Gaffney.

What book coming out in 2006 are you most looking forward to?

Without a fucking doubt: Don’t Look Down by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer. I’m not sure how I’m going to survive till April 4. How many shaved gerbils do I need to sacrifice to get an ARC of that, d’you think?

AND WHEN IS LAURA KINSALE’S NEW BOOK COMING OUT? WAH!

Best cover?

I’m blanking on this, probably because I’m a bitter bitch who notices and remembers horrible things more readily than good things.

Worst Cover?

Argh. Take your pick.

I’m coming in late to this (work: KICKING MY ASS; the mess in my apartment: KICKING MY ASS; life in general: KICKING MY FUCKING ASS) and am jumping in the fray only because an alert reader very kindly *snort* provided us with linkage, but in case you’re a blind or somehow incapacitated and completely unable to do your blog rounds: Angie managed to blow things up quite nicely yesterday on RTB with her article about credible reviews, and Karen Scott picked up the torch, and MaryJanice Davidson provided some hilarious commentary, even if I said “bitch, please!” more than once while reading what she had to write. Which really isn’t too different from how I am when I’m reading her books, heh.

Y’all know how I feel about reviews, reviewing and authors who think readers aren’t qualified to review. If you feel any doubts, then check out this little bit of mouth-frothing from days of yore. (Tangent: Smart Bitches is almost a year old. What the fuck, y’all?)

I only have one more thing to throw into the discussion, and it’s probably nothing particularly new (I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t read all the comments in all the threads about this issue): Authors who snip and snipe about how readers just aren’t qualified to review a book because they don’t know what it’s like to give birth to precious, precious babies all by their little selfses survive the rigors of the publishing process love to draw similes to professions like medicine, law, engineering and the hard sciences. Look, no schlub off the street is qualified to critique, say, a research paper on quantum mechanics. And that’s a perfectly valid point. Y’all need to be certified to do that shit. The implication is: the average reader’s view is invalid, and only authors can know another author’s pain and be qualified to provide commentary on a published novel.

Oh, you know what I’m gonna say next: BITCH, PLEASE. What I want to know is: how many published authors--especially authors who write genre fiction--have advanced degrees in, say, English, Linguistics or Fine Arts? If these standards are to be accepted as logical, then off the top of my head, Sara Donati is allowed to review books and THE REST OF US (myself definitely included) need to sit down and shut the fuck up.

Here’s the terrifying part that authors hate, just hate to own up to: you really don’t need any special qualifications to get a novel published, much less write one. I’m not saying it’s easy--it’s patently not. But unlike a doctor, or an accountant, or an engineer, you don’t need any sort of professional certification to be recognized as an author. People who have successfully published books--massively bestselling books, even--have come from all over the economic, education and class spectrum: high-school drop-outs, college professors, single moms scribbling story ideas on the backs of napkins, teenagers, ex-cops, accountants, bored English majors. Shit, if books like The Lighthouse Keeper are any indication, you don’t even need to be particularly literate to write a novel that’s consquently slobbered over by readers like a 10-year-old boy at a NAMBLA meeting. And experiments like Naked Came the Stranger have proved that crap, well, sells.

So on one hand: Kudos for being published.

But on the other hand: Your masterpiece is sharing that honor with books like Desire’s Blossom and To Tame a Renegade.

And one last thing: I’m also amused by the people who are swearing off MaryJanice Davidson because of her views. My personal opinion is, yeah, she’s being an asshole, but she’s a funny asshole, and that’s some hard, hard shit to pull off. I can sympathize with the urge, but hell, if I swore off asshole authors entirely, my list of authors I could read would be very slim indeed, and frankly, I’m too selfish for that because I’m such a book whore--I like ‘em big, I like a LOT of them, and often several different ones at the same time. There’s only one reason I no longer bother to read anything MJD releases, and that’s because I’ve decided her recent books have sucked a lot of ass, even though I enjoy her distinctive, snarky voice.

Freebird has a bad, bad cold, so instead of being outside enjoying the 60-degree January we here on the east coast are experiencing, I’m inside with snuffles the napping man.

But it’s ok. I have Food TV.

And I have to say: “The Essence of Emeril?” Sounds like an erotica publication. 

Sarah: “Look, you’ve stolen time, the sun, possibly the space-time continuum AND the flux capacitor. But you may NOT HAVE MY SHIRT, BUB!”

Candy: Dude, he’s totally going to reach into her chest and rip out her implants and run away screeching with delight because NOW HE WILL HAVE THE BIGGEST MAN-TITTIES OF ALL, YES HE WILL PRECIOUSSSSSSS. And she knows it, too, but she’s a romance novel heroine, so all she can do is sit there and gaze, limpid-eyed into the distance, and quiver gently.

Sarah: That dude above needs to give THIS chick the shirt. I think it’s a chick anyway. It might be a man with cantaloupes glued to his chest. I’m not entirely sure.

Candy: Whoa. I think I might’ve seen this chick on the cover of the “Midgets Who Love Getting Fucked in the Ass By Chicks” porn DVD.

In any case, that is one of the scariest beckoning fingers I have ever seen. RUN, MOTHERFUCKER, RUN.

Sarah: Can someone tell me why he has skunk hair? And why long flowing hair that looks like one mess of tangles is supposed to be the essential image of romance?

I mean, Candy and I just experienced Caribbean Splendor, and if our hair looked like that, I’d be alarmed.

Not to mention her fingers are broken or twisted. Ouch. She must have been trying to comb that hair.

Candy: The amount of L’Oreal Féria required to dye that chippy’s hair boggles the mind. She must buy them in gallon tubs at Costco or summat.

And good call on the finger thing, Sarah. Dude has a total fetish for the knobbly feel of broken fingers scraping across his chest.

(Tangent: MAN, I need to try and get a screencap off that one episode of Sealab 2021 in which Captain Murphy goes all nuts and institutes Martian Law and dubs Marco “Sir Phobos, Beater of Ass” and then proceeds to beat the shit out of Sparks’ fingers, because Sparks’ fingers? Look about as fucked-up as that chick’s does.)

Sarah: Here is my unanswered prayer: NO MORE CROTCH SHOTS. A crotch on the cover does not say romance any more than long hair. The crotch? It says, “Hello. I am a groin.”

Candy: Nothing says true love like heads superimposed on crotches, unless it’s heads superimposed on crotches in an effort to hide the massive wet spot.

This book, it is bad.

So bad, it will induce you to commit violence against your ancestors.

I am going to write this review based on the ten or so pages I read. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t even take it out of the library. I made no effort to choose this book. It was on the shelf in the bathroom of the rental house in St. John, and I figured I’d give it a shot.

I didn’t bother to meet the hero. I am not even sure about the origin and meaning of the scrolls referred to in the title. But the heroine? And the precociously annoying little girl?

It’s a new Smart Bitch category, I think: “Slap-Your-Grandma’s-Grandma Bad.”

Don’t you love when you check into a rental house or a vacation spot and you see that people have left paperbacks from their vacations for you to read? I had a grand time in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and now St. John, partially due to other people’s generosity in leaving paperbacks for me to read.

The house we rented in St. John had paperbacks on shelves - IN THE BATHROOM next to the TOILET. WOW.

And, much to Hubby’s disappointment, there were mostly romances. Including a Stephanie Laurens, which I read, and a Linda Howard.

You should have heard me the first day: “There is a LINDA HOWARD in the BATHROOM.”

Hubby: “Huh?”

Sarah: “Oh my God! ... Oh, SHIT.”

Hubby: “What? What’s wrong?”

Sarah: “It’s a TIME TRAVEL Linda Howard!”

It was a few hours before I went back in the bathroom. I was afraid I’d start reading it and end up hurting myself when I pounded my head on the wall - it was a solidly-built house. I think I ultimately moved it to my inlaw’s room and hoped I wouldn’t find my mother-in-law reading it. I figured I shouldn’t take any chances, in case it was like that movie that will kill you, only in paperback form.

I hereby declare St. John, USVI, to be the tropical home of the Smart Bitches. St. Croix, I am sure, is nice. St. Thomas, though crowded (and listen to me, who works alongside 9 million people, calling St. Thomas, population 48,000 “crowded") is quite spiffy as well.

But St. John?

There are the following Smart Bitch locations, and I am not making any of these up:

Chocolate Hole

Booby Rock

Johnson Bay

Ram Hill

Ram Head

So how could I not declare this island to be the tropical home of the Smart Bitchery? Now to find a property big enough to hold all our books and our collective brilliance.

I am back and in full effect, yo. I have:

• The sidebar to update
• Regency Recommendations to format
• A rant to write
• A couple of ads to design--to all of you who’ve inquired, sorry for the incredibly slow response time, but I’ll git on it and git ‘er done ASAP
• Four books to review
• Hundreds of e-mail messages to browse through, surprisingly few of which are asking me whether I want to satisfy my woman with a larger penis
• Eleventy four bamillion comments to read
• Twice as many blogs to catch up with
• So many new mosquito bites on my legs, arms and face, my little girl brain can’t even handle the math required to count that high
• And a partridge in a pear tree.

Hey, anyone want to see a video of me feeding a pig a beer on St. Croix? It’s delicious and deliciously surreal.

I will confess: I am totally fascinated by writers who write longer than a single blog entry. My word limit is about 250-300. A 250-300 page document?! Oh hell no. Brain short… no words left...all done.

So - writers, editors, publishing dudes, what’s your writing resolution this year?

This New Year’s Edition of Covers Gone Wild visits the popular themes this year: man-titty, bad poser covers, bestiality and classic clinchy awfulness.

Candy: Sweetie, here’s a hint for you: that half mask? Ain’t doing shit. You need more coverage--say, from forehead all the way to chin, perhaps even neck--if you’re really trying to hide all that fug.

Sarah: That is one big zit he has on his lip. I’d have hidden the lower half, rather than the upper half.

I’m not sure what the goal is here: he’s not fascinating in a sexy, dangerous sort of way. He looks more like those Capital One commercial vikings who come after your credit balances.

Candy: Look! An innovative way to clean out your ear canal! Press up against the groin of a shiny, be-titted, blond-haired alien, and his specially enhanced pen0r will dig out years of accumulated wax. You think he’s some kind of intergalactic warrior, but no, he’s a selfless, far-future otolaryngologist.

Sarah: Is he giving birth? Did he just crap a heroine? Is she hiding from the blazing sun of Gutron under the safe shade of his galactic man-titty?

Or is he hiding the wet spot in her hair?

Candy: “What are you going to fuck today, Napoleon?”

“Whatever feel like I want to fuck. Gawd!”

Sarah: Nice body paint. But seriously, I bet it’ll give her a monster of a yeast infection.

Wait, maybe that’s who he is: Yeast Infection Man.

Candy: Dammit, how do these cover artists know that my wildest dreams involve a corpse with testicular elephantitis wearing a scabies-infested robe and slinging his gear in an electric blue speedo? Damn. They’re psychic, PSYCHIC, I tells ye.

Sarah: Wow, that’s totally my wildest dream, too. I mean, especially the part where his robe looks like he’s taking a wildly huge piss on the ground.

Let there never be chest hair or speedo sacks in the CG cover world in 2006, k? That should be the art department’s resolution right there.

Candy: I do believe we have a winnah for our ongoing man-titty competition, ladies and gents. I really like his thoughtful pose. What is he pondering? Whether his saline implants are going to rupture? Whether his tits are firmer and bouncier than Pamela Anderson’s? What it sounds like when doves cry?

Sarah: I will tell you what I think. Just like when I see the perfect orbs at the nude beach casting perfect round shadows on the ground: Those are NOT real.