Road Trip Wednesday – Best Book of October ’10

Time for another Road Trip Wednesday, sponsored by YA Highway.  This week’s theme is Best Book of the Month – October.

Fortunately for this month’s winner, I apparently finished Paranormalcy at the end of September.  I read some good books this month, trying to stay Halloween-themed, but only one had me really hooked.  That was Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins.  This was a big surprise for me.

The book seemed kind of fluffy when I looked at it, but I just kept looking.  So finally I previewed it on my Kindle.  I was having fun, so I bought the full thing.  As usual I was reading five things at once, but when I stopped to focus on Hex Hall, I got hooked really easily.

Which made it really too bad when I dropped the Kindle and killed it at chapter 8.  The screen was all black with some white lines through it, and the casing was open at the corner.  I didn’t know if Amazon was going to replace it or not, so I thought that it was possible I was never going to get to finish this book.

Luckily, the Kindle was replaced quickly, and the first thing I pulled out of the archive on the new one was this book.

I wouldn’t say that Hex Hall was the most intelligent read or anything, but I had a lot of fun reading it, and since a lot of fantasy has me rolling my eyes instead of just enjoying it, that’s a real plus.

My favorite thing was probably the best friend.  A vamp who wasn’t too angsty (except when she was falsely accused of killing people, and even then she was better than many vamps with consciences), liked hot pink, was a lesbian, and basically seemed as normal a best friend as any vampire ever was.  Also, I felt the romance was well built up.  Not as adorable as Paranormalcy by a long shot, but it was nice to see that they were being forced to spend a lot of time getting to know each other before they moved from lust-hate to potential romance.

Sadly, none of my pre-Halloween reading has really scared me.  I was looking for that one book that would bring the magical creepiness that reading scary books as a kid created, but nothing delivered

As for the next month’s RTW, we’ll see what happens in November.  NaNo doesn’t leave much reading time, so I don’t know how many I’ll read in November.

Currently on iPod: Under Your Spell from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Lots of love,

Sage

Teaser Tuesday – Daddy’s Little Girl

Heehee, I’m sneaking in here with a teaser because I just revised a bunch.  A couple of betas mentioned that I ignored Evie’s parents for far too long, so I added some scenes with them.  Here is one.

The front door creaks open, and I pause the show and jump to my feet.  Our house is so old and noisy. It’s probably my dad, but I go to check anyway because God knows I don’t want my mom to see how I destroyed her family room couch.

Nope, just Dad.  I meet him at the door and kiss his cheek while he shoves his coat into the closet.  He’s about as neat as me, which is to say, not at all.

“Hi, Danny’s here.  We’re watching TV and playing Wii.”

“That’s great, honey.  Is he staying for dinner?”

“We already got a pizza.”  Damn, I bet Dad would have bought it for us if we had just waited.

“Great.”  He gives me a hug and waves in to the family room as he passes on his way to the stairs.  “Hi, Daniel.”

“Hi, Mr. Dark,” I hear Danny call, though clearly with a mouth full of pizza.

When I stop at the family room door to go in, Dad hands me a twenty before parting.  All right!

I join Danny in front of the TV and show him the twenty.  “Pizza, compliments of Dad.”

He laughs.  “You’re such a Daddy’s Little Girl.”

“Shh, I’m watching.”  I hit play and watch as Ace talks about his parents.

Hope you enjoyed.

Lots of love,

Sage

Lots of Love Thursday 10/14/10

Woo, I remembered.  Some sister of mine will be so happy.

You remember the drill, right?  I’m going to list all the things that I remember right now that made me happy this week.

• Kindle replacement was free.  I think I actually got this last week, but this week was when I saw that I didn’t get charged because they got the old one back.  In case you didn’t know, I sadly dropped my Kindle off a table and the casing broke.  So I got a Black Screen of Death.  Amazon told me that they wouldn’t replace it for free for a dropped Kindle, but when I talked to someone on the phone, she instantly told me they would.  No need to threaten to take my e-book business anywhere else, yay.  And all my books were there in the Archive, yay.
• Second good Glee episode in a row 🙂
• I keep finding my friend, Rae Mariz,’s book, The Unidentified, all over town.
• Doing different classes at my gym (and the others around here in the same chain) and staggering them with my personal training routine each week is keeping me motivated to work out.  This is an ongoing thing to be happy about.
• I followed kickboxing on Tuesday with a mile run.  At the time, it sucked, but I felt pretty accomplished afterwards, and since I did it in half the time I used to do it in P.E., I just want to say, inhalers for the win.
• I was the most athletic person in the aqua fitness class I took this week. Of course, this might say more about the class than me
• Got new medications that are actually working and making a month-long problem I’ve had go away, yay.
• My 13-hour workday pretty much sucked on Sunday, but getting off Monday before noon, and then Tuesday and Wednesday off was really nice
• There was overtime on my paycheck, and there will be overtime on my next one too
• Today I got lunch for free thanks to work.  Fancy pizza, salad, and half a slice of pumpkin cake (I split it).
• I picked a NaNo project
• I picked a version of Hero/Villain to go with and began revising with my beta notes

Whew, was that enough for you?  I didn’t know this was such a good week, lol.

On new iPod: Papa Don’t Preach from Glee

Lots of love,
Sage

NaNo Is On It’s Way

Hey, everyone.  I’ve been ignoring the blog, but I’ll try to be better about it.

NaNo is coming up.  For those who don’t know what NaNo is, it’s short for NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month.  The basic concept of NaNo is that you spend the month of November writing a 50K+ word novel.  That’s 50,000 words in 30 days.

The website for it can be found at www.nanowrimo.org.   I’ve done NaNo 5 times so far, and won it every time.  Each time I do it, I try something new.

2005: Euniq – this was a sequel to Echoes of Silence, except that it was MG, not YA (EoS was YA).  Just like EoS, it was back before I knew how to write and avoid cliches, and it is pretty cliched.  New element: Pantsing.  I had no plot before I started the novel.  I only decided the day before that I was going to do it at all.  When I started, I only knew that the MC was going to fall out of a tree and what the four main characters would be like, but nothing about where the story was going.  Of course, by day 6 I had it all plotted out, but still.

2006: AFTRLYF – Yeah, that thing I’m waiting on fulls I wrote way back in 2006.  It was an adult book then.  I still love it.  I hit 50K on day 21 and finished the rough draft on Thanksgiving.  New element: First person and adult book.  First person worked so well for me that I write most of my stuff in 1st now.

2007: DownLoad – I still love this book, though I hated it at the time.  But at the end, there were enough things I loved about it that I worked to edit it, went through betas, edited some more, and queried.  But unfortunately I only got a couple of requests from it.  New element: Sci-fi

2008: Truth or Dale – I hated this book when I was writing it, and I’m not very fond of it today.  There are a few scenes I like, but otherwise, it sucks, and my betas agreed, so I trunked it for life.  New element: Present tense.

2009: Dance Me a Match – Okay, this wasn’t as bad as Truth or Dale, but I knew it wasn’t really working when I was writing it.  I tried to add some edgy elements, but I blew them.  I really chose this over H/V because a) it had a NaNo-friendly format, b) I wouldn’t write it outside of NaNo, and c) it had a new element and H/V didn’t.  One good thing that came from DMaM is that Fireflies came directly from it. New element: Contemporary… until I added a ghost, but even that was an iffy fantasy element.

So here we are, 2010.  NaNo starts in just over 2 weeks.  Am I ready?  Well, I don’t know about ready, but I have a novel picked out (which is more than I can say about October of last year).  More about that in a future post, though.

Currently on new iPod: Dragostea din tei by Dan Balan and Lucas Prata

Lots of love,

Sage

Dragostea din tei