Bitchin' Blog Posts
: News
March 14, 2011 | Monday | 18 Comments
It’s time to fill out your brackets for the 2010 DABWAHA tournament of books. If you’re not familiar with it, the DABWAHA is a bracket-style tournament that echoes the NCAA basketball tourney, only instead of college basketball, we’re using reader votes to determine the book of the year. I’ve got a lot of DABWAHA news, in convenient bullet-list format. The reader nominations are in - and each category is now complete with 8 nominees, one in each picked by readers! I am going to post the top 10 reader nominations in each category - because you need more books to…
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February 18, 2011 | Friday | 9 Comments
First, if you haven’t subscribed to The TBR newsletter, you missed our first issue on 14 February. We’re setting up the next one with more micro-reviews, international readers, and DABWAHA news, so if you’d like to subscribe, you can absolutely join in the fun. We will absolutely not spam you and our goal is to send out only two newsletters per month. I like my newsletters how I like my men: short and intelligently informative. In the last issue was The Magic DABWAHA Form: this year we’re having readers choose one book per category. Want to nominate your favorite book?…
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November 02, 2010 | Tuesday | 10 Comments
It’s election day here in the US, as polls open at 6am and television news analysts start hyperventilating all over their new touchscreens as they surf the internet on camera so you can watch YouTube with them and they’ll feel less alone and alienated by the internet. Hey now! You can watch this absolutely bananas piece of PSA on YouTube with me and John Leguizamo right now! I think this is from the 90s but I confess, my MTV/Rock the Vote years get all mashed up in my head. If you’re in the US and you’re a registered voter, please…
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October 18, 2010 | Monday | 2 Comments
There, get that out of your head any time soon. HA! Fresh from the dentist, where I had tips put on my canine teeth because I grind them, so I’m extra more VAMPIRE now (WOO!), here’s the publishing news that exploded in my inbox today: First, Harlequin is rebranding, per a letter that was posted on e-Reads, and has a new logo. Plus they are eliminating the “Silhouette” name and consolidating under the “Harlequin”: brand: In April 2011 our Silhouette series will become Harlequin series. As you know, Silhouette Nocturne became Harlequin Nocturne in June of this year. Special Edition,…
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August 19, 2010 | Thursday | 3 Comments
Thank you to everyone who entered the contest to win a copy of Ellen Hopkins’ book “Tricks.” While the story of her disinvitation to the Humble, Texas, Teen Lit Fest has been picked up by a few news outlets, I don’t know if anyone from Humble has contacted her - but I hope that the end result is that she is invited back. And if that’s not possible, I hope every teen in Humble reads her book and sends a review to both the librarian who protested Hopkins’ inclusion, and the superintendent who made the decision to rescind her invite.…
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June 24, 2010 | Thursday | 22 Comments
Yesterday, Edith Shain, the nurse from the VJ-Day picture of The Best Kiss ever, died at age 91. According to the news article, she never really knew who it was that kissed her in Times Square, even though that’s one of the most iconic images ever. Marguerite Butler said she was going to smooch her husband in honor of Ms. Shain - an idea I totally support! Smooch your partner then do it again. Kissing is often a short scene in romances, especially erotically charged scenes that move on to kisses in “Other Locations.” But good kisses in romance are…
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March 06, 2010 | Saturday | 42 Comments
This week, over at Miller-McCune, results of a study were published that examined the title hook words of romance novels from Harlequin: Coming from an evolutionary psychology perspective, they hypothesized these titles would reflect mating preferences that have evolved over the millennia — specifically, a desire for a long-term relationship with a physically fit, financially secure man who will provide the resources needed to successfully raise a family. You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m shocked. I’m Googling the word “agog” to see how I can best modify my facial expression to accommodate the definition. Linda Holmes from NPR’s Monkey…
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December 22, 2009 | Tuesday | 27 Comments
This is SO cool: Ancestry.com has an article about the preservation of the marriage records of Gretna Green: Many self-appointed “priests” ran wedding shops in Gretna for those who wanted a quickie wedding, but one of the most famous was Graitney Hall. It was run first by David Lang, then his son Simon, and later by a family friend. The marriage registers kept by Lang and his successors between 1750 and 1834 contain the names of nearly 25,000 individuals—about 50% of the marriages approximated to have occurred in Gretna during those years.
For some time the Lang Registers have been…
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November 28, 2009 | Saturday | 36 Comments
Kia writes: I read a contemporary romance at the end of my very long first pregnancy over 6 years ago, though I’m not sure when the book was actually published. The protagonist was a photographer, who had a troubled first marriage with an abusive husband. Financially she is struggling because she walked away from the relationship without a penny, with only her quiet beauty and dignity intact. Luckily she’s housesitting for a friend with a fabulous place by the sea. Her neighbor is a handsome, wealthy playboy. He’s emotionally unavailable because of some manipulative ex, who has tried to snare…
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November 21, 2009 | Saturday | 22 Comments
In an article about the allure of love potentially gone bad titled Why We Love It When Love Bites, NY Daily News Entertainment Editor Olivia Smith takes a look at romance, New Moon, and why so many people are drawn to tales of Love Gone So Freaking Wrong. She quotes Dr. Eric Selinger, who gives a brief but compelling analysis of what makes the Twilight series so compelling from a structural standpoint: An idealized, unconsummated romance like Edward and Bella’s, he says, falls in the tradition of Eros, which dates back at least to the Greek poet Sappho in the…
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November 20, 2009 | Friday | 7 Comments
Auto-Tune the News: how soon until someone can Auto-Tune a romance novel?
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October 22, 2009 | Thursday | 13 Comments
In other news of the digitally bookward today, Kindle has released a PC application that allows you to buy Kindle books without… actually owning a Kindle. It’s currently available for that oh-so-smexxy Windows 7, and with the app installed you can read Kindle books, download anything you’ve already purchased from your Kindle leased-titles library, and add and synchonize notes to and from your Kindle app on iPhone and iTouch. The new upgrade to Kindle for iPhone or Blackberry adds that notetaking and annotation functionality to the phone, so now whatever you’re reading is accessible with your notes and bookmarks on…
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October 20, 2009 | Tuesday | 7 Comments
If you like popular culture essays, BenBella has launched their new Smart Pop Books site, where they’ll be offering free essays weekly and the option to order digital copies of essays individually. Currently among the crop of free essays for reading are “Whimsy Goes with Everything” by Heather Swain from the Gilmore Girls essay collection edited by Jennifer Crusie, and “Darn Your Sinister Attraction!” by Carol Poole about the violent relationship between Buffy and Spike from a collection that analyzed the psychology of Joss Whedon’s television creations. SmartPop is also running a contest for essays on the Whedon show Dollhouse.…
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September 09, 2009 | Wednesday | 26 Comments
Of the four category books that I have kept over the years – through numerous moves and countless reassessing of whether to keep this book or that – two of them were written by Anne Stuart. Somehow, I lost track of her over the years, so I was thrilled when I discovered the Ice series. I power-housed through those books! Yeah, the heroes are Alpha to a near-sociopathic degree. Yeah, more than one of them have come pretty close to actually killing the heroine before finding themselves overwhelmed with some previously-unknown reluctance, all the while trying desperately not to give…
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September 03, 2009 | Thursday | 4 Comments
It is two pieces of awesome, and verily I am rocking out with the glee. First: Billie Bloebaum, romance buyer for Powell’s airport store in Portland, is now the romance blogger for PowellsBooks.blog. WORD. She’s had a few blog entries in the past, but now she’s going to be talking about romance, ebooks, and all things romance genre. Her first entry about romance? All about a pair of book I really, really really enjoyed: Jill Shalvis’ Double Play and Instant Attraction. Yay! In other news, did you know that you can buy ebooks from Powell’s? It’s true! Thanks to Darin,…
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