Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Novellas
May 03, 2012 | Thursday | 43 Comments
I've received a few email requests for erotic content similar to 50 Shades of Grey [GR | A | BN | S | K | ARe] and a few bazillion Google searches for '50 shades synopsis' and '50 shades review' and, my personal favorite, '50 shades free download.' Heh. Good luck with that last one. This week at Kirkus I talked about the erotic romance that might appeal to those who enjoyed 50 Shades of Grey, from titles with BDSM to explicit sex (and strong heroines, hooray!) and shorter works of erotic fiction. People are still reading and finishing the book, and a few are…
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August 03, 2011 | Wednesday | 48 Comments
This all you need to know. Hot and Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance is neither hot, nor steamy, nor romantic. It contains short stories that work more like sketchy idea pitches than like fully realized stories, the romances are perfunctory and either depressing or unbelievable (or, in many cases, both) and worst of all the collection is boring. I normally read one book every one to three days depending on length, content, and other commitments, and it took me almost two weeks to force myself to finish this because I. Was. Bored. I was really excited when this anthology came…
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July 16, 2011 | Saturday | 20 Comments
Bookstorecat and some other folk are looking for this book, which contained three stories in one paperback:
I’ve spent many hours trying to find the first contemporary romance book I
ever read. I was about 13, so it was around 1993. The sad thing about this
is that I remember A LOT of unhelpful details about this book (which I’ve
condensed and abridged here), but I still can’t track it down—and believe
me, I have googled the hell out it.
The book contained three novels or novellas, all by the same author. It was
a primarily dark green paperback.
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May 14, 2011 | Saturday | 8 Comments
JaneDrew wrote in looking for assistance on behalf of a friend of hers: A friend of mine is looking for a book she read back in high school, and I told her I would pass along what she remembered to the fantastically well-read folks over at the Bitchery… 1) It was published between 2000 and 2003. 2) The book consists of two novellas, each focusing on one of two sisters. 2a) It may be classified as YA. 2b) The title might be something like “A Tale of Two Sisters,” except that searches with that title have…
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January 19, 2011 | Wednesday | 53 Comments
I’ve spent the last few days knocked on my backside by Hella Flu, and in that time, I watched Vanilla Ice renovate a house (he crunked a pool, made a bathroom bling, and told me about single celled micro-organisms, and about encephalitis. No, really, I wasn’t having a fever hallucination. Vanilla Ice said “encephalitis” to me) and read a lot of novellas. I didn’t have the attention span or energy to read an entire book, so I was in a serious novellaly-minded mood. “Novellaly” is my new favorite word, too. One of the books I picked up was The Guy…
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May 24, 2010 | Monday | 36 Comments
When Jane Litte and I hosted a session on “Save the Contemporary” at RT this year, in the middle of a discussion, we discovered that in the audience was contemporary romance author Susan Donovan. I think my literal response was, “Oh, cool!” So when she got in touch with me later, I suggested an interview, because I was curious what she thought of the contemporary market, and romance in general. You visited our Save the Contemporary panel and we were very excited to meet you - thank you for coming. What do you love most about contemporary romance, reading and…
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September 29, 2009 | Tuesday | 9 Comments
My internal monologue while reading this novella went as follows for the first third: “Oh, now that’s different.” “Ok, cool.” “Huh. That’s some smart use of rock and fire imagery.” “Ok, now that’s COOL.” “This is really, really different.” I love cool and different. The story opens on Aera’s final test as a priestess of fire: she must enter a labyrinth of the volcano, pass through multiple gates to the eye of the maze, and find a criminal who has committed blasphemy. Her job is to kill him to appease the Fire God before the priests release the lava to…
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September 25, 2009 | Friday | 47 Comments
I’ve long stated that I’m paranormaled-out, that the struggle of Good vs. Evil with the hairy and the fanged doesn’t do much for me anymore. Too often the Presto Instant-Lurrrve because They Were Meant To Be frustrates me and I stop caring about the fate of the world. Really, if the planet blew up because there wasn’t enough emotional tension between the protagonists, it’s a justifiable loss. I much prefer a plot that forces the hero and heroine to come to terms with their relationship for reasons other than The Fate of the World, and having the attraction and fated…
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