Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: The Fearful Meme
SBD: Help me end this thing.
I’m close. So very, very close.
At the risk of abusing Beth’s Smart Bitches Day tradition, I’m going to use this morning’s post to solicit help in ending my romance. Specifically, I need information. I figure the collective experience of my romance-reading readers beats the crap out of my meager investigations any day of the week.
We want . . . information.
Is it, or is it not de rigeur in a romance novel for the hero to overcome challenges and prove himself in the denouement? Well, whether it is or not, I’d like you to give me examples of how this was done in your favorite romance novels. Or in your most hated romance novels, for that matter — it’s all grist for the mill.
Trust me, I have something in mind for all of this information, and it’s not what you think. My betas will, I hope, be pleasantly surprised.
D.
Friday Snippet the First
Holly Lisle’s meme, by way of Tamara Siler Jones (who has posted another scene, woot!)
I’ve posted a bit of Nest before, but you needn’t read that portion. What follows is the first scene of Chapter Two, and all you need to know can be conveyed by the movie’s tagline (for when this trilogy gets published and becomes a blockbuster motion picture):
Animal Farm — in Space!
Meet the Grith Lyssomes.
(more…)
SBD: Kissing impaired
First the news: I’ve made it to Round Three in the Samhain Contest. My entry is now #4 in the comment thread. This is the make-or-break line, in my opinion. If I don’t alienate my supporter(s) with this one, I might just make it to the finish line.
***
“Kiss Me Goodnight,” from marco_n65
Last Thursday, Thorne commented that she would like me to write about:
Your first kiss. (The kiss by which all others have been judged; and found wanting)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Over the weekend, I started re-editing my romance, and when I came to the first kiss, I thought Meh. I play the first and second kisses for laughs, and none of them ever rise to rock-my-world quality. I also recall many of my betas griping about my lack of time and attention to kissing. All seemed to agree that my writing is trapped in Freud’s Genital Stage.
A bloody long question meme . . .
Most recently from O’Brien’s place.
Were you named after anyone? Undoubtedly some guy who died in WWII. I’ll try to get the details from my dad.
When was the last time you cried? Last night, watching V for Vendetta. Chokes me up every time. If you haven’t seen it yet, please rent it; and if you think it romanticizes terrorism, you are missing the point.
Your morning meme
This is an “eight random facts about me” meme. I’m tagging everyone who, right this instant, can’t figure out what they’re going to blog about today. Now you have a topic.
Thorne stuck me with this one. (Sorry. Punny mood this AM, apparently.)
1. Breakfast this morning: coffee and Nilla wafers.
2. I’m a glass half-empty kinda guy who would prefer to be a glass half-full kinda guy.
3. My home is full of tiny flies. I can get rid of them using the vacuum, but by the time I’ve finished, more flies are back where I started.
4. Arguably our strangest pet, ever: a Cuban Knight Anole. We named him Ike. He would turn jet black whenever he was pissed, which was often; he would gape and hiss at you, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and he had one hell of a bite.
5. I think I’m trapped somewhere between the Oral Phase and the Anal Phase. Is there a Gastric Phase? (Incidentally: we’ve all heard the phrase “anal retentive,” but did you know there’s such a thing as “anal expulsive”? Ew.)
6. My favorite shirts are from Eddie Bauer’s Wrinkle Resistant line. However, the ones I buy are far less fugly.
7. Last night, we had to explain “soap operas” to my 11-year-old son. By his age, I was already onto my second addiction (first: Dark Shadows; second: Ryan’s Hope). In med school, most of the class watched All My Children in the med student lounge on our lunch hour. I would spend that time eating my sandwich and working the crossword puzzle. Not that I was above All My Children (or All My Chickies, as we used to call it), but it wasn’t Ryan’s Hope.
8. I think this post by O’Brien is sexy. It made me sad, too, but I’m not saying why.
It’s getting increasingly difficult, finding new stuff to reveal. Sometimes I think that one day, this blog will heave itself out of e-space and lurch through the streets, passing itself off as me. And no one will know the difference.
D.
Three bloody things
A meme from Tiggs. Go check out her place or she’ll spank you. Of course, she might spank if you do visit her. Tiggs’ blog is that kinda place.
Three Things That Scare Me:
1. George W. Bush and his evil cronies
2. Fascists
3. Religious/political ideologues
Yeah, I cheated. They’re all the same.
Three People Who Make Me Laugh:
1. Cintra Wilson
2. Jon Stewart
3. Stephen Colbert
Three Things I Love:
1. My fambly
2. A good massage
3. A perfect meal
Three Things I Hate:
1. Cancer
2. Heartburn
3. My ferret, when she musks
Three Things I Don’t Understand:
1. Legalese
2. Administratorese
3. Dirtyknese
Three Things On My Desk:
1. An ancient copy of Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
2. My Blackberry
3. That June Cosmo I so recently dished on
Three Things I’m Doing Right Now:
1. Waiting for the laundry to dry
2. Airing out the bedroom (the ferret musked, remember?)
3. Wondering if my family will be content with leftovers
Three Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
1. Cruise the Aegean
2. Watch the war crimes trials of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Gonzales
3. Attend the post-Rapture bash. It’s gonna be fabulous.
Three Things I Can Do:
1. Write
2. Fix people
3. Make people laugh, present blog entry excepted
Three Things I Can’t Do:
1. Team sports
2. Understand folks who say they need to “drill down on those numbers”
3. Handle celibacy
Three Things I Think You Should Listen To:
1. Gogol Bordello’s Punk Rock Paranda
2. Soft Cell’s Chips on My Shoulder
3. Nine Inch Nails’ La Mer/The Great Below
Three Things You Should Never Listen To:
1. Tucker Carlson
2. Bill O’Reilly
3. Ann Coulter
Three Things I’d Like To Learn:
1. Shiatsu
2. Screenwriting
3. Any musical instrument. I can’t even blow on a damn didgeridoo.
Three Favorite Foods:
1. Dim sum (especially jellyfish, yum!)
2. Sushi
3. Italian. Good Italian. Not that Olive Garden crap.
Three Shows I Watched As A Kid:
1. Garner Ted Armstrong
2. Wonderama
3. Night Gallery (how’s that for a trio?)
Three Things I Regret:
1. Not having better self knowledge as a kid, young adult . . .
2. Not having faith in myself to take chances
3. That I didn’t indulge in more high risk behavior as a college student
Three People I Tag:
Hmm. Who won’t mind? How about . . .
D.
Three old favorites
From Kate:
The Little-Known Favorites Meme. Rules: List and describe three of your favorite books that other people might not be familiar with. Then tag five people. See, easy!
My first thought: It really is easy! I could do a Thirteen on this. Then I took a look at my library and realized how mainstream I really am. Eclectic, perhaps, but mainstream nonetheless.
Below, I’ve selected three books that meet both criteria: little known and well loved (by me). At the very least, you need to see if I tagged ya.
Eight steps
Here are the rules:
1.Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
But this would be too easy. To make it more of a challenge, I’m going to begin at age 5 and share some memories in eight easy steps, five years at a time. Sound like fun? I think so. See me under the covers.
SBD: Too stupid to live!
For a change, I have some real, honest to Gaaaaah bitchery for today’s Smart Bitches Day post. To wit: Maddie Faraday, heroine of Jennifer Crusie’s Tell Me Lies, is too stupid to live.
I don’t often bail out on a book when I’m past the 100 page mark. I really don’t usually bail on mysteries, no matter how far I am into the book. But in Tell Me Lies, I made it past page 200 and THEN bailed.
I don’t care who done it. As far as I’m concerned, Maddie deserves to get framed with the murder of her cheating, embezzling husband Brent. She has done nothing to earn the love and protection of stock-hunky-hero C.L.; she hasn’t even earned the love of the Requisite Crusie So-Ugly-Is-It-Even-a-Dog?® dog, Phoebe. She definitely doesn’t deserve to retain custody of her lovely daughter Em. The woman will be the death of that child. There should be a special Darwin Award for people who take not only themselves but their children out of the gene pool.
I mean — seriously. Hiding the murder weapon in a Spam casserole? Why is she even touching the murder weapon any more than she has to? And the crap she does with the embezzled money. Why, why, why? Why, if not to further the plot?
And that’s the real bitch of this novel. If Maddie’s gonna get set up, let the murderer set her up. She shouldn’t set herself up. She especially shouldn’t set herself up since she knows she’s the number one suspect!
Soon after Maddie stashed the gun and the money, I closed the book in disgust. Enough already. I admit I’m tempted to flash to the end, but only if it’s to read about Maddie cleaning the Women’s Prison toilets with a bristleless toothbrush; to see her visited by C.L. with a new girlfriend it tow (“Sorry, Maddie, but she was there, and you weren’t. Have a good life”); and to watch as her daughter is raised by Maddie’s evil in-laws, who will lie to the girl and tell her that her mother died in an attempted prison break.
Yeah, sure, I’m cruel. I’m a bastard, in fact. But I wasted over 200 pages of my reading life on that book and I want ’em back.
Oh — forgot to say it. Better late than never.
Spoilers!
D.
Who’d wanna live in a world without wood?
Today’s Smart Bitches Day post brings us Summer Devon’s Futurelove, an ebook I’ve wanted to read ever since I heard the premise. More on that in a moment. As those of you who have tried to get me to read your pdfs and ebooks know, I’m hopelessly slow at reading things off my computer. Dyslexic, in fact. I keep wanting to turn the page. The fingerprints are a bitch.
With the advent of my Blackberry, Summer’s erotica opened up to me like a nubile vixeny refugee from Barely Legal. Come to me, Summer! Show me your stuff!
Here’s the premise. In the future, I don’t know how people reproduce, but it doesn’t involve penises or vaginas. Clones, perhaps, or test tubes. Maybe they duplicate particularly attractive people using a transporter, just like they did in those old Star Trek episodes, Captain Kirk, Space Queen, and Good Kirk, Bad Kirk. I don’t know. Summer doesn’t tell us, and I don’t care, because this is erotica, not science fiction, and in erotica no one bloody cares how anything works as long as people with hot bodies are getting laid and getting laid frequently.
In the future, all manner of physical defects have been genetically engineered out of the human race. The men all have hot bods, they’re super-strong, they don’t fart or snore or leave their dirty socks lying around or ignore their girlfriends just because Monday Night Football is on and if they’re eating anything in bed, it sure ain’t crackers. They lack all of those 21st Century flaws — which would be cool, of course, except for the nonfunctional penis problem.