Book Bitch: Sunshine

I've renamed the book analysis "Book Bitch" because I've noticed most of the books I want to work up are awful, bad, horrible things and I want to share my misery with the world. You can learn more from reading a god-awful book than you can from reading a good one, and there's something about a train wreck that makes folk beg for more.

Today, however, we will be doing a good book:

Title: Sunshine
Author: Robin McKinley
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Readability: Awesome

What You Need To Know Before You Buy: Neil Gaiman says it's pretty much perfect. It makes me green with envy and gives me the gold colored fluffies every time I read it. Go buy this book. Why haven't you bought this book already? GO! GO!

Pallate CLENSER man!

So ... been working on another book review/analysis thing, only I've decided to throw out the idea of being even handed and fair. It's now called "Book Bitch", where I will STILL talk about the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn't work in books ... but I'm not going to go out of my way to find good books to work with. Mostly because I keep finding oh my GAWD awful books EVERYWHERE and if I matched every book on a level with Tale of the Body Thief to a book on the level of say, Sunshine or Lovely Bones, I would run out of good books really, really fast.

BTW my co-worker has turned up another bad paranormal romance. And by bad, I mean that it is, no shit, worse than Twilight. And not maybe kinda sorta, uh-uh. I've read three chapters, and I'm making that call right now. This is worse than Twilight. Because body glitter aside, Twilight made sense. I cannot imagine this book making sense.

So just to give people an idea of what I'm working on, in addition to gutting the first half of WtBR's fantasy sections (That's all I'm redoing. I promise. I promise) I'm trying to do a quickie on Sunshine, to prove that I actually do read good books, and probably will start one on The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife because those two are just as awesome as Sunshine and deserve much shilling. As for the suck ... I've yet to start my review on the first Merry Gentry book, which desperately needs to be done, and I've decided to embark on a massively epic Bitch on the great, massive pile of steaming batshit that is the Left Behind  series. Because I found the first prequel for cheap at Half Price books, and oh my God. At least Stephenie Meyer stopped at four. There's fifteen of these puppies, and they all deserve it.

Also Tale of the Body Thief and if I can track down a copy, The Caterpillar's Question. Because that book was oh so very much KILL WITH FIRE.

As for the personal writing front ... I am still of the mind that the drive for professional writing credits is hopeless, as I am not writing Paranormal Romance and the requirements for a first novel for everything else is generally perfection. So until somebody tells me differently and hands me a check, this is a hobby. It's the only way I can handle it, keep revising and stay sane. Some people do model trains, some people do their houses. I do books. That doesn't mean I'm giving up on writing. It means I'm giving up on writing professionally, for now, for the moment, until somebody (with a check, made out to me) proves that I'm wrong. The odds are totally against me, and the faster I accept that and stop daydreaming about seeing my book in a bookstore somewhere, the faster I can get my sanity back. The alternative is to quit my job and get shifted back over to days, because THAT is what's really going on with me, and I can't afford to do that right now. It'll also make writing fun again, because it hasn't been for a while now.

And yes, I'm still gonna try the agent-and-publisher thing ... when it's ready. I'm just not going to hold my breath or wait for a reply that probably won't come.

Pearl of Great Depression: There's a REASON this stuff isn't in stores

You'll want to skip this entry. Seriously. Just skip.