Tuesday Rounding Up

Authors Behaving Badly:
A book review on Goodreads has led the book's author to respond thusly ->

You did not read the book. If you did you would not writing your nonsense. Everyone agrees with me that perhaps you should seek medical attention. Your remarks were so off base and the damage they cause, are sinful. Please honey get some help. I notice your other reviews and many authors that you gave two and one stars review too did not deserve it and in my mind was criminal. Now with your rebuttal proves my point. The book is a work of art and will stand for all time. The Author William Terry Rutherford 

via Luca Veste

Songs About Dead People from Stephen Blackmoore author of DEAD THINGS

Warren Ellis talking about GUN MACHINE

What to expect when you're expecting . . . to be be published

DEAD LETTERS from Chris F. Holm is getting some nice reviewing

Hilary Davidson's THE NEXT ONE TO FALL is available in paperback as of today

Faced with money problems, crime fiction author has to sell some of her homes, plus her Bentley and Ferrari

Macmillan is settling for $20 million in price-fixing case. Macmillan joins other publishers in settling, none admitting any doing of wrongs.

Crimefactory 12 is out and looks lovely

Catch up on your reading with the FIVE YOU CAN'T MISS series

Not entirely sure what this is, but it appears to be something about writing and agents answering questions

Write fan fic

Dave White is not here. He has moved his blogging duties to basketball

King of Perverts and the Nasty Boys

Uh, Brian. You do know what kind of blog this is right?

Relax, I just want to show you some pictures I took...

I went to the used book store the other day with the daughter and bought this.

I grabbed it because of the dated cover and because it looked like it could be a fun crime fiction book. Two things.

The first is that the first page tells about the characters. You don't see that too often in crime fiction books so that's kind of cool.

The second is that this was a TV show. I have no memory of this show at all. Does anyone remember this show? You can see a preview of the show here (embedding is disabled on this video). I'm sure it's goofy as hell but I'd love to watch this.

Now on to a book.

King of the Perverts surprised me. First, here’s the synopsis:

Poor Dennis. He’s a regular sort of guy who’s recently been dealt a shitty hand by life: he lost his job, his wife hates him and wants a divorce, and it turns out she was also cheating on him as well. Now he’s living on his brother’s couch. Holy fuck, that sucks. Dennis can’t imagine things could get much worse, and that’s why he jumped at the opportunity to take part in a new reality game show: a “sexcathlon” where the first person to achieve 10 increasingly difficult and perverted sexual challenges wins a million dollars and is crowned King of the Perverts. Dennis doesn’t care about the title, he just wants the money, but now he’s not sure he can make it to the end. Enduring a golden shower and following through with an Abe Lincoln are hard enough, but he’s losing his nerve and fears what act of perversion will come next. He’d like to drop out, but his Russian bear of a cameraman, Mongo, has other plans for him and that million dollar prize, and Dennis has to decide which is worse: winning the King of the Perverts, or losing it.

After reading the synopsis I was unsure. It’s simple for a premise like to go awry. So I downloaded a sample to my Kindle and found the tone lighter then I expected. It was also laced with a crude black humor resulting in laugh out moments.

That was enough for me to take a chance on the rest of the book. And I’m glad I did.

Yes, this is a vulgar book and is not for everyone. But it’s also surprisingly warm and winds up as a love story. There is also a biting commentary on the cynicism of reality TV, not the least of which is because it isn't hard to imagine a show like this in real life. One of the sex challenges is down right laugh out loud funny, you wouldn't ever think you would laugh at something like this but clearly Lowe has a great comedic touch.

Feeling adventurous? Give this one a try.

Snow days

By: Joelle Charbonneau

Winter has finally hit!  Snow has fallen in the places where you’d expect to see snow and especially in the Northeast.  To those who are buried in several feet of wintery whiteness, please stay safe and warm. 

The wonderful thing I’ve noticed is that twitter or facebook during this latest snowstorm are filled with posts about people taking advantage of the snowstorm and using the time to read.  Whoo hoo!  With all the gaming systems, television shows, movies and aps floating around, it is wonderful to see that people are excited about the prospect of having time to devote to discovering a new author or curling up with a longtime favorite.

I admit, that as more and more of my time is devoted to writing, I have less and less time to spend reading.  This is seriously unfortunate.  And something I intend to remedy as soon as I get this current manuscript written. 

So whether you have been snowbound or are watching the weather glad or jealous that you aren’t involved in this most recent adventure from Mother Nature, tell me what books should be in my TBR pile when I go on my next post manuscript reading binge?  What have you read that you can’t stop thinking about?  What books made you laugh or cringe?  (And if you’ve written a book that you want all of us here at DSD to know about, this would be a good time to tell us about that, too!)