Bittersweet: What Writing a Character with the Same Crap Brain As You Can and Cannot Do
There is something exquisitely painful about trying to promote a book that features a severely depressed heroine when depressed oneself.
We're getting into the time of year when publishers slow down their release schedule, so this month is a little lighter than usual. Gird your loins for January, when they open the flood gates again.
Now's a great time to stock up on winter reading and catch up on all those October books!
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Romancelandia, I present to you... a behind the scenes look into the hopeful, delicious, unputdownable Dine With Me. You can check out my full review of Layla Reyne's m/m foodie romance here, but read on for my interview with her!
Every fall, when the days turn gray and windy and the leaves fall from the trees to cast their skeletal shadows across dark roads, I crave a Gothic romance. Give me the ghosts, murder and events that could be paranormal or the result of sinister humans. Give me a protagonist fleeing their One Safe Place in terror. Give me characters who don't know who to trust but still need to work together to solve a mystery and defeat evil. And please, please give me an HEA at the end of all this. Otherwise I will throw your book against the wall.
This is the first in a series of LGBTQ+ romance lists Sarah has written just for you! Sarah runs a couple of queer book clubs, including Rainbow Readers of Massachusetts, which you can find on Facebook. Find her on Twitter @queer_reader.
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For those who enjoy following one couple for multiple books, seeing how they grow, evolve and take down the bad guys together, here are 9 of my favorite gay/bi romance series featuring the same couple.
At long last, I have read The Queen of Ieflaria! I'll admit, backlist (already released, out for a while) books being on audio increases my chance of reading them by about 90%, and that's definitely the case here. I bought it from NineStar ages ago, but it's languished on my Kindle ever since. The first two in the series, The Queen of Ieflaria and Daughter of the Sun are both out on audio, the third is currently in eBook and I have hopes of audio.
Susan Lazarus trusts very few people, and that has served her well in life as first an abandoned street rat, then as a con artist and now as a private enquiry agent. Templeton was once in her trusted inner circle, her teenage misfit confidant and then first love, but when it mattered most he seemingly failed her. Susan rebuilt her defenses, found love again and when they finally crossed paths all she wanted was to thwart his criminal ways. But when he is framed for murder, she is the only one capable of unraveling the truth and clearing his name.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about Twice in a Blue Moon. A couple of them involve spoilers, so I'll stick that at the end. This is a second-chance romance that begins when Sam and Tate meet in London while on vacations with their grandparents. She's with her cafe-owning, over-protective grandmother, and he's with his step-grandfather who turns out to be terminally ill. This last bit is revealed early in the book, so don't be mad at me. Anyway, they're staying at the same hotel and end up eating breakfast together every day. The vacation is two weeks long and Sam and Tate, ages 21 and 18, fall into a whirlwind romance. Vacation is cut short, however, when Sam presumably tells the press that Tate is the long-hidden daughter of a mega-famous movie star, a secret she, her mother and her grandmother have worked to hide for over a decade. Then she doesn't see him again and doesn't have any way of contacting him. Fourteen years later, the two are reunited when she's cast as the lead in a movie adaptation of his novel, Milkweed.
Here we are, in October. When I’m dodging all sorts of tasty, sugary temptations (it’s a good thing I don’t have kids - I’d steal all their candy spoils from trick-or-treating and likely drive them into therapy that much sooner…) and I look to distract myself with just about any healthy alternative - like, say, books! Here are some of the October unusual historicals catching my eye this month:
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