Book: Overclocked by K.S. Augustin

I got a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

This was a marvelously intricate story for a novella (108 pages), meaty and satisfying. There were parts of it that, despite the author's down-to-earth explanations, still went over my head, but I'm okay with reading material that challenges me.

I enjoyed the evolution of Carl from playboy scientist out for the fame and glory to a self-sacrificing man who believed his actions could, and were necessary to, save the world.

The descriptions of the internal landscape of the internet were useful in visualizing what Carl and Tania were experiencing - not everyone who was there saw things the same way, and the differences were interesting in themselves.

As with the previous book I read, the formatting was phenomenally well-done, and really made reading this a pleasure - chapters were clearly divided, no orphaned lines or stray words in the middle of paragraphs. A lot of indie-published authors are less perfectionist, and I deeply appreciate the care that Augustin takes in making these books easy on the eyes.

Odd, strange and bizarre....

Seriously?  My tax money has been going to this my entire life? The FBI says it has found no sign of the remains of former Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa and is ending a dig in suburban Detroit. Authorities have pursued multiple leads on Hoffa's whereabouts since his disappearance in 1975.

For more on this story, go to http://usat.ly/19RpPJ1.

Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago today, on a Friday night, I was as big as a house, and my father-in-law reminded me of that fact frequently.  It was all in fun on his end, but I hated it every single time he said that out loud.

OK.  I wasn't as big as a house, but I FELT that way.

Mrs. Potatohead was due today, and what did I choose to do?  I went camping.  Uh-huh.  It was the annual Celebration of Summer that my mom put on, and even due any damn minute, I went camping.  In the summer.  In Texas.

I think my mother made sure every pagan medical professional she knew would be on hand just in case I went into labor - we had record attendance that year.  Luckily Mrs Potatohead didn't make her appearance until Tuesday morning, after over twenty-four hours of labor.  But my mom made sure that if her grandchild was going to arrive out at Lake Tawakoni, she was going to arrive in style.

So I camped, and nearly everyone waited on me hand and foot, and I judged a Sun King competition, and my husband ran around the whole place naked as a jaybird and got sunburned in some interesting places.  I have to admit that remembering that gives me warm fuzzies.  He deserved it later.

Product: Kroger's Yogurt Smoothie Bars

Being a BzzAgent means I get free products or coupons for free products from time to time.  In this case, I got coupons to try Kroger's Yogurt Smoothie Bars free (and some $1 coupons to pass along).  It took me a while to find the product at my local Kroger, and my Kroger only had the Triple Berry flavor.  It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but I do like the taste, and it's certainly a mouth full of cool when it gets hot.  It's got a good texture, comparable to the national chain that shall remain nameless.  One of these really hits the spot when I need a quick pick-me-up, too.

Book: Triple Threat by Bella Jeanisse LANGUAGE AND CRUDENESS WARNING NSFW

There's a shorter, more pleasant review on Amazon.   This isn't that one.

Triple Threat reads like a fifteen-year-old wrote a rock band RPF, inserted themselves Mary-Sue style in first-person POV, then anonymized the whole thing so it could be published for money. If you read the book after this review, you cannot blame me for the time you'll never get back.

Main character wants her best friend, but insists to herself that she’s not in love with him.  Insists that she IS in love with another member of their band, and so tries to get him into bed.  Dates another guy who has a premature ejaculation problem, so to keep herself satisfied, keeps frakking her “best friend” sometimes even when her boyfriend is on the phone with her, or on the other side of the door.  Lets her “best friend” see her naked, take risque photos of her, tells him that she’s not in love with him, lets him frak her anytime he wants anyway, at least once he "convinces" her anew every time.

Girl seems to have no self-control at all.  She says no, a guy kisses her and she’s all ready for action and can’t resist him.  

Completely unrealistic guy continually getting all down and dirty with the main character, even naked with penis touching clit, then backing away because “it’s not right” or “it’ll ruin the friendship” or “I don’t want to just have sex with you - you need someone who cares about you.”  Then, out of the blue, he changes his mind and they frak and it’s boring.  Well, not to them, because every orgasm is the best one she ever had in her entire life.  The pleasure is always awesome or rapturous.  Someone needs a thesaurus.

Lots of passive voice and telling instead of showing.  taunt is used in one place instead of taut.  Just dreck.

Liberal use of the f-bomb, with which I personally don’t have a problem with (even though I've replaced it here BSG-style, lol).  There are no other women in the book, except for the groupies the other band members frak after every gig.

Every guy is almost literally hung like a horse.  I mean like 12 inches long and so big that she can’t get her hand around him.  So big/long that it hurts to have sex.  And yet she does a DP scene with two of these guys in her snatch at the same time, because anal sex hurts.  

Both the guys she fraks the most are always telling her what she feels.  She doesn’t feel the way they think, but she’s completely unwilling to just tell either of them what it is she does feel.

The “best friend,” the one she’s been frakking since the beginning of the book, freaks out about her finally settling down with a guy and threatens to quit the band.  He asks for a threesome, she says she’ll ask her boyfriend, and suddenly, he’ll stay with the band and they all live happily ever after.

Reviewed for Kitties Like Books Too (http://kittykatreads.blogspot.com)

Random cuteness overload

Hugz!!

He doesn't pout as well as his mother.  lol

Snapple wanted people *drinking* their tea, not eating their bottle caps.  

Whatever he's got planned, it bodes ill for someone.  :D

Thus endeth your cuteness quotient for the day, courtesy of my favorite grandson.

Random reading, writing and TV

Criminal Minds, you kill me every year.  And it wasn't the finale, but I love the little glimpses we get of JJ's Will, and the way she decided to work off that bad juju was great.

I have seventeen (!!!!!) pieces, BSG and original, in various stages of done, and having my beta-reader otherwise occupied for the past month is driving me crazy.  I'm hopeful that with school letting out, her life will slow down soon.  Cross my fingers.  I might have to go over there and make her read while we're watching TV.  I can just see that.  "Here.  Read my porn, please.  No, I don't want cookies (I'd be lying), I want to finish my stupid stories so I can post the porn."  lmao

Arrow is not a perfect show, but it's got really great moments, and there were a lot of them during the last four or five episodes of the season.  During the scene where Oliver was trying to tell Tommy he'd be fine, there was so much homoerotic subtext that it wasn't even subtext.  Damn.  I swear I thought Oliver was going to kiss Tommy and I think it might've been hotter than Oliver kissing Lauren.  lol  And what's with Diggle?  All of a sudden he's running around in tank tops and he's even buffer than Oliver?  The shoulders on that man.  See, the show gives me plenty of eye-candy, and for that alone, I will continue to watch it.  John Barrowman.  :flails:  And that little moment with Thea and Roy?  Awwww.  I kind of like the idea of Oliver and Lauren, but frankly, there's more chemistry between Oliver and Felicity, and that's not even considering her continual verbal sexual innuendos.  How is Oliver ignoring those with a straight face?  Hell, how is the actress saying those lines with a straight face?  Every time she lets one fly, I think of the story Like Something Out of a Fanfic and it makes me laugh.

Once Upon a Time is getting too convoluted for me.  These two are conspiring with each other, and she's conspiring with him and he's conspiring with another her and she's become a barfly and where the hell is Red?  And Charming is boring again without his gun.  I still have the last three episodes to watch, and I will.  Ethan Embry is wasted here.  And seriously, this show does not have enough sex - everybody wears too many clothes.

Still have Revenge and Castle to finish up for the season.

I'm liking Grimm a lot better then OUaT right now.  I could listen to Sasha Roiz read the script in a monotone, if he would do it in French.  He has very pretty eyes.  I'm wondering where the Juliet thing is going.  Something's off with that.

I think I'm going to skip the rest of Monday Mornings, except for the shower scene, of course, when I visit my TV friend.  I'm also not going to bother to watch Revolution or Touch.  I'd really like to watch a few episodes of Bates Motel - I love the two leads - and see if it appeals to me.  And A&E is having a marathon of Katee's Longmire today, with the new season starting tomorrow, I think.  I have to catch up on Person of Interest, too, since I can only watch that one on the DVR.

I ran into a professional cook at Kroger today.  I was trying to find something for which I had a "free" coupon, and he asked what it was I wanted to make.  He was describing making something, and he's all "bip bip bip and it's done" and it was adorable.  I explained that I suck at cooking, unless it comes in a box or has very strict instructions, whereas my brother can pick six random things off the shelf and make something fantastic.  He said he could do that, too.  I envy that, but more I envy that he likes to cook.  I just hate it.  Cooking is all hot and sweaty and there's no good payoff.  I mean, yeah, there's food at the end of it, but if I want to eat, I have to cook every day, and that is just a big fat pain in the ass with nothing to show for it but ten minutes of eating and then dishes.  I just need to win the lottery.  Plus, I got back from Kroger and realized that I didn't pick up one of the three things I even went for in the first place.  :sigh:

Having a latex allergy and then finding out that something I used has latex in it?  So not fun.  At least my morphine allergy makes pretty purple poofies on my skin.  The latex makes my skin look like I have leprosy.  Ick.  And ow.

My new Kindle will not let me download the app that lets me read my Nook books on my Kindle.  Frakker.  The Nook is just not as user-friendly, and makes reading slow and cumbersome.

Been too long, so a little fun

I have OCD.  I am (?) OCD.  Whatever.  Anyway, this manifests in my life in some odds ways.

When I drink from something that has writing on it, the writing has to face me.  If there's writing all the way around, I have to pick something and that has to stay facing me until I'm done with that cup.

When I tear my Sweet N Low packets (or whatever the store/restaurant equivalent is), they all have to be facing the same direction - right side up, facing me - and I tear the right ends off.

As a matter of fact, while I'm sitting at a restaurant, it would be very unusual for me NOT to face all the packets in the little condiment rack.

I sit with my back against a wall.  If trouble's coming, I want to see it coming and maybe do something about it.  I've been told that this is something I learned from my dad, though I don't recall that at all.  I just know I can't eat with my back to a room full of strange people.  Or a door.

I alphabetize to destress.  Give me a stack, pile, room full of anything, and I can work off my stress by putting whatever it is into alphabetical order.  I also bake and throw furniture around, but I think those are more normal destressing activities.  lol

Cans, boxes, jars, etc., in my pantry all face front.  If there's more than one of something, the labels all have to line up with each other.

If I'm eating at a restaurant, when I'm done, I start stacking stuff and cleaning off the detritus.  Some of my dining companions find this amusing, some find it annoying, but the waitstaff?  They love it.  This is something my stepmother does, too, so maybe it's a learned behavior, rather than related to my OCD.

I do my stuff in the shower in a certain order.  Whenever I've tried to shake myself out of that, I always forget something important and have to get back in to take care of it.  Having to do that irritates me more than just keeping to my routine and being weird.

Movie: Death Race 3: Inferno

This was mindless entertainment at its C-movie finest, complete with gratuitous female nudity and blatant misogyny.   The female nudity was fine, and I even expected it.  I neither expected nor needed a rearview shot of Danny Trejo's character getting a blowjob.  Talk about not being able to unsee something...but kudos to the filmmakers for making the scene with someone who doesn't have a perfectly sculpted ass.

A race through the desert, a bad buy, a contract gone wrong, an unexpected sacrifice, mediocre special effects with regard to human carnage, and an unnecessarily expositional ending complete the tour.

Set in the Kalahari Desert, and filmed entirely on location in Cape Town and Cerese (not sure of the name), South Africa.

Dougray Scott is a delightfully over-the-top bad guy.  Actually, most of the bad guys were a bit over-the-top.

Ving Rhames was a nicely understated amoral race promoter.

If you're into these kinds of movies, I think it's worth your time.  If you're not, you'll hate it.

What a wonderful world this would be...

I went to the CVS this evening to return my redbox and take the landlord to get his McDeath for dinner.  As I was driving away from the CVS, my car started acting funny.  Thanks be to my misadventurous youth, I know what a car feels like when it's running out of gas, so I maneuvered to a blank spot in the parking lot and had myself a little think.

We ended up walking over to McD to get his food, since he's insulin-dependent, and I don't want to deal with blood sugar issues.  He did not have the dog or the cane, so he couldn't walk home.

We get back to the car, and we're trying to brainstorm who to call.  His father, the obvious choice because he lives five minutes away, has already turned his phone off for the night.  His brother, on a rare in-town weekend, is actually camping with his kid.   I could walk to the gas station, but I have no gas can and no money to buy one.  He's willing to spring for gas, but doesn't have enough to buy a gas can, too.  What happened to the days when gas stations would have a gas can on hand and let you borrow it?

I'm scrolling through my phone and it's all Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, DC, New York, Texas!  Oh, wait, he lives two hours away.  Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, damn I know a lot of people in OK.   I finally found someone and managed to get hold of her after three unanswered calls, and so a ten-minute trip to get food turned into a three-hour sit in the car.  She got there, had already procured a gas can and had filled it, and a random guy that she just happened to know was there and offered to come help.

Anyway, car started right up, I got a tank full of gas (I asked for it last week, but this is not the way I anticipated it happening, lol), and I even got my Fossil Felix the Cat watch back, because my friend had found it a week or so ago, and remembered it was mine.

While we were sitting there, I commented that the one time I leave the house without my Kindle is the one time I needed something to occupy my time.  After I declared that I was never leaving the house again without my entire purse, including my Kindle, we had a good ten minutes riffing on what would be in the magical backpack in the trunk from now on (included a tent, a camp stove, chainsaw (wtf) and various other goodies).

We also talked about energy exchanges and how he'd come to understand them.  

I've never been comfortable asking for help.  The last five years have been an exercise in curing myself of that in a big way.  Anyway, I've reframed the help thing in my head, because someone once explained to me that everyone likes to feel useful or needed or just have the warm fuzzies, so when I refuse to ask for help, I am depriving other people of an opportunity to do something that makes them feel good.  I have to tell myself this a lot sometimes, but it works.  Sometimes.

Tonight, though, he talked about it in physics terms - you know, the universe is energy and everything is energy and it flows around and through everything.  When I try to be self-sufficient, I'm frakking up the energy flow - I can't put energy out if I'm not taking any in.  I'm not explaining it very well, but it hit me that by trying to be all I need no one and can do everything myself, I'm mucking up the flow and that makes things worse for everyone, including the people around me.  So I've got some thinking to do and more reframing of the crap in my head.

And on that note, what stopped me from calling any of a dozen people was the idea behind saying, "Hey, I ran out of gas, will you come rescue me?" which is, "Hey, I'm a loser who doesn't even have enough money to put gas in my own car, and I ran out of gas five minutes from my own house, and won't your Saturday night suck if you come help me."  Gah!  I complain that no one ever calls me for help, even though I would, gladly, even at my own inconvenience.  So what makes me think that others don't want the same opportunity?  My head is a frakked up place.  I'm blaming the 60s.

But.  Full tank of gas.  Felix the Cat. I bow to the universe.

Movie: Skyfall

There's a moment, about ten minutes in, when Bond is drowning, and you can see exactly how well Daniel Craig is built.  :ahem:  It's reminiscent of a popular still from the set of the senior pilots' bunkroom on BSG.  heehee

What?  I've been writing smut, and I'm feeling shallow at the moment.  :D

Dame Judi Dench is the bomb diggity.

I like suspenders on a man.  They give his trousers the right....drape.

The new Q is adorable.

Scruff does not look as good on DC as it does on some other men.  At least not the scruff he was sporting here.

I laughed out loud several times.  I think my personal favorite is "Welcome to Scotland." 

I loved that house - out in the middle of nowhere, plenty of room to tramp around, water nearby, and a secret tunnel!  When can I move in?

Replacing Google Reader

OK, so Bloglovin did not work for me.  I couldn't arrange my feeds the way I wanted, and it would only display one column, down the middle, which included blurbs and pictures and the whole shebang.  I want HEADLINES/SUBJECT LINES only.

NetVibes gives me that.  Importing it from Google Reader was easy, once I found the tutorial on it.  It has a very user friendly interface, with click to expand and click to collapse, so I can view more of a headline, then collapse it again if it's not what I want.

Since it's headlines only, it allows me to scan the headlines for the things I want to read first.  It allows me to rearrange my feeds into new groups by dragging and dropping.  It lets me mark all of a blog read without impacting the other blog feeds under that category.

So far, I've found nothing I don't like about it.  It's going to replace Google Reader nicely.

Also, it's free, but has upgraded versions that do more things - more than the average reader would need.

One thing I do like that Google Reader doesn't do, when I mark things read, they don't disappear. So if it happens that I marked something read and it turns out that I want to refer back to it a few days later, the headline is still there, just grayed out so I know it's been read.

Movies: Paperboy, Deadfall

Movies I've seen lately via my redboxinstant trial (and can I just say, I don't recommend it) are Paperboy, Deadfall and The Cold Light of Day.

Paperboy was a very strange movie, described by a friend thus: "despite getting booed at Cannes was a hugely entertaining over-the-top, sweaty, sexy and then some, Southern Gothic kinkfest of a movie."  Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, and David O (from MI-5) are the main stars, with an ubercreepy turn as an inmate by John Cusack.  :shudders:

I had to see this because my friend (mentioned above) told me that Zac runs around most of the movie at least shirtless, and frequently pantsless.  Zac is my hugely age-inappropriate movie star crush, and naturally I was intrigued :snicker: by the idea of him doing much of the movie in his tighty-whities.

If you have trigger issues with incest, probably not your thing.  I do, but it was very subtle here, and male/male, so not as triggery for me.  It was a train wreck, but an entertaining one.  And yes, Zac Efron was muy bueno in his underwear.  lol

Deadfall at its core is a story of family and what we'll do for them when the shit hits the fan.  Brother and sister, father and son, husband and wife, father and daughter.  All four families are dysfunctional in some way, with some overt brother/sister incest vibes (seriously, someone needs to tag these things) that were not too squicky, for me anyway.  Deadfall had a fairly heavy-hitting cast, including Kris Kristofferson, Sissy Spacek, Treat Williams, Kate Mara (a favorite of mine because she gets parts that don't depend on looks - not that she's unattractive, she's just not Hollywood gorgeous) and Eric Bana, with relative newcomers Olivia Wilde (who has gorgeous and unusual eyes) and Charlie Hunnam.  Except for a news report playing in the background in one scene, you'd never know what the brother and sister did that necessitated them running, and it's really not material to the plot.  Suffice it to say, they're on the run, and all kinds of violent hijinks ensue.  Does include one very short but effective lovemaking sequence, with Hunnam and Wilde naked (not the brother and sister, fyi).  Not all the families find resolution by the end of the movie, and the denoument, while not precisely Hollywood, was just what I expected.  It could only have ended one other way, really, and while I was hoping they would go there, they at least opted not to give it a happy ending.

Mark Cuban had top production credit on Deadfall.

Cold Light of Day was a Bruce Willis movie, with Henry Cavill as the son placed in a very strange situation when someone kidnaps his family while he's visiting on vacation.  It did some slightly surprising things with the plot.  A potential love interest (great chemistry between Cavill and the actress) turned out to be the character's sister, and I was really pleased that they chose a sibling direction for the two rather than the more usual love starting under harrowing circumstances.  Cavill is in the new Superman movie, Man of Steel (?) and has grown into quite a striking man since his turn as the young Mondego in Count of Monte Cristo.  The action sequences weren't always believable, and the camera action was a bit much for me at times, but I really enjoyed this movie anyway.  Aside from Bruce Willis, whose part is rather short, there's a star turn by Sigourney Weaver as a colleague of the father's whose motives are suspect.  With the ending they gave it, it could easily turn into a franchise for Cavill, though perhaps not as successful a one as Bourne or Die Hard.

As for the redboxinstant thing - I did like getting the four free credits that I could use at the kiosk, but their streaming leaves a lot to be desired, and that's assuming you can find a recent movie you want to watch (they don't have much in the way of recent major motion pictures available to stream, and what they do have is extremely difficult to find - their search function sucks).  I did managed to stream One For the Money and SWAT: Firefight.  With only four credits per month and the streaming issues, it's definitely not worth $8 a month.  Amazon is a much better deal at $80 a year, or Netflix for the same $8 a month, with a far greater selection and very few streaming issues that I've ever encountered.

Replacing Google Reader

I've tried feedly.  Very big footprint and runs in the background, even when the browser's closed.  I tried feedreader, which though it let me sign up for it, I can never actually get the webpage to open.

Now, I'm going to try bloglovin.  We'll see.  Ignore the follow me link if you want.  I'm just trying something new.

<a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/6854303/?claim=fms8an9nr4m">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Book: Marked For Vengeance

I received a digital copy of this book from the author in return for an honest review.

Marked For Vengeance is about Alyx, who is some sort of supernatural being called a Protector, and her experiences during her third lifetime as a human.  Her job while on Earth is to be in the vicinity of her Marked and protect him or her if necessary.

It’s an interesting idea, and I probably would have enjoyed reading more if the book hadn’t been plagued with awkward sentence structure throughout and a much higher than average rate of homophone mistakes, as well as other incorrect words.  As the daughter of an English teacher, I tend to read with a mental red pencil at the ready, and to be hypercritical of mistakes.  Many people will not be bothered by the problems I noticed.

Alyx has a stronger than normal (for her) attachment to her Marked during this lifetime and pays enough attention to him that she borders on stalking.  The major events of the story take place within a tight timeframe - maybe just a few days, and at the book’s end, Alyx is uncertain if she’s fulfilled her purpose as a Protector, and several other questions remain unanswered - the ones to which I’d most like the answers, honestly.

Based on this first book, I’m not convinced there’s enough compelling story material here to warrant a trilogy (as I understand it), though I’m willing to wait and see how the coming battle will play out.  Obviously, I’m not privy to the author’s imagination, and there may be much more to this story than I think there is.

There was a three-chapter sample of the second book at the end, which pretty much picks up where the initial story stops.  During the first three chapters, there’s an awful lot of internal Alyx dialogue and exposition, more than necessary to move the story forward, in my opinion.

Descriptions are vivid, and characters are easy to imagine as real people I might meet on the street.  I really like the friendship between Alyx and Cindra.  The entire premise is a unique take on Angels and the hierarchy of the Beings above us, so not the same-old, same-old.


This book is currently exclusive to Amazon.

BzzCampaign: Kroger dairy blends and Greek yogurts

As a BzzAgent, I get coupons or free products to try in exchange for providing my honest opinion about the product.  In this case, I got coupons, which I will gladly share, and a $10 Kroger card to be used to purchase the product.

I got into this BzzCampaign for Kroger's new dairy blends and Greek yogurts and used the coupons and my Kroger card to stock up on different flavors.  So far, I've only tried the Black Forest Cake, and I have to say that I was not impressed.  This was a flavor of dairy blend, meaning it's not yogurt and not completely dairy.  It also doesn't taste very good.  Not bad, but not good, either.  I've got seven other flavors to try, so keep an eye here for more first impressions.  It's got a strange lumpy texture, whereas my usual Yoplait is always smooth, except for the fruit in it.

Book: Venus Blackmailed, Part Three

Guess I wasn't paying attention to the Part Three in the title when I purchased this. Even so, I didn't have any trouble picking up what the plot was, since it's pretty simple. Student enjoys humiliating teacher and for whatever reason, teacher allows it. This is all about debasement of and control over another, nothing else. If you're into that sort of thing, this'll probably work for you, but there's not even the tiniest hint of emotion in this one, so if you're looking for that, move along.

It's also riddled with poor grammar, homonym errors and other technical gaffes, maybe two or three per page.

Book: The Prince by Tiffany Reisz

I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley for review purposes.

I got to read The Siren last year, and was greatly looking forward to reading the rest of the books as they came out. This book focused on Wesley on his home ground, and Nora's relationship with him. A lot of things come to light about Wes - he's not necessarily who we thought he was. Nora actually has a little crisis of confidence, wondering if she's good enough for him.

The books ends on a bang, and I almost hate the author for ending it there. Seriously? I might have to hire a hit man for that.

I did find the Soren and Kingsley story interesting, as well, and that part dovetails with Nora's adventure with Wesley in a very interesting way. That series of showdowns will be fascinating to watch.

Book: Power Play: Resistance

I don’t understand Jonathan’s move from zero (meeting Bran at the bar) to 200 (spending $8K on a suit, cooking him dinner and cuffing him to the bed the next night), why he’s so enamored of Bran that he’s pushing so far, so fast.  I got the fast face-fuck in the alley the night they meet - people do that all the time, but the rest?  Not so much.

I did not find either of the men to be in-character as they were described.  Jonathan is not sadistic, or was not portrayed to be, despite the fact that he said he was more than once - he struggles internally too much to be someone who enjoys giving pain.

This story was not romantic or sexy or sensuous or erotic or even educational about the S&M lifestyle.  I just kept hoping there was something there, and it never showed up.  If this is truly an example of a TPE, I want no part of that.  At all.

Bran is too Alpha to really be a sub - he struggles too much internally to enjoy submitting to someone else, and he does not enjoy the pain.  His body responds, no doubt, and he says he’s having some of the best sex of his life, but seriously, except when he's actually orgasming, he's not enjoying any of it.  Three million dolllars is not worth the kind of mind-fuck Jonathan’s putting him through.

Jonathan punished Bran more than once for using his safeword.  It’s only OK to use it if Jonathan thinks Bran is actually at his limit.  I get the concept of not using the safeword willy-nilly, but there were at least two times that Bran's internal dialogue told me he was at his limit, and Jonathan ignored it and kept going.  What's the point of even having a safe-word?

Basically, at the end of this book, I’m left wondering why Jonathan wants to Top someone he can't respect, why Bran can’t tell Jonathan and his three million to fuck off, and why either of them are even doing this.  Except for the first time in the alley, none of the sex was hot - I didn’t get the feeling Bran was willingly engaged at any time, just his body.

If my mind is elsewhere during sex, as in “not there at all” there is something wrong, and the person with me should notice and do something about it.  I’m not talking about the pain/pleasure of subspace, but the mind going away because what’s happening to the body is unacceptable.

Aside from all that, the book was well-written and I found few errors of the technical kind.  Any BDSM errors are in my own mind, because my personal experience with the lifestyle is minimal.

Random, some more...

Got another request for a book review.  This one's not just some no-name author trying to perk up his or her review count.  This one's from Brenda Novak.  Technically, it's from her assistant, who said she enjoyed reading my reviews, and could I please review the latest book if she sent me a copy. 

:eek!:

Also, in the seriously amusing category:  Landlord's dad was over Sunday to hang the curtains they got him for christmas.  Since Landlord is blind, I was the eyes, and made sure things were level and even and whatnot.  Later, dad's gone and we're hanging pictures in the game room, and out of the blue I say to Rick, "Your dad's a sub.  Maybe not in his work, but with home-related stuff."  Silence for a moment.  "You know, that explains a whole lot about a lot of things."   Conversation passes to other things, and another friend comes up in the conversation about getting on Medicare versus paying COBRA premiums. They're talking about the best way to get K to go through the information and get signed up (he'll be 66 in March), and again, apropos of nothing, I say, "Kent's definitely a sub.  If you want him to do something, you have to tell him what he needs to do and just keep telling him until it's all done."

So Landlord decides that we should find a way to start a dating service, where part of the inflow process is to sit and have a conversation or several with me, so that I can determine where in the spectrum someone lies, thus matching them up with their proper complement.  I got to imagining the ads for such a service and just giggled madly for a few minutes.  Me, who hasn't dated in well over two decades, matching people up based on a BDSM profile I make up in my head.  :snicker: