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Apr. 24th, 2006 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanaiseThe local adult education program has a class in online dating. A face to face class. For people who want to use the internet to meet someone. Doesn't it seem likely that if they could interact in person, they wouldn't need the internet?
I'm still liking Urban Shaman. It does have one of my key hatreds in the world of fantasy (Celtic gods. I love them, but really. They're over used in fiction.), but the characters are at least interesting (And it does give a reason why the main character is half Irish, half Cherokee, as well making her not a southwestern reservation indian, which is a pleasant change.).
It's interesting me on another level as well, which is that I find it more readable than the LAG Retrievers novels, and I can't figure out why. I wanted to like those books--wanted soo much to like them, and yet I didn't. I read the first one, fighting my way through that awful font (seriously. sans serif? It was painful), and thought the problem I had reading them was just the font. I started the second one, and realized that the thing that kept pulling me out of the story wasn't just the font, it was the fact that every few pages I'd read a line and say, "wow, I bet the author was really pleased with that one," which is not the way to stay involved in a story. There is voice, and then there is hearing a perfectly well defined character use lines which don't belong to them. US, I got to page 150 before I had the author jump out at me. (note to writer people: if your character is not shown to be a geek before (and a mechanic/cop who majored in english doesn't scream 'geek' to me), having them suddenly notice obscure ST references in another character's speech makes me remember that this is a book, and was probably written by a geeky author, as most of the authors I know are. Of course, if your characters are total geeks, I think 'Mary Sue" so I may just be anti-geek in general.)
But I still do have about half of the book to go, so I may move over into the disliking it stage as well, though I hope not. It's sad, really. I read Red Dress Ink books all the time, and I love them. They have all the good things about romances, and about stories in general. I read YA genre fiction, which often has a romance as well, and they're also good. So why are there so few good paranormal romances in the lines which are supposed to be designed for those books? Maybe I should try harlequin's paranormal line? Though I think most of the really really bad ones are in the strictly romance line as well. (ie, Highlanders, vikings, time travel.) The paranormal failures are just...not as good as I want them to be. Not actively bad, just passively not good. I don't anticipate that I'll stop reading them, though. (I'm such a sucker for punishment, I may even keep reading the paranormal short story collections which are so unbelievably bad that they should be buried at the crossroads.)
I'm still liking Urban Shaman. It does have one of my key hatreds in the world of fantasy (Celtic gods. I love them, but really. They're over used in fiction.), but the characters are at least interesting (And it does give a reason why the main character is half Irish, half Cherokee, as well making her not a southwestern reservation indian, which is a pleasant change.).
It's interesting me on another level as well, which is that I find it more readable than the LAG Retrievers novels, and I can't figure out why. I wanted to like those books--wanted soo much to like them, and yet I didn't. I read the first one, fighting my way through that awful font (seriously. sans serif? It was painful), and thought the problem I had reading them was just the font. I started the second one, and realized that the thing that kept pulling me out of the story wasn't just the font, it was the fact that every few pages I'd read a line and say, "wow, I bet the author was really pleased with that one," which is not the way to stay involved in a story. There is voice, and then there is hearing a perfectly well defined character use lines which don't belong to them. US, I got to page 150 before I had the author jump out at me. (note to writer people: if your character is not shown to be a geek before (and a mechanic/cop who majored in english doesn't scream 'geek' to me), having them suddenly notice obscure ST references in another character's speech makes me remember that this is a book, and was probably written by a geeky author, as most of the authors I know are. Of course, if your characters are total geeks, I think 'Mary Sue" so I may just be anti-geek in general.)
But I still do have about half of the book to go, so I may move over into the disliking it stage as well, though I hope not. It's sad, really. I read Red Dress Ink books all the time, and I love them. They have all the good things about romances, and about stories in general. I read YA genre fiction, which often has a romance as well, and they're also good. So why are there so few good paranormal romances in the lines which are supposed to be designed for those books? Maybe I should try harlequin's paranormal line? Though I think most of the really really bad ones are in the strictly romance line as well. (ie, Highlanders, vikings, time travel.) The paranormal failures are just...not as good as I want them to be. Not actively bad, just passively not good. I don't anticipate that I'll stop reading them, though. (I'm such a sucker for punishment, I may even keep reading the paranormal short story collections which are so unbelievably bad that they should be buried at the crossroads.)
