Remember folks there is an alternative to A*****

I'm editing our mystery menu.  New category - murder in the great outdoors - and some of the authors I want to add have earlier titles that I can't get hold of through the shop.  I'd rather cut off my fingers than use A***** so decided to go with ABE books instead.  Result!  Four authors - Dana Stabenow, Marcia Muller, Sue Henry and Ken Goddard's books are coming my way shortly.

The drawback to a large draft

Until yesterday morning my printer has never run out of toner mid-print.  Cue rush to Toners R Us to get another one.  So the draft is now in the hands of my crack reading team.  Now what do I do??

Oh and the results of 'say yes week', a fun run, coffee with an old acquaintance, dinner date with hubby, a new place to write.  Not a bad result.

Draft #3 complete

Thunderball lives! (in a drawer until the next set of feedback)

Reading aloud - not so scary

Yesterday was cool.  Reading to a class of music and theatre students at Westminster College.  Of course it helped that I was reading from Jane Austen.  Tonight another JA my good friend Jenn Adams will be signing 'Y is for Yorick' at the bookstore. 

Finished The Mozart Conspiracy, enjoyed it but really did see a couple of things coming.  After all if this going to become a series then certain things had to happen.  Writing today, hopefully this is the last day for draft #3.

Got Books

I think this qualifies under the heading 'be careful what you wish for'.  The Mozart Conspiracy had me at James Bond meets Jason Bourne meets The Davinci Code.  No arc for this one so I have to have it read by Friday - hmm shouldn't be a problem as I'm halfway through it.  Armful of arcs includes, new Jacqueline Winspear already out and selling like hotcakes, new Erik Larson out in May and more Swedish crime The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler and this afternoon I'm doing some reading for a class at Westminster - that's reading aloud to a class at Westminster.

Gimme books! - oh and another installment of 'say yes' week

A little light on the reading this week.  I'm almost finished with The Man in the White Suit, Ben Collins' autobiography.  Not only was he the Stig, he's driven everything you can imagine - and some things you can't.  He also details the gruelling training he did with the army reserves and the many celebrity encounters he had when coaching stars' laps on Top Gear.  The other book for this week is #3 in the PJ Tracy series.

Hoping to come home from work tonight with an armful of arcs.  Also this week along with going to Jen Adams' book signing and handing out completed draft number 3 to my lovely reading team, it's another one of those 'say yes' weeks, where people offer me gigs and I just accept without giving it any thought.  Impulsive and crazy? Yes. But you'd be amazed what turns up and it really amps up your confidence.

Reading in the sun

Sometimes you just need a break and that was a good one.  I did read a bunch of books though.  "White Devil" by Justin Evans another literary mystery, present day, smart and I have to say pretty scary.  His descriptions of a jealous, possessive presence that has confused a student at Harrow with his former lover would be difficult to replicate onscreen.  The other thing, this spook is carrying a disease that kills.  That's coming in May.  I also read The Paradise Prophecy by Robert Browne, this is a July release and taps into Dan Brown territory except with a much more supernatural edge (think Angels and Demons - for real).  I enjoyed it but I am not going to rush out and read John Milton's Paradise Lost, the book that features heavily throughout the story.

PJ Tracy's second book Live Bait - I love this series.  Cop humour isn't always well done but the two leads Maggozi and Rolseth are great.  The continued association with Monkeewrench and Grace  MacBride works well and again even though I had figured it out, two twists at the end made the book for me.  Number three Dead Run is on order.

Typhoon, which is out in paperback introduced me to Charles Cumming, his writing rivals John Le Carre and Len Deighton both favourites of mine.  Set in Hong Kong on the eve of the 1997 handover to the Chinese and ten years later.  Rookie MI6 agent Joe Lennox catches the debrief  of a Professor Wang.  Joe thinks he's stumbled on a career making coup but it's stolen out from under him by CIA agent Miles Coolidge who also has designs on Joe's girlfriend.  When an older, wiser Joe is sent into China he's after a rouge operation called Typhoon, he uncovers a massive conspiracy with his old adversary at the heart of it. 

I'm just finishing Cubeology by Daniel Barko which is set in Australia.  It's about a bunch of college students, who are drawn together by a mysterious cube and a terrible accident.  Each student gains powers they have trouble controlling, the police are very suspicious of them and one of their group is currently in a mental hospital.  Help arrives in the shape of a mysterious stranger but then people start dying and the students will have to take on the master if they want to survive.  The book actually contains the game they use, but so far no magical powers have been forthcoming.  This reminded me a little of The Magicians by Lev Grossman but I like Cubeology better.

In writing news, I just cracked the magic 300, I reckon another week and I'll be looking at draft number 3.

and then there were five

So I finished Bulletproof Mascara yesterday, just in time to catch two more arcs.  Cubeology and The Paradise Prophecy both requests on my part.  Today I'm combining Rollover edits with avalanche patrol.  We had four inches of snow last night and dirty great slabs of it keep falling into the drive.  Trick is to shovel but not get nailed by the snow.

Almost at 300 and this weeks to read list

I'm just 4 pages away from the magic 300!  At the moment writing and agreeing on edits is taking up a lot of my time but I'm still hitting the books.  This week there are four, Bulletproof Mascara by Bethany Maines - I read the second one first - these are spy-jinks, cross an Avon lady with Charlie's Angels and throw in a little James Bond for good measure and voila!  Live Bait - the second in the PJ Tracy series and Typhoon by Charles Cummings which is set in Hong Kong during the handover and then ten years later and finally an arc called The White Devil by Justin Evans which is described as scary, literary, gothic and a mystery.

New for March One Of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde

Fforde’s brand of literary lunacy continues.  In the real world – Swindon to be exact – Thursday Next has been missing for a month, she’s crossed over to bookworld working undercover on ‘something big’ but with a week to go before peace talks that could avert a genre war the real Thursday vanishes without a trace.

In bookworld the fictional version of Thursday suddenly becomes very popular, the council of genres want to use her as a mute stand-in at the peace talks suffering from ‘irritable vowel syndrome’.  The Men in Plaid keep trying to kill her and Red Herring from accident investigation is chasing her for a report on an obscure trans-genre taxi accident.    

Does Thursday have the answers, did her understudy Scarlet get hyphenated and sleep with a gnome, who is Adrian Dorsett and why was the ISBN scrubbed off his book?  Does she really need a butler?  Are Thursday and the peace delegation sailing up the river without a paddle and most importantly is Harry Potter annoyed that he’ll always look like Daniel Radcliffe?   

Long-time Fforde fans can dive right in to this brew of literary puns and witty word play. If you are new to Thursday’s adventures, you might want to start with The Eyre Affair.

New for March The Informationist by Taylor Stevens

Vanessa Michael Munroe, an androgynous blend of strategist and street fighter.  Born to missionary parents in Cameroon, Munroe can conjure information seemingly from thin air and corporations are willing to pay for her services.  Oil billionaire Richard Burbank offers Munroe a massive pay day to find his daughter Emily who vanished in Africa four years ago. He reasons if Munroe can’t find her - no one can.  Burbank’s only condition, a security consultant - Miles Bradford - to watch Munroe’s back.

As her efforts start to pay off it becomes clear that someone doesn't want Emily's fate to get out.  Munroe finds herself double-crossed, injured and running towards a past she fled nine years ago deep in the Cameroonian jungle.