Books of June and post haste goats — Kristen Writes Things

Greetings good buddies and perfect strangers who probably found my blog by Googling “evil fuckery.” It’s a beautiful morning and I’m on an only moderately smelly Caltrain to San Francisco, and also, I just read the best line I’ve ever read in an email that didn’t come from Sarah.

“We had to kill the Chosen One post haste and install a goat in his place.”

Boom.

If you want to get me to by a book, let me tell you, you don’t need hadoop to crawl my data. I’m gonna tell you what it takes right now. Send me an email that starts with “One foine [sic] day, we were sitting in an airport barbecue restaurant eating very bad barbecue, and we hatched the idea for Kill the Farm Boy.” Then, at the end, make me promise to not tell someone’s mom that their beloved son was killed by a falling gardener. That’s the formula. I clicked that link so hard I might have broken a nail. Email conversion level: expert.... unlocked.

That made my morning. You know what made my day last night? (Because that’s a thing. You can make a day even when its night. Sorry-not-sorry to explode your mind with that truth bomb.) Pre-orders. Awwwww yeah. Like Christmas on June 4th at 9pm after a totally awesome taco party. Like getting pinged in the middle of the day to drink because someone said one of the buzzword bingo words, which I would never admit to, but probably happened yesterday to someone I know who might be me. Maybe. In other words, cool.

How was my day made at night? Well, let me tell you. It started with Phil telling me that Amazon was having an issue with my payment. But not really. He was saying the words “Krissy… Amazon is having an issue with your payment” while looking at his phone, but what he was saying with his heart was that the much awaited and much vaunted put-me-out-of-my-fargin-misery installment of Ministry of Curiousities, book the tenth, Wisdom of Madness, was ready. That guy. He really knows how to make a day/night with the reading of transactional emails while not making eye contact.

Let’s just say I put down the very subpar second installment of the previously discussed Castles Ever After series, Say Yes to the Marquess, to throw my credit card at the screen.

Hawt taek: Having finished the Castles Ever After by Tessa Dare, I’ve decided that as a series it only deserves a shaky “it’s aight” rating. Book one was pretty okay. The third book was mostly okay. The second book was BORRRRRRING with all of the caps and all of the Rs.

If you’re gonna have conflict from a long lost character who you spend 200 pages trying to convince the reader is a boring diplomat, but then introduce him in the last 30 pages of the book as a hot spy with exquisite diction, who can kill a man with a letter opener and make it look like an accident, you have undone all of your own hard work. That shit doesn’t make sense. And also, if you have a character like that, don’t hide him. Have him all over that book. As a matter of fact, throw out the oaf prize fighter you wrote the book about in the first place and make it about his brother the peer who is actually as interesting and awesome as he sounds.

I get it. You needed super sexy spy who the heroine has been waiting for (for eight long, lonely years even) to show up so the she can have dramatic self-doubt before eventually choosing huge, muscle-er little brother. And I get it that the author wanted to seed some serious doubt, so when she does choose big beefcake who is not a hot marquess spy, everyone feels all of the feels. But something went dreadfully wrong in that last thirty pages. I care way more about the wrong dude and what he's been up to for the last eight years than I should.

The moral of this story is that you shouldn't write boring books about the wrong characters, k? /rant

Don King has nothing on regency promoters, clearly.

So, going back to me paying for things…. It turns out that throwing plastic at my screen is not a valid form of payment, which it too bad because throwing things as payment is just as satisfying as it sounds. Just ask rappers in music videos. I don’t think music video hoes actually accept any other type of payment except cash money that’s been airborne.

Anyway, I did eventually pay for my book in a totally pedestrian and boring fashion that didn’t involve rapper approved currency methods or potential tommy john surgery (I throw money at a lot of books. Shit could happen.) And by this time next week I will have resolution to the Alice in Wonderland plot line. I will. Because there is no freaking way that CJ Archer is gonna do Sarah, Kristina, and I like that again and dangle an 11th book in front of us. We’ve already paid our dues… it was called books 7-10, which we probably should have put down because the series was getting tired, but which we didn’t put down because we swore every time a new freaking book came out that it’d be the last. And then they went and introduced new characters that we love and now we give the tired dad sigh every time one comes out. But now I squee because I do think this is the end and I slightly more than 50% excited to see what happens.

MoC has to get in line behind the books that are already there and possibly a romance novel that was written by my friend’s coworker. I classify this as doing a favor, since he really does need to know what she’s probably typing while she’s nodding her head to whatever he’s saying in that meeting. But I’ll get to it (and maybe those goats) soon, don’t worry. And when I do, I’ll report back. You can rest assured.

You can also buy the goat head mask (and hooves) on this Etsy site for a thousand dollars. You're welcome.