other people’s books

And now for today’s major reason I was happy to avert the threat of the bug from work: rachelcaine had a reading tonight at Third Place Books. As I’ve been a fan of her Weather Warden books for a while and as Third Place is literally right down the hill from my house, I pretty much had to show up for this. Never mind that the actual reading was for the latest Morganville Vampire book and that I’m way behind on those; I showed up anyway, just for the awesome.

jennygriffee showed up as well, since she knows Rachel better than I do and even had the pleasure of rooming with her at a Harry Potter convention a few years back–and, she’s in the dedication of one of the Weather Warden books. So we both said hi to Rachel and got hugs and a bit of chatting, and each of us had a few books signed; I decided to bring the first one of each of her series, the Weather Wardens, the Morganvilles, and the Outcast Seasons. She wrote nice things in each of them, for me!

Yay! Rachel Caine Thinks I'm Awesome!

We were charmed as well that an older gentleman ahead of us in the line was attending the reading on behalf of his college-age daughter, who he said was a big fan of Rachel’s work and who was very put out that she was in New York and missing her first reading in the Pacific Northwest ever. He got Jenny to take his picture with Rachel to send to his daughter, which was awesome.

And Rachel told some awesome little anecdotes, including how that excellent jimbutcher quote on the first Weather Warden book came from Jim not even realizing that the book was hers–and they’d known each other already for quite some time, he just hadn’t realized that particular pen name was her! Lulz.

She gave out shiny things to all the people in the line, and there were apparently shinier things she was going to give to anybody who’d shown up with the whole Morganville series. I didn’t see what shiny swag that involved, since I’m behind on buying those! But what she gave out was pretty shiny, a big bookmark that changes images when you change what angle you hold it, and an Official Morganville Resident ID Card.

Shiny Morganville Swag

All in all it was a lovely little way to blow an hour. We left quickly, because the author herself had to get back to her hotel room–she has a book due tomorrow, the next MV installment, and she had 10K to go! She’s been jamming in all of the writing on this thing on the last several stops on her tour. I gotta say, for a woman on a reading tour and working in crunch mode on her next manuscript, she was looking pretty authorial, too.

Authorial Author is Authorial

Props as always to Third Place for their lovely little author events. I’ll have to scamper back down there on Tuesday as well for cmpriest!

So the fine ladies over at Smart Bitches have been doing a book club thing lately, and their latest title is Scoundrel, by Zoe Archer. They posted about it this morning, and as soon as I saw the blurb and the cover, I knew I was going to have to read it. To wit:

And okay, yeah, the fact that this guy is dressed like he mugged Malcolm Reynolds or perhaps Brendan Fraser’s character from The Mummy is going a long way to making him Relevant to My Interests, but really? More importantly? The simple fact that this dude is in fact DRESSED makes him infinitely sexier to me than all of the over-muscled tattooed guys wielding oversized swords that seem to be all over paranormal romance covers these days.

Plus, the plot sounds like great fun. As y’all know I’m in the middle of a massive Amelia Peabody re-read, and this fits in beautifully with that, with the promise of Historical And Also Paranormal Awesome. I have already yoinked a sample of this book down onto the Nookronomicon, just to see if the writing does in fact deliver on the promise of Awesome.

And I’m also swinging back to check out Book 1, whose cover hero apparently mugged Indiana Jones. ;>