Author Archives

Melissahttp://www.missmeliss.comWriter, voice actor, dog-lover, and bathtub mermaid, Melissa is the Associate Editor-in-Chief at All Things Girl. To learn more about her, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter (@Melysse) or Facebook. You can also listen to her podcast, "Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub" at Bathtub Mermaid or on iTunes.

Book Geeks in Love

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October evenings make me cook more, because it’s actually cool enough to use the oven. Also, I just re-read Julie Powell’s book about cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book I’ve drooled over while visiting others, but have yet to acquire a copy of.

Tonight, as I made midwestern food for Fuzzy, who works scary hours and never remembers to eat lunch, I thought about other October evenings, when we were first married and lived in South Dakota, and we would use one of our evenings off work to go to Barnes and Noble, me in my favorite leather bomber jacket, he in an ancient North Face jacket that has long since been destroyed. We’d browse through our favorite sections, then meet up and exchange smooches in the science fiction aisle, wash, rinse, repeat.

Afterward, we’d share a table in the little cafe, and I’d have a mocha, and he’d have hot chocolate or hot cider, and we’d share the peach tart they used to sell.

We don’t often linger in the cafe after bookshopping any more.
In fact, lately, our bookstore visits have been surgical strikes rather than literary sojourns.

But we still exchange smooches in the science fiction aisle.

Booking Through Thursday: Live and In Person

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The folks at Booking Through Thursday asked:

  • Have you ever met one of your favorite authors? Gotten their autograph?

    • I’ve never really seen the point in autographs on slips of paper, but I do like to attend signings when I have the opportunity. I’m also not really one to just interrupt someone and goggle at them. That being said, I have contacted a few authors whose work I enjoy, or think I’ll enjoy, and asked them to do interviews for me, for this site…there are two to be posted (one I’m late on) this month.

  • How about an author you felt only so-so about, but got their autograph anyway? Like, say, at a book-signing a friend dragged you to?

    • I’ve never been dragged to a signing. I did stumble into an author at one of the reception desks in a bookstore once, and ended up not only buying her book, but having it signed. (Um, I still haven’t read it though.) She was holding a signing I hadn’t known about.

  • How about stumbling across a book signing or reading and being so captivated, you bought the book?

    • Yes. See above.
    I’ve stayed for readings at bookstores in SFO, too – there’s something so cool about hearing words read aloud in a public venue. It reminds you of how very much humanity is born of Story.

Frustration: The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue

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This is not a review. Why? Because you can’t review a book if you haven’t read the whole thing, and after a week of attempts I’m still only about forty pages into Barbara Samuel’s The Goddesses of Kitchen Avenue.

The cover blurb made it seem like a book I’d like – a story about different women coming together in friendship.

The structure is one I would normally find refreshing – it’s told partly in reproduced email messages, partly in first person accounts. It’s different stories braided together.

But I can’t get into it. I can’t get to the zone – you know the one? – where you’re totally sucked into the story, and just can’t read fast enough, and you can hear/taste/see the people and places described? I can’t get there. And so I’m frustrated. I mean, I could be reading about Tampa real estate, and it would be more gripping than this book.

I’ve read reviews of Goddesses…. that praise it, and call it brilliant and wonderful. Is there something wrong with me, that I just don’t see it?

Is it a flaw in the book, or just a sign that I’m supposed to be writing, not reading, right now?

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is put a book aside, and go back to it later. I’m afraid I’ll have to do that with this book.

save our homes

Lost Titles

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Every time Fuzzy goes to Florida for work (which is at least once a quarter), he brings home brochures for Boca Raton real estate and Orlando vacation rental property, and I read them so I can get a sense of what the market there is doing.

I found one the other day, and turned to a page that had a house I swear I’d read about in a novel. Sadly I don’t remember the name of the book, but it took place in Florida, and the lead character was an artist, a painter. I don’t remember it being chick-lit, exactly, but I’m not sure it was overly dramatic, either.

I have a feeling I didn’t read the end, and I can’t remember the title. It might have been a woman’s name, or a reference to art.

But I really want to read it again.

More Coming Attractions

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I just received the emailed interview from Julia Holden, and while she doesn’t talk about fictional Las Vegas homes for sale (or trailers stashed behind hotels or casinos, for that matter) the subjects do include Paris, pseudonyms, future plans, and the Folies Bergere.

The authors who’ve been contacted are picked because they’re fairly accessible – with websites, blogs, etc., – as well as because I like their work, or think my readers will appreciate what they have to say.

So far, everyone I’ve contacted has been really gracious and returned the questionnaire much quicker than anticipated, which is really good for me.

Ms. Holden’s interview won’t be posted until November, most likely, but I wanted to let you all know it was coming.

Coming in October

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Just a brief list of what’s coming to Bibliotica during the rest of October:

– Review of the season premiere of Blood Ties
– Reviews of Rises the Night and The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason
– In Their Words: Emailed interview from Keith R. A. DeCandido, who apparently never sleeps. This will go up either Tuesday or Thursday of this week, and should not be missed – some of his responses made me wish I had protective underwear.
– More site changes. You may have noticed the new layout, but I’m working on one that will spotlight featured pieces a little better.

I’ll also be re-reading the original Dracula by Bram Stoker and posting a list of my favorite fictional vampires.

Thanks for reading.

Moonlight-ing

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I spent this morning cleaning my coffee maker, but I probably should have spent it researching drug treatment centers instead, because after my mini-marathon of Dracula: the Series on Friday, I also finally managed to catch an episode of the new vampire detective show Moonlight which is brought to you, in part, by Ron Koslow who was also involved in one of my favorite 1980’s television shows, Beauty and the Beast.

Friends who managed to see the pilot of Moonlight told me that it was very much an Angel ripoff. I disagree. If anything, it traces more of its roots back to Forever Knight than Angel ever did, and that’s fine, because what makes Joss Whedon’s work stand out is that it is so fresh and difference. It also has more than a passing resemblance to Blood Ties which returns this week.

In any case, Moonlight features Australian actor Alex O’Loughlin as vampire private investigator Mick St. John, who is relatively young in vampire terms, as he was still mortal as recently as 1950. He’s got a torch for a blonde reporter, who is apparently in a stable relationship with someone in the district attorney’s office, so there’s they typical vampire-mortal attraction dance going on, and of course, they fight crime.

It seems like a show still finding its feet, and I’ve read that there were major casting changes at the last minute, and that David Greenwalt who was involved in the show’s creation, walked away from it over the summer, so I’m hoping it will last long enough to have a chance of growing beyond it’s very earnest first couple episodes, and maybe offer a little bit more grit.

My verdict: Worth catching, but don’t cancel plans for it.

Dracula: The Series

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If there’s some kind of drug treatment for people who like cheesy vampire stories, than I surely need it, because yesterday while I was working I went through an entire disc of Dracula: The Series on DVD. Now, an entire disc may not sound bad to those of you accustomed to getting four hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a disc, but you will understand why a disc of Drac is bad when I tell you that, because it’s a half-hour show, one disc = eleven episodes.

Eleven.

Now do you sense the wrongness?

Back in the very very early 1990’s, there was a channel in the NJ/NY area known as “Universal 9” – I’m not sure if it was some precursor to UPN or not, but among the funky syndicated shows they ran were this one, and another called She-Wolf of London that was about an American university student who is bitten by a werewolf while she’s visiting England. Adventure and romance ensue.

Dracula however, is at least partly a sit-com. It features extremely tall Canadian actor Geordie Johnson as “Alexander Lucard” – who lives in a modern castle and conquers the world by conglomerating it. Pitted against him is Bernard Behrens as “Gustav Helsing” – Uncle Gustav to the two American (who are really Canadian) kids who are sent to live with him in Belgium (except it’s really Luxembourg) while their mother wanders around Europe in her job for a bank. The boys are Max (10) and Chris (16), and they are cheerfully geeky in that “still have eighties hair” sort of way. Also staying with Gustav is Sophie Metternich (played by The L Word‘s Mia Kirschner), and of course she and Chris end up flirting with each other, a lot, while Max and Uncle G run off to try and kill Dracula.

There is a lot of wielding of crosses and splashing of holy water, big swirly capes, and near-vaudevillian gesturing, especially when Drac is about to sink his ridiculously long fangs into the neck of the week.

Guest stars are campy in a “If I wasn’t Canadian and it wasn’t thirty years too late I’d be on Gilligan’s Island” sort of way, and most of the 41 Canadian actors who showed up in EVERY US/CAN joint production of the era show up here as well, including, in a recurring role as Klaus “I’m a psychotic giggling loon with fangs” Helsing, Gustav’s son, turned Dracula’s minion, Geraint Wyn Davies. Followers of Vamp TV know that Geraint Wyn Davies would show up wearing fangs (and a better hair style) a few years later as the lead in the “Crime time after prime time” show, Forever Knight.

If I’m mocking this show so much, you may wonder why I bought the discs. Well, for one thing, the entire first season of 21 episodes (there was no second season, which is too bad, because had they chosen to tone down the cheese some interesting plot points were coming out) was a whopping $8.49 at a certain online megabookstore.

Also, sometimes, you just need to laugh.

A Dangerous Dress

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by Julia Holden

I bought A Dangerous Dress after reading Julia Holden’s other novel One Dance in Paris a couple weeks ago, and exchanging comments via her MySpace page. She’s kindly consented to do an emailed interview for me, when she has a few free moments, and I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it.

Anyway, this book shares with the other a trip to Paris, and is still a chick-lit coming of age story, but there are no trips to anything like Caesars Palace this time, though there is a movie set, a news set, and a bank involved.

The lead character, Jane, is working in her uncle’s bank, and feeling a bit humdrum, when she gets a call from a French movie director (who happens to be her college roommate’s father), asking her to please come to Paris and find the perfect 1928 dress for the star of his film. Her expertise, he says, comes from the college paper she wrote years before, about her late grandmother’s very own flapper dress – a dress so exotic, so unique, that it is literally dangerous. Dangerous in that edgy, seductive sort of way.

The dress is, of course, merely a catalyst. Jane jets off to find love, adventure, new skills, more adventure, and a lot of self-awareness, in an entertaining read that goes by way too fast.