How I Spent My Summer Vacation - Part One

Hi Everybody,

It's been a while since I've checked in here. There were some personal things going on in my life over the last few months which I'm going to keep personal, but things are looking up of late. Needless to say that with all the turmoil going on, I kind of left my writing by the wayside a little bit. I recently turned back to it, and cleaned up what I've got a bit, but I can't seem to get any new words on the page.

Now, I'm still working at The Job Which Supports My Writing Habit. But my inner writer decided that since he wasn't producing anyway, he'd officially take the rest of the summer off, with the understanding that as soon as September starts, I'm going to hit the pad again. Hard.

So I fired up my Nook (I LOVE my Nook) and I've spent the last couple of months reading. I've read more books in the couple of months I've had this thing than I've read in a looooong time. And I'm reading... you guessed it... CRIME BOOKS! (Because man cannot live by sci-fi alone, my friends)

I actually started off with a sci-fi book called Blood Oath, which was a Babylon 5 novel. It was written by Michael Straczynski, who created B5, so it flows just like an episode of the series. If you've ever watched the show, you can almost picture Jerry Doyle as Garibaldi and Claudia Christian as Ivanova having the conversations that he writes in the book, so he did a good job of staying true to his characters. It was an enjoyable read, and a good start for my little reading adventure. Then like I said, I moved on to murder books.

James Patterson writes a character names Alex Cross, who is a Washington DC homicide cop who is also a psychologist. He's bought in on all sorts of specialized murder and kidnapping cases where there is a strong psychological element to the crimes. He's written 18 of these books to date, and I read them all, so I won't break them all down. But I'll say this much: I like Morgan Freeman, and he did a great job with the scripts they gave him to work with in Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls, but the movies didn't do the books justice. They changed the whole dynamic of the character, left out some great supporting characters (He had a partner in the books, but not in the movies. They also gave him a wife, who was dead in the books, and left out his kids and his grandmother). I think the movies would have been a lot better if they'd done their stories the way Patterson wrote the books. But that's just me.

Another book I checked out was David Baldacci's True Blue. I liked his main character, Mace Perry. She's a Washington DC cop (a great source of crime stories, apparently) who was sent to prison for a crime she was coerced into committing (she was kidnapped, drugged and forced to help in a robbery) and is just getting out of prison. She wants to solve one big case so that she can redeem herself in the eyes of her peers and get back on the force. The best ally she has (and also her fiercest opponent) is her sister Beth, who just happens to be the Chief of Police. Mace spends just as much time fighting with her over-protective sibling as she does trying to solve the case. The ending is one where no one gets quite what they were expecting, and it takes a long time to get there (over 400 pages of gangs, feds, and mayhem). But it's a great starter story if the author wanted to turn it into a series.

That's just a sampling of the books I've read so far, and there's still a little bit of summer left. So next time, I'll have a few more off-the-cuff reviews for you.

Read on!

- B -

My Goodreads Review of "Killing the Blues", by Michael Brandman

Robert B. Parker's Killing The Blues by Michael Brandman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought this was a great addition to the Jesse Stone series. I agree that Michael Brandman captured the late Robert Parker's style very well, and he does his portrayal of the character justice. Jesse Stone is a flawed character with enough virtues to balance out his flaws a little, unlike the character in the tv movies. I think he's written a bit too much on the miserable side for tv, but that's just my opinion. The story was solid from beginning to end, with just enough of the relationships between Jesse, Molly, and Suitcase featured to flesh out the characters. It was nice to see some of the other recurring characters as well (Gino Fish and councilman Hasty, for example) written with most of their nuances intact. I did miss Sunny Randall, as it seems that Mr. Brandman is choosing a different direction than Mr. Parker was going with Jesse's personal life. But if the future stories are as good as this one was, I think I'll get over it.

View all my reviews

I'm ba-a-a-ck...

Hi all,

I just came back from 3 days in the Poconos with my sweetie for our anniversary.   The cabin we stayed at was beautiful, and the scenery was too nice for words.   I'm attaching a few pictures.   I hope this works.   They really don't do the place justice, though.

Saturday morning view from the cabin

Our cabin the other side of the brook

The other news of note is that the book contest over at Dream (http://dreamonus.com) is finished, and I got the names of the winners this morning.  They are:
Antane Armstrong of Bloomington,IN
Sabrena Pattat of Anderson,IN
Gary Green of Satellite Beach, FL
and Holly Markoski of Shillington,PA

Congratulations to the winners, and a big thanks to everyone else who entered!  There were over a hundred entries, which honestly was a lot more than I thought I'd get.  I hope people stay this interested in it!

Until next time...