Happy Gay Friday

So, today is a festive day! Yes, of course, it’s the day of the royal wedding, that too… but what’s way more important… it’s hubby’s birthday today! ;)
His is the last of 4 birthdays we celebrate this week, starting with that of hubs’ best friend’s last Sunday and his father’s and my stepmother’s on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s been a birthday cake galore and I’ll be glad when it’s all over again. Same goes for the royal wedding, to be honest. We’ve been hearing nothing else than Kate and William in the media these days.

In between working and eating cake this week, I’ve also found back my reading groove. Lily’s A to Z Reading Challenge is working for me, albeit in an adapted form. Yay!
I’ve read four A titles so far and I’ve moved on to the B now. I’ll post about the books that I’ve read sometime next week, when I have more time to play online again.

For now, it'll be more cake for me and another festive day tomorrow (it's Queen's Day here) before I can enjoy some quiet time again. I hope you all have a fabulous weekend too!

Happy Gay Friday everyone!

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Swiftly Dusted: Starting Over by Ethan Stone

Author: Ethan Stone
Title: Starting Over
Series: Standalone
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Release date: March 9 , 2011
Length: 34 pages

Backblurb/Goodreads link | author's website | buy link

Genre & keywords:

M/M, Romance, Contemporary, Short story, One night stand, Marriage of convenience, New beginnings

Synopsis in short:

Eddie meets Nate in a diner and they feel instantly attracted. They spend the night together but they know that's all there'll be, because Nate is married. The fantastic night and Nate's departing remark make Eddie see that he wasn't really living anymore after his ex Gill had left him. So he decides to change his life and starts living again.

POV: The story is told in first person and solely from Eddie's point of view.

H/H & characterization: It's only a short story, about 34 pdf pages, and therefore there's not much room to really get to know the protags. Because of the choice of perspective Eddie is the one we learn most about. We get his back-story about his former relationship with Gill and we follow him when he starts changing his life. He's a hard working, nice guy who has low self-esteem thanks to his pompous former lover. Due to the limited amount of pages that the two heroes actually share on page together, we don't see very much of Nate at all, and the fact that he wears a wedding ring adds to the confusion. He seems a considerate, nice and tender man though, but that's only based on how he acts in bed during the one night stand and the morning after.

Empathy level: Nate's thoughts and feelings stay unknown until the very end. That and his wedding ring make it not easy to relate with him. Eddie is easier to like and understand because we follow him from beginning to end. However the period after the one night stand, when he starts to make changes in his life, is told about in a recap style, which leaves little room to empathize with him all the time either. But when he deals with his ex Gill the way he does, I whole-heartedly cheered for him.

Heat level: There are basically only two extensive sex scenes, at the beginning and at the end of the story. In between, months pass in which Eddie and Nate hardly see each other. The hot get-togethers are detailed and written with emotion. 2 out of 3 flames

Angst level: It was clear from the beginning that there could never be more than that one night between Nate and Eddie. So, Eddie didn't hang on to his feelings for Nate too long. So, not much angst there, just a little sadness. Instead the unrequited feelings turned out to be a fresh and nice way to let Eddie find his new happiness, instead of letting him be ruled by his feelings of regret. This was a concept I rather enjoyed. 0.5 out of 3 hankies

Overall entertainment level: Given the limited on page time Nate and Eddie spend together, the one-sided point of view and the short length of this story, it's difficult to establish a satisfying insight in both characters' feelings and emotions. Therefore the love declarations felt a bit rushed. I admit that the insta-love is not often my favorite, especially not when I can feel the potential a story has in the emotional department, would it have been given more pages. This author's writing style and way of structuring a story are pleasant and skilful but in this form they lack tension and emotional depth. All in all, I enjoyed this story because of the sympathetic heroes, the fresh concept of starting over and the well-written, smexy scenes, but it didn't completely satisfy me in the relationship development and HEA department.

Final judgment:

Hardworking, lovable hero finds his life back after a hot one night stand with an equally hardworking and lovable cutie, who could've used a bit more on-screen time to make the HEA more convincing. Theirs is an enjoyable, sexy, but also a bit rushed story about finding yourself back.
3.5 out of 5 stars
~

Happy Gay Friday & A New Challenge, Book notes, Fan Letter Blog Crawl and more

I’ve got a few things to share this week, so to give this post the suggestion of some sort of structure I’m going to use numbers. We’ll see where we end. I hope you stay with me. ;) Here we go:

1.
First, have you heard of the incredible anti-gay actions of Facebook? FB proved their intolerance by deleting complete accounts of people who had pictures of same sex kisses on their pages. I first heard about this from m/m author RJ Scott on twitter who told me she didn't even get a warning. Her account got deleted just like that. Since then, I've heard about more accounts from m/m authors that got banned. RJ Scott is trying to rebuild her account with the use of tumblr, her yummie account can be found at www.rjscott.tumblr.com.

2.
Hey, and I'm on tumblr too since a few days. :) I'm just starting to figure things out about reblogging, liking and posting things... But if you want you can find me at www.rarelydustyrandomness.tumblr.com.

3.
Me joining tumblr is another result of the review block that I wrote about in my last post. About that, I'm following the advice a few of you gave me, or at least I'm trying to. It's true that I need to remember why I started blogging about books in the first place, one and a half year ago. Simple as it sounds, it was just the joy that writing/talking about books gives me. Nothing else.
I think that taking a short break every now and then, as someone dear suggested, isn't a bad idea for me at all. Preferably, I take those mini-breaks in the future when I have written a few reviews in advance so nobody will notice. ;) But since that's not the case now, my little blog will just have to do without them for a short period. Instead I'll be posting about books in a different way. Perhaps I'll try Chris' reviewette form. :)

4.
To keep myself from fidgeting about what books to pick up next, I've made an A to Z list of book titles from my TBR that I'm going to read in alphabetical order. Lily came up with the idea of an A to Z challenge over a month ago and others, like Tam and Jenre, are doing it too. I thought I might give it a try as well to get me out of the reading slump I'm in. Every letter on my list has at least 2 titles to go with it, but sometimes even up to 6. I don't know if I'm going to read just one title of each letter or more than one before I skip to the next letter. I'll just see how it goes. And in the meantime I'll keep reading my requested review copies too, in-between the A-Z books, and write those reviews eventually as well. So, wish me luck with finding back my reading mojo. :)

5.

One of the books I'm definitely going to read for the letter B is Blood and Roses by Aislinn Kerry.
Jenre read it for her challenge and Tam pointed it out to me on twitter because it's set in Amsterdam. It's so rare that an m/m romance takes place in my own country that I did a little happy dance about this find! Thanks girls! :)


6.

Another book that's on the list but had escaped my attention somehow is Make Me by Jessica Lee. It's released in March and is the short sequel to Bloodlines that I read and reviewed here a little while ago. I'm really curious about the continuing story of Mason and Evin, because I enjoyed their story very much.

7.
Kassa’s planning another Fan Letter Blog Crawl which involves bloggers writing fan letters to their favorite authors. It was a great success last year and if you want to join this year go over to her place to tell her.

8.

Here in the Netherlands we’re having a long Easter weekend, from Friday until Monday, and we’re having beautiful, sunny and warm weather! :) Hubs and I are going to enjoy hanging around the house, sitting in the garden, trying to memorize it all, because it might be our last spring/summer in this house. Because… we put it up for sale today! We don’t necessarily want to move but if we can sell it we’re going to move to The Big City, if not we’re happy to stay here. So, we’ll see what happens…

Happy Gay Friday (or should I say Easter Egg Hunt) everyone!

~

I'm blocking...

I'm having a bit of a review block... what I've written doesn't seem to be post-worthy yet. I think I'm becoming too self-conscious about reviewing with all the opinions flying around about how authors and reviewers should behave regarding reviews, about the 'professionalism' of bloggers, and about the rating of books.
I can't remember that things were so heated when I first started blogging (17 months ago) but maybe I just wasn't aware of it while it was anyway. For now, I think I better leave the blog posts about these or related topics alone. And I'm going to focus again on the joy of reading and talking and writing about books.

Because the review block also causes a bit of a reading slump. Since I've read more than a handful of books that I still have to review, I'm dreading to pick up another review copy.
I don't want to make my to-review list any longer, before I've written a few first. However, it's hard to read any other books as well. It's not only the guilty feeling (oww, poor review copies... *g*) but it's also not being able to decide what I should read next... *sigh*

So, instead of reading I spent my evening being creative with Photoshop to make me a new header. :) Playing with Photoshop always lifts my mood and now I'm curious what you think of the new header.
Can it stay? Or should I put the old header back? That one looked a lot darker:

Happy Gay Friday & The Sweet Spot and My weekend buys

Is it me or are things slowing down a bit in blog land? It’s probably me… because I get so much done these days, with the nicer weather and the longer days. Usually I feel like I’m always running behind with everything: work, chores, the finances, writing reviews & blog posts, and especially with bloghopping. But I’ve lost that feeling of being behind - thank goodness -, whenever I think it’s about time I go read some blogs there hardly are any new posts. Did you notice it too?

So, with all the spare time left, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks more time on Twitter than my usual once a month frequency, lol. And I signed up for a new Yahoo group which sounds like fun. It’s founded by m/m authors S.J. Frost, Johnny Miles and Sloan Parker and it’s for readers and writers of m/m romances. The group is called The Sweet Spot and is open to join now. The official launch party will be April 16th when they'll host a chat and give away books from the three authors. The live chat will be held from 6-9 pm EST on April 16, but you are welcome to come by any time during the day to enter for the giveaway. Here’s the link for the group, in case you like to join too. :)

Spending more time on Twitter usually means spending more time drooling over NSFW pictures, which is not a bad thing of course (Eyre and Marie Sexton are posting and retweeting the hottest pics via their (tumblr) blogs and I can never resist to click on their tweets).
Hanging around on Twitter also means buying more books, which is also not a bad thing but not a good thing either with a TBR shelf like mine. ;) One of the pretties I saw a tweet about yesterday was a LoosId release that immediately grabbed my attention: No Apologies by Tibby Armstrong. When I looked it up on Goodreads I saw that quite some people had already read the ARC and were enthusiastically praising the book. So, I can’t resist it! *sigh*

Another tweet today reminded me of the release of the new Stephani Hecht book: Snapshots and Bylines. Her books are auto-buys for me but still... Twitter is like a virus, I’m telling you, it’s infecting me with buy-disease every damn time.

What will be your weekend buys? Or can you control yourself better than me?

Happy Gay Friday everyone!
~