Sunday Night Fondue

♥Thinking Blog Award:
I'm proud to say that my post about 2 of the books I was judging for the Passionate Plume Awards has been honored with a Thinking Blogger Award from Annie Dean in this post on her blog! The meme originated on The Thinking Blog and it's my very first tag, too. Thanks, Annie- who woulda thunk I'd ever get an award for my writing!

BTW, don't forget that Annie's new book The Average Girl's Guide to Getting Laid is now available over at Loose-Id. As soon as I've whittled my Recent Savorings commentary queue and my Soon to be Savored TBR pile down a little, I've got some serious ebook shopping to do!
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If you aren't familiar with the Thinking Blogger Award (and honestly I wasn't either), these are the rules:
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1.If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
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2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
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3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.
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So I've met rule 2, I'll have to figure out how to do rule 3 (I know how to display the logo, I just don't know how to make it a link). So now for the toughest one- it's my turn to tag five people whose blogs have made me think. When I think of all the blogs I've read, and all the blog entries within each blog, selecting just 5 is going to be pretty damn hard! I'm not sure how kosher it is to award it back to the person who awarded it to you, but I still want to mention this blog of Annie's even if it's not for this award. It's the story of how her and her husband ended up where they are today. It'll leave you with a dreamy sigh and a smile.
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This is actually the first blog post that came to mind after Annie tagged me for this meme:
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Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels. In response to one of Laurell Hamilton's blogs (that actually had tongues a-waggin' all over the 'net) the SB's first addressed the blog itself, then in a second post, they started a discussion about characters becoming real to writers. It is this second post that I am giving the Thinking Blog Award to. And not just for the post itself, but the post started a fascinating conversation of comments among the writers that frequent the SB site. As a non-writer, I'm still trying to truly comprehend what writers mean when they say their characters speak to them and change the way the writer wants the story to go. At last year's RT Con, every single writer brought this up. Finally, by the last day, I had to ask one of the panels to try and explain it to this non-writer. They all tried but other than the explanation that, if you know someone really well, you would know if you were forcing them to act out of character, I don't think my mind functions in a way that allows me to grasp the whole concept. Which is probably why I found the conversation on the SB's blog so utterly fascinating. But I would imagine that it would also serve as a master's course for new writers.

Morgan Hawke had a blog entry a couple of years ago titled Writing Smut for Profit. No, I haven't saved the link for 2 years, Merry Phillips blogged about it a couple of months ago. Merry had just sent her first submission ever to Phaze Publishing and then came across this blog from Morgan. After reading it Merry was nervous that she's done everything WRONG. Well, I was her beta reader and "Comma Patrol" so I knew she had a compelling story, and when I applied Morgan's advise to it and her publisher selection, I reassured Merry that she had, in fact, done everything RIGHT. And Jason's Reckoning will be released at the end of this month at Phaze. But I bookmarked Morgan's blog because it gave me a real slap of the writer's side of reality.

Hmmm... since the rules don't say I need to give all my awards at once, I think I'm going to hold onto the last three for now. I may remember another post I've read before and made me think, or I might come across a new one that deserves the award.


♥Over at Smart Bitches, they're compiling a list of the greatest love stories of all time. Here's the ones that immediately popped into my head, although I admit that, for a couple of them, their qualifications as love stories could be argued. I actually have Commentaries for some of these sitting in a blog draft I started a couple of weeks ago. And every one of these are solidly in my Crème Brûlée category.
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Single Title:
Menage Emma Holly
Across the Sea Irene Maillol
Son of the Morning Linda Howard
A Gentleman’s Wager Madelynne Ellis
The Proud Breed Celeste DeBlasis (thanks to Laurie Breton for the reminder) ~

Within a series:
Devil’s Bride Stephanie Lauren’s Cynster series
Skye O’Malley Bertrice Small’s Skye O’Malley series
Tempting the Beast and Elizabeth’s Wolf from Lora Leigh’s Breed series
Darkfever from Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series
Seduced by Moonlight from Laurell Hamilton’s Merry Gentry Series
Blue Moon and Narcissus in Chains from Laurell Hamilton’s Anita Blake series
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I just KNOW I’ll probably kick myself later for some I forgot.

♥My niece has informed me that my new blog template isn't working right in Firefox or IE6. It's working fine for my IE7, no matter which screen I'm viewing it on. Unfortunately, it took me so long to modify the template- mostly because it tended to be a trial and error process- that I'm just going to have to put further modifications on the back burner for now. Particularly since it appears I'm going to have to learn html and CSS MUCH better than the pitiful knowledge I have now. *sigh*