You Want a Piece of Me?

BBAW continues over on MyFriendAmy's blog. Good stuff happening today, author Andromeda Romano-Lax talks about what book bloggers mean to her as an author. Follow Amy's link or just click here to learn about an upcoming auction of "marked-up books by authors and other notable people."

Today's Mr. Linky assignment was to link to a post that shows our blog at our best. Which post did I submit? Well, check out today's Mr. Linky and find out. I chose one that I think shows WHY I don't call what I do "Reviews" but instead refer to them as "Commentaries", plus, with all the BBAW participants who are Inspirational fans and might visit, I didn't want to pick a book that had too much smexoring in it. If you're one of my regular visitor's, do you agree with my pick?

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Since I've been getting new visitors thanks to BBAW, I'd thought I'd take a minute and explain what Cubie's Confections is all about.

I'm a northeastern Ohio (halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh) soccer/football Mom of 4, oldest son (meteorology major) and daughter (communications major) are twins, almost 22 and in college, a 16 year old varsity cheerleader daughter (she's a flyer- EEK!) who's a junior in high school, and a 12 year old football/soccer playing son who just started 7th grade.

Next week is the 25th anniversary of my marriage to the love of my life. We own a hardware store and my husband runs the day to day operations. I handle the back office stuff even though my degree is actually in Computer Science. But since I haven't programmed for anyone since shortly after PCs were first mass produced (I specialized in IBM Superminis), I claim no expertise and, in fact, consider myself kind of a technotard when it comes to most things PC related. I had baby #4 on a Thursday evening and was back at the office Monday morning nursing him in one arm while keying with the other because it was end of month crunch time and it had to be done. After a couple of weeks of THAT, plus watching the clock to get home before the bus dropped off the older kids, I moved my office permanently home, which is why I can be found around the intertubes so often.

I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't read voraciously. Since I don't really have anyone around who shares my love of books, the internet, and specifically other bloggers, has given me a wonderful opportunity to discuss books for the first time with people that share my love of reading. And there's not much that makes me more kinds of happy than when I rec a book and someone tells me that they bought it and love it too!

Okay, so now the blog. First of all, Cubie is the pronunciation of QB, the acronym for Queen Bitch. See, my husband absolutely cannot say no to any of our kids, so that leaves me in the role of the wicked witch. Whenever I lay the law down on the demon spawn, he mumbles in my ear "You're such a bitch", to which I reply "That's QUEEN Bitch to YOU, Bucko!". So thanks to that running gag, you'll see me around the blogosphere as BevQB, which I suppose I should also explain: Back when I first discovered blogs, I used the ID "BevL", well when I created this blog, I automatically created the ID "QB" not realizing that any Google blog I left a comment on would show me as "QB" also (duh), so there I was commenting on some blogs as "BevL" and others as "QB". To prevent confusion and/or sock puppet accusations, I created a new ID, BevQB that incorporated the two IDs.

Now CONFECTIONS? That refers to the man candy pics that I knew would occasionally pop up around here. And once I came up with the confections concept, I ran with it right over the top! See that background? It's a close-up of a chocolate wedding cake scattered with cherry blossoms. And I scoop up pics of chocolatey goodness whenever I come across them. Believe it or not, I have even more chocolate pics stored away than the ones I have scattered all through here!

The juxtaposition between the over the top girly look of my blog versus the dark, gritty and/or erotic stories that I comment on, just plain appeals to my sense of the unexpected and absurd. Let's face it, your first thought when you see a book blog this over the top would NOT be the urban fantasies and paranormal romances that make up about 80% of what I read, right?

Reviews--- they aren't many here. See, I prefer to call them Commentaries because the term "review" is usually associated with a set type of format and I didn't want to lock myself into anything. I just wanted to say whatever I wanted to say. In fact, that's my mantra around here-- "It's my blog and it's here first and foremost to entertain and organize ME (although lately I haven't found much time to blog as much as I used to). If anyone else finds it interesting, amusing, or helpful, that just makes it all the more fun!" And it really does amaze and tickle me that some people DO visit me! But that mantra is why you'll see all those lists in the sidebar, and why I created an entire index. I needed a way to keep track of books!

Oh, one more thing I guess I should explain-- my Commentary Categories.
Crème Brûlée - My All-Time Favorites (A+)
Lava Cake - reads like warm Chocolate Lava Cake... à la Mode... sprinkled with nuts (A,A-)
Peanut M&Ms - mmmm...devour... sigh... then reach for the next one. My daily dose of Insanity-B-Gone. (A-,B+,B)
M&Ms - a bit lighter and/or not quite as satisfying as Peanut M&Ms, but still Oh-So-Enjoyable! (B,B-,C+,C)
Dark Chocolate - by some, just "meh" to me (C-,D+)
Coconut Truffles - SO not for me! (D,D-,F)

I've always placed books into those types of groups in my head instead of an A-F or 1-10 grading scale. So when I created this blog, all I had to do was come up with names for those groupings. Of course, those names had to be as over the top as my blog theme, so I started with Peanut M&Ms. The candy has been all that stands between me and menopausal meltdown. So it seemed right that the base category was named for my daily dose of Insanity-B-Gone. From there, I just moved up and down coming up with names that reflected my tastes (hee) in both confections and books. I can't emphasize enough that, even though the category NAMES are over the top, those groupings are the natural, instinctive way I've ALWAYS grouped books in my head.

So, assuming you're still awake, Welcome to Cubie's Confections! Feel free to take a look around. My header and sidebars should give you a pretty good idea of what types of books you'll see around here. And, if you check out my index by author name, you'll see the books I've already posted commentaries on. There's a button near the top of the sidebar or you can just click here to visit it.