Sounds like you enjoy dark urban fantasy as much as I do! 

I tried the first two of the Kim Harrison books and just couldn't get into them.  Maybe because I am a Witch, and they were just too silly for me.  But I am a huge fan of Lilith Saintcrow and her "Dante Valentine" series and of course Jim Butcher's "The Dresden Files" novel series.  These are reeeeally good dark urban fantasy series.  Give them a shot if you haven't tried them already.

I am just starting Laurell K. Hamilton's series.  My book addict friends tell me to stop after the 8th book in her series because LKH has added lots of soft porn to her novels, and it just gets worse with every one in the series and so do the plots.  I am also trying Charlaine Harris.  So I'll let you know how it goes.

If dark urban fantasy is your favorite I have lots of suggestions in my TBR list for that genre that other fans have given me.  Let me know, and I'll list them, so you can check them out too if you like.

Hi, Beacheddecay!

You asked for it (grin)!  I keep my TBR list in a tiny loose-leaf notebook in my purse, so it is always handy when I go to the bookstore or search for dark urban fantasy online.  I also belong to a lot of fantasy/book forums and groups.  Recently, I was looking for more in this genre to read since I am such a fan, and this is what I got in response to my postings.  I have just started reading on this list so most of these I can't recommend from personal reading experience.

By the way I forgot to mention Madelyn Alt.  Good Witch books, two so far.  Her third is coming out the end of the year.  And by all means read the next in the Dante Valentine series if you have already read the first.  It is "Dead Man Rising" and simply AWESOME!!!  I am such a fan of this Lilith Saintcrow series.  She has another series called "The Watcher" series.  It is kind of romance.  I don't know if you like paranormal romance, but I don't, although these books are good if you do like that (I've read all of them)

Some of the authors on this list might be paranormal romance. The people who gave me these suggestions didn't specify which was which, but I fgured I would check them all out myself anyway when I am ready to move on to the next author on the list.  Here it goes...

--Rosemary Edgill (Bell, Book & Murder...three novels in one book)

--Mercedes Lackey (Diana Tregarde series)

--M.R. Sellars (Roman Gant series...Witch paranormal mysteries)

--Robin McKinley ("Sunshine")

--Shirley Daamsgard

--Victoria Laurie

--Katie Macalister

--J.R. Ward

--Erin McCarthy

--Mary Jane Davidson

--Sherilyn Kenyon

--Christine Warren

--Lori Handeland

--Savannnah Russe

--Simon R. Green (supposed to be just like Jim Butcher...Yea!)

--Cheyene McCray

--Nalini Singh

--Karen Chance

--Jackie Kessler

--Kathy Love

--C.E. Murphy

--Sunny

--Maggie Shayne

--Terry Brooks (demon series)

--Charles de Lint

--Yasmin Galenorn (Chintz & China series) 

If ya'll like dark urban fantasy, there's a new author on the scene who's been making quite a splash on the best-seller lists:  Vicki Pettersson. She has two novels out: The Scent of Shadows and A Taste of Night.

~Beth

By the way, are you familiar with Spilled Candy Books?

http://www.SpilledCandy.com

They specialize in Witch books.  No kidding.  Check them out.  You can order their books from the website or amazon. 

Thanks!  Just added that one to my TBR list too. 

Here's what I got from the bookshop:

(FOR ME)

--Sunshine in hardcover with no dustjacket by Robin McKinley

--Deerskin by Robin McKinley

--Hamilton Kiss of  Shadows, which is book 2(Ithink)in her Faerie series.

--Nightlife by Rob Thurman

--The Tanya Huff book

(FOR MY HUSBAND)

--Zelazny: The changing Land

--The Dawn of Amber

--Sign of the Unicorn

--Knight of Shadows

--Trumps of Doom

--Prince of Chaos

--Sign of Chaos, HC cond good dj rough

--Jack Vance we have now is Maske: Thaery

--Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

What do you think?  Tanya Huff's name sounds so familiar but I didn't have her on my TBR list.  The bookshop lady suggested her.  Have you read any of her books?

Me too.  Just couldn't care about any of those characters. 

Speaking of that, did you ever read The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters?  Yikes!  I made it through 150 pages of that one, because of all the buzz about what a brillant book it was (and it was beautifully written).  I thought surely I must be missing something.  But I wasn't.  For me it just didn't click, and I could care less about the characters.  And now there is a sequel coming out.  Double yikes!

Ha!  Glad I could save you the headache!

By the way, besides dark urban fantasy, my other two favorite kinds of books to read are the classics (Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Virginia Woolf...I love beautiful language) and poetry (Wordsworth is my favorite).  How about you?  Are you a closet classics lover too? 

Also do you belong to any social networking groups for book people?  I belong to Librarything, but there isn't enough networking going on there, so I was looking for something else.  There are lots out there it seems, but for one reason or another they haven't appealled to me so I haven't joined.  I did find an intriguing one the other day when I was searching the net called Goodreads.  Know anything about that one?

Sorry it took me so long to get to this forum today.  What a day!  A good one, but exhausting.  I decided to change the template on my website this morning, and it took hours longer than I thought it would.  Lots of snafus, including having to add a new site meter.  But all problems are solved, and I just love it...it is so pretty now.  Check it out if you get a chance http://www.KittyfeatherPress.blogspot.com

Okay, I LOVE the paranormal.  As a Witch, the paranormal is my life (my real life...grin).

And Walter Mosley's E.Z. Rollins is great.  Haven't read the books but saw the movies and loved them.  That's another thing.  Don't get me started on movies...I adore them, and we see over 100 movies every year on DVD and TCM.

Egypt is also another burning passion of mine.  In this lifetime and in past lifetimes.  In fact, my first past life memory is as a Priestess in the Temples of Bast in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago (yes, I am an old spirit).

I feel exactly the way you do about well-written sex scenes.  I think one of the best I ever read was only 3-4 paragraphs long and used none of the usual words for a sex scene, yet had me gasping for air at the end of it.  I'm talking about the one in Working for the Devil between Danny and the demon.  Wow. That was when I knew for sure Lilith Saintcrow was a masterful writer.  You should read Dead Man Rising.  Awesome!

Interesting you have an interest in New Orleans.  Are you an Anne Rice fan?  She is an incredibly talented writer.  And talk about panting...the porn books she writes under another name are not to be read in a bookstore in a crowd of people for sure.     But I am not a fan.  Her characters are too mean-spirited for me to care about them.  Meaness is a really quick way for me to put a book down and never pick it up again.  I've seen too much in real life to want to read about it in my leisure.  But she is an excellent wordsmith.

So why are you interested in New Orleans?  Do you live there?  I attended the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, and it is amazing how similar Charleston and New Orleans are in architecture.   

How funny about the book club!!  I'm not a joiner...on the net I am a major networker and joiner, but in person, no.  Too much of an anarchist, I think.  Put me in a group, and the indecision of most people drives me nuts, and pretty soon I have taken over, and I'm saying, "Okay, first we do this and this and this."  It's what I get for being an organized person...I can see from 1 to 10 in a straight line, and all the steps that need to be taken inbetween.   

I only read the first page of the Anne Rice book about Jesus while I was in B&N one day.  I had to laugh...she is so into marketing.  She has Jesus as a kid kill another kid on the first page.  What a hoot!  Grabbing her audience by the throat in the first 100 words or less.  That's Anne Rice!

Okay, now you have thrown me again.  The first time by saying you like violence in a book and now by telling me your ex was abusive.  How is that possible?  I thought violence and abuse would be the last thing you would want to read in a book, no ???

How about that!  I was married in the most famous historic church in Charleston...St. Phillips.  The one that juts out into the road and is in all the paintings of historic Charleston.  But only because my family is Episcopalian and the Priest from the church we went to in Atlanta when I was a little girl was the priest at that church 15 years later.  It was a "mom" thing, like most first weddings (grin).  When you get married the second time you get the wedding you always wanted.  The first one is the one your mom always wanted.  That was certainly true for me.

Cool that you met Anne Rice!  Was she dressed in black and vampish?  How about you?  What DID that dress look like you had on (grin)?

Glad you liked my website makeover!!

How wonderful you have rescue cats!  At the moment my feral colony is down from 21 to 7 (lots of adoptions) after getting them all fixed and tamed.  I have 5 indoor cats (all ferals and strays).  And a mom and her 4 kittens in a dog pen in my garage at the moment.  She was abandoned pregnant and had her kittens on my front porch for Mother's Day.  Really cute kittens too.  When they are old enough I will find homes for them and get mom spayed.

I have been in the Southeast since I was 6 when we moved to Atlanta (Dunwoody North in Chamblee) and then to Dalton, GA, when I was 12, where I stayed until I almost finished Dalton Junior College (packed up my car and left in the middle of the night to escape an abusive boyfriend).  Then I moved to Charleston, SC, to almost finish at the College of Charleston, got married (new boyfriend), and moved to Newberry, SC, and then to Columbia, SC, where I have been for 27 years.  My oldest brother lives here too, and my mom and youngest brother live in Myrtle Beach.

I never could get into SF, but I just bought my husband a Philip K. Dick novel for Father's Day (from the cats ).  We have enjoyed the movies made from Dick's books, so I thought he might like to read one of his novels.

LOL about your lost post.  Been here too many times myself.  There was one book forum I used to belong to, and the software was a nightmare (which is why I gave up on that forum).  It lost so many of my posts that I got in the habbit of copying every post before I previewed it so I could paste it in again if something happened to it, and I still do that with all my forums just in case.

Did your book club ladies only read the Oprah selections?  The only one of those I read was White Oleander.  Wow!  Blew me away.  Excellent book, but a painful read for me....it hit waaaaaaay too close to home for me. 

Action...ah, that makes more sense.  I think sex scenes and action scenes are the most diffcult for everyone to write.  You have to develop a good sense of timing with action scenes.  And with sex scenes you want to find a new way to show and not tell.  That is why we don't like romance novels...too much cliche and telling.

No sex scenes in my novels (would be totally out of place), but I have written them years ago in some of my short stories.  Very little action in my novels, although there is some.  However there is a lot of action in the cat scenes, especially my latest novel-in-progress, which has a crazy kitten in it.  But there is always drama in my books. 

That is because I like drama and character development best in the novels I read.  Even with the dark urban fantasy novels, novels full of action like the Jim Butcher novels, my favorite parts are the ways the characters develop inside and grow, and the way the relationships between the characters form and grow.  My favorite is between Harry and the vamp Thomas.  Then between Harry and Karin Murphy.  So I find myself getting through the action scenes just so I can get to the personal parts, which I love best.  And Harry is such a hoot I am always laughing when I read those novels.

I knew you wrote poetry but I didn't realize you also wrote fiction.  Neat!  I'll bet you are writing about vampires, yes?!  I would love to see some of your work sometime.  You can send it to me at my email address laurastamps@mindspring.com and I would be happy to take a look at it.  Offer some pointers if you need them and if not suggest some magazine markets if it would work as a short story.

Thanks!  I'm glad you liked my website and the new design.  You could also get a blog just to document your thoughts and post parts of your writing now before you publish anything.  That would be fun, and blogger is so easy to use.  I only ran into trouble because I was updating my template from an old one, and they tell you upfront you will lose stuff when you do that, and I did.

That dress sounds great!  Wow. 

By the way have you ever been to any of the fantasy cons?  How anbout Dragoncon in Atlanta?  Wow...best show ever and talk about costumes.  I loved every miniute of it and went for the first time last year.  Great show.

My goal is to have as many cats as I can without ending up in divorce court (grin).  I am the kind of person who loves lots of cats, probably because I have lots of mama cat in me, so I tend to think in litters. 

Burmese are very pretty cats.  I have advertised in Cat Fancy magazine off and on for the last 15 years, because most of my novel and poetry books readers are cat people.  And I was actually featured in an article in the April issue in 1996, and again in the Feb 2006 issue (the one with the Maine Coon on the cover) when they reviewed my latest poetry book THE YEAR OF THE CAT: NEW POEMS.  Anyway whenever I am in there or advertsing I usually get a subscription, and I just love how they profile a different breed with every issue.  Even if you have that breed you learn something new.  I remember when they profiled the Burmese breed last year...just gorgeous!  Do you get that mag?

My husband always freaks when a new cat joins our family, because all the other cats can't stand it.  But then in a month or two they are all chasing each other and scuffling and having a great time.  I had one cat who was very picky and just wouldn't eat much for 5 years until I got a sweet male.  From that first day she began to eat everything in sight and is on a diet now.  It's all about control.  Who will be the Queen of the indoor colony.  That is the burning question among cats, whether they live inside or out, because they are very social animals.

Got to run to the Linkedin site now.

Magickal blessings for a great weekend! 

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (I think).  She is a SC author (I think, again) and all the rage down here.  Her new book is The Mermaid Chair.  I think the first book vaguely introduced the notion of the Goddess, and the second book may be more of the same?  I don't know for sure.  Not my thing (in that I like a strong dose of the Goddess not a vague one).

I would love to see your story!  Send it to me when you are ready.  I belong to several SF&F forums, and a really big one called Chronicles Network (www.chronicles-network.com) has a fabulous section for "Aspiring Authors" where you can submit a piece for critque or review.  I love to cruise that section whenever I am there and offer editing tips, etc., for the pieces that are posted.  Editing is one of my favorite parts of writing.

Do you still have the story you sent to the con that no one got because the ending was too subtle?  I would love to see that one too.  Sounds like fun.  I adore subtle endings.

What gorgeous kitties!!!  Thanks for the pics.  I have been taking lots of pictures of the kittens in my garage, because they grow so fast, and in a few weeks they will be ready for adoption.  But I don't have a digital camera, and prefer the old fashioned photos I can put in one of my kitty albums and mail to friends and carry in my purse to show EVERYONE (lol...watch out when you see me coming!!).  I even take pictures of my gardens (yep, they are in my purse too). 

Yesterday at the grocery store they had a bunch of books on sale, and I bought two that were priced so low I couldn't resist.  Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic by Kelley Armstrong.  She isn't on my TBR list, so I know nothing about her, but the novels are about Witches so I took a chance.  Turns out when I asked some of my Yahoo book group people many said they had read her novels series and loved it.  Have you ever read these books?  What did you think?

You're right...that first cat photo is a scream!  What a precious fat belly! 

Thanks for your input on the Kelley Armstrong books.  It seems people either love them or didn't like them at all.  I especially hear that about the first two in the series, which are the ones you read.

I just started Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton this morning.  Starts off kind of slow, but I expect it to pick up soon.

Thanks for your story...wonderful to see it in my email this morning when I turned on my computer!!!  I have an ipod interview today.  This is my first ipod interview, so it should be fun, but that means it has to be a phone interview, so I probably won't be able to read your story until tonight.  I usually do email interviews, which means I can answer a question and then do something else on computer while I am waiting for the next question to come in.  Although newspapers prefer phone interviews as well.

But I will get back to you tomorrow morning about the story for sure.  Thanks so much for the background info on it.  I am not a gamer so I would have been totally lost.  This story will be so much fun...I am soooo looking forward to reading it!!