Lisa Paitz Spindler, Danger Gal

Listening now: Maroon 5’s SONGS ABOUT JANE

They call themselves “neo-soul” which seems pretty accurate to me. I could listen to Adam Levine’s crooning all day. He thinks he’s a bad boy, but how can he be when he sings lyrics like:

I’ll fix these broken things
Repair your broken wings
And make sure everything’s alright
My pressure on your hips
Sinking my fingertips
Into every inch of you
Cause I know that’s what you want me to do

They’ll at least tide me over until U2’s new CD comes out.

Reading now: Suzanne Brockmann’s FLASHPOINT

I love how this woman writes. Deep POV, angst and yet there’s a quirky sense of humor there too. In each book I count the pages to the first Star Trek and Star Wars reference. She always has a character somewhere who is a computer geek, and this time it was the heroine. Geek girls unite!

When I read one of Brockmann’s books, I don’t write anything of my own since I can’t put her stuff down long enough to think. Plus, I’m procrastinating big time because I’m intimidatd by the story that I’ve conjured. In FLASHPOINT Brockmann sets up a new story about a woman who was held captive in Kazbekestan and tortured in numerous ways. It’s really going to be interesting to see how she handles this woman’s journey to finding a stable relationship in a future book. I’ve been grappling with that kind of story myself and am afraid to write it. Both Brockmann and Laura Kinsale, another of my favorite romance writers, write about seriously relationship-challenged people and show them creeping toward normalcy. More to the point, especially for Brockmann’s stories, there isn’t the typical happily ever after ending. Sure, they do end up “together” in the end, but it might not be married and usually those characters pop up in other stories with some kind of bump in the relationship. You get to see that it’s not all Prince Charming leading Princess Aurora down the happily ever after “Once upon a time.”