Category: Thursday Thoughts

MJ’s Musings: Early Bird or Night Owl?

I am what is known as an early bird. I get up early. It’s my best time to think because the distractions of the day haven’t yet attacked.

But I often wonder if I am naturally an early bird or was my circadian rhythm warped by my upbringing. When I was a child, even a teenager who often babysat until the wee hours of the morning, my mother made sure I was out of bed by 9AM every morning. People who lingered in bed were lazy and slothful.

Part of this could be my dad having to get up at 4AM to work in a factory every day. So naturally bedtimes at our house were early.  I get that.

But since being an adult and with my children adults, too, when I’m not bound by the alarm for the day job, I do tend to stay up later at night–and to write and write well.  So perhaps my natural cycle is that of a night owl.

Maybe when I retire I’ll find out.

MJ’s Musings: SEP-Match Me If You Can

MATCH ME IF YOU CAN is one of the Chicago Stars series. I have to admit, I’m not that fond of it. I enjoy it while I’m reading it, but there was nothing about the story or the characters that compel me to compulsively reread the book. In fact, I didn’t own a copy until a couple of years ago.

The premise is great: a professional matchmaker vs. a professional sports agent. Two tenacious characters. But I don’t know them. I don’t understand their foibles. I don’t love them. Maybe I need to read the  book a couple of more times in order to plumb their souls. I had to do that with Natural Born Charmer, and it worked.

Here’s the thing: I don’t hate the characters. They don’t make me uncomfortable (something I’ll explore next month). I’m merely indifferent to them.

Can you convince me to care?

MJ’s Musings: SEP-Nobody’s Baby But Mine

Nobody’s Baby But Mine is a little creepy in that there is a slight stalker element. The heroine wants a dumb man to father a child for her, so she sets her sights on a football quarterback who says “ain’t” in a southern drawl and makes assumptions. Bad assumptions, all the way around.  The hero may be from North Carolina, but being from the south is the only assumption the heroine got right. Almost.

Tricking the football playing into getting her pregnant is morally wrong; the heroine knows it, but her longing for a child who won’t be a genius (the heroine is a physicist who’s always felt like a freak because she’s smart), but who will be normal outweighs her morals.  Twice.

There is a secret baby (for a couple of pages), a marriage that’s anything but convenient, and a truly lovely romance that unfolds as the hero and heroine get to know each other.

The cast of secondary characters is interesting. I adore the hero’s hillbilly grandmother. The secondary romance, between the hero’s parents is interesting, and showcases what a brilliant author Susan Elizabeth Phillips is. The subtleties tying the primary romance to the secondary is extremely well done. At first, I didn’t like the hero’s father, but with each re-read of the book and my own development as an author have made me appreciate exactly what Phillips did here.

Four stars.

 

MJ’s Musings: SEP-Heaven Texas

2 Comments

I really like this book. I love how the heroine is the only one who can see through the hero’s BS–and calls him on it. The hero is a lot deeper than many romance heroes.  He is a genuinely good soul all the time. Even at the black moment in the story, and events turn ugly, his innate goodness shines.

Some of the town folk and athletes are stereotypical, but I think the author does that to enhance the qualities of the hero.

The reason the book is so low on my list is because of the secondary plot/romance between the hero’s mother and the bad-boy who’d loved her from afar in their youth. I’ve read this book numerous times , and while that plotline is  not as creepy-icky as it seemed the first time I read the book, and is really handled quite well, I still find it creepy-icky. In this reader’s opinion, there’s a scene that occurs in a dark closet that should have remained in the dark closet and not on the page.

Overall: 4 stars.

MJ’s Musing: Word Nerd

There used to be a board game called PROBE. Used versions on Amazon are shockingly expensive. When my parents cleared out their games a couple of years ago, I “called” PROBE, but one of my nieces ended up with it.

The purpose of the game is to come up with a word (using letter cards, face down on a rack) and other people guess the word, letter by letter. There are blank cards, too, a player can add to the beginning or the  end of the word.

To this day, I will see a word and think, “Oh, that would be a great word for PROBE.”

Some of my favorite words are: gypsy; rhythm, awkward, squirm, swarm.

I confess: I am a word nerd.