Well, it’s been fun on WordPress but I have switched to Blogger. This site will eventually close and I am no longer blogging on this site.
Go to http://hackaroosreviews.blogspot.com/ to check out my new blog and new look! I hope to see you all there!!! 🙂
Thank you, as always for your continued support!!!
Wicked Winter Saturdays is a weekly post we started to challenge ourselves to read more steamy books and have a lot of fun. Feel free to join in. (let us know so we can add a link to your post).
The Autumn Review
Sim-Sational Books
The Bookish Babe
Paranormal and Urban Fantasy Reviews
**The books featured on Wicked Winter Saturdays are for adults. If you are under 18 years of age, or do not like smexy books, please stop here. **
Goodreads Description:
Caroline Reynolds has a fantastic new apartment in San Francisco, a KitchenAid mixer, and no O (and we’re not talking Oprah here, folks). She has a flourishing design career, an office overlooking the bay, a killer zucchini bread recipe, and no O. She has Clive (the best cat ever), great friends, a great rack, and no O.
Adding insult to O-less, since her move, she has an oversexed neighbor with the loudest late-night wallbanging she’s ever heard. Each moan, spank, and–was that a meow?–punctuates the fact that not only is she losing sleep, she still has, yep, you guessed it, no O.
Enter Simon Parker. (No, really, Simon, please enter.) When the wallbanging threatens to literally bounce her out of bed, Caroline, clad in sexual frustration and a pink baby-doll nightie, confronts her heard-but-never-seen neighbor. Their late-night hallway encounter has, well, mixed results. Ahem. With walls this thin, the tension’s gonna be thick…
In her third novel, Alice Clayton returns to dish her trademark mix of silly and steamy. Banter, barbs, and strutting pussycats, plus the sexiest apple pie ever made, are dunked in a hot tub and set against the gorgeous San Francisco skyline in this hot and hilarious tale of exasperation at first sight.
What did I think?
So, first off, let me just say that I *LOVED* this book. Like absolutely loved. I will most definitely have this book as an ebook plus have it in paperback because I loved it so much.
Caroline has to be one of my favorite characters from now on. I loved her personality, humor and vulnerability. When she was with her girlfriends, they had my in fits of laughter. Her inner-mind-monolgues seriously had me going. Plus she is a successful, strong woman so snaps for that also. 😉
Now, Simon, is one hunk of man. Totally and completely. I actually want one of my very own just to stare and drool at from time to time. He was so adorable and perfect with Caroline.
Clive has to also be one of my favorite characters to date. Yes I know he is a cat but damn does he have the best personality.
I found this entire story very funny, very romantic, and very sexy. Even though the sex scenes weren’t overly erotic, I did still find them very hot. Key parts: HOT TUB. That had to be one of the hottest scenes in this book. Holy shyte. *fans self*
Alice Clayton has a real way with words and writing to keep the reader interested and entertained. The only regret that I have is that this is the only one in this serie *sigh*. I could do with a lot more Simon. 😉
Favorite Quote(s):
I don’t care how old you are, or what background you come from, there are two universal truths. We will always laugh at…gas if it happens at the wrong time, and we are always curious about what goes on in other people’s bedrooms.
If Clive could wear a blazer, he would have taken it off, draped it casually over his kitty shoulder, and pointed at her.
Hey everyone!
Hackaroo here giving you an update on what’s been going on and why I haven’t been blogging as much.
*takes breath*
So a lot of you know that this was a big year for me. My boyfriend of two years proposed to me in 2011 on our 2 year anniversary. We decided to get married on our third year anniversary which is this year in August. Here are a couple pictures for you….because it was one of the most amazing days of my life and I love to share 😉
*le sigh*
After the wedding in August, things went up and down. Most of you know I lost two of my grandparents in September. We also found out I was pregnant in September as well. 😀
So September was a plus and a minus in some ways. My grandparents still hold a huge piece of my heart and I will miss them both.
Then just recently we had a couple more family emergencies and we moved to a bigger house. So needless to say the last four months have been hectic. 🙂
And I am moving Hackaroo’s Reviews to Blogger in January. WordPress has been good but Blogger allows more flexibility and rafflecopter works. 🙂 And it’s free which is also a plus.
So thank you, as always, for still being here. I hope you stick around and see what’s up. 🙂
Merry Christmas!!!
Welcome to Hackaroo’s Reviews stop on the Release blog tour. I am a huge fan of Mr. Merrick and am glad I have gotten to know him. He is an amazing and talented story writer and I am very honored to have him on my blog today. But first, here is a little bit about Matt:
M.R. Merrick is a Canadian writer, and author of Exiled, the first installment in The Protector Series. Having never traveled, he adventures to far off lands through his imagination and in between cups of coffee. As a music lover and proud breakfast enthusiast, he’s usually found at the computer, between a pair of headphones and in front of a large bowl of cereal.
About Release:
From Goodreads:
After uniting the shifters and calling in reinforcements, Chase has to face his toughest challenge yet: learning to control his emotions. But as tensions rise and his powers grow, controlling his emotions becomes the least of his problems.
Terrorized by a multi-shifter who is hell-bent on turning him, Chase questions just how far he’s willing to go to stop his father. Meanwhile, Tiki’s virtuous nature has placed him in the middle of Vincent’s past, leaving Chase to oppose a senate of vampires and defend a demon he hates.
Trying to balance his friends, his enemies, and his inner demons, Chase is left searching for answers about the Mark, his destiny, and where he can find the next soul piece. Stopping Riley is his top priority, but as more obstacles arise, he finds himself doubting all the decisions he’s made – especially regarding Rayna.
One thing is for certain: Chase has finally realized that he doesn’t know anything. The light doesn’t always quell the darkness, the monsters don’t always stay in the shadows, and the past doesn’t always stay in the past – sometimes, the demons inside are the hardest to fight.
Now….on with the interview:
Both inspiration and ideas come from two places. First, my imagination. It twists and turns things into something more than they began, and occasionally that something is really cool. And second, everything around me. Since I started writing, I pay attention to things in a more acute manner. When I see something of interest, my imagination takes hold and warps it into different things.
Once I have a workable idea, or at least something that has done more than piqued my interest, I daydream about it, brainstorming to see if it’s an idea I think will be worth the time investment of exploring more. Sometimes it is and I do more planning and plotting, other times it’s an idea that either isn’t any good, or it isn’t ‘ready’ yet, and so it goes into an ideas folder for later.
In all honesty, it happened by accident. Before I started writing Exiled (really the first type of fiction I had ever tried to write), I was having an incredibly hard week. I needed an escape. Usually I would turn to watching movies, playing video games, or reading books for this, but nothing was working. Nothing had exactly what I wanted, and so I decided to create what I wanted for myself.
I sat down and wrote a scene with Chase and a demon, and then all these questions started popping into my head: Who is this guy? Why is the demon trying to kill him? Why is he alone? As the answers came to me, what I thought was a really good idea began to percolate and I just didn’t stop. A few months later, Exiled was born and I was extremely excited with what had just happened. I’d spent every night for six months working on it, and I wanted it to be read. So, I spend the next year editing, revising, and learning everything I could about the publishing industry.
I wish I could say yes, but in all honesty, it’s different with each book. Exiled was just written from my mind, no outline or anything. Shift had a very detailed plot that I tried to follow very closely. Whereas Release had a solid outline, which I neglected almost the entire time I was writing it. I visited the outline several times to review it, but I hardly looked at it once I really got going. The emotional turmoil of Release went where I wanted it to go, but it got there in a different way than I had planned.
The action and gore I don’t have an issue with. Romance was easy because it’s a very minor part of my series, and that had been planned since the beginning. It happens slowly. There is no love at first sight. Everything has advanced naturally for me.
The hardest part is weaving everything together and knowing what to cut from the books. Some characters, sub plots, etc. appear at first to be either very obvious, or cliché. I wanted them to appear that way, but in the grand scheme of things, I knew they were not. Looking back now however, I realize I could’ve put things together in a different manner and in a much better way.
I cut about 40,000 words from Exiled, because 80k-100k was the norm for submitting to literary agents. The problem is I ended up cutting out some pretty cool and important stuff that would’ve built the world better, and I never added it back in when I decided to self-publish. Some of those ‘missing’ or ‘obvious’ things have deterred readers from advancing with the series, and I think it was an issue I had with the delivery in Exiled. I’ve learned a lot over the course of this series, and that’s a lesson that is learned over time, I think. I definitely won’t make that mistake again.
Building all the different Underworlds and creating new monsters is the easiest for me. I literally just close my eyes, start with a single detail, and construct everything around it. It comes very naturally for me, and I think that’s one of the reasons I love writing in the Fantasy genre so much. I get to build my own world, my own rules, and my own monsters. That’s the part I most look forward to when I sit down to write each book.
The same answer as above applies to this, but also, I love writing the scenes that incorporate magic. The elemental magic in The Protector is something I’ve always daydreamed about, since I was a little kid, and I love bringing it to life in my own way.
I actually find it more difficult since I decided to work from home. I think I write less. I stress about sales too much, since now I’m dependant on them, and since I’m home with the kids all day, I find myself procrastinating and putting it off when I finally have free time to write.
It’s soul-splitting.
It’s the most passionate book of the series so far. I always invest all of myself into any book I work on, but this one has my heart splattered on the pages. I knew it was going to be an emotional book to write back when I was working on the first draft of Shift, but when it finally came time to put Release together, it was more emotionally and mentally draining than I was prepared for. I’m still recovering and trying to get back into writing. I was exhausted when it was finished. Release is an incredibly intense piece of the story.
Thank you so much Matt for allowing me the pleasure of having you on my blog. 🙂 I am very honored that you answered my questions.
Right now in the Shifters Read A Long, we’ve finished the first book Stray. I’m anxious to see what everyone thought. Especially the ones who have never read the series before.
I’ve been looking for a chat room for everyone to go to and am having trouble finding one. I’m planning on having a Twitter Chat starting at 6:00 pm Pacific time.
We will only be talking about Stray and no spoilers allowed 😉 Anyone can join in and the more the merrier!!!
The twitter Hashtag for the Chat is #ShiftersChat.
Here is the information on Stray:
Description:
There are only eight breeding female werecats left . . .
And I’m one of them.I look like an all-American grad student. But I am a werecat, a shape-shifter, and I live in two worlds.
Despite reservations from my family and my Pride, I escaped the pressure to continue my species and carved out a normal life for myself. Until the night a Stray attacked.
I’d been warned about Strays — werecats without a Pride, constantly on the lookout for someone like me: attractive, female, and fertile. I fought him off, but then learned two of my fellow tabbies had disappeared.
This brush with danger was all my Pride needed to summon me back . . . for my own protection. Yeah, right. But I’m no meek kitty. I’ll take on whatever — and whoever — I have to in order to find my friends. Watch out, Strays — ’cause I got claws, and I’m not afraid to use them . . .
I will be tweeting beforehand to let everyone know when we’ll be chatting it up. My twitter handle is @Jessica984 so please look me up!
Hackaroo's Reviews 