Monday Miscellany

Today’s stop on the Red blog tour is at Book Lover’s Inc.  I’m being interviewed!  And check out this lovely review of Red from Sidhe Vicious Reviews.

We’re getting hammered by Tropical Depression Lee today.  No cookouts for us!  But it’s bringing with it cooler temperatures and some much needed rain.  My poor hubs has to work, so I’m chilling out at home, mining the DVR for programming (since it’s raining so hard we’ve got no consistent signal) and finally getting around to watching the latest Lifetime Nora Roberts movie, Carnal Innocence (yeah, we see how often I watch TV without my hubs…I think I recorded it back in February).  I’m always interested to see how well they translate them.  Some have been really good–Angel’s Fall seemed to be a fairly faithful rendition.  Some have been awful, with way too much deviation from the book–Montana Sky was a HUGE disappointment.  Which is sad because that’s one of my favorite Nora books.

So far Carnal Innocence is…okay.  I’m never sure how movies will present Mississippi.  Nora did a pretty good job in the book, considering.  There are things that annoyed me, but they’re very typical of non-southerners.  Naturally the movie was filmed in L.A., so there are all kinds of hills and beautiful scenery that we just don’t have in the Delta.  Which is not a shock.  It’s a Lifetime movie.  I’m sure they didn’t have the budget to film on location.  The houses, other than Sweetwater, are, generally way too big and pretentious.  They have changed random details like making the Sheriff black, which I don’t care about except that’s not how the book was written.  They just had a love scene in front of a fireplace with a lit fire, which is utterly  moronic, since it’s dead summer in this story and Tucker was in the pool at the beginning of the movie.  And there seem to be plenty of random shots of Tucker’s flat belly for no apparent reason (I didn’t say that was necessarily a bad thing). But they totally nailed the southern hospitality and overt friendliness, so I’m not too upset.  I’m waiting to see if they bring in the dog.  It’s looking like no, which is sad.  Nora always writes great dogs and I really liked Useless.

That’s something I loved to do in my romantic suspense that never seems to work out in my paranormal stuff.  It just seems weird to give a werewolf a dog or something.  Plus, my paranormal peeps are often on the go in circumstances that would make having a pet at home or along for the ride kind of difficult of irresponsible.  I’ve got a dog planned for my kitchen witch series.  The heroine, Lyla, is allergic to cats, so she winds up with a Great Dane for a familiar.  Squish.  Who, through a spell gone awry, is going to wind up being able to talk.  Which should be a lot of fun.  That’s something I’d like to see more of.  Somebody successfully pull off pets in paranormal.  The kind who are characters in their own right.  You don’t see it often.  Katie MacAlister does a great job with this in her Aislin Gray series with Jim, who is actually a demon in a Newfoundland’s body.  But it works.  He’s a marvelous character.

Who’s your favorite pet character in a book?

9 thoughts on “Monday Miscellany

  1. A Great Dane named Squish?? Squishy and I approve of this, heartily.

    Favorite pet character in a book would have to be Taggle from PLAIN KATE. The fact that I love him so much says a lot about how skillfully Erin Bow writes his character; see, he’s a cat, and I’m not a cat person. But I’m totally a Taggle person.

  2. all time favorite is Pete the cat in Heinlein Door into Summer inj current books would be a tie between Harper Blaine’s ferret and Stephine Plum guinea pig

  3. Have you read Jaye Wells – Red Headed Step Child and the rest of the books in the series? Gugiul is a demon that takes on cat form sometimes, and is hilarious! She’s written him even funnier than Katie MacAlister’s Jim, though I definitely enjoy him too.

  4. Favorite pet? Wow, that’s a hard one. I think it might be Pansy in the Hurog duology by Patricia Briggs. He’s a war stallion.

    Ooo, I like the sound of Squish.

    Personally, I’ve been looking at my own writing and considering pets, but so far, I’ve not written anyone who could really afford to have one. Though there are a few horses who appear briefly… I have a few stories on the back burners that will probably feature pets, though. I have plans for a dragon and a squirrel—though not in the same story.

  5. I like the dog, Valdez, in Gerry Barlett’s Real Vampires series. He’s really a person that is in servitude to help protect the heroine in the books but he loves eating his Cheetos! So funny and such wisecracks from the dog.

  6. We’re doing the same thing here…watching DVR’d stuff since the rain is messing with our signal. But we needed this rain so badly! I was away all weekend, so it was weird coming back to what used to be crunchy grass and what’s now soggy ground.

    Stop teasing me with the kitchen witch stuff. You KNOW I’ve been waiting so long for that series. LOL

    I’m not sure what my favorite pet in a book would be. There was an English bulldog that I liked in the Archy McNally series by Lawrence Sanders. I just can’t remember his name.

  7. Not being a pet person, I can’t really think of a favorite storybook pet. I’ve never read a Nora Roberts book, but I’ve seen all the movies. My favorites were Montana Skies and Northern Lights. Of course, I didn’t have the conflict of whether or not they followed the books, and I loved the scenery in both movies.

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