30 Day Book Challenge 4

I’m doing this challenge in groups of 6 so that I end up with 5 posts at the end of June for my 30 day book challenge instead of 30. This is my fourth set of books.

19. As I said, I don’t care for audiobooks, but if a man with a sexy British accent wants to read something to me, I won’t put up a fuss. I watched a multipart show about meerkats of all the silly things because the narrator had such a delicious British voice.

20. I love unreliably narrated books! So much fun. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is a good example of a book with an unreliable narrator. Merrikat pulls you into her world and you think you know what’s going on… or do you? I do have a preference for books about sisters…

21. Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips, is an anthology of short stories that are set in Orange County, California. Many are very dark, giving us a peek at the desperate lives people live behind the facade of glittering McMansions and shiny new cars. I see it has a whole bunch of bad reviews because people want Orange County stories to be upbeat, I guess. Well, they aren’t. WE SUFFER HERE.

22. I had to find a brand new book to read for the LGBTQ love story, as there were none on my list. It’s definitely not a genre I seek out, though I’ve read bits of pr0n here and there, as you do. Naturally, I chose the L, since it’s bad enough having one man in a love story, but two of ’em? Gah. Anyway, I picked Endless Love by Lauren Trevino. This book was just okay. It could have used an editor/proofreader ~ there were lots of typos and elided words. We all make mistakes and it’s hard to catch our own when we’ve gone over the same pages a hundred times and made changes. Beyond that, the heroines were rather bland with cookie-cutter motivations. Just like the cliched male/female romance novel, every character was incredibly beautiful, there was a friend who betrayed them, one walked in on the other at exactly the “wrong” moment (twice), the sex was always amazing, yada. Some chapters were too disjointed and short. There were POV breaks. Etc. But the story still pulled me along well enough to the end with some tension anyway. I was planning to give the book 2 stars but gave it 3. Why? Because at the end, the lovers discussed the 2016 election and actually went out in the street to protest. Generally, romance novels don’t take any political stance, and for that act of bravery, I awarded another star.

23. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This is the last line of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books. It’s probably due for a reread.

24. Wow, I don’t have any true collaborations in my Goodreads list. This means a book written by 2 or more authors, not a collection of stories by 2 or more writers. Different things. I must have read some, but I don’t recall any. To rectify this, I’m going to buy one of the books by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer. She’s a romance writer and he’s a suspense writer ~ they wrote a few books together (I actually attended one of their workshops in San Diego several years ago). I’ve wanted to read one, so this is my opportunity. I don’t have time to read it before this goes live though. Sorry about that.

See you on the 30th with my final set of June books!

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Image stolen from Sandmanjazz.

The Newlywed Game [A-Z Games]

Note: I’m doing the April A-to-Z challenge without signing up or linking back to the main site.

The Newlywed Game was just cute! And Bob Eubanks was so funny, owning that sweet spot right between wholesome and risqué. I don’t know if he coined the phrase “making whoopee,” but we’ll always associate it with him and with the show.

TNG debuted back in 1966, the last series to premiere in black and white (converting to color by the end of the year). It was a big hit, dethroning Password, and ran for 8 years. Until Family Feud had a 9 year run in 1985, TNG was the longest running game show in ABC’s daytime history. Another first ~ Bob Eubanks was only 28 when he became master of ceremonies of the Newlywed Game, the youngest emcee to host a show. To learn more about the hosts and versions of the show, click here.

The important thing to know is that TNG was canceled in 1980 because its producer at the time, Chuck Barris, debuted a spin-off game show called 3’s a Crowd, where a man, his wife, and his secretary would compete. People clutched their pearls at the implications, and Chuck’s shows were all shuttered ~ that one, TNG, The Dating Game, and The Gong Show. But TNG returned for a week for Valentine’s Day 1984, and in 1985, a New Newlywed Game began.

The basic premise of the Newlywed Game is for husbands and wives to try to match each other’s answers to a variety of silly questions. I always enjoyed it because the couples seemed like real people and the answers didn’t feel coached or rehearsed. There was no element of luck as far as rolling dice or studying up on ancient philosophy to ace some category; you just had to hope you knew the person you married as well as you thought you did.

Please tune in tomorrow when I will blog about Old Maid.

~*~

Image credited to Herald & Review.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Layers

I never baked you a lasagna,
Never prepared noodles and cheese,
Meat and sauce just to please you.
I didn’t fill my small apartment
With the smells of an Italian
Jewish grandmother’s kitchen.
I thought you were joking,
But you were not, when you said
You wanted those layers,
Deep, rich, and bubbling;
When I falsely assumed
We should spend time in bed
Under tiers of covers,
Limbs intertwined,
Breath comingling,
Your mouth hot on mine.
That all was fine,
But you wanted more proof
That I cared about you–
You had spent money on me,
And I had given nothing in return.
You felt burned–
Where was a steaming casserole
Full of pasta and beef,
Arranged with sausage and cheese,
All underneath that luscious canopy
Of melted mozzarella?
These would have been the levels
Of deliciousness to cement
My honorable intentions.
But instead I appeared
Like every other superficial wench,
Out to finagle fleeting fragments
Of base bodily bliss.
Yet there is so much more
To human existence
Than that initial layer
Of physical desire;
That first kiss on the beach fire;
That want to dance naked in the moonlight madness;
That can’t go a day without your touch sadness;
That need your voice in the night lustcraze;
That lost in the smell of you dreamdaze…
If only
I had
Made
The
Damn
Lasagna.

~*~

A friend in a poetry workshop shared this challenge with me from a few weeks ago: write a poem about desire. “Lasagna” was my response.

Image from Pixabay.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

I Think It’s Tuesday #PoiMe

Warning: this is not gonna be one of those smell the flowers in the pandemic posts, but there are plenty of those around, so if you would rather read something cheery, move along now.

I’ve been doing my side work from home as usual but not my main work. It would be complicated to set up. The days blend in a haze of sleeping late, sweatpants, coffee, news, news, and more news. 😢

It’s depressing to live this way and never see any of my favorite humans. I don’t know when I’ll be able to visit my daughter up North again. Or even see my family in Los Angeles. Everything seems terrifying. But I’ve been staying indoors mostly and not even going for walks. I don’t like getting the mail because I never know if someone will stand too close. Today was okay. No one was at the mailboxes when I was.

The worst thing is reading these constant bits of news and feeling more horrified. But I need to know what’s happening! I live near a busy street and traffic never stops whooshing by… where are they all going? Why aren’t they staying home like they’re supposed to? Aren’t they hearing the same stuff I am? 😡

I’ve been cleaning a lot. I have nothing else to do but keep checking the mishmash of news. I read a book. Probably will read another. Been chatting with friends. I was gonna bake banana bread, but no one else is around to help me eat it, so I didn’t. No need to turn into a chubby hermit. Got bored with the phone games. I’m finally working on Ghosted. 👻 Luckily, I really like it.

I am grumpy and sad. I don’t find the beauty in this. Maybe if I had a partner? Then we could be having luscious sex and engaging in wonderful deep conversations and playing chess and watching lovely old movies and making lasagna and planning our escape from this mad mad world, but instead I just keep checking the cat boxes to make sure no poop needs to be removed.

It’s not that I mind being alone. I like to be alone. It’s the forced aspect of it. And it’s the constant uncertainty in every direction. Health, family, finances, job, future. What’s going to happen? Even if things tentatively begin to improve, will we be re-whomped with this, or a new version, next winter?

Sorry, I can’t put up some Hallmark card type of post. This really sucks. 🙁

~*~

Image originally from Pixabay.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

No Sharing!

Melanie had some fun St. Patrick’s themed questions today, but I wasn’t in the mood for those. Then she posted these, which are much more to my taste.

What harsh truths do you prefer to ignore?

All of them! Let’s see… a big one is how many bugs and bug parts I’m probably eating all the time in salads, cereals, etc. Gross! Next, is how I’m damaging my health by sitting on my butt all day and never exercising. Another is how I keep reading the news and think I actually know what’s going on lolololol 🤣🤣🤣

Actually, a super harsh truth right now is how many greedy, selfish, inconsiderate people there are who will not stop harmful behavior without the force of law. I mean, we always know this, but I for one am not usually thinking about it. Then this virus comes along and people just don’t wanna cooperate for the greater good. They have to be forced, no way around that fact. 😢

Is free will real or just an illusion?

Illusion. We’re almost completely wired up to make every choice due to our genetics plus environment, and we exercise very little if any “will” over that, even though it feels like we do. I say “almost” because of the random elements in there, not will.

I guess, given this truth, we can be more forgiving of the sh!t heads in my first reply who won’t voluntarily cooperate. They can’t help their selfish ways. But that does not mean we let them do what they want. No. We hire more cops.

What is the meaning of true love?

True love, in my opinion, is that passionate attraction we feel toward another person combined with the steady certainty that we would care for their well-being to the same degree or greater than our own.

If both elements are not present, then it is not true love. Passion without care is just a sexual connection, even if it’s embellished with other goodies like intellectual sparks and shared hobbies. Caring without the passion is a great friendship, but most will jettison that for even a slight chance at a romantic partner.

Great questions! 😻

~*~

Image credited to imgflp.com.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

FPQ60: Otters

Fandango provocatively asks… how we met our significant otter, or if we don’t have an SO, how we met our last one. My last otter wasn’t “significant” in the sense of being a long-term relationship (a few months of contact); but it was important in the sense that it marked the end of my dating days.

I met this guy ~ let’s call him “Michael” ~ via a dating site in 2016 after I took a break from dating. I had created a hidden profile and impulsively went live with it while at the Los Angeles County Fair because I was in a optimistic mood while hanging out with friends. What a fun day that was!

Anyway, I met a few guys who were meh and then Michael. I don’t want to say a lot about Michael right now or the specifics of our time together because that emphasizes what happened (and encourages people to give advice 🙄), when the crucial aspect is the totality of my dating experiences.

You’ve heard of the straw that broke the camel’s back, right? Well, I’m the camel in this scenario and these guys were straws, none of them that important, certainly not Michael. But he was the last one, and I did break. Before him, I met a bunch of lying liars, all in different disguises, and he was a lying liar too… wrapped up in a disguise I hadn’t seen before. But still he was the same as the rest, and when I understood this I was finished with it all.

I fell into a depression, not because of him, but over the loss of the dream/fantasy that I would find someone. For decades, I had nurtured this dream, fed it romance novels and love songs and Meg Ryan romcoms. I truly thought I would have the happily ever after, my soul mate, my eternal flame. Giving it up left a huge void of darkness. I cried all the time. It was hard to sleep or I slept too much. Negative thought spirals took control of my mind and refused to let go. It took about a year and a half for me to get better.

But getting better is an ongoing process, and it does not include dating. I know people mean well when they encourage me to try again or say nice things about meeting someone, but part of my healing is coming to terms with the fact that this is not going to happen and that part of my life is over. I can’t allow myself to be subject to the agendas of liars and narcissists again; I can’t put myself in the position of being harassed and stalked by whiners and bullies when I don’t do what they want. It’s too traumatic and stressful to think about. I’m getting shaky even typing the words.

I realized that dating sites themselves were a huge part of the problem for me. They attract the worst sorts of men (whether pay sites or not), and the older you are the worse it gets. The men were significantly sh*ttier when I was on at age 55 than when I was 50. They acted like they were doing me a favor by even saying hello, like I should be grateful for their attention. I get that other women are able to ignore the jerkos and focus on finding the prize in the pile of poo, but that’s really hard for me. I am affected by comments from jerkos. That’s why I like to preemptively block them here and on Twitter when I can. 👻

So, when anyone asks for my opinion of dating sites, I tell them that they all suck. If you enjoy becoming a product/commodity and having a people look you over for your features as if you’re a TV on Amazon and reject you for a better deal, then maybe you will enjoy the sites. Not me.

Besides, we shouldn’t meet anyone now anyway. Who knows how often they wash their hands? Back to cybersex! 😍

~*~

Images from Fandango and Google.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Let It Burn

Happy February! I’m participating in Bee’s fun music challenge again and hope you’ll join in (you don’t have to play every day).

Today’s theme is a love song with weather in it and I chose “Set Fire to the Rain” by Adele. This is such a passionate song and when I read the lyrics I realized it could have worked for yesterday’s sex song too. I just love it for the pure emotional content.

~*~

Written for Love Is In Da Blog Day 6.

Image credit to Happy Color.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Come On Baby Tell Me So

Happy February! I’m participating in Bee’s fun music challenge again and hope you’ll join in (you don’t have to play every day).

Today’s theme is a song about making love. I had a few songs in mind, but they didn’t work out ~ when I looked up the lyrics, they weren’t what I thought they were. Sometimes I have a feeling about a song, but when I read it on the screen it sounds dumb. There are a lot of supposed “mood” songs, but the idea was to find one about making love, not to make love to, though it could be both, I guess. I don’t really enjoy hardcore explicit lyrics, unless they’re funny, but I wanted to stick with serious love-making here, not segue into goofery. Finally, I remembered good old Sir Rod. I mean, duh.

~*~

Written for Love Is In Da Blog Day 5.

Image credit to Happy Color.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Chocolate Lady’s Eight Candle Book Tag ~ Day 8

To celebrate Chanukah this year and my friend the Chocolate Lady, I accepted her challenge to participate in the Eight Candle Book Tag. This was a fun game. Thanks for coming up with it, Davida!😀

I’m pretty sure I said “wow!” or something to that effect when I finished Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. This book was a revelation. First, it’s simply a great romance novel full of interesting, complex characters, lots of wit and humor, loads of sexy times, a quirky setting, and an actual plot. Second, the sex isn’t as unrealistic as it’s often portrayed in the “bodice rippers” set in the 1800s or whenever. Third, WTT is a contemporary romance, written in a breezy style, which made me think about my own writing.

What I thought was, hmm, ya know, if this kind of writing gets published, then maybe I too could write a romance novel!

And indeed I can write one. Did write one. More than one actually. Getting published, however, is another matter entirely…

Happy Chanukah!

~*~

Images from The Chocolate Lady’s blog

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

PFF29: A Good Offense

Welcome to Paula’s Friday Flashback! This is a challenge begun by Fandango and it’s fun to see what we posted back when (as well as the comments). The below is a reblog of a post I made on December 22, 2013. I’m pretty proud of this rant. Enjoy! Warning: contains swearing.

The Defense Rests

Oh look, it’s yet another article dissing romance novels. (Ghosh offers a tepid “apology” for his diss here ~ he has clearly never read a contemporary romance novel. See my last paragraph about “journalists” who do no research.)

And so many women feel compelled to explain/justify their love of this genre. No one says to men, hey, why do you like watching those explody movies full of gratuitous violence? Or science fiction flicks with goofy aliens. And what about that TV show about zombies everyone loves? Yep, zombies are fine, no need to question anyone’s taste on THAT, but romance novels… now those are suspect.

Most people even accept that men enjoy pr0n. Some women might not like the fact that men enjoy it, but they aren’t puzzled by the idea. It’s not confusing. But people who don’t read romances act confused about women who do read them. “I don’t get it. They’re formulaic. You know how they’ll end.” And so? We always knew Columbo would get the bad guy, yet we liked watching him anyway.

I’m not sure why people have such a problem with romance novels. If you don’t like ’em, don’t read ’em. It’s fairly simple. I dislike all science fiction except the original Star Trek, so I avoid it. That works. I have no interest in any zombie type stuff, so I don’t read or watch it. No problem there. But people who don’t read romances seem to feel a burning need to continually diss the genre.

Beyond that, we have the explainers and the analyzers. Must don Freudian cap and tell you vhy you like zeeze books. You had a strained relationship wiss your fadder, yes? Zomg. SHADDAP.

You know what the problem is? Too many fucking “journalists” and not enough topics. Every week these explainer dorks are scrambling for something to write about, but they don’t go out and actually experience anything, interview anyone, take photos, etc. They just yabber away from their armchairs and make shit up. Hopefully something annoying that people will click on so they’ll see some dumb ad.  Many are still sailing in the faint breeze from that Fifty Shades book  and trying to make a penny off discussing erotica erm blah yip yap SEX whatever.

Leave us alone and let us enjoy our bodice rippers in peace.

/end reblog

~*~

Image from Pexels

©️2019 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.