Pimping Your Friends

For fun and money.

Well, okay, I lie on the money, though hopefully it is money for them.

When my husband first started working for MCI (not now, of course) and we moved to Colorado Springs, we were under a mountain of debt.  This is because we came off unemployment and paid on two houses (then a house and an apartment) for a year and a half.  We had twenty thousand dollars in unsecured debt and no savings.  We paid the debt off in two years.  Yes, part of it was due to squeezing each dime so hard it squealed.  (We also gained massive weight by living on Russian Peasant Diet, but never mind.)  Meat, if we bought it, would go to flavor the stew and then for Robert.

But we got a considerable help paying off the debt when we discovered that if he recommended a friend who got hired, he got a bonus (I don’t remember how much.  Maybe $500?)  Well, we knew tons of unemployed and underemployed people in the Carolinas.  And every time Dan got one of these bonuses he would go, “I feel so guilty.  Like I’m selling my friends.”

Of course it doesn’t apply, since I’m not getting a bonus (looks pleadingly at friends, particularly older son) and though I have an interest in Naked Reader Press, it is so far from paying off initial investment this hardly counts.

However, Naked Reader has some books out I would like to make you fine ladies, gents and smiling dragons aware of.  No disparagement on the other Naked Reader books, and you should totally go nuts on their catalogue, but I’m highlighting some, for various reasons which I’ll try to give in the text.

First up, ConVent, (that link goes to Naked reader, this one to Amazon, this one to Barnes and Noble) by Kate Paulk.  Kate first wrote this as a fun thing for the bar.  It was then more… well…  She involved almost everyone at Baen, often in unflattering ways – hey, I’m a succubus, so cry me a river – but when it became obvious it wouldn’t be a Baen book, and if it were it would get her burned at the stake, she made some changes.

So, what it is – It is the story of a vampire who attends SF conventions.  Oooh, exciting, right?  Well, actually, yes.  First of all, Jim is the daddy of all sarcastic, biting (pardon the pun) vampires.  And of course, your average SF con has a lot to be sarcastic about – though it’s done with the sort of touch that means he’s one of us, not a stranger sneering at our foibles.  Second, while she extended the “authors” present to be from every house, and also blended them, so you’ll never know who is who – because they’re not a person, but several in one – there is still a feel of roman a clef to it, and it’s like looking through a keyhole at the closed parties and gossip of the sf authors circuit.  The only people left un-blended were those who gave Kate’s permission to use them, so you can probably identify without much strain my family and a few other characters from Baen’s bar (often as victims.  Virgin sacrifices, to be exact.  And some of them will make you swallow your tongue at the idea of their being virgins.)

Third, there are murders, and character growth, and…  Try it.  If you liked Zombies of the Gene Pool and Bimbos of the Death Sun, you’ll love this. When a vampire, a werewolf, an undercover angel and his succubus squeeze are the good guys, you know it will be a fun ride.  And oh, yeah, yours truly did the cover.  Don’t sneer too much, I had an afternoon to do it, after the lined-up cover had to be pulled for copyright issues (the artist’s, not ours.  Someone was selling as theirs art that… wasn’t.)  But though it’s damning with faint praise, it could be MUCH worse.

Next up, a very different type of book: Nocturnal Origins, by Amanda Green.  (Amazon here, Barnes and Noble here) (Yes, that cover sucks.  It sucks more than my cover for Witchfinder, and I am trying to persuade Amanda to let me draw a new cover.  Yes, again, that’s sad, when I’m better, but can the peanut gallery pile on, please?) I don’t know how many of you out there are both mystery fans and urban fantasy fans.  Yeah, I know the urban fantasies often pretend to be mysteries, but you know and I know it’s not true.  Not in most cases.  I read both genres, and I should know.

Nocturnal Origins on the other hand, is the real deal.  Part of the reason Amanda chose to go with Naked Reader, though she had interest from at least one traditional publishing house is that she thought that the traditional houses would have clue zero what to do with it, and she is probably right.

I mean, take your accurate procedural (and right now I’m blanking on the procedural writers I like, though Jill McGown is always a good one) and blend it with an urban fantasy involving werewolves and other shape shifters, all with solid world building and well-though-out rivalries, and that’s what Origins is.

MacKenzie Santos has a problem.  Since a brutal attack that left her dead, she’s been well, it starts with alive, right?  Not that she’s complaining, but she’s really not supposed to be alive, and for a woman with an organized mind, the incongruency bothers her.  And then she starts shifting shapes into a Jaguar…  And her life is completely upended.  The book is both a journey of self-discovery, as she becomes used to her body’s foibles, and discovery that there are more like her around.  Then there is the rivalry between the Pures and the Lycans – i.e. between hereditary shifters and made ones – and a series of gruesome murders by an out of control shifter.

Poor Mac is up a creek without a paddle, and if she had a paddle, she wouldn’t be able to hold it, since her shifted form has no thumbs.  Of course, she’s not going down without a massive and interesting fight.  Consider Amazon gift options, if you’re giving a brand new kindle to that Urban Fantasy or Police Procedural buff on your list.

Then there is Cat’s Paw  (amazon and barnes and noble).  This hits close to home, being by my son, Robert Anson Hoyt.  Those of you who’ve read Robert’s Christmas Serial, or, for those of you with a flexible mind, his ultra bowl reports, won’t be surprised to know that this book is seriously weird.  I mean, seriously.

It came about because before we sold our old house Robert and I had to build a balcony.  Uh… like this, the roofers who were supposed to LIFT the balcony and repair the front porch roof under it, and whom we hired specifically because they said they could do that, instead hacked it to pieces and threw it on the front lawn.  The offer on the house, of course, included a functional balcony.  So, that fine August, Dan and I bought wood, Robert – then thirteen – and I got our tools and off we went to the house we’d left, to build a balcony.  Dan, Marshall and our friend Charles joined us in the evening but (though I no longer remember WHY) Robert and I were the only ones who had our days free.  And Robert’s price for helping was for me to help him plot this novel that had been bothering him.  Picture us in short sleeve and caps, under the August sun, sawing and using nail guns (nail gun, yeah!) and plotting furiously.

His conceit was this: there is an entire fantasy world within our world.  It involves magic.  We know nothing about it, because only cats do.

You know the metaphor about the bird who sharpens its beak on the mountain?  And when the mountain is worn down, the universe will end?  Yeah, well…  The mountain is down to where one last beak-swipe will finish it.  The bird, Happy, is getting ready to do the deed.  Its ancient opponents and guardians of the universe, the cat royal family, are all dead.  The universe is as good as gone.

Enter Fluffy, the world’s smartest dumb blond, pregnant with the litter of the last prince, and Tom, a drunken cat, raised in a dumpster behind the bar and a Heinlein hero on his father’s side and, oh, yeah, Guinevere, a well-read cat who lives in a library and named himself – he thinks – after an Arthurian hero.  IF ConVent has the least likely set of heros, these are the next unlikeliest team.

Yeah, okay, the cats drink tea and use weapons, but for heaven’s sake, these are magical cats.  If you’re not gagging at that, you really have no business gagging at the implement-using.  Perhaps they gave themselves opposable thumbs.  Besides, in context, it makes perfect sense.  Try it.  Go on.  You KNOW you want to.

And by way of insanity we come to B. Quick.  (Amazon and Barnes And Noble) B. Quick is a cozy mystery.  Full disclosure, its characters are gay males.  Well, the voice character and the love interest are.  If this bothers you, read no further.

It’s probably the only cozy mystery that ever started with the VERY unlikely hero saving someone out of a raging river.  The unlikely hero is drunkard with a college professoring problem.  Bill Yates is soooo far down the slope of despondency and self-doubt that on a good day he can sort of see a glimmer up there.

A great part of the fun involved in this mystery (and the next, Quicksand, which I had the dubious honor of helping edit – dubious because C.S. Laurel is a friend, and being a friend feels entitled to fighting me over every precious word (argh) ) is that you get to live for a while in Bill’s mind.  Bill’s mind is the sort that, having rescued a blond out of the waters decides that throwing him in was the work of the Society for The Elimination of Good Looking Blonds.  He has the sort of mind that imagines there are kraken (and possibly submarines) in a Colorado river.  He has the sort of mind that lives crosswise to the world, and makes the intersection either funny or tragic, and often both.  Often at the same time.

Throw in a politically correct faculty, a rapacious ex-wife, a confused would-be rival to the love interest, and life gets really interesting really fast.

Now, go forth and take a look at these fine books.  Me, I’m going to go feed my guys breakfast and then I’m going to write a book review.

If you guys like this sort of thing, I might pimp some more of my friends in the future.  (The problem is putting fishnet stockings on the guys.  Yeah, even Cliff bitches about it.)

Of course I’m not pimping Dave Freer.  You guys don’t need that, right?  If you haven’t read Dave Freer DO.  Run, don’t walk.  Buy him in every form, by every publisher.  He’s simply, after Pratchett, the best author working in our field today.  And, unlike Pratchett, he needs a lot more recognition.  So read, pass around, recommend, send money in small unmarked coins (to him, not to me, you sillies.  Well, to me too, if you insist.  But to him FIRST.)

Go have fun.