When three don’t make a triangle

Hurray, I’ve purged all religion out of my system, so now things can go back to normal and I can write about love and sex again. And let me start with the title of this post, because when I came to think about it, the term ‘love triangle’ is the single most ridiculous misrepresentation possible! A triangle has three corners connected to each other, which implies an equal relationship throughout, which is so not true of love triangles! They should call them love Vs. Yes, I know that isn’t nearly as snappy, but love Vs suck anyway.

Books that make you weep with envy

Otherwise known as part one of the Thirty Twenty-six Day Week Book Challenge. Gosh, that’s really snappy, isn’t it? I think I might start to abbreviate that as the 26WBC. Anyway, the first challenge is for The best book you have read in the past 12 months.

Funnily enough, if you’d asked me this two months ago I wouldn’t have been able to answer it. I read a lot of books and I enjoy a lot of books, but I don’t often rank them in my head. But then I read The Lies of Locke Lamora, and was completely blown away by it.

Deis Volentibus

I promised a post on religion, but before I start it I suppose I should make my own views clear.

I am an atheist. I do not believe in the existence of any god or gods of any description. I decided on this probably in my early twenties, after spending a few years wavering between agnosticism and atheism. My childhood was fairly religious, not in the sense that my parents were (they were anything but), but I went to faith schools and got a pretty thorough education in the Bible. I just decided at some point that I could not believe in some all-powerful being up in the sky who created the world. To me, God is a means of blaming someone else.

With that out of the way, I would also like to make it clear that my philosophy is very much ‘live and let live’. I don’t care one whit what you believe, as long as you don’t try to make me believe it too. In return I’ll do the same. One of my best friends is a devout Catholic and we respect each other’s views; it has never been a problem for either of us.

Likes, Loves and Influences: Melanie Rawn

The year was… ooh, 1996 I think. I was still at university, wrestling my way through a degree in Slavonic Languages and Literature. I was in my fourth year, and by this point I had pretty much figured out that I’d picked the wrong subject to study, but rather than flushing four years down the drain I was determined to just get my degree. I hadn’t really thought about job prospects, probably out of an optimistic but fairly accurate sense that I could learn anything people would chuck at me. The goal was simply to get that degree out of the way.

As part of the degree students could spend some time in a Russian speaking country to soak up the local culture and language. I’ve always been a bit of a homebody, so when the choice was between three months in St Petersburg or one month in Odessa, I opted for the latter. Yes, I know St Petersburg would probably have been much more awesome, but I just really didn’t fancy it.

Metaphors, euphemisms and the thesaurus

This is another post sparked by two things. The first thing is me reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, which has some fantastic usage of metaphors in it. I always go a bit gooey over a good metaphor, but when they’re especially inventive I just have to squee a little. My favourite one so far is ‘as drunk as a baby in a beer barrel’. Not that I can remember any more at the moment, but that’s beside the point.

Of course, there’s the other side of the coin as well, which is the bad metaphor, but I can’t think of any examples of those either. I’m not doing too well here, am I? Well, that’s because of the second thing which sparked this post, which is something my darling husband drew my attention to. It’s absolutely awesome, and you can find it below.

Can a woman be strong yet still need a man?

So, the computer has stopped fritzing out. I’m not sure if it is a permanent state of affairs, since all the husband did was swap out my memory for his, but neither of us are blue-screening, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

Of course, this means that I no longer have an excuse not to cough up a post, so it’s lucky that I have something to talk about today.

I have been pondering the subject of strong women for a while, but two things have happened this week to make it particularly pertinent. The first one was this article on the New Statesman website. It is a very good post (probably a lot better than mine will turn out to be), and it once again highlights the ongoing battle for equality which women have to fight, often on a daily basis.

Swearing in Fiction

Well, the three days of summer have so far stretched to about ten, and it doesn’t look like the end is in sight just yet, so I suppose I have no further excuses to not do a ‘proper’ post. And while I’m at it, I might as well tackle a continuously controversial subject: swearing. In particular the word fuck and all its various permutations.

Likes, Loves and Influences: Tanith Lee

Today it is time for the third part in my love letters to authors, and my subject is Tanith Lee. I’m not sure how well known she is these days, but I’m trying to do this more or less chronologically, and Tanith Lee is an author who has kept me company throughout much of my teenage years.

This is the part where I curse my unreliable long-term memory, because I cannot for the life of me remember how I actually came into possession of her books. They just always seemed to be there. However, I’m pretty sure that the first ever book I read by her was Volkhavaar.

Let’s Talk about Sex

Do I have everyone’s attention? Good.

As subjects go, sex is one of those loaded ones that can divide people, make them all giggly or uncomfortable, or simply make them clam up and turn away. It’s a very important subject for me though, and I did promise a post about it.

What Romance means to me

Before everyone thinks this will be a whiny post about how my husband doesn’t buy me enough flowers or chocolates (he doesn’t, but he’s awesome in other ways), I mean Romance as a genre, not as the stuff couples do for each other.

As a secondary title I should probably add that this post is also about what I want from Romance, since that’s a highly personalised thing.