An almost-kiss

In honor of Valentine's Day, I joined the Indie-Kissing blogfest, hosted by the Indelibles. For lots of steamy PG kissing scenes, head over to see all the links here.

Obviously, the spirit of this romantic day has somewhat deluded me, because:

a) I don't actually have a kissing scene to share because I totally chickened out when it came down to pasting a scene out here for anyone to see. Other writer's kissing scenes don't make me blush at all. My own??  Let's just say that if I get any redder in the face, it would bleed over through the internet. So I have an almost-kissing scene.

also,

b) I'm not an Indie author and I have nothing published yet to promote. I just love blogfests and I haven't done one in a while.

So, before I chicken out, I present to you my "almost" kissing scene from my YA science fiction work-in-progress, Startripped.

Lander starts to say something, then shakes his head and closes his eyes for a moment. He faces forward in his seat again.

“What were you going to say?”

He shakes his head again. “I don't want to influence you - either to stay, or leave,” he says. “This should be your decision. It's your life.” One hand tightens around the steering wheel, the other clutches the device that is somehow transmitting sight to my eyes. A cell-phone in disguise.

“Tell me anyway.”

He turns and leans toward me again. Closer than before. He lets go of the steering wheel and brushes my cheek, and for a moment, I think he's going to kiss me.

Or maybe it's just me. Great. I’ve just been offered the hardest choice of my life, by a guy who can’t tell me anything about himself, and I want to kiss him?

“I really want you to come with me, Camria.” His eyes are locked on mine. It’s a powerful thing, looking into someone else’s eyes, at such close range. Even more intimate, in a way, than kissing. More vulnerable. It feels like he’s looking right into me, into all the places in my soul where fears and insecurities lurk. I want to flinch away and divert my eyes, but his expression holds me. He’s just as exposed as I am. There is such pain behind his eyes, and such longing on the surface, and hope.

Ten Recent Romances

I've already done a top ten list on my favorite love stories here (Beauty and the Beast, The Time Traveler's Wife, and LadyHawke are on that list), so this list is going to be a little different. 

Top Ten Tuesday is  an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish blog with a different top ten list theme (all related to books) every Tuesday (see the full list here). 

I have this odd obsession with categorizing love stories. I started out with thirteen categories of love stories here, and the following year expanded that to eighteen different types of love stories. 

But every year I discover more variations on all the different ways love can be found and lost. So here are ten more categories from some recent fictional romances that have come out in the past year or so. 

1. Crown of Embers by Rae Carson. Afraid love can't be returned. Hector is in love with his Queen (who he can't hope to marry) and charged with the role of protecting her life. And Elisa is all, oh I love this guy but there's no way he could love me back, he's just here because it's his duty.

2. The Archived, by Victoria Schwab.  "Working together dangerously" romance. Mackenzie and Wesley both do the same job, and its a very dangerous job (involving the "contents" of a creepy supernatural library). They have to keep their job a secret, too, from practically everyone else in their lives. So naturally they are drawn to each other, and naturally their job forces complications into their relationship. 

3. Stormdancer, by Jay Kristoff.  In love with the enemy's man. Yukiko has the misfortune of falling in love with one of the Shogun's samurai (personal guard to the Japanese king) - and the Shogun ends up being the bad guy. So when it comes down to it, she doesn't know if Hiro is going to be true to her, or to his king. 

4. Grave Mercy, by Robin LaFevers. Forced to pretend to be lovers. Ismae is assigned the most insulting job ever: forced to pose as a mistress to a noble, where she has to pretend to be romantically involved in a dishonorable situation. Duval isn't very keen on this set-up either.  Not to mention they're in a political situation where they don't know if they can trust each other.  

5.  Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo. Tempted from true love by a powerful man.  Alina is in love with boy she grew up with, but knows she's just a friend to him. When she is forced to join the Grisha (an army of magicians) she is courted by the Darkling, the powerful and mysterious leader of the Grisha. Should she hold out hope for the friend she's really in love with, or give into this new temptation?

6. Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman. In love with a guy who is promised to your best friend. At least Seraphina has his friendship, though. Except for this: if he (or her friend, who is also the princess) discover her horrible secret, kiss everything goodbye.

7. For Darkness Shows the Stars, by Diana Peterfreund.  Love wrecked by obligations, but forced to continue to be friends.  In this futuristic re-telling of Jane Austen's Persuasion, Kai won't forgive Elliot for turning him down to meet her family obligations. Now he's flaunting his attentions on her friends and it's tearing her apart (and making him miserable too).

8. Scarlet, by A.C. Gaughn.  I'm too tough to fall in love.  A re-telling of Robin Hood, where one of Robin's gang is actually a girl in disguise. Robin knows Scarlet's secret, but she refuses to let him get under her skin. Turns out her toughness is a desperate attempt to cover up something else.

9. The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern.  Competitors pitted against each other fall in love.  Marco and Celia serve different masters, who are involved in some mysterious competition, with unclear but dangerous stakes. Marco and Celia are chess pieces in their games... until they overturn the board. 

10. Opposite of Hallelujah, by Anna Jarzab. I had the perfect love until I totally messed it up. Caro really lucks out with the neatest guy, who's crazy about her, fun to be around, doesn't even have any dark, destructive secrets. Nope, the secrets are what Caro has. So she lies. But then she gets found out. And Mr. Perfect is freaked out by it (turns out he's not so perfect after all). 

Which one of these categories most intrigued you? (or share a romantic category of your own). 

Giveaway: the Lost Girl

I have a copy of The Lost Girl, by Sangu Mandanna, to give away to a random pick from anyone who comments on this post.

This book is chilling like Frankenstein but so well disguised in a modern YA form that you swallow it all as a delicious drink of emotion and love and rebellion and you also swallow the horror of it because it's just that well-done. 

From Goodreads:

Eva's life is not her own. She is a creation, an abomination--an echo. She was made by the Weavers as a copy of someone else, expected to replace a girl named Amarra, her "other," if she ever died. Eva spends every day studying that girl from far away, learning what Amarra does, what she eats, what it's like to kiss her boyfriend, Ray. So when Amarra is killed in a car crash, Eva should be ready.

But sixteen years of studying never prepared her for this.

This is not a love-triangle book, but it is a twisty mess between the boy that Eva's really interested in (Sean) and the boy that Amarra loved, a relationship Eva is forced to step into when Amarra dies.  But this book goes a lot deeper than relationship issues.  I quickly realized that Eva has no rights of her own; echos are illegal and completely subject to their creators and "owners".  This book ended up being a lot scarier and with much higher stakes than I initially suspected. 

Eva is physically identical to Amarra, but she grows up to be her own person despite a lifelong process of training and indoctrination.  So for Eva, living as Amarra is basically living a lie.  Through carefully crafted writing, you also get a taste of what it means to Amarra, while she's still alive, to have to live with the knowledge that somewhere out there her echo exists - a person her parents authorized as her potential replacement! Then there's all the implications and issues it causes with Amarra's parents and siblings, and eventually her friends and her boyfriend when they discover the secret. 

On Eva's side you have her four guardians, who have raised her and loved her for years (basically, her family) and then suddenly have to let her go and sever all contact with her when she's sent to fill Amarra's place. So this wrecks their lives, too. 

And if all of this doesn't provide enough emotional angst (which is very, very well done), then you get two absolutely chilling characters, Matthew and Adrian, the Weavers: the people responsible for creating echos and marketing the lie that these people can possibly replace your original loved one. 

Matthew was a intensely powerful and scary antagonist. I couldn't believe how much I hated him and how scared I was for Eva because of him. And then there are the Seekers. And the chase scenes. OMG. The last 1/3 of this book was so intense I think I was twitching from nervous tics while reading it.  There's this place called the Loom where echoes are made that is freaky because through the whole book you can't help but wonder, just how are they made? We get hints that this isn't some clean, sterile test-tube baby process.

My breakdown:

Characterization: a fantastic array of characters.  Eva and her guardians (I couldn't get enough of Sean!), Matthew for the evil factor, Amarra and her family and her boyfriend for all the angst and secrets. 

Plot: a powerfully executed concept. 

Pacing: The hunters could have been used earlier to raise the stakes some more, but regardless, this book kept me riveted and often startled. 

Personal appeal: As soon as I read the description, I knew I wanted to read this book. And it delivered. The author wasn't afraid to take her character into her worst possible fears and greatest desires and to pull me in right along with her.    It also got me thinking about loss of loved ones, cloning, individuality, freedom, and human rights. 

Leave a comment for the giveaway - what do you think about human cloning? 

Please include contact info if you aren't signed in so I can reach you if you win. If you Join this site (see sidebar), I'll follow you back. Giveaway open until midnight February 11. 

My top 100 movies (Nathan Bransford's challenge)

Forgot a top ten list! Nathan Bransford challenges us to list our top 100 movies. Go to his post to see his top 100 movies and a bunch of other bloggers' lists too. From these lists there are at least a dozen more movies I want to see, including City of God, North by Northwest (how have I missed this one?) and Donnie Darko.

The first 20 or so are in order, the rest are pretty much random.

1.       Casablanca

2.       The Empire Strikes Back

3.       The Horse Whisperer

4.       The King’s Speech

5.       Gladiator

6.       Witness 

7.       How to Train Your Dragon

8.      Anna Karenina (1995)

9.       The Shawshank Redemption

10.   It's a Wonderful Life

11.    The Outsiders

12.    Star Wars

13.    Monty Python and the Holy Grail

14.    Déjà Vu

15.    Master and Commander

16.    The Wizard of Oz

17.    Gone With the Wind

18.   The Godfather

19.    Giant  (James Dean AND Elizabeth Taylor, wow)

20.  Glory

21.     Ferris Bueller's Day Off  

22.   Shrek

23.   Sleeping Beauty (because of Maleficent)

24.   The Princess Bride

25.   The 10 Commandments

26.   Ben Hur (the chariot race scene still rocks)

27.   Silence of the Lambs

28.   Les Miserables (1998)

29.   Persuasion (1995)

30.   Crimson Tide

31.    Hunt for Red October

32.   Seabiscuit

33.   Terminator and Terminator II

34.   The Incredibles

35.   Blade Runner

36.   Avatar

37.   Contact

38.   Inception

39.   Armageddon

40.   My Big Fat Greek Wedding

41.    The Painted Veil

42.   Shadowlands

43.   Back to the Future

44.   The Blind Side

45.   Speed

46.   A Time to Kill

47.   Man on Fire

48.   Courage Under Fire

49.   Steel Magnolias

50.   The Sixth Sense

51. I, Robot

52.   Gattaca

53.   The Island

54.   Thelma and Louise

55.   The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

56.   Life is Beautiful

57. The Little Princess (1939 with Shirley Temple)

58.   The Hobbit (2012)

59.   Remember the Titans

60.   Dances With Wolves

61.    The English Patient

62.   Star Trek (2009)

63.   The Help

64.   Airplane!

65.   The Green Mile

66.   Monsters Inc

67.   The Pursuit of Happyness

68.   Close Encounters of the Third Kind

69.   The Prince of Egypt

70.   Down Periscope

71.    Apollo 13

72.   Forrest Gump

73.   Raiders of the Lost Ark

74.   Lions for Lambs

75.   Robin Hood (2010)

76. Juno

77.   Up

78.   Crash

79.   La Femme Nikita

80.  Indochine

81.   Chariots of Fire

82.   The Ghost and the Darkness

83.   Jaws

84.   Traffic

85.   The Road Warrior

101.   Dead Poet's Society (a late addition!) 

Sentimentals (maybe not great movies but something about them stuck with me)

86.   Stepmom

87.   LadyHawke

88.  Stardust

89.   Beauty and the Beast (Disney)

90.   Toy Story 2

91.    Legend (1985)  oh, the unicorns!

92.   Excalibur

93.   Ice Age

94.   Finding Nemo

95.   Stargate

96.   Dirty Dancing

97. Thor (because of Loki)

98. Bambi

99. The Lion King

100. The Avengers

This was surprisingly fun and challenging! What movies are you scratching your head wondering why in the world they didn't make my list?? (grin)