Introducing Teaser Tuesdays

It is Tuesday and I have decided to start participating in the weekly meme Teaser Tuesdays hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.  It is open to everyone so if you have a book blog feel free to join in on the fun! So here is how this thing works: 1) grab your current read 2) open to any old page 3) share 2 "teaser" sentences from that page 4) make sure not to include spoilers!!! 5) but do make sure to include the title and author of the book so that readers can find it to read it. Sounds pretty simple right? Well we shall see. Hope y'all enjoy!

"One minute he was relatively calm, the next he was like a Ping-Pong ball on speed."

"If only she'd known what was going on when they were at the party, she could have stopped him."

-P.117 The Hit by Melvin Burgess

Release date: April 2013

Add it on Goodreads

*These quotes have been pulled from an uncorrected proof and may be subject to change.*

Impending NaNoWriMo AKA Doom TIme

My dear writing friends, November is approaching, NaNo is coming. I finally admit it and am very quickly sliding into my total freak out mode. My fellow writing friends have reminded me and pestered me for a very long time about this but all of the sudden it has finally sunk in. I find myself pinning everything NaNo, and creating my own NaNo memes to express my crazed emotions to friends such as this beauty:                                                                    
I know, I have issues, just hush and keep reading. Only the insane attempt this challenge and only special, special people are mentally unstable enough to finish it. I mean a 50,000 word novel in 30 days? Come on! You know you are completely off your rocker when you realize that as a full time student, or as a full time employee, or as a full time parent, or just as a human being, life doesn't exactly pause to let you get those ever so important words in, and yet you are still attempting this. If you are new to this whole concept of balancing say, school with NaNo let me just tell you now. Don't hope for balance it isn't going to happen. Period. Don't argue with me. I have been there. Basically the only way to fit both life and your NaNo baby in is to get creative when it comes to those things that humans need like say eating, or sleeping. Eating is a pretty easy thing to combine with writing. MULTITASK PEOPLE! Sleeping however that is a little trickier. You will soon find that sleep really doesn't happen or else it is extremely lacking. So when the inevitable writers block hits you are so exhausted you just finally loose it and have a good old fashioned meltdown. Your friends and family will ask you if you are ok and you will look a little like this.

But you will recover eventually and push through because you have already spent way too much time and sacrificed far too much to give up now! Soon if any life form that tries to intervene with your NaNo time, they will find their very lives in danger.

And when some important life event or emergency scare interrupts you writing time right when you get on a roll despite your screaming, yelling, and threats, and you loose that grand idea, or train of thought. You look a little something like this.

But as with emotional break downs you will eventually get over it and move on. You blink and BAM! November is over. It is all over! Congrats! You survived! Well sorta... Now weather you completed all 50,000 words or not you feel a lot like this.

Because you are completely exhausted, running on no sleep, all your creative juices are gone and now, now you must return to life. If you did complete the 50,000 you will happy dance and be joyful but still the feeling of just being done will be lurking right along side. Then, no matter however long you wait or don't wait before going back and reading what you have written you have this moment...

But you did it all the same! Yay you! And despite all this trauma there will be amazing moments just enough so that when the next November rolls around you are totally stoked to do it all over again. That is why only the certifiably insane attempt NaNo.

Please do not be frightened by this post. NaNo is actually really great and a ton of fun and it defiantly has a lot of pluses, and there is always a whole community of fellow crazy NaNo-ers to help you along the way so I highly recommend it. Feel free to add me and we can be crazies together! Happy almost NaNo everyone and good luck! And be sure to keep an eye out for that fab Tuesday post of mine!

Stacking The Shelves #2

Well, today is yet another super Saturday so ya'll know what that means! If you guessed Stacking the Shelves number 2 you are right!  My next Stacking The Shelves will come a little early this week so keep an eye out Friday for that! On another note, I want to apologize for not posting on Tuesday! It was set to post automatically for me but it didn't work! I will try to for sure post it this Tuesday though! I don't really have anything else to say so I guess I will just dive right in! It is really short this week because I have been so busy but I hope y'all enjoy just the same!

Deception
C.J. Redwine

I bought this book and almost hyperventilated upon first spotting the familiar cover because I suffer from extreme Courier's Daughter series fangirl syndrome. I read the first book Defiance and immediately fell in love so naturally I am UBER excited to read this one!

Add it to your Goodreads here and buy a copy through Liberty Bay Books by clicking on the hyper-linked title!

A Meme for Super Saturdays

I am going to start participating in Stacking The Shelves hosted by Team Tynga's Reviews! I hope to post every Saturday but we shall see if that goes as planned. I may occasionally post on a different day, but I will try to post on every week. For those of you that don't know, Stacking The Shelves is a meme where once a week you share your excitement about newly acquired books. Shout out to Catherine for convincing me to join some memes, and be sure to check in again on Tuesday to see what I have cooking! So I hope y'all enjoy and here goes nothing!

Oblivion
by Sasha Dawn 

I got a galley copy to read from Liberty Bay books and it just sounded glorious so it was a must read for me! And it's October, Halloween approaches, that makes it the perfect time for a physiological thriller!

Add it on Goodreads and buy if from Liberty Bay Books by clicking the hyper-linked title!

My Life Next Door

by Huntley Fitzpatrick

You may recognize this title from my A-Z challenge list, I bought it the other day and am excited to start reading it. I'm crossing my fingers because romance and contemporary books are still not really my thing so we'll see! Yay for expanding comfort-zones and horizons!

Add it on Goodreads and buy it from Liberty Bay Books by clicking the title!

Beautiful Darkness
by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl 

I bought this one at the same time as My Life Next Door and am so excited to read this it isn't even funny! I read the first book in this series, Beautiful Creatures, and absolutely loved it! Then I got distracted with a billion other things and books and just life in general and I never read any further into the series. So, I am kinda fangirl level excited to read this so I am sure some entertaining posts will come of reading this!

You know the drill by now! Add it on Goodreads and click the title to buy it from Liberty Bay Books! 

Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

by Katie Alender

Colette Iselin is excited to go to Paris on a class trip. She'll get to soak up the beauty and culture, and maybe even learn something about her family's French roots.

But a series of gruesome murders are taking place across the city, putting everyone on edge. And as she tours museums and palaces, Colette keeps seeing a strange vision: a pale woman in a ball gown and powdered wig, who looks suspiciously like Marie Antoinette. 

Colette knows her popular, status-obsessed friends won't believe her, so she seeks out the help of a charming French boy. Together, they uncover a shocking secret involving a dark, hidden history. When Colette realizes she herself may hold the key to the mystery, her own life is suddenly in danger...

I don't know if it is just me that feels this way about the synopsis, but after reading it my very first thoughts were a bit of a mess. I was like I need to read this! But at the same time I thought what in the world is this?! Somehow I decided it would still be worth reading, although when I started it I will admit, I was prepared for the worst. I read the first paragraph and quickly decided that the worst that I had prepared myself for was nowhere near just how bad this was. The first paragraph sounded like a child wrote it. The description was painful. (I almost cried and I died a little inside.) It was one of those annoying paragraphs where literally everything the author could possibly describe is described, but with only one word. One generic, word that you would find in a child's vocabulary. I almost stopped reading right there. I was trying to brace myself to attempt to make it through a book of that awful writing style. I trudged on, and I was surprised to find that it was only that paragraph. Throughout the entire book the descriptions were beautiful and well written; they painted pictures in your mind...except that first paragraph. I am very disappointed in you Katie, and all the people that edited this book. How could you let that paragraph happen? That sad excuse for writing?

Overall I thought the writing was good and had great imagery and voice...except that ONE PARAGRAPH! 

Anyways, this book turned out pretty darn good. I had a few issues with the character in the beginning just because she was...ugh how do I say this using good person words? I found her obnoxious, I guess to say the least she was chillin' with those snotty rich girls, and so she was kind of snotty, and not rich, but at the same time she was so not like them that I just wanted to scream at her "WHY ARE YOU FRIENDS WITH THOSE GIRLS?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?! YOU ARE BETTER THAN THIS! I KNOW IT!" But, I ended up liking her in the end because she grew, and learned, and made smart life changes. The character development was really rather brilliant actually, and I quite enjoyed that aspect of the book. However, it was a bit like something out of a "Total Transformation" commercial, you know the ones for those badly behaving teens where they supposedly go from one extreme to another, but her change didn't really seem unrealistic, or crazy, or anything, so it was still quite nicely handled. The story line is quite interesting, and certainly original! I found I quite enjoyed it despite the strangeness of the whole scenario. I don't want to spoil anything but I think the title alone tells you a lot about just what kind of strangeness I'm talking about here. So, I think that is all I have to say. Thanks for reading through my mini rant and congrats for surviving it! This book gets 3 out of 5 stars from me! You can buy it through Liberty Bay Books by clicking on the title under the cover picture and you can add it on Goodreads here.   

Briana