[Bam’s Note: Ann read these books one after the other. In ONE sitting. That’s dedication. Oh, and here be spoilers. Lots of ‘em.]

Okay, first, I cannot keep the titles straight. If Bam wants to fix this she can, but otherwise, whatever. Y’all will know what I’m talking about. Oh, and I’m not worried about spoilers. I figure everyone else in the known world has read these so big deal, right? But you have been warned.

Book 1 - Hello, wildly oscillating POV. I usually can’t stand books that open in the POV of someone who’s gonna die. Or hell, someone who isn’t a protagonist. JR Ward writes well enough that it minimizes my distaste, but still, not an auspicious start. If I hadn’t been so damn determined to wade through these books, I probably would’ve put it down before page 5 and never picked it up again.

Bam told me, “Stick with it. It gets better.”

So I did.

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Contest is over. The winners are: Lorelie and Amy C. Lorelie, you get a complete set of the Lady Spies books (SIGNED!) and Amy C., you get a signed copy of Seduction is Forever. Please email Jenna and claim your prizes.

Thanks again to Jenna for coming by to visit us. Jenna, come back again soon!

How I Kept a Secret and Learned to Love Widgets (All in One Summer)

Hello and thanks so much for having me! I should probably introduce myself, I’m Jenna Petersen and I write historical and erotic historical romance (as Jess Michaels) for Avon Books. My latest book just came out, Seduction Is Forever. It’s a historical romance that ends my Lady Spies series.

So, I’ve been bursting with a secret since July 2007. If you read my recent Avon Romance Blog entry, you probably know that keeping secrets… yeah, not my forte. Especially when they’re good. And this one was definitely good. You see, I got a very cryptic email from my editor right before RWA National, inviting me to a “Secret Meeting”. Cue the mysterious music. Of course, I accepted. Who can resist a mystery? Certainly not me.

When I arrived, a handful of authors and I were locked into a room where we were told about the new HarperCollins Author pages. It was a basically a brand new program our publisher was doing to help us authors promote ourselves through these really cool, interactive pages at the HarperCollins website. Up until then, our pages at the publisher site had been a photo, a really brief bio and a booklist. They got the job done, but could they be any more boring?

So I listened to all their descriptions and I then I got to play with their new tools. This included not only the site builders, but the widgets, which are little embedded icons that relate to an author’s books. I learned about countdown widgets (like I have at my site for Everything Forbidden, which comes out on October 30) and “Look Inside the Book” widgets and all kinds of things that bring interactive content to a site. Plus, we found out that ANYONE could load a widget to their site, whether a reader or an author. Which was pretty cool.

Obviously, the meeting had me jazzed. I was so excited to share this new development with everyone I knew and a few people I didn’t. But then they dropped the bomb…

We had to keep it a secret until the launch.

What? I couldn’t share the excitement of building this new page and picking out colors and playing with content with the known universe? I blog, it’s now in my nature to share every little thing. I can’t help myself. But I made the big vow to keep quiet.

And then I went home and realized I actually had to build a page. It isn’t like I hadn’t done it before. I have not one, but two websites. One is my Jenna Petersen author site and the other is my site for aspiring authors, The Passionate Pen. But this was something different. I wanted the content to be fresh and fun, something my readers couldn’t find anywhere else. But since I can’t keep my big mouth shut (see above), that turned out to be more difficult than I imagined.

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Here are the finalists of this month’s writing contest. The entry that garners the most votes wins. Yes, it’s a democracy. Good times. Winner announced on October 27th. Thanks again to BFF Ann for helping me pick them. Check ‘em out.

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…when you’re a male

by MARK HENRY

The Victoria/Victor Syndrome

When Bam told me I’d be her first guy. I was honored. Nervous. Excited. Dare I say…aroused? She’s a beautiful, articulate and giving woman, after all, and her first time should be special… magical. We met on the veranda of her sumptuous Savannah manse, serenaded by the whippoorwills in the Spanish moss draped chinaberry trees, and the clopping of horses on the square, carriage wheels shirring against cobblestone. It was there that we shared our first kiss, slow at first, tentative, and then suddenly brazen, tongues tangling, fingers searching out each other’s flesh. I swept her into my thickly muscled arms and wrapped her in a cocoon of passion and ecstasy.

Um… hold up [Yeah… hold up! -bam].

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I was inspired by this post I saw on Pajiba, about “What Really Happened to Lloyd Dobler“—

And what these women also fail to understand, at least in my opinion, is that many of these lofty expectations are built around a myth that Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court — after the ding of the seat belt light, and after they safely landed in London — managed to stay together and live happily ever after, populating the world with ‘Lil Doblers and spending their golden years in a rocking chair sipping on Country Time Lemonade. Well, here’s a reality check, Captain Stupendously Obvious: Over half of all marriages end in divorce and, I suspect, that number is even higher when the two spouses are high-school sweethearts. Of course, it’s no secret that marriages don’t always last, but even when they do, arguments and lifestyle compromises are inevitable. If Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court were still together today (they are not, I conjecture), you can bet your ass that Lloyd is selling or processing something sold or processed to take care of Lloyd, Jr. and provide Diane with the sort of comforts she was accustomed to when her father was bilking the nursing home. You don’t give up a house in the ‘burbs with a jukebox in it to live off the fat of the land and watch your husband toil away with a failed kickboxing career (“sport of the future?” Ha!), now do you? Not even for the freakin’ Ice Man.

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