[fake blurb alert]
Terry Randall is nursing a heartbreak. Because of his long, grueling hours as a marketing executive for Banana Republic, his lover of ten years Fernando decided he has had enough of Terry’s neglect and booked it for Miami to become a tennis instructor. Now Terry finds himself sitting alone every night in his Restoration Hardware-decorated home, fondling his argyle sweaters and ecru khakis, and crying into a glass of Merlot. Fernando had been his light, his love, his reason for living… and now he’s gone… and he’d taken Terry’s favorite chenille robe with him. The harlot… Terry would have been content spending the rest of his existence watching reruns of Queer as Folk while embalming his insides with bottles of absolutely fabyooooolous Pinot Grigot… until Luanne and her daughter moved in.

Luanne Bixby is finally learning to stand on her own two feet. After a seven-year loveless relationship with a man who’d only married her because he got her pregnant, Luanne is ready to break out and have fun… which would have been a lot easier if she didn’t have a six-year-old daughter who suffers from an embarrassing tendency to run up to strange men, wrap her arms around their legs, and refuse to let go. Luanne has had to resort to injecting the poor dear with Ketamine in the neck. And then there was that absolutely horrendous pepper spray incident… According to Janey’s therapist, Janey is only acting out because she is in need of a father’s love and men aren’t exactly falling all over themselves in a rush to volunteer for the job. Luanne hopes this move to a fashionable apartment building in Austin would be just the thing to launch her new life with Janey…

Terry has never been fond of children, but the little tow-headed girl down the hall… “OH MY GOD, YOU LITTLE SHIT, GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS ‘DRY CLEAN ONLY’?!?! DO YOU?!?! THESE PANTS WERE IMPORTED FROM FRANCE! DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHERE FRANCE IS?!?! GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!”

Props to my homie Amber for sending me this cover.

Our good friend Jackie Kessler just sent me this cover. My first reaction to it? Stupefaction. There’s something weird about it, but… I don’t know… my brain’s been fried by Latin translations or something and I can’t come up with anything to say about it. So help me.

1) Chick’s head… too big?
2) Ass is too small?
3) Back looks oddly like front?
4) Her neck is broken!

Help me out and as a thank-you, I shall bless you with… dun-dun-dun—- An ARC! Fun times all around! Winner to be announced on Friday!

Oh, and don’t forget to enter this month’s writing contest. There are some really good entries this month, guys. Scary good. But yeah, are you gonna let ‘em have that 50 bucks? OF COURSE NOT! Go enter!

Oh, and our friend Shiloh Walker is still looking for questions to ask me for our interview for her blog Vamps and Scamps. Help us out!

Well, goddamn. I’ve never looked at a Silhouette hero and thought, “Uh! Uh! Yeah! Yeah! Give it to me, Papi! Punch it!” I could just be hormonal right now on account of Aunt Flo being in town and all, but there’s something about this cover that made my girly parts tingle something fierce. I wonder if it’s because homeboy looks eerily James Franco, whose male essence I want to take deeply into my body, so that I may carry his child in my lonely, empty womb. Drool… just look at those shoulders. I love how he looks at the woman like, “Man, bitch, I hate you… I really do. You disgust me. But I wouldn’t hate it if you got down on your knees and told me you loved me. With your tongue. No teeth, though.”

Anyway, the date on the bottom says Aug 2007 (I think), but why is our intrepid heroine dressed like a a chick from the… I don’t know, fifties or something? Oh, hey, it’s a wedding dress. She’s got little pearly things in her hair and stuff. She’s even got gloves! I can’t figure out the expression on her face. Is it trepidation? Is it a “Ooh, boy, I landed a James Franco look-alike who’s a gazillionaire and now I can lose my virginity!” kind of hope? Look, she’s happily signing away her soul to him and shit! That’s awesome. Five will get you ten she’s marrying this guy to save her family’s company and he’s marrying her ’cause he needs a “fake wife” as a permanent escort to corporate events and stuff. What’s a marriage of convenience when they inconveniently fall in love?

[fake blurb alert!]
Mary Beth Jones is a 21 year old cashier at the Winn-Dixie in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. All her life, people have told her she’s “purty enough to model” and Mary Beth has taken that to heart. Never mind that she has a snaggle tooth that will scare an orthodontist, a left eye that has the tendency to wander, and has to shave her whiskers in the morning (who doesn’t?)! Modeling is her way out and damn it, as soon as she gets off her shift at Winn Dixie, she’s heading for the mall for the ANTM try-outs!

Mary Beth, heretofore known as Maybeth, makes it to the top 12, even though Nigel Barker thinks she’s more “Sears Catalogue, Fall 1985″ than “high fashion”. Mr. Jay thinks she “thinks too much” about her poses and should just “go with the moment”. During panel, Tyra illustrates the difference between “wonk-eyed crazy” and “fieeeeeeeeeeerce”. Maybeth avoids being eliminated by being a backstabbing, shit-talking bitch that makes for good TV and as she tells the Camera Three, she is “not here to make friends” and “want[s] it more than anyone else here!” Miss Jay Alexander thinks she’s too short and has the tendency to look “draggish” especially with her lantern jaw.

And then comes the part of the show where the girls must pose with… a male model. The theme is… Highland Romance Novel Covers! Now Maybeth reveals her secret fear: she has a phobia of long-haired men with bigger boobs than she does and the male model she must pose with is… OH NOES, NATHAN KEMP! Maybeth tells Mr. Jay that she can pose for the cover by herself and will do so… naked. Edgy! Mr. Jay wishes her luck and tells her, “Don’t forget your neck!” Mr. Jay wanted to give her long flowing locks, but they ran out of human hair extensions and have to go with synthetic hair. OH NOES! At panel, Tyra tells Maybeth that as a model, she has to rise above her fears, even if that meant posing with a male cover model. She must strive and do everything for ONE GOOD SHOT and Tyra was hard-pressed to find anything “usable” in the whole bunch. Miss Jay Alexander thought she looked “awkward” and draggy”. Nigel Barker says the photo is “not good”. Twiggy says, “It’s too… commercial for me!” Thus Maybeth lands in the final two for the last time and… is… ELIMINATED!

[Ok, I realize that joke ran a little too long, but damn, I love me some ANTM.]

It’s a real man that can wear a lavender shirt and a thin gold tie without looking like one of those bitchy contestants from Project Runway and not say shit like, “It’s kind of, ya know, like trying to disguise a piece of shit amongst a bunch of diamonds. Whatever, even if you put pasties and a freaking maxi pad on the 13th model and send her down the runway, it’s like, who give a fuck at this point?”. Awesome.

Folks say a picture’s worth a thousand words and I know, just from looking at this cover, that this guy is a cowboy (or at least from the great state of Texas) AND ex-military without even looking at the blurb. How do I know this? It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes deducting skills, friends. Check out this belt buckle. Do you know anyone outside of a Texan who’d wear a buckle as big as his balls? And it’s obvious he’s got big balls, friends, ’cause he could wear a shirt like that without accidentally breaking out into, “Sashay, Chante!” Oh, and what’s that in his hand? Dog tags? Why is he carrying them around? Who knows! He’s a hero for sure, though. I bet he saved a whole battalion in Iraq just with a knife clenched between his teeth and a ball of twine in his hand.

I’m just happy there isn’t a gurgling baby on the cover despite the title being Bound By the Baby. What does that even mean? Did he knock up some dumb virgin by having sex with her without a condom ’cause he told her “you can’t get pregnant the first time”? Why would he marry anyone stupid enough to believe him? ‘Cause she’s pure, that’s why. And how does he manage to look five kinds of awesome in that shirt? Yeah, I have no answer to that.