dear isobel

I finally got around to cleaning out my closet and getting rid of the stuff I wore to work at GGB five years ago. A lot of it was out of date and not exactly age appropriate. Sad that I dress better now that I’m a bit older than I did when I was younger. Now I just want to wash everything just so it’s fresh.

I made the painful move of posting closed notices on the Megan, Claire and Kim sites. I may keep the Megan and Kim domains only because I also have their fanlistings, but the fan sites are gone. I’m convering Scott and Linze back to regular fan sites.

I just deleted all the videos on my external hard drive for Becky, Claire, Kim and Megan (37 GBs!) I’m trying to make the process complete even though closing all of them was a really hard decision. I even deleted the Becky domain from my account, now that it’s been moved. First time since it’s been open I haven’t had it on my account. *sighs* Oh well.

When it comes to Nora Roberts, she’s reliable in a number of ways. I can count on her to be releasing something near my birthday and Christmas, so I rarely have to purchase a book on my own. I can count on her to include something supernatural in just about everything and I can almost always count on her to be entertained, even if it is only mildly. She’s one of the few authors that I don’t pay attention to reviews about because her track record speaks for herself when it comes to me.

That being said, I wish this trilogy had been better. It had a wonderful premise, a strong set of characters and a lovely touch of my favorite hobby — genealogy. (Though I wish Ms. Roberts would do some research of her own — this is not the first book in which genealogy is used. In Black Rose a few years ago, she referenced the 1890 census which…doesn’t exist. It was burned in a fire and very few fragments are to be found — none of which include the portion she used. It’s a small thing but it’s something I always stumble on when I reread.) The elements were there, so why didn’t it work?

The element of surprise was gone — you knew from the moment Cybil entered the picture in Book #1 that the pairings were set in stone and there was little suspense there. When it comes to traditional romance novels, there is very little suspense. There will very nearly always be a happy ending and your characters are together. It’s the journey that keeps it satisfying, but when I know in Book #1 that the next two books will be Fox/Layla and Cybil/Gage, it left me with a little less eagerness to read it. Though this also happened in her In the Garden — I knew it would be Roz/Mitch and then Hayley/Harper, but it didn’t matter because I loved those characters so much by the end of the first book (even Mitch, who we barely knew) I wanted to see how they fell in love. In this set…I really couldn’t bring myself to care about Cybil and Gage because…I just didn’t see the chemistry between them. They were the odd people out — but I’ll get to Book #3.

So Book #1 started off with great promise. A wonderful brash heroine who obsessed about her weight and a sweet hometown boy with a great dog. They were perfect for each from the first moment and I very much enjoyed Quinn and Cal for much of the first book. Of course, their romance wasn’t the only plot. The set up of the Big Bad, which I didn’t find all that distracting. Until Roberts began to gather the main six characters and group conversations began. And continued through the next book. And the third. My God. I barely got through them with any sort of concentration on the first read and I now skip them when I reread because they just drag and I can feel my eyes start to roll back in my head.

There are some great suspenseful moments in the first entry — the Valentine’s Dance and the blizzard with Lump, and without those dreadful group moments, I probably would have rated it an A. The only reason The Hollow rates so highly with me is because I fell utterly in love with Fox O’Dell, the male lead and I found his romance with Layla unforced and very natural. It was sweet and he was utterly charming. The side plot with his sister Sage and her partner, Paula, was also wonderful and I liked seeing Roberts explore that connection, even if only briefly. David was one of my absolutely favorite characters from In the Garden, so I’m glad he wasn’t an aberration. There were more group moments in this second book, of course, and those moments dragged for me but unlike Blood Brothers, it never dragged me away from the center story — Fox and Layla.

So with those two books, I was interested in how the story would end. Where the Big Bad would go, and how Cybil and Gage were going to end up together and then as I got into the book, I found that I didn’t care. The group conversations were even more annoying. The romance was unbelievably forced and while I didn’t find the triple pregnancies very odd I found Cybil’s reaction incredibly annoying. Roberts is not an author who uses pregnancy as a device very often so it doesn’t bother me when she did the triple whammy. It made some sense, actually, and it added to the story. It just annoyed me that it was handled so…I’m not even sure how to describe it. The Pagan Stone is the only one of the three that I didn’t go back and read a second time, so perhaps my opinion will improve then.

I enjoy the trilogies — because I like to see old characters return and update, but I like it best when her trilogies work over time. The last two were compacted in a matter of months and it showed. The Circle trilogy handled it somewhat better. The first two romances were somewhat weak but the story felt somewhat strong and the third, Valley of Silence was so wonderful, it made up for them. I very much enjoyed the Three Sisters, which took place over a year and gave you a chance to see Ripley, Nell and Mia change over the books. It made that final book so much more pleasurable to read because the connection felt so real. In the Garden worked the same way for me. I adored Harper and Hayley so much that I was very eager to see their story conclude and it’s one of my favorite novels.

In the end, while this trilogy is better than a lot of romance novels I have read in my life (I can think of a few Johanna Lindsey books I’d like to clear from my mind in particular), it’s nowhere near the quality that I have read from Nora Roberts. It’s an enjoyable read, which is why I’ve rated it somewhat high, but it could have been so much more and that was the disappointment.

I struggle with extra content for this site because I don’t exactly know what to add. My two favorite hobbies are genealogy and writing, both of which have their own blogs and/or home on the web, so I don’t do much with them here. I’ve thought about tutorials but I’m nowhere the level of some of the people out there. I’m not a beginner, but I’m barely intermediate. Somewhere in the middle. So I added a page for my favorite resources. It’s a start.

I hate when one aspect of a plugin doesn’t work but the other part does exactly what you need so you can’t really discard the entire plugin. I’m using Category Pages for my Crimson Glass fanfiction archive. The plugin was originally designed to set a page to be the permanent part of a category archive. For example, if I set a page’s category to be “Daughters”, when you clicked on the Daughters category, it would take you to the page and then whatever else is on the category archive. This makes it much easier to run a fanfiction archive as you can just click on the category and go right to the page.

However, for some reason, this plugin isn’t letting me make any category connections. I tried to go to the support forums and ask for help. I got ignored. I went to the plugin’s actual support forums, but I can’t post without registering and I can’t register because it keeps telling me I’m a computer. Gah!

And I can’t find a plugin that does anything else. I may just scream.

Doesn’t it feel like there is never enough time for the things you want to do? I really need to prioritize my projects better. It’s not even my real life that’s annoying me (I try not to think about the mess my financial aid office has created with my student loans, it helps with the homicidal tendencies). I have a habit of taking on way too much at any given time. For example, here’s what I’m attempting to do this week:

1. Convert Megan Ward and Rebecca Herbst to Wordpress.
2. Add transcripts & press archives to Megan Ward, Rebecca Herbst and Claire Coffee.
3. Finish new layouts for the Pepsi and North & South fanlistings so they can be moved to new collective and dying-dreams.net can be officially off my radar and ready to expire in two months.
4. Finish cleaning out my computer files so that everything is neatly organized in its own folders and that I only have what I actually use.
5. Move the rest of my pictures and videos to the external hard drive.
6. Defragment both external and internal hard drive, run a registry cleaner.
7. Work on fanlistings for John Adams and US Presidents.
8. Attempt really hard not to open a Kimberly McCullough fan site. (Bri, you will not tempt me!)

*sighs* Such issues. At least my last summer class is over Tuesday and I’ll have a month off before next semester starts (as long as the financial office stops screwing with me.)

So prioritizing right? I should do all the computer maintenance first because if I don’t keep my computer running in top shape, then I won’t have to worry about the rest of it anyway. Then I should do anything with a deadline — namely my two history fanlistings and then my last two d-d.net fanlistings so that I’m not forced to renew the domain again (I opened the new collective in 2006, and I’ve already wasted two renewals, grr). After that, I can focus on the fan sites. Right now, most of the updates are gallery related anyway so it’s not a big deal if I put off the WP conversion another week or so.

It makes sense when I type it out like that but working on the fan sites is always more fun than computer maintenance right? *sighs* I’m too good at procrastination.