The Good: The  Evernight Readers’ Choice Awards were held on Saturday and Deep Water was first runner up in Best Menage category, while Breaker Zone was first runner up in the Best Erotic category. Thanks so much to everyone who voted for me — I truly appreciate each and every one of you!

The Bad: I seem to be in a moderately bad mood today and I don’t know why. It could just be that I have a metric buttload of cleaning to do around here before I can put up the Christmas decorations and for reasons that I don’t understand a family member is stating on FB that I won’t have anything up this week. Whatever.

The Croggling: I was looking for Empress of Storms reviews today and found one that, to be honest, had me o_0 at first, then laughing, then absurdly flattered. The reviewer, who is also a noted writer of SF and fantasy, had this to say about EoS:

“This book was so good-hearted I forgave it the things that bothered me, #1 of which was that I couldn’t tell if it was set in our world or a second world; all the names were definitely Greek and so were the cities, but the mythology was wrong and there was magic? But a political intrigue story with several twists in it, about a young queen affianced to an older king of another nation, and their relationship and how it affects their countries and their enemies. Definitely a fantasy novel, but the romance elements were strong; particularly, all the erotic scenes were explicit, and other than the first one (which establishes some important groundwork for the partnership) there’s no real plot reason for the rest of them. People who dislike explicit sex scenes for the point of explicit sex scenes will probably be annoyed.”

She then went on to review a MM contemporary romance, concluding with “Also explicit, but more pertinent to the plot (oddly enough) than the previous book, which wasn’t a romance.”

*goes back to check book notes*

*checks categories on Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords*

*confirms that yup, I wrote a fantasy erotic romance*

I just read this to Ramón. He replied, “So let me get this straight. A member of SFWA read your book, which was an erotic romance with fantasy elements, and thought it was a fantasy novel with gratuitous sex. So essentially you wrote a romantic pastiche of high fantasy that worked so well it passes for actual high fantasy.”

Then he paused. “You realize this means it’s eligible for a Hugo.”

I think we scared the cats with our cackling.