Cover Reveal: The Night Creatures series by Marianne de Pierres (US/International)

Way back in December 2011, I read Burn Bright by Marianne de Pierres and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've wanted to read on, but getting just that book was a hassle and a half. Getting the others wasn't going to be an easy feat no matter how much I wanted to read them (and I still want to read them a LOT).

Now? Not so much. Because Burn Bright and the rest of the Night Creatures series will be available in ebook and paperback through Amazon WORLDWIDE very soon. As in, this month kind of soon. This also comes with new covers for each book in the series (a little sad because I LOVE the original Aussie covers, but this happens sometimes) and I'm happy to be able to show you the new covers for the series as a member of the Burn Bright VIP club!

First comes the new cover for the first book, Burn Bright:

Into a world of wild secrets and deadly pleasures comes a girl whose innocence may be her greatest strength.

In Ixion music and party are our only beliefs. Darkness is our comfort. We have few rules but they are absolute . . .

Retra doesn’t want to go to Ixion, the island of ever-night, ever-youth and never-sleep. Retra is a Seal – sealed minds, sealed community. She doesn’t crave parties and pleasure, experience and freedom.

But her brother Joel left for Ixion two years ago, and Retra is determined to find him. Braving the intense pain of her obedience strip to escape the only home she’s ever known, Retra stows away on the barge that will take her to her brother.

When she can’t find Joel, Retra finds herself drawn deeper into the intoxicating world of Ixion. Come to me, whispers a voice in her head. Who are the Ripers, the mysterious guardians of Ixion? What are the Night Creatures Retra can see in the shadows? And what happens to those who grow too old for Ixion?

Retra will find that Ixion has its pleasures, but its secrets are deadly. Will friendship, and the creation of an eternal bond with a Riper, be enough to save her from the darkness?

Listen well, baby bats. Burn bright, but do not stray from the paths. Remember, when you live in a place of darkness you also live with creatures of the dark.

--

Then the cover for Angel Arias, the second book in the series (no jacket copy for this one in order to protect you from spoilers):

And finally, the new cover for Shine Light, the final book of the series (once again, no jacket copy in order to stop spoilers from happening):

 For comparison, here are the three original covers:

  

So what do you think? I didn't care much for the new covers when they first popped into my inbox, but I've got to admit, they're growing on me. I'll always be fond of the Aussie covers, though. Very unique and eye-grabbing and beautiful. Either way, I'm happy more readers will be able to have access to the series soon. Australia is hoarding too many good books!

Revenge of the DNF

If you've been following me long enough, you've seen me plow through some REALLY terrible books like wow, but even I lack the patience for certain books sometimes. Busier school year + book that has nothing to keep me going + stupidity = nope. I've had enough DNF (did not finish) books build up that I think it's time to unload some mini-reviews on y'all.

I don't want to spend more time on these DNFs than I already am, so you get the cover, title/author, where I got it from, and why I didn't finish it. Also, if you're coming here expecting sweetness? You might want to leave. I try to hold myself to a certain standard in reviews, but all bets are off in DNF reports.

Crash by Nicole Williams (Bought)

Oh God, there are not words for this. I read a single chapter and... Wow. Just check out my Goodreads review of it for quotes. If I copy the quotes here, it'll take up way too much space. In short, this is one of the worst attempts at writing in a teenage voice that I've ever seen. It may actually be THE worst I've ever seen, it's so bad. That this got a deal with HarperCollins baffles, terrifies, and amazes me.

Okay, here's just one quote: "My heart went boom-boom, my head got all foggy, and I felt this ache inside when he turned and walked away, like we were tied together by a fixed rope. I’d let exactly four of these soul typhoons pass unexplored, but I’d made a pact of the utmost sacredness with myself that I wouldn’t let a fifth go by in the same kind of way. (2)" Just so you know, that really is from page TWO of the book. TWO. I'm way too smart for this bullshit.

Books like this are why new adult can KISS MY ASS.

Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler (Birthday gift)

Note to readers? Don't be stupid like me and buy a book because of its title. I bought this one because it implied harem romance I was fully aware wasn't going to happen and all I got out of it was a headache.

This is a major case of me getting what the author is going for and seeing it sometimes but it not working most of the time. Anna just lets Frankie keep pushing her and pushing her about her virginity when it's none of Frankie's damn business. My best friends don't get to push me like that about my sex life or relationship status just like I don't get to push them around about it. If they try to, their ears practically get bitten off once we're in private.

I was so sad to see this one fail as badly as it did too. Ockler her the heartfelt moments in her prose and times where it rang true, but I got so annoyed with Frankie and Anna and everything else that I gave up a little over halfway through. 

Mila 2.0 by Debra Driza (ARC given to me by a friend)

I got a bad feeling just looking at my copy and lo and behold, reading it didn't go well. Quit after part one, which was about 34% of the way in. I just didn't have the patience for this.

The way the other girls Mila's age are characterized disgusts me. Kaylee's only traits are that she's boy-crazy, she's angry when the new guy starts paying attention to Mila, and she's vicious enough to start a rumor saying Mila cut off her arm and sent it to an ex-boyfriend after he broke up with her. Another girl named Parker makes mean quips as well about how Kaylee is only nice to her because she's new. The way Mila describes them/their clothing reeks of judgment, like how she expects Parker to preen smugly when Mila notices her haircut and how both girls wear platform shoes.

What, are platform shoes the sign of mean girls now? Then you all better run for your lives because me and my three-inch glittering platform heels? We're the motherfucking devil in disguise.

Mila just isn't that interesting of a character. Her developing relationship with her love interest Hunter is boring and all the information about who/what Mila is gets infodumped on her/us via an iPod she listens to while her mother fixes her arm. Seriously? That's a pretty lazy way to tell us about her origins.

Smokeless Fire by Samantha Young (Bought)

Did I really expect anything different from the woman who brought us the hot mess known as On Dublin Street? No, not really. Still, I gave it a try because it sounded interesting enough. Bzzt! Wrong!

This quote left me asking what the hell was going on when I'd barely even begun to read: "Everywhere he glanced those eyes of a thousand nights, eyes that had made love to every spectrum of color this realm and the others had to offer, were refracted on the cold glass and black marble of his home (p. 6)."

Eyes making love? What? Not to mention the poor grammar. Commas: they're important. "Let's eat, Grandpa" and "Let's eat Grandpa" is a good example of that.

There are also words being thrown across a room belligerently, amateur infodumping that doesn't even attempt to seem natural, lots of head-jumping into heads we didn't need to be in, and no commas where there needed to be commas. Also, slut-shaming: not cool.

"OK, maybe it was too early for patience. “What… get high? Get wasted. Sleep around with a bunch of STD-infected skanks (p. 47)."" (Also a failure to use question marks right in this passage, but the slut-shaming is much more important.)

Thank goodness this one was a Kindle freebie when I got it. I don't feel like I wasted any money because I didn't PAY any money. All I wasted was time on this sorry excuse for a book.

---

There are plenty more DNFs where those came from, but I tend to just mark them as gave-up-on on Goodreads, make a small note about why, and leave it at that. What about y'all? Anything you haven't been able to make yourself finish reading for the life of you lately?

Nadège Richards: Badly Behaving Author

Until author Nadège Richards decided to attack me, fauxpologize, and make purposely vague posts on Facebook, I had no plans to post anything else about author-reviewer fights after the epic post about 2012 in author drama.

Well, she did all that. I'm never going to take something like this lying down, so it's time to set the record straight with all the screencaps I can offer. One thing I learned in 2012 was to screencap EVERYTHING. Even the things I've linked to are screencapped in case they get deleted.

This didn't start with Richards, you know. It started with an author named Brittany Hiester, who I got into a very small tiff with back in March 2012 when she posted on my review of Heaven by Alexandra Adornetto. The only work she was then involved in was an anthology called If I Should Die Before I Wake and I put it on my "will-not-read-due-to-author" shelf, which is my normal protocol when I come across a badly behaving author. She sent me a message in November 2012 apologizing for what she said and how she acted and I accepted it. Now, I'm a busy college student with the attention span of a dead fruit fly, so I never got around to PMing her or removing her book from my shelf.

That brings us to January 10, 2013. Nadège Richards, one of the authors in the anthology, also posts on my Heaven review. I start there to give you the full context of who posted what afterwards and to make sure you get it all. My comment, which contains the full text of hers, isn't likely to be deleted anytime soon.

For any and all screencaps after this, click them to make them much larger.

Shortly after she made her comments, she deleted all of them and PMed me; "We need to talk" was the subject of the message. I don't know the legalities of taking screencaps of private messages and don't want to risk it, but here's a summary of what she said:

Her crack about whether or not I've written a book is her generic response to reviewers so she didn't mean anything by it (that doesn't make her look much better in my eyes), she's still in school and what she said to me wasn't immature, shelving her books as "will-not-read-due-to-author" is an onslaught/slaughter, and I probably wouldn't like it if she did that to me. (If I actually did something on her level, I'd let her have at it.) She oddly respects me for speaking my mind about bad books and she's sorry about her attitude, but she isn't sorry for her comments. She tries to appeal to my heart with the fact it's a charity anthology (spoiler: it fails because that is non sequitur) and she wants to put this all behind us.

Now, I have excellent fauxpology senses. If someone apologizes but doesn't mean it, I can tell nine times out of ten. Hers reeked of insincerity. At that time, I was still rather blase about all of it because she seemed just like any other clueless commenter. She just had author status. I tried to PM her back the next morning to talk it out with her like she wanted according to the subject line, but she blocked me. If I hadn't already known her apology was a fauxpology, this would have confirmed it.

January 11 passes without incident and I'd already forgotten her. Then came January 12 (also known as this morning), when I got up and found that she hasn't put it behind her at all. She doesn't want to.

The very first email in my inbox was for a comment from Brooke, someone who liked Richards' page on Facebook. According to her and her links, Richards has been posting very vague statuses about my on Facebook, meanwhile misrepresenting the situation to her fans completely.

Here are the posts, one and two and three and four:

Notice that on one of those screencaps, my comment can be plainly seen. I have since been blocked. I see she doesn't want any of her fans being like Brooke and doing some of their own research.

Funny thing: you can check all her books on Goodreads and all you will see that is remotely negative toward her books are shelves.

Number of negative ratings on her books from people who have shelved the book in such a manner--or even negative things said about her in the review? That would be zero, and I damn well hope it stays at zero because I don't want people doing that.

Moral of the story: don't mess with this kitten. I prefer to be sweet, but if you give me just cause, I'll fight back with everything I have.

2012: The Year Everyone Lost Their Heads

I blame the Mayans for all the author/book drama in 2012. If they hadn't said the world was going to end this year and LIED, maybe fewer people would have been asshats. For everyone who wants a record of what went on so they can go back and laugh at it, I give you a recap of 2012 in drama! Grab some popcorn because this will be a long one. This won't be a comprehensive list because there are so damn many dramas big and small, but I'll recount some of the more well-known, entertaining, or personally important ones.

Links are compiled thanks to the list of books I won't read due to the authors behaving badly, the lovely ladies at Cuddlebuggery and the occasional Scandalous Scandals/Controversy section of Buzzworthy News, my black-belt Google-fu, and scouring for links on Goodreads.

JANUARY

This month was especially bad. Oh Lord, this month was awful. The First Five Days of Goodreads recounts this well, though more than a few links are altered or dead now.

Dan Krokos

Before 2012 even started, my friend Kira posts a pre-review of Tempest by Julie Cross criticizing the portrayal of a man-hater as a feminist. Author Dan Krokos criticizes her about her criticism and in the new year, he took it to Twitter and a whole bunch of authors joined in to bash Goodreads. People who jumped in on this whether or not they KNEW what the hashtag they jumped into was about included Lauren DeStefano, Courtney Allison Moulton, Pam van Hylckama, Bill Cameron, Rachel Hawkins, and Jessica Corra. All but Hawkins and Cameron apologized. Krokos apologized too and is genuinely sorry about what he did, as he expressed in this in an interview with The Midnight Garden. Most have forgiven him.

Just about all the links are dead on that one because Kira removed Tempest from her Goodreads shelf, so the Midnight Garden interview is the only one I can provide. Sorry 'bout that, folks.

Leigh Fallon

Steph Sinclair, one of the lovely ladies behind Cuddlebuggery, got forwarded an email originall written by Leigh Fallon. In it, Fallon calls her a cow and tries to get people to downvote her review and other negative reviews of Carrier of the Mark on Amazon while upvoting the positive reviews. After some questions about whether or not Fallon wrote it, there is confirmation she really did do it. Fallon apologized, but that didn't help matters much. A lot of people (including me) still have her marked as Do Not Read.

Jamie McGuire

Sophie on Goodreads writes a negative review of Beautiful Disaster and the author decides it's a good idea to post about it and tweet saying it's attacking her readers. Hm, the itty bitty Goodeads reviewer (at the time) getting swamped by trolls who get so bad that she often deletes comments (as is her right) or the author with a legion of fans... I know who I side with!

Jane Litte of Dear Author fame and McGuire battle it out a little on Twitter and for now, that's the end of that. This won't be the last time you see McGuire in this post.

 Julie Halpern

ALL the links to what Halpern said are dead now, so I'll quote Cuddlebuggery's summation of it:

Julie Halpern writes a personal attack on Allison’s recent review of Don’t Stop Now.  The blogger world reels from the ridiculousness of it all.  Then a rash of discussion breaks out.

She posts a second blog post.  It is not an apology.  She blames the bloggers for being too sensitive and justifies her attack.

A third and final blog post is written demanding bloggers stop being so upset about her offensive posts.

The bloggers agree, forgive her and rush to buy her new book.  Then they all die from a sarcasm overload.

Quotes from Halpern in those posts include:

 I fucking hate people who write nasty reviews!

Ugh! I didn't make it up, beyotch! (addressed to reviewer) (source)

(Fun fact: this one happened on my 18th birthday. Not the gift I wanted.)

Kiera Cass

This one is more Cass's agent Elana Roth. Roth decided it was a good idea to call Goodreads/The Midnight Garden reviewer Wendy Darling a bitch on Twitter because Wendy had the audacity to not like The Selection. Cass never objected to it, so I consider that implicit agreement. They both sent apologies that Wendy didn't think sounded too sincere.

FEBRUARY

Longtime problem author Vanity, aka Melissa Douthit, is finally banned from Goodreads, along with 27 of her sockpuppets/friends. Other than that, February was calm. Hallelujah! Unfortunately, this isn't anywhere close to the last we see of Douthit.

MARCH

Jamie McGuire

I told you Jamie McGuire was going to make a comeback! This time, she's attacking a review on Amazon for calling her book YA--despite the fact that she asked fans to vote for her novel in the YA category in the GR Choice awards a few months before. Backtracking: she needs a better bicycle for that. Dead link to the blog post where she tried to get people to vote, but I have this status update and this comment. She also fails to understand the definition of a personal attack.

Then one of McGuire's author friends, Steph Campbell, decides to pipe up. Bad idea.

ANOTHER of McGuire's friends, Jessica Park, also whines about people giving her three stars and then trying to friend her on Goodreads. Oh, the humanity!

Shannon Hale

Hale decided to tweet her opinion of three-star reviews on on Goodreads. Once again, bad idea. Would have gone better had she not failed at letting it go and smoothing things over.

Then we have a small something courtesy of Michelle Wolfson, who takes issue with the fact that some people didn't like The Selection by Kiera Cass. She's also okay with Cass's agent Elena Roth calling Wendy a bitch and calls Wendy an idiot while she's at it. Surprisingly few people cared.

APRIL

Rebecca Hamilton

There are no words for this lady. Consult Cuddlebuggery and this review for more. While talking to Kat Kennedy, she compares a bad review to rape. Just about everything you expect to see happen because of stuff like that happens.

Sue Dent

So in the comments section of a review, Sue Dent has a meltdown over someone looking at the sample pages of her book and not liking it. Her bad reaction includes wanting to run the commenter over. Black humor: not always a good idea. There are also T-shirts.

The Story Siren

This was one of the largest scandals of the year: major YA reviewer Kristi, aka The Story Siren, was found to be plagiarizing other bloggers' material. I made a post on it, so check it out if you want the full story. Basically, she took from beauty bloggers to craft four of her pages, posted a few fauxpologies, and her fans started emailing hate mail and such to the people who outed her or stood against her. It's just an ugly mess.

BUT SHE STILL GETS ARCS GALORE FROM PUBLISHERS, INCLUDING A GODDAMN NOOK FROM HARPERCOLLINS.

Just saying.

Layce Gardner

According to her, people like me who write negative reviews are "bitchy, angry people who need to get laid." Mm-hm. Same story as usual. I'd ask for them to spice things up a little, but people eventually do that and everyone wishes they didn't.

MAY

Elle Lothlorien

 This author, when a negative review of one of her books is posted, likes to respond to them, which often resulted in the reviewers being pressured into changing their reviews or ratings to suit her. Not smart.

Jessica Park

Park, a friend of famous badly behaving author Jamie McGuire, decides it's a good idea to post a screencap of a Goodreads member's shelf on her book, which was so given thanks to Park's own tag-team behavior with McGuire on Amazon. She also comments on it. Not too bright.

 M.R. Mathias

When his thread about his books got moved to the small press/self-published section of the forums, Mathias was not a happy boy. Not at all. This resulted in a meltdown with him making many, many comments on a Goodreads list dedicated to badly behaving authors (but all of his comments are deleted now, woe) and many, many stupid tweets.

Laurell K. Hamilton

This is hardly even anything because LKH has done this so often. So often that she gets a page on the Fandom Wank Wiki just like Anne Rice does. What she does this time is rather typical of her: complaining about reviewers, assuming they're complaining because her character Anita Blake is having sex with multiple people (and not because her books might be going down down down in quality or something), etc. Barely worth paying attention to. It's almost funny!

 Melissa Douthit

She returns! This time, it's because she decided to air popular reviewer Wendy Darling's alleged personal information and twist around what happened during The Selection's debacle. Cuddlebuggery and Pocketful of Books have the most comprehensive screencaps/link collection on this whole sorry mess. Wendy herself made a post responding to all this, and it becomes clear how much the problem with The Selection has affected her.

This whole fiasco scared many of Wendy's friends--and people who fought with Douthit in general--into locking down their social media presence for a while. This may be the only event this year that had a personal effect on me; a supporter of Douthit's came to play with me, which resulted in a stress-related medical condition I'd just started recovering from to start up again the night before I graduated high school.

JUNE

Steven Nedelton

Because it summarizes this quite well, I'll borrow a comment of mine from elsewhere on this: Spamming people, calling someone who takes issues with the way you advertise yourself a communist/fascist, and then saying they must be on drugs? Uh, fuck no.  

L.B. Schulman

This was more of a maybe-drama; looking back, I've got no idea what happened here. A bunch of blank accounts attacked my friend Blythe's Goodreads review of League of Strays and there were suspicions the author had something to do with it. Schulman's comment on a blog post of Maggie Stiefvater's is a sign of something to come.

Jaq D. Hawkins

 Hawkins took exception to one review of her novel Dance of the Goblins and tried to get it taken down, saying she will otherwise sue the reviewer for slander and extreme copyright violation. What ensues is pretty damn silly and also kind of awful, but entertaining nonetheless.

JULY

Oh God, July. This was probably one of the worst months.

Heather White

The author had a very bad reaction to a negative review, as seen here and here. After fighting with Kara and Melissa, she deleted her account on Goodreads.

Caroll Bryant

A lot of these links have been deleted because it happened on Goodreads for the most part and the author was deleted from the site. He also deleted most of the relevant comments. This is going off memory and what other friends have said.

One of the more wild events of the year. Bryant posted about bloggers who received copies of his book for review and said they'd review it or interview him, but they never did so for their own reasons. This massive sense of entitlement he's got going on makes him want to post a list of those bloggers. Many people advise him on Goodreads that this is an awful idea, but he goes into a downward spiral. Links got deleted, unfortunately. At some point, he admits that he was once part of Stop the Goodreads Bullies, which I'll cover next. Considering how reviled STGRB is among reviewers, this is pretty much him giving himself a death sentence, but the links are once again lost thanks to deletions.

He does eventually post the list, which consists of six blogs/bloggers: In Between Reading And Writing, YA Infatuation, The Lit Bitch,YA-Aholic, A Cupcake and a Latte, and Nightlyreading. The first blog is run by a young woman that Bryant lied about his age to, sent fake pictures of himself to, and led on when he knew she had a crush on him and it wasn't going to work. She was underage at the time and Bryant recently made a post about him and that young woman on STGRB that twists things around and lies about what happened, according to a source who doesn't want to be named/linked to.

I highly suspect Wendy of the now-defunct review blog A Cupcake and a Latte quit blogging in part due to this, as she was one of the bloggers Bryant named. She shut down shortly after it happened, but she claimed she never approached him like he claimed she did. Also, despite his claims at this time that he was no longer part of STGRB, he is now regularly featured there and given a voice there.


Stop the Goodreads Bullies/STGRB

I don't remember when they popped up or how anyone found out about them, but they exploded onto the scene in late July. Starting with four bloggers/Goodreads members (Ridley, Kat Kennedy of Cuddlebuggery, The Holy Terror, and Lucy), they posted their alleged real names, locations, where they went at certain times, and details of their lives. Every other blogger had something to say about how disgusted they were with this site. It has long been suspected that infamous BBA Melissa Douthit is behind the site due to how the attacks on this site are so similar to how Douthit attacked Wendy Darling back in May. Some people have posted compelling proof for this theory--proof that makes some people sure she had something to do with it no matter what the site claims.

After they realized how much trouble they could get in for posting personal info the way they did, they took it down and said it never happened. Of course, I know better because I have screencaps of the original posts. I'd post them here, but I want to include the entire posts and my screencaps are too damn large. No matter where I upload them, the screencaps are too large and the text becomes blurred when you zoom in.

Someone recently told me I made their sidebar of Badly Behaving Goodreaders, but STRGB can kiss my ass and learn what bullying actually is. As I said to someone at some point, this is BOOK REVIEWING, not the God damn battle of good vs. evil for the fate of the world.

L.B. Schulman

Y'all remember her, right? Suspected of having something to do with other Goodreads members attacking a reviewer? Well, whether or not she did it, a number of readers put her on their do-not-read shelf because of this tweet,  in which she shows support for Stop the GR Bullies. A little ironic considering her book is about bullying and how repaying bullies in kind isn't the way to go. There was also an anonymous comment on STGRB at one point that sounded like it might be her.

Cassandra Duffy

Same story, different character: she thinks "anyone who posts a scathing rant review of a book without receiving a giant paycheck as compensation are just bitter ***** who should probably find a hobby that doesn’t involve tearing down artists who actually contribute something to the world."

The word censored out? Twats.

Donna White Glaser

One of many, many authors some readers put on their do-not-read lists of various names. Why? For supporting STGRB.

Victoria Foyt

I'd known about her novel Save the Pearls for months because it showed up on NetGalley a while back, but I paid it no mind because it sounded like a racist piece of shit. Once the right people discovered it and brought attention to it, things EXPLODED. Her Huffington Post articles came under scrutiny and racist statements like "Conceivably, if the book had not reached the African-American community of readers, if such a category still exists, perhaps there might be some backlash" made some people start foaming at the mouth. No matter how many times Foyt denies being racist, her actions and her book speak a lot louder than she does.

And did I forget to mention the blackface in promo videos for the novel? I did? Damn. It's unfortunately true.

AUGUST

Emily Giffin

Another big one solely because the author involved is pretty big. Basically, the author's husband called a reviewer who gave one of his wife's books one star a psycho. Giffin posted on Facebook about it, which could be seen as encouraging her husband and fans to keep attacking the reviewer. Full story and screencaps are here on Corey Ann's blog.


I heard through the grapevine that the reviewer in question only just found out about the drama recently because their Amazon account is connected to an email account they barely use.

Simone Elkeles

A review on Goodreads anyone can tell is just good fun and a parody upset the author and she called bully. She contacted the reviewer multiple times in private messages telling her to take it down because it's misrepresenting her and... well, bullying. Cue the deletion of her comments and many people being disgusted with the author.

SEPTEMBER

Pam van Hylckama

Before anyone gets confused, Pam did NOT behave badly. Rather, someone behaved badly toward her--to the tune of attacking her for rejecting their novel. 

Full story here, but one day, someone attacked Pam in her car and started slamming her head into the steering wheel when she rolled down the window to talk to him. Her dog bit him and the man ran off. Later, the police looked through her email and found threats from an author she rejected. Using the address listed in the query letter, police went to his house and found him with a bite mark from Pam's dog on him.

Receiving such things from rejected writers is apparently par for the course as an agent and this horrifies me. When I was querying a manuscript and someone sent me back a rejection, that was it. Done. I didn't email them again saying I hoped they died or begging them to think about it or any of that. Ugh. -shivers-

OCTOBER

Nothing worth reporting. Yay!


NOVEMBER

A.E. Rought

Not bad behavior per se, but she upset a lot of people when she called the idea of having a female as the main character a trope. A trope, of course, is usually defined as a cliche or an overused idea. What, having a main character be of the female persuasion the way 51% of the world is means it's a trope?

Anna Marie Moore

Not an author, but this one was big enough and closely enough related to books that it counts. The Book Smugglers (two of my absolute favorite bloggers to ever exist) recounted their tale of how Moore, a website designer, was paid to redesign their site back in June and still had not delivered anything but excuses up until the point they posted about it in November. That was when they saw she was accepting new projects on her site when they themselves hadn't seen any work done on their project. Her estimated time to complete their work when they hired her? Two weeks. THAT was a fail.

DECEMBER

Mia Castile

Same story as usual: saw a bad review, didn't like it, proceeded to whine about it on their blog. This bad review  is apparently the one she's talking about, seeing as it's by a fellow author who has always been known for speaking her mind on the books she reads.

Tiffany Reisz

FINALLY, Reisz lets her opinions fly on Twitter.


She later apologizes for what she said. Some people accept her apology, some people don't.  The jealousy thing and saying a lot of reviewers are failed writers really gets my goat. For more screencaps, read this review's comments.






God DAMN, typing all this out hurt my fingers. I'm never doing this again. (Then again, we all know how I can turn never into possibly and get all the way to yes at some point. See Beautiful Disaster for an example.)