Serial Reader

The ninth—and, so I’ve heard, the last—Cal Leandros novel is due for release in August. I’ve requested it for my birthday and am presently blasting through the three volumes preceding so I can hit the ground running in September. I spent most of the weekend with my nose in Blackout, white-knuckling with Cal and Co. while deftly avoiding work on the novel.

I admit, I’m stuck and I don’t know how to fix it.

So it’s been handy having an excuse to ignore it. The Cal series is a nightmare ride that just won’t quit. I’ve raved about it before and won’t repeat myself here except to say again, damn, I wish I’d written it. I love a good series. I started as a kid with The Happy Hollisters, graduated to Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion in my tweens, Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicle in my teens and from then … heck, I started writing my own. My bookshelves are loaded with multi-volume sets: E.E. Knight’s The Vampire Earth, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series (to volume 8; after that, it got stupid), Rob Thurman’s Cal Leandros novels, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, of course, and most recently, the Weather Warden series by Rachel Caine. I get comfortable in another world and off I go.

Not sure what it says about me that I’m so comfy reading about guns and monsters and incestuous siblings, especially given my outwardly positive, optimistic mantra-chanting appearance. Perhaps I’ll simply file the irony under “contrast” and proceed on my merry way.