Leap Into Books & Score Good Stuff!

The cool thing about Leap Year

is we have...

an extra day to read!

So I Am A Reader, Not A Writer and Jinky Is Reading got together and created a blog hop just so we could all score a passel of good books and other prizes.

I'm a writer but my first love was and always will be reading.  Don't you just love to lose yourself in a different world, be a different character, experience a different time?  What's your favorite genre? Subgenre?

I'm all over the place with my reading.  My first reading binge of one type of book came in the fifth grade and I just couldn't get enough fictional biographies.  By junior high (no, we didn't have middle school back then), I read westerns--Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey, plus several other authors. 

By high school, if it was fantasy, I'd read it.  Sorcerers, magic, unicorns, evil wizards--too bad Harry Potter happened a long time afterwards or I'd have been a crazy-addict.  In college, when I had time to read, it was a murder mystery.  I like cozies.  I want a dead body on that first page and then puzzle out whodunit.  Great fun. 

But then I got on a Greek mythology kick.  Mary Renault was responsible for that--I loved, loved, loved all her books!  Well, not all.  I have the last one she wrote before she passed on but I don't have the heart to read it because I know there won't be any more. :(

You see a pattern here?  I go in genre reading streaks.  Romance?  I didn't start reading romance until about fifteen years ago.  Actually, I'd read one but was so annoyed with the "hero" that I thought he should be shot on sight, and then when the heroine declared her love even though he'd been so mean to her, that did it for me.  It was my daughter who practically forced me into reading another.  "You can't judge a whole genre by one book, Mom!"  So I did read another, and of course loved it.  So I read a couple hundred more within a few months.  They were a godsend while I was recovering from pneumonia.

I loved Romances so much, in fact, that I started writing my own books.  But I can't stay in one sub-genre.  First I wrote a science fiction romance (that will never see light of day!), then I wrote a couple western historical romances, then hopped into fantasy romance.  Now I go back and forth between those two, and now I've started a YA fantasy (not romance) series, too (hope to be finished by the end of this year).

Apparently my reading habits didn't translate into my writing habits because I can never stay in one sub-genre for longer than two or three books, then I'm off to something else.

For the Leap Into Books Giveaway Hop, I'm picking five commenters and each will can choose which book they'd most like to read.  Here are the choices:

Much Ado About Marshals: western historical romance

Down Home Ever Lovin' Mule Blues: western contemporary romance

Faery Merry Christmas: fantasy romance

Faery Special Romances: fantasy romance

So leave a comment...

What are your reading patterns?  Do you like to mix'em up, or do you read everything you can find in one sub-genre?  Or do you read all of one author's books, than another author's?  Is your favorite book of all time in current your favorite genre or sub-genre?  (Be sure to leave your email address so I can contact you, or else I'll have to pick another winner.)

Give us the goods!

After you leave your comment here,

leap to these blogs for more fab prizes!

Cathie Dunn sent me the Irresistably Sweet Blog Award

I'm the happy new recipient of The Irresistably Sweet Blog Award, granted by the super-talented author and genuinely nice person, Cathie Dunn.  Since this award involves strawberries, I'm more than happy to accept.  Thank you, Cathie!

Cathie lives across The Pond but I'm thinking we should get her over here to do a booksigning.  We both have relatives in Idaho so that sounds like a good place to start, right?  I mean, it really saves on hotel bills.  Then, I'm sure the Scots are all just dying to read my western romances, so maybe I ought to do a booksigning in Scotland, too.  I'll be out on the corner with my tin cup collecting for the trip. 

My other blog, Romancing The West, is a lot more active than this one.  That's because it's aimed at Old West research as well as featuring western authors.  My author blog (this one), is for my fantasy books, non-western writer friends, and pretty much whatever I decided to post here.  Sometimes it's active, sometimes I get busy and my poor author blog is the first thing that's neglected.  Naughty me.

Each person who receives (and accepts) The Irresistably Sweet Blog Award has to post seven random facts about themselves.  Whew, baby, that could get dicey.  But here we go.

1. I adored 4-H when I was a kid, and I had a cow named Cleopatra who was such a good show animal that we won All-Around Grand Champion Showman at the Owyhee County Fair.  She got in trouble, though, because she kept stealing little kids' ice cream cones--her favorite food.
2. Learning to ride a bicycle was a trial.  I could go straight, but crashed if I had to turn.  Because of this, my baby brother had to have several stitches on the back of his head (several times).  He lived.
3. My first horse, a Shetland Pony, was the spawn of the devil.  You can read about one of our adventures at My Personal West.
4. When I was a kid, all I could think about was getting off the farm and moving to a city.  Now that I live in the city, I write about the country, and I always love going back to Idaho.
5. I was raised by a Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Pinkie.  She was the best dog in the world. Ever. 
6. Most of my life, I've been heavily involved in politics, but at this point, I do everything in my power to ignore all the goings on, and recognize the same campaign rhetoric (sometimes word for word) that we used 25 years ago.  Somethings never change.  Let them play the game--I'll make up fiction that's actually called fiction.
7. Speaking of fiction, I never wanted to be a writer.  My first heart's desire was to be a baseball announcer on TV.  When that didn't pan out, I thought it would be fun to be an interpreter at the United Nations.  Instead, I ended up coding accounting software.  That's how I ended up writing romance novels.

Whew!  I made it through all seven factoids, and now to bestow The Irresistably Sweet Blog Award to seven awesome blogs.

Sarah J. McNeal
Jenny Twist
Marion Spicher
Adrianne Lee
Karen Harbaugh
Lindsay Townsend
Linda Banche