You heard me. Here at Mad Genius Club we’re not afraid to name names and point fingers at the culprits!

I must preface this post with a note: Please, please, please, don’t flood me with your “soon to come out” books. Because the most likely thing to happen is that I forget them and never read them.

I have the attention span of a gnat, my memory is a stainless steel lint trap (I only remember what doesn’t matter) and I have all the control over my reading that I do over my eating. Um… that last: I used to be anorexic when very young, and have been overweight ever since, because I have two modes: eat nothing or eat all the time. (If I lived on my own I’d likely revert to eating only when I feel hungry and then probably my two mainstains: popcorn and a slice of cheese grabbed on the go. All of it irrigated with coffee. But being a mom meant I had to cook on the regular, which meant I inevitably ate. If Dan dies before me, I won’t linger too long, because I’ll probably starve to death while doing something utterly fascinating, like organizing all my comic books or writing a disquisition on embroidery thread.)

This means that either I read everything or I read Jane Austen fan fiction. And here I feel a strong need to explain to people who seem to think I want to write like Jane Austen or that Jane Austen is some sort of ideal that no. I read JAFF because I don’t watch movies. Explanation: Years ago I looked for a fandom I could write in to learn to write with instant critique (this was still my best idea. You see I didn’t know how some things I did on the screen were interpreted by readers. Finding out helped me be a much more “connecting” writer. It also cured me of the idiotic “Turn to the dark because why not” that training in literature in the 20th century instilled.) I don’t watch movies, so the only fan fic I could write was based on the classics. And the only one that wasn’t all sex all the time — not that I have ANYTHING against sex, but even in my 30s I was aware that sex distorted the “input” in the reader’s mind. They might love or hate your work based on the sex scenes only, when nothing else connected. So I didn’t want to use it — (this is where I recommend you don’t read 3 Musketeers fanfic. It’s … weird, in the sex dept.) was Jane Austen. Oh, there is sex Jane Austen fanfic. There is even m/m and f/f Jane Austen fanfic (I LOVE to read the comments for those on Amazon. Just the comments. They amount to “And now I’m going to remove my eyes with a melon baller” but some people are very witty). It’s just the MAIN body of it is very clean. (For some reason there are no groups devoted to Shakespeare fanfic? Go figure. The world is inexplicable.)

Anyway, having fallen into the Austen fanfic group Austen fanfic (now available on Amazon) became my go to for “My brain is now running on spare cycles.” Because I can’t NOT read, and so I read stuff like I eat popcorn:I know what the experience is, it doesn’t mess with me one way or another, and it keeps the spare cycles going.

Before that my go to for that spot in my brain was Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck comics. I’d spend months reading nothing but that.

Which is usually a sign I’m stressed or depressed, yes, but the last five years have been….

So mostly that’s all I read save for when I pop up, unpredictably and read real stuff for a month or two, then something happens and I’m back to spare cycles and JAFF.

So, if you send me your stuff, with your luck — you know very well what I mean — I’ll fall back into JAFF the next day and in six months I’ll have no clue you even sent me anything. So, don’t do that.

But Laura sent me a book, (I’ll tell you what it is when it comes out) just as I was surfacing from JAFF (I’d gotten to the point I read the first chapter then flip to the last. That’s a sign.) And I started reading it this week while fighting typesetting.

I realized I was in trouble night before last when I dreamed of her book. Which was…. uh… weird, because I never dream of other writers’ books.

BUT THEN yesterday, after a long fight with Midjourney bot (the clanker was being uppity) I thought “I’ll read a few lines.” At three thirty am, I finally got to sleep.

Which is why blog posts are so late today. And so weird.

It’s all Laura Montgomery’s fault, because she wrote an amazing book, fast paced, well reasoned, with vivid scenes and that rarest of things for science fiction: vivid, unforgettable, thoroughly HUMAN characters.

Well done her. Now she owes me a night of sleep.