MaggieLRobinson: @TessaDare @courtneymilan Lucy told Michelle to stay in and read GOTH to Barack for inspiration #tessadare

Do you want some cool stuff?  A copy of Tessa Dare’s Goddess of the Hunt?  Some wicked artisanal chocolates?  How about some other copies of awesome romance releases today?

Here’s how it works.  You have until midnight, PST, August 31, 2009.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to talk up Goddess of the Hunt on twitter.  Now, I’m not just talking about the regular sort of buzz–you know, blah blah blah, starred review in Publisher’s Weekly saying it fit “fit all the best of romance into one novel”, or blah blah blah, 4 and 1/2 stars from Romantic Times, or even blah blah blah I loved GOTH it was so awesome!

No.  Here are some examples of appropriate twittering:

I hear Barack Obama invited Jeremy over to the White House. #tessadare

or:

@TessaDare’s acclaimed GODDESS OF THE HUNT released 14 minutes ago; already solving global warming. Go Tessa and GOTH! #tessadare

or:

@tessadare ‘s GODDESS OF THE HUNT was released in NY 30 minutes ago. Does LUCY rule the world? #tessadare

The more egregious (and positive) your tweet, the better! Goddess of the Hunt solves all your problems, and gives you a bag of chips.

You must tweet to win this contest (but twitter is free).  I will give away:

• 4 copies of GOTH (to different people of course)
• 1 copy each of other awesome historical romances that release today, July 28, 2009: Eloisa James’s A Duke of Her Own, Julie Anne Long’s Since the Surrender (Pennyroyal Green Series), and Meredith Duran’s Written on Your Skin.
• A box of artisanal chocolates and a fine Nerf pistol, which has been used by historical romance greats Tessa Dare and Sherry Thomas (among others) (edited to add: it is the Nerf pistol that has been fired by Tessa Dare and Sherry Thomas; the chocolates are unused, thank you!), will be awarded to the person with the most over-the-top tweet.

Each tweet is an entry.  To enter, you must mark your tweet with the #tessadare hashtag; entries marked with the #tessadare hashtag that are not appropriate talk-up tweets are not valid entries.  Enter as much as you like.  Your chances of winning depend on how many people enter.

Go forth and talk up Tessa Dare!

Many of you know that I am Tessa Dare‘s biggest fangirl.  (And no, I am not referring to my weight.)

It’s been hugely exciting for me to watch everyone fall in love with her, starting with the agents who wanted her, to the auction that ensued when Goddess of the Hunt went on submission.  Now her book is only slightly more than one month away from release, and reviews are beginning to show up.  In the last week, I’ve seen reviews from the two major print sources that review romances.

Library Journal gave Goddess of the Hunt a coveted starred review, and said: “This is an exceptional debut novel, from the first hilarious “practice” session to the gradual melting of Jem’s outward reserve and Lucy’s maturing realization of whom she really loves. VERDICT A beautifully crafted tale that captivates with sassy wit, a lush, sweetly intense sensuality, and an abundance of beautifully articulated, appealing characters.”

And today, Publisher’s Weekly chimed in.  It also gave Goddess of the Hunt a coveted starred review: “Dare seems to have fit all the best of romance into one novel, from sensuous interludes and crafty humor to endearing multidimensional characters. Readers will eagerly anticipate the two sequels due in the fall.”

Now, you may notice that I’ve referred to both those reviews as “coveted.” But let’s face it.  What’s really coveted isn’t the review.  What you are coveting right now is . . . an early copy.  Oh yes, those are coveted.  But, you say, ARCs were few and far between.  Tessa gave away her last ARCs on Dear Author; and auctioned one off for charity for a fairly hefty sum.  There are no more ARCs to be had.

Except . . . what’s this?

Oh, my.  That would be . . . an ARC. Of Goddess of the Hunt.  In my hot, greedy, cunning little hands.

Tell me, do you covet it?  Yes?  Well, one of you will get it.  Here’s what you need to do to win a chance to get the last Goddess standing.

1. Post on your blog, or post a tweet, about Tessa Dare’s Goddess of the Hunt.
2. Post a comment on this blog post, with a link to your blog.  If you are entering a tweet, mark your tweet with the hashtag “#goth” to enter and make sure to reference the author of GOTH by including @TessaDare.
   
3. Enter by Thursday, June 25th, at 6 PM EST to win.
   
4. One winner will be chosen by random drawing to receive the truly coveted ARC of Goddess of the Hunt.  Two other winners will be chosen, also by random drawing, to receive slightly less-coveted proof copies of “The Dangerous Book of Excerpts.”  “The Dangerous Book of Excerpts” contains an excerpt of Goddess of the Hunt (longer than the one on Tessa’s website), an excerpt from Surrender of a Siren (longer than the one on her website, which is nonexistent).  It also contains excerpts from my own works, but pshaw; those are not coveted at all!  These exhibit some signs of wear and even have scribblings in them, as they really were used as proofs.

Enjoy! Covet! And spread the word–Goddess of the Hunt managed to “fit all the best of romance into one novel.”  And that is something to talk about.

Edited to add: Romantic Times comes in with a 4 1/2 star review and a TOP pick!  “Dare is on the path to stardom….  Dare uses wit and wisdom, humor and sensuality to relate a tale of tangled love that reveals her ability to touch hearts with her appealing characters.”

Huzzah!  It’s “Buy a Book Not Written by Courtney” Day, and today, the book you should buy is Sherry Thomas’s Not Quite a Husband.  As you can tell from my post yesterday, I loved it!  (If you’re sitting on the fence, read the excerpt from Sherry’s website–I promise you, the book more than lives up to the potential you see there.)

Sherry was nice enough to offer up a copy of Not Quite a Husband for a commenter on yesterday’s post.  And the winner of Sherry’s book is . . . colleen!  Colleen, send me an e-mail at courtney@courtneymilan.com, and we’ll arrange delivery.

But as I’m headed to the bookstore today to get my own copy (yes, I read it early, but I want my very own official copy for my Sherry Thomas collection!), I figured I could pick up two (I’m also getting a copy of Diana Peterfreund‘s eagerly-awaited conclusion to her Secret Society series, Tap & Gown).  So Lesley, send me an e-mail as well!  You’ve won a copy, too.

Now onto the good stuff.  As you might have been able to tell from my last post, I think there’s some fascinating, complicated stuff going on in this book, and I would love to dish about some of it.  I’ve already talked to some people about Sherry Thomas’s newest on twitter, and thought to continue the discussion there.  (There’s already a few threads on it, if you search).

Here’s how you participate:

1. Get a twitter account  (if you don’t already have one)

2. To make sure people can find your tweets, mark your book-club discussion with the hashtag #nqah

3. You can use http://www.tweetchat.com to follow the #nqah hashtag, or search.twitter.com.  If you use tweetdeck or tweetie or almost any other twitter interface, you can create searches.

4. If you post a spoiler, you must encode it in ROT-13 so as not to spoil unsuspecting twitterers.

What’s ROT-13?  ROT-13 encoding is a code.   So you can post spoilers in ROT-13, and they’ll look like this:  Thrff jung! Crbcyr guvax Ybeq Vna vf znq!  That way, people who don’t want to be spoiled can avoid reading anything they don’t want to read.

The easiest way to write/read ROT-13 is to use Firefox and install Leet Key, a plugin that (among other things) can decode ROT-13.  Once you have the plugin installed, you can highlight text in ROT-13 (or the text you want to put into ROT-13), right click with your mouse, choose “Leet Key” then “Text Transformers” then “ROT-13.”  If you don’t use FireFox, or don’t want to install another plugin, you can use this webpage instead.

There is no time that’s too late for discussion.  The #lordian hashtag from the last twitter conversation is still in occasional use.  I imagine there will be talk for at least a week.  So grab the book, read on, and then join in the discussion!

So it is too early (by one day) to buy Sherry Thomas’s Not Quite a Husband. Still, it is early enough that I feel like I can gloat about having read an early copy of this book.

I don’t think anyone here needs to be told about Sherry Thomas.  Her debut novel, Private Arrangements, took the internet by storm.  Everyone was delighted by the mature characters, the elegant prose, the sly wit.  It was recognized as one ofPublisher’s Weekly’s best books of the year, is a Rita finalist in both the “Historical” and the “Best First Book” categories. . . .  And then, three months after the release of Private Arrangements, she did it again with Delicious–a book that would suffer from being called “elegant food porn” because the love affair with food was a romance, not pornography.

So when Sherry offered me the chance to read Not Quite a Husband early, I was all over it.

And how heavenly was Not Quite a Husband?  First, as always with Sherry, there was the writing–an elegant stretch of awesome that brought to life unfamiliar places.  I’ve never been to the Swat valley.  Heck, I’ve never even been to the requisite subcontinent.  But Sherry Thomas fooled me into believing I was there at every step of the way.

Second, there was the hero.  Leo Marsden is one of the most delicious heroes that Sherry has ever penned.  He’s sexy, obstinate, and steadfast without crossing the line into creepy-oh-my-god-a-stalker.  One of the things that makes Leo so appealling is that he recognizes on some level that his feelings for Bryony–a mix of love, despair, and worship–could become just a little weird if he doesn’t buck up and have a backbone.  This determination.  In some ways, this is his greatest strength . . . but it’s also, as you will see, his biggest weakness.  Like all tragic heroes, it’s Leo’s strength and individuality that ultimately does him in.

But finally, and most importantly, there’s the heroine.  Now, I have loved all of Sherry’s heroines.  I loved Gigi, for her strength of mind and independence, for her ability to see what she wanted and focus on it with laser-like intensity.  I loved Verity, for her skills, and because she would not give up no matter what life threw at her.  But Bryony . . . . I love Bryony like I’ve never loved a Sherry Thomas heroine before.  In fact, Bryony may be one of my favorite heroines ever.  She’s one of the most flawed, complex, and yet despite her prickly exterior, lovable heroines that I’ve ever read.  Like Leo, her greatest strength is her biggest weakness.  Bryony is smart and focused.  She is a doctor, and a damn good one, too, in an era when women were just beginning to become doctors.  In many ways, because of her upbringing, Bryony eschews the feminine.  She wears severe clothing, doesn’t think about boys, and . . . well, she’s not exactly the kind of doctor you’d call “nurturing.”  She’s brilliantly competent.  If you’re dying, she’s the one who will bring you kicking and screaming back into the daylight, but it’s a brisk, cool competence, not the warm, soft capability that you so often see ascribed to female doctors.

Like all truly intelligent people, Bryony is aware that this coolness hides a certain amount of brittle awkwardness.  When she falls for Leo, she never considers approaching him; she just assumes that she’s going to have to wait out her infatuation on the sidelines.  And when Leo reciprocates her feelings, she knows, deep down, that it’s too good to be true–but she’s too weak to walk away.  Bryony is one of the most fascinating, complicated heroines that I’ve read in a romance novel.  She’s prickly–but only because she’s afraid of her own vulnerability, and so she curls up like a hedgehog, sharp spines pointed outward.  I really empathized with Bryony every step of her journey.

As to what happens to these characters, let us just say that Sherry Thomas is going to make Bryony very, very vulnerable indeed–but without once robbing her of her innate dignity.  And that’s such an important line to me.

One of the things I love about Sherry Thomas is that I can read her books knowing that I’m going to get a good dose of unsettling.  She’s going to make me feel uncomfortable.  She’s going to make me feel the real pain that her characters must endure.  But, because Sherry writes romances–I know that at the end of the book, she is going to make it all better.  And she does.  The end of Not Quite a Husband made me feel like I was walking out of a dark movie theater into a bright, hot summer day–just a little dazed, my eyes blinking in the sunlight.

There are so many interesting aspects of this book that I want to talk about, and so tomorrow, on release day, I’m going to suggest that you join me on twitter under the hashtag #nqah to talk about Sherry Thomas’s newest.  I’ll post instructions in the morning.

But I’ll do more than that.  Sherry has been kind enough to offer up a free copy to one commenter.  As tomorrow is (you guessed it) “Buy a Book by Sherry Thomas” day, I figured we should hold the drawing early in the day so that the people who do not win will have all the extra impetus to . . . you know, Buy a Book by Sherry Thomas.

So leave a comment, and tell me your favorite kind of heroine.  One lucky commenter wins a copy of Not Quite a Husband!