Book Review – The Cauldron by Sirren Rossi

This was a departure from my normal reading fare, which is kind of odd if I stop to think about it. The Cauldron is billed as sci-fi erotica, erotic sci-fi, and sci-fi romance. All good-hearted people love sci-fi and most people can dig on erotica when the mood strikes. Yet, somehow or another this was a story I wouldn’t have sought out. But you meet other authors on Twitter, someone asks nicely for a review, and, well, the rest is history.

Long story short: I really enjoyed this story.

Now, for those of you who don’t think you can intertwine erotica and sci-fi, I’d suggest a little-known book called Altered Carbon, which contains more sex than the average Game of Thrones episode and without the ritual beheading at the end. Sex and sci-fi can play nice with each other if the author has a solid handle on both genres and understands how to intertwine them for the best effect. That doesn’t necessarily mean busting out the R-4310 Orgasmatron, either. It means linking science fiction – the best examples of which are about people not tools – and erotica – again, people not tools. Not saying there’s no room for the R-4310 Orgasmatron in erotic sci-fi, just that the story shouldn’t be solely about advanced sex technology.

So, enter Sirren Rossi, an author who gets that good stories, no matter the genre, always come down to people. And the people in this case largely revolve around one Commander Scirocco Piers who starts the story doing a little sex therapy for a crewmate and ends up showing a softer side of herself spending time with a friend. After fighting off an alien ship with all the gusto of a Klingon yelling, “Perhaps today is a good day to die.”

Ostensibly, The Cauldron is part one of a series and the novella does a good job of leaving us wanting more. It wraps up its own plotline nicely, but teases that’s there’s much more to the story than we’ve seen so far. One would hope Rossi is working on a sequel that will answer some of the underlying questions left behind as well as provide another opportunity to let Commander Scirocco spread her wings and fly a little further into the manic wonderland The Cauldron is setting up.

As an added bonus, like all good sci-fi, this one comes with detailed pictures of the ships involved. It’s like a bit of sex, a lot of action, and some cool nerding out to spaceship porn at the end. Everything you really need in one tight, taut, story about aliens, sex, and interstellar naval battles.

It is the 24th century. Deep in unexplored space lays the uncharted star system GS-104. The Terran Alliance starship ‘Lightning’ – a long range scout vessel – is tasked with surveying this far-flung system for potential colonization. The ‘Lightning’s’ Chief Intelligence Officer – Commander Scirocco Piers – part spy, part officer, and part sex therapist – expects another routine mission.

What she does not expect is that the Lightning will encounter an alien ship from a rival galactic empire – and that the ship will break a long-standing treaty and attack – stealing secrets vital to Terran security across known space.

Now, Scirocco is called upon to use her many and varied skills to attempt to retrieve the stolen secrets and prevent the enemy from getting away with them and putting the whole of the Terran Alliance at risk – all without starting a war.

But with her captain dead and her plans falling apart, Scirocco is faced with challenge after challenge – on the alien ship, on her own ship’s bridge, and in bed – forced to test all her skills with the fate of two empires hanging in the balance.

Can she find it in her heart to be what she must be and do what must be done?

Get your copy on Amazon

Check out Sirren on Twitter

Check out her website

WATWB – Your Monthly Shot of News That Doesn’t Suck

Things is getting better. Cops are rescuing kittens from rush hour traffic, the former record for tallest stack of M&Ms has been broken, and more than 7000 schools are now solar powered. Also, Rudy Giuliani lost his license to practice law in New York, but that’s a whole other story.

Despite all the good news of the day, this is gonna be a short post. Despite the fact that Guinness Book of World Records has seen yet another record smashed, I think it’s best to focus on the gorilla in the room: Solar power. Now, the fact that 7000 schools in the US are going solar sounds really cool – and it is! – but they account for a tiny percentage of total schools, something like 5.5% of the total schools in the country. But it’s a start. Just like the biggest stack of M&Ms in the world started with only two pieces of candy, a switchover to renewable energy – which has huge implications even at the national security level – will start a bit at a time. Eventually, we’ll hit a tipping point and the amount of energy we dig out of the ground at ever-increasing expense will be replaced with panels you strap to your roof. Given the amount of all-electric vehicles I’ve seen lately, that can only be a good thing.

Read the full story here and feel free to slag me for being a liberal tree-hugger in the comments.

If you’d like to connect your blog and help spread a little joy (or snark, like I do), it’s easy to sign up. Just ask and ye shall receive. Or go check it out here: here.

Our lovely and talented hosts this month are: Sylvia McGrath and Belinda Witzenhausen.

~~~GUIDELINES~~~
1. Keep your post to below 500 words, as much as possible. (Wow, I totally missed that mark this time around).
2. All we ask is you link to a human news story on your blog on the last Friday of each month, one that shows love, humanity and brotherhood.
3. Join us on the last Friday of each month in sharing news that warms the cockles of our heart. No story is too big or small, as long as it goes beyond religion and politics, into the core of humanity.
4. Place the WE ARE THE WORLD Badge on your sidebar, and help us spread the word on social media. Tweets, Facebook shares, G+ shares using the #WATWB hashtag through the month most welcome. More Blogfest signups mean more friends, love and light for all of us.
5. We’ll read and comment on each others’ posts, get to know each other better, and hopefully, make or renew some friendships with everyone who signs on as participants in the coming months.
6. To sign up, add your link in WE ARE THE WORLD Linky List below.
This is a Blog Hop!
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

And now, your moment of Zen:

5. The tallest stack of M&Ms is 5 candies.

Book Review – The Devil’s Valley by DM Shepard

Back in May of 2020, I reviewed a great novel by DM Shepard – The Dark Land. Even though 2020 felt like it lasted twenty years, that was only a little over a year ago. The Dark Land was a horror novel set in that arctic hellscape we like to call Alaska – a place where the mosquitos are organized and voracious, it snows in July, and vampires stalk the long night to feast on the blood of the living. No. Wait. That last bit was the plot to 30 Days of Night, a movie which, um, had vampires in it.

Anyway, rather than rely on the trope of vampires as the prevailing monsters, Shepard did her research and found Alaska was already populated with far worse monsters than a 19th century gentleman in Ireland could come up with. Rather than sucking the blood out of victims and making women pine away for the vampire’s gaze, Shepard’s Tailed Men played soccer with human heads and turned women into zombie sex slaves. Perhaps the gentry of 19th century Europe found rejecting the church and drinking blood to be oh so gauche, something only the lower classes would do, while a gentleman was expected to avoid such tawdry things.

Alaska has a long and rich heritage of people living there for millennia. These were tough SOBs who would probably say, “Drinks blood? So what? Had bloodsicles for breakfast since I ran out of whiskey.”

By taking the sheer toughness of Alaskans and pairing it with a long native story-telling tradition (What else are you going to do when it’s 0 degrees Kelvin outside?), you get tough hombres facing off scary tough hombres in an epic hombre cage match. Only the cage is made of ice and the chill in the air will freeze your lungs.

The Dark Land ended on a relatively upbeat tone. Sure, a lot of people were dead, but it looked like the enemy had been pushed back across the 39th parallel and things would calm down for a while. In the fine tradition of sequels everywhere, in The Devil’s Valley we find that while the Tailed Men may have been pushed back, they were by no means down for the count. They come roaring – well, snarling, snapping, and chittering – back with vengeance in their dark little hearts.

Like The Dark Land before it, The Devil’s Valley is a terse thriller. It gives us believable characters stuck in a horrifying situation, but it’s not weighed down by subplots or other malarkey. Think of it as the Ariel Atom of horror stories. Pure, lean, mean, and ready to rip your flesh off. Which, frankly, is how horror stories should be. It fills in some details about the Tailed Men’s motives and expands on their general nasty demeanor while also giving us a bit of backstory about how this isn’t the first time the bastards have crawled out of their caves. The Devil’s Valley also hints at more stories to come and ends on a cliffhanger, so hopefully Shepard is hard at work in Alaska right now figuring out how to get her characters out of the pickle she left them in and also finding bigger pickles to put them back into.

Get your copy on Amazon

Follow DM Shepard on Twitter

Check out her blog

Check out her website

Five friends on a winter fishing trip discover that something bites harder than the Alaskan winter. Evil places earn their names for a reason, and were never meant for humans to trespass.

Rose and Ulrik must make a choice—return to the safety of civilization, or save the ones they love.

On the heels of their near-death battle with the legendary Tailed-Men at the Headless Ravine, Rose and Ulrik face a new challenge. The dead walk in the icy forest; leaving nightmares in their wake. Voices whisper in the darkness, driving people to question their sanity. Surrounded by monsters in a vast wilderness, the psychological warfare is now worse than the creatures’ obsidian claws and whip-like tails. When a group of their close friends on a winter camping trip are the next targets of the Tailed Men, Rose and Ulrik will risk everything to save them.

The answers to defeating the Tailed-Men hide behind the jade grin of an ancient and mysterious golden skull, and time is running out to unlock its secrets and save their friends. It’s a treacherous race against time and darkness to reach the north side of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park to a remote place known as:

The Devil’s Valley

The Dark Land is now waging war. The stakes are their lives…and the souls of the ones they hold dear.

#WritingTip – Forget What Those Guys Say

Stephen King has famously said get rid of adjectives and adverbs. H.P. Lovecraft used adjectives like a junkie uses crack rock. Some people tell you to only use “said” in dialogue tags while others eschew that recommendation. The world is awash with ideas about how to better your writing. Some good – read it aloud and see how it flows – others not so good – write exactly like this guy.

I’m not dumping on Stephen King. I actually enjoy his work and have been reading him for decades. H.P. Lovecraft, on the other hand, is one of those writers who had stupendous ideas that have survived the test of time but whose writing makes me want to pull my brain out. Frankly, I feel Lovecraft tried too hard to set the same morose tone with everything he wrote, but that’s just my opinion and nearly 100 years after his death people are still reading him so take my opinion with a grain of salt. The differences aren’t necessarily based on adjective or adverb use, though; they’re purely stylistic choices each author made or evolved into over time. And I know plenty of people who think Lovecraft was a genius while they feel King’s writing falls flat. Comme ci comme ça.

A couple of years ago there was a new writer on Twitter posting about how no one was reading his book because his writing style wasn’t popular. By not popular, I mean it was like reading stereo instructions: Dense, flat, and about as exciting as watching eggs boil. When I and a few others pointed out that he could always change, he wailed that he couldn’t change. I think in the end he really expected everyone else to change and appreciate the sublime majesty of his deeply underrated prose.

I don’t know that he ever changed and it’s entirely possible he’s still out there somewhere screaming into the void. Of course, it’s also possible he got picked up and turned into a Netflix series. You can never really tell these days.

This is just my take on it, but if you’re writing a book you’re the one writing the book. Sure, you can follow advice of others and, in some cases it might be a good idea, but it’s your book and you’re the one who’s got the final say. You may have that story kicking around in your head. It may be filled with alien sex and dive bars and getting drunk in alleys while pros lament about their latest job in the back seat of someone’s busted-ass Chevy Cruze. Or maybe it has puppies banding together to save the neighborhood from the hated cats. Whatever is in that book is your story and it deserves the respect that comes from you writing it. Like you you. Not half-assed clone of Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft you, the real you. And if that means you’ve got a bag of adjectives at your feet, feel free to toss those suckers into the mix and see what happens. If it sucks, change it. Especially if people tell you it reads like VCR instructions. But don’t start down the path by limiting yourself to someone else’s ideas about what makes “good writing”.

We’ve already got those guys out there. We don’t need clones of them. What we need is your story in your voice on your timetable. Who knows, maybe your voice will be the next big thing and you’ll get to write your own theories on writing. But you’ll never know unless you find your own way and follow it.