Never Will I Ever

I've been doing a lot of reading over the past couple of days... and I had to do something that I absolutely hate to do.  I returned three books.  THREE.  That's unheard of for me. But I couldn't finish them.  What killed me was that two of them had a bunch of 5 star and 4 star reviews and only a few bad reviews.  I don't know what it is with this new fad of loving really weak heroines, stalker heroes, and villains that are so freaking ridiculously "bad" that they end up as more of a farce than a real threat.  I can't deal with it though.

That's one of the reasons I don't incorporate any danger or major drama into my books.  I'm afraid I'm going to end up a giant hypocrite with a book that's just like the books that I can't stand.  So I've decided to write myself a little list.

Never will I ever...

1.  Have any of my heroes or heroines think or say "I don't deserve [the hero/heroine]."  Because even if someone feels that way, they rarely actually think the words, it's usually more something along "they're out of my league" or "we have nothing in common because they're rich and I'm poor" or something like that.

2.  Let any of my heroines be dumb enough not to get help.  I can't stand it when a heroine character is being stalked and harassed by the bad guy and she doesn't even tell her friends, much less the police or someone who can help.  Seriously?  WTF.  Not even her friends?  I also won't have her tell her friends and then ignore all of their advice to get help.  I think it's incredibly unrealistic that someone could be receiving threats of rape or death on their phone and just brush it off as "head games."  Yeah, I read a book where that was happening.  Granted, I didn't read very far into it.

3.  Have a stalker hero.  Christian Grey freaking creeps me out.  You know who did the stalker hero correctly?  Lexi Blake and Shayla Black in Their Virgin Secretary.  The difference is hard to explain, but it's mostly that Tate isn't doing it because he wants to control Annabelle or always know where she is.  He's just a socially awkward computer genius who keeps tabs on EVERYONE, not just her.  If you've read both books, you'll probably get it.

4. Insert danger/stalker/villain just to make the hero and heroine realize they love each other.  If they wouldn't commit / confess their love without someone being in life-threatening danger, then I'm not going to force false circumstances upon them.  Because seriously, that kind of adrenaline and sudden emotion does wear off.  If a relationship isn't working, period, it's not going to magically fix itself just because someone almost died.  Having something like that make people want to change / work harder at their relationship is acceptable.

5. Make my villain too psycho and too unbelievable.  I was reading a book where the villain, at the very beginning of the book, jumped the hero along with four of his friends and beat him so badly that he was in a coma for a few days.  Not only that, but he did it in retaliation for the hero sticking up for the heroine when the villain was bullying her and calling her a whore in public after she turned him down for a date.  THEN, the villain "somehow" (it was never explained) avoided being charged or even arrested.  Despite the fact that there were witnesses.  While the hero is in the hospital, the villain (who is married, btw) is texting and threatening the heroine and still calling her names and saying how he's going to get her and going to finish off the job on the hero.  Seriously?  Even psychopaths don't leave around that much evidence over a period of MONTHS.  Literally, months.  He was too bad and too inhuman to be believable.  Yeah.  I had to ask for a refund for that book too.

So that's my little list of Never Will I Evers.  If you ever notice me doing any of these things, please call me out on them so that I can fix it immediately.

In writing news; I submitted chapter 24 of Taken by the Wolf to Literotica last night.  They've been getting chapters out pretty quickly so it could be out as early as over the weekend, or it might come out next week =)  Pretty excited about this chapter... the mystery of the Moon document on the Wolf's desk gets cleared up in it!