Everyone who knows me knows I am a huge Damon fan. I am not Team Damon (or Delena fan as my daughter is quick to correct me) though just because he is the ‘bad boy’ or because he is very blessed in the looks department. Oh I have reasons. I do indeed. And some of them have to do with Miss Elena herself.

Changing Characters

Damon has been evolving and changing ever since he came in contact with Elena. He has become softer and more in control of his actions when he is emotional. Early on and even in the distant past, Damon has been ruled by his emotions. He reacted and acted from an emotional place. He loved Katherine so much, he didn’t blink twice when he discovered she was a vampire and drank her blood willingly. He similarly dropped out of the army when he grew bored and homesick. As a vampire, when people hurt him he lashed out by hurting (or more often killing via neck snap or heart rip) others. He was the epitome of impulsive.

As time passes in Elena’s company, he has become better at controlling his impulses and thinking of the consequences before taking action. He has learned to consider the feelings of others and not just his own. Damon is maturing…after 140 plus years.

Meanwhile, Elena started off very much in charge of her emotions. Deeply in grief over her parents’ deaths, she worked hard at maintaining a ‘normal’ façade. She made decisions with her head and not her heart. As the show has gone on, she has let her emotions rule her more in that she has become self-sacrificing to save those around her. Finally this season she fights now for the things she wants instead of putting herself on an altar to be sacrificed and hoping everything would all work out. Elena has also become a lot more ‘practical’ lately. This point was illustrated most when she (a doppelganger and therefore supernatural) stabs Alaric to allow his ring to work when she found him stabbed and dying in her house. Exposure to vampires and Damon has given Elena edge and has hardened her. She has gone from prey to fighter in this world she has found herself in.

In the beginning Damon and Elena would not have worked together but because they have changed over time they are very attractive together and they work.

What About Stefan?

To be fair, if I am going to pair Elena with Damon, I have to reject Stefan (the other side of the triangle). Her goes:

Part of why I don’t like Stefan with Elena is purely subjective. I just don’t feel the chemistry between those two characters. It feels surface deep only. The actors are great but for me, those two characters don’t click, they are only going through the motions of a romantic relationship. I think they truly and deeply care for each other but it more of a platonic caring.

Stefan is entirely too governed by his ideals and his head. Except for when lets his ripper side out in which case he has no control whatsoever. Stefan can’t control both sides of his personality though he has made great strides in the last half of this season. He still seems to have his emotions locked up firmly and doesn’t fight for Elena. He is content to stand back and let her choose. While I admire both brothers for respecting Elena enough to let it be her choice, Stefan has stepped back so far that it seems as if he is still wary of his feelings for Elena. If he lets them out they will take over again.

Tonight I hope we see Elena choose Damon. I’d like to see those two as a couple for a while. Since the series isn’t over yet, that won’t mean that they will get to stay together but for now, I’d like to explore a Damon-Elena relationship.

        

I don’t know about you but I am one of those that tries really hard not to jump on the bandwagon with everyone else. In fact the more popular something becomes the harder I try to resist. The Hunger Games was that for me. The more people came to me and told me how good it was the more I didn’t want to try it. After all, how could anything live up to that hype?

Then I saw the first Hunger Games movie teaser.  I thought, Maybe I could check out a copy at work. However, since I don’t work for a couple days I should check to see how much the nook book cost. It was on sale, so I touched that little “buy” button and I was hooked. That was in early January. Since then I’ve read several books about teens set in a dystopian future and I am looking around for more to put my hands on.

The following is a list of the books I’ve read and my thoughts on them.

Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins: The first couple of chapters of Hunger Games was all right but not great. I definitely couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. After the first couple of chapters, I was unknowingly sucked in and not released until the final page was read. I loved it. Katniss was a character I could relate to and cheer for. And she uses a bow. I use to participate in archery tournaments when I was a teenager though I am/was no where near as good a shot as she is. Peeta was an ordinary boy who acted like a prince. I fell a little bit in love with him myself. As soon as payday rolled around I slowly bought the second two books in the series and I tried to savor them. No matter what I did they went by way too fast. I finished Mockingjay two days ago and I am seriously considering rereading the whole series again today.

Delirium, Pandemonium (Release Date 2/28/2012) by Lauren Oliver: In this series, love is a disease and there is a cure for it that is administered when you are 18. If you are given the surgery earlier, complications can arise. Lena is counting down the days until she will be old enough for the cure, hoping that she won’t get the disease beforehand. Of course she meets someone and succumbs to the disease. I greatly enjoyed these books and became heavily invested in Lena’s relationships with her boyfriend and her best friend. The world-building was rich and gritty and detailed. Warning: Book One ends in a cliffhanger and Book Two’s cliffhanger makes the first one seem like a crack in a sidewalk. Waiting for book three is going to be torture. Argh!

Matched, Crossed by Ally Condie: In this series, Society (yes, with a capital S) controls everything about your life; your job, your education, your entertainment, how many kids you have, and who you marry. For Cassia, she can’t wait until she is Matched with her future husband. When she sees the face of her best friend Xander on the port screen she couldn’t be happier but then another familiar face flashes across the screen. Has a mistake been made? Curiosity prompts her to seek out Ky, the strange boy who lives down the street and her very carefully arranged Match begins to get messed up. This series is a lot slower paced than the previous two but the world is just as interesting. In this case, the world keeps me reading more than the characters do. Crossed ended with some revelations and twists that definitely want me to go back for more.

Partials (Release Date 2/28/2012) by Dan Wells: In the future, humans have created artificial people to fight their wars for them. After the wars, the Partials, as these soldiers are called, want equal rights and rebel against humanity. During this war, a virus is released that kills off 99.9% of all humans. The remaining 40,000 are living on Long Island and struggling for survival. The RM virus is still killing; killing off every baby within days of being born. Without new babies, humanities days are numbered. Our protagonist, Kira, is a medic-in-training with a knack for research and she has an idea about where to find the cure to RM. Unfortunately, her idea will involve her defying the government. This book has a lot less in the romance subplot than the previous ones listed her but there is the tiniest thread that begins near the last third of the story. This story is all about survival and fear and how to get one despite the other. It is gritty and raw and a wonderful read. I can’t wait to read the next book.

Any and all of these I’d recommend to teens through adults. If you would rather skip the romance subplot then I would recommend the Hunger Games trilogy or Partials. If you like your romance subplot front and center, Delirium or Matched would be better. All of them are good and well worth your reading time.

Dystopias may be places that are as bad as can be but dystopian settings are darn good in my opinion.

Note: As a bookseller I occasionally have access to Advanced Readers Copies of books and that is how I was able to read Pandemonium and Partials before their release dates. Lucky me.

        

Social Networks

• Facebook: I have an author page on Facebook that I post to occasionally; sharing links, quotes, or simple updates.
• Google+: I just started over on Google+ a month or so ago. I am still getting use to the tools over there but I try to post somewhat regularly there as well.
• Twitter: I’m CLNorman on Twitter. I haven’t found the will power to resist being sucked into such an active stream of information but I do post rarely and check out things there.

Author Pages

• On Smashwords
• On Amazon

Note: My stories are also available through Barnes & Noble but they haven’t yet enabled an author page feature, at least that I’ve found.

In Person

• RadCon: Feb 17th-19th in Pasco, WA. I’ve been attending this convention for various reasons since high school. Now I go for the writing related events and to visit with friends I only see at conventions.
• MisCon: May 25th-28th in Missoula, MT. This will be my fourth year at this convention and it has become my favorite. It is small in size but big in scope. The writing workshop is excellent and well worth the cost all by itself.
• Rivers of Ink: Oct 12th-13th in Richland, WA. I am on the planning committee for this event and so you can find me here in many different capacities. I also appear on the writing panels on Saturday.

        

I hope you like it.

        

This is Bear. He’s part poodle, part Cocker Spaniel and all bark. At all times of the day and night. Needless to say I haven’t been sleeping well. However, he has those puppy dog eyes that can’t be ignored so I don’t mind much. I think that he is a little ambitious to want to play with two toys at the same time. But it is way more doable than the four toys he had a half hour after this picture was taken.

Speaking of my imagination, these tracks were all over the driveway this morning. I’m told they are turkey tracks but I’m not sure. I’ve heard there are dragons around here and maybe these are the tracks of their young. What do you think?

While I am sharing random things with you, have you all seen this video? Watch it as it is totally geektastic!

        

I didn’t get to see the show when it aired live. I somehow missed that it was on though I had heard about a series that James Cameron was going to do on TV and it sounded interesting. I just never heard that it started airing. A few years ago, I browsed through the TV Show DVDs at the store and stumbled across Dark Angel Season 1. I bought it, took it home, and popped into my DVD player. After all what could go wrong with a TV show about ‘genetically-enhanced children in post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest’?

I fell in love and immediately started searching the TV guides for the air dates for current episodes. That was when I found out that this lovely, funny show had been cancelled after just two seasons. <sigh> I returned to the store and bought the second season. When I finished watching it, I was bummed. It does not end in a great place and as anyone who has been reading this blog for very long knows, endings mean a lot to me.

A while later I discovered that there were Dark Angel books and that they even tied things up. Finished the story even and I became very excited. But I couldn’t find copies of them anywhere. Finally last month, it dawned on me to look through the Nook library for e-book versions of them. Eureka! I immediately added all three to my nook wish list and last payday bought the first one.

Yesterday, I finished it. Dark Angel: Before the Dawn covers the timeline between when Max escaped from Manticore and up to the first scene in the first episode. It filled in a lot of backstory for all the characters and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Today is payday and I’ll be purchasing the next one in the series as soon as the money hits the bank.

One of my favorite things about the show is Michael Weatherly. His character, Logan Cale AKA Eyes Only, is a man with a cause and yet sense of humor. When life puts him down (paralyzing him in episode one), he doesn’t give up. He keeps going. He shines a light into Max’s life and she uses her uber-rogue skills to help him with his cause. The series is full of light and dark, weaving a rich and detailed glimpse into this world.

If you haven’t seen this series, you should. If you have, did you love it? Did you read the books and did they help satisfy the need for an ending?

I’ll be back in two books to let you know what I think of them.

        

Snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, and sugar cookies always made the list. And were we to make just one batch? Heck no! We had to double, sometimes triple, every recipe we made up. Hours and hours later, we (and the kitchen) would be covered in flour, sticky with sugar, and have platter after platter full of cookies. The surfaces of multiple pieces of furniture groaned under the weight of all the cookies baked on that day. (Oddly enough this was way before my mother picked up the hobby of collecting cookie jars. I wonder if this yearly event led to it.)

I loved this tradition because it brought the family together and of course, there were cookies. I don’t like to brag but I do have a fairly large sweet-tooth. It was something we did every year. It lent a “sameness” to the season that was comforting and tied one Christmas to another.

I dreaded this tradition because after the first hour, my sisters and I got on each others nerves and sniped at each other. We (or at least I) got very tired of filling up tray after tray with cookies to go in the oven. The dough sticking to my fingers drove me crazy. I don’t know if I am not a fan of baking because of this or if it was always a part of my personality. All I know is that I wanted out of the kitchen and to get back to my book or my Barbies.

I will occasionally bake one thing or one batch of cookies (and by occasionally I mean about twice a year). I enjoy the fruits of my labor. Immensely. I also feel bad that I don’t bake with my kids more often.

Maybe this year I will start the tradition anew. After all, I can now send my kids in to bake and sit back and watch the flour fly from the comfort of my chair.

        

Thank you.