Release, Blog Tour, and Conan

First of all: No Proper Lady releases today! You can find it at Amazon , or at the Sourcebooks website or hopefully at your local bookstore!

I am very excited, obviously! I am also doing a blog tour, and will post links appropriately. Today I’m at Urban Girl Reader, talking about female assassins and the advantage of surprise.

I would put up links to everything, but that does not seem to be working so well.

In unrelated news, I went to see the new Conan film last night. The Cimmerian–not Ahnold, the text version–was one of my first crushes, so I was tentatively looking forward to the film despite some pretty bad reviews.

Alas:

Good stuff:

1. The visuals. However you want to take that.
2. Um. Evil Utilikilt Guy and Marilyn Manson’s Creepy Girlfriend seem to be having a lot of fun here?

Bad stuff:

1. We seem to have sacrificed character development in favor of a lot of random fight scenes.
1a. Yes, this movie is rated R. We know. You don’t have to have sixteen decapitations and someone getting de-nosed to prove it. I don’t *mind* the blood, but it got tedious.
2. Likeable sidekicks? No. Bundles of Unfortunate Implications? Oh yes.
3. So there’s a random plot device. And the movie starts with Evil Utilikilt Guy getting the last bit. Except that there’s another, previously unmentioned part, because we need the chick to be a plot device, because God forbid a female character in this movie have agency.
4. Oh, the chick. I do not believe anyone ever watched the 1970s Conan and wished that Valeria could be more like Princess Useless von Hairstyle, aaaaannd yet…here we are. Snippy damsel-in-distress “monk” with Great Destiny. Sigh. Valeria, I miss you.
5. Someone on the scriptwriting team clearly has A Thing for chicks dangling from great heights while shrieking.
6. The Mask of Ultimate Power seems like it basically a) lets you stick your dead wife’s soul into another chick’s body, and b) makes your evil lair collapse. This is not a great bargain as artifacts go.
7. So, Pirate Sidekick? I appreciate that you want to get your buddy laid and all. Well wing-manned. However, when the chick in question is possibly the key to resurrecting the Dark Artifact of Actually Not Doing Anything and definitely has a bunch of guys looking for her? Maybe you should consider not encouraging her to go wandering off onto the mysteriously forested island.

Sigh. A more detailed post tomorrow, but for now…I do not recommend it. Especially not in 3D, unless you like severed noses in multiple dimensions.