Am I Getting Too Old For This?...

 

Well, I think today is the day when I have officially felt too old. 

This sucks. I have been a self-taught computer noodler since the late 1990s, and I have always felt pretty confident in my abilities to noodle around a program and figure things out. Before YouTube was a thing it was a case of trial and error - with some pretty big errors along the way - and once I could Google/YouTube something, I was more content in my ability to figure it out. That was until today...

As you may know, I was considering adding another platform for book reviewing. Just trying something new, where I could just make purely bookish content. I did think about another blogspot page, but I was hoping to expand my scope. That's where WordPress came in. I just saw so may great book bloggers using that site that I thought I'd give it a go - and became immediately lost. This site is not intuitive at all. I got myself turned around more than a few times just trying to figure out whether or not to use the AI generative feature to create a site, swiftly abandoned that, and when I went to try it the old fashioned hands-on way, I felt so frustrated with trying to understand and apply the multitude of different themes, pages, designs, links, etc. that I am honestly considering just deleting the blog and moving on to something a little more my speed. Apparently my speed is blogger :/ 

Honestly, it is truly a humbling experience to be (maybe) defeated by a site that seems to have changed its dashboard/design platform in the few weeks that I've been gone, sulking about my previous attempt. I think I'm going to have to do a deep dive into the basics of WordPress (if I even decide to go back) and I may concentrate on the graphic elements that I want to add to this new blog before embarking in the physical manifestation of my plans. Okay, back off to the keyboard salt mines.

Thanks for keeping me company, and until I see you next time... 

Erotic romances are just not my cup of tea

When I first discovered Lora Leigh back in the mid 2000s, I had no idea that erotic romance was going to become the booming market it is now.  I didn't read her Breed series for the sex, but for the intriguing story line that centered on a global rogue governments project to create brutal, super strong soldiers by using animal DNA and splicing it into human genetics to make the perfect warrior.  Cruel, soulless, intelligent, and completely loyal to whomever held his/her leash. 

The people born into those facilities suffered cruelties beyond comprehension, but have since escaped and are now being hunted by the government labs to recapture them and begin the breeding program once again.  Breeds 2.0.

Now this was an amazing premise, and I have enjoyed the books.  But when I decided on the first of January to use my library's Overdrive catalogue, so that I could read a few short books and get my Goodreads goal off to a good start, I thought I'd give the erotic romances another go - and it didn't go well.  Instead of finding another Breeds series I instead found books that only used a vague plot to take you from sex scene to sex scene.

Am I too old?  Are my reading tastes those of an aging generation who just don't get it?  Oh God, am I turning into my mother?!!

No.  I've just come to the conclusion that erotic romance as a genre just isn't for me.  So far this year I've read about 15 books and none of them have rated highly.  Perhaps my enjoyment of the Breed series stems from the fact that it made the jump from an indie publisher (Ellora's Cave) to a huge publishing juggernaut like Berkley?  Well, I think that that certainly didn't hurt it.

Anyway, my point is that it is okay to not love (or even like) a genre of books.  Don't let anyone tell you that you're not a real reader if you don't like a genre, or subject, or on the flip side, if you do like books that everyone else seems to hate don't let their criticisms put you off.  Don't feel guilty for having a personal preference.

Do I like erotic romance?  No, not really.  But I do like this series and some of the author's other works and in the end that's all that matters.

Thank you for hanging around to read my musings.  I'd be interested to know if you have read any of the books that fall under erotic romances (such as Ellora's Cave), and if so what did you think of them.

And until next time,