Source: Meme Generator
Hello everyone.
It’s been a while since I last blogged. Oh, who am I kidding. I haven’t put up a blog post in two months and I’m so sorry about that. My life has been kind of… stuck in limbo and it reflected both in my writing, my health journey, and my blogging
I will now take each of these issues one, at a time.
Source: Goodreads
I’ve always been a person that those who know me will consider as being not totally normal. Which is good. I’m okay with not being like everyone else. I smile when people say jokingly, “You know you’re not normal right?”
That’s how much I love that term.
So it is to be expected that when I stumbled onto a book with the title How to be a Normal Person I was intrigued.
Then I read this synopsis:
Gustavo Tiberius is not normal. He knows this. Everyone in his small town of Abby, Oregon, knows this. He reads encyclopedias every night before bed. He has a pet ferret called Harry S. Truman. He owns a video rental store that no one goes to. His closest friends are a lady named Lottie with drag queen hair and a trio of elderly Vespa riders known as the We Three Queens.
Gus is not normal. And he’s fine with that. All he wants is to be left alone.
Until Casey, an asexual stoner hipster and the newest employee at Lottie’s Lattes, enters his life. For some reason, Casey thinks Gus is the greatest thing ever. And maybe Gus is starting to think the same thing about Casey, even if Casey is obsessive about Instagramming his food.
But Gus isn’t normal and Casey deserves someone who can be. Suddenly wanting to be that someone, Gus steps out of his comfort zone and plans to become the most normal person ever.
After all, what could possibly go wrong?
Growing up in a secondary school in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, there were two things pretty common in the bags of the students (mostly female and some male) that were within my age group of 13-16. One was the stacks of shiny CDs containing the latest blockbuster hits which we turned into some sort of barter system, in that, you have a movie I want to watch? Well I have one for you as well. The second thing we had in our bags were Harlequin Present novels. Sure we had the occasional Harlequin Desire or Blaze (and Silhouette if you wanted something with a bit more volume) but Harlequin Presents was our currency. Damn we had a ton of Harlequin novels. They were short and handy and you could lose yourself in the crazy zaniness of the characters and the plot. And the best part? They were cheap. I mean, I could buy a whole stack of them over the holidays and they wouldn’t put a dent in my savings. Seriously? Look at them:
Source: willreadforfeels.com
Every time I see an Harlequin Present cover, I smile and remember happier times. Sure the stories were crazy but that was why I loved them! (Same goes for Kdramas :)). Now imagine my delight when I found out in the later part of December last year that Dreamspinner was releasing a new category under their publication, titled Dreamspun Desires. And this was the cover…
Source: Dreamspinnerpress
I mean, can you see the connection. The circle. The main character/characters in said circle. The title that promises a very crazy ass ride? It was Harlequin Presents meets M/M romance. And that for me was a double whammy! And when I found out that it was just as cheap ($6.99 for two books!) I hit subscribe faster than you can say Holy smokes it’s Harlequin with two men.
So, after I hit subscribe and told them yeah, take my money every month. I can part with 6.99 for such craziness, I had to wait two weeks for the first set to be released (they released it on January 1st & 15th).
So, whilst everyone was looking forward to the New Year for various reasons, I was as well, although the principal reason for me was the realization that I was going to get Dreamspun’s first story on the very first day of the year.
Review Monday is back. Yay!
And today’s novella is Eli Easton’s Blame it on the Mistletoe. Yeah Yeah. I know. October is too early to be reading a book set in Christmas time, but this novella was brilliant. As I delved into it this last weekend, it occurred to me the benefits of reading book reviews and taking note of mentions on my Goodreads feed, because that is how I learnt about this book. I went ahead to buy it and the minute I read, I promptly went back to purchase all the Eli Easton books I could find on Dreamspinner. I had to stop though, after I realized that I was buying more books than I could afford at the moment. So with tears in my eyes, I let go of a few and made up my mind to come back at the end of the month :).
Cursed shall you be forever. Your gaze shall turn to stone all who look upon you. The hair and face that you delight in shall become terrible to look upon. Your blood shall be sought by all for it shall have the power to heal and to kill. This shall be your fate and the fate of your descendants for all eternity.
This story was written for the Love is Always Write event at the M/M Romance Group on GoodReads.
Alessandra Ebulu 
