Title:

The angst! Oh, the angst!

At Any Turn should seriously consider a brand partnership with a pharma company manufacturing Captopril (“Free bottle with every copy!”) given the elevated blood pressure levels people are likely to experience when reading it. My daughter recently discovered a cartoon series on Netflix, appropriately titled Total Drama, and I’m pretty sure that this book is a more grown-up version of it, all rolled into a convenient, three-hundred-and-sixty-seven page package. I swear, if you’d hooked me up to a pressure cuff or stuck a finger on my pulse while I was reading this thing, you would have rushed me to the nearest A&E.

At Any Turn picks up where At Any Price left off (spoilers ahoy-hoy for those who haven’t read the first book in the Gaming the System series); videogame millionaire, Adam Drake, and gamer-girl blogger Mia Strong are attempting to explore a post-virginity-auction relationship. Adam is working on controlling his workaholic tendencies and Mia is anxiously waiting to find out if she’s managed to get into med school. Given that the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ drama of book one, I thought that At Any Turn might follow a slightly smoother plot trajectory. You know, give readers a bit of time off for good behaviour.

No. No, no, no, no, nooooo.

Unlike At Any Price, which was narrated by Mia, Adam takes the reins in this one, and I can only say that, emotionally, he is like a light switch at the mercy of toddler – turned on and off repeatedly until you think you’re in an 80s discothèque. One minute he wants to stay in a relationship with Mia. The next, he’s totally over the whole thing or playing silly games with her emotions.

I couldn’t lose her. I wouldn’t.

Fuck it. Fuck her. I pulled my eyes away and never looked at her again.

“When can I see you again?”

“April says you’re taken and I as pretty sure that you were single. So which is it?”

… in spite of the warning bells at the back of my head, I decided to milk it a little.

“I am currently unattached.”

 I was willing to concede, finally. I was willing to put this in her hands.

 I was starting to hate the fact that I was still so hung up on her. Maybe it was just time to walk away from this mess?

“… we are done. Forever.”

… it was time she knew she was mine. “I love you,” I said hoarsely as she turned the knob.

You get the idea. (Quick ‘thank you’ to Katniss for standing in for Mia and Ken for Adam. Although I do apologise for the fact that Mia’s hair colour remains the same throughout. The Children’s Toy Box Production Company didn’t have a suitable Barbie replacement.)

In all fairness, Mia, bless her, certainly doesn’t make things easy on old Adam. Granted, her character is going through some pretty heavy stuff but crying all night into a self-help book: what does every single relationship councillor on the planet tell couples going through rocky patches? That’s right, they use the ‘C’ word. No, no that one, this one:

COMMUNICATION.

I do like a book that builds tension but, to me, it felt like that there was a lot of drama for drama’s sake and it all could have been resolved much sooner with a simple conversation between the protagonists. Ultimately, that would have made me like them both a lot more than I ended up doing – and not left me with the overpowering urge to hit both of them over the head with an Xbox controller.

As to the gaming aspects touched on in the story: if you read my review of At Any Price you’ll know that I was originally attracted to the book because of its inclusion of game development in the plotline. As someone who used to work in the videogame industry, I was intrigued as to how Brenna was going to weave the rather unglamorous life of game dev. into the storyline.

While most of the story was believable, two things stuck out for me – the hidden quest in Adam’s online game, Dragon Epoch, and the paintball match against rival developer Blizzard (who actually exist in real life).

Now, according to the book, Adam is the only one who knows exactly what the hidden quest is – which in the real world is highly unlikely because implementing any sort of gameplay isn’t just the work of a single coder. Even simple mechanics require concept artists, modellers, riggers, animators, lighters, a sound team. Then you’ve got the problem of inserting something into existing software. Nine times out of ten, something will break when you do this. Okay, maybe I’m being a little melodramatic, but the bottom line is changing code is (really) risky. That’s why new stuff, after it’s been made by a raft of people, is always always put through its paces by a group of testers before it’s released to the general public. And why the entire studio will take turns shooting you with a Nerf Gun if you ask for a change in the days prior to publishing/manufacture approval.

I know this from personal experience.

As to the paintball game; the only people who usually get shot at these kind of videogame studio corporate get-togethers are the executive and senior producers. And ‘friendly fire’ is a relative term: arm a dev. team with paintball guns after three months of twelve-hour days and eating Domino’s pizza night after night, there’s going to be anarchy.

Reading this review back, I think I sound a little harsh. That actually wasn’t my intention. Brenna is an excellent writer and At Any Turn is a fine example of self-publishing; the copy is wonderfully clean and the story hangs together well. However, I would be lying if I said that the constant on-again-of-again plotline didn’t wind me up and leave me feeling exhausted. I just hope that the third Gaming the System book dials back on the deliberate miscommunication. I don’t think my blood pressure can handle another round of Adam and Mia sabotaging their relationship at any and every turn.

*Please note that a copy of At Any Turn was provided by the author free of charge in exchange for a fair review.

**REVIEW UPDATE: Brenna (who, I might add, has been an excellent sport about the Barbies) has confirmed that Adam alone is not responsible for the secret Dragon Epoch. Misunderstanding of the text on my part. So you can consider that portion of my review A Very (Very) Brief Overview of Videogame development.

Tickle your fancy? Click on the following links to purchase a copy.

Amazon.com

• At Any Turn – Kindle

Amazon.co.uk

• At Any Turn – Kindle

Kobo

• At Any Turn – ePub

The post At Any Turn – Brenna Aubrey (Gaming the System) appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.

Title:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to work in the videogame industry. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say, when At Any Price (Gaming the System) came to my attention earlier in the week via a link in this post by Skye Warren, I was immediately intrigued. My mind began to whir. Was the heroine going to get ‘serviced’ next to the servers? Would the hero decide to ‘review her build’ during the daily Scrum meeting? In my experience, game dev. is a whole load of (stressful) fun, but calling it sexy would be … a stretch, to say the least. Unless you count listening to hundreds of emote .wav files to make sure they don’t sound unintentionally orgasmic, getting shot (repeatedly) with Nerf guns when you tell the dev. team they need to fix a bug the night before manufacturer submission, asking the rigger to make a character’s boobs smaller, and informing the lead artist that the creature he’s spent the last few days concepting needs to look ‘less penis-like’.

However, it turns out that the videogame backdrop for At Any Price (the first in a series of three books by author Brenna Aubrey) is more peripheral than integral, despite the references to patches, servers and avatars. It’s true that Adam, the hero, can code like a god (apparently, he’s the Zeus of C++) but it’s his addiction to his mobile and laptop, rather than his association with MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing) game development, that ultimately define him in Ms Aubrey’s story.

It all starts with an online auction. Gamer girl and blogger, Mia Strong, from whose point-of-view At Any Price is told, is strapped for cash; her mother is recovering from cancer and, thanks to a bunch of medical bills, about to lose her house. Mia herself is struggling to foot her college tuition. What’s a girl to do? Well, if you’re her, you decide, in a rather Catarina Migliorini-meets-Belle de Jour move, to wave your middle finger at the social stigmas surrounding prostitution and sell your virginity online.

 I’ve decided to decry the crimes and impositions put upon my sisters since the beginning of time until now. And I offer, therefore, a new paradigm. One where a woman can sell her purity and enjoy the fruits thereof.

I’m not spoiling the story by revealing that Adam Drake, CEO of Draco Multimedia Entertainment, is the guy who wins the right to deflower Mia. But despite a raft of contractual clauses pertaining to said deflowering, things go a bit … awry.

Hands up, I was more than a little worried that our leading man might turn out to be yet another carbon copy of the dreadful Christian Grey (beware the millionaire with the contract), but, thankfully, he managed to dodge the Fifty Shades of Gaming bullet. So how best to describe Mr Drake, then? What sort of man pays three-quarters-of-a-million for some skin and blood? At the risk of revealing myself as a complete geek, one who is Alpha in both the traditional (me Tarzan, you Jane) and gaming (fully functional but his assets need work) senses of the word.

Mia? She, too, is very much a work in progress – not without her bugs and, like Adam, in possession of an emotional and social codebase that needs a whole lot of finishing.

At Any Price raises some interesting and difficult questions. If you sell yourself for money, just the once, are you a prostitute? Will society continue, as it has done for hundreds of years, to see prostitution in the negative and malign those who engage in it? Independent Institute research fellow, Wendy McElroy’s words seem particularly appropriate in this instance:

“Prostitution is not merely an exchange of sexual favors; it is a financial exchange. At this point, individualist feminists rise to defend the free market as well as a woman’s self-ownership. This is expressed by the question: ‘Prostitution is a combination of sex and the free market. Which one are you against?’”

Of course, I couldn’t help but jokingly accuse a bunch of ex-colleagues of writing At Any Price under a pen name, which lead to some hilarious back-and-forth about whether the hero performed at ‘a consistent 60fps per second’, if he ‘qualified as a Class A’ (for the non-nerds amongst you, that’s the worst type of bug you can get during development and, generally means that no one is getting any sleep for the foreseeable future) and this extremely witty parody from a good friend of mine who is married to an Executive Producer:

“As his fingers pumped the buttons of the controller her thoughts turned to what else those dexterous digits could do… the washing up, putting that picture on the wall that’s been lying around for 6 months, clearing out the garage. #reallifeofagamerswife”

Sexually speaking, At Any Price is relatively tame. But the story is more than interesting enough to carry things along. Some readers may find the coitus interruptus aspect a bit frustrating, but the good news is that although this book is the first of three about Mia and Adam, there’s no make-you-want-to-tear-your-hair-out cliff-hanger.

Tickle your fancy? Click on the following links to purchase a copy.

Amazon.co.uk

• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Kindle
• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Paperback

Amazon.com

• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Kindle
• At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Paperback

*Apologies for the lack of stick figures in this one, troops. My black ink pen has run dry and I’ve yet to buy a new one!

The post At Any Price (Gaming the System) – Brenna Aubrey appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.

Like Lazarus rising from the dead (although granted, in this case, the resurrection has taken a lot longer than four days), I’m finally (finally!) back on the laptop and twitching the florals. Woot! It’s been pretty damn frustrating not being able to blog and ramble as normal but I suspect it’s been far more so for those of you who’ve continued to visit Chintz over the past two-and-a-half months in the hope of finding a new post. So inappropriate hugs and kisses to everyone who’s stuck with me and offered their support as I’ve moved from one side of the world to the other; it’s been a long slog but at long last I have a reliable Internet connection and an actual house to live in. Largess.

I’ve decided to kick off my new (albeit slightly delayed) blogging year with an Alert Me. Given that I’ve been offline so much recently, it feels like there are about a billion news stories and articles that have passed me by, so in a lot of ways this round-up is as much for me as it is for you. Enjoy.

In Which I Explain Why I Turned Down a Three-book New York Print Deal to Self-publish
Source: Brenna Aubrey (via One Handed Writers)

This piece by Brenna Aubrey makes for fascinating reading. If you’re a self-published or aspiring author, then I strongly encourage you to swing by her Website and cast a beady eye over it. Not least because it gives an excellent breakdown of some key contractual clauses that writers will come across when presented with book deals drawn up by traditional publishers. Pay careful attention, people, to the Non Compete clause. This is a bloody important bit of legal jargon. And can I add that any new author who has the guts and strength of character to turn down a six-figure deal in order to stay true to her own personal writing goals and aspirations has my undying admiration. On the strength of this post of Brenna’s, I’ve now downloaded the book in question, At Any Price (Gaming The System). I’ll let you know how I get on with it; stick figures may be on the horizon.

SexBytes
Source: SexBytes

If you’ve not yet subscribed to SexBytes, you really do need to sign yourself up. Attached to e[Lust], this handy little site pulls together all sorts of sex-related posts and articles and files them in once place so that they’re easy for you to find and peruse. These past few weeks, there have been some truly excellent entries, including Skye Warren’s article, Why Can’t an Author Make a Living Wage?, Why I Post Nude Photos (and Why I Blog About Sex) (an exceptionally thoughtful and eloquent piece on sex blogging, by Penny’s Dirty Thoughts), and Ready, Normal People? (an on-the-money article examining the U.K.’s current Internet censorship crisis courtesy of Sephy Hallow).

‘Normal Sex’ Is Becoming More Popular Among Women: Fifty Shades Of Regular?
Source: Medical Daily 

I’ve included this article because it ruffled my feathers to such an extent that small tendrils of steam came out of my ears. I was willing to forgive the use of the term ‘normal sex’ in the title (what the hell is ‘normal sex’, anyway?) because it was enclosed in quotation marks and thus had some self-awareness. But then I came upon this delightful paragraph:

‘Two summers ago, women were glued to Fifty Shades of Grey, and the novel had women asking their partners to explore unchartered sexual fantasies. Many claimed that the racy BDSM novels helped them to explore their sexuality and be more open with what they desired from their partners. Others just called it “mommy porn.” There was also a speculation that the racy novels would cause a baby boom, according to Digital Spy. However, according to a recent survey, many women are more inclined to revert back to “vanilla sex,” or, in other words, they are ready to hang up their whips and put away their handcuffs; women are craving intimacy.’

It’s that last phrase that really bothered (and continues to bother) me. What, there’s no intimacy in BDSM? Let me tell you, when you truly submit to someone, when the very core of you is laid out and vulnerable, when you’ve had all your secrets, wants, needs and desires pulled out of your head and held in the palm of someone else’s hand, there’s a level of closeness that I cannot begin to articulate. I am not for one minute saying that there is anything wrong with ‘vanilla’ sex – or that it is less intimate than BDSM sex (albeit in a very different way) but I am saying that words like ‘normal’, ‘intimacy’, ‘security’ and ‘love’ are as applicable to those who engage in ‘kinky’ sex as those who don’t.

Happy belated New Year, everyone.

The post Alert Me: Back from the dead, turning down publisher deals, and tasty little SexByte morsels appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.