An Eye-Candy Bequeathal and New Obsession
It’s time for me to move on. Long past time, probably, but this previous weekend clinched it.
You see, I’ve had a minor eye-candy obsession with British hottie Henry Cavill for many years now—which is embarrassing, considering how old he was(n’t) when I first started crushing on him:
Dear Henry was but a wee lad of 24 years old in 2007 when I first started crushing on him as Charles Brandon in The Tudors.
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But real age aside, he managed to exude maturity in the role of the aging Duke of Suffolk as the series continued (the very deep voice helps).
Oh, yes, another 7 to 10 years and he’ll be just perfect!
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Which was why, back in 2010, back when very few people knew his name (mostly just those who watched The Tudors), I chose him as the template for Andrew Lawton in Follow the Heart:
Henry Cavill and the guy who was chosen to represent him on the cover of FTH.
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But now that Henry is Superman (a disappointing movie, but Henry looked fabulous in it), everyone knows who he is—and half the romance authors in the world are using him as a template. (The other half are using the template for the hero in An Honest Heart, but we’ll talk about him in a few months.)
So it’s time. Time for me to move on, to get back to crushing on obscure actors that most people have never heard of. Of course I have my two “alternate universe husbands” (i.e., I’m married to them in alternate universes, since each is already married in this one—and since I’ll never meet either of them anyway):
Oded Fehr and Karl Urban, my two main obsessions.
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So let me take this moment to publicly bequeath Henry Cavill to my dear friend Liz Johnson. (She asked first, ladies. Take it up with her.)
But fear not! I have already chosen my new obscure-actor obsession. And he’s someone I’ve posted as eye candy on the Facebook page (yes, I’ll get back to that sometime this summer), on my eye candy Pinterest board, and even here on the blog.
His name is Marton Csokas (according to his bio on IMDB.com, his last name is Hungarian and pronounced Cho-Kash):
Yep, he’s definitely my type! Tall, dark, brooding, and foreign! (He’s Kiwi, like Karl.)
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And not only is he from New Zealand, just like Karl, I also noticed him in the same “place” as Karl—in the Lord of the Rings movies, in which Marton portrayed Celeborn, husband of Galadriel:
And he wore a long blond wig in LOTR, just like Karl!
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And another Karl connection—Marton was also in The Bourne Supremacy (he plays the agent in Germany whom Matt Damon beats the crap out of and then blows up with a rolled-up magazine; Karl played the super-sexy assassin, Kiril; yes, apparently I do have a thing for guys who occasionally play villains).
Marton in motion/sound:
No, he doesn’t have as pronounced a Kiwi accent as Karl does.
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Here are a few more images, just for good measure:
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Who’s your secret (or not so secret) celebrity crush-of-the-moment?
Book-Talk Monday: You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling (for your favorite type of books)
Open Book by Dave Dugdale
My favorite genre to read since I was eleven or twelve years old is historical romance. I’ve gone through different iterations of favorite tropes and authors over the years. Arranged Marriage/Marriage of Convenience stories are some of my favorites. I cut my teeth on American-set YA historical romances with the Sunfire books in the 1980s, and, at the same time, fell in love with the medieval setting by picking up my mom’s Jude Deveraux books around the same time. In the early 1990s, it was Regency and medieval, along with some American West. Beginning in the mid-1990s, there was a fair helping of Inspirational historical romance.
When I went to graduate school in the early/mid-2000s, I started reading contemporary inspirational romance, since that’s what I was writing. By the time I finished grad school, I was working full time as an editor, and because of my training in grad school of reading everything critically (analyzing and breaking down everything) and the editing I did eight or nine hours a day—in addition to writing—my reading ground to a full stop.
It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to start reading for pleasure again. And for a while there, I fell in love with it and sometimes went to bed an hour of more early just to have more time to read.
But now, I’m experiencing a reading slump once more. I’ve started reading books that I should love, but I find myself getting a little bit into them and I want to move on to something else. So I have to ask: Is it me or is it the books I’m choosing?
I’m in the middle of re-listening to a book (Victorian-set historical romance) that I really enjoyed last year. I’m reading a new-to-me author whose book is set in a time period I’ve never read (mid-17th century/English Civil War). I downloaded a historical romance novella yesterday based on a review on one of my favorite blogs.
But I think I’m going to try to really shake things up with my next book choice. I’m really thinking about trading Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome before the TV series based on it starts (well, it starts next week, so if I do read it, I’ll wait to watch it until I finish). I’m not sold on this—after all, I’ve never read a Stephen King book. But is there anything more out of my reading comfort zone than that? 
Have you ever read anything completely out of your comfort zone? What was it and what did you think of it?
Fun Friday: What’s Your Superhero (or Supervillain) Name?
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I thought this would be fun to play in honor of Man of Steel opening today (I’ll be seeing it with my girlfriends tomorrow).
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Shamelessly borrowed from BuzzFeed
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I guess I’m a Supervillain, because mine comes out as Evil Psychic Princess.
What’s your Super Name?
Trailer Thursday: The White Queen
Wordless Wednesday–MAN OF STEEL!!!
