Swept Away Blog Hop Stop: My Big Fat Fail of a Valentine's Day

Welcome to the Giselle Renarde stop on the Swept Away Valentine's Blog Hop!

Let's start with the good stuff: what you get.  I'm not giving a free ebook to one lucky reader, or even two or three.  Nope.  I'm giving a free ebook to EVERY visitor.

The easiest way to do this is make the book FREE at All Romance ebooks for the duration of the hop, so that's exactly what I've done.  If you hippity-hop over to ARe, you can pick up your free copy of my shapeshifter fairy tale (based on the Brothers Grimm story Allerleirauh), A Tale of Fur and Flesh: https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-ataleoffurandflesh-625148-142.html


Now on to the big fat fail portion of my post.

My Valentine's Day began to big-fat-fail LAST YEAR (it started early!), when I bought an opera subscription with my mother and let her pick the dates.  Sure enough, she got us tickets to Tristan und Isolde (a 5-hour opera, if you're not familiar with it) for Valentine's Day.

I have a sweetheart in my life, as many of you know. Sweet and I have been together nearly 5 years, and, fortunately, we're both pretty anti-V-Day.  The commercialism of Valentine's Day bugs the hell out of her, even more than it bothers me--and I didn't think that was possible.  So we never celebrate by going out or buying each other gifts.

But I figured, since I was meeting my mother downtown, I would buy a cupcake from Mom's favourite little cupcake shop.  My mom doesn't have anyone special in her life, romance-wise, so I thought that it would be a nice gesture.

Well, I got to the cupcake shop and it was PACKED.  They were so busy they actually had a security guard on duty to corral the crowds.  There must have been 30 people in line when I overheard from someone on staff that there were only 7 cupcakes left.

Okay. So, screw that idea.

I thought I'd buy my mom some gourmet tea to help her get over the cold she's had for a week.  I went to the specialty tea place, but guess what?  Sold out.  Of course!

So I met my mom giftless, not that she minded.  Here's the thing: once we took our seats and the Canadian Opera Company's production of Tristan und Isolde kicked up, we realized... wow... we really could have used the sugar from that cupcake I couldn't get.

Dude.

I LOVE opera.  I love classical music.  I love theatre.  I have never in my life walked out on anything.  But I did walk out on this.

I have never seen such a dismally lacklustre opera production.  No sets beyond a black box. Basic black costumes.  Instead of giving us something great to watch while these performers sang their asses off for 5 hours, they gave us a huge movie screen broadcasting some art school crap.  Oh my god, SO MUCH GRATUITOUS NUDITY!  And, hello, I write smut for a living.  When I complain that your opera has too much nudity in it (especially when I'm sitting next to my mother watching it), that says something.

I wish I could do a better job describing to you how terrible this production was, but it killed so many of my brain cells that I can barely form sentences right now.  Thank god we left after the second act or I'd be a zombie right now.

Oh, and speaking of zombies, my mother kept falling asleep during this opera... and my mother makes movie monster noises in her sleep... so every 10 minutes or so I heard moaning beside me and I had to jab her in the ribs to wake her up.

Happy Valentine's Day to me!

So I came home to my girl (on the phone, not in person--we're a long distance couple unless she's working in the city) and after a big fat day of failure... awwww.... just the sound of her voice made the fail go away.

Which is what happens every time I hear her voice.  My sweetheart makes life's big fat fails all melt away.

Awww...

Hope your V-Day was full of awww...

And if it wasn't, here's a free book: https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-ataleoffurandflesh-625148-142.html

Hugs,
Giselle

Oh, and guess what? For the kinksters in the crowd, I've got a new book hitting the market TODAY. It's called Kinksters: 10 stories of wild group sex, bisexual fun and kinky pleasures!  Check it out at Amazon: