Emily Howitt

The Nightlife: New York, by Travis Luedke, is actually pretty good. I say “actually” because I wasn’t really sure what kind of book I was getting into. It warns of graphic sex scenes and I think violence in the beginning, so I wasn’t sure if this was going to just be sex, sex, sex, and basically an erotica novel. Not that I read that many of those. I feel like romance and erotic novels are always blurring the line anyway. Some romance novels I’ve read, like Outlander , can get quite graphic in their sex scenes. Some of the sex scenes in the Nightlife are indeed graphic, but they are usually fleeting. They don’t take up pages and pages, and there is definitely more to the book than just sex. That being said, the book does primarily focus on Michelle and Aaron. Michelle is a vampire, which I kind of like. It’s not the typical Twilight kind of vampire. It’s a different take on vampirism. When a vampire of her kind turns someone, that person becomes their slave, and bound to them by b...

Vulnerability. Capable of being physically or emotionally wounded (Merriam Webster).  Being vulnerable has negative connotations in our society. Even the definition is negative. Who wants to be wounded emotionally or physically? The problem is, if we’re cut off from being hurt, sometimes that can be more damaging then the risks we take when we’re vulnerable. We don’t always realize it, but we make ourselves vulnerable all the time. Whenever we let someone in, we’re being vulnerable. Whenever we tell someone something intimate, or about something that matters to us, we’re being vulnerable. We’re letting other people in who may not want to be let in. We don’t know how they will react. They could react extremely negatively, yet we’re told to share our feelings with others and not to keep things bottled up. But being vulnerable still seems like a bad thing. Like we’re in a weakened position if we admit that we are vulnerable. A while ago, I wrote this post  about how I ...