Restraint and Karen Marie Moning

I've been doing a lot of traveling lately and thanks to the magic of hotel wireless and ereaders, I've read the entire Karen Marie Moning Fever series in like...ten minutes. Not kidding. I had my husband pull over near a coffee shop in Cleveland so I could use their wireless to buy the last in the series. For those of you who might not have read these books and I sort of feel like I was the last one on the planet to do so - GO! Get them! you can read them all back to back without the wait all those keeners had to suffer through. There's a lot to talk about with these books and Sinead and I are going to get righteous about how good these books are very soon - but the thing that truly blew me away was Moning's restraint. Her restraint in getting the hero and heroine together - honestly, she made me pant for those moments of connection. Sinead's post about why rushing to sex isn't always satisfying - Moning's restraint and the scenes she chose - totally satisfying. She's the case maker for why it's better to prolong that tension. There was also this incredible restraint about information. Each book answered some questions and built on others, until the last book all we really truly cared about were two things: who is Mac and what is Barron's. The other stuff, good moments of holy shit, but secondary to those two big driving questions. The last book got a bit heavy with information, but for the most part every scene was an arrow pointing forward. I feel, as a writer, I want to splatter everything on the page. Everything I know - and I try to fight that, but it can still feel like I'm flailing away. Moning never seemed to flail. She wrote with precision and restraint. Great books.