Eye of the Wizard -- Popular Highlights!

When reading on a Kindle, you can highlight a passage to save a quote you like.  When three or more people highlight the same passage, Amazon saves it as a "Popular Highlight".

Finding these Popular Highlights can be tricky.  Amazon will sometimes display them on a book's product page--but just sometimes, and just a few of them.  Other times, you can view them on your Kindle by clicking "View Popular Highlights" (but only, it seems, the top ten highlights--some books with a hundred highlights on Amazon show only ten on Kindles).  It gets even trickier.  Some Kindle devices show highlights on a book, while another Kindle might not--even for the same book!  For example, my novel The Gods of Dream shows three Popular Highlights on Amazon, zero on my Kindle 2, and ten on a friend's Kindle Paperwhite.  Confusing and seemingly arbitrary.   Author Moses Siregar recently blogged about the issue here.

Curious to see what my readers are highlighting, I checked a few of my books on Amazon, found a scattering of Popular Highlights there, and managed to view more by purchasing the novels and viewing Popular Highlights on my Kindle.  Since Kindles display ten popular highlights at most (and this is inconsistent between devices and accounts), I'm sure I'm missing a bunch.

However, even those Popular Highlights I discovered quite amused me.  In this blog post, I'd like to share the Top Ten Popular Highlights for my fantasy novel Eye of the Wizard!  Here they are:

__________

"He tried to trip me!" Jamie said, wiping suds off her mouth.

     "He twied to k-kidnap me!" Cobweb said.

     Romy suddenly raised her head from the table.  "I like turtles!" she announced, then passed out again, banging her head against the tabletop.

__________ 

"And Neev and I can put on a magic show!" Romy said, leaping to her feet, a smile spreading across her face.  "Neev, you'll be the magician, and I'll be your sexy assistant."  She sketched an elaborate bow.  "I am, you know, an artiste."

__________

"Our prices are so low," Romy added cheerily, leaning against him, "you'll think we're mentally challenged."

__________

His face was like chiseled stone, but his eyes were haunted windows, shattered.

__________

"I don't want to hurt you," Jamie called, "but if you keep firing arrows, I'm going to cut off your head.  Okay?"

__________ 

Ignorant humans, Romy thought, sure that anyone with fiery hair, horns, and fangs is evil.

__________

Suddenly, as Dry Bones prattled on, and as everyone was getting rather bored with his speech, a flow of lava burst into the room.  The lava slammed into Dry Bones, knocking him against the wall, sizzling against him.

     "Will you villains never learn?" Neev said, stepping into the room on goat hoofs, shaking drops of lava off his hands.  "Never spend so much time explaining your plans."
_________

Awww... they gave me the third bed, all for me.  They do love me.  It made her feel all warm and ticklish inside.  Oh wait, that's not warmth and tickliness.  She stumbled toward the window and threw up some more.  Blech.  I am never drinking again.

__________

She was so beautiful, that if Dry Bones had lungs, his breath would die.  She stood not a hundred yards away, shooting arrows from her bow into targets.  She could as well have been cupid, shooting arrows of love into Dry Bones' heart--or at least, into his ribcage where his heart would once beat.  Cobweb's hair seemed woven of gossamer, cascading down her back, not a strand out of place.  With his hawklike vision, Dry Bones could see that her eyes were blue as sapphires, her ears were pointy, and golden freckles covered her small nose.  It had been years since Dry Bones had loved a woman, but Cobweb stirred all those memories in him, raising fire in their ashes.  She looked like an angel, he thought, an angel sent from heaven to cure his weary heart.

     Nice boobs, too, he thought.

__________


My god, you guys highlight the silliest things.