As promised it is my pleasure to bring to you the very fun photo entries for the Bleeding Dusk photo contest. For those of you playing at home, the contest was to promote first week book sales for the third book in Colleen Gleason’s Gardella Vampire Chronicles Series, The Bleeding Dusk. Participants were asked to purchase the book during the week of February 5th-11th, photograph themselves and their book, or just the book, as ‘proof of purchase’, and send it in to me by midnight February 12th.

The winner was to be chosen at random as creativity was not a prerequisite. However Colleen Gleason suggested that we also award a creativity prize.

And so in no particular order whatsoever, here are your entries, followed by the announcement of the winners and a special prize for everyone reading this post!

Continue reading The Bleeding Photographs →

One of my favorite Science Fiction related sites to visit on a daily basis is SF Signal. JP Frantz and John DeNardo, with a small host of ‘irregulars’, host a site that includes book and film reviews as well as providing multiple daily links to science fiction related happenings around the world wide web. I should warn you, when dropping in on their site one runs the risk of getting lost for hours in the kind of minutiae that causes genre fans to get their geek on.

A fairly new feature to their website is the weekly Mind Meld, described thus:

“In this series of posts, we pose a single question to a slice of the sf/f community and, depending on the question, other folks as well. The idea is similar to the Brain Parade posts that used to appear on the long-defunct Meme Therapy blog. What we hope to get is an interesting cross-section of views and opinions that open a particular topic up for discussion. We’d love to hear what you think!”

What has resulted is a weekly topic in which a variety of science fiction authors, editors, etc. post their two cents worth regarding a science fiction related topic. The results have been fascinating every week and it is one of the features I most look forward to.

Each week they also include a member or members of the blogging community in the discussion.

Continue reading Come Meld With Me →

I have been noticeably absent from posting and blog visiting the past few days due a little home construction project. While not quite as precarious as the work pictured above, it was harrowing in its own special way.

Our one and only working bathroom has had a leaky tub for some time now. It is an old house and needed to be replaced. My dad traveled down from Nebraska on Friday to do the repairs, with me along as ‘unskilled labor’.

I forgot to take a full ‘before’ picture, but this gives the basics.

You can see the window, the place we tore out the old tub, tile and sheet rock, and the old flooring. After 5 days of hard labor…. voila!!!!

Continue reading From Controlled Chaos Springs Beauty →

(Click on image for larger wallpaper)

…to make a certain Venator-turned-Authoress very, very happy.

And how can you do that, you might ask?

Continue reading It’s Not Too Late… →