Bloggiesta is a yearly challenge where the blogging community gets together and works on improving their blogs. Throughout the weekend designs see a face lift, posts get cleaned up, reviews get written, or new content ideas get kicked around and it’s a lot of fun! Last time I participated I did a full site redesign putting in nearly fourteen hours of work over three days. This time I want to focus more on content. So here are some things I want to spend time on this weekend:

• Work on writing reviews!
• Write up fairy tale discussion posts.
• Work on lists to help fellow readers find awesome themed books.
• Maybe finally write up that post on must have wordpress plugins for book bloggers.
• Share some awesome reading music stations I created a while back.
• Do Mini-Challenges!
• Possibly work on improving SEO for review posts.
• Possibly tweak the CSS for my bulleted lists because gosh this looks bland.

It’s been a while since I have written anything for this blog, my health resulted in many things taking a back seat these past two months but I’m ready to get back to the grindstone and work on sharing some great book love. As long as I don’t look too closely at the sheer number of books on my Goodreads’ “to-review” shelf. Yikes!

I have been a huge fan of Charles de Lint for years. I was introduced to his work through his various short stories that he wrote for the Bordertown series. You can find some of them published in his short story collection Waifs and Strays, a book dedicated to urban fantasy stories about teens lost and on their own. He really captured my heart later when I started to explore his other work and read his book Memory and Dream, a fantastical book about an artist who can bring her paintings to life.

His newest work, coming out November 11th, has really caught my eye though. I love reading stories about dragons and they seem to be experiencing a resurgence recently. So I was psyched to hear about The Painted Boy.

The Painted Boy by Charles de Lint

Not only is it a dragon novel but it’s a non-western dragon novel. I look forward to being educated.

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Breaking the Spine.

Princess Bookie is hosting another recreate a book cover contest!

Going for another try at this. Last time I tried this with my attempt at a cover for Mockingjay I didn’t even get one vote and was out in the first round.

I think I went over the top trying to make a nice entry this time to make up for it. Try, try again, right?

Made up of… I lost count on the number of images, all vector based and royalty free – with the exception of the mermaid, which was a plain 3d rendering I colorized and spruced up a bit. For the book Forgive my Fins.

I’m participating in The Great Flow Giveaway over at The Book Lady’s Blog, to win a copy of Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation. Basically, the point was brought up that talking about menstruation is considered a bit of a taboo topic and so in order to “work” for a copy you have to enter into the dialogue about, well, your flow! So, if you are at all squeamish about this sort of thing I suggest you cut away right now, because here are some of my experiences, and a lot of tips for survival.

Princess Bookie is hosting a contest to re-design the cover of a YA book coming out in 2010. You can find out all about Princess Bookie’s Recreate a Book Cover Contest and enter yourself if you want. There is a limit of 50 entries or a deadline of March 15th. Whichever comes first.

I decided to recreate the cover for Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins. It’s the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy and is coming out this August. I have read The Hunger Games and am going to reward myself with Catching Fire as soon as I get all caught up on reviews. So, needless to say, I’m excited! I did end up spoilering myself, though, when I read the synopsis of Mockingjay to design the book cover. Still looking forward to Catching Fire in spite of it!