1. ‘Sup Saturday gift certificate Contest Winner:

What follows is the list of 26 entrants, in the order they commented. Using Random.org, I got the number 18, which is…

Janice, Wendy, Laura, Magdalen, Meri, Kristie(j), Katiebabs, Amy, Keira, Book Vixen, Janine, Limecello, Animejune, Heidenkind, Shery Thomas, JanetW, Nicola O., Carolyn Crane, Maili, Magdalen, Maered, Renee, Tumperkin, Rigmarole, Kate, Ann F.

Congratulations, Carolyn! Let me know what bookstore and what email. Send me an email at jessica@racyromancereviews.com

2. Links of Interest

Another good post from Sparky on why we can’t always have a productive conversation.

I also liked this post by Ilona Andrews on family and UF, paranormal and mystery books.

And Tumperkin is saying interesting things about a book I must read, Lavyrle Spencer’s Morning Glory.

Marg of Reading Adventures reports on a Library Reading Challenge.

And here’s an Audiobook Challenge for 2010 from Royal Reviews.

Royal Reviews is a new to me blog, coming up on its 3rd anniversary reviewing romance, nonfiction, fantasy and historical. It’s clearly very popular and well trafficked, a reminder to me that my corner of the book blogging universe is just that, a corner. This one has short reviews by a fairly large cast of contributors who all have pseudonyms. It hosts a lot of contests and challenges.

Another blog, The Season, is new to me as well. I see that Katiebabs is blogging for it, and it seems to be the brainchild of a Kensington romance author named Beverley Kendall. It has fora, a newsletter, and lots and lots of contests, including a recent pitch contest. It’s a very ambitious site, which wears its growth goals on its sleeve, by posting its stats and advertising rates. I could not find an About page or archives to tell how old it is, but this one seems to be a positive promotional sort of thing like Romance Buy The Book.

Another new to me group blog, The Teflon Panties, with reviews and contests. They actually did a “1/2 chapter in” DNF review of JR Ward’s Covet, which I thought was kind of brave.

I personally tend to be attracted more to solo blogs, where I feel like I am interacting with identifiable individuals, but I thought these might interest others.

3. Cyberstalking your fellow bloggers

Have you ever Googled a blogger? I totally have, and I feel it’s not always ok. Usually, I am just trying to see where else someone blogs, if they have a MySpace, or if they have lists on Amazon that I can glom. But if you romance blog under your real full name, I may just find out where you went to high school or where you work without trying to. I haven’t found out much about any of you, by the way (ok, a grand larceny rap, a Cool Whip fetish, and a very bad mid nineties hairdo, but that’s it!) (kidding!), and usually quickly turn from bloggers to old boyfriends, which better suit the typically narcissistic flavor of my mindless web crawling. Sometimes if I get a new commenter here, I will Google them to see what their “online” personality is like, to better assess a comment that seems harsh or trollish, for example. Other times, I might Google the name of a commenter on another site who strikes me as interesting in some way. Sometimes I wonder if anyone Googles me, but then I think, “who the hell cares what I do when I’m not here?”. Then I consider at my own occasional stalkerish ways and reassess those odds…

4. Pity Party

I first heard of that expression when I read the 2006 Vanity Fair interview with Jennifer Aniston where she “opened up” about the demise of her marriage to Brad Pitt. Aniston, normally the most boring interviewee on the planet, actually said something memorable: that she threw herself a “pity party”. I thought this was such a great idea that I host them for myself whenever possible. I’m about to have one in this here post, so bail now if you don’t like the sound of that.

I’m reliably at my lowest ebb, in terms of energy, this week of the year. So many things, good and bad, one after the other, happen in December — the end of term, birthdays, holidays, etc, etc.. I love the kids’ birthdays (and for those of you counting, yeah, spring break is a fertile time for the Racy family) but it’s always kind of bittersweet. I’m proud and happy for them, but I get gripped at moments by a parental panic: time is moving, they are getting older [insert inchoate fear] … Well, suffice to say the birthdays are always a bit of an emotional time for me.

I don’t talk much about my second job at a hospital, but it’s fairly stressful at times. As part of this work, I sometimes sit in an ICU conference room with families of critically ill patients and their doctors, nurses, social workers, and clergy. And we try to figure out what to do. These meetings can last one, two, three hours, without a break. We go through boxes of tissues. Unlike most of the other people in the room, I usually haven’t been involved in the patient’s care up to this point. This is a virtue when it comes to mediating and staying calm, but it creates an odd emotional dissonance that I haven’t found a good way yet to deal with. It’s a privilege to share those intense moments with families and the care team, all of whom are deeply invested in the patient, but it can be very draining, and, boy, has it been draining lately.

Also, my hospice friend (this is volunteer work, for a different organization), whom I have known for two years, has just died. I had spent my last afternoon with him on Thanksgiving day. A week later, I was dutifully filling out the requisite paperwork at 6:00am before my family got out of bed. I am supposed to record narratives of each visit, but I had put off the final week of entries. I sat at the kitchen table writing descriptions of my 7th to last visit, my 6th to last, my 5th to last, and so on. It was stupid to try to do all of them at once. By the time I got to the Thanksgiving visit, writing about my final moments with him, I was sobbing. This volunteer work is important to me, but it also creates emotions that are hard to discharge or deposit.

This is a downer, but it’s true: I’m exhausted, depleted, constantly on the edge of tears or snappishness, and trudging through the days to get to the end of the semester. I read for a lot of different reasons, but at the moment, reading is my chosen form of therapeutic escape and catharsis.

If you write books, thank you, because I really need them right now.

Related posts:

  1. Winner of the Blogversary contest — Christine I had 34 entrants to the contest and the Winner was the 13th entrant — Christine from The Happily Ever...
  2. Contest Winner The winner of the “Winner’s Choice” contest is Violet, who chose Seduce Me At Sunrise. Violet, please send me your...
  3. Contest Winner: MAERED I finally got around to typing everyone’s name in and generating a random list of entrants at Random.org. The winner...
  4. Monday Morning Stepback The Weekly Links, Opinion, and Inanity Post 1. Links of Interest: Sandy of AAR was interviewed about vampire romance for...
  5. The Monday Morning Stepback I had so much fun writing my “this n that” post last week, that I’ve decided to make it a...
  6. Monday Morning Stepback –Updated with call for Winsor Lists!! UPDATE: On October 16, in honor of the birthdate of Kathleen Winsor, author of Forever Amber, please consider posting your...