Tis the season

For book give aways!

YA Highway is giving away a number of great books!

From the blog:

Books to be won include:

GRACELING by Kristin Cashore

JELLICOE ROAD by Melina Marchetta

HOW I LIVE NOW by Meg Rosoff

CRACKED UP TO BE by Courtney Summers

BEAUTIFUL CREATURES by Kami Garcia

SHIVER by Maggie Stiefvater

WONDROUS STRANGE by Lesley Livingston

Our first place winner gets a choice of bookcases (up to $40 value) from CSNstores.com and his/her choice of FOUR of our selected favorite YA books!

Our second place winner will receive the remaining THREE books from our selected favorite YAs!

http://yahighway.blogspot.com/2009/12/one-million-followers.html

Go to the link and enter for your chance to win. You can get at least one entry just by following the blog. You only have until December 17th to take advantage of this great offer!

Frostbite- A Vampire Academy Novel

Product Details Reading level: Young Adult Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Razorbill; First Edition edition (April 10, 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 1595141758 ISBN-13: 978-1595141750

Frostbite is the second book in the Vampire Academy series. In this book, we get a farther look into the challenging life of dhampir, and future guardian, Rose Hathaway. Rose is impulsive, crude and quick tempered, but her training sessions with Guardian Dimitri Belikov have started to rub off on her. Rose is becoming more responsible and she's finally starting to see that what he's been teaching her are valuable life lessons. Lessons that she will have to learn if she wants to graduate from the academy and be her best friend, Lissa Dragomir's guardian.

Rose has more than her attitude to worry her: she can't get Dimitri out of her head, even though he may be falling for someone else, she can't stop slipping into Lissa's mind at intense, personal moments and to top it all off, her mother is in town. But after a brutal attack on Moroi royals by the immortal vampires, Strigoi, Rose finds her problems to be less than important. After the disappearance of three of her peers, Rose has to test her strengths as a guardian and a friend.

In the first book, it took my a while to get in to all the new mythology-- I'm a stickler for tradition--but halfway through the first Vampire Academy Novel, I was hooked. I've bought all four books in the series and I'm impatiently waiting on the mail today so I can get reading #3, SHADOW KISS.

This is a great series for anyone who enjoys a little romance, adventure and vampires!

Another great contest for ya!

Not by me though. I haven't gotten into that yet. Maybe someday :)

Megan Crewe, author of GIVE UP THE GHOST is giving away two sets of prizes.

Prize #1: Books!

Fortune’s Folly by Deva Fagan, which combines fairy tale motifs with themes of storyteling, and fashion!

Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston, revealing a magical side of Central Park and a young woman’s love for theater.

Lament by Maggie Stiefvater, full of faeries and music and difficult choices.

Prize #2: A three-chapter critique of a novel manuscript. Best for young adult speculative fiction (fantasy, paranormal, science fiction),

Go to her blog for more details, and check out her video trailer for GIVE UP THE GHOST!

http://www.megancrewe.com/blog/?p=635

Happy Holidays!

We are a multi-cultural family and so the holiday tree signifies a number of things for us. My husband is of Russian/Jewish heritage. In his former home country, they celebrate the New Year much like the Christian American Christmas, with a tree and gift-giving. My heritage is extremely diverse, but I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, an area heavily influenced by the German/Dutch culture and a large part of my ancestry stems from those people.

We are not religious (that does not mean we are atheist either) so I suppose our holiday celebrations are somewhat secular, but it's what we do. We celebrate Christmas (I know, how dare we partake in a celebration that we are not religiously involved in! *cough* Saturnalia *cough*) and we celebrate the New Year and we celebrate the Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah. We leave our tree up until January 13th. It's usually falling apart by then, but we keep him, in honor of the old Russian New Year. Hanukkah starts at sundown on the 11th this year so I'll be sure to post Menorah pictures, but until then, this is our tree!

As a child, my sister, my mother and I would ride horseback out to the family Christmas tree field, and pick and cut our own tree and drag it back behind the horses. Living in NYC makes it a bit difficult to continue that tradition, so instead I take my kids down to the parking lot by the mall each year and we pick out and buy a tree there.

It's much more beautiful in person, of course, but we don't go all out with tinsel and ribbons and bows. I prefer it's more simple beauty :)

I won!

Remember that super awesome contest I posted that was for writers? I actually won, by luck-of-the-draw, a first chapter critique from the lovely Angela Ackerman of The Bookshelf Muse! Woot! I've gotten some excellent feedback on this story from my crit partners and trusted beta readers, and I'm sure anything Ms. Ackerman can offer will help me make it that much better. If you're a writer and you haven't yet seen Angela Ackerman's emotion thesaurus, check it out! http://thebookshelfmuse.blogspot.com/

Win a SIGNED copy of TWILIGHT!

Can a contest get much cooler? Enter for your chance to win an actual signed copy of TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer!

http://ramblingsofawannabescribe.blogspot.com/2009/12/epic-contest-win-signed-copy-of.html

Turkey Day!

I apologize for having not posted in a few days. Busy with the holidays, you know. I just wanted to stop by here and say that I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I spent mine with my family, including my mother and father and one of my sisters and her family. I had a total of ten adults and my two children over for dinner. I cooked (my first Thanksgiving) and thankfully, everything turned out perfect. Couldn't have asked for a better day. Of course, I would have enjoyed it more had I not come down with a cold that night...

How was your holiday? Anybody get the Christmas tree up yet? My mom and the kids and I bought ours that Friday and had it up in front of the window by Saturday morning! I'll get some pictures here soon.