Congrats to Lily, who won the copy of Strawberries for Dessert by Marie Sexton! Strawberries for Dessert is now available from Dreamspinner Press. (To promote Strawberries for Dessert, Heidi Cullinan posted a free short featuring Randy and Sam from Special Delivery and Double Blind.)

Contests

• Kristi’s looking for your tips on blocking a shawl with saw-toothed edging. Leave a comment with your tip by 11:59 pm MDT, August 6, for your chance to win a copy of her brand-new shawl pattern.

• LesleyW’s curious about your book prejudices. Leave a comment about said prejudices before August 7 for your chance to win a copy of The Vampire Shrink by Lynda Hilburn.

• Devyn Quinn’s giving away a copy of her new paranormal romance, Siren’s Call (Dark Tides), to a commenter on each of the three posts she made during her visit to Desert Island Keepers. Leave your comments by midnight, August 7, to enter.

• The Smart Bitches are giving away five ARCs of Jennifer Crusie’s forthcoming romance, Maybe This Time. Comment by August 8 for your chance to win.

• Jessica of ReadReactReview is celebrating her blogiversary with a contest. Comment by midnight EDT, August 8, for your chance to pick any two of the paper, in-print books she has reviewed.

• Bronwyn Green’s over at Fang-tastic Books, sharing what she loves about Michigan and giving away two of her ebooks! Winners will be announced on August 11.

• Janna’s on vacation, but she’s throwing a contest party at her blog while she’s gone! Each guest blogger post that you comment on between August 2 and 20 gets you an entry in the contest and a chance to win one of the six great prizes.

• EH is having a contest for readers outside of the US and Canada. Leave a comment by August 31 stating which of the gift packs you’d like to win.

Bookity

• New releases: Lily (m/m romance), Literary Escapism (UF/PNR; includes interviews, contests, & news), Katiebabs (forthcoming releases whose covers intrigued her), Renee (romances that she’s looking forward to), and Elisa (GLBT releases for July).

• Jessica’s Monday Morning Stepback is always good reading. And check out her review of the new book True Blood and Philosophy.

• Don’t miss Dear Author’s news posts.

• If you’re an author who read the article in the August issue of Romance Writer’s Report about online promotion and thought those were great ideas, Dear Author points out the problems with two of the ideas and suggests alternatives.

• Lifehacker has a useful post on how to set up your writing as a real business.

• The climbing library is gorgeous and very clever. I wonder if my condo association would notice me adding one…

• I’d like to see this tower made entirely of books.

• Awful Library Books finds some doozies that are still in circulation, like this 1957 edition of The First Book of Boys’ Cooking – they even included the recipe for making raw carrot sticks!

• You might be a reader if…

• Check out the Misadventure that Kris found! I added another example in the comments. Be warned that some of the other links in the comments are very NSFW.

Ebookity

• The Attorney Generals in Texas and Connecticut are investigating the potentially anticompetitive nature of the agency ebook pricing scheme.

• Good article from TeleRead on the need for standard ebook formats.

• Some Kindle humor.

Make, Learn, Do, Think

• Print and fold all sorts of Dr. Who characters and icons.

• Make New Orleans-style iced coffee to drink at home.

• What Americans eat and drink in a year…

• Did you know that a half hour of exercise can increase your creativity for hours after?

• Hands-only CPR appears to work as well as mouth-to-mouth CPR.

• Iams has expanded its recall of certain dry Iams and Eukanuba brand pet foods due to possible salmonella contamination.

• As someone who’s been working in telecom for over 14 years, I found this look into AT&T’s disaster recovery centers fascinating.

• Curious where email spam comes from? Take a look at the real-time Google map.

• Yes! Vindication for my years and years and years of not making my bed. 🙂

• And vindication for being a twitchy, doodling meeting attendee!

• Good news! Sleeping in on the weekend may actually help you catch up on missed sleep during the week!

• Oh, clever – use old yogurt container lids to catch drips as you paint.

• A camera bean bag can provide an inexpensive and portable stable base for your camera. You could also make a larger bean bag, combine it with an acrylic cookbook holder, and have your very own beanbag bookstand.

• If you blog and you repost articles from other sources, be aware that companies are trolling for such use and slapping bloggers with $75,000 copyright violation fines.

• Trying to increase your geek cred? Maybe shoes with keyboards printed on the soles will do the trick….

• I really like this nautical rope bracelet. I wonder if I could find black nautical rope to make one for myself?

• Make your own zippered case for a laptop or other electronic device.

• If you cross stitch and you’re a Mythbusters fan, you must check out the pattern for this famous quote from Adam Savage: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”

• You know you want to knit duck feet baby socks…

Huh

• You will not catch me knitting any of these. Some of the comments are pretty funny, too. (Um, thanks??, MamaTulip!)

• If that thing’s the future of communication…

• Kitty-shaped lipstick?

• Not sure why anyone would buy a $500 cat dress.

• Whoops – how closely have you looked at the shapes of the pieces of your puzzles?!

• Can’t say that I recommend throwing a brick into your washing machine.

• If you’ve always wanted to be able to punch a hole through the cap of a beer bottle and drink your beer through a straw (and you aren’t worried about the little metal disk now floating in your beer), you’ll love the BottleBop Bottle Cap Punch.

• July was National Ice Cream Month in the US. Consumerist listed ten bizarre ice cream flavors that you might want to try… or not. No, no haggis ice cream for me, thanks!

Cool

• Star Wars cupcakes!

• Kitty wall decals.

• Made me smile.

• Cute yarn bomb.

• 15,000 fireworks going off at once.

• Maybe the photographer in your life needs a Canon lens coffee mug?

Linkity Peeps

• Kristi’s weekly list of craft, photography, food, and humor links.

• KB’s weekly WTFery post. (NSFW)

• Marsha’s links to various knitting patterns for gloves and fingerless mitts.

LOL

• CJ and I achieved a tiny bit of notoriety from our post at Tor.com about best and worst job prospects in the urban fantasy economy. 🙂

• Some knitting humor from Indexed.

• If you’ve ever had your lunch vanish from the fridge at work…

• I would hope that every university anywhere would read this xkcd and think carefully about its website… (Make sure you hover your mouse over the comic for additional text!)

• Discover the science behind why vampires sparkle! (Via Smart Bitches)

• Is it bad that I’d like to modify my car to do this?! And while I wouldn’t necessarily want to modify my car to do this, it’s pretty clever. (Thanks, Jeanne!)

• If you’ve ever wondered how to give your opossum a pedicure, wonder no more! (Thanks, Jase!)

• Kitties and cat toys…

• Some very unhappy wet kitties… (Thanks, MamaTulip!)

• And you know better than to leave your kitties in direct sunlight, right?

• Learn how to relax like a kitteh!

• Oh oh.

• Oh oh.

• This explains a lot, actually.

• Basement Cat is very adaptable.

Teh Cute

• Just be warned that you might not make it out alive from the Daily Squee…

• Grrr… and stuff.

• Kitten! Very, very sleepy kitten! Tabbies! Melly! Kitten and the Bean. Floofy kittens! Silly kittens! Hungry kitten! Kittens! Kittens! Baby flamingo!

Reading Update
See what happens when I read long books instead of shorts?! I have a very short Reading Update. 🙂
Brushback (Evan Austin Mysteries, Book 1) by Jamie Scofield. ebook. Excellent m/m mystery about a Seattle private investigator hired to find an about-to-be heir by the mother who abandoned the boy and his father years ago. However, things aren’t quite as straightforward as that. 🙂 So… are there going to be any other books in the series?! This seems to be the only book from the press and the only book by this author… and no updates since the June 2009 release.
Double Blind (Special Delivery, Book 2) by Heidi Cullinan. ebook. Excellent m/m romance about a gambler who picks up and inadvertently saves a guy who just lost his last five dollars at roulette and isn’t sure what he has left to live for.
Loving Edits by Mickie B. Ashling. ebook. Very good m/m romance about a rich and prestigious editor, the writer/lover he dumped years ago, and the writer’s beloved and devoted boyfriend. The beginning might be tough to get through, because none of the three are shown in a particularly good light, but the payout is more than worth it (probably because of it)! I’m always hesitant to read menage, because so few authors have convinced me that it would work emotionally for everyone involved, but I can definitely add Mickie B. Ashling to my list of authors who can make it work.
Priority One by Stephani Hecht. ebook short. Good short m/m romance about a new paramedic, young and inexperienced in more ways than one, who’s living with his overprotective brother while trying to recover from a traumatic incident.
Tinsel and Frost by Eden Winters. ebook short. Sweet short holiday m/m romance about a former ballet dancer who’s now a stripper after a career-ending accident.
The Distance Between Us by L.A. Witt. ebook. Decent m/m romance that, unfortunately, drove me completely nuts more than once or twice, or I would’ve rated it higher. It’s about two guys who have been together for ten years and finally broke up recently. However, they’re still living together because of the housing market – they can’t afford to sell their house and they can’t afford to pay rent somewhere else and pay the mortgage on the house. They get a very hot roommate and then both get sexually involved with him. I wanted to slap the two main characters. Many, many times.The sex-to-story ratio was seriously skewed. And this wasn’t one of the menage books that worked for me. All of this is a shame, because I really like L.A. Witt’s writing.
So Much More Than Naked (Books 1 & 2) by D.J. Manly. ebooks. Um. These m/m romances were codependent trainwrecks of pseudo-bdsm, the two main characters were both TSTL, and I only kept reading out of sick fascination for how bad it could get.

“Well, ok, I am less bored now that Mom finally opened the windows again.” -Mayhem