Category: Event

Bloggiesta To Do List: Winter 2016

I’m very excited to be participating in a Bloggiesta event for the first time! For those who don’t know, Bloggiesta is blogging marathon in which a bunch of bloggers band together to challenge and support each other as we each work on improving our blogs. This coming weekend (Saturday the 16th and Sunday the 17th) is the yearly winter mini Bloggiesta! You can find out more at the Bloggiesta website.

Bloggiesta-Mini 16

On New Year’s Day, I posed a list of broad goals I’d like to accomplish with this blog over the coming year. But today I’d like to share my to do list of concrete tasks to accomplish this weekend in order to get going down the right path.

To Do List:
  • Leave at least 5 comments on posts by other bloggers
  • Participate in the Bloggiesta twitter chat on Sunday at 2pm Eastern
  • Do a Bloggiesta mini challenge
  • Post reviews on Goodreads and Amazon with links back to the blog
  • Sort through my genre categories
  • Plan out my next 3-5 posts
  • Evaluate my sidebar, and rearrange if necessary

Are you participating in Bloggiesta? Have you done it in the past? Let me know in the comments!

All Hallow’s Read: Neil Gaiman’s Halloween Tradition (Plus a Giveaway!)

Several years ago, one of gothdom’s most reverend authors decided to start a new Halloween tradition. We love books. We love Halloween. Why not combine them? Thus, Neil Gaiman created All Hallow’s Read. Celebrating All Hallow’s Read is simple—just give someone a scary book either on Halloween or during the week leading up to the holiday. To learn more about the tradition and its origins, check out the All Hallow’s Read website. Not sure what books to give? Lists of suggestions abound, but below are some of my favorite spooky stories to share with family, friends, or strangers of all ages.

Also, in the spirit of this tradition, I’ll be giving away a spooky book myself! Read through to the bottom to find out how you can enter to win the horror/humor collection Blood Lite II: Overbite.

Continue reading All Hallow’s Read: Neil Gaiman’s Halloween Tradition (Plus a Giveaway!)

Death-tastic Book Signing with Caitlin Doughty

IMG_8274Last week, I got to hear author and revolutionary mortician Caitlin Doughty speak at the Strand as she promoted the paperback release of her New York Times best-selling memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons From the Crematory. My review of Smoke was one of my very first blog posts here on this site back in July, and I’ve been a huge fan of Caitlin for several years. Needless to say, I was delighted to have the opportunity to finally meet her and get my advanced reader’s copy of the book signed. But before she signed any books, Caitlin addressed the modest crowd that was gathered in the Strand’s rare books floor to discuss her work in the death industry and answer any questions we might have about our own mortality. Her talk was both fun and informative, as you might expect from an alternative mortician-cum-Youtube star, and I’ve written up some of the highlights to share with you below: Continue reading Death-tastic Book Signing with Caitlin Doughty