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Congrats to Laura, who won Clear Water by Amy Lane! Clear Water is being released today by Dreamspinner Press.

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Brace yourselves. Monday is a holiday in the US, so there won’t be a Misadventure. Surely there’s a Misadventure or two that you might’ve missed and could catch up on instead? 🙂

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Contests

• Blodeuedd’s giving away winner’s choice of an ebook copy of Crux, Deadlock, or Crossroads by Moira Rogers. Contest closes September 5.

• ModernCat’s giving away three steamy 6 packs/9 Lives 2012 calendars. Comment before September 6 for your chance to win.

• Blodeuedd’s giving away two copies of The Lady of the Storms by Kathryn Kennedy. Contest closes September 7. US & Canada.

• Fiction Vixen is celebrating her two-year blogiversary by giving away a Kindle loaded with ebooks! Contest closes September 7.

• Blodeuedd’s giving away a copy of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star by Heather Lynn Rigaud. Contest closes September 12. US & Canada.

Bookity

• New releases and more: Elisa Rolle (LGBT), Tor.com (YA paranormal, UF/PNR/horror, scifi, fantasy), AAR (romance audiobooks), and Book Lovers Inc (a little of everything).

• Author and publisher news from Dear Author.

• Haruki Murakami on being a novelist.

• Kassa on “should read” versus “want to read” books.

• Vacuous Minx on the gay-for-you/out-for-you trope in m/m romance.

• The Lambda Literary Foundation changes its award rules again.

• Neil Gaiman on google and librarians. (via Neil Gaiman’s Journal)

• Woe! (Thanks, Juni!)

• Some Dalek/book humor.

• Turn an old action figure into a bookend.

• Make book covers from stretchy fabric.

Ebookity

• Stephani Hecht has a free Lost Shifters-related short story, Hey, There’s Fur in My Wedding Cake, available for download.

• Kaje Harper has a short m/m-themed young adult story, Intervention, that you can read free on her website.

• A children’s picture ebook from David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity” was briefly available free… but has been taken down due to copyright issues.

• Interesting post about not being able to resell ebooks from Confessions of a Community College Dean. (I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s a good discussion to have.) (Thanks, CursingMama!)

• Amazon’s beta testing a way that you can ask authors questions from within their books as you read. Authors, I’m curious what you think about this. 🙂

• BookHunch (still beta) will be a crowd-sourced book review site.

Do, Make, Learn, Think

• Are you familiar with FEMA’s Waffle House disaster index? (Strangely, this is not from The Onion.)

• If you’re looking for a used car, beware of cars damaged by Hurricane Irene, even if you don’t live near the East Coast.

• Before and after Hurricane Irene photos…

• iPad tips and tricks.

• Make a retractable dock for keeping your iPad safe in the kitchen.

• Keyboard shortcuts all computer users should know. I’d add CTRL-Z (undo) and CTRL-Y (redo). CTRL-Z is very handy when you’ve just moved or deleted something inadvertently. 🙂

• Use a binder clip to keep your headphones from tangling.

• Turn a milk jug into a lightbox for photographing small objects. Or build a larger tabletop softbox.

• There’s a scientific reason why images of animals are so popular on the internets.

• New research suggests that the gender gap in spatial reasoning is not genetic, but cultural.

• Chocolate might be good for your heart!

Gluten-Free

• Easy Eats is a new online gluten-free magazine. You can get the first issue free by going to the subscription page and selecting the special introductory offer ($0) of one free issue.

• Thomas Keller is introducing a high-end gluten-free flour, which will be available later this month and supposedly can be used as a cup-for-cup substitution with gluten-containing flours. (Unfortunately, it contains milk powder, so is not lactose-free.)

• Gluten-free marshmallow peach berry pie. (via The Kitchn)

Cookity

• Twelve chocolate cookie recipes. (via The Kitchn)

• Biscuits with chocolate gravy?! (via The Kitchn)

• Weird ice cream from around the world. (via Consumerist)

• Fifteen sweet peanut butter dessert recipes.

• Fifteen recipes using late summer vegetables.

Crafty

• Crochet a slice of rainbow cake.

• Or maybe some pears.

• Get garter stitch borders to lay flat.

• Needle-felt Kermit the Frog. (via CRAFT)

Cool

• Teeny tiny TARDIS. (via CRAFT)

• Baby food jar LEGO minifig heads!

• If Doctor Who was cast by the Muppets…

• Steampunk ships. (Thanks, Bron!)

• Steampunk Darth Vader.

• Gorgeous geeky cakes.

• Owl post necklace.

• Typewriter sculpture.

• The Survival Strap bracelet.

• “Blackboard” lunch bag.

• Yarn-bombed NYC bridge.

• Moon illusions. (Thanks, Jeanne!)

• Poor Clark. Bruce won’t take his calls…

• Cat, food, and cool linkity from MrsPao.

• Clever waste-free Christmas cookie cutter.

Cool or Wha…?

• Self-portrait and pseudo-3D quilts.

• Keyboard Cat quilt…

• Black velvet paintings for geeks. (via CRAFT)

• Yarn brain earrings.

• LEGO Nyan Cat.

• Hello Kitty duct tape.

• Zombie’s Day Out short film.

• Haunted dollhouse.

Wha…?

• Gollum wedding cake. (via The Mary Sue)

• Taxing prostitutes in Bonn, Germany, via parking meter… (Thanks, Kim!)

• Creepy candle girl. (via Gizmodo)

• Model motorcycle made from… lobster shells.

• Giant ear iPhone case.

• Darth Vader iPhone case.

LOL

• G-Male: If Google Was Your Boyfriend… funny, yet creepy.

• English doesn’t borrow from other languages… (Thanks, Jase!)

• Best obnoxious responses to misspellings on Facebook. (Thanks, Lorette!)

• Knitting and the Internet… from 1997.

• Norse crisis flowchart. (via The Mary Sue)

• Some dark hurricane humor from xkcd. (Make sure you hover your mouse pointer over the comic for additional text.)

• Best or worst hurricane shopper ever?

• Hurricane Irene autocorrect fails.

• Hmm. He has a point.

• Darth Vader cake wrecks.

• Do you know how to tie a tie with the Lovecraft knot?

• “A 100% Improvement in The Matrix Reloaded.”

• What Schrodinger didn’t know…

• How kittehs pick the most inconvenient place to stand.

• Fuzzy Potter, the kitten wizard.

• Force cuddling your cats.

• Be very suspicious…

Teh Cute

• Kitten and the Bean! Baby cheetah! Kittens! Panda and baby! Kitten! Baby oncilla (seriously, you will squee out loud)! Kittens! Hedgie! Kittens! Baby jaguar! Kittens! Dall sheep lamb! Kitten! Ferret! Baby ring-tailed coatis! Baby zebra! Bunny! Cat and fresh kitten! Tiger! Panda and baby! Falcon! Baby lion! Baby cheetahs!

Reading Update
Barging In by Josephine Myles. ebook ARC. Excellent m/m romance about a somewhat slutty travel writer who’s rented a narrowboat for a week so he can write about and photograph life on the canals. When he (literally) runs into a hunky, prickly boater who takes an instant dislike to him, things get a lot more interesting… for both of them. This was a story that built slowly, but never felt like it. And make sure you have your hankies handy! Highly recommended. Available September 20.
Shattered Secrets (In the Shadow of the Wolf #1) by Diane Adams & RJ Scott. ebook. Very good m/m paranormal romantic suspense about a wolf shifter who hooks up with a cop who doesn’t realize he’s hooking up with a shifter… and isn’t pleased when he does realize. But a shifter-related case throws them together again and things get complicated. So… when’s the next book coming out? 🙂
The Usual Apocalypse (The Society #2) by Christine Price. ebook ARC. Very good paranormal m/m romantic suspense about an agent who works for a paranormal investigation organization and is very good at his job because people can’t lie to him. Usually. When he takes over an internal affairs investigation because the previous investigator and her husband were found murdered in their beds, he has no idea that his life is about to change irrevocably in multiple ways. I didn’t realize that there was a previous book (In Darkness Bound). I see some reviewers have complained that it wasn’t a romance – rest assured that this most definitely was. Available September 26.
Prep Work by P.D. Singer. ebook short. Very good short m/m romance about a somewhat disgraced celebrity chef who discovers that the intriguing chef at the pub where he’s having dinner is a fan.
For the Attention Of (Pushing the Envelope #1) by Kim Dare. ebook short. Good kinky short m/m romance about a dom who receives a very intriguing and mysterious invitation, which he can’t resist.
Pop, Pop, Snap! by Winnie Jerome. ebook short. Good kinky short m/m story about a cashier at an amusement park who runs into the guy he broke up with to date a guy who turned out to be a jerk.
A Prideless Man (Supernatural Mates #3) by Amber Kell. ebook. Pretty good paranormal m/m romance about a guy with rheumatoid arthritis who moves to the shifter town because he’s always enjoyed being around shifters… and discovers that most of what he thought he knew about himself is wrong.
Riddle of the Sands (Fathom’s Five #2) by Geoffrey Knight. ebook. Pretty good action adventure about a group of gay adventurers rushing against time both to find an antidote to a rare poison with which one of their group has been injected and to find a lost Egyptian pyramid. Only recommended if you can suspend disbelief for a plot more over-the-top than anything from an Indiana Jones movie.
The Curse of the Dragon God (Fathom’s Five #3) by Geoffrey Knight. ebook. Ok action adventure in which our group of gay adventurers is all over the place, trying to rescue their beloved Professor and prevent a bomb from destroying Beijing. I know that this series is deliberately over-the-top, but sometimes it works, and sometimes… not so much. Particularly if you have people arriving instantly in San Francisco from Krakow and the Caribbean. But hey, you might enjoy this if you don’t mind hearing bad porn music playing in your head during the sex scenes.
Danny’s Boy by Kate Aaron. ebook short. Ok short m/m romance about a guy who can’t find work after university, so returns to the small town where he grew up and runs into his homophobic former best friend. While I quite liked the story, the pronoun confusion was extreme and frustrating.

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“I am a Panther Princess Shark, swimming through the living room, hunting my prey!” -Mayhem