I got a nifty press release yesterday and wanted to pass it on to you folks:

MMO Portal Launches the Sale of MMO Calendar 2008 to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Wichita, KS - November 15, 2007
- MMO Portal is proud to announce that the 2nd annual MMO Calendar is now on sale! MMO Calendar is an annual, non-profit fund-raiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. With the help of some wonderful MMO developers we have put together another one-of-a-kind calendar featuring original artwork from some of your favorite MMO’s. MMO Calendar 2008 includes:

Age of Conan
Dark Age of Camelot
Dungeons & Dragons Online
Eve Online
EverQuest
EverQuest II
Guild Wars
Lord of the Rings Online
Pirates of the Burning Sea
Star Wars Galaxies
Stargate Worlds
Warhammer Online
World of Warcraft
As a special thank you to everyone that purchases a calendar this year we’ve also been given a bag full of prizes to give away! Upon placing your order you will be entered to win 1 of 10 prizes for each game!

List of Prizes

Age of Conan — Beta Key
Dark Age of Camelot — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Dungeons & Dragons Online — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Eve Online — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
EverQuest — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
EverQuest II — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Guild Wars — Copy of Guild Wars: Platinum
Lord of the Rings Online — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Pirates of the Burning Sea — Beta Key
Star Wars Galaxies — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
Stargate Worlds — Beta Key
Warhammer Online — Beta Key
World of Warcraft — 1 Month of Free Game-Time
* 10 of each prize will be given away randomly per game. Odds of winning are solely dependant on the number of buyers.

Keep in mind though… even if you don’t win a prize in one of the drawings you still win. As always, 100% of the proceeds of the sale of MMO Calendar go directly to the amazing people at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, helping them in the fight for children’s lives. Is there a more noble cause anywhere?

Express your love for MMO’s and children all at once! This year’s calendar is only on sale through November 25th, so order yours today!

So, visit MMO Portal, pick up a calendar, support St. Jude’s, and get a chance at prizes!

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

Today’s question comes from Conspiracy-Girl:
I’m still relatively new to this meme so I’m not sure if this has been asked yet, but I’m curious how many of us write notes in our books. Are you a Footprint Leaver or a Preservationist?

I’ve been both over the years, but overall I’d say I’m a preservationist. I’ve had my spates of underlining or highlighting non-fiction books, usually a habit brought on by taking classes, but I’ve always returned to my habits of leaving books relatively untouched, with at most a dog-ear or two that I smooth out after I’m done writing my review. That way, after all, if I decide I don’t want to keep the book, I can donate it to the library when I’m done. Cookbooks, however, I absolutely write in. I put a rating on recipes as to how good the results were, and I note any changes to the recipe.

Yesterday’s book review was the delicious Hot Drinks by Mary Lou and Robert J. Heiss. I’m making progress in The Gift of Rain; it’s somewhat slow, but has definitely caught my interest, so even my limited attention span can hang on for the ride! Last night we made cranberry-walnut scones as our first recipe from The Pastry Queen Christmas, and they were awesome.

We have some a designs up at the shops, one that we’d originally intended to be infant wear, until a clever teenager pointed out that it would work for just about anyone:

Someday I’ll use words
to express my extreme
dissatisfaction with the
current situation.
Meanwhile allow me
to scream.

I found the new Massively MMO news rag via Plaguelands. It’s kind of like a news rag on too much coffee, but that’s okay. Drop by often, check out their news posts on your favorite games, and enter all the spiffy giveaways they’re launching with (okay, so if you haven’t been there yet you’ve already missed a bunch of them, but not all!). I still have my fingers crossed on the ones I’ve entered.

Today’s new book review is of Bill James’s Wolves of Memory, a fantastic Harpur & Iles mystery which I highly recommend. Also this week I’ll be reviewing a hot drinks cookbook (yum!), so stay tuned for that. This is the latest list of upcoming reviews, and I’ll post a new one soon so it won’t have so many crossed-off items on it. You might notice a sudden increase in the number of cookbooks we’re working with; this is, of course, due to Thanksgiving upcoming! Our usual guests can’t make it (a standard hazard when some work odd schedules and others are a number of states away), but that won’t stop us from cooking too much food!

We posted our first new “Adventurers’ Last Words” design in a while: “Awww, How Cute!” It seems particularly appropriate to baby clothing, don’t you think?! Somehow cute things always turn out to be so darn deadly in roleplaying games. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

*blinks sleepily and glances at the watch*

Yes, yes it is.

Here are some links to the latest book reviews:

• The Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook
• Liza Fosburgh, Soups & Stews for Fall and Winter Days
• Jack R. Nerad, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hybrid & Alternative Fuel Vehicles

I now have the ability to easily add new links to the main page of the site, so it’s being updated quickly now. I’m in the middle of reading Bill James’s Wolves of Memory and hope to have a review up for that Monday at latest.

An early-morning conversation:

Me: I’ve noticed a pattern. I’m most prone to insomnia after sugary, fatty desserts.
My husband: Another good reason to eat well and take care of ourselves.
Me: Oh, speaking of, I ran some EVE missions last night and sent you another 3 million ISK for implants.
My husband: I’ll pick up some cupcakes on the way home from work.

Actual conversation.

I deployed three new designs to the cafepress stores last night. One went to Caffeinated Chicanery, the writing-reading-cooking-humor-etc. store:

THAT
They told me I couldn’t
wear that on a T-shirt

Okay, so we might be over-fond of wordplay and irony-based humor, but I think lots of other people appreciate it too.

The other two went to Gamers’ Heaven, our gamers & geeks store:

Level 70 Dad

It’s the companion piece to our Level 70 Mom design; I noticed sales of the latter were going up noticeably as the Christmas season approaches, figured folks were buying them as gifts, and thought it would be nice to have a matching design for dads too. So I set our business partner to the task of brainstorming image designs, and then I put them together. Fun process.

The other is called ‘Boss Faction,’ and it’s for all you working Warcraft or other mmorpg players:

I’m not kissing ass
I’m just grinding boss faction

Don’t forget if you sign up for the monthly store newsletters (left-hand navigation column, at the bottom) you’ll get access to a subscribers’-only sale each month. Also you won’t have to worry about missing our special announcement later this season!

That’s it for now, I think, although I’m sleepy enough that I’m not sure.

This morning I posted a rave review of Tosca Reno’s Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook. Why rave? Because it’s one of the first healthy-eating cookbooks I’ve tried that caters to those of us who are addicted to high-flavor foods, rather than bland, uninteresting stuff. Yeah, I know there’s a huge market for the latter, so I can’t in good conscience mark books down for catering to it, but damn it’s so good to find a book that caters to people who don’t want to sacrifice an awesome variety of tasty foods in order to be healthy!

We have at least three more book reviews coming out this week, two of which are also cookbook reviews. Stay tuned for a review of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook, among others!

Seriously, Tosca’s books have helped us enjoy our healthy eating enough that we’ve been able to keep up with it. And that’s great, because it’s helped me immensely. Finally one of those medical scans showed something; my gallbladder is contracting sluggishly. Not a clear-cut case of it needing to come out, so instead of referring me directly to a surgeon my doc is sending me to a gastroenterologist for another opinion. Eating so well using Tosca’s suggestions and things we’ve derived from her books has made me healthy enough that I can actually indulge in a treat now and then—like a small serving of chocolate bread pudding from the Ghirardelli cookbook—with only mild repercussions.

I’ve always had trouble getting myself to eat salads. They’re too much work to make interesting (i.e., include a variety of ingredients); they aren’t very good; etc. I have a new way of handling that, though. I prep some ingredients early in the week. For example, we take some hothouse (seedless) cucumbers, wash them, and run them through the food processor’s slicing disk. Then we stick them in airtight plastic containers in the fridge. I shred or slice some carrots, or buy them pre-shredded, and do the same thing with them. I’ve also started buying baby spinach instead of or in addition to lettuce, because it doesn’t go bad as quickly and it’s really good. Instead of buying large tomatoes I buy small pearl or grape tomatoes.

Anyway, this makes it much easier to toss together a salad quickly that contains plenty of interesting and delicious ingredients. I often add a few nuts or cubes of cheese; you can chop those in advance and store them too. And of course a small amount of dressing works wonders, too. Now you have a salad with lots of flavor that takes just a minute or two to create, no chopping necessary. And since you have containers of cucumber, carrot, spinach, and tomatoes on hand, you can easily toss a handful onto your plate any time you have anything else as well.

Yesterday’s Booking through Thursday asked how many people read horror, and I was very surprised to see most of the respondents narrowly define horror as gross-out horror. I suppose I shouldn’t have been—this has been a long-standing problem for horror authors, and one which I’ve been quite aware of as a horror writer in the past—but it’s been a long time since I wrote horror and so I’d largely forgotten about the issue.

Horror fiction is any fiction designed to evoke a feeling of horror (i.e. dread, terror, shock, revulsion, loathing, fear). That sounds obvious, yes? And yet apparently it isn’t, if people are narrowly defining horror by its current trend of gross-out examples such as ‘Hostel’ and ‘Saw.’

It becomes more obvious that horror should have a wider definition than buckets of blood if you look back in time a bit. ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ is a very famous horror movie/book, and yet there’s no blood. It’s all psychological horror. Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft are two classic horror writers, and yet they didn’t write gross-out horror. Horror doesn’t require a single drop of literary blood to be shed.

So why the change?

Marketing departments.

No, I’m serious. ‘Horror’ has long been seen as a tiny niche, as a low-brow pursuit of often disturbed minds. In order to give books a potentially wider audience, marketing people have long searched for any means possible to put some word other than horror on the back of a book—’thriller,’ ’suspense.’ If it’s a cross-genre work, then it immediately gets filed under its other genre, labeled perhaps ‘dark fantasy’ or just ’science fiction.’ This is why people have gotten so confused. Any fiction designed to evoke horror is still horror, it’s just that it gets labeled by other names in the hope that it’ll sell better that way. And this works, as evidenced by the number of people I saw yesterday who said, “ew, I hate horror with all its buckets of blood, but I like thrillers, suspense, dark fantasy, etc.” Really what they’re saying here is, “yeah, I like horror, I just don’t like gross-out horror.” They’ve been caught up in an artificial distinction designed to sell more books.

Further confusing things is the fact that any kind of fiction can also be horror fiction, since horror is defined by an evoked emotion rather than by genre tropes or settings. Literary fiction can be horror fiction. Fantasy, romance, SF, mystery… it can all be horror fiction.

The best summation of this is found in Douglas Winter’s immortal words from his 1982 anthology Prime Evil, which I expect to be immediately familiar to nearly every horror author out there:

Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion.

I’m a bit late with this week’s BTT, but better late than never, eh?

What with yesterday being Halloween, and all . . . do you read horror? Stories of things that go bump in the night and keep you from sleeping?

I thought about asking you about whether you were participating in NaNoWriMo, but I asked that last year. Although . . . if you want to answer that one, too, please feel free to go ahead and do both, or either, your choice!

I love good horror, and started out writing horror 10-15 years ago (I had several stories published that people found genuinely chilling, which pleased me greatly). I prefer horror that’s more at the psychological end of things rather than randomly splatter-gory, although I don’t mind gore as long as it serves the story. In other words, gore doesn’t bother me, I just don’t see the point in it unless it serves an atmosphere that’s horrific as well. Gore by itself isn’t enough.

As for NaNoWriMo, I doubt I’ll ever do it. I’ve been tempted, but there are three things that stop me: a lack of free time that I want to dedicate strictly to that; the fact that I’ve largely switched to non-fiction and it’s national NOVEL-writing month; and the fact that I’d have to write at a rate for the event that might bring my tendonitis crashing back. That wouldn’t be worth it.

By the way, head on over to Estella’s Revenge today—they have a feature on Dewey’s recent readathon!

Also, check out free rice! Play a vocabulary-expanding game while donating rice to feed hungry people! Then come back and tell us how high a score you managed to get. So far I tend to vacillate from 43-46.