i_hope_that
For many of us, the holidays can be kind of rough. If you're searching for a network of understanding friends, this ultra-nurturing community encourages you to express your heartfelt wishes and offer other members encouragement and acceptance. Not for the terminally snarky or emotionally-challenged, this is a good-spirited place to lend comfort and support.

diygifts
Feeling crafty? If you've got a few last folks on your holiday gift list, this is a great place to seed your creativity and generosity. You'll also discover wonderful DIY tips to decorate your home and entertain guests. Offering a no-frills-no-skills attitude that welcomes the cash-challenged and arts-phobic, you're sure to get ideas and make friends in the process.

cooking_club
A fun and friendly community dedicated to those who love to cook, whether you're a meat-and-potatoes type, an aspiring gourmand, and/or a vegan. In search of a brilliant dish to use up those weekly leftovers? Post your ingredients and you'll be whipping up a feast by dinner. You can also share favorite recipes. For Type A chefs, you can spice up your culinary repertoire with exciting cooking challenges.

If you’re desperately looking for something to do – even something small – to protest at the anti-Gay bill in Uganda, and maybe, just maybe, get someone in power to rethink, you may want to join this Facebook group

Anglicans who want THIS statement from Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury has failed to exercise moral leadership to protect gays & lesbians in Uganda and has instead exercised political pressure to attack a bishop-elect in Los Angeles because she is a lesbian.

As Anglicans who treasure their Communion and expect more from their Archbishop, in the Advent spirit of John the Baptist’s cry to the religious leaders of his time, we call on+Rowan Williams to repent of his earlier statement and issue this one instead:

“The proposed legal actions that would make homosexuality punishable by death in Uganda, and the lack of outrage regarding this proposed action by the Church of Uganda, raises very serious questions not just for the Church of Uganda and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole.”

“The proposed legislation has not yet become law, and could be rejected, with the Anglican Church of Uganda leading the opposition. That decision will have very important implications. The bishops of the Communion have collectively acknowledged that offering pastoral care and listening to the experience of homosexual persons is necessary if our bonds of mutual affection are to hold.”

We believe with God all things are possible — and we pray together during this Advent season of repentance and new beginnings for the revitalization of our Communion on behalf of the Gospel and for the liberation of all held captive by homophobia. (read less)

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stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.

It’s been a bit of a trying month, with both shoulders now getting in on the freezing act, scarcely any range of motion left in the left hand one, and permanent tiredness due to not being able to sleep.  However, some things somehow make up for it all and today I’m feeling very very lucky

Sarah Frantz at Dear Author has picked False Colors and Blessed Isle in her list of top Romance Books of 2009

and Jayne at Dear Author has picked the I Do anthology in her list of top Romances of 2009

I feel like a bit of a waste of space at the moment – I can’t even do my own hair – so this makes me feel that at least I’ve managed to do something good this year.  Thank you so much, Sarah!  Thank you Jayne   Big virtual bunches of flowers all around

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Get to know My Guests. Want to know who's checking you out? You can now view the 100 most recent, logged-in users who visited your journal during the past 30-day period with My Guests. For those who prefer to fly under the radar, you can update your My Guests privacy setting here.

Introducing My Stats. If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now see detailed reports on how many people are visiting your journal, friends pages, and entries (wherever they're posted on LiveJournal). You can also view data on comments and RSS requests. My Stats is only available to Paid and Permanent account holders, but you can upgrade anytime. (FYI, an annual subscription costs less than a large pizza with everything on it, PLUS it's rumored to make you lose weight in your sleep!) For additional details on this feature, read this article in paidmembers.

Get ready to check your vital statistics!. To begin, mouse over Journal in the upper nav bar and select My Stats from the dropdown menu (Horizon) or select My Stats under Journal in the side bar (Vertigo). If you're using another design scheme, you can visit My Stats directly. You'll find My Guests on the My Stats tool bar.

Happy holiday promotion!

We're delighted to tell you about our holiday coupons, which will help you share the love with your LiveJournal friends! If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can send up to 10 LiveJournal Basic/Plus users a $10 coupon for an annual paid subscription now through January 15th, 2010. Recipients can upgrade for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25). Please note that these coupons are not transferable and cannot be used to renew existing paid accounts. If you're a Paid/Permanent user, you can send out your holiday coupons now!

Tweaks and Enhancements

1. The search is on: We've replaced our default search tool with one from Yandex, a leader in search engine technology. This means you'll get smarter, more granular results! To get started, enter your search terms and click the Go button to the left of the Find box on the upper right of the LiveJournal header. This will take you to the search landing page where you can further refine by Entries, Comments, People & communities, and FAQs. You can also access the search page directly.
2. Whitelisting: We've released a new option to help you moderate your busy communities more efficiently. If an entry contains a link to a whitelisted (i.e., trusted) site, it will be posted automatically without need for moderator approval. If a post contains a link that is not on the whitelist, you'll be prompted to approve. To access this option, please visit settings for any community you maintain and select the third option in the Community Moderation box (located in the lower left-hand corner). Click the enable link to custom-edit your community's whitelist, which has been prepopulated with trusted domains. You can manually add or delete URLs in the text box. Please note: If you're the maintainer of an unmoderated community, you may see the radio button for this setting checked, even though it's not active. This is a known issue. Please select whichever option you prefer and click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. If you're happy with your current settings, then no need to do anything!
3. TMI, dude: We've added some fun FREE sponsored vgifts! You can send up to 50 TMI vgifts to mutual friends (btw, you cannot send free vgifts to communities). If you're a Paid/Permanent user and you want to view sponsored gifts, click Show sponsored gifts on your homepage or visit the sponsored gift page. These vgifts will only be available through Wednesday, December 23rd.

You can view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Until next time, stay snug!

This year the standard was even higher than last year, and we were, again, struggling with the problem that we had so many good stories that we had to reject some for no better reason than that they were too long, or they were ever so slightly less relevant to the theme than other stories of the same length.

Strangely enough, the heat level is way down this year, making this a volume highly suitable for buying for friends and relatives who might be supportive of civil rights without wanting to read too much erotica.  But otherwise we have perhaps more of a wide spread of subjects and settings than we had last year, and a real international line-up with authors from the USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and Australia.

In no particular order – almost certainly not the order in which they will appear in the book, these are our stories for 2009:

Two Men: A Fugue by Sophia Deri-Bowen

The Uneven Chance by Charlie Cochrane

Work Experience by Bruin Fisher

Elephants In Her Tea by Julia Rios

Mountain Ash by Ruth Sims

Inner Truth by Alex Beecroft

Mallory’s Gift by L-J Baker

Cakewalk by Nathan Burgoine

The Song Inside by Nexis Pas

Turnabout by Lee Rowan

Home Cooking by Brian Holliday

Morbidly Obese by Rick Reed

Ships that Pass by Jamie Freeman

Honolulu Hula by Neil S. Plakcy

Aim Higher by JL Merrow

Hitched by Michael Gouda

No Queens on Pickett Street by Martha Miller

Even Guys Cry by D.C. Juris

Ganymede by Lenore Black

Under the Shadow of Your Wings by Jill Palmer

Touche by James Buchanan

Stripes by Nigel Puerasch

Mister Right by Rob Rosen

Congratulations to everyone who’s in, commiseration to everyone who isn’t, but it’s worth repeating that the standard was so high we were turning publishable material away.

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Thank you to genrereviews for including the I Do anthology in their list of books they rate as “Best of 2009″

I Do! anthology
Even ignoring the fact that all proceeds for this anthology go to support equal marriage rights, this is just a beautiful, beautiful collection of stories that explore the gamut of love, in every setting and every stage of the game. Some of the stories involve awkward encounters, some are quietly uplifting, and some are spicy hot. All are worth reading, which is quite the feat for any anthology.

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Who make the point I was trying to make about reviewing, only in a funnier way and without being too worried if anyone thinks they’re being rude.

I was reading their book, “Beyond Heaving Bosoms” this week, which is wonderful, and very funny, though not directly relevant to the m/m part of the genre.  But it struck me as very timely indeed when I came across this:

Camp Number One consists of those who Just Don’t Get It.  They’ve either never read a romance novel before, or they picked one up, discovered it was awful, experienced permanent retinal scarring from the terrible cover and wrote the entire genre off…

Camp Number Two is the cheerleader camp…. Their attitude seems to boil down to: “Romance is awesome, and if you don’t have a nice word to say then you should just shut up.  Bless your heart.” … On one hand, they would have made Rodney Dangerfield proud with the way they growl about how romance novels get no respect… On the other hand, when reviewers point out some romance novels are about as substantial as a house built entirely of meringue… these people are often the same ones who claim that romance novels are escapist fun, and somehow exempt from rigorous literary examination.

…heads up and break out your red pen and your English degree!  While it’s undeniable that romance novels are great fun, they should absolutely be subject to rigourous examination.  We lit nerds say so.

Moreover, and worst of all, some romances are utter fucking crap.  Complete, utter shittastic fuckcakes of crap with a side order of “How in the world did I pay actual money for this?”

LOL!  I feel an attack of fangirling coming on

Quite aside from the scarily well timed remarks about criticism, this is a great book, with a choose your own romance at the back, a flow chart with which you can easily separate Old Skool and New Skool romances, a heroic name generator (my next hero will be called Lord Hawkhollowfire, a werewolf billionaire secret agent.)  A chapter on cover art with a colour by numbers activity and a “Spot the Bullshit Regency Term” game.  And lots of other fun stuff, combined with some fascinating analysis that helped me to understand some of the themes of Romance which have always seemed so massively screwed up to me.  (Summed up in the handy phrase “The Irresistible Woman’s Magic Hoo Hoo Tames the Untamable Mighty Wang.)

LOL!  I think it would be fair to say that the status of m/f romance has definitely gone up in my estimation as a result of reading this.  *And* I sat in public with the clinch cover proudly displayed and chortled so much that the entire cafe ended up giving me funny looks.  Very funny and well worth reading.

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