Hello everyone. The excitement is building for GRL 2012, the only Retreat for GBLT romance. I know many of you are looking forward to what is the premier event for our genre and I would personally like to thank the organizers Ethan Day, Carol Lynne, Damon Suede, J.P. Bowie, Heidi Cullinan and Teresa Emil. William Neale who lent his marketing and other talents to this event early this year unfortunately passed away before he could see the results of his hard work but I would like to thank him also for his efforts on our behalf.  We will all be raising a glass to William at the Retreat. The party is apparently already underway as many of the folks have hit the road earlier today because they couldn’t wait. It should be a great Retreat. Just so you know – you don’t have to wait for pictures, we now have an official photographer for the site (because I suck at taking photos): Her name is Helen and she is from Australia. Now if only I can figure out how to upload the pictures.

On to other business: As I’m sure you are aware, we’re still having problems with site loading and I think we have nailed down what is causing these fluctuations.  There are two issues: the first is that unfortunately we have become a victim of our own success. Because so many of you access the site (as of June 30 this year we had almost 250 million hits and 3.8 million actual visitors in the 3 years that the site has been in operation), page requests to the host’s server have exceeded its capacity to respond in a timely manner, causing frequent timeouts. Also, there is too much information loaded on the first page of the site. We tried to resolve this problem at first by moving the site to a different grid of servers three weeks ago but that only helped temporarily, so we have to make some major changes, initially by reducing the size of the first page. You have probably noticed that we now have 5 posts on this page rather than the previous 15. Christian is hard at work reconfiguring some of the information on the right hand sidebar, by moving it to different locations, and he will be writing a post once the job is completed so that you will know where to find stuff that you look up regularly. I hope this explanation gives you an idea of what’s going on, since as all of you know, I’m not a technical expert.

On the fun side: Christian has brought back the Halloween green men from the dead, and the header is now in Halloween mode. Enjoy!

Last week I gave you lots of information and fun stuff from around the world so I won’t burden you this week. You will be free of my sense of humour for at least the next 7 days except for an Old Spice ad I saw that made me go WTF?? Here’s the text

“With Old Spice Danger Zone you’ll smell like volcano powered motorcycles and ninja punching”

I have no idea what this means except that the picture of a motor cycle and a ninja duking it out makes me want to laugh, not smell a guy wearing Old Spice. How do these so called marketing gurus dream this stuff up and get companies to pay for their crappy ideas?

Reviews on the weekend: Beneath the Surface by Kate Sherwood reviewed by Jeayci; Melting Wax and Burning Feathers by Jennifer Cierra reviewed by Cryselle; Chasing Cold by Stephen Graham King reviewed by Sirius; I reviewed My Regelence Rake by J.L. Langley; Raine reviewed Power Exchange by A.J. Rose; and Feliz reviewed The Lord’s Tale by Sue Brown. If you haven’t seen these reviews this would be a great opportunity to check them out.

Free Books This Week

Tigerland by Sean Kennedy – Dreamspinner Press
Blind Faith by Christine Price – Samhain Publishing
Darkness to Darkness & The Cat in the Cradle (print or ebook) – Jay Bell
A Rookie Move by Sam B. Morgan – Loose Id
Starfish and Coffee by Kele Moon – Loose Id
The Last Thing I Saw (A Donald Strachey Mystery) by Richard Stevenson – MLR Press
Push Comes to Shove by J.L. O’Faolain – Dreamspinner Press
Fall Down the Mountain by P.D. Singer – Dreamspinner Press

Reviews This Week

Jenre: Chaos by Megan Derr
Andrea: Shared Revelations by Andrew Grey
Cryselle: Summer School by Tam Ames
Raine: Lightning Rod by Vaughn R. Demont
Jeayci: Beneath the Surface by Kate Sherwood
Sammy: SING by Jaye Valentine and Reno MacLeod
Feliz: The Gravedigger’s Brawl by Abigail Roux
Sirius: In Excess by Quinn Anderson; Out in Paperback by Ian Young
Aunt Lynn: Appearances Matter by Jeff Erno
Wave: Tigerland by Sean Kennedy; Pine Tar and Sweet Tea by Kerry Freeman; A Rookie Move by Sam B. Morgan

The boyz are off to GRL for the week so they won’t be appearing on the site on Friday. They will send you kisses from Albuquerque.

Till next week, that’s a wrap.