Pre-order Wine Sense - The Art and Appreciation of Wine

Many of you may have read about me talking about The Boy and how he often matches wines to all the food that I cook, something which he is very good at.

The Boy has a genuine love of wine and is one of those people who enjoys wine for the pleasure and complexity of the experience, rather than drinking for the sake of the alcohol. He never drinks to get drunk, but rather drinks because he enjoys the fruit, the process and more importantly, the wine itself.

I'm so proud of him right now. After a lot of work, his book "Wine Sense" is finally ready to be launched. He spent a lot of time working on it - researching and writing.

He has recently launched his pre-order campaign, which you can find here, and I strongly encourage you to go on over an pre-order the book. There are some great options for getting the book and my personal favorite is the $100 Patron Edition, which gives you:

Personally signed dedication by author of hardcover copy (plus Ebook) delivered to you upon book publication and prior to public launch plus Patron acknowledgment and thanks in all future editions of book and on SAZ in the Cellar and InkIT Publishing websites for one year.

I can't begin to tell you how excited I am for him and how proud I have of him, for reaching his milestone.

You can also read more about the model he is using to launch his pre-order campaign called "Crowdsourcing" in a recent blog post which he has written as well.

You can also read about what The Boy has to say about Wine Sense on his Saz in the Cellar blog post about it.

You can find The Boy in all those places below, do head on over and follow, like, connect with him, and all that good stuff. :-)

Twitter: @shipleyaust and @inkitpub

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sazinthecellar

Blog: http://sazinthecellar.com/

I hope you head on over and check him and his book out.


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F-F-F-Friday (Part Deux) - Reading list

I wanted to write about my reading for the year since we're on the theme of reading with my last post but mostly, I'm doing this because I wanted to post all the pretty pictures of the covers of the books that I've read throughout the year.

I set myself a goal of reading 100 books this year and I have as of today exceeded it by 59 books. I'm expecting that by December 31st, I'll like go over by a few more. Goodreads keeps suggesting that I up my reading goal but I haven't done that so I'm sitting at 159% out of 100% which is actually quite nice. I suppose I could have upped my goal, but the reality was I wanted to see how I exceeded my original goal. Last year, I only read 101 books. This year I had started out very strong, reading an average of about 25 to 30 books a month, but that fell off in the middle of the year as life got busy and we traveled a bit.

My reading consists mostly of romances (I'm a sucker for a happy ending) in most of it's sub-genres (except possibly Westerns) with a few thrillers, suspense, humour and non fiction thrown in. I'm not counting the cookbooks that I read either 'cos that's just research.

Before I add all the pretty pictures of the book covers of books I've read, here are some of the highlights of my reading year: (not in any particular order, these books are all ones that have made an impact on my reading life - taken my breath away, made me laugh, made me cry, gave me characters that I cared about and made me want the book to last forever) ...

And now ... here are all the books I read this year ... (oooo ... pretty pictures ... ) *me making googly eyes*

Okay, I admit, this post has been rather self-indulgent. I'm rolling around in one of my great loves - reading. I'm also cheating by having two F-F-F-Friday posts so that I can indulge but WTH ... it's my blog and it's coming on Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone because that's tomorrow. I hope you have a wonderful time with family and loved ones.



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F-F-F-Friday - Judging...

This is a non cooking post ... of course, it's F-F-F-Friday. It's also the day before I have to make 20 creme brulees for Christmas Day dessert but more on that in another post.

So, I've committed to doing something rather huge right now. Not something that I'm very good at ... this whole committing to something thing. I'm always rather careful when I commit to something because I want to make sure I follow through.

What is this that I've committed to, you ask?

Answer: I'm judging a writing contest. It's for the Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) Emerald contest.

I've committed to judging 5 manuscripts in Round 1 which is December / January, and then judging 5 or 7 (I can't remember which) manuscripts in Round 2 which is January / February. This, of course, is going to keep me quite busy and to be honest, I'm rather excited about the whole thing since I just love reading.

I also feel quite honored that they would allow me to judge their writing contest. I'm getting to see manuscripts of books written by authors before they get published. Who knows, there might be a gem that I discover that will become the next Nora Roberts or Julia Quinn.

I haven't actually started the reading of the manuscripts yet, although, today, I did get organized. I'm up in The House, so I've been installing Microsoft Office onto the new 'puter so that I can use the scoring sheets that I've been provided. I've actually got the manuscripts sitting right here on my desk staring at me saying "Read me! Read me!" I plan on getting started tomorrow and reading at least two of them and scoring them. I'm hoping to get through this lot for Round 1 before the New Year starts.

For those of you who can't tell from the list of books that I've recently read in the sidebar of this blog, I read a lot of romance. Recently, I've been particularly fond of reading paranormal romance. It's a phase I'm going through. Anyhow, it looks like I've been sent quite a variety in the romance sub-genre. There's paranormal (current favorite), historical (oldie but goodie), erotic romance (hawt!), a fantasy / futuristic one (spaceships and robots!) and one on time travel (please don't let this be another Highlander trapped in a time capsule!). This is going to be FUN!

I'm going to have some fun now and post some covers of an example of books that are in the romance sub-genre of the manuscripts that I'm judging. It's just going to be fun to look for the book covers.

Note: the following book covers are for books of PUBLISHED authors and all of them darn good!!

Paranormal Romance

Historical Romance

Erotic Romance

Futuristic Romance

Time Travel Romance

Some other random things happening in my world right now:

• We just installed Internet into The House. The House now feels less like a holiday home because I'm now CONNECTED!
• We have a brand new phone number to The House for above-mentioned Internet. This brand new number has not been given out to anyone. No one at all besides me and The Boy have this number. Have already received several scam calls on it from random Indian person asking to speak to the Windows Operating System User. I hung up.
• Christmas presents are all wrapped and Christmas letters sent. Presents did not exceed $50 per person (we're keeping it simple) and we sent out 125 letters. Postage costs a fortune!
• One Christmas letter went to Iceland. Another went to Germany. Those were the two most exotic countries on the Christmas letter list.
• I had a job interview yesterday, so the New Year may see me gainfully employed. Saying a prayer that I do get this job.

Well, tomorrow's Christmas Eve. I hope you have some fun things planned with family and loved ones. We're spending Christmas Eve with the best bud, his wife and his parents. We're going to gorge ourselves on food because the best bud being Italian, will OVER-feed us.

Christmas Day will see us with the parents and some relatives we haven't seen in donkey's years. It will be good to reconnect. I'm hoping the 20 creme brulees will go down well.

Then it's on to NYE, but I'm hoping to check in again before that. If I don't though ... have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.



© This work is copyrighted to Invest-Ex and Destiny’s Fortunes Pty Ltd