The 15 Day Book Blogger Challenge was started by April @ Good Books and Wine.

Day # 8 and I present 15 things that appeal to me on blogs (in no particular order of importance)...

Writing Earthquake Scenes
Earthquakes make me feel all quesy inside.

Where I grew up in Russia was not an earthquake prone zone, so I didn't actually experience my first quake until I was on an undergrad student exchange in California in 2003. It must have been around Christmas/Chanukkah because the three of us (me and two other IREX exchange kids who were based at the same uni with me) were living in our host family's house and there was definitely a Christmas tree present.

The 15 Day Book Blogger Challenge was started by April @ Good Books and Wine.

With the weekend looming, I'm combining the next three Days of the 15 Day Book Blogger Challenge into one, as I'm highly unlikely to have the time to blog during the weekend. So today, I'm going to confess What's The Last Book I Flung Across the Room (Day the Forth); Will (try to...) Recommend a Tear Jerker (Day the Fifth) and; Describe How I Shop For Books (Day the Sixth).

The 15 Day Book Blogger Challenge was started by April @ Good Books and Wine.

On the Day The Third of the 15-Day Blogging Challenge I have to declare who my blogging BFFs are.

Instead, I'm going to offer my own interpretation of this task and list the five blogs I read regularly. This selection of five is based on many months of trial and error until my blog-reading routine stabilised for a time being.

And so, here comes... My top five fav blogs...

Day The Second of the 15 Day Book Blogger Challenge requires I blog about my bedtime reading ritual...

It's simple, really - if I have time to read in bed at all (it's been a bit of a luxury lately due to studies and extensive writing periods that tire me out and make my eyes cry), I wash my face and put on my PJs, crawl into the bed and get my ereader out. The unique angle of my bedtime reading routine... I always have a notepad and pen nearby - since I'm a sponge for words and phrases, I like to write down things that inspire or puzzle me to have a look at it later in the light of day.

By the end of today (ideally *sigh*) I have to submit three huge chapters of my PhD thesis to my supervisors for Three Year Review (it's a big thing...). I've been working on these chapter for months and months to get them to the first draft state and then weeks non-stop more to polish them. I'm still not completely happy with what I have written, but I have to stop somewhere and I keep telling myself this is not the final final submittion, so whatever I have at this stage, will have to do...

In the meantime, I've got the The Hayden Project manuscript feedback returned from the test-readers and now these piles of notes sit on my desk taunting me, tempting me. What makes me feel a little bit calmer about Hayden and her crew is that now she's got a spunky completely rewritten query that makes me proud. It took me about a year but I got this query where I wanted it...