Dark Nights and Warm Cookies

The winner of the Alanna Giveaway is: katayoun!

The winner of the Lament Giveaway is: Paradox!

Email me with your addresses to receive your prizes…. (um, after the Xmas rush).

I had a very computer-free weekend. Sailor Boy and I decorated the house for the holidays on Saturday, and then we did a little last-minute Christmas shopping in a mall packed solid with screaming people and attended his office’s holiday party (also loud, but in a much more relaxing way). On Sunday, my best friend and her husband came over and we made Christmas cookies all day long. We made four different types (we were going for five, but one of them was so good we decided to do another batch instead).

What cookies were these? The Pioneer Woman’s Spicy Molasses Cookies. Guys. Yum. You must make these, right now. They take about 3 minutes to mix up. Seriously, it takes longer to heat up the over than it does to make these cookies. It takes longer to go to the store and scour the spice shelves for ground cloves than I does to make these cookies. I made the second batch while my best friend was taking cooled cookies off the rack. it was that simple.

We also did dried cherry shortbread, dark chocolate-ginger crinkles, and traditional painted cookie cut out sugar cookies. All good, but these molasses cookies, warm and soft and right out of the oven? So. Good.

My family is showing up today, so I’m in a flurry of last-minute preparations. Lots of laundry loads, scrub the tub, a bit of shopping, stuff like that. It’s currently 17 degrees outside, so I’m going to wrap up like that little kid from A Christmas Story and take Rio out for a walk.

In very exciting news, I got my first-ever reader-reaction on Rampant. Everyone else who has read it has been either a) a friend or work colleague, or b) someone who works for my publisher. E. Kristin Anderson is a bookseller at BookPeople in Austin, Tx, and after a valiant quest that included a rather threatening drawing of a killer unicorn, got her hands on an ARC. She writes:

And UNICORNS!  The latest book by Diana Peterfreund is the talk of the town.  Or at least my part of town, which includes me and everyone I know, which is basically me, my friends, and my cohorts at the bookstore.  Seriously, Rampant is THE SHIT.  You can’t miss this book – I haven’t read something so awesome in ages.  It’s so far my favorite for 2009 (and, yeah, I’ve read a good deal of 2009 stuff already, though, admittedly, very little summer list).  My coworkers and I have been salivating over the book since I first heard about it from Miss Justine Larbalestier this fall.  Word spread quickly that someone had written a book about man-eating unicorns that could only be killed by virgin descendents of Alexander the Great.  With this kind of book, you’re either in or you’re out.  And Anyone out is clearly uncool.  So I got first dibs on Rampant, devoured it into the wee hours of the night until I was trying to read with one eye open and eventually passed out with the book cracked open over my face.

And it was amazing.

(And then she goes on a huge rant about the cover, which she doesn’t like. At. All.)

Very cool!

Today’s giveaway is another mystery box o’ books! (Probably mostly romance novels…)

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