Pardon the chain link; the gate was so frozen in place after the weekend’s thaw I couldn’t open it.

No, I’m not quite crazy; having the sun rise high enough that its beams make it through the trees on the south horizon is as much a promise of spring as the seed catalogs arriving in the mail. If you want some proof of my craziness, I’ve just signed up for my third blogfest of the year. And the dates of the first two are rapidly approaching.

First (in terms of when I signed up) is the Year of the Snake. On February 10, 2013, we pass from the year of the Dragon to the Year of the Snake. The challenge is: “Find within your work a passage that embodies the spirit of the snake as defined above. You are encouraged to include a giveaway, but it’s not required. Snakes would find you foolish, but I won’t.” Well, that’s Sunday, and while Six Sentence Sunday will be gone, I’ll still be posting bits of my work. I’m planning to take Wendy Russo (who’s hosting the hop) a bit more literally than she probably intended, but as it happens the work I’ve been selecting bits from does have an appropriate passage.

Then I couldn’t resist the World Building Blogfest, though it will probably mean double posts on some days. That one’s five days, from January 28 through February 1, with posts on the world you’ve built in your fiction. For me it’ll be worlds, and some of the challenges are going to be “It varies according to which planet you’re on,” with examples. The challenges are:

Post #1 – 1/28 – History & Government
Post #2 – 1/29 – Religion & Culture
Post #3 – 1/30 – Food & Drink
Post #4 – 1/31 – Geography & Climate
Post #5 – 2/1 – Demonstrating world-building in an excerpt

#1 and #3 will be double post days; #5 will be an episode of Jarn’s Journal. I need to get busy writing the other four.

The new one, today, is the Pride and Prejudice Bicentenary Challenge. The idea is to read (or watch) and blog on a number of books and/or videos connected with Jean Austin’s masterpiece. Now I am not generally a romance reader (the modern ones are a little too explicit for my taste) but I adore Jane Austin. I even used Pride and Prejudice and two spin-offs in a post I wrote about point of view. One is allowed to choose one to twelve pieces, so at most this will involve one post a month. I already had nine books that I thought would qualify (not counting the five I used in the point-of-view post) so while it’s a little early to identify which book goes on which day, I will be blogging about one of these books, or others on my TBR list, on (usually) the second Tuesday of each month.

The ones I have are:
The Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (Stephanie Barron)
Darcy’s Story (Janet Aylmer)
The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4^th to the death of  Charles the 1^st (Jane Austin)
The Jane Austin Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World (Margaret C. Sullivan)
Jane Austin and Her Times, 1775-1817 (G. E. Mitton)
Pride and Prescience (Carrie Bebris)
Suspense and Sensibility (Carrie Bebris)
The Matters at Mansfield (Carrie Bebris)
Death Comes to Pemberley (P. D. James)

The post hosting the blog and its comments have already suggested several others, and I’ve added to my iPad:
Georgiana Darcy’s Diary (Anne Elliott)
Mr. Darcy’s Diary (Amanda Grange)
Darcy’s Decision (Maria Grace)

I’ll be watching others’ reviews for what else to add. I have some DVD’s in mind, too, so my reviews will be back, at least occasionally.