The holiday — both Christmas and a spur-of-the-moment trip to the beach — torpedoed my blogging, but I wanted to get in one more post before the end of 2008. Last year, I started keeping track of all the books I read and movies I watched during the year, and I did the same this year. Check out my lists before. Did you read or see any of the same ones? What were your favorite books and movies of the year?

Books I Read in 2008:

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (young adult)
Trouble in Tennessee by Tanya Michaels (romance)
The Sweet Far Thing by Libba Bray (young adult)
The Bleeding Dusk by Colleen Gleason (romance)
Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith (young adult)
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (young adult)
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (young adult)
Remembered by Tamera Alexander (inspirational romance)
Ready or Not by Meg Cabot (young adult)
Arctic Tundra: Land With No Trees by Allan Fowler (nonfiction/research)
When Twilight Burns by Colleen Gleason (romance)
Graffiti Girl by Kelly Parra (young adult)
Our Living World: Earth’s Biomes Tundra by Barbara A. Somevill (nonfiction/research)
Treasures of Alaska by Jeff Rennicke (nonfiction/research)
The Host by Stephenie Meyer (fiction)
Girl at Sea by Maureen Johnson (young adult)
Leaving Paradise by Simone Elkeles (young adult)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (young adult)
Northern Lights by Nora Roberts (romance)
Glass Houses by Rachel Caine (young adult)
The Dead Girls’ Dance by Rachel Caine (young adult)
Texas Heir by Linda Warren (romance)
Midnight Alley by Rachel Caine (young adult)
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (historical fiction)
The Legend of Zoey by Candie Moonshower (young adult/children’s)
Claiming the Courtesan by Anna Campbell (romance)

I watched 125 movies or TV series on DVD this year. I can’t figure out how to copy them from my Excel file to here, but among my favorites of the year (either released in 2008 or just watched on DVD) were:

3:10 to Yuma
The Bourne series
Stardust
North & South (the BBC production)
Howl’s Moving Castle
Roswell (all three seasons)
Miss Potter
Becoming Jane
27 Dresses
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Juno
Enchanted
The Other Boleyn Girl
Wall-E
Hellboy
Dead Man Walking
Tears of the Sun
Penelope
The Dark Knight
Waitress
Twilight
Wanted
Hancock

There are several movies coming out in 2009 that I want to see. Among them are X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Star Trek, The Watchmen, Terminator Salvation, Night at the Museum 2: Battle at the Smithsonian, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and the third in the Underworld series, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which is due out in January. Here’s the trailer:

First off, I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah. If you’re traveling, especially where there is bad weather, please be safe.

Speaking of bad weather, I’m blogging at the Wet Noodle Posse today about my connection between big snowstorms and Monopoly.

It’s been a busy few days (okay, when is it not busy?). Thursday, I started working on one of the new books I sold last month. Actually had a funny moment — I’d thought that I’d written two to three chapters on this one earlier, but they weren’t with the printed-out synopsis. So then I thought perhaps it was the other book that didn’t sell for which I’d written some chapters. So I did my writing plan (how many pages I wanted to get done a day) based on starting from Page 1. So it was a nice surprise when I fired up the laptop and saw I had indeed already written three chapters (48 pages). Yay! I wrote six new ones, and I’ll return to it probably Tuesday because…

Friday hubby and I traveled to do Christmas with my parents.

Yesterday, I had my local RWA chapter holiday party and had to start proofing the Romance Writers Report (I’m the editorial liaison this year).

Today I need to finish the RWR proofing and send in my edits.

Tomorrow I have to drive to the other end of the state to do an interview for an article I’m writing for my part-time magazine job.

I finally finished reading The Other Boleyn Girl last night. I’d been reading this tale of Mary Boleyn, the sister of Queen Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, for what seemed like forever. I actually did like it, but for some reason it just took me a long time to get through it. European history hasn’t been my favorite segment of history before, but now I’m interested in Henry VIII and his wives. I think the next book of Philippa Gregory’s I’ll read is The Constant Princess, about Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon.

When hubby and I were in college, we got into reading the X-Men comics. There was a comic store right next to campus, so he’d go get the new issues as they arrived. I hadn’t been a big comic reader prior to that, but I totally got hooked on those. So when the X-Men movies came out, I could barely wait for each new installment. Now I’m anxiously awaiting a new one, the origin story for Wolverine, once again played by Hugh Jackman. The trailer just came out a few days ago, and it looks awesome! Wolverine and Sabretooth are back, though now Liev Schreiber is playing the latter. You can see snatches of other characters from the comics, including a Storm as a toddler. And finally Gambit is in one of the X-Men movies! I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get him in one. Bonus — he’s played by Taylor Kitsch from Friday Night Lights, who just happened to be the model for a secondary hero in a YA I wrote and hope to sell. And if that one sells, I play to have a sequel in which he’s the primary hero.

Anyway, here’s the awesomeness of the trailer.

Sunday night, Bob the 57-year-old physics teacher from Maine became the oldest winner in Survivor history. I always love it when I feel someone deserving and nice wins. Going into the final night of this season, there were five people left. I was okay with any of them winning except Kenny. He was a good strategic player, but his constant whining about how Bob didn’t give him the immunity necklace (hello, he was going to blindside Bob if he did that) was annoying. So, I was glad to see him voted out.

Of the final four, I was rooting for Sugar and Bob most, then Matty and finally Susie. Because of a tie at the final tribal council where the remaining players voted, Matty and Bob had to do a head-to-head fire-making challenge, which Bob won (he, the master of challenges). So Susie, Bob and Sugar headed into the final tribal where the jury got to ask them questions. This is always uncomfortable and has more than a few sore-loser moments. What took the cake though was vile, nasty Corrine making the uncalled-for remark about Sugar’s dad, who had died prior to Sugar coming on the show. You can not like someone, you can even be made at them, but don’t make fun of their grief over the passing of a loved one. That’s just wrong. She even made Randy not look so bad by comparison.

Some years, a person will get jury votes because of their ability to play the game and make strategic moves even if those moves got the people on the jury voted out. This wasn’t one of those years. There seemed to be a lot of dislike toward Sugar, even though she was a fan favorite. She got no love and no votes. Susie, who seemed nice enough but not a particularly strong player at times, got three votes, but Bob managed to get one more (I’m honestly surprised he didn’t get more) to win. And then he won the extra $100,000 voted on by the fans. For a moment, I kind of hoped that he’d go, “You know, a million is enough,” and split the $100,000 between Sugar, Susie and maybe even Matty. But I think he was honestly shellshocked and couldn’t really think. I imagine I might act the same way if I’d just won a million dollars. I’d be willing to find out.

So, Survivor is off to the Brazilian highlands in the new year. My TiVo is primed to capture all the action.

I’m blogging about Christmas memories from my small hometown over at the Romance Bandits blog today. Come on over and share your own Christmas memories.

Ever hear the saying that you have to make a mess to clean up a mess? Well, that was definitely true last weekend when I bought the new bookshelf and reorganized all my books and shelves. Here’s an in-the-process shot.

It’s amazing that I didn’t trip and break my neck. I’m quite clumsy.

But here’s the organized beauty of the new shelf when I was done.

The top shelf is devoted to paranormals.

The second shelf has YA books. You’ll notice several my by publisher, Razorbill.

Shelf 3 is the domain of my Noodler pals.

Shelf 4 holds hardbacks, my friend Tanya’s books, and books but the Banditas.

The bottom shelf is full of writing resource books and nature/travel books.

My older bookshelves are also organized. One is purely writing and research books. Another is filled with the Harlequin/Silhouette books, single-title contemporaries, romantic suspense and historicals. A smaller shelf has the women’s fiction, some historical series and my keepers.

Now I don’t have to go digging through random piles and plastic tubs to find the book I want. Happiness = organization.

I’ve blogged about book trailers before and how unfortunately many of them are not exactly stellar. But sometimes I do come across some that are of good quality and catchy. The latest to fall into the good category is by fellow YA author Simone Elkeles. Here’s her fun rap video about her book, Perfect Chemistry.

She even did a fun behind-the-scenes video that has some funny bloopers.

My friend Tanya sent me this, and I can’t stop watching it. For those of you who like Supernatural, you’ll get a kick out of this. Be warned, you might not want to play it with young children in the room because of a couple of words. Since I’m a big Sammy fan, this is getting favorited on YouTube.

Today, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in wrapping gifts and preparing packages to mail so they arrive by Christmas. Pray for my credit card tomorrow as I slept all these boxes to the post office.

So, speaking of Christmas, what is on everyone’s wish list this year? Me, I want to get the floor in our front living room fixed so the front door will open again. Something has sagged, thus rendering the door inoperable. Sagging floor not good. I can’t even put up my Christmas tree because that’s the room where it goes, and I don’t want to put it up only to have to move it if workmen show up.

Someone on the children’s/YA writers’ loop I’m on posted this link. I think it will give all you Jane Austen fans a good chuckle.

Been a busy weekend. I went to Jackson, Tennessee yesterday for a group book signing. I only sold two books, but I had a nice time hanging out with my writing buddies and got to catch up on the ride to and from with my good pals Beth Pattillo and Annie Solomon. We brainstormed ideas for our chapter’s retreat in February.

Today, hubby and I met my oldest friend — as in I’ve been friends with her longer than anyone, not that she’s literally older than all my friends — and her family for lunch. They were in town doing lots of fun things for the weekend.

I got all of my books reshelved and organized late Friday night. More on that later. I’ve been working on lots of paperwork this afternoon and evening. Seriously, I think paper is like rabbits. When you turn around for five minutes, it’s produced a pile more.