Smugglers’ Stash and News: The Vuelio Blog Awards Edition + Smugglivus is Coming!

Hello Everybody, happy Sunday to all: To those who celebrate Thanksgiving, we hope you had a wonderful long weekend!

Speaking of celebrating!

The Inaugural Vuelio Blog Awards took place this last Friday! The Award was set up by Vuelio to “reflect and reward the various, vital contributions – societal, commercial and cultural – that UK bloggers are making every day” and as you know, The Book Smugglers was nominated for Best UK Blog in the Art and Film category alongside Street Art News, Live For Films and FlickeringMYTH.com.

I went to the ceremony at The Brewery in London with my partner, intending to have a bit of relaxing fun but nothing could have prepared me for what actually happened. The Brewery? A super posh and amazing venue. As soon as we arrived – ha! we were the first ones – I was greeted at the door then promptly asked to pose for red carpet photos, followed by a video interview.

Then we had about one hour to have champagne and mingle with the other guests – and the room was packed. We spent that hour with Simon Carter from Cost of Living Blog, who turned out to be a SciFi fan (his wallet was a super cool Star Trek one) and we geeked out about all the awesome current TV shows.

Then, we moved in to the main event – a sit down dinner to candlelight, followed by the Award itself. By that point it hit me that hey, WE ARE NOMINATED FOR AN AWARD – and I could not eat anything BECAUSE NERVES. Thankfully our table had a bunch of really awesome people – Becky Short and Zekra Rahman from Midas PR and Kat Rayment from Laydey Katabella – and our category was the second to be presented and then…

WE WON.

WE. WON.

When they called out our name I nearly fell off my chair for reals. I went to the stage to collect the award, had more photos taken, was whisked away to give another interview then FREAKED OUT with my partner. I was then finally able to relax and drink ALL THE WINE.

Meanwhile, in NY, Thea was celebrating remotely:

Folks, this was an amazing experience. Congratulations to all the winners and a huge thank you to Vuelio for setting this up so beautifully, to the award judges for thinking so highly of The Book Smugglers, and to The Wallace Collection for sponsoring our category.

Our agenda toward World Domination is going super great and according to plan, as you can see.

But now, back to reality and to WORK!

This Week on The Book Smugglers:

On Monday, we wrap up our Star Wars celebrations with our joint review of Moving Target: a Princess Leia Adventure

Followed by this month’s Octavia Cade’s Food & Horror column

Then, on Tuesday, we launch SMUGGLIVUS 2015!

For the uninitiated, here is a quick primer:

Smugglivus, what?

Smugglivus is our month-long (ok, technically it’s about five weeks long) end of the year celebration. Back in our first year of The Book Smugglers in 2008, we wanted to do something special at the end of the year leading up to our blog anniversary in early January. So, we came up with the idea to host a holiday bonanza to celebrate our favorite books, authors, and bloggers of the year. Thus, inspired by Seinfeld’s infamous Festivus, Smugglivus was born.

Each year, Smugglivus begins on December 1 and features guest posts from our favorite people across the interwebs (with a healthy serving of our regular reviews and giveaways, of course). The event ends with a bang on January 7, our very own blogiversary. (It’s our EIGHTH this year!)

What can you expect from Smugglivus 2015?

Awesome Guests

For the duration of the event we will feature at least one (but often more) guest almost every day. These guests include authors whose books we loved this year to our very favorite book bloggers. Our guests will talk about different topics: their favorite reads/TV/movies of 2015, what they are looking forward to and/or have planned in 2016, or anything in the holiday spirit of sharing bookish thoughts.

This year, our all-star author lineup includes, among many others, Aliette de Bodard, Seth Dickinson, Genevieve Valentine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Rin Chupeco, Sarah McCarry and more. Of course, we’ll also have plenty of awesome bloggers/reviewers over to play, including, Renay, Kelly Janes, Mahvesh Murad and many, many more.

Airing of Grievances

The Airing of Grievances is quite possibly our favorite Smugglivus ritual, in which we rant. We rant about fandom, books, TV shows, movies, the Internets, reading, and maybe even each other. *GASP* (All in good nature, of course. Most of the time.)

This year the AoG is going to be EPIC.

Ana and Thea’s Most Excellent Books of 2015

In which we post our top 10 (ish) favorite books of the year, including notable mentions and favorite books published prior to 2015. We’ll also post about our favorite TV shows and movies in our “Best of The Rest” feature.

And that is Smugglivus in a nutshell! We will of course, continue with our regular schedule with reviews (albeit less than the usual number of titles per week) here and at Kirkus, but Radar and Old School Wednesdays posts will likely go on a break till January. Our usual Sunday stash will be mostly dedicated to the festivities as well.

Plus, we have a couple of short stories coming out in December AND a couple of surprises from Book Smugglers Publishing too!

We do hope you join us for the event and have as much fun reading our guest posts and reviews as we had organizing them!

~ Your Friendly Neighborhood Book Smugglers