April 20, 2005--New Content...Can you believe it? My two main projects for this year were the Daily Meditations (below) and to get my butt back in gear on the book reviews. I was debating whether to keep the book review section the same or to change the web design. See, I mostly am doing reviews on non-fiction books to help Pagans find materials from which to learn. But I also believe there is quite a bit you can learn from fiction, and getting the chance to review a copy of Morven Westfield's Darksome Thirst was a great opportunity to expand my reading habits. So this brought up a debate...do I change the review criteria to include fiction? Do I create a whole new section for fiction? Should I change the whole layout of that section of the site?

I played around with the web design a lot, wrote and re-wrote review criteria guidelines, and even wrote and re-wrote reviews themselves. It was pretty frustrating to find some kind of happy medium. In the end...I wound up going back to my original style for doing reviews, and when the criteria simply did not apply to a book, I simply put "Not Applicable."

Anyway, I posted 6 new reviews, bringing the grand total of the official reviews so far up to 10. I'm trying to go through my library of books to do official reviews on the books that people will be familiar with, ones that stick out in my mind as deserving more publicity (because they are GOOD, but might be harder to find or are from smaller publishing houses), and ones that I simply remember well so I can get more reviews written as quick as possible without having to re-read the books when I could be reading something new. Please go check the reviews out (they are also listed by author's name)...and remember, if a book piques your interest, I have them all linked to Amazon.com for ease of purchase and to help support this site.