About

This Blog

Novel Concepts is a blog about reading first and foremost, and secondly about writing because that goes hand in hand with reading. If you've read The Beginning you'll remember that I said I've tried to start a book blog 3 times before, and couldn't get it to keep my interest (the name I was trying to use was "The Bibliolatrix") because I was trying to take myself too seriously. That won't happen this time because I've decided to just have fun with it, so what will happen here?

I'll be:

- reviewing books I'm currently reading or have read in the past

- blathering in about any novel ideas about writing and books that pop into my head

- posting about anything else related to reading and writing that strikes my fancy

When will I do this? Between 1 and 3 times a week depending on how busy a week I'm having.

Me

I usually dislike about me sections because I have been known to indulge in over sharing, I'll be careful to make sure not to this time I promise! My name is Lauren, but for the sake of this blog you can all call me Ren, because that's what I've decided I'd as my nom de plume. I am an Library and Information Professional living in Ontario Canada. What does that mean? It means I find, organise, manage and disseminate information for people, and it's important for you to know that I love working with information. I work in an academic library. Since this is a book blog it is also very important that you know what kinds of reading materials I am particular to; I greatly prefer fiction to non-fiction. In terms of genres I tend toward fantasy, science fiction and espionage/political thrillers but that's not all I read, I'll try pretty much anything once before I write it off. For example, I'm not a big romance novel fan, but there are a few paranormal and historical romances out there that I have enjoyed. Look how things change over time, when I first wrote that previous sentence it was true, now I will also unabashedly pick up romance novels if I find them interesting.(no, Twlight is [STILL] not one of them, I make no bones about the fact that I find the writing in that series terrible.). I'm as equally likely to be found reading adult, YA and 9-12 books because I don't discriminate against a good story line and good characters. Some of the best books I've read have been for the younger target audiences.

I can't think of anything else that I think you all need to know about me right now so I'm going to go ahead and not put anything else here for the time being!!

The Header

I figured a blog called Novel Concepts should have a novel concept for a header design; and so the header you see above was born. I originally wanted to fill the letters with hand drawn pixel illustrations of some of my favourite fictional scenes...but then I realised how LONG that would take and I remembered that I'm good at pixel art but I'm not that good. So it was off to Flickr to find some suitable images, from some books I really love, with appropriate Creative Commons Copyright Licenses. 

Here's the credits for those images:

N-O-V-E-L C-O-N-C-E-P-T-S

The font used is Porky's.