Our thanks to this week's sponsor, Diamond Book Distributors, who are promoting the graphic novel companion to Frank Beddor's bestselling The Looking Glass Wars cowritten by Liz Cavalier and brought to life by the amazing Ben Templesmith.

Thanks to Jim Demonakos (blog/twitter) for designing our favicon - that little green "U" icon that appears to the left of our URL in your address bar. Jim puts on the increasingly successful Emerald City Comic Con but apparently our first-nonexistant-then-lame favicon bugged him enough that replacing it became the most important thing on his plate. I'll have to figure out other ways to bug him into doing free work for us.

Spent the week avoiding bloodsuckers of a different variety by reading Vampire Zero, the sequel to the sequel to David Wellington's first vampire novel (featured in an Unshelved Book Club a few years ago) 13 Bullets. Wellington is my favorite horror writer -- I could not put this book down. The new book doesn't come out until October, but you can still read 13 Bullets for free online (it's also available in a handy paper edition at finder bookstores everywhere).

Awesome envelope art (via @MyLifeInACube).

Executive summary: go here to submit your Pimp My Bookcart 2008 entry.

Long version: Last year several entries got lost in the mail. These days email is not the most reliable of media, thanks to spam. It's not the spam itself, but the various protections thrown up by email programs & ISPs. Our own daily email delivery is being blocked more often than I wish (which is why I keep pointing people at our RSS feed). Anyway, this year we wanted a way to make sure that we got every submission, and also to reduce the amount of work we needed to do at the end of the contest. So I wrote a webform where you can upload your photos. Of course then we needed a way to approve submissions so that we didn't become a popular forum for porn and/or LOLCATS.

This is brand new code. It's doing lots of cool stuff, including resizing images, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has more than a few bugs. If you do experience problems uploading your submission(s) please email me directly.

P.S. Once we get a few (approved) submissions you can see them pile up here, another new feature. Last year most arrived in the last two weeks, but we did get a steady stream from the beginning, and I know at least some of you have had your submissions ready for weeks. I can't wait to see them all!