Scaling back

As I mentioned last week, Jen and I both have had things come up in our lives to make them busier than they already were. The GLBT Challenge is a huge time commitment between coordinating guest posts, mini-challenges, links, prizes, and more. While we don't want to take away from the challenge, which we love, we need to simplify going forward. We have decided to make two major changes.

First, we will be doing away with prizes from here on out. In the last six months, we've given away 12 books and have tons more prize items still in the bucket. Most of them are sitting on my shelf at home and I can't continue to house them going forward. I didn't want to just take them off the list and leave the burden of prizes to people who have offered up donations, so instead there will simply be no more prizes going forward. I wish we could continue to offer them, but the sacrifice is necessary at this time.

That will, of course, change the way mini-challenges work. There will no longer be a prize motivation for participating in the mini-challenges, but we hope people will continue to participate in them anyway. We originally put the mini-challenges out there as a way of expanding our thinking and giving different options to people who weren't sure where they could look for GLBT resources, and we do plan to continue posting them monthly through 2010.

The other big change we're making involves guest posts, which is a huge time investment for us. We have guest posts planned through August, but after that we have nothing definite set up. Instead of going out trying to look for people to post for us, though, we're just going to have a call for volunteers on the mini-posts. If someone wants to post, great! If not, there will simply be no guest posts. We're okay with that. Guest posts are wonderful things, but they aren't necessary to continue the challenge.

That will be the bulk of the changes to the GLBT Challenge moving forward. As an apology of sorts, we'd like to offer up a few of the books from the prize bucket in a giveaway. You can fill out the form below to enter to win one of these books (links to Amazon for book description):

1. Raven Summer by David Almond - YA contemporary fiction
   
2. Delilah by India Edghill - historical fiction
   
3. The Lady and the Poet by Maeve Haran - historical fiction
   
4. Give a Little by Wendy Smith (signed) - nonfiction
   
5. Mirrorscape by Mike Wilks - YA fantasy
   

You may sign up to win as many of these are you're interested in. Just fill out this form:



Giveaway will end on 7/15 and we will announce the winners then. Thanks for all your patience and understanding! Once again, we really appreciate your participation here at the GLBT Challenge.