Welcome to Let's Get Steamy 2.0!!!

Welcome to the second annual Let's Get Steamy event! Starting today, and going for the WHOLE month of February, I will be celebrating the amazing, fantastical, quirky, and oftentimes hilarious world of Steampunk! I've got interviews with some of the greats from the genre and also quite a few brand new authors you've never heard of who can grind the gears like the best of them! I'm also branching away from my norm a little. Instead of just reviewing books or interviewing authors, I am celebrating EVERY aspect of the Steampunk Genre. There will still be book reviews and author interviews of course, but I'm also throwing in posts about the movies, music, fashion, jewelery....everything that could even possibly be thought of as Steampunk, I will be featuring! *throws confetti* For those of you who weren't here last year, get ready, because you are about to be thrown headfirst into a work of fantastic inventions, mechanical marvels, and gritty graphic greatness!

First of all, I guess I should explain just what Steampunk is. Even if you don't know for sure what steampunk is, you've probably seen it before...maybe even fallen in love with it without knowing exactly what it was that you were enjoying.  Steampunk is Science Fiction. It's got the advanced and fantastic inventions that pop up in Sci-Fi, but instead of space ships and worlds of the future, Steampunk goes back in time. Typically set in Victorian England or The American Wild West, Steampunk pretends that things like steam engines, analog computers, and time machines are not only possible, but are every day occurrances. It's kind of like Steampunk authors decide to ignore  modern science and say, "But what if it could work" and then just went from there. For more information about steampunk check out this post from last year's Let's Get Steamy event!

The A-Z of all things Steampunk 

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This year I will not only be rating reviews with my traditional Keys (5 Keys is the same as 5 Stars), but I will also be rating according to "Steampunk Difficulty". The thing with Steampunk books is that sometimes they can be a bit much for people who aren't used to reading them. Sure, some are just as easy to read as any YA book you pick up from the library, but others are so technical that I feel like I need a manual or a guide just to understand the mechanics. Others are written in the style of classical Victorian Literature which, if you aren't used to it or prepared for it, can come as a shock to readers used to having books like Twilight as their main entertainment. SO, I will be using gears to show just how Steampunky these books really are.

One Gear is probably going to mean an easy transition book. The concepts of Steampunk are there, but the writing style is modern and easily understandable. Maybe there's barely any Steampunk at all, but there is the FEEL of the genre. Mostly these books are going to be YA novels. There's a lot of YA Steampunk out there that shows off the best aspects of the genre without confusing first time readers.

Five Gears are going to be the hard books. These ones are either very complicated, gritty, and written in Victorian prose (Examples include ACTUAL Victorian Novels) or have a lot of mechanics to them. These books are not "Hard" per-se, but a reader who has never attempted to read Steampunk before might want to attempt something else at first just so that they can get a better feel of the genre before jumping in without a life jacket. There are some books that even die-hard Steam fans have to re-read or use dictionaries to help them out, and these are those books. 

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Now, let's get down to what you really want to know about...the prizes :) This year I am so freaking thrilled with what I managed to wrangle together as a prizes! There will be not ONE...not TWO...but FOUR Grand Prizes for Let's Get Steamy 2.0!

I will be reviewing tons of classic, current, and epic steampunk all this month. Shockingly, I found more 4 and 5 star books for this month than any of my past events combined. That is a TON of amazing books! SO for one of the Grand Prizes, the winner will receive a copy of EVERY book that I review during this month! EVERY BOOK. Depending on how many we get to, that is 20-30 books! So if you're looking to start or improve your Steampunk Library...this may be the giveaway for you!

The last three parts of the Grand Prize Giveaway will be Three prepaid, registrations (2) to Steampunk conventions all across the country!

Yes I'm serious. Three of the entrants into the Let's Get Steamy Grand Prize Giveaway will walk away with the chance to experience the Steampunk lifestyle up close and personal by attending either the World Steam Expo in Dearborn, MI, Steamcon V in Bellevue, WA, or The Steampunk World's Fair in New Jersey! 

What you've gotta do to win is enter in the Rafflecopter below. There are a few big ways of earning entries like writing a blog post about Let's Get Steamy or putting the Let's Get Steamy button on your sidebar. But the biggest way of entering is going to be participating in the events! Most days I will have one, possibly two posts that share the love, the creativity, and the joy of Steampunk. Comment on these! Discuss, ask questions and let your creativity fly and then come back here and tell me where you commented! As I will have 2 possible entries a day for comments, feel free to come back and enter as much as you want! (on days that have no post or have only one post, you can look up other Steampunk reviews and posts in my archives and comment on one of those!) You can also get entries by spreading the word on Twitter, Facebook,Tumblr, Google+, and any other place you can think of!

a Rafflecopter giveaway
And the grand prize (as amazing as it is!) is nothing compared to all the other giveaways I've got lined up over the next month.  I've got giveaways of individual novels, clothing, accessories, jewelery, movies, EVERYTHING from pretty much ALL aspects of Steampunk for you guys to win! 

Winners will be chosen and announced on March 1st so you've got a long way to go and so many opportunities to win prizes!

So good luck you guys! Now all you've gotta do is sit back, relax, and wait for all the Steampunk awesomeness that I'm going to be throwing at you! The more I hear from you the better chance at winning one of the grand prizes or one of the smaller prizes.  I can't wait to hear what you have to say and to share my favorite Steampunk authors with you!