Making It Up

as we go along

giveaway

Hotel Transylvania – DVD and art book giveaway.

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Fancy a holiday with a difference? How about a visit to Hotel Transylvania?

Welcome to Hotel Transylvania, Dracula’s lavish five-stake resort, where monsters and their families can live it up and no humans are allowed. One special weekend, Dracula (Adam Sandler) has invited all his best friends – Frankenstein and his wife, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Werewolf family, and more – to celebrate his beloved daughter Mavis’s (Selena Gomez) 118th birthday. For Dracula catering to all of these legendary monsters is no problem but the party really starts when one ordinary guy stumbles into the hotel and changes everything!

To celebrate the release on Blu-ray™ 3D, Blu-ray™ and DVD on February 4th, I’m giving away a DVD plus The Art and Making of Hotel Transylvania book to 1 lucky winner. Out now from Titan Books, The Art and Making of Hotel Transylvania features over 400 pieces of concept art, character sketches, storyboards and digital art, plus interviews with key filmmakers and crew. A spooky treat for the eyes! Visit www.titanbooks.com for more information!

All you have to do for your chance to win is leave me a comment telling me your ideal holiday location. You can have further entries for tweeting or sharing this post, but you must leave a separate comment telling me what you’ve done. I’ll be using And the winner is plugin which requires separate comments. Competition runs until next Monday 4th February at midnight, and I’ll announce the winner on the blog, as well as attempting to contact via email. You will need to pass your address on to me to send to the PR company who will send the prize direct.

If you’d like to win even more Hotel Transylvania goodies, check out the MONSTER ME Facebook competition You could win a Micro Scooter for the kids by uploading a video of them doing monster impressions from the film, enter if you dare!

© 2012 Sony Pictures Animation Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[disclosure – I have received no compensation for hosting this competition, but will be reviewing the DVD in the next few days. The prize will be supplied direct by the PR company. Links to Amazon are affiliate links.]

Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun by Liz Kessler – blog tour and giveaway.

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Today I’m trying out a new kind of post. It’s a linked blog tour post – Alison has got a review of the new Emily Windsnap book, along with an interview with Liz Kessler. I’m hosting a giveaway – I’ve got three copies of the book up for grabs. Keep on reading if you want to find out how to enter.

I remember Alison getting the first Emily Windsnap books to read. She was given them by a friend at the Montessori school she went to, in a beautiful box set with a lovely starfish necklace. That must have been 5 years ago? Maybe more. It was a lovely gift, from a close friend, and fits rather well with the whole focus of the tour – friendship.

The Emily Windsnap books are all about friendship! We’re inviting young readers to join the Emily Windsnap Friendship Festival in September 2012 – go to www.lizkessler.co.uk to find out how to get involved and win!

For your chance to win one of three copies of Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun, you need to pop over to Alison’s blog (be lovely if you left her a comment while you’re there) and find out what kind of animal Liz Kessler would like to be. Then come back here and leave me a comment telling me, and I’ll enter you into a random draw. You can get extra chances to win by sharing this post, but you *must* leave extra comments telling me where you’ve shared. (I use a wordpress plugin called And the winner is, very useful, but works on the number of comments. No extra comment, no extra entry.) Competition closes midnight 21st September, and is only open to UK, sorry. Details will be passed to the publisher for fulfilment, if you don’t want details passing on, don’t enter.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs that are taking part in the blogtour – details below. Hope you’re having a fabulous Friday.

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists – exclusive screening ticket giveaway.

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We love Aardman. Adore them. I was absolutely thrilled to be invited to an exclusive screening in London next week, of the new Pirates film before its release on DVD. And not just a screening, oh no. There will be fun food, and best of all, a modelling workshop with Aardman Animation, where the kids will learn to model their own Dodo out of clay.

Small is over the moon 🙂 I can see him really enjoying this one.

And, dear devoted readers, the excitement doesn’t end there, oh no. I have a pair of tickets to this exclusive event to giveaway!

You’ll need to be able to get yourself to Camden for a 4.30pm start on Tuesday 4th September. There will be refreshments and entertainment, then a modelling workshop and finally a screening of the film, with everything due to be finished by 7.15. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, all you have to do is leave me a comment by 3pm tomorrow, Friday 1st September, telling me your favourite Aardman character.

Further optional entries for sharing this post on social networks, but you must leave an extra comment for each share, with a link. Winner will be drawn tomorrow afternoon by use of a WordPress plugin and the winner is, which chooses randomly. Details will be passed to the PR company concerned and it will be up to the winner to confirm arrangements with the PR.

THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS is available on Blu-ray 3D™, Blu-ray™, DVD and Digital Download on September 10.

Contest closed – and the winner is Julie!

Zumba fitness 2 for Wii – review and giveaway

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You may remember me reviewing Zumba Fitness for Wii a while back, when I was working on being fit and svelte. These are not words that describe me now. Blimp describes me now, sadly, 6 months pregnant is not my best look.

I tried to keep up with the exercise for a while, and did run for the first 3-4 months, but then it started getting cold and I started to really struggle and somehow I just stopped. Now it’s a struggle to just walk around town, so when the offer to review Zumba 2 came on, I agreed with the caveat that it would be more of a comparative review than an exhaustive workout.

I’m pleased to say that this second version does indeed have improvements on the first. Or maybe I did learn something from doing the first one 😉 Either way, my first attempt at it generated a 58% score, which seemed pretty good to me right now. (Please don’t feel the need to tell me how much better you can do!) I found this easier to follow along somehow – perhaps the avatar is just easier to understand than in the first one? The one thing that I did think was a shame was the lack of variety of low intensity workouts – most of them seem to be medium or high and I don’t really want to be going for high intensity workouts right now. I do understand that this isn’t really targeted at the heavily pregnant woman market though 😉

I like the slow v normal speed settings in the tutorial section (sorry, can’t remember if that’s new in this version or whether the original had it too) and it’s a great fun way of getting or staying active at home.

Now tomorrow when you check back there will be a giveaway, but I’m afraid rafflecopter has defeated my poor babybrain tonight. Or it might just be exhaustion, I’ve no idea. But do check back as I’ve copies of the game as prizes and it’ll be a quickfire comp too 🙂

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Gamers ahoy – Disney Universe review and Grease Dance XBox competition.

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Rattling through a bit of a backlog of reviews and competitions this week, worth keeping checking in to see what else is coming up 😉

Today it’s Disney Universe – we were very lucky to be sent this to review on Wii. It ticks all my boxes in that it’s suitable from age 7 up and is multi player, so we can all join in playing. (Well, except Smallest, though she does try 😉 ) It took a little while to get the hang of it with lots of aggravation while the children tried to work out if they were playing together or against each other to begin with. This isn’t precisely what I want out of a game, but once we got over that hurdle it seems to have plenty of play value, as it’s kept them going for quite some time, whereas we have a sad pile of other games that have been out of the box once, then never seen again.

Personally, I enjoyed playing spot the film character, though I did struggle to follow the game play from time to time, but I think that’s just me not being quite as visual in terms of game play as the rest of the family. I’ve even seen dp join in, which hadn’t been achieved previously apart from the various sport things like flying planes. All in all, this gets a hearty thumbs up from us as definitely one of the better family games we’ve encountered since finally getting ourselves sorted with a console.

Grease Dance packshot

And now to the competition. I was offered a copy of Grease Dance to review and would have leapt at it, but sadly it isn’t available for the Wii. It is out on the other major consoles though, and I couldn’t pass up on the chance of two copies of the XBOX Kinect version for my readers. All you have to do to enter is tell me how much you love me in the comments between now and Tues 22nd, and I’ll pick a couple of winners via random number generator and mail to get details from them. Details will have to be passed to the company concerned for fulfilment, and I would be grateful if you’d come back and let me know precisely how fantastic a game I’m missing out on. UK entries only, and if you don’t respond within 5 days, I’ll choose another winner. Random number generators decision is final 🙂

And the winners are:

no 3 Sarah Anguish (@littleboo_21)

and no 4 Sonia (@mummy_loves)

Congratulations!