January 2020 Wrap-Up

Hi! It’s the last day of the month, and time to wrap-up everything I’ve done this month. I hope January has been good to you and you have a great February too.

Books Read:

It’s been hard getting a lot of books read lately. I don’t know why. Anyway, I did manage to read 11 books (2 of them were rereads):

• Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy – Cassandra Clare and others
• The Duchess Deal – Tessa Dare
• Ghosts of the Shadow Market – Cassandra Clare and others (reread)
• This Light Between Us – Andrew Fukuda
• Eliza and Her Monsters – Francesca Zappia
• Tweet Cute – Emma Lord
• The Kingdom of Back – Marie Lu
• Lady Midnight – Cassandra Clare (reread)
• Disappearing Earth – Julia Phillips
• Don’t Read the Comments – Eric Smith
• When We Were Vikings – Andrew David McDonald

Blog Stats:

• My number of blog users went back to what it had been but I haven’t had time to post as many reviews as I’d like to. I still have to write my review for When We Were Vikings (which I just finished in the last hour) and I haven’t read Belle Revolte, which comes out February 4. If I can finish that book by Tuesday I’ll be up-to-date on my ARCs. I feel bad, getting a little behind, but I guess that happens sometimes.
• For some reason my Twitter followers are up to 2155. It’s strange how sometimes it goes up and sometimes it doesn’t.

Writing:

I haven’t been as productive this month as I would hope. I still have 66 pages to finish with draft #4 of The Brightness of Shadow. I’m going to let my husband read it after this, but I already know there are still changes I want to make before I let anybody else read it, which means a draft #5. I listened to How to Write Best-Selling Fiction this month and I guess the more you learn, the more ways you have to improve your work. But it’s getting closer to how I want it. And I’m cutting out the first chapter.

I did publish the first chapter to Saving Adelinetta, which is a Young Elites fanfic written from Magiano’s perspective. I’m not likely to publish anything else in this story for a while, but since this kinda stands alone and I was really happy with it, I published it. This chapter is the story of how The Boy of Mensah escapes from the temple of Mensah and then names himself Magiano at the end of the chapter. Several details were given in The Young Elites and I used them and filled in some details for this chapter of the fanfic.

Life:

This month was really exciting for books (even though I’m behind in my ARCs and my winter TBR).

So one cool thing I got to do was meet Kiersten White! In October 2018 there was a Top Ten Tuesday post called “Authors I’d Love to Meet.” I had never read any of her books at that point, but she seemed so nice on Twitter that she was on my list. I’ve read two of her books now. Anyway, not only was she really nice, like she seems to be on Twitter, she’s actually very funny. She said she’s judging me a little because I’ve never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer before, but that’s okay. There’s a character named after her called Pearston in my book, and she thought that was funny (the joke is sometimes bookstores get her name wrong, and one of the wrong names they’ve called her was Pearston).

But wait, there’s more! I was thinking about that post, Authors I’d Love to Meet, and thought that I’d probably never get to meet Astrid Scholte unless I became some big-time author someday because she lives in Australia. The very next day, Penguin Teen announced that Ms. Scholte AND Marie Lu are going to be going on tour together with Melissa de la Cruz. They’re making a stop at the exact same spot where I met Kiersten White! You can imagine how excited I was to hear that, as they were both on that list. It’s open to the public, and even though I’m taking my boy with me to that event (he’s read 8 Marie Lu books himself) I’ll probably have to leave several of my books at home.

Oh, and in other exciting news, I’m getting a Chain of Gold ARC! Can you flippin’ believe that? First, I get an ARC of The Kingdom of Back, and now this! They’re both from Bookish First (I love them). These are literally the two ARCs, if I was going to beg for ARCs for books in the first half of this year, that I would beg for. And both will be mine!

Other than that, I have a cold, my daughter has the same cold, and my dh has the cold, although he made it to work today. It’s probably not the Wuhan Corona Virus because it doesn’t look like we’ll need a trip to the hospital but whatever we had, it looks like we’ll survive.

So that’s it! How was your month?