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May 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 3 Comments

Well! May was a month, wasn’t it? I suppose we could just stop there and call it a day, but I suppose I’ll go into a little more detail.

Books Read:

I’ve been reading some books from my seasonal TBR! Woo! I still only read nine books this month, but I’ve been whittling down my Spring TBR. Out of the nine books, there were three rereads:

  • The Rose Society – Marie Lu (reread)
  • The Midnight Star – Marie Lu (reread)
  • Malediction – Katerina King
  • Red Famine – Anne Applebaum
  • Tell Me Everything – Sarah Enni
  • Chain of Gold – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Suzanne Collins
  • 1453 – Roger Crowley
  • Of Silver and Shadow – Jennifer Gruenke

Blog Stats:

I’m currently at 2,204 Twitter followers. I thought I had lost followers this month, but I guess not!

Blog traffic is steady.

Writing:

I’m still publishing my fanfic, Saving Adelinetta, on AO3. There are currently 20 chapters published. I have written 30 chapters, although I expect there’ll be 40-45 chapters total.

Last week, a scene between James Herondale and Cordelia Carstairs kept going through my head and I had to write it. So I also published “Wedding Runes,” a short story, to AO3. I normally don’t write for such a large fandom, so I was fairly surprised, because it’s been getting a lot more hits than I’m used to.

I haven’t done too many edits to The Brightness of Shadow but I’ll get to it again at some point.

Life:

So we are done with school for the year. Hooray! That means more time to read.

We were planning on driving to my mother-in-law’s house in Arizona for my daughter’s 18th birthday later this week. It might be too dangerous to go now. We’ll see. My dh is still unemployed so we’re flexible.

My heart breaks for all the hurting people in this country right now. May was such a difficult month for so many people. So many people out of work, so many people sick, and so many people feeling helpless because of racial injustice.

I’ve been thinking about The Kiss Quotient lately. I identified with the main character, Stella, so much when I read it. When I was in high school, I even thought the only way I might ever get someone to go out with me is if I paid them. I didn’t think so at the time I wrote my review, but since then a part of me wonders if if maybe I actually am a little bit on the autism spectrum. It would explain so much. Some things have happened in the past week that seem to confirm my suspicions. Not that it makes any difference in who I am.

So that was May. I’m really hoping we have good things to say about June? It’s both my and my daughter’s birth month. I think I’ll have some good reading statistics to share, I might get some writing done… but with all the violence going on the past few days, and a pandemic still going on, I’m not sure if the US as a nation will be doing all that well. 🙁

April 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 4 Comments

Hello! It’s the last day of the month again, and it’s time to review what happened! The month has been mostly good, but not all.

Books Read:

Again, I didn’t read a ton (not doing well on that Spring TBR) but I did get nine books read (one was a reread):

  • Once a King – Erin Summerill
  • The Lucky Ones – Liz Lawson
  • The Best Laid Plans – Cameron Lund
  • The Rose and the Dagger – Renée Adieh
  • The Young Elites – Marie Lu (reread)
  • Chosen Ones – Veronica Roth
  • Fallen Glory – James Crawford
  • The Summer of Impossibilities – Rachael Allen
  • Aяguing with Socialists – Glenn Beck

Blog Stats:

Blog’s doing okay, especially considering I feel woefully inadequate in the number of blog posts I’ve been putting out.

Twitter followers is up to 2195. Slow and steady wins the race! Not that there’s a race.

Writing:

This month was RevPit, and I’m sure I won’t get picked, but that’s okay.

YALLSTAYHOME was last weekend, and it was great! I got to see so many writers and I really enjoyed it.

I’m not going to be querying THE BRIGHTNESS OF SHADOW yet, but I’m okay with that. I want it to be the best it can be before I send it out.

I’ve started to publish Saving Adelinetta to AO3. So far, I’ve published 7 chapters. This is a fanfic I started during the 2018 Olympics. I wrote about 200 pages in 10 days. After finishing chapter 30, I wrote some snippets of later chapters and stopped in order to finish Like Normal People. Then I couldn’t really get back to it. In order for me to write fanfics, I have to immerse myself in the world for a while. When it’s been too long since I’ve read in the universe, I can’t write it. I’m currently rereading The Rose Society, and along with the reread, I’m publishing the chapters of my fanfic that correspond with it (Saving Adelinetta is a Young Elites fanfic that follows Magiano’s POV). I know how it ends (the story goes beyond The Midnight Star to tell what happens after) and pretty much all the scenes I haven’t written. I have about 10-15 chapters left to write, and I’m estimating this will end up at about 100,000 words. I’m pretty excited about this book right now (you can read it here).

Life:

My husband lost his job. Oddly enough, this was not related to the Coronavirus. Several months ago, my husband helped hire his new boss to the company. After the new boss started working there, he started to fire people from the company and hire his friends from the competitor that he used to work with. I’m pretty sure that’s highly illegal, but what are you going to do? At least since lots of people are out of work, it won’t look horrible on his resume. He’s going to get a certification that will help him get a new job and hopefully more money.

Since my husband is home more often, we’re redoing the backyard and patio. Right now, our backyard is a mess. We’re getting rid of the weeds, planting grass, and putting in a fire pit. Probably going to put in a garden. We’re getting patio furniture for our deck too! I can’t wait to sit out on the deck and read this summer.

We have some dead trees in our backyard. As part of our backyard renovation, we’re cutting down these trees. The tallest tree accidentally fell into our neighbor’s backyard. Oops. Fortunately, they’re really nice. The fence already needed to be fixed. We still have to get rid of the rest of the trees, but that one was the tallest and most difficult.

The school year is almost over! Tomorrow my boy will take his final history test for the year, completing the book. We’ve gone over American history from before Columbus to Bill Clinton. We have 2 1/2 chapters of science left, and then we’ll finish math towards the end of May. We finished his pre-algebra book, but since we started partway into the book, we went straight into algebra. I calculated it so he gets exactly 104 days of summer vacation like Phineas and Ferb, LOL.

So that’s April! Hopefully this was the worst month for Coronavirus and cases will start to taper off.

RIP Speck: ~October 2013-April 3, 2020

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

We lost our fish, Speck, a few hours ago. We held a short fish funeral in our backyard, where she was laid to rest near her former tankmates. I know it’s weird to write about a fish in a book blog, but she was a part of our life for the majority of my kids’ childhood. She was 6 1/2 years old, and 4 inches long.

We got her, along with three other fish, Billy, Josh, and Minnow, on October 31, 2013. My kids won them at a carnival. My boy was six years old (almost 7) and my daughter was 11. They’re 13 and 17 now.

Minnow didn’t last long, and when we moved from Arizona to Colorado, we packed the fish up in a cooler and drove them to their new home, setting up our old tank in the new state. We moved across town, and the fish moved in the same cooler to our new home.

My daughter probably is one of the few people in history who could honestly say “the fish ate her homework.” Once, our old fish tank started leaking–all over my daughter’s homework. That’s when we ended up buying the 36 gallon tank we have now.

Billy died (in our current home, before the fish ate my daughter’s homework) and then Josh. We went and got friends for Speck, because goldfish like to have friends. One of Speck’s friends, Dusk, is still with us, and seemed to comfort Speck in her last couple of days on earth, while she was struggling to swim. Dusk and Speck hung out together a lot.

We’ll miss Speck, along with the three other fish my kids picked up at the same carnival that left before her. We also have a cat, but we didn’t get her till our daughter was a teenager. The fish were with us through our kids’ childhoods, and they’ll always live in our hearts.

March 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 10 Comments

Hello! It’s the last day of March, and what a month it’s been! I bet for most of us, it’s the least typical month we’ve had for a very long time. I can’t wait to read everybody else’s wrap-ups this month, because they’re going to be so much different than normal.

Books Read:

I did a little better last month than in February, completing 10 books.

  • A Treason of Thorns – Laura E. Weymouth
  • Sparrow – Mary Cecilia Jackson
  • Light from Distant Stars – Shawn Smucker
  • 11/22/63 – Stephen King
  • Night of the Dragon – Julie Kagawa
  • Stop Missing Your Life – Cory Muscara
  • Sky Without Stars – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell (reread)
  • Between Burning Worlds – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell
  • Today Tonight Tomorrow – Rachel Lynn Solomon
  • Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times – John W. Hall

Several of these books were amazing!

Blog Stats:

Blog stats are fairly steady. I haven’t been finding as much time to write reviews, but at least I’ve been doing Top Ten Tuesdays.

I’m at 2191 followers on Twitter. Wow!

Writing:

  • I would say that I haven’t written much, but I have, it just hasn’t been fiction. I’ve been keeping a coronavirus journal every day. It’s part of a journal series I started in 2017, although I stopped updating it regularly until this month. Since the 12th I’ve been updating it daily. I write it for an audience that may read it at an unknown time in the future, so I end up explaining things that seem obvious to us sometimes.
  • I did write a short story called “Patient Zero” earlier in the month, and I put it on Wattpad. The inspiration from the story is in the next section.

Life:

So who hasn’t had a radically different month than normal here? The coronavirus has changed the way almost everybody on earth has done things.

So the highlight of this month was probably the Penguin Teen Book Tour, where I got to meet Astrid Scholte, Marie Lu, and Melissa de la Cruz (front row of this picture, in order). I took my boy to this event and we had a wonderful day. First we went to a bakery and had brownies, then we went to the Lego Store, then we had dinner at the mall, before coming to The Tattered Cover. You can see me and my boy in this picture in the first row of chairs in the center of the right aisle. The next day I was feeling a little queasy, and it was in the early days of coronavirus, before everything got shut down. I thought, Oh no! What if I made these authors sick?

So then, I started thinking, what if someone attended a book signing of their favorite author, found out the next day they were sick with a deadly virus, accidentally spread it to their favorite author, and she died? How horrible would that be? So of course, I had to write a story about it. I’m happy to report that I don’t have coronavirus and all three of the authors pictured are evidently healthy, so I didn’t accidentally get any of them sick. Since the event was on March 5th, we can be sure no ill effects came from my meeting them.

The library and the gym shut down after that, and like most people, I don’t leave the house much. I do go for a walk every day, listening to an audiobook or an audio class. The Sunday before last I walked over six miles, to a park that is farther away from my house and back. I haven’t gone to the store since Friday the 17th though. We have enough food to last a while, but the grocery stores are still open, so I’ll go shopping again this Friday.

My husband is still working, which is good. Although he can work from home, his boss is insisting he come in and sit in his office by himself all day. He hurt his foot, so the doctor is forcibly making him work from home today and tomorrow.

Almost everything I normally do has moved to Zoom though. Church? YouTube live. Homeschool coop? Zoom. Russian meetup group? Zoom. I even went to an author event on Zoom last Saturday. I had been planning on going to see Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell on March 25th at The Tattered Cover, but of course, that event got cancelled. Fortunately, I found an event they were holding online and it was a lot of fun!

Well, let’s hope April is the worst of this coronavirus pandemic. I know most people (including myself) would love to see an improvement next month, but since I’ve been keeping a journal on this, I’m pretty sure the worst is still to come. Italy has already started to see fewer new cases and fewer new deaths per day, which is good. Some places in the US seem to be taking more days to double the number of cases and deaths, which is also good. Let’s hope that all of us staying at home (and I do hope you’re staying at home unless you have to go out or are exercising by yourself, away from people) are making a difference. I’ve read The Great Influenza by John M. Barry and it’s quite possible that we’re seeing a similar situation, but the US in 1918 had their maximum number of flu cases in October (after exponential growth) and then they started to taper off in the months after that).

February 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 10 Comments

Hello! February is almost over, so it means it’s time for a monthly wrap-up! We have an extra day this month because it’s a leap year. If you’re reading this on the 29th, today is the ONLY day in four years you can order Brigadoon Breakfast tea at Adagio. I love Adagio teas and have waited almost 4 years to try it. I ordered 18 ounces of it, LOL. I don’t get any referral bonuses off that link, but I thought you might want to know about it if you like tea and want a once in four year opportunity. Anyway, let’s get started!

Books Read:

The last few months have been abysmal in getting books read. It’s so bad, I’m not even close to finishing my Winter TBR. I’m still on track for my Goodreads challenge, but I only read seven books last month.

  • Lord of Shadows – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Killing the SS – Bill O’Reilly
  • Belle Révolte – Linsey Miller
  • Queen of Air and Darkness – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Chain of Gold – Cassandra Clare
  • Broken Throne – Victoria Aveyard
  • Sensational – Jodie Lynn Zdrock

But I suppose there’s more to a reading life than numbers. Queen of Air and Darkness is 880 pages long. The first time I read it, I read that, Lord of Shadows, Lady Midnight, and Clockwork Princess is 8 or 9 days and it was exhausting. I took a lot more time reading them this time around.

Blog Stats:

  • Blog users have fallen but I haven’t been posting as much, so that’s not much of a surprise. Hopefully I’ll get more into the blogging and reading groove soon.
  • Twitter has been up though, to 2172. Not sure where that is coming from.

Writing:

  • I finished my fourth draft of The Brightness of Shadow. I entered into Author Mentor Match, but I know I won’t get picked, even though they won’t announce the mentees until March 3rd. That’s okay.
  • I had two of my short stories chosen for publication! Twist in Time Magazine is doing an anthology called Thank You For Your Service, and my personal essay, “September 11th” was chosen for publication. It’ll be published on November 11th this year. I also was picked for the 42 Word Story Anthology. They’re picking a lot of authors for that one.

Life:

  • My boy has been grounded from his phone and computer for most of the month, and he’s used it to read a lot. He read the entire Young Elites trilogy, which is good, because I’m taking him to see Marie Lu, Astrid Scholte, and Melissa de la Cruz on the 5th. He’s read 10 of Marie Lu’s books now, plus her short story in Slasher Girls & Monster Boys. He wanted a book recommendation yesterday and I suggested Four Dead Queens.
  • Sandhya Menon’s book launch for Of Curses and Kisses went great! The evening was spectacular, until I was almost home. I almost died. It started snowing, my windshield wipers stopped working, I couldn’t see, and then when I tried to get off the freeway, my car spun around on the freeway twice. I was so scared, and I was praying hard in the car. I hope to turn that event into a short story which I hope to submit to Chicken Soup for the Soul. Fortunately, nobody got hurt, and the weather is supposed to be nice for the Penguin Teen Tour next week.

So that was my month! I really hope to step up my reading next month because there are so many books I want to read and they’re just not getting read! I hope you had an excellent February and have a wonderful March! And that we finally see a curtailment of this snow.

Thrones

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

So today I’m going WAAAAY off topic. But it’s Sunday, and I deleted my other blogs last year so I’ll go with it. Before I started this blog, I had a political/religion blog; I also wrote nonfiction articles for Associated Content (later Yahoo! Voices) and some other places. I was thinking about the concept of thrones this morning and thought I needed to write about it. This isn’t book related, but it’s me as an author related, so I’m just going to go with it.

We read about thrones a lot in YA (Throne of Glass, all those stories with royalty in them, etc.). So this morning in church, I was thinking about the thrones in the Bible.

  • When God was up on Mount Sinai, that was kind of like His throne. Moses was pretty much the only person allowed to go up on the mountain, because everybody else was like:
We're Not Worthy!
  • And then later on, there was the Tabernacle, which was this big tent where God lived. It was later replaced by the temple. God made a rule where only the High Priest could go into the center of the temple, where the Ark was, and there was a whole bunch of ritual involved in him going to the throne, or God would kill him.
  • Years later, Esther married King Xerxes (known as Ahasuerus in the Bible) and you couldn’t go into his throne room unless he called you. If you did go into the throne room uninvited, he could hold out his scepter to you and then you would be okay, otherwise, they’d put you to death. When Esther went in uninvited, fortunately, he held out his scepter to her.

So today, the Bible compares praying to going to the Throne room of God, but we don’t have to worry about getting killed any more. Because of Jesus. And that’s a good thing.

That’s my random thought for the day. Tomorrow we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming with a review (on Sandhya Menon’s blog tour) of Of Curses and Kisses!

January 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 14 Comments

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).

Meeting Kiersten White

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?

November 2019 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 9 Comments

Hey! I hope you all had an AMAZING November! Any November that I win NaNoWriMo is a good November to me, K? But on to the rest of the month:

Books Read:

I only finished reading ten books this month. Three of them were rereads. One of them was 1463 pages though (which is forever on audiobook).

  • This Savage Song – Victoria Schwab
  • City of Heavenly Fire – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Safe Harbour – Christina Kilbourne
  • Reverie – Ryan La Sala
  • Clockwork Angel – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Call Down the Hawk – Maggie Stiefvater
  • Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
  • The Queen of Nothing – Holly Black
  • Sea Witch – Sarah Henning
  • Clockwork Prince – Cassandra Clare (reread)

Safe Harbour is the most underrated book out of the above, I think. And I finally read a book by V.E. Schwab, after saying I need to do so for about a year now.

Blog Stats:

Blog visits are down and Twitter followers are flat, but it is NaNoWriMo and I haven’t had the chance to visit as many places as I would like to.

Writing:

NaNoWriMo 2019 Winner

Do I need to say anything else? I haven’t written much else this month. Next month I need to work on editing The Brightness of Shadow and working on finishing this still untitled book, but I won. I didn’t spend as much time this year on NaNoPrep as last year, but I still finished.

Life:

I got to visit my husband’s family in Arizona for Thanksgiving, so that was good. Homeschool coop is over with for a couple of months, so I’m going to appreciate the break. No hospital trips, fortunately. We had a few big snow days this month.

So that was November. How was your month?

Bookmarks!

By Brookelorren on 26 Comments
Top Ten Tuesday

Hello! Welcome to another Top Ten Tuesday, where we talk about books! This week’s topic is “Favorite Bookmarks” but since I really don’t have ten of those to talk about, I’m going to talk about bookmarks in general. What I use, which ones I want, etc.

June bookmark

Magnetic bookmarks are sometimesthe cutest! I got some for Christmas last year. Here’s June from Legend, who currently resides in my Spanish copy of The Midnight Star. I try to keep the bookmarks with their author, at least.

Day bookmark

Of course, if I have June, I also have to have Day. He currently lives in my hardback copy of Prodigy.

Then I have these adorable Shadowhunter bookmarks. They’re usually my go-to bookmarks when I’m reading a physical book (since Day and June are otherwise occupied). They came in a set of seven, but a few of them are hanging out in books somewhere and I don’t know where I left them. One of the good things I like about these magnetic bookmarks is that I don’t lose them. I’ve learned to put them in the front of the book while I’m reading them. Unfortunately, if I forget to take them out of a book when I’m done reading it, I end up losing track of them. But they’re somewhere.

Shadowhunter bookmark

Here’s another one of my Shadowhunter bookmarks, currently hanging out in Clockwork Angel.

Bible Verse Magnetic Bookmarks

I have this set of four Bible magnetic bookmarks. One of them is appropriately… in my Bible. The other one is hanging out in my Calendar for Writers.

Brooke Bookmark

I was given this bookmark several years ago. I lost it for a while, but I recently found this again. So there’s hope for my missing Shadowhunters, who are currently hiding.

National Geographic Bookmark

I don’t use my magnetic bookmarks when reading magazines. I’d probably end up losing them easily that way. For those, I like to use National Geographic inserts. They’re fairly large, and fit into magazines fairly well. I keep a couple of them on hand most of the time. They work better than scraps of paper or the smaller magazine inserts, and I don’t have to worry about whether they get lost.

Cyra and Akos

I don’t have these bookmarks, but they’re on my Christmas list. These are of Cyra and Akos from Carve the Mark. You can get them on Etsy.

Cruel Prince bookmarks

These Cruel Prince bookmarks are adorable as well. I don’t have them and didn’t ask for them for Christmas, but they are cute.

Van Gogh bookmarks

There used to be these adorable Four and Tris bookmarks on Etsy, but they’re no longer available :-(. I did find these cute Van Gogh painting magnetic bookmarks on Amazon though.

As you can see, I really like magnetic bookmarks. Before I found them, I just used random scraps of paper, because I could never keep track of them.

What are your favorite bookmarks? Do you use magnetic bookmarks like I do? Do you know of some really cute book characters on magnetic bookmarks? I’d love to have more of my favorite characters on bookmarks. Looking forward to your responses!

Next week’s topic is “Changes in My Reading Life.” See you then!

October 2019 Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

Hello! Another month is gone, and it’s already NaNoWriMo! I’ll be busy writing my next novel (hopefully) this month, but this is what I did in October.

Books Read

I read fourteen books this month. One of them was a reread, and another one was a short story (but Goodreads counts them as “books”). There was a lot of Octoberage going on here, coincidentally. There were two graphic novels on my list last month.

  • Rebel – Marie Lu
  • The End and Other Beginnings – Veronica Roth
  • War Girls – Tochi Onyebuchi
  • “Ark” – Veronica Roth
  • Batman Graphic Novel – Marie Lu
  • The Beautiful – Renée Ahdieh
  • Pumpkinheads – Rainbow Rowell
  • Across a Broken Shore – Amy Trueblood
  • Song of the Crimson Flower – Julie C. Dao
  • Every Stolen Breath – Kimberly Gabriel
  • Color Outside the Lines – various
  • Always Forever Maybe – Anica Mrose Rissi
  • City of Lost Souls – Cassandra Clare (reread)

It was a very good month because both I had two new stories to read by BOTH of my auto-buy authors! Every Stolen Breath contributed Illinois to my Read Around the US challenge, and The Beautiful gave me historical Louisiana.

Blog Stats:

Twitter follows are flat as are blog visits.

Writing:

In October I started getting ready for NaNoWriMo. I have a great character to write about and I’m excited! I also wrote a short story for Wattpad’s Looking for Alaska Contest, called “Mist Off a Morning Lake”, which you can read if you’d like.

Life:

I’ve been driving a rental car around for the last few weeks because my husband got rear-ended in October and our car was totaled. We got a new (to us, at least) car. I hate going to car dealerships. It’s kind of annoying. Even though we went to the dealership with financing already lined up through our bank, they make us fill out a credit app. ::roll eyes:: It also takes for freakin’ ever to buy a car. But that’s over with.

No more hospital trips, although one of my family members was allergic to some medication given and it kept this person in bed for a week, until we figured out what was causing it. Hoping this new medicine works out better.

It also snowed this month. School was cancelled two or three days already for the season. I still teach school on snow days though. I told my boy that as soon as we get through the books he’s done for the school year. He’s still on track. I’m sure he’s looking for fall break the last week of November. Our homeschool coop ends in three weeks (yay) and then it’ll be a little more relaxed for a couple months.

So that was October. How was your month? Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? If so, good luck!