August Monthly Wrap-Up

So today’s the last day of August, and it’s time for yet another monthly wrap-up post.  This is what happened in August:

Books Read:

This month I read ten books, and some of them were pretty long.  I had a lot of library books come in, and I’ve been trying to make sure that those get read first.  Normally I post an ARC/new release review at the beginning of the week on my blog, but because I’ve had so many library books to read, September 3rd’s review will be on an older book, City of Glass.  That’s just the way things worked out.

• Crown of Midnight – Sarah J. Maas
• My Mother.  Barack Obama.  Donald Trump.  And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. – Kevin Powell
• Glass Sword – Victoria Aveyard
• George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire – Peter Y. Choi
• When Elephants Fly – Nancy Richardson Fischer
• King’s Cage – Victoria Aveyard
• Give the Dark My Love – Beth Revis
• City of Ashes – Cassandra Clare
• Heir of Fire – Sarah J. Maas
• City of Glass – Cassandra Clare

Tower of Dawn was on sale for $2.99, so I picked that one up this week.  Now I don’t have to be in such a rush to read it when it becomes available at the library.  I’ve found that that is one of the biggest drawbacks to getting books from the library.  You have to be ready to drop everything and read them when they become available.  Right now, I think I really only have three books that are going to become available soon, and I’ll be able to handle that.

I have plenty of books that I’ve been getting off Amazon.com for $1.99.  Their monthly Kindle deals are just too good to pass up!  I thought about getting Warcross because it went on sale for $2.99, but I held myself back.  After all, I already have two copies.

Blog Stats:

• I actually lost followers this month on Twitter, but there’s an explanation for that.  Twitter did some sort of purge, and I lost about 90 followers in one day.  I thought maybe it was something I had said, but it wasn’t.  So I’m at 1523 followers, but if there hadn’t been that Twitter purge I would have been over 1600.
• I’m at about 300 monthly users on my blog.  For a while, I was higher than that, then I dropped lower.  I haven’t had as much time to visit other blogs, but 300 has been a goal of mine, so that’s good.
• I have 12 posts written that haven’t been posted yet, which is more than last month. I’m trying to get ahead, because I’ll be really busy during NaNoWriMo.  You might find me doing a lot of graphic novel and short story reviews in December because of NaNoWriMo, LOL.

Writing:

• I finished writing Like Normal People!  Yay!  I published my first chapter on January 7th, 2016, and published the last chapter on August 30th, 2018.  I had two long bouts of writer’s block with this one.  First, in 2016, I had to write about mountain climbing and had no clue how to do it; I was in the middle of a move, and then I just forgot about my story.  The second time was in February, where one of the chapters was completely boring me and I didn’t know how to make it interesting.  I wrote a bunch of other stuff while waiting for inspiration on that one, even though I only had three and a half chapters left.  Once I was able to write that chapter, the story was done in a week.
• I already have over 10 pages of notes for my NaNoWriMo novel this year.  I have a good idea of what is going to happen in the story, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to have to be a duology, because towards the end it looks like a war is about to break out.  This started out in my head as a fanfic of a fanfic, but it has developed a lot so far, and although if you squint, you can see what inspired this story, it will look completely different.  I still have 2 more months to plan this before I write, too.
• For September, my goal is to finish writing the first draft of Hero.  I’m in the wrapping-up phase of this story, so there probably won’t be too many chapters left to write, but I haven’t outlined this one, so I’m not sure how may are left.  I don’t know if I’ll get to Saving Adelinetta in October.  I want to make Hero look really good first.  I’ll probably be spending more time editing and revising my stories going forward, which will make them better, but it will also cause them to take more time.  I’m guessing that Saving Adelinetta needs at least 100 more pages to finish it, and that one is going to need a lot of revising (I literally wrote about 200 pages of that story in 10 days).

Life:

Like many people, school has started, and so things have gotten busier.  My daughter spent her first day of public school (ever) in the hospital.  She’s out now though.  It takes about 40 minutes to drive her to school.  So… now I get home from work at around midnight and get up at 6 AM to drive her to school.  My husband has agreed to drive her on Thursdays and Fridays though, so that is a big help.  The upside to that is that I can listen to audiobooks on the way.  Right now I’m listening to Everless.  That’s like free reading time.

My Spanish and German classes have restarted, and I actually have pretty good enrollment numbers.  The Duolingo people decided to change the Spanish tree on me the week before classes, and I had to rewrite the booklet I give to my students over a weekend (it’s 50 pages).  Class has been going well though.  I’m not as nervous this year, and planning is going a lot more smoothly.  I’m learning how to incorporate more speaking practice, which helps the class move forward.

So that’s it for August.  How was your month?