September 2020 Wrap-Up

Hello! Hard to believe we’re already at the end of September. I hope you all had a wonderful month. Here is what I did:

Books Read:

The whole summer and spring has been awful for book reading. I’m amazed I’m still on-track for my Goodreads challenge. I only read 8 books this month:

• The Opposite of Always – Justin A. Reynolds
• The History of Wales – John Davies
• Hanger Management – Susan Albers
• Descendant of the Crane – Joan He
• Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik
• A Torch Against the Night – Sabaa Tahir (reread)
• Skyhunter – Marie Lu
• Macbeth – William Shakespeare (reread)

I almost forgot about Macbeth, but I read it in school with my boy and we finished today. It’s technically a reread since I read it when I was in high school.

I got to be a part of the Skyhunter Street Team and it was great! The people at Fierce Reads were so nice; they gave me a mask cover and a bookmark as a thank-you gift. I ended up getting two finished copies–I pre-ordered one and got another one from Bookish First–so I guess that means my niece gets an extra book from me for Christmas this year.

Writing:

School has started, and my critique partner has been pretty busy with teaching (as have I) and we haven’t worked on our books together lately. I have been working on Saving Adelinetta though. I have posted the first 26 chapters now. There’s five chapters left in the second section, which I’m currently posting, and then I probably won’t start posting the third section until 2021. I haven’t written most of the third section yet, and November is NaNoWriMo, where I’ll be working on an original project, so the third section is just going to have to wait.

Excited because tomorrow starts Preptober! But… if I want to start sending off my NaNoWriMo book (from 2018) out to agents on December 1st, I better get cracking. I’ve been dawdling on edits to The Brightness of Shadow so much that it might take that long. I always thought it would be funny to start querying my NaNoWriMo book on December 1st–although not from that year’s NaNo, obviouly.

Life:

My dh is still looking for work. For some reason we were denied for food benefits, even though unemployment pays $2000 a year below the poverty level. We reapplied, so hopefully they’ll say yes this time, otherwise we’re buying food this week with our credit card.

School started, and it’s been keeping my Mondays busy. I homeschool my boy 5 days a week (he started 9th grade) and I teach Spanish and German on Tuesdays. This year, I’m teaching via Zoom. The advantage to Zoom is that you can put all these nice pictures into your classes. The disadvantage is that it takes hours to put all these nice pictures into your classes. I was happy this Monday because I finished by 1 AM. Then I probably won’t use all this work next year.

My membership at the gym ends next week :-(. I paid for two years a little over two years ago, and they gave us an extension because they shut down for the Coronavirus. It’s been nice while it lasted. I’m going to miss swimming. I’ll have to find out a way to work out that isn’t too hard on my feet. Maybe yoga. I’m sure there’s some classes on YouTube or something I can cast to the TV. Does anybody know of any good (free) classes?

It snowed a couple of weeks ago, while it was still summer. I was worried about our plants. They lived through the snow, but died mysteriously this week. The strawberry plants are still fine though. We didn’t get any cantaloupes or watermelons, but we did get a cucumber.

That was a picture before all the plants died. We’re planting garlic next week; hopefully that will turn out well.

I made a mini-Olaf on our patio table when it snowed, so he could finally experience summer “and finally feel a summer breeze blow away a winter storm, and find out what happens to solid water when it gets warm.” This was from September 9th:

So that was my month. How was yours? Hopefully October will be wonderful for all of us!