July 2019 Monthly Wrap-Up

Hello! It’s the last day of July and it’s time to recap what happened! It’s almost August and time for school to start back up soon. But I won’t be working, woo! Well, writing is work but it’s very flexible. This year I’ll have one kid in homeschool and one kid in public school.

Books Read:

I read 15 books this month. Three of them were rereads.

• Beasts of the Frozen Sun – Jill Criswell
• Ash Princess – Laura Sebastian
• Carve the Mark – Veronica Roth (reread)
• This Is How You Lose the Time War – Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar
• City of Brass – S.A. Chakraborty
• Champion – Marie Lu (reread)
• Jukebox Joyride – Jacob Stein and Jason Rabinowitz
• Goof-Proof: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing the Perfect Query Letter – Victoria Loder
• The Thousandth Floor – Katharine McGee
• Nottingham – Nathan Makaryk
• The American Dream? – Shing Yin Khor
• City of Ashes – Cassandra Clare (reread)
• Allegedly – Tiffany D. Jackson
• The Raven Boys – Maggie Stiefvater
• There’s Something About Sweetie – Sandhya Menon

I finally read one of Maggie Stiefvater’s books! I’ve been talking about how I wanted to read The Raven Boys for months, and there’s a readalong going on, so it was a good incentive to finish.

Blog Stats:

• Twitter: 2095 followers. Almost at 2100!
• Blog stats are still pretty steady.

Writing:

I’m so surprised at how much progress I’ve made this month! The first 21 chapters of The Brightness of Shadow are available for beta reading now. I ended up adding two chapters (they’re short) and added another scene that wasn’t originally planned, but should contribute to the overall character arc.

I entered a local contest, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. My boy entered the same contest in a different age category. I had the hardest time writing it… I started three different stories but settled on the third one. It was inspired by something that happened to my brother.

Life:

No hospital visits this month! I would say maybe therapy was working, but no. I guess my family member doesn’t like the staff. Whatever keeps this person out, I guess.

So school is going to start back up, and my dd is going to go to public school, and my boy is going to be homeschooled again. We just toured the public school today and dd is hoping to join the swim team there. They have a 3D printer there.

It looks like we’re going to refinance the house soon! This will be good, because we’ll be able to pay off a ton of bills and reduce our interest rate. We’ll free up a ton of money every month and we’ll have enough cash to redo the yard, get a new dishwasher, get new furniture, redo the kitchen counters, and get some electrical work done.

I’m really looking forward to getting a new bed and living room furniture. We used to have a really nice sectional couch, but it was ruined during our house fire ten years ago and we haven’t had anything really nice since. I guess I’ll probably have to share pictures! It might be a month or two still, but the loan guy says it shouldn’t be a problem!

So that’s what happened this month! Hope you had a great July too, and have a wonderful August as well.