August 2019 Monthly Wrap-Up

Hello! It’s the last day of August, and it’s time for another monthly wrap-up! This month was pretty good. We started school, so it’s been busy, but I’m getting a lot done. So what happened?

Books Read:

Once again, I finished 15 books in the past month.

• Start Here – Trish Doller
• Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World – Scott McCormick
• Isle of Blood and Stone – Makiia Lucier
• A Court of Wings and Ruin – Sarah J. Maas
• Crown of Coral and Pearl – Mara Rutherford
• The Shadowhunter’s Codex – Cassandra Clare and Joshua Lewis
• The Dream Thieves – Maggie Stiefvater
• Satellite Bible Atlas – William Schlegel
• Truthwitch – Susan Dennard
• Ghost Fire – Wilbur Smith
• The Lady Rogue – Jenn Bennett
• The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
• Blue Lily, Lily Blue – Maggie Stiefvater
• Rora – James Byron Huggins
• The Future of Another Timeline – Annalee Newitz

Part of me doesn’t know if Rivals! Should really count, because it’s only available on audiobook, but it reads like a book, so I am.

Blog Stats:

• Twitter: I lost 14 followers, down to 2081. Oh well.
• Blog users are slightly up.

You really can’t control how other people are going to react to you, so you just keep plodding along. Nobody likes to see their stats go down, but if I was solely into it for the numbers, I’d just follow everybody and not worry about whether they posted things I was interested in or not.

Writing:

I haven’t focused a lot on The Brightness of Shadow this month. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing!

I realized that Rebel‘s pub date was coming up, and I wanted to publish Hero before that time, so I’ve been finishing up edits on that and have been publishing it to AO3. It’s a Legend fanfic that takes place right after the epilogue of Champion, where Day (now going by Daniel) gets some unexpected news when he returns to the Republic. I wrote the first draft before Rebel was announced, so it’s not canon with that book or with Life After Legend I or II (I hadn’t read them yet). I did slide in one little detail I gleaned after reading the Rebel sampler, but it’s mostly independent. I feel a little like Cath from Fangirl wanting to finish Carry On Simon before the last Simon Snow book came out. If you’d like to read it, the first 18 (out of 27) chapters are up on AO3.

Neither me nor my boy won the writing contest, but I got some good feedback, edited it, and sent it out to a couple places. To me, the important thing is that I’m putting my work out there and trying. I finished my first Attic Notebook, so in a little over a month I’ll be able to start reading those stories and maybe I’ll expand upon some of them.

I got an idea for NaNoWriMo this year. So I have two months to work on the characters and do some worldbuilding.

Life:

Looks like we won’t be refinancing the house for a couple of months. We found out at the last minute that we weren’t eligible for the program we were going with (for reasons I don’t want to disclose publicly). We’ll be going for a conventional loan instead, but that’s going to take looking for another lender and won’t happen right away.

My daughter started public school and is doing great! She gets up on her own, and all I have to do is make sure she leaves at the right time. She pretty much does it without my help, but I’m not going to leave that to chance. Her grades are going great.

No trips to the hospital this month! It’s been 2 1/2 months now. We did get a bill for about $59 because my husband rolled a wheelchair for less than 100 yards to take my family member to her room. The $59 was for “mileage”. It’d cost less than $59 to drive a Bugatti 100 yards! It amounts to more than $1000 a mile. It costs about $20,000 to rent a Bugatti for a day, so if I pro-rated that based on the fact that I’d probably drive a rental car more than 20 miles, the mileage on that wheelchair was more expensive.

My boy started school too, and that’s going well. At the homeschool coop, the only thing I’m doing is TAing for an improv class. That should be fun.

In exactly one month and 33 minutes from the time I type this, I get to read Rebel! Yay!

Since I’m getting a copy on the Kindle (I ordered a signed hardback too) that means at exactly 10 PM on September 30th, I get to read it. I called it a school holiday so I can stay up all night to read it and go to sleep afterwards. It’s the homeschool coop’s fall break, so lucky me, I can actually pull that one off.

So that’s my August. How was yours? Hope you have a great September.