April 2020 Wrap-Up

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.