All posts tagged monthly wrapup

December 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

Hello! Another month is done, and it’s time for the monthly wrap-up! It’s the last month of the year too.

Books Read:

I finished my Goodreads goal! Yes! I actually went several books beyond that.

Goodreads tracks these audio/video classes I’ve been taking by The Great Courses, in addition to audiobooks and print books. It feels like cheating to count them, even though I often listen to them on my walks in lieu of listening to an audiobook. But going over My Year in Books, I still would have reached my Goodreads goal even without them. I don’t list them here (although maybe I should… I’ll start next month). I’m setting my Goodreads goal for 2021 assuming that I’m including them. Although I’m keeping my goal the same. I don’t want the Goodreads goal to be stressful.

Anyway, I read 12 books this month (not counting audio/video courses). This was the most of any month this year!

  • A Sky Beyond the Storm – Sabaa Tahir
  • Fireblood – Elly Blake
  • The Promised Neverland Volume 1
  • The Heavenly Man – Brother Yun (reread)
  • Starfish – Akemi Dawn Bowman
  • Enchantée – Gita Trelease (reread)
  • A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
  • Golden Poppies – Laila Ibrahim
  • The Language of Thorns – Leigh Bardugo
  • Everything That Burns – Gita Trelease
  • Clockwork Angel – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • The Promised Neverland Volume 2

I finished the last three books on December 31st, but they were all partially read. My dh was like “uh, we were planning on doing family stuff tonight” and I was like “not until 8!” And I managed to finish them all before then.

Writing:

Last month, I wrote two Shadowhunter’s fanfics: “A Walk in the Snow,” which takes place on Christmas Eve, and “The End of a Marriage Blanc.” They’re both post-Chain of Gold Jordelia fics. I probably should be finishing my NaNo20 duology, but I didn’t.

I sent my first queries!

I already know what I’m going to write for NaNo21 though. When I was in high school, I wrote a best-friends-to-lovers story called Save the Best for Last. Even though I haven’t seen the story since high school, and don’t know where it is, I’m going to rewrite it. Obviously, it’s going to be a lot different, especially since the original was a self-insert rpf. This one is going to take place in The Brightness of Shadow universe, 6000 years before that story takes place.

Originally, I was going to write a story about the evil queen Katerina and her daughter Elena for NaNoWriMo in 2018. In August, something told me “Don’t write that story yet. Turn that fanfic you wrote in April into a story about elves and humans.” So I did. Later, I found out that Katerina and Elena were in the same universe, just ~6000 years before The Brightness of Shadow.

Save the Best for Last is going to take place a few years before Katerina and Elena’s story. What I think is the coolest part, though, is that I’m discovering more about how the elves came to take over Erenya while I’m thinking about Save the Best for Last. Had I written Katerina and Elena’s story first, I would have made a mess of things. Some of the events that take place in Save the Best for Last will affect both my rewrites of The Brightness of Shadow and my unwritten story of Elena and Katerina. The characters in Save the Best for Last (I don’t know their names yet) aren’t politically important (they’re just simple villagers) but the times they live in will be important for the other stories.

Life:

My dh got a job! His new boss definitely needed an HR manager. My dh is already making improvements, and has ideas to help increase its rating on Yelp and reduce turnover.

We finished school for the year and have been off for a couple weeks. So nice having a vacation. But we start again on Monday. Homeschool coop doesn’t start again till later in January though. I don’t know if I’ll end up with enough students to teach the German class again, but I’ll probably teach the second semester of the Spanish class.

For Christmas, I ended up finishing FOUR scarves. One, for my sister-in-law, was almost done, and I just finished it. Then I made a maroon one for my daughter. Then I designed one with Seahawks colors for my brother. Finally, on December 21st, my dh was like “we need to spend my paycheck this week on the mortgage. We don’t have any money for Christmas.” Uh… so that night, I started making a scarf for him. I only worked on it while he was at work, and I finished it two hours before he came home on Christmas Eve (we eventually got a mortgage forbearance and were able to get a few Christmas presents).

2020 decided to give us one last gift. On December 29th, my dh blew a tire by running over something that was covered with snow. We didn’t have enough money in our bank account. So I went to my boy and told him “we have an emergency, we need to borrow your money!” With his help, we managed to scape together $188, which was $2 more than the final bill.

And I think the motor in our heater blower isn’t working (my dh doesn’t think so, but I believe he’s mistaken). So I’m looking forward to the coronabucks we’re getting on Monday. We’ll finally be able to get our 2nd car up and running again too! We stopped using it last April after my dh lost his job; we didn’t need it, and one of the windshield wipers is broken. Now that he’s working again, we can get it registered and insured and start using it again.

So that was December! How was your month? Did 2020 leave you with any parting gifts? Are you glad it’s 2021?

October 2020 Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 4 Comments

Hello! It’s November 1st, and time to say hello to the holiday season and hustle and bustle until the end of the year. But before we get there, what happened last month?

Books Read:

I realized this month why I was having such a hard time getting things read. My husband is home all. the. time. Don’t get me wrong, I love him, but when he had a job, I’d wake up, fling the curtains wide open, and read before or after (often both) teaching school. Now, I can’t fling the curtains open because he’s often sleeping. Then my boy comes in at 11 PM to write code on my dh’s computer, and after that, my boy comes and sits on my bed to watch a video by Jaiden Animations, and then they watch Cutthroat Kitchen. Who can read with all that going on?

Anyway, I only read 6 books this month. I don’t expect it to get any better with NaNoWriMo starting today. I need to read 19 more books to finish my Goodreads Challenge. Worst case scenario, I can squeeze in Life After Legend I and II in a half hour. While I don’t plan on reading a lot of short books to win my Goodreads challenge, since I know I’ll be close, I might choose to squeeze in a few books that way.

Hopefully my dh will get a job next year and I can get my reading on track.

Anyhoo, this is what I read:

  • The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – V.E. Schwab
  • The First Hostage – Joel C. Rosenberg
  • Make Up Break Up – Lily Menon
  • The Red Scrolls of Magic – Cassandra Clare
  • Mirror Gate – Jeff Wheeler
  • A Reaper at the Gates – Sabaa Tahir (reread)

I almost finished Julie Kagawa’s Talon in time to include it on this list, but I started NaNoWriMo instead. I had an hour left in the book and I had to go to sleep. I’m starting The Scorpio Races today, which is something I planned to do for nearly a year already (since it starts on November 1st, I’ll start reading it on that day).

Writing:

Woo! Time for NaNoWriMo! In the summer of 2019 I started to come up with the germ of this story: a girl, who is a lady-in-waiting to the princess, is being held as a prisoner in her enemy country after she was captured in a war. When she discovers that they intend to kill her, she ends up running off with the handsome gray ace son of a duke, and they end up getting shipwrecked on a deserted island.

I always thought it would be funny if I started querying my NaNoWriMo novel (from 2018) on December 1st. THE BRIGHTNESS OF SHADOW is not ready, and since I’m writing another novel now, it’s unlikely to get ready in the next 30 days. But you know what? It’s 95% ready. I’ve had someone say to me “Why isn’t this published already!?!” Will that last 5% make the difference between a rejection and an acceptance? Probably not. Especially since the first half of the book is completely ready to go, and the only pages I haven’t gone over for the last time (before querying) aren’t even pages an agent will see unless they request a full.

That last 5% is holding me back. It’s been sucking my motivation. It’s been keeping me from moving forward. So, on December 1st, I’m going to send it out into the world and see what happens. I will finish that last 5%, but I won’t let the fact that it’s not done yet stop me from querying. Because, although I know they say not to send out a novel until it’s as good as you can make it on your own, the tiny sliver of change that I can make myself is insignificant.

So December 1st, I’m sending out my first batch of queries. And if it gets accepted, I’ll have a funny story about how I started querying my NaNoWriMo novel on December 1st, which is something agents say never to do. They generally mean don’t send out the NaNoWriMo novel you just finished though, not the NaNoWriMo novel you started two years ago and have already edited it so much that–even though you love it–you want to move on to the next stage.

Life:

Not much is going on over here. It’s the same nearly every week. Sunday: church, then start getting ready for Tuesday’s Spanish and German classes. Monday: teach my boy school and finish preparing for Tuesday’s classes. Wednesday through Friday: recover from teaching language classes and teach my boy. Saturday: maybe do something different?

My dh and I went for a drive at the beginning of the month to go see the falling leaves; that was different. Then we went to Kansas because we’ve never been there before. I want to go somewhere new every month, because we’ve been here in Colorado for about six years and haven’t seen much yet. For November, I want to see the Denver Art Museum. Since dh doesn’t want to go to the art museum (I really don’t want to go with him and have him rush me anyway), we’ll also go on a drive somewhere nearby.

I don’t celebrate Halloween, but I started playing Animal Crossing and I went to an Animal Crossing Halloween party with my daughter. The characters were so adorable! My boy went trick-or-treating and dressed up as a plague doctor. I want to wear the plague mask to Walmart sometime. I took my mask today but chickened out. I’ll do it when I’m only going in for a couple things.

So that was October. Hopefully if you’re doing NaNoWriMo, you’ll get what you want out of it. I’m not holding my breath for the elections, but hopefully by the time I write my wrap-up of next month, we won’t be in the middle of a civil war and people are killing each other.

September 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments

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!

August 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 8 Comments

Hello! It’s September already, which means it’s time to go over what I did in August.

Books Read:

I only read eight books last month. To be fair though, I went camping for a week, and I didn’t get very much read over that time period.

  • The Crow Rider – Kalyn Josephson
  • The Damned – Renée Ahdieh
  • A Spectacle of Souls – Jessica Julien
  • The Bride Test – Helen Hoang
  • Conquest – Celeste Harte
  • Summer Days and Summer Nights – Various (reread)
  • An Ember in the Ashes – Sabaa Tahir (reread)
  • Listen to Your Heart – Kasie West

Writing:

Writing has been going okay. I should be ready to query The Brightness of Shadow soon. I’m getting ready for NaNoWriMo 2020, which is only 2 months away now.

Life:

Life is a mixed bag. My dh is still looking for work. He paid for a resumée service to hopefully help him have a better chance at getting work. So far, we’ve spent about $1500 in an attempt to find a job. Hopefully we’ll find something soon. Last time he was out of work he couldn’t find anything for 10 months, and that was during a good economy. So far, only about 2 people have called back in 4 1/2 months.

But… one advantage to not having a job is you can leave whenever. We went camping with my parents at Staircase campground in the Olympic National Park. We figured it might be the last time we can all go, since my daughter is 18 and who knows whether she’ll want to go with us again. We had a good time and did a lot of hiking. They closed the park last week, so we barely made it before they shut down.

I started to work more on Zazzle again. It’s been a while since I put a lot of effort into it, and it’s been bringing in a trickle of money even after years of not working on it. Here are some of the recent products I’ve made. If you have any requests for any of my designs on a Zazzle product it’s not on, or if you would like me to create any swag to promote one of your books (if you’re an indie author) let me know. Meanwhile, if you click on the below link and buy anything off the Zazzle site (doesn’t even have to be one of my designs) I’d get a commission.

Our air conditioning went out, right before our area had record-high temperatures. That was fun. I slept on the couch, would open all the windows when the temperature outside was lower than the temperature inside, and then closed all the windows once the temperature outside was higher than the temperature inside. Fortunately, we were able to have someone come look at it after a week, and it was only a blown capacitor. I’m glad we didn’t have to replace the entire thing, or that wouldn’t get done this year. Although the temperatures have started to cool down, so it wouldn’t matter as much now. We probably won’t be in the 90s again for the rest of the year.

I’m still going swimming at the gym a lot. I have a pre-paid membership for the next couple months; once that expires, I won’t be able to continue unless we have some income coming in.

So that was August. Did you have a good month?

April 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 4 Comments

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.

March 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 10 Comments

Hello! It’s the last day of March, and what a month it’s been! I bet for most of us, it’s the least typical month we’ve had for a very long time. I can’t wait to read everybody else’s wrap-ups this month, because they’re going to be so much different than normal.

Books Read:

I did a little better last month than in February, completing 10 books.

  • A Treason of Thorns – Laura E. Weymouth
  • Sparrow – Mary Cecilia Jackson
  • Light from Distant Stars – Shawn Smucker
  • 11/22/63 – Stephen King
  • Night of the Dragon – Julie Kagawa
  • Stop Missing Your Life – Cory Muscara
  • Sky Without Stars – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell (reread)
  • Between Burning Worlds – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell
  • Today Tonight Tomorrow – Rachel Lynn Solomon
  • Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times – John W. Hall

Several of these books were amazing!

Blog Stats:

Blog stats are fairly steady. I haven’t been finding as much time to write reviews, but at least I’ve been doing Top Ten Tuesdays.

I’m at 2191 followers on Twitter. Wow!

Writing:

  • I would say that I haven’t written much, but I have, it just hasn’t been fiction. I’ve been keeping a coronavirus journal every day. It’s part of a journal series I started in 2017, although I stopped updating it regularly until this month. Since the 12th I’ve been updating it daily. I write it for an audience that may read it at an unknown time in the future, so I end up explaining things that seem obvious to us sometimes.
  • I did write a short story called “Patient Zero” earlier in the month, and I put it on Wattpad. The inspiration from the story is in the next section.

Life:

So who hasn’t had a radically different month than normal here? The coronavirus has changed the way almost everybody on earth has done things.

So the highlight of this month was probably the Penguin Teen Book Tour, where I got to meet Astrid Scholte, Marie Lu, and Melissa de la Cruz (front row of this picture, in order). I took my boy to this event and we had a wonderful day. First we went to a bakery and had brownies, then we went to the Lego Store, then we had dinner at the mall, before coming to The Tattered Cover. You can see me and my boy in this picture in the first row of chairs in the center of the right aisle. The next day I was feeling a little queasy, and it was in the early days of coronavirus, before everything got shut down. I thought, Oh no! What if I made these authors sick?

So then, I started thinking, what if someone attended a book signing of their favorite author, found out the next day they were sick with a deadly virus, accidentally spread it to their favorite author, and she died? How horrible would that be? So of course, I had to write a story about it. I’m happy to report that I don’t have coronavirus and all three of the authors pictured are evidently healthy, so I didn’t accidentally get any of them sick. Since the event was on March 5th, we can be sure no ill effects came from my meeting them.

The library and the gym shut down after that, and like most people, I don’t leave the house much. I do go for a walk every day, listening to an audiobook or an audio class. The Sunday before last I walked over six miles, to a park that is farther away from my house and back. I haven’t gone to the store since Friday the 17th though. We have enough food to last a while, but the grocery stores are still open, so I’ll go shopping again this Friday.

My husband is still working, which is good. Although he can work from home, his boss is insisting he come in and sit in his office by himself all day. He hurt his foot, so the doctor is forcibly making him work from home today and tomorrow.

Almost everything I normally do has moved to Zoom though. Church? YouTube live. Homeschool coop? Zoom. Russian meetup group? Zoom. I even went to an author event on Zoom last Saturday. I had been planning on going to see Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell on March 25th at The Tattered Cover, but of course, that event got cancelled. Fortunately, I found an event they were holding online and it was a lot of fun!

Well, let’s hope April is the worst of this coronavirus pandemic. I know most people (including myself) would love to see an improvement next month, but since I’ve been keeping a journal on this, I’m pretty sure the worst is still to come. Italy has already started to see fewer new cases and fewer new deaths per day, which is good. Some places in the US seem to be taking more days to double the number of cases and deaths, which is also good. Let’s hope that all of us staying at home (and I do hope you’re staying at home unless you have to go out or are exercising by yourself, away from people) are making a difference. I’ve read The Great Influenza by John M. Barry and it’s quite possible that we’re seeing a similar situation, but the US in 1918 had their maximum number of flu cases in October (after exponential growth) and then they started to taper off in the months after that).

February 2020 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 10 Comments

Hello! February is almost over, so it means it’s time for a monthly wrap-up! We have an extra day this month because it’s a leap year. If you’re reading this on the 29th, today is the ONLY day in four years you can order Brigadoon Breakfast tea at Adagio. I love Adagio teas and have waited almost 4 years to try it. I ordered 18 ounces of it, LOL. I don’t get any referral bonuses off that link, but I thought you might want to know about it if you like tea and want a once in four year opportunity. Anyway, let’s get started!

Books Read:

The last few months have been abysmal in getting books read. It’s so bad, I’m not even close to finishing my Winter TBR. I’m still on track for my Goodreads challenge, but I only read seven books last month.

  • Lord of Shadows – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Killing the SS – Bill O’Reilly
  • Belle Révolte – Linsey Miller
  • Queen of Air and Darkness – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Chain of Gold – Cassandra Clare
  • Broken Throne – Victoria Aveyard
  • Sensational – Jodie Lynn Zdrock

But I suppose there’s more to a reading life than numbers. Queen of Air and Darkness is 880 pages long. The first time I read it, I read that, Lord of Shadows, Lady Midnight, and Clockwork Princess is 8 or 9 days and it was exhausting. I took a lot more time reading them this time around.

Blog Stats:

  • Blog users have fallen but I haven’t been posting as much, so that’s not much of a surprise. Hopefully I’ll get more into the blogging and reading groove soon.
  • Twitter has been up though, to 2172. Not sure where that is coming from.

Writing:

  • I finished my fourth draft of The Brightness of Shadow. I entered into Author Mentor Match, but I know I won’t get picked, even though they won’t announce the mentees until March 3rd. That’s okay.
  • I had two of my short stories chosen for publication! Twist in Time Magazine is doing an anthology called Thank You For Your Service, and my personal essay, “September 11th” was chosen for publication. It’ll be published on November 11th this year. I also was picked for the 42 Word Story Anthology. They’re picking a lot of authors for that one.

Life:

  • My boy has been grounded from his phone and computer for most of the month, and he’s used it to read a lot. He read the entire Young Elites trilogy, which is good, because I’m taking him to see Marie Lu, Astrid Scholte, and Melissa de la Cruz on the 5th. He’s read 10 of Marie Lu’s books now, plus her short story in Slasher Girls & Monster Boys. He wanted a book recommendation yesterday and I suggested Four Dead Queens.
  • Sandhya Menon’s book launch for Of Curses and Kisses went great! The evening was spectacular, until I was almost home. I almost died. It started snowing, my windshield wipers stopped working, I couldn’t see, and then when I tried to get off the freeway, my car spun around on the freeway twice. I was so scared, and I was praying hard in the car. I hope to turn that event into a short story which I hope to submit to Chicken Soup for the Soul. Fortunately, nobody got hurt, and the weather is supposed to be nice for the Penguin Teen Tour next week.

So that was my month! I really hope to step up my reading next month because there are so many books I want to read and they’re just not getting read! I hope you had an excellent February and have a wonderful March! And that we finally see a curtailment of this snow.

December 2019 Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments

Hello! Welcome to my final post of the decade! I hope the 2010s were good to you, and I hope you have an even more amazing decade ahead of you. Being the last day of the year, it’s time to give a wrap-up for the year.

Books Read:

This has been a fairly busy month, visiting my parents in another state and trying to get edits done on my book, so I only managed to read 10 books. Two of them were rereads:

  • Every Other Weekend – Abigail Johnson
  • The Guinevere Deception – Kiersten White
  • Thousands – Pepper Winters
  • Of Curses and Kisses – Sandhya Menon
  • Clockwork Princess – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Father of Lions – Louise Callaghan
  • Almost Midnight – Rainbow Rowell
  • The Christmas Pact – Vi Keeland and Pelelope Ward
  • Rebel – Marie Lu (reread)
  • Echoes Between Us – Katie McGarry

Blog Stats:

Wait, what? How did my blog users go up? Over 450 people stopped by this month. Thank you! Maybe because I posted on Christmas Eve where a lot of people were taking a break. Twitter is up to 2130? Nice.

Writing:

I wanted to finish my fourth draft of The Brightness of Shadow, but I only managed to do 139 pages so far. It’s a major rewrite, and I’m sending this to beta readers after this (I promise).

Life:

Any month without a trip to the hospital is a success. I went to visit my family in Washington State. We almost thought we were going to have to take our cat on vacation with us, but my daughter’s friend decided to cat-sit at the last minute. Unfortunately, a couple of our fish have gotten sick :-(.

That’s all! Have a great New Year’s Eve and I’ll see you in 2020!

September 2019 Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

::Waves:: Hello! It’s October 1st already and it’s time to do the monthly wrap-up for September. It was a pretty good month and October should be great too.

Books Read

This month, I read fifteen books and four short stories/novellas. I was getting ready for the releases of Rebel and The End and Other Beginnings, so I reread the Warcross duology, all the Legend novellas, and finished the Carve the Mark duology. Eight of these were rereads.

  • City of Glass – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • Dive Smack – Demetra Brodsky
  • Who Put this Song On? – Morgan Parker
  • Naughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman
  • The Raven King – Maggie Stiefvater
  • “Opal” – Maggie Stiefvater
  • Shadow Frost – Coco Ma
  • The Fates Divide – Veronica Roth (reread)
  • City of Fallen Angels – Cassandra Clare (reread)
  • And I Darken – Kiersten White
  • Cilka’s Journey – Heather Morris
  • That Night – Amy Giles
  • The Fountains of Silence – Ruta Sepetys
  • American Panda – Gloria Chao
  • Warcross – Marie Lu (reread)
  • Wildcard – Marie Lu (reread)
  • Life Before Legend – Marie Lu (reread)
  • Life After Legend – Marie Lu (reread)
  • Life After Legend II – Marie Lu (reread)

Dive Smack counted for Massachusetts in the Read Around the World challenge, Cilka’s Journey counted for historical Russia, and The Fountains of Silence counted for historical Spain.

Blog Stats:

  • Twitter made a few gains this month, breaking the 2100 mark with 2101.
  • Blog users went up slightly again.

Writing:

I finished publishing Hero on AO3. Because it was a book that occurred after Champion and I wrote it before Rebel came out, I wanted it to come out before Rebel‘s release. I started writing Republican Runaways, the sequel to Republican Phenoms, and I’m on chapter 2. I tried to write a short story for a submission due at the end of the month, but that didn’t work out.

Life:

No trips to the hospital this month. Yay! It’s been pretty busy with school and trips to the doctor, but at least I can read while my family member is at the doctors. Other than that, not much has been going on.

So that’s about it! October is when a ton of amazing books are released. Don’t think much else is going on, but it should be a good month!

July 2019 Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

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.