All posts tagged monthly wrapup

March Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 3 Comments

Can you believe March is already over? It was an amazing month for me, both reading and otherwise. Hope April is just as good!

Books Read:

I read thirteen books for the first time and reread three (okay, so Life after Legend is 22 pages and Life after Legend II is 5 pages so they really shouldn’t count, but Goodreads counts them). So sixteen books total. Many of the were really good. Book in blue are rereads.

  • Sky Without Stars – Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell
  • The Evertree – Marie Lu
  • The Land of Yesterday – K.A. Reynolds
  • Siege and Storm – Leigh Bardugo
  • Prodigy (Graphic Novel) – Marie Lu
  • Blood Heir – Amélie Wen Zhao
  • A Court of Thorns and Roses – Sarah J. Maas
  • Champion (Graphic Novel) – Marie Lu
  • Ruin and Rising – Leigh Bardugo
  • The Devouring Gray – Christine Lynn Herman
  • Sky in the Deep – Adrienne Young
  • Six of Crows – Leigh Bardugo (audiobook)
  • King of Fools – Amanda Foody
  • Legend – Marie Lu (audiobook)
  • Life After Legend – Marie Lu
  • Life After Legend II – Marie Lu

Blog Stats:

  • I’m at 1984 Twitter followers. I actually have more Twitter followers than the year I was born now.
  • Site visits seem to be steady. I should be able to visit more bloggers in a couple of months (you’ll see why at under the life section).

Writing:

I finished the second draft of THE BRIGHTNESS OF SHADOW. I also learned that the conventional way to write about an unpublished work was to write it in capitals, as opposed to published works, which are in italics. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, I was a little discouraged with the book at this point, and ended up publishing the first four chapters of my latest Legend fanfic, Hero. I don’t know what the convention is for partially published works. Anyway, a couple of days ago I was thinking about my characters and what they wanted, and I came up with an idea that’s going to change quite a bit of the book, but make it better at the same time. I wrote a partial scene to this change and… it’s pretty good.

Life:

Okay… big, glorious change on the life front: my husband got a new job! It’s going to pay about twice as much as his current job. So as of this morning, I only have forty more workdays left at my current job (I plan for my last day to be May 31st). After that, we’ll be able to afford for me to stay at home and be a homeschool teacher and full-time writer/blogger.

I’m staying a couple extra weeks at this job in order to buy a new laptop. The one I have now was inexpensive to begin with, and I never really intended to do so much writing on it. The new laptop I’ll be in the market for will be able to have all my writing applications open at once and shouldn’t slow down while I switch between them.

My daughter seems to be doing… okay. She hasn’t needed to go to the hospital and that’s good. Things are still hard for her, but sometimes life is like that.

So that was it. Hopefully April will be a great month!

January 2019 Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

January is on its last legs, so it’s time for a wrap-up of the month to see what happened.

Books Read:

My reading this month absolutely rocked! I read ten novels and one short story. Some of these books were on the shorter side, so I guess that helped.

  • The Gilded Wolves – Roshani Chokshi
  • Empire of Stormes – Sarah J. Maas
  • The Wicked King – Holly Black
  • “The Midnight Heir” – Cassandra Clare (short story)
  • The Unbroken Hearts Club – Brooke Carter
  • Spectacle – Jodie Lynn Zdrock
  • The Light Between Worlds – Laura E. Weymouth
  • Twisted Roots – Shelly Goodman Wright
  • Pennies – Pepper Winters
  • Dollars – Pepper Winters
  • The Last Year of the War – Susan Meissner

Blog Stats:

  • I went over 1900 Twitter followers this month. 1500 was a milestone for me, and 2000 will be another one of those milestones I’m looking forward to.
  • Blog traffic seems to remain steady. I’m trying to visit more blogs, but it’s difficult when so many things are trying to get out attention.

Writing:

  • This is one area I’m super excited about. I finished the first draft of The Brightness of Shadow! I’ve been going through edits and the second draft is looking so much better. I’m not one of those writers that loathes their work in the early drafts, but there’s a lot I’m doing in this 2nd draft. I’m looking forward to getting feedback from beta readers and my critique partner… they get to see the 2nd draft, not the first.
  • I started Shadow’s Queen. I’m not officially working on it or anything, but if your characters are telling you to do something, you listen. I have about 2000 words on this one.
  • I’ve done some editing on Hero, but not too much. My efforts have been focused more on The Brightness of Shadow.
  • My boy and I have started doing the #AtticNotebook together. It’s something that Laini Taylor started where you get a prompt (or not) and you write for 15 minutes in a notebook. Once the notebook is done, you put it aside for at least a month before looking at it again. I’m amazed at how many ideas are coming to me. Some days I have more interesting things to write than others.

Life:

  • I had to go to court for October’s car accident. I guess in Colorado they try to contact the other party when there’s an accident, and they couldn’t contact them, so I get to go back to court in March. My dh and I are absolutely convinced that the other party was speeding (on a dark and snowy night) and when I go back I will be bringing up those points to hopefully mitigate the fine.
  • My dd is back in the hospital, maybe for a month or more. We’re praying she gets better. She had to drop out of school last semester, but when she gets out I think we’ll get her into a flexible online school that hopefully won’t cause too much anxiety. When you miss a lot of school it’s really hard!
  • I’ll be back to teaching Spanish next week, but I’ll take next year off. We’re going to Hawaii for two weeks in the middle of the school year and I don’t really want to deprive the kids of two weeks of teaching. It’ll give me more time to advance my writing too. My friend Shelly Wright (I read her book this month) is taking a semester off teaching writing this fall to work on her books too.

November Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 6 Comments

November is but a memory, which means that it’s time to take a few minutes to talk about what happened.

Books Read:

I only read eight books this month, but I was really busy winning NaNoWriMo.

  • Here and Now and Then – Mike Chen
  • The Cruel Prince – Holly Black
  • Crow Flight – Susan Cunningham
  • Clockwork Angel – Cassandra Clare
  • The Young Adult Writer’s Journey – Janet Schraeder-Post and Elizabeth Fortin-Hinds
  • Clockwork Prince – Cassandra Clare
  • Children of Blood and Bone – Tomi Adeyemi
  • Clockwork Princess – Cassandra Clare

That’s still an average of two books per week while writing over 50k words.  Not too bad.  Right now I’m trying to finish Lady Midnight and Lord of Shadows before Queen of Air and Darkness comes out on Tuesday.  A little insane, but I might actually do it.

Blog Stats:

  • I’m at 1,764 followers on Twitter.  NaNoWriMo has been really good to me there.
  • Unfortunately, on the actual blog I haven’t had time to visit other people’s sites as much as I’d like to.  Hopefully there will be more time in December.  I don’t even have next week’s Top Ten Tuesday post written yet.

Writing:

I wrote 53,675 words on The Brightness of Shadow this month, which means I won NaNoWriMo.  Yay!  I still have 13 chapters left, however.  I hope to finish them this month, because then I’ll need to spend January editing, because I have work with my critique partner to do at the beginning of February.  I already know a few things that I’m going to change to make this better in the second draft.

Life:

So, no car accidents this month.  We got our new car to replace the one I totalled.  The last two Saturdays have been really treacherous on the roads though.

My daughter spent another week in the hospital, but she’s out now.

So that’s what happened this month.  Lots of writing.  Next month hopefully I’ll get more reading done and I’ll finish the first draft of my book.

August Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 10 Comments

So today’s the last day of August, and it’s time for yet another monthly wrap-up post.  This is what happened in August:

Books Read:

This month I read ten books, and some of them were pretty long.  I had a lot of library books come in, and I’ve been trying to make sure that those get read first.  Normally I post an ARC/new release review at the beginning of the week on my blog, but because I’ve had so many library books to read, September 3rd’s review will be on an older book, City of Glass.  That’s just the way things worked out.

  • Crown of Midnight – Sarah J. Maas
  • My Mother.  Barack Obama.  Donald Trump.  And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. – Kevin Powell
  • Glass Sword – Victoria Aveyard
  • George Whitefield: Evangelist for God and Empire – Peter Y. Choi
  • When Elephants Fly – Nancy Richardson Fischer
  • King’s Cage – Victoria Aveyard
  • Give the Dark My Love – Beth Revis
  • City of Ashes – Cassandra Clare
  • Heir of Fire – Sarah J. Maas
  • City of Glass – Cassandra Clare

Tower of Dawn was on sale for $2.99, so I picked that one up this week.  Now I don’t have to be in such a rush to read it when it becomes available at the library.  I’ve found that that is one of the biggest drawbacks to getting books from the library.  You have to be ready to drop everything and read them when they become available.  Right now, I think I really only have three books that are going to become available soon, and I’ll be able to handle that.

I have plenty of books that I’ve been getting off Amazon.com for $1.99.  Their monthly Kindle deals are just too good to pass up!  I thought about getting Warcross because it went on sale for $2.99, but I held myself back.  After all, I already have two copies.

Blog Stats:

  • I actually lost followers this month on Twitter, but there’s an explanation for that.  Twitter did some sort of purge, and I lost about 90 followers in one day.  I thought maybe it was something I had said, but it wasn’t.  So I’m at 1523 followers, but if there hadn’t been that Twitter purge I would have been over 1600.
  • I’m at about 300 monthly users on my blog.  For a while, I was higher than that, then I dropped lower.  I haven’t had as much time to visit other blogs, but 300 has been a goal of mine, so that’s good.
  • I have 12 posts written that haven’t been posted yet, which is more than last month. I’m trying to get ahead, because I’ll be really busy during NaNoWriMo.  You might find me doing a lot of graphic novel and short story reviews in December because of NaNoWriMo, LOL.

Writing:

  • I finished writing Like Normal People!  Yay!  I published my first chapter on January 7th, 2016, and published the last chapter on August 30th, 2018.  I had two long bouts of writer’s block with this one.  First, in 2016, I had to write about mountain climbing and had no clue how to do it; I was in the middle of a move, and then I just forgot about my story.  The second time was in February, where one of the chapters was completely boring me and I didn’t know how to make it interesting.  I wrote a bunch of other stuff while waiting for inspiration on that one, even though I only had three and a half chapters left.  Once I was able to write that chapter, the story was done in a week.
  • I already have over 10 pages of notes for my NaNoWriMo novel this year.  I have a good idea of what is going to happen in the story, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to have to be a duology, because towards the end it looks like a war is about to break out.  This started out in my head as a fanfic of a fanfic, but it has developed a lot so far, and although if you squint, you can see what inspired this story, it will look completely different.  I still have 2 more months to plan this before I write, too.
  • For September, my goal is to finish writing the first draft of Hero.  I’m in the wrapping-up phase of this story, so there probably won’t be too many chapters left to write, but I haven’t outlined this one, so I’m not sure how may are left.  I don’t know if I’ll get to Saving Adelinetta in October.  I want to make Hero look really good first.  I’ll probably be spending more time editing and revising my stories going forward, which will make them better, but it will also cause them to take more time.  I’m guessing that Saving Adelinetta needs at least 100 more pages to finish it, and that one is going to need a lot of revising (I literally wrote about 200 pages of that story in 10 days).

Life:

Like many people, school has started, and so things have gotten busier.  My daughter spent her first day of public school (ever) in the hospital.  She’s out now though.  It takes about 40 minutes to drive her to school.  So… now I get home from work at around midnight and get up at 6 AM to drive her to school.  My husband has agreed to drive her on Thursdays and Fridays though, so that is a big help.  The upside to that is that I can listen to audiobooks on the way.  Right now I’m listening to Everless.  That’s like free reading time.

My Spanish and German classes have restarted, and I actually have pretty good enrollment numbers.  The Duolingo people decided to change the Spanish tree on me the week before classes, and I had to rewrite the booklet I give to my students over a weekend (it’s 50 pages).  Class has been going well though.  I’m not as nervous this year, and planning is going a lot more smoothly.  I’m learning how to incorporate more speaking practice, which helps the class move forward.

So that’s it for August.  How was your month?

July Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 4 Comments

So it’s already the last day of July, and another time to do a monthly wrap-up.  Here is what happened for the month of July:

Books Read:

I finished 10 books this month, plus I also reread Like Normal People, since it’s a goal of mine to finish it in August.  When I was reading through it, I discovered a minor error that persists through the book, so I’ll probably go through the published copy on AO3 and fix them.

  • Origin – Dan Brown
  • Ever the Hunted – Erin Summerill
  • Throne of Glass – Sarah J. Maas
  • The House of One Thousand Eyes – Michelle Barker
  • Batman: Nightwalker – Marie Lu
  • Summer Days and Summer Nights – Various Authors
  • 1,000 Years, 1,000 People – Various Authors
  • Red Queen – Victoria Aveyard
  • Harbor Me – Jacqueline Woodson

Blog Stats

  • I gained 41 Twitter followers this month, up to 1570.  My goal was 1550; a few days ago I was three away from that goal, but I got a boost at the end of the month for some reason.
  • I have 7k monthly views per month on Pinterest.
  • I have about 250 monthly users on my blog.  Tuesdays are generally my best day (Top Ten Tuesdays).
  • I have 9 posts written that haven’t been posted yet.  I have generally been able to keep up with my scheduled posts (I have a calendar that tells me what posts I want to publish when) even though I now have to work again.

Writing

  • I won Camp NaNoWriMo this month with a challenge that I got on Facebook.  I was challenged to write a Gen Fusion fic… or a fanfict without a love relationship that combined two different fandoms.  I wrote My New Best Friend with those parameters, and I think it turned out well.
  • I realized that we only have three more months before NaNoWriMo this year, and I have four works in progress.  Not going to be able to finish them all.  So… I have decided to put Gamers on hiatus until 2019.  I’m not sure where I’m going with that anyway; I just have the characters and an inkling of what’s going to happen, but I don’t know for sure.  The other fics are all at least 2/3 complete, and I know how I want to end them all.  So I’m going to try to finish the first drafts at least.

Life

This month I had to go back to work after taking a leave of absence for a month.  Life has been pretty busy as a result, but I still was able to get a lot done.

We have decided to let my daughter go to public school this year… ugh.  She’s been homeschooled since she was 3 1/2.  I don’t know if she’ll like it, having to get up early every day like that, doing her homework, etc.  We told her that she can’t fake being sick and she has to do her homework, but this is what she wants… so… she’ll have to live with it.  We’re trying to get her either into an art-focused charter school or a school in another district, because her default school is evidently not that good.

In August, I start teaching Spanish and German again.  It will be my third year teaching these classes.  I still get nervous teaching them, even though I’ve done this twice.

So that’s all for this month.  Hopefully I’ll be able to report that I FINALLY finished writing Like Normal People in August!

June Monthly Wrap-Up

By Brookelorren on 12 Comments

I wasn’t planning on doing one of these, but I decided that I would do one anyway, which is why this is late.  Here is what happened in the month of June:

Books Read:

I read 15 books and wrote reviews on all of them.  They’re not all published yet though.

  • Indianapolis – Lynn Vincent
  • The Wrath and the Dawn – Renée Ahdieh
  • Smoke in the Sun – Renée Ahdieh
  • Use of Force – Brad Thor
  • Never Stop Walking – Christina Rickardsson
  • An Ember in the Ashes – Sabaa Tahir
  • A Torch Against the Night – Sabaa Tahir
  •  A Reaper at the Gates – Sabaa Tahir
  • Far Forest Scrolls Na Cearcaill – AAAAA (that was what was listed as the author)
  • Ace of Shades – Amanda Foody
  • My Real Name is Hanna – Tara Lynn Masih
  • Friction – Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg
  • The Kiss Quotient – Helen Hoang
  • Echoes – Alice Reeds
  • Strange the Dreamer – Laini Taylor

Blog Stats

  • So in June I passed 1500 Twitter followers :-).  I gained 50 followers.
  • I didn’t set up Google Analytics until halfway through the month, but I’ve seen an increase in blog traffic.
  • Pinterest monthly views rose from about 2.3k views per month to 6k views per month.
  • I finally figured out how to add my blog to Bloglovin’.

Writing

  • I finally finished the first draft for Chapter 22 to Like Normal People (a Legend fanfic)!  I’ve had writer’s block on that thing for a couple of months now.  It needs quite a bit of work, but now that I have gotten past that little hurdle, I can finally finish the book.  The fact that I started this story in early 2016 with the intention of “throwing this thing together in an evening”, and it didn’t quite turn out that way, is why I’m no longer publishing any part of my WIPs on AO3 until at least the first draft is done.  I hate to make people wait while I have writer’s block.
  • I started a new work in progress, Gamers, which is a Young Elites modern day AU.  I wrote 38 pages.  I have a glimmer of an idea of what I want to do with the story, but I don’t know everything at this point.
  • The first draft of Saving Adelinetta (a Young Elites fanfic) is at 249 pages, and is now about 2/3 of the way done.
  • The AO3 Writers group on Facebook is having a challenge for July called fandom roulette: they want me to write a gen fusion fanfic.  I wrote 21 pages on July 1st, and it’s going to be a Legend/Divergent fusion.  I’ve never written anything like this before.  I already know the end… the story is going to stay gen (no romantic relationships) until the last page, LOL.  Don’t know how long it’s going to be, but I have to finish it this month for the challenge.

Life

I took a leave of absence from work for the entire month of June, which is why I got so much done.  Unfortunately, the LOA was due to family issues which are still ongoing, but I had to go back to work.  One good thing about going back to work is that my job really only takes about half of my brainpower, so I can dream up scenes while I work.  Today I mused over the last scene in my Legend/Divergent fusion, and while I will probably tweak what was in my brain today when I finally get there, I really like how it’s going to end.

Not much else is going on… other than my car’s starter stopped wanting to start, and I have to take it in to get fixed tomorrow.