Just Me

  April is one of my favorite months of the year. Why? April is National Poetry Month! I love poetry. Poetry is the first thing that I started writing, all those years ago when a nurse gave me an empty journal and encouraged me to fill it with poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem, when I was 11 years old. I created a local poetry club, in which I edited and published a poetry magazine, and I have self-published over a dozen poetry books. I’ve done poetry readings, poetry contests and participated in poetry message boards.   For this reason, I made sure I included poetry books among the books I read this month. Two of the poetry books I read are from famous poets, but I definitely looked for poetry books by unknown poets as well. I am glad I was able to include at least one of them! (There would have been two, but I just didn’t like the other poetry book I started reading.)   I am also tackling the Classics shelf of one of my many bookcases and...

  Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash I try to see the silver lining of every cloud, no matter how much a bad thing hurts or how hard it can be to look on the good side of things. I think a lot of the bad stuff we go through in life is just teaching us some of the hardest lessons we have to learn. Even so, for the things that are not so terrible, there are still some upsides to take comfort in.   I was reminded of this recently.   Some time ago, I decided to start reading all of the books in different series. I read all the Harry Potter books and all of the Percy Jackson books. The funny thing was, when I was reading the Percy Jackson books, I realized we didn’t have all of the books! Eep!   Even though I was frustrated that this setback delayed reading the next book in the series, I pretty much told myself, “I should wait until we have all of the books in a series before I start reading it.”   If only I had heeded that advice with the latest ser...