Just Me

  December was certainly a month where I did A LOT of reading! It was also the month where I started and stopped reading many books, mainly because they just weren’t working for me. (I still have them, though. I plan to pick them up to read again at some point. Maybe I will be interested in them then!)   I ended up reading a lot of books this month mainly because of my book reviewing gig. I challenged myself to read 3 books in a week for every week of December but, unfortunately, I was not always able to meet that challenge. Alas! Two books to read in a week is easier for me to manage than three, especially since I have a lot of things going on!   I wanted to read a Christmas book this month, but the only one I read was a children’s book. I still enjoyed it, though, because I love cats and the pictures were cute. I have some Christmas-themed cozy mysteries in my TBR, but I’m not really interested in reading cozy mysteries at this time.   With this being...

  Happy last day of August! And, for me, today is the last day of summer. Which means that it’s time for me to tally up how many books I’ve read this summer, and that number is 45.   August sure was a busy month. Even though I took a break from my monthly newsletter as well as my Substack so that I could focus on grieving the loss of my brother, it was also a time for me to take care of my youngest kid’s back-to-school needs. He returns to high school shortly after Labor Day, so we were pretty busy getting everything in order for the big day!   I was also busy working on a publishing imprint that will be debuting next month!   And I also stayed busy working on things related to my writing: Meeting deadlines, completion of writing/revising/finalizing a manuscript before sending it off, writing another children’s book and writing a bunch of other things to submit.   I am grateful I was still able to make time to read every day this month. I usu...

    Today is the last day of July and all I can say is GOOD FREAKING RIDDANCE!! Between bad things happening with the press, my business partner’s personal crisis still going on, and my brother passing away, it has not been a good month for me on a personal level. And, yes, of course I had some rejections with the writing, but I get those every month, so they didn’t ruin my month for me. Those three other things did.   It was the loss of my brother that drove me to writing even more than usual, but I also continued to read every day as well. Reading brings me comfort and a sense of peace. It is also a nice way for me to escape from the bad stuff in life, not to mention helping to take my mind off of things.   Some of the books I read this month were children’s books. In my defense, that box of books for kids was RIGHT THERE. I couldn’t just ignore them! So I grabbed a bunch that interested me and sat down to read them.   This is true except for one...