Just Me

  The month of July was a very busy one for me. But even before the month started, I knew it would be a difficult month to get through, because July 24 would mark one year since my older brother, Troy, passed away. I am still very grieved that he is gone.   Even so, I had a ton of things keeping me busy that made it difficult for me to dwell on my sadness. Work for Dreamweaver Press is going strong and I have a lot of submissions to get through. We also released another book this month: the fantasy novel  Insights into the Next Realm: Shadows from the Darkness  by Erika Ravnsborg. Alas, as much as I had hoped to get an anthology out this month, it didn’t happen. And Twisted Dreams Press was also busy. We are receiving submissions for anthologies as well as nonfiction books, which we are very excited about. We haven’t published any nonfiction books yet, so we are looking forward to publishing our very first nonfiction title in the near future. Twisted Dreams Pre...

    The month of January saw my book reviewing gig come to an end. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to work this gig. It really challenged me as a reader! I also learned a lot as a book reviewer and got to enjoy spending so much time reading books. Or, should I say, getting paid to read books.   This particular gig is seasonal, so I will be working it again when it rolls around later in the year.   However, I’m happy that I was able to push myself to read as many as four books in one week. That’s pretty awesome! What isn’t so awesome, however, was falling behind on some other things because of that challenge (I’m looking at you, unfinished novel-in-progress). But I am working on getting caught up on those things.   In fact, I plan to spend the day tomorrow wrapping up writing my short story and sending it off for edits!   January saw the end of some other things too. I finished editing stories for an anthology, finished revising a ...

  Every month brings new books to read for research. Whether it’s research for a book I’m writing or an article, these books can be either fiction or nonfiction, meant for adults or meant for children, or they can be books published years ago or fairly recently.   My plan was to write a certain article this month and I wanted to get the books I would need to read for it. I’d gotten the idea for this article to see if there were books similar to a book I had written. There were indeed; nine books, actually! Fortunately, they were not the same as the book I had written, but they were similar.   Because of this, I wanted to read those books to get a feel for a common writing style used in them, as well as the type of writing and vocabulary level used in them. The problem was that I could not afford to purchase all of those books, so I decided to hit the library to see what I could find there.   Meanwhile, my search made me notice something: A common theme ...