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...

  I didn’t get much reading done this month – that is, if you don’t count the MANY articles I read for the March KU book I wrote. But for books? Nope, not that many this month. I was mostly focused on the topic I was writing about, and for the first couple of weeks, aside from one children’s book written by a friend and fellow author, I just read books about that topic. That’s how it is when I am writing a nonfiction book with a tight deadline: I read ONLY books on that topic! I don’t even read newspaper or magazine articles unless they are on that topic. (Which means I usually have a lot of catching up to do on the various newspaper and magazine mailing lists I am on!).   However, as I got close to finishing the book, I went back to reading other books. The books I am reading are as follows:   Research book Biography Random nonfiction book A book from a shelf I am currently tackling (right now, the classics) A fellow author book A series book  ...