Sunday Post – 2/11/2024

February 11, 2024 Sunday Post 9

The Sunday Post is hosted by the wonderful Kimberly, the Caffeinated Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week, take a look ahead, and showcase our new treasures—I mean books!

This week I’m also participating in The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz, and Stacking the Shelves hosted by Marlene at Reading Reality.

The Past Week

DON’T FORGET to update the excerpt!

In real life: I had an appointment with one of my specialists on Monday, down in the city about an hour and 20 minutes to our south. Yesterday, I attended the monthly meeting of my fiber guild. Other than that, I did a lot of… well, I’m not sure what I did a lot of. Preparing slides for the meeting, emailing back and forth with a number of guild members on a variety of issues, dealing with paperwork & taxes related to my freelance work… somehow, it all seemed to eat up a lot of time, and very little blogging got done.

I was listening to a Writing Excuses podcast (S8:E38) in which the authors discussed putting easter eggs in stories and books. Mary Robinette Kowal mentioned that she puts a Doctor Who cameo in each of her books. That is awesome, and now I totally have to go back through her books and find them all.

Writing accountability: My writing goal is 250 words every day (fiction or other creative writing; book reviews don’t count.) In the past week: I wrote 1 days this week. (I think it was actually two, but I forgot to record the words-per-day for one of them.) I also spent part of several days doing research. Word count for the week: 512 (out of 1750.) I am trying to use 4theWords to gamify my writing sprints, but with limited success so far.

Recent Posts

Looking Ahead

  • Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree – review
  • Love Freebie – Top Ten Tuesday, tentative
  • The Lily of Ludgate Hill, by Mimi Matthews – review, tentative
  • The Bright Spot, by Jill Shalvis – review, tentative
  • other reviews TBD
  • Sunday Post – 2/11/2024

What I’ve Been Reading/Watching

Reading: I reread one more of Celia Lake’s “extras,” Three Tales of Gabe and Rathna, a collection of scenes and stories related to The Fossil Door (which I reread last week.) That put me in good shape to read her newest book, Perfect Accord, when it came out on Friday; I finished it last night.

I was so excited to be approved for People Who Live in Glass Houses (Jayne Castle/Jayne Ann Krentz; ARC) that I dove into it the day after I downloaded it and finished it up the next day. And then Just Stab Me Now arrived on my Kindle, and I devoured it in a single night. Then I finished up Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing: A Writer’s Workshop, a short, advice-packed book for new writers, which I started last fall. After that, I plowed through Inheritance (Nora Roberts), because it was due back to the library this weekend. And then I went on to Constable Country (Catherine Aird), one of my Christmas gifts.

I also went back to reading Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett (ARC.) I’m enjoying it, I’m just a bit distractible in my reading these days. Having put it aside for something (else) I needed to read, I then got distracted by a bunch of other books. But I’m back into it now, and it’s really good!

Listening to: The Writing Excuses podcast (season 8.) To fill the three-hour round-trip drive to my specialist, I also went back to listening to Roma Agrawal’s Nuts & Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed The World (in a Big Way). It’s fascinating to explore various applications of the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, pump, lens, and string through history and see how widely they are used today—often in unexpected ways. For instance, the gyros that control the attitude of the International Space Station are an application of the wheel, and springs are used to reduce noise in concert halls and earthquake shaking in skyscrapers.

Playing: Same old stuff: NYT word games (Wordle, Connections, and the Spelling Bee); and Pokémon Go.

Watching: We watched most of season 5 of Brokenwood.

Added to the Hoard

For Review or Consideration

Many thanks to Avon for The Summer Escape!

Purchased or Free (Kindle, print, or audio)

Kindle: Preorders that came in this week: Just Stab Me Now; Perfect Accord. On sale: An American in Scotland; Mistletoe and Murder (reviewed); Gryphon in Light (reviewed); The Carousel; Nightbirds On Nantucket

Audiobooks: The Seven Dials Mystery (read by Emilia Fox)

(Click title for Goodreads page or my review.)

Stay kind and hopeful… and may your books bring you joy this week!

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9 Responses to “Sunday Post – 2/11/2024”

  1. Anne - Books of My Heart

    It seems like you got a lot of reading accomplished in addition to other chores and tasks. There are cycles where one does more of less of things which depend on a variety of factors. I’m getting ready for the spring garden and that will take up some extra time soon. I was “bad” yesterday and mostly read instead of getting to my tasks.

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    • Lark_Bookwyrm

      I don’t count it as writing time, and certainly not as words written, but it is still work on the project. The other thing I have a hard time tracking is revision. I mean, obviously if you have to write a whole new scene, that’s words-per-day, but what if you’re just editing, tightening, adding a sentence here and removing half a sentence there?