Hello hello hello! I originally intended to take this week off from blogging, as I had a lot on my plate and wanted to focus my time and energy elsewhere. Then one of the things that was on my plate came off it . . . and I remembered that I had a half-finished post that I'd been saving for March Magics, so here we are! For those who don't know, March Magics is an annual, month-long celebration of the writings of Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett. I typically don't participate aside from using the event as an excuse to read Howl's Moving Castle, Chrestomanci, or some Discworld, but this year I'm squeezing in a post or two on the blogs and socials as well! As some of you might remember, I finally finished reading the Discworld series last year, after having procrastinated on Night Watch for an embarrassing amount of time. And now that I've read the whole series, I decided that it's a great time to share my favorite Discworld books — a list that, for the most part, also functions as a set of excellent entry points into the series for those curious.

The Best Books of Discworld

1. Going Postal. The chances of this book not taking first place were exactly nil. It has all the things I love about Discworld — the clever use of tropes and archetypes, the masterfully crafted plot, the brilliant characters, the humor — packaged with some of my favorite character and storyline types. Moist von Lipwig is a character in much the same line as The Music Man's Professor Harold Hill, and when what should've been a death sentence lands him instead in a government job, well . . . magnificently masterminded chaos ensues. Plus, even though it's fairly late in the series, it's a good entry point for the Discworld novels — it gives you the background you need on Ankh-Morpork and its significant inhabitants, and I'd argue it has some of Pratchett's best writing.
   
   
   
2. Guards! Guards! I may love Moist von Lipwig . . . but he's only my second favorite Discworld character (tied with the Patrician). My favorite? Sam Vimes. Vimes is a character of contrasts, a transplant from another genre who works astonishingly well in the fantasy city of Ankh-Morpork. And while Guards! Guards! shows him at his lowest . . . it also shows how he went from that lowest point onto the path that we see him on for the rest of the series. As a bonus, it's also a very good starting point for the series — early enough that you don't really need any background knowledge, but far enough in that Pratchett really had a feel for what he was about. (It's also where I started the series, so you know. There's that.)
   
   
   
3. The Wee Free Men. The Tiffany Aching sub-series in general is pretty good, but the first book — featuring a very practical, no-nonsense young Tiffany and her first encounters with the wild and riotous Nac Mac Feegle — is definitely my favorite. It's got Pratchett's take on fairies and fairyland, a main character who sets out to defend her family and her home, and just a lot of excellent moments and insight. It's also very short, so if you're after a quick read, this is it.
   
   
   
4. Hogfather. This is probably my most-read Discworld book, even if it doesn't take the top spot, as it's often one of my yearly Christmas reads. When the Disc's version of Santa Claus goes missing, Death must temporarily take his place while Death's granddaughter Susan (who is somewhat along the lines of a goth Mary Poppins) figures out what's gone wrong. Also featured are the wizards of Unseen University (whose extensive and mostly food-oriented holiday celebrations are interrupted by the goings-on), send-ups of a vast variety of Christmas tales, and what happens when you have a great deal of belief and nowhere for it to go. While it's a very secular take on Christmas, it does have worthwhile themes — and it's just generally a fun read.
   
   
   
5. The Fifth Elephant. This is the one book on this list that I wouldn't necessarily recommend as a starting point, simply because it's both late in the Discworld series as a whole and midway through the City Watch subseries. So, while it can be read first without issue, you'll enjoy it more if you have a little context for, well, most of the characters. That said, I do love this book. There's lore, intrigue, a genuinely clever mystery, and Sam Vimes being, well, Sam Vimes. The one thing that sours the story is that there are some LGBT themes running through parts of the story, but there's also some great themes about power and tradition and culture and lines that you shouldn't cross, so I feel it balances out.

Have you read any Discworld books? If so, what are your favorites? And will you be doing anything to participate in March Magics? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

December 2023 Doings!

Hello, all! I hope everyone had a merry Christmas, both the season and the day. I can definitely say that my Christmas season didn't go quite how I expected it . . . but that seems to have been the theme of 2023, so I can't say I'm entirely surprised either. We'll get to that in a bit, but first, writing! In which I have some good news!

Writing!

• I finally finished drafting Bastian Dennel, PI #4! Last month's assessment of being within a chapter or two of finishing wasn't quite correct; I actually had more like three and a half chapters left before I could call the draft done.
• But those three and a half chapters have been written! And I don't think they turned out half bad. I'm quite pleased with the last two, actually. The others will need some tweaking, but so do large swathes of the rest of the book, all for the same reason. And the point is that the draft is done, so now I can do that tweaking . . .
• Except not literally now because I have other projects that I need to work on first. And I'm also very likely going to make this book Bastian Dennel, PI #5 instead and write a new (much shorter) book as #4. But that's neither here nor there. The point is, the book is drafted! Huzzah!
• I actually finished the final chapter on Christmas Eve — I'd intended to write maybe 500 words and then go to bed early while the rest of my family watched A Christmas Carol. But then I realized that another few hundred words would wrap things up, and then I could have a proper, guilt-free break for the rest of my sister's visit . . . so I did not go to bed early, but I think it was worth it.
• That's all the writing I've done so far this month (I say "all;" it was a very respectable 8,700-odd words), but I will be writing my New Year's Eve short story in the next few days. Or, possibly, I've already drafted it by the time you read this post, depending on how things go and how much of it I feel like writing on my phone.

Reading!

• My reading this month can be pretty neatly divided into "Christmas" and "not Christmas."
• On the not-Christmas side, I finished my reread of the Illuminae Files with Gemina (just as good as I remembered, and I also realized there's kind of a Die Hard reference or two in there — besides the whole situation being very Die Hard-ish) and Obsidio (better than I remembered, though my memory was still very good — it's one of those books that's more enjoyable on the reread, because you know it'll come out all right and you can appreciate all the twists and turns instead of just being stressed). I also read To Destroy an Illusion (not as good as the Austen Fairy Tale, but still a very interesting twist on some obscure fairy tales) for review purposes. Also, it's not pictured because of a Goodreads issue, but I reread DragonSpell as part of a readalong some friends of mine are doing, and that was lovely. I forget how good those books are.
• The non-Christmas highlight of my month was, of course, Behind the Curtain, the latest — and, arguably, best — in W.R. Gingell's Worlds Behind series. I loved pretty much everything about this book, but the best bits were getting to know more about Camellia's past and seeing Athelas connect more with both her and Harrow. I especially loved the growing bond between Athelas and Harrow, and there's one particular scene — but that's a spoiler, so you'll all have to read it to know what I'm talking about.
• On the Christmas side, we had several rereads: Christmas in Talesend (which nicely filled the one-night gap between finishing Illusion and the release of Behind the Curtain), Hogfather (one of my favorite Discworld novels, and certainly the book I've read most in the series), and A Christmas Carol (read via the Dickens December Substack). Also in this category is my current read, A Superhero for Christmas . . . which I really should have read before Christmas, but I was busy.
• Finally, we have two new-to-me reads: Greenglass House and Twelve Days of (Faerie) Christmas. Greenglass House is a middle-grade novel, good but not amazing. I liked the mystery and the setting, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read it first when I was closer to the target audience's age.
• Twelve Days of Faerie Christmas, on the other hand, was an absolute delight. It's a sweet, fun Christmas romance involving lots of fae magic and schemes and a very clever take on the gifts of the Twelve Days of Christmas song. Every bit of it is a delight, but the ending most of all. I will absolutely be rereading this one next year, though I may do so after Christmas instead of before so the timing lines up properly. (I could have done that this year . . . but I was really excited and didn't want to wait.)

Watching!

• Surprisingly, this month didn't involve watching as many movies and shows as it usually does. Most Decembers, we watch a lot of movies as a family, and I also watch a lot of shows on my own because I'm trying to finish Christmas gifts. This year, I only had one gift I could work on while watching something else, and we also had less opportunity to watch things together until Christmas weekend and the following week.
• That meant we didn't rewatch as many Christmas movies as usual, but we did get a few in: A Charlie Brown Christmas, White Christmas, and The Man Who Invented Christmas. I also rewatched 'Twas the Night Before Critmas, the Critical Role Christmas oneshot because . . . well, it's fun, and I haven't watched any Critical Role in a long while.
• We also watched Holiday Inn, which I hadn't see before this year. I don't think I'm going to rewatch that one — I'd rather just watch White Christmas, where I like all the characters, most of the scheming is funny and benevolent (even if it does have an angle of self-benefit) and someone at least tries to have a civil, mature conversation about what's going on instead of just being possessive and manipulative. No, I don't have strong feelings about this at all; whatever gave you that idea?
• The one notable non-Christmas movie I watched was Across the Spider-Verse on the day after Christmas. My sister watched it a few months ago, loved it, and told me I needed to watch it . . . but I have a really hard time watching movies by myself (because if I have three straight hours all to myself, then I have other things that I need to be doing with those hours), so we planned to watch it together while she was here for the holiday. I really enjoyed that! Though I think Miguel is a drama queen with bad logic who doesn't deserve half the hype he gets, either in-universe or from the fandom, and I want to know why more people aren't talking about The Spot, because yes, he had a rather cliche motivation, but otherwise he's such a cool villain, with an excellent progression from being played for laughs to being a genuine threat.
• (I know why he gets the hype both places, for the record. To the fandom, he's an anti-hero with an excellent sense of drama. In-universe, it's because his explanation of things makes all the sadness and tragedy in the spider-peoples' lives make sense and absolves them of any guilt or regret. Of course it happened this way. It had to happen this way. It always happens this way. There was nothing they could've done otherwise, and trying just would have doomed everything. Or so he claims. So, yeah, I get it. I just don't think he deserves the hype.)
• Seeing all the spider-people was cool, though. And Gwen and Miles both had great character arcs, plus I liked how the movie showed the mingled love and tension in their relationships with their respective families. So, good movie.

Life!

• So, December started off well — quite well, even, as on the very first day of the month, I had the pleasure of attending a former coworker's very lovely wedding. Both the ceremony and the reception were beautiful, and the couple made a point of keeping Christ centered in all of it — it's the only wedding I've ever encountered that involved Communion for the whole congregation because the couple wanted to serve Communion together as their first action as husband and wife.
• The rest of the weekend, however, signaled the start of a downhill slide, as my dad came down with a very bad cold on Saturday. My mom and I did our best to avoid catching it, but by midweek, around the time he started feeling better, we were both down for the count, and I was home on sick leave. Thankfully, after several days of rest, we were both feeling better in time for me to go to work the following Monday . . . and then my dad caught the same cold again from a coworker. Thankfully, everyone was healthy again (or mostly so) in time for Christmas, but it was still stressful and frustrating, and it also made doing anything Christmas-y difficult.
• It also made finishing my grad school class difficult (or, you know, more difficult) and solidly shattered my plans of wrapping up my final project early. I ended up doing most of the work on said project on the last two days of the class. Thankfully, a lot of the prep had already been covered by previous assignments, so I was able to get the thing written and turned in on time. And now I am done with grant writing for hopefully a very long time.
• Still, I am grateful that one of the few gaps in the cycle of colds was the Friday of our Bible Study's Christmas party. We always do a baked potato bar and an ice cream bar, and usually the kids act out the Christmas story in a sort of semi-impromptu play. This year, however, we knew we wouldn't have many kids there, so we decided to switch to a dramatic reading of the Christmas story, interspersed with Christmas carols. I helped with a lot of the planning for that; it was the first time in years that I've been so excited for a Christmas play-adjacent thing. I think everyone enjoyed it, and I was certainly happy about how it worked out.
• Also that weekend, at least if I recall correctly, was my D&D group's last session of the year, in which we defeated one of our nemesis once and for all — he's a rakshasa, and we killed him once in the mortal plane, but he can come back . . . so we went to his plane and took him down a second time so he can't keep on with his schemes and tricks. I got the killing blow and cut him off mid-monologue, and it was very satisfying. (I did give the DM a chance to talk, for the record! But not a long chance, as it very quickly became clear that this guy had nothing useful to say and would just try to turn us off our purpose if we let him go on.)
• The fact that everyone spent so much of the month sick meant less attention was given to things like Christmas baking, but we did still make cookies. We just didn't try any new recipes for Christmas itself this year. All the same, my gingersnaps and peppermint pinwheels turned out well, and my mom made macaroons, peanut butter balls, biscotti, and Russian teacakes, so I'm happy. And I did make oatmeal-ginger cookies at the start of the month, which were also very tasty.
• Probably the best part of Christmas this year was that my sister came down from Ohio for the holiday! She arrived Saturday, just in time for us to go to the Christmas Eve-Eve service at our church — which, by the way, was lovely. It wasn't as much of a spectacular as some past years have been, but I think it was nicer overall, as we had more traditional songs, and I think the pastor's message was better than it has been some years. Then, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were both pretty chill, on the whole. I received some lovely gifts (including new planners and the Baking Yesteryear recipe book), and my family liked the gifts I gave them. There wasn't anything really out of the ordinary about either day, but they were still good days.
• My sister returned to Ohio on Wednesday, and we drove up with her as far as Pittsburgh to visit my grandpa for a little while. Getting to see him again was nice, and I'm happy to report that he's recovering pretty well from all the various medical stuff he's had to deal with over the course of this year. All in all, it was a good visit.
• There's a few days left yet in December, but I anticipate those being mostly quiet, with the exception of New Year's Eve afternoon and evening. My former roommate and I will do our gift exchange (over video call) that afternoon, and I look forward to that — she's in one of my D&D groups, but that group hasn't really met all month, so I haven't seen her in a while. And then our Bible study always has a party for New Year's Eve that should be lots of fun. It'll be a good way to end the year, that's for certain.

January Plans

• January means getting back to business as usual, with work, writing, and grad school.
• On the writing front, I'll be working on Daughters of Atirse #2. This is a prequel to Song of the Selkies focusing on Ceana's older sister, Onora, and it's also a retelling that blends The Goose Girl with Puss in Boots. I'll probably outline it over the next couple days (if I have time) and then start actually writing at the beginning of January. If I have time, I'll probably also try to squeeze in a draft of whatever I do for H.L. Burke's DOSA-verse anthology. (I have about 75% of an idea. I just have to work out some loose ends.)
• At work, I'm hoping for a fairly quiet month. January usually doesn't have a lot going on, so that hope has a reasonable chance of being fulfilled. That said, we're getting ready to launch some new grief ministries, so we'll see how busy that keeps me.
• As for grad school . . . confession time: I still need to register for the next set of classes. I should have done that a couple weeks ago, but I was too busy with Christmas stuff, and I also didn't even want to think about classes for a solid week after I finished my most recent one. I think the next thing I'm taking is technical writing, though, which should be pretty chill. Technical writing isn't my favorite type of writing ever, but I also don't dislike it, and I think I'm fairly good at it. So, we'll see how things go.
• When it comes to reading, I have some exciting ARCs waiting for me on my Kindle — the only reason I haven't read them yet is that I've been distracted by Christmas stories! But I'll fix that pretty soon. Otherwise, well, I'm trying not to plan too much.
• Lastly, on the crafting front, I have a crochet shawl that I'm hoping to make good progress on. I'm also toying with the idea of giving some new crafts a try . . . but we'll see if that actually goes anywhere or not.
• And, of course, I'll be setting my New Year's goals in the next couple days, so we'll see what comes of those.

How was your December? How was your Christmas? Any plans for January? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

 

April 2023 Doings!

Hello, all! April is over (well, almost), and so is my blogging hiatus. As I expected, this has been a very busy, tiring month. A good month, to be sure, but still. I have had far too many lates and earlies, as Bastian would put it, for my taste, and too many days in which I was running behind the schedule of when I wanted to. I almost thought I was going to have to push this post until next Friday, which would've been a week later than it should've run, but I managed to find enough spare time at the last minute to get it up. So, let's get on with the Doings!

Writing!

• I have gotten tragically little creative writing done this month — only about 12,000 words, which is less than half of my average in the previous several months. There's been some weeks when I haven't been able to touch my manuscript more than once, if I got to touch it at all. (The week of the 16th, the only reasons I got to do any creative writing of any kind was that I skipped out on a D&D session that I was going to be late to anyway, and then I needed to do prep for a session in my campaign.) On the upside, I've generally been pleased with what I did write, so . . . there's that.
• (Needless to say, the fact that I haven't been able to do as much creative writing at a time when I very much want to be writing has not helped my stress levels at all.)
• What was I doing instead of writing? Grad school stuff. Which is actually writing-adjacent, so I suppose I may as well talk about it now instead of in the Life section. I spent most of this month working on my final project for my second grad school class. If you follow me on Facebook or you share a Discord server with me, you're probably already aware of this project: doing research into a possible reason why some writers prefer to write to music and why some writers prefer silence and then writing that research into a series of blog posts. This was an interesting project, and I've wanted to look into it for several years, but I haven't had a reason to until now. Unfortunately, it was also extremely time-consuming — and, yes, I knew going in that these things take time, but I actually got through a whole class before this without sacrificing significant amounts of writing time. Anyway, I finally got my rough draft done this past Wednesday (three days after I wanted to have it finished), so now at least I get a semi-break while I wait for peer review . . .
• Further delaying the research project was another smaller assignment for the same class: writing a blog post about how to do research in one's field. I opted to write about how I research for worldbuilding, so that was another technically-fun-but-time-consuming task. On the upside, once this class is over, I'll have four weeks' worth of blog posts to share over the summer! 
• The D&D campaign I run didn't meet much this month — which, surprisingly, was more due to other peoples' schedules than mine. We only had two sessions, one of which was . . . not the best, as everyone (including me) was tired. The second session, though, was really fun; we actually had our full group for the first time in ages, and people got pretty into the roleplay. I'm looking forward to hopefully getting more of that once peoples' schedules ease up.

Reading!

• I predicted in my last Doings! post that this month would be mostly rereads and mood reads, and what do you know? I was absolutely right.
• I did finish The Shepherd's Crown, which I was in the middle of last month, and I continue to feel generally meh about it. Was it a good book? Sure. Was it a fairly good ending to the Discworld series? Again, sure. Was it anywhere close to being one of my favorites in the series? Not remotely.
• As far as new books that I read entirely this month go, The Orb and the Airship was absolutely the best. I got an early copy because I backed the Kickstarter, and that was so very worth it. This is such a wonderful blend of steampunk and epic fantasy, and I loved the characters (especially Marik and Beren) and the storyline. I can't wait to read the rest! For those who didn't back the Kickstarter, you can currently preorder it in either ebook or hardcover from Amazon. I 100% recommend doing that, if you couldn't tell.
• Another excellent new read was Miss Percy's Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons, which is one part Austen, one part fantasy, and all parts excellent. A Regency-era spinster unknowingly inherits a dragon egg from her great-uncle; hijinks ensue; it's excellent. Slow-paced, but still with enough to intrigue and keep me turning the pages, and the narration is full of self-aware, Princess-Bride-esque humor.
• My final new-to-me read was The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass. This is the book version of the workshop series I did at last year's Realm Makers conference, and I appreciated the opportunity to revisit what I'd learned. I probably would've appreciated it more if I hadn't been so tired and if I could've had more opportunity to put the principles in the book into practice, but . . . oh well.
• I'm not really going to go into my rereads, save to say that The Secret Garden is still delightful for adults (as the best books are), and I am strongly tempted to combine it with some fairytales and write a retelling of it. I won't be doing so soon, but . . . sometime.

 Life!

• (Yes, we skipped a section because I didn't watch anything noteworthy this month, even if you set the bar for "noteworthy" pretty much on the ground.)
• The month obviously started with Holy Week, which was . . .  a lot. Even with my best efforts to get stuff done in advance, and even with getting some extra time off on Thursday, it was a busy, tiring week. But it ended well — I got to actually see the Stations of the Cross that I worked so hard on last year, our church's Easter service was good, and Easter lunch with our Bible study was very fun. I made a coconut cake, and that turned out quite delicious if I do say so myself!
• With the onset of spring comes the time to plant, and so I have acquired more herbs to join my rosemary and thyme plants from last year. This year I got two more basil plants (since the one I had last year died over the winter — not surprising), as well as a mint and a parsley. I potted all of them last weekend, and I'm hoping that they do all right. The basil seems fine, but I'm a bit worried about the parsley (which didn't have very well-developed roots, though it looked great up top) and the mint (which lost a lot of leaves before I could get it in a real pot, though its roots seem fine). We'll see how things go. I do hope it warms up properly again soon so I can leave them outside . . .
• On the crafting front, I finished my Dark King's Curse fanart embroidery (except for removing the stabilizer and mounting it in something for display), but I was running low on embroidery floss and didn't have time to get to the store, so I switched back to the shrug I'm crocheting. That's working up fairly fast, but it's also getting large enough that taking it anywhere will become very awkward very soon.
• Finally, we have D&D — the campaign I play in has had a few sessions this month, which were all . . . interesting. Our party was split until the most recent session, with our sorcerer off scoping out an enemy's headquarters and the rest of the group trying to rescue my character's sister and the sister's adventuring party. The rescue did succeed, but storms was it a struggle at times. Happily, we're all back together now and prepared to storm a fiend's hideout (well, one of his hideouts) and maybe do a little, ah, social reorganization in the country where said hideout is located. And by that I mean that we need to help a lot of halfling farmers deal with the people who are oppressing and taking advantage of them. It's definitely going to be an interesting challenge.
• Since I already discussed grad school stuff in the Writing section, that about covers it. This has been a busy month, as I said, but it's mostly been busy with the same things over and over again.

May Plans

• My grad school class ends in the second week of May, so next month should actually be a lot less stressful.
• That said, I still do anticipate a full month. Just, you know, full of more fun things.
• The big event of the month is likely to be my sister's graduation on the first weekend in May. I am so proud of and excited for her — she's a mechanical engineer, so not an easy program, but she's done and finished well, and I know she really enjoyed most of her studies. I'm looking forward to going up to Ohio to celebrate with her and also to have her back home for one more summer. (I'm also hoping to visit some friends while I'm in Ohio, so that will also be fun if it works out.)
• I'm also looking forward to going back to the local Viking Festival the weekend after my sister's graduation. My sister and I went last year, and it was fun — basically a very small viking-themed Ren Fest-ish event. I'm sure it'll be fun this year as well, and we may end up doing something with a friend afterwards, so that'll be a good day. We may also try to attend the Virginia Renaissance Faire at some point, since it's mostly in May and tickets are actually pretty cheap, but we'll see how that works out.
• Of course, since I'll be done with grad school for the summer, and since I need to have my Selkie Story finished (or nearly so) by the end of the month, I also plan to dive back into writing and get a lot done. And once the Selkie Story is drafted, it'll be back to work on Bastian Dennel, PI Book 4. Plus, the group I run is close to wrapping up our LotR D&D adventure, which means I'll need to prep for the next adventure after that. (I'd also like to work on some one-shot ideas I have . . . but only if I end up with a bunch of extra time somehow.)
• At work, I expect things will continue as they have been for the last couple weeks since Easter. Summer is often a somewhat quieter time for me, at least compared to Lent and Advent, and if that continues to be the case, I will not complain!

How was your April? What are you looking forward to in May? How did you celebrate Easter (if you celebrated)? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

 

March 2023 Doings!

Hello, everyone! Spring is officially here, huzzah! And March is somehow at an end, which means it's time for a new Doings! post. But before we get into the body of the post, I have a quick housekeeping announcement: I will be taking a hiatus from blogging for the month of April. This isn't for Camp NaNoWriMo (though I will be writing a lot); I just have a lot on my plate, and I know it'll be a busy month. So, I'm taking a little blogging break while I can.

Writing!

• My most exciting writing news of the month: as some of you may remember, back in January, I wrote and submitted a story for the Fellowship of Fantasy's magical dogs anthology. You may also recall that I was concerned about whether or not the editors would go for it . . . but as it turns out, they did go for it, and at the start of March, I got an email saying that my story, "Grim Guardian," had been accepted into the anthology! As you might expect, I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of the collection, and I can't wait to be able to share more about the story with y'all. There's going to be a cover reveal in early May, so keep your eyes out for that.
• In other news, I once again spent my month primarily focused, writing-wise, on my semi-secret selkie Little Mermaid story. Progress on this has been slower than I'd like, due to stress, technology problems, other demands on my time, and the fact that I was trying to muddle through a gap in my outline. There were several weeks this month when I felt like I was barely writing anything. Still, words are going on the page, and I'm pleased with enough of them that I'm not too discouraged.
• On the D&D front, I did finally solve my Pelennor Fields/"What's going on with Gondor & Denethor" problem, thanks in no small part to some help from various friends. I'm happy with where I ended up on that, though we'll have to see how things actually play out. Running the actual battle of Pelennor Fields went well, and we actually got to play it on March 25 (which Lord of the Rings fans will know is a significant day) — it's not quite as cool as actually finishing the LOTR story in that session would've been, but I'll take what I can get.

Reading!

• This month was a mixed bag in many ways, but it was a really good reading month. It also involved a lot of rereads; I'll let you draw your own conclusions as to whether or not those things are connected.
• But first, the things that weren't rereads! Dark Clouds by Suzannah Rowntree was definitely the highlight here. I reviewed the book last week, but in short, it was an absolute delight, especially if you're an enjoyer of Leverage, Grand Duke Vasily (or characters of his particular type), or both. Ten out of ten, will look forward to rereading.
• My other few new-to-me reads were ok, but not nearly as memorable. The Maiden Ship had some fun seafaring adventure to it, but didn't particularly wow me; I'm undecided about whether or not I'll continue the series. I also read another volume of Fullmetal Alchemist, which I think I would have enjoyed more had it not been so long since I read the previous installment. Finally, I started one Pratchett read for March Magics: The Shepherd's Crown, the final Discworld book and one of the only two books in the series I hadn't read. At this point, I'm not quite halfway through and am having decidedly mixed feelings. The first several chapters felt extremely under-polished, though the story picked up around Chapter 6 or 7. On one hand, it's not uncommon for me to be iffy about a Pratchett book in the beginning but quite pleased with it by the end. On the other hand, I've been a little meh about all the Discworld books past Making Money. So . . . we'll see.
• Moving on, we have abundant rereads! My favorite of these was, unsurprisingly, The Goblin Emperor, which I technically read because I wanted to study how the author used some particular elements of language as worldbuilding, and not because I've been itching to reread it since Christmas . . . but I definitely was not disappointed by it the second time around. And I still absolutely love Maia.
• I also enjoyed rereading the Lockwood & Co series. While I haven't watched the show (it's on Netflix, which I'm not interested in paying for), I have seen a lot of fandom posts from people who have seen the show and decided to just revisit the story in the way that was available to me. I have to say, the last two books are much more enjoyable when you read the full series straight in a row and don't have to try to remember what people are talking about.
• As for my remaining rereads, I'm still reading The Lord of the Rings via email newsletter, which has been both enjoyable and helpful for D&D writing. It was also a bit interesting because I had about a week when I was technically reading The Two Towers and The Return of the King at the same time, but at this point, Two Towers is finished, and Return of the King is nearly so. And I also reread Mixed Magics towards the beginning of the month because I needed something short and I hadn't read it in a while. I have to say, I basically did not remember anything about any of the stories in it, but that wasn't a terrible thing.

Watching!

• Not a lot for this category, but I did finally watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so that was fun! Out of the two Indiana Jones movies I've watched (I skipped 2 and don't know if I'll watch 4), this one was definitely my favorite. It has adventure, puzzles, traps, near-death experiences, villains you're pleased to see fail, and a Grail Quest — what else could you ask for? And, as the cherry on top, instead of focusing on romance as the primary side plot, we have a father-and-son relationship to anchor the human side of the story. It's great. And, yes, everyone else already knew this, but the fact that I'm very late to the party doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy the party.
• And . . . yeah. That's pretty much it. I wanted to watch more Leverage, but every time I thought I was going to have time, something else either took longer than expected or otherwise got in the way. Alas.

 Life!

• For a few months now, I've been referencing a Big Thing I’m Not Talking About Yet and promising that I'll actually tell y'all what it is in the next Doings post, mostly because I wasn't sure if the thing was going to work out. But at this point, I think it is going to work without killing either me or my writing career, which means I'm not going to put y'all off another month and will instead say: I have started grad school, specifically an online master's program in Professional Writing.
• I was supposed to start in January, but I wanted to buy some extra writing time and the university I'm doing the program through has three sub-terms per semester (with the middle one overlapping the other two), so I decided to push things back and start in February instead. And then, as mentioned in my February Doings, I had one good well, one awful week, and one neutral-ish week. Thankfully, the awful week was more or less a fluke — a combination of unclear instructions and outside stressors — and the only really bad week I've had since was the one in which tech issues struck the week of my largest project for my first class — which also happened to be the first week in which I had overlapping classes. But, again, that was a combination of outside stress and uncertainty about how to approach a particular assignment, and to be frank, it wouldn't have been a good week even if I only had writing and work on my plate. So, yes. This is a thing that's happening, and it's going reasonably well.
• Ok, what else happened this month? My sister came home for spring break at the start of the month, and getting to see her and hang out with her was fun. She did have a cold for about half the week, so we didn't get to do as much stuff as I might've hoped, but it was still very nice to have her at home for a little while. Then we finished that week by driving up to Pennsylvania to see my grandpa, which was also nice.
• We also celebrated Pi Day, of course! My mom made spaghetti pie for dinner and apple pie (pictured above) for dessert, and both were absolutely delicious.
• My adventures in embroidery continue, as I finished the first script-based piece (aside from washing away the stabilizer and figuring out how I want to display the piece) and have started on a second. This new one is a bit of fanart for The Dark King's Curse, and I'm generally pleased with how it's turning out. Once it's finished, I'll probably post a picture, unless I decide to wait until I've made a second version. I have, in the process, learned that I don't like doing stem stitch for lettering and that shorter text is better than longer text, so, yeah.
• On the baking front, I made a coconut cake for the birthday of one of the pastors at work. It's the special recipe of my former supervisor who retired, and it was also a favorite of that particular pastor, so I was excited to get to share it and see how I did. Thankfully, everyone liked it. (I wasn't worried, to be clear. I made it last year for Easter, so I know it's good. But it's the context, y'know?)
• On the topic of work, things have definitely been busy there. Most of that is preparation for Holy Week, but we've also been adjusting the way we do some things and introducing some new event types, so that's been interesting. This has also been a month of tech troubles, some of which fell at the same time as my personal technology problems, so that's not been ideal. But, you know, busy is better than bored, and I've had the opportunity to work on some fun projects and pieces, so I'm not complaining.
• Oh, and D&D is going! In the campaign I've been in since I was in college, the group is rediscovering how much we struggle when a particular character (the sorcerer, also our de-facto leader by virtue of being good at coming up with plans) isn't around, as we've split the party to scope out an enemy's headquarters and rescue my character's sister at the same time. I've also been playing in another once-a-month campaign through my library, which has been interesting. I'm playing a Tabaxi conjuration wizard, and she's fun, though I'm still adjusting to the dynamic of the new group.
• Otherwise, I've mostly been appreciating the warmer weather (even if I'm not spending much time outside) and all the flowers blooming in our yard. I've been able to skip a coat in favor of just a fleece jacket quite a few days this month, so I am quite pleased with that. (And I will be more pleased still once I can get down to a cardigan and short sleeves!)

April Plans

• The first week of Easter is Holy Week, which will be very busy. Not as busy as last year, thank goodness, but still not a week in which I anticipate having much downtime, especially since I also have multiple social events (a Mid-Atlantic Realm Writers meeting and a Connect Group meeting) happening in the evening during that week. Plus, it's the last week in which I'll have overlapping grad school classes. After Holy Week, though, I think things should calm down quite a bit. And I am looking forward to Easter and my Bible study's annual celebration.
• My creative writing focus will continue to be on my selkie story first and my D&D campaign second, as those have the most pressing deadlines. I'd like to get back to work on BDPI #4 sometime soon, but . . . priorities.
• I'll also be doing research for my grad school class and writing a paper based on said research. My plan is to investigate a possible aspect of why certain people do and don't like to listen to music or other background noise while writing. This is actually a question that piqued my interest back in 2020, enough so that I ran a survey about it, but I didn't have sufficient motivation to do anything with the results of that survey . . . until now.
• On the reading front, I suspect it'll be mood reads all the way down. Well, that and catching up on beta reading, on which I am horrendously behind. I do apologize to anyone reading this to whom I owe beta comments — though, in my defense, I've been just a little bit busy.
• (Side note: I just discovered that my natural inclination is to spell "apologize" the British way, with an "s" instead of a "z." My best guess is that it's caused by the fact that I've been reading a lot of books by British and Aussie writers these last few months?)
• I think that about covers all the important things. And if I forgot it, well, it probably wasn't that important.

How was your March? What are you looking forward to in April? Would you rather be busy or bored? Also, if you're a Discworld fan, what are your thoughts on the last four books in the series? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

Full disclosure: I almost canceled my blog post this week. I'm tired, I have novel writing to do, all the ideas I came up with were either dependent on my reading particular books this week (that I didn't read) or just weren't right for this particular moment in time, and did I mention that I'm really storming tired? (This is about 75% my own fault because I've been going to bed really late, but the reasons why are not fully under my control, so.) But! I didn't feel right canceling twice in a month, and so HERE WE ARE with a topic that I came up with at approximately 4:00 yesterday afternoon. That being: reads that have surprised me in a good way with how much I liked them. There don't tend to be many of these — which isn't a bad thing, because I don't tend to read books I don't think I'll enjoy, which means I'm more frequently disappointed than unexpectedly delighted. But! That is not always the case; sometimes I read things expecting them to be eh and instead discover that they're marvelous. These are those books.

 

Surprisingly Excellent Reads

1. Lady of Dreams by W.R. Gingell. It is entirely possible that W.R. Gingell is some sort of magical being based solely on my feelings about this book. It should not be possible for a magical realism character drama that's more or less a blend of an Austen novel and a K-drama to entrance me this much. And yet. It is absolutely in my top five favorite Gingell novels, which means it's beating out the majority of City Between books. It's just so lovely. (I should reread it, honestly.)
2. Stolen Mayfly Bride by Sarah K.L. Wilson. When I initially read through the list of books in this series, this was one of the ones I had the lowest expectations for. It just sounded weird, you know? But it was written by an author who had blown me away with another of her books (Heart of Shadow, if you want to know), so I gave it a try . . . and it's just lovely. Wilson knows how to write fae well, she knows how to write clever characters, and she knows how to craft a truly excellent arc.
3. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. I procrastinated on this book for multiple years before I read it. Not even kidding. The plot sounded just enough like a particular trope that I can't stand that it turned me off, even though there's usually not a lot that can put me off a Vimes story. But I had to read it in order to progress in the series . . . and, as it turns out, it's arguably one of the best of the Discworld series. It's not quite as fun as some of the others, but it's very good.
4. Ten Blind Dates by Ashley Elston. I'm not one for contemporary or rom-com, but as y'all know, I've been trying to expand my horizons these last couple years, and a friend recommended this to me as a Christmas read. I expected it to be ok, but it turned out to be quite delightful — focused as much on family and friendship as it is on romance, surprisingly fun, and not horrendously angsty. I actually liked it enough that I said I was going to reread it in my review. I haven't gotten around to that yet . . . but maybe this winter? We'll see.
5. Space Boy by Stephen McCranie. This is cheating a little because I read it as a webcomic, not a book, but it does have print edition, so . . . it counts? Right? Anyway. I actually gave up on the comic the first time I tried it; I didn't love the vertical format, and the story didn't catch me. I tried it again a couple years later . . . and proceeded to binge read all the episodes published up to that date in a matter of a few days. It's a lovely, hopeful story, part slice of life and part intrigue/mystery/action (more the latter at this point, but more the former for the first hundred episodes), and I'm glad I gave it a second chance.

What books have surprised you with how much you enjoyed them? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

April 2022 Doings!

April has, unsurprisingly, flown right by, and here we are in May already. I think you all already know what the month's main events were (one of them was pretty hard to miss if you follow me anywhere online), but we'll get on with the Doings all the same.

Writing!

• Mask of Scarlet is officially published and out in the world! Huzzah! We did have a little delay on Kindle Unlimited availability due to my forgetting to click the "make available in KU" button, but otherwise, the release went pretty well. Many thanks to everyone who participated!
• Other than Mask of Scarlet release stuff, my main writing project was starting the rewrite/first edit of Through a Shattered Glass (formerly known as the Super Secret Mystery Project). This has been going a bit slower than anticipated — I had a couple busy weeks when I didn't get to do as much as I wanted. But in general, it's coming along well, and the fact that I'm working with a much more extended timeline than usual means I can get in an extra round of feedback, which I'm happy about.
• I also did some work on the current module of the Defenders of Serys D&D campaign I'm running, though we missed several weeks this month, which meant I didn't have to do too much. (The current adventure also has too many possible path branches for me to prep too far in advance.)
• In general, stuff was pretty quiet on the writing front, but that's fine — it's always nice to have a more restful month.

Reading!

• Well, this was a better reading month than March was.
• Unsurprisingly, this month included a lot of ARCs. I've already posted my thoughts on most of those, but I'll provide a quick recap:
  • Tall & Dark was a delightful con/mystery adventure followup to Miss Sharp's Monsters. Highlights included the same memoir-ish style as Miss Sharp, the same dark and exciting world full of monstrous royalty, a new and clever MC, and a return of Grand Duke Vasily (who is having, just, the worst succession of bad days). I reviewed this at the start of the month.
  • My Soul to Take is the third of Bryan Davis's Oculus Gate series. It's a worldhopping Davis book, so obviously I enjoyed it — read the rest of my thoughts here.
  • Crown and Cinder and Cindy Ellen were my fellow Midnight Curfews books, and I enjoyed both very much! Crown and Cinder is a blend of Pride and Prejudice and Cinderella that just works wonderfully well (my thoughts), and Cindy Ellen is a short and sweet Old West Cinderella story (again, my thoughts here).
  • Search for the Astral Dragon is the only ARC here that I haven't already posted about — that's coming next week. In the meantime, I can say that it's a thrilling space adventure that I definitely recommend picking up.
• Outside of ARCs, we have a nice assortment of stories. I did finally finish Raising Steam, though it took me pretty much all month (reading between ARCs and due library books). I stand by what I said earlier — it's a good story, but it's not a great Discworld novel. It lacks the usual spark, and I think it's largely because no one is an underdog anymore. At this point, I only have one book left in the series (well, plus Small Gods, which I may or may not read), and I'm hoping very hard that it doesn't suffer from the same problem.
• On a more cheerful note: Every Living Thing is the final James Herriot memoir, and it's just as lovely as the others. This one deals a great deal with Herriot's family and with the new assistants who come through the practice, which was fun. Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 4 was exciting, though I kind of can't believe that I didn't see a particular twist coming. Finally, Leading Edge is an anthology that contained a couple ok stories (interesting premises, but too open-ended for me) and one really delightful story about fae magic and goblin markets and true love. It's a pretty cheap ebook, and I'd recommend picking it up just for that one story.

Watching!

• Aaaaand we're back to the watching-stuff slump, probably because I was too busy to spend much time on the treadmill or set aside work early enough to watch anything. I finished Critical Role Episode 8, watched a little bit more No Evil, and that's pretty much it.

Life!

• . . . What the pumpernickel happened this month?
• Outside of the book release, most of this month's activity centered around work and Holy Week . . . usually at the same time. Last year, the church was still in pandemic mode, so Easter was comparatively low-key. This year, we had a big Good Friday event in addition to services and promo graphics and regular weekly stuff, and . . . it was a lot.
• And then I ended up getting hit hard by allergies and a little bit of a bug midway through Holy Week.
• It was not a good time.
• But everything got done that needed to be done! And I still got to go to Easter lunch with the Bible Study!
• And I made a coconut cake, and it was delicious! It's a recipe from my former supervisor (the one who retired in January), and it was my first time trying it. I was a little nervous, but it turned out super well!
• Other than Easter stuff . . . we spent two weekends working outside, one to cut and split a fallen tree into logs and one to split and stack all the wood we got from other fallen trees that we'd only cut into sections. That was, y'know, a lot. I'm just the person carrying things, and I was tired.
• I ended the month with another cake, this one chocolate with chocolate icing. Mostly by accident, I ended up making it on the day of Mask of Scarlet's release. (I mostly made it for dessert at Bible study that evening.) It was also very tasty, though putting sprinkles on it was a mistake because they kind of . . . went everywhere.
• I did not do very well with walking on the treadmill, nor did I figure out a stretching routine like I intended. I did start working on another goal, though, which is learning (via YouTube) some popular line dances. I'm hoping that, by the time September rolls around and I have another wedding to go to, I'll be able to actually participate in some of the dancing rather than just sitting on the sidelines.

May Plans

• The most exciting bits of May are happening at the same time: my sister coming home from college for the summer and our Bible study's yearly retreat. I'm honestly not sure which I'm more excited about.
• I intend to finish the first edit of Through a Shattered Glass by the end of the month — maybe a second round of edits as well, if things go extraordinarily well.
• I also really need to figure out what's happening with the TaSG cover. Which probably means biting the bullet and hiring someone to make it, because once you factor in the cost of stock art, it's a pretty reasonably priced option. I'm just procrastinating because my favorite cover designer isn't available.
• At work, I think May will end up being the Month of Signage . . . unless stuff keeps getting delayed, which is entirely possible. It will, if nothing else, probably be fairly quiet since we sorta dropped the summer newsletter that would normally be taking up a lot of time. (In theory, this means that I should also take the month to update all my how-to-do-this-job documentation and maybe print a copy so that other people can reference it. Will I actually do that? Who knows.)
• One solid plan I do have is that I'm going to participate in Bryan Davis's big 20-years-of-authordom celebration contest! Which means y'all will be seeing a fair bit about Davis's books on my blog and social media accounts. (Don't worry; I will intersperse it with non-Davis-related stuff.)
• This also means that I want to finish rereading Oracles of Fire so I can write the "rereading DiOM/OoF" blog post that I've been planning for months. I should probably get back to finishing up my series rereads in general, honestly . . .
• I also want to work on crafting projects! Specifically, cosplay-related stuff for Realm Makers! My plan is to do more low-key cosplays three days (which will have a base of primarily items that I either already have in my closet or can wear as normal clothes in addition to in a cosplay), plus a "centerpiece" outfit for the Awards Banquet. I am very excited, and I'm trying to manage my expectations, but . . . yeah. I have gotten very few opportunities in my life to cosplay, so I like taking advantage of the opportunities I do get, especially because I've been watching a fair number of Morgan Donner videos in the last year.

How was your April? Any exciting plans for May? Did you pick up any of the Midnight Curfews releases? What's your favorite cake (to make or to eat)? Do you enjoy cosplay? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

March 2022 Doings!

A third of the year is already gone . . . hard to believe, isn't it? It's been a busy month for me in many ways, but a restful one in others — and a good month, I'd say, all round. Let's get on with the Doings so you can see what I mean!

Writing!

• This has been another busy writing month! A little less so than February was, but still very busy and very productive.
• I spent the first week and a half of the month hard at work on my Super Secret Mystery Project (TaSG), averaging about a chapter a day — except on the day I spent mostly in the car and the day I finished the draft, on which I got several chapters written. It's been a while since the words flowed that readily on any given project. I think it was a combination of a tight deadline and low pressure — TaSG isn't directly connected to any of my previous projects, and I hadn't fully committed to anything with it, but I did need to get it done by a particular point in time for what I wanted to do with it.
• After finishing the Super Secret Mystery Project, I took a bit under a week off while I waited for the last of my Mask of Scarlet beta feedback to drift in, and then I dove back into edits on that project. I've been working on that on and off through the second half of the month — I'll finish a round of edits, take a few days, then edit again. At this point, I'm at the ebook formatting stage, which is exciting. I'm testing a new method of doing chapter headers that I hope will make my life a little easier. (Also, I remembered to start with ebook formatting this time rather than print. Thank goodness.)
• On that note, there's still time to sign up for an ARC of Mask of Scarlet or the other Midnight Curfews, Crown and Cinder and Cindy Ellen! The goal is to have ARCs available sometime the week of April 10.
• Outside of my novels, I've been working writing the next adventure for my Defenders of Serys D&D group. That's going a bit slowly because I don't have a ton of time or energy to put to it, but I do have the next couple sessions ready, and the fact that we basically didn't meet this month meant I had some extra time to plan. If worst comes to worst, the nature of the next adventure means I already have a good framework and plenty of pre-made NPCs to improve with, and a very limited number of options for enemies if I need a combat scenario on short notice.

Reading!

• Ugh. This month started out really well in terms of reading and then everything just . . . fell apart. It's starting to look back up, but yeah.
• I started out by steaming through three more Discworld books, two of which were new to me and one of which was Making Money, which, while not on the same level as Going Postal, is still excellent-quality Moist von Lipwig content. The two new ones were good as well, particularly Thud!, though not anywhere near my favorites list.
• Then I switched over to arguably my favorite book I've read this month, Cinderella Must Die by W.R. Gingell. I posted about how much I loved this one earlier this month, so I won't repeat myself except to say that it was an absolutely delightful romp of a fairytale murder mystery.
• Back to Discworld, I read Snuff, the last City Watch book. And it was . . . fine? It was a very good book. But it lacked some shine or spark that had made me love the other Vimes books, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why. It wasn't that Vimes was out of the city — The Fifth Elephant is one of my favorite Discworld novels. It wasn't that there wasn't stuff happening. It was just . . . missing something.
• At this point, I was starting to think that maybe I was reading too much Discworld, and I'd remembered that I had a Kindle Unlimited subscription that would expire in a month and a bit that I needed to use. So I worked through a few indie reads — Sorcerer and the Swan Princess was an interesting take on Swan Lake, though it wasn't as substantial as it could've been, and Stolen Mayfly Bride featured a properly Other take on fae — before realizing that if I wanted to do a Discworld post in March, I needed to get busy.
• And so I started Raising Steam . . . and that's where it all fell apart because I could just. not. get into it. I should've been all over it, because it's Moist von Lipwig and Vetinari and so on . . . but it just wasn't doing it for me. Eventually, I realized why: I'm a good third of the book in, and it still doesn't feel like there's real stakes. There have been challenges, but it's nothing the main character can't deal with and hasn't dealt with before. There's not even the usual risk to Moist's life, since he got himself into the current situation. And I think it's the same problem I had with Snuff; while there was action and mystery enough, I rarely felt like there was any risk of the conflict not being successfully resolved.
• Anyway. Raising Steam is currently on hold while I read my ARC of Tall and Dark, the first in Suzannah Rowntree's successor series to Miss Sharp's Monsters, and I'm enjoying that very much thus far. So at least the month's ended on a high note.

Watching!

• If this month was a bit of a slump when it came to reading in some ways, I made up for it in what I watched! I spent a lot of time in the car at the start of the month, plus I've been making an effort to use the treadmill a couple times a week, so that's given me a little more space where I don't feel guilty about watching longer stuff rather than writing, editing, blogging, or doing something else "productive."
• I actually watched three whole movies this month! Most exciting to me was finally seeing Encanto, which was a lovely movie. I'm not sure if it was quite as amazing as everyone hyped it up to be, but it was still excellent. I do love a good family story, and a magical family story in an equally magical house is even better. I have to say, though — why's everyone so obsessed with not talking about Bruno when "Waiting for a Miracle" is right there? Y'all are sleeping on the good stuff.
• Anyway. I didn't love the other two movies, though for different reasons. Meet Me in St. Louis is an older slice-of-life-ish musical, and, it was . . . fine? I spent most of it mentally shaking my head at the characters. As for No Time to Die, the new James Bond . . . well, let's just say that the title is inaccurate on multiple levels. I will give it credit for good costuming (the major female characters are in actual practical clothing!) and for character depth and having family actually be a good thing and a motivating factor? But it was so long.
• Outside of movies, I fit in another episode and two halves of Critical Role (bringing me up to midway through Campaign 3 Episode 8 and introducing me to Chetney. I also started watching No Evil, which is a YouTube animated serial featuring mythology and legends from North and Central America. I didn't expect to love it, but I've gotta say, I'm kinda hooked.

Life!

• The highlight of the month was, of course, my sister being home for spring break for a week at the start of March. The whole family drove up to pick her up, which was a lot of time in the car — but, as I said, it was some good quality writing time, and we got to meet one of her friends, so that was fine. We didn't do a lot during the week, but we did watch a movie and play a couple rounds of Sentinels, and we finished out her break by visiting my grandpa in Pittsburgh . . . where it snowed. And was cold. But getting to see him was still nice.
• Since then . . . most of the excitement is stuff I've already covered in other sections. I will say that work has been very busy, as I'm knee deep in materials for the church's Good Friday event, other Lenten and Holy week materials, and trying to solve problems of signage around the church on top of my normal work. It's . . . a lot. I'm not complaining by any means, but yeah.
• Pi Day was a nice bright spot in all the stress, though! We celebrated with spaghetti pie and strawberry mallow pie, both of which were DELICIOUS.
• We did finally get some warm spring weather, which is just . . . hallelujah thank you God. And then it promptly froze again the next couple weeks. But now it's warming up again! I'm wearing short sleeves (under a cardigan, but still)!
• I also got new tennis shoes, which are slip-ons instead of traditional lace-up shoes, and I am delighted.
• So, yeah. It's not been a quiet month, but it has been consistent in its business, so I won't complain.

April Plans

• Mask of Scarlet comes out THIS MONTH, y'all! If you want to get in on helping with the tour, keep checking my spaces — Kendra and I will be releasing details on how to get involved soon. And, of course, you can still preorder the book.
• I also plan to edit the Super Secret Mystery Project, so that'll be fun.
• I am not doing Camp NaNoWriMo. It's just not the place I'm in, and I don't feel like I need the extra motivation.
• Of course, I'm looking forward to Easter. Our Bible study is planning the usual Easter lunch gathering, and I'm thinking about what I want to contribute. I may attempt coconut cake using the recipe that my supervisor gave me before she retired. We shall see.
• On the work front, I don't anticipate life getting any less busy anytime soon. Even once Holy Week is over and done, we'll have summer to prepare for . . . and we're thinking of redoing some of the church signage, which means I get to do a bunch of research to figure out what that even looks like.
• I'm not even going to try to plan out my reading, other than the fact that I'll have several books to read or finish for review and I want to get some more mileage out of Kindle Unlimited before it goes back to full price and I cancel the subscription. I'm too tired to be anything but a mood reader.
• I want to keep using the treadmill semi-regularly. You might be saying, "But Sarah! It's spring! Go outside!" and to you, I reply: I do not like walking on the road. If I liked walking on the road, I would not have spent time and effort campaigning for a treadmill. I do hope to go outside and read, ideally in a hammock, and I will almost certainly end up outside to help clear up the tree that fell down in our yard the other day. (Don't worry! Nothing was damaged! It's not even a really big tree, thank goodness, and we knew it would come down eventually.) But I like to do my excercise where I can pair it with Critical Role or Leverage or another show. 
• I also kind of want to get better about stretching regularly so I don't end up with really bad consequences from sitting and staring at screens all the time? But I have to do research before I can properly commit to that. I'm just saying it here now so I'll have extra motivation to work on it.

How was your March? Any exciting plans for April? Have you preordered Mask of Scarlet and/or requested an ARC yet? Are you happy about spring's arrival? And do you prefer to do excercise inside or outside? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

December 2020 Doings!

Hello, everyone! Yeah, this Doings post is not coming to you on the usual day. But since this is such a posting-heavy week (with Doings!, my 2020 reading wrap-up, 2021 goals, and hopefully a short story for New Year's Eve), I decided to mess with the schedule a bit. So, yes. This will likely be the first of many posts this week. Enjoy?

Writing!

• No, the Midnight Show sequel is not done. Yes, it is behind schedule. I continue to blame research. Also, y'know, Christmas prep.
• On the upside, I've written some every day this month, so I feel good about that. And I think we're close to being finished; nearly all the pieces are in place for the mystery to be solved and the conflicts resolved. I'd feel better if I'd written more every day and if a few more pieces were in place, but I will take the victories I can and try again next month for the losses.
• I also didn't work at all on my D&D campaigns, but we're still working through the current module, and I expect to be in this module for another couple of weeks, so we should be ok.
• I'm finishing out the month with 17956 words (plus probably another couple thousand over the next few days) written in December and 53698 total on The Midnight Show sequel. Some of those words will be cut in edits, but this book will definitely be longer than its predecessor.

 Reading!

• This month's reading was about 50% Christmas stuff, which is more Christmas reading than I've done in quite a while. I started off with Hogfather, which I liked better on the reread — It helped that I'd been seeing posts about the story a lot on the socials, so I was pretty hyped. I followed it up with some short stories: The Sixth Christmas, which was an interesting take on a Christmas Carol/Wonderful Life-type situation, and the Christmas in Talesend anthology, which is always fun. And we finished up on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with The Enchanted Sonata, which was also absolutely delightful on the reread.
• Outside of Christmas reads, I finished the published Magus of the Library books with volume 3, which was about as good as the first two. And I read some short stories: an anthology by Patricia C. Wrede, the highlight of which was an Enchanted Forest Chronicles short story about an enchanted frying pan, and H.L. Burke's "Spider Spell", which was fun but did not make me more favorably inclined towards spiders as a whole.
• I also read Allie Brosh's recently-published second book, Solutions and Other Problems. It wasn't bad, but I didn't love it. I was glad I'd read it once, but I don't think I'll reread it.
• The non-Christmas highlight of the month was rereading Little Women, which honestly gets better every time I read it. It truly is an excellent book, and it was nice to revisit all my favorite parts and all the bits I'd forgotten.
• And I'm finishing out the month with 10 Blind Dates, which is not my usual genre (it's contemporary YA romance, of all things), but it was recommended to me by a friend and I'm actually enjoying it more than I would expect. It has a lot of emphasis on family relationships as well as romance, which is nice.

Watching!

• Obviously, we watched a lot of Christmas movies this month. Some of them were the usuals (Rudolph, Little Drummer Boy, White Christmas, Peanuts, etc.) Others were new to me; we watched Shop Around the Corner and The Bishop's Wife the week before Christmas. Both were . . . I wouldn't choose to watch them again, but I wouldn't refuse if other people wanted to watch them unless I had a compelling something else that I needed to do. (I do want to watch You've Got Mail now, though, since people have told me that it changes most of the reasons I wasn't excited about Shop Around the Corner.)
• We also watched the 2019 version of Little Women, and I was actually impressed. They did better with peoples' character arcs than I feared, and while I have mixed feelings about how they handled the back-and-forth between different parts of the timeline, I think the movie was well-done overall. (I also feel like this movie clarified a lot for me why so many people disliked a particular part of The Penderwicks At Last that I was genuinely happy about. So there's that.)
• Also, Overly Sarcastic Productions posted the next part of Journey to the West, and therefore I am IMMENSELY happy. It was a very fun episode, and my desire to read the actual book has been renewed. (Tragically, no libraries near me have the better English translations. I might suggest the libraries acquire them, though . . .)
• And, of course, I'm still working my way through Critical Role. I'm halfway through Episode 42, and the Avantika arc is still not my favorite, but it's getting better! And I think I only have about eight episodes left before we get to the arc I'm really excited about, which is the trip to Xhorhas.

Life!

• Most of the month, of course, was occupied by Christmas stuff: making and acquiring gifts, sending Christmas cards, baking cookies, and so forth. I am very happy with this year's Christmas baking. I made molasses cookies and gingersnaps (because we were running out of molasses cookies), both of which I've made previously. I did about 60% of making cut-out cinnamon sugar cookies — my mom and I mixed the dough up in a joint effort, and I did the cutting and baking. And, arguably the one I'm most excited about, I made mint chocolate chessboard cookies, which are a variation on cut-and-bake sugar cookies, but with strips of chocolate and mint dough formed into a checkerboard pattern. They turned out very well, and I hope to make the Neapolitan variation sometime in the future.
• In addition to the writing and the Christmas prep, I spent a lot of the month working on the second half of the freelance design project I was working on last month. This month was less of a learning curve, but it still took a lot more out of me than I'd hoped. On the upside, I'm almost done, and what's left should be less frustrating. Hopefully, anyway.
• On a happier note, I did have a second interview with one of the places I applied for back in November, and it went very, very well. And the interview led to a very exciting phone call about a week before Christmas . . . but more on that in the next section.
• And now, back to Christmas! Christmas Eve was . . . not really what I was hoping for? We ended up with the noon Christmas Eve service, which I wasn't super happy about (the service was very nice; it just made for an extraordinarily awkward flow for the day), and we didn't do as much driving around and looking for lights as we normally would because it was raining. (And there weren't as many lights on for the same reason.) But it was ok.
• Christmas Day was very nice, though. We ended up having ham instead of the lasagna we originally planned, and that was very tasty. My family seemed to like the gifts I got them, which I'm glad of. (One highlight: I got my sister her first set of D&D dice!) I also got some very nice gifts, including some expansion sets for Sentinels of the Multiverse (I now have all my favorite heroes, villains, and environments, along with some new environments I'm super excited to try), the most recent Invisible Library book and Randall Munroe's What If?, and two new tumblers to replace the one that has a bunch of cracks in the outer wall from when it got knocked onto the ground in a parking lot back in September. (They change color in response to temperature! I am more excited about this than I have any right to be! Also, they're a little larger than my old one but not so much that they don't fit in cupholders.)
• After Christmas, we took a short trip up to visit my grandpa, since we haven't seen him in quite a while. So that was very nice.
• And throughout the month, my sister and I had several opportunities to play Sentinels of the Multiverse with our roommates over Zoom. It works surprisingly well — it's better when all parties have both the villain and the environment we're using, but we can manage even when only one person has the deck. About half the games we played were against a surprisingly deadly combination: Omnitron (think: murderbot with control of a robotics factory) in the Ruins of Atlantis (exactly what it sounds like). Omintron is a Level 1 villain, so he's usually not hard to beat, but somehow this villain/environment grouping killed very capable hero teams three times (three!) before we finally managed to beat it.

 January Plans

• So, the most exciting thing that's happening this coming month: barring calamity, I am officially starting a new full-time job in the first couple weeks of January! I'll be doing print and web design work for a church about thirty minutes from where I live. I'm looking forward to it, though I'm also a bit nervous (more about changes in general than about anything specific). I think it'll be a good place to start out with professional work: it seems like it'll be less stressful than some other places I applied to, and the people I'll be working with most seem very nice.
• That means I'll have to work out how to balance writing with full-time work and not ignoring my family, as I fully intend to finish the TMS sequel in January so I can send it to Kendra in February. I will have a four-day workweek instead of a five-day one, so that'll help. But it'll still be a challenge.
• I'll also be finishing up the freelance project in the beginning of the month, but, again, I should be just about done with it. Fingers crossed that I'm not wrong . . .
• And in whatever time I have left over, I have a lot of reading to do so I can get in Return of the Thief and Rhymth of War before I have to return them to the library. Because let me tell you, I'm super tired of trying to dodge spoilers, especially since people are starting to leak stuff about RoW. Queen's Thief fans seem pretty good about tagging spoilers even months after the release. Not so much Cosmere people.

How was your December? Any exciting plans for January? Are you as behind on your TBR as I am? What were the highlights of your Christmas season?  Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!

February 2019 Doings!

Ok, all the stuff I said about February being a horrible month? I was wrong. February was a very good month (with the exception of a few days). It was also a very busy month, so I'm kind of glad it's done . . . not that it's going to get any easier from here on out.

Writing!

• I spent most of the month working on the fourth round of edits on Mechanical Heart, which ended up being more extensive than I expected. My beta readers made some excellent points about pacing and character dynamics that mean completely rewriting several more chapters than I expected. Of course, completely rewriting things takes longer than regular editing, so I'm only about halfway through the story instead of all the way through.
• That said, I'm really excited about the results of the edits I've done so far, and I think that the story as a whole will be much better for the changes. And I get to annoy Josiah and write a really fun female friendship at the same time as a result, so that's exciting.
• (For the record: Josiah needs to be annoyed more. He had it far too easy in the previous versions of the novel. Also, he's just a generally dramatic sort of guy and that comes out very strongly when he's annoyed.)

Reading!

• I don't know if it was a self-defense mechanism against all my stress this month or the fact that I've felt like I'm starving for good books or just the fact that I found a lot of really good reads, but February was an amazing month for reading. It can be pretty easily divided into two halves: pre-Blind Date and post-Blind Date.
• Pre-Blind Date was mostly defined by one author: W.R. Gingell. I tried Masque on a whim; I'd just finished the latest Invisible Library books and needed another fantasy mystery (ideally, fantasy murder mystery). I happened to remember Masque and figured, hey, it probably won't be as good as the Invisible Library books, but it's a fairy tale retelling and a murder mystery, so it can't be that bad.
• Surprise: It was as good as the Invisible Library books. Not a surprise: by the time I finished, I was officially addicted to both fantasy mysteries and W.R. Gingell's books. I mean, the Two Monarchies series is basically what would happen if you combined that series with a Diana Wynne Jones book and I am in love.
• So, yeah. I devoured Masque, which is arguably my new favorite retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I mean, you can't go wrong with murder to drive a plot, and the protagonist is delightfully sneaky and clever — plus, she's 28 and happily unmarried when the book starts, and she isn't particularly interested in changing that but also isn't angsty about the fact that she does inevitably fall in love. And the magic system is fascinating; it hits a sweet spot between technical/scientific and fairy tale-like that I didn't even know existed. And the world is highly interesting; you don't see a lot of fantasy worlds where magic is normal. Also, there's politics. I love politics in fantasy. And the love interest is pretty cool.
• All that put together, it should be no surprise that I proceeded to devour the other Two Monarchies book that I already owned, Spindle, a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. That one was also very good, but in a different way. No murder here, but still mystery and politics and a couple whose relationship dynamics, combined with the world, reminded me of Howl's Moving Castle. Like, I've never read another book that I could honestly compare to Howl — except this one.
• So, obviously, I had to read the rest of the series . . . which I didn't own. Surprise: I bought all the Two Monarchies books, plus the random spinoff. (This actually is a surprise; I almost never buy eBooks unless they're free or $0.99 unless I really like the author, but I paid full price for these. And I would've bought all her other books too, but I ran out of spending money.) Blackfoot wasn't quite as good as Spindle or Masque, but Staff and Crown was utterly delightful. (Annabel is at her best when she's got Isabelle by her side, plus we had Melchior and a boarding school full of noble and upper-class girls, and someone's sneaking about plotting things, and there was intrigue and sneakery and explosions. What more could you want?) And Wolfskin, the spinoff, was excellent too. It had a very different feel, and I'm not 100% satisfied with the ending, but the mystery was excellent.
• I had two other Gingell books already on my Kindle: Twelve Days of Faerie (a fun mystery involving fae; not my favorite of Gingell's books but still fun) and A Time Traveler's Best Friend (kind of confusing and weird, but not bad). And after that, I had to console my soul by reading Pratchett — specifically, Night Watch, which is also time travel but much less confusing. It was pretty cool to see what characters were like before we met them at the series start. Also, you can't go wrong with Vimes.
• And as soon as I finished that, it was Blind Date with a Book time!

• This is my best year yet for Blind Date books. I had a grand total of seven 'dates', and I was pretty satisfied with all of them. Here's the rundown!
• VIRTUAL REALITY, GAMING, and CYBERCRIME: Warcross (Marie Lu). I really enjoyed this one! It was less predictable than I expected and much more colorful than most sci-fi novels I read. Plus, SAO has made me a sucker for virtual reality game stories. My one complaint is that the romance moved much faster than I liked. It was a really nice slow burn for a while, and then — boom. They're kissing. Oh well.
• EPIC TEEN ADVENTURES, MAGIC, and MYSTERIES: The Rithmatist (Brandon Sanderson). This was one of three rereads and definitely my favorite of those three. I think I've probably read The Rithmatist more than any other Sanderson book at this point. Not that I'm complaining; it's a good book!
• ABSURDITY, ALIENS, and QUIRKY TECHNOLOGY: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams). Another reread. I tried this one a couple years ago and found it depressing, but a lot of my friends love the series. I hoped that maybe I'd enjoy it more now since I knew it wasn't basically sci-fi Discworld, but . . . no such luck. It's still depressing and nihilistic.
• FANTASY, LOST MEMORIES, and SACRIFICE: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman). This is my first Gaiman, and I really enjoyed it. It was a little bit weird and a little bit creepy, but I'm not complaining about that. I loved the way that myths were quietly intertwined with the story, and the general feel of the book . . . it's like if someone wove a Diana Wynne Jones book and A Wrinkle in Time into one story, and it's beautiful.
• MONSTERS, TIME TRAVEL, and SPECIAL POWERS: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs). Ugh. I saw the description and thought storms yes, but now that I've finished it, I am intensely disappointed. This is the book you'd get if you combined the most cliche YA contemporary fantasy novel in existence with those Aggressively Realistic contemporary books I was semi-forced to read as a kid. (They were all set in the South, all featured relatively poor characters who were generally miserable, and were supposed to be Deep and Significant but were mostly just depressing. I'm pretty sure they were trying to be modern To Kill a Mockingbirds or Flannery O'Connor stories, but they failed miserably.) It was boring, it was annoying, and it was cliche. It could've been amazing, but it failed me. I definitely will not be back for the rest of the series.
• MAGICAL VISITORS, CHILDHOOD ADVENTURES, and SURPRISE: Mary Poppins (P.L. Travers). I haven't read this book in so long. It used to be one of my favorites, and I enjoyed revisiting the stories. I will confess that Mary seemed a lot grumpier than I remembered, and the writing style is definitely aimed at younger kids . . . but some of the magic is still there.
• FRIENDSHIP, SPACE & TIME, and CONSPIRACIES: Twinmaker (Sean Williams). This is the only book I read about which I had no prior knowledge regarding the author or story. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't amazing. A lot of the ideas were interesting, and I think the author did a fairly good job with the worldbuilding. Unfortunately, the plot and characters were kind of predictable. I enjoyed it, but I don't think I'm going to read the sequel.

 Watching!

• The number one thing I learned this month? I am not a fan of "art" pieces when it comes to television and movies. It's not that there's anything wrong with them, but I have very low patience for TV and movies in general. (Part of the reason is probably that I'm stuck if I watch something long, as opposed to reading a long book, which can be done in bits and pieces over the course of a day, week, or month.) So, when I end up watching a movie that's the cinematic equivalent of a highbrow literary novel — all introspection and silence and obscure metaphor and symbolism and confusion — I end up bored and frustrated rather than stimulated. Watching them when you're running a fever and probably should be in bed doesn't help matters.
• All that to say: the Studio Ghibli film The Red Turtle is a beautiful film full of metaphors that I don't think I understood. And the middle 90 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey are excellent and suspenseful and thought-provoking (if slow), but the beginning was odd, and the end made no sense at all. And you can call me uncultured all you like, but I don't think you should have to confuse and bore the audience to create a story — whether on the page or the screen — that's deep enough and meaningful enough and full of enough symbolism to be considered art. Art doesn't cease to be art simply because it's accessible.

• Much more pleasant was Cedarville's winter play: Agatha Christie's Appointment With Death. The first half was a bit frustrating because it was so much character buildup and I kind of wanted to get to the murder already. The actors all played their characters well, and I understand why they needed so much time to set up characters' motivations and personalities and so forth. The second half was excellent, though, and the answer to the whudunnit made sense.
• And the Honors org put together a Princess Bride movie night for Valentine's Day. It was awesome. We watched the movie and then our philosophy prof (who is every Honors student's favorite professor) talked about love and relationships and whether or not true love is a thing and whether or not it's really wise to marry a pirate. It was a good time.
• Outside of those four things, I didn't watch a whole lot. We managed a few more episodes of Doctor Who; I'm enjoying Tennant a bit more than I was when he first showed up. Also, I met K9, so that was fabulous. (And also Sarah Jane Smith — that was interesting, seeing a current and former companion interact with each other and the Doctor.) And the roomie and I are slowly making our way back into Fairy Tail. Sadly, the amount of writing I needed to do (and the number of events I had) cut severely into our watching time.

Life!

• The highlight of the month was definitely the weekend before Valentine's Day. My family came up — not primarily for me; there were events that my sister needed to be at, but we still got to spend time together on Sunday and Tuesday.
• Also on Tuesday was the second-best Cedarville chapel event of my life: Andrew Peterson speaking in chapel! He played a few of his songs from Resurrection Letters, and he read us the first chapter of his upcoming book on writing. It was fabulous. And then that evening he did a concert, which was amazing. He played a lot of my favorites and shared some of the stories behind the songs, and it was just beautiful. Plus I had a really good time trying to guess which songs were coming up based on his descriptions; I only guessed wrong once. (I though he was going to sing "After All These Years" or maybe "You Came So Close," but instead it was "Every Star Is a Burning Flame.")
• Now, you may be wondering "Why is Andrew Peterson in chapel only the second-best chapel of your life, Sarah? That sounds pretty amazing." The reason is: he was actually in chapel twice, and the second time was better. It was less serious, more fun, and he played some of his less-well-known songs. I'm going to suggest you actually go watch it. It's a little under an hour, but it's super fun, and something happens at the end that couldn't have been better if it had been planned.
• And I got to go to a Q&A with him after chapel, which was cool. Sadly, I didn't get to ask any of my questions — all the music majors got their hands up first. But it was still cool to hear what he had to say on some of the topics.
• In non-Andrew-Peterson-related news . . . Um. Honestly, I've covered most of it. I went to plays and movies. I saw Andrew Peterson (and got a CD signed by him, which was great!). I read copious amounts of fiction. I didn't have to spend much time arguing with Captivate, and my group projects are all going very smoothly — except one, but that one's not our fault. We had a survey that we needed sent out to the whole school, and we did what we were supposed to do to make that happen, but the person sending it apparently just forgot for a week solid. We're rather annoyed about that.
• Oh! We did have a snow day pretty early in the month! That was exciting, and it was nice to have a day off of classes. The only problem was that all the meetings that were supposed to happen that day got rescheduled to Thursday, as did a meeting that was supposed to happen on the weekend (and for which I needed to put something together in the computer lab), so that was stressful. I'm pretty sure I ended up with the same amount of stress for those two days that I normally would've had; it was just all condensed into Thursday instead of being split between the two.
• The last thing that happened this month was Sing, Dance, Laugh, a show put on by the Inversions (an acapella group), AYO (the dance org whose showcases I LOVE), and DTR (an improv comedy group). It was pretty fabulous; they made fun of millenials, lip-synced to the Bellybutton Song and "Let's Get Down To Business" (the latter of which involved a joke about the philosophy prof I mentioned earlier), and generally had a good time on stage — which meant those of us in the audience had fun too.

March Plans!

• I'm on spring break! Almost! I have a couple classes still today, but once those are done, I'm free! I had a hard time finding a ride home, which was frustrating, but I did get it worked out. So, pretty soon, I'll be back in VA!
• I don't have any particular plans, but I know I have a lot of writing to do. I need to get as much as I can done on Mechanical Heart, and I want to see if I can put together a D&D one-shot for some friends of mine on the hall who are kind of interested in D&D but aren't certain enough to commit to a full campaign. I have the skeleton of the adventure already; I'm adapting a forum roleplay plot that I created earlier this fall (and which is progressing very slowly). I'm well aware that I'm not super experienced with D&D, so I'm a little nervous, but I figure that my friends will be pretty forgiving — and I know how to tell a good story, so all I have to do is work out the mechanics. That shouldn't be too hard.
• I do have class projects that I'll need to work on, but not as many as I've had some years. Several of my projects I can't really do anything with off-campus. I do want to get ahead in Web Design if I can, but we'll see if my internet cooperates.
• I also have to figure out my schedule for next semester, so that's stressful. Actually, it probably won't be too bad; I'll be a senior, so I just have to figure out which of the classes I still need are offered in fall and which are offered in spring and sort it out from there. I just hope that Advanced Comp with the professor I want doesn't conflict with a graphic design class again. It will be super weird, though; I'll only have one actual PWID class; everything else will be Honors, Graphic Design, or PWID electives (which are all run by other majors or departments).
• I'll also be working on designing a website for my church here in Cedarville, and I'm super excited about that. I'm meeting with him later this morning to talk about what he's thinking and hosting options and content and so forth. (I was supposed to meet with him on Tuesday, but that got delayed . . . oh well.)
• And, of course, there will be reading. Probably not as much as there was this past month, but you never know . . .

How was your February? Was yours as non-blah as mine? Any fun plans for March?
Thanks for reading!
-Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)