Writing!
- First of all, an update on the DOSA Files anthology. The Kickstarter was successfully backed to the second stretch goal, so paperbacks will be shipping sometime mid-June, and the audiobook is officially in the works! If you missed the Kickstarter but still want a copy, no worries — you can preorder the ebook on Amazon, and the paperback will be available for purchase June 27. We'll be doing a blog tour to celebrate the wide release of the anthology, so if you want to help spread the word, please click here and sign up.
- As for Daughters of Atirse #2, I am still not quite finished, despite my best intentions, but I am closing in on the climax and the end of the book! Just a few chapters left! My wordcounts weren't quite where I wanted them to be — I was hitting somewhere around a thousand most days, but not much higher, and there were more than a few days with counts in the 400–600-word range. Still, I made very good progress, and I'm trying to focus on that rather than berating myself for not having been done with this a month ago.
- In more exciting news, as you might have heard earlier in the month, Song of the Selkies is a Realm Awards finalist! I'm very excited to have made it to the top five (especially considering what other books SotS was competing against — there were some big names and amazing stories on the Long List!), and I look forward to finding out who the ultimate winner will be at Realm Makers in July.
- Finally, an update on my spare-time projects — which, to be clear, I work on when I either can't work on Daughters of Atirse or I'm already done with my Atirse writing for the day. I finished the Travel Interlude for my D&D group, but I have not gotten back to working on the next adventure. I'll be honest; the fact that this group hasn't met at all in May kind of tanked my motivation for doing D&D writing.
- I'm also poking at another project that's still in the fun planning/ideating/worldbuilding stage, referenced in my Taleweaver's Desk update as the Secret Star Book. Normally, I wouldn't be doing even this much on a new project when I still have Onora's story and D&D writing to focus on, but I'm allowing myself to work on it here and there as I have time as a reward for surviving my most recent grad school class. I don't know exactly where that's going to go, so I won't say more about it for now, but I am having fun with it, as it's very different from most of my other projects.
Reading!
- April may have been my month of highly-anticipated releases, but May was still a pretty good reading month. The highlights of the month were H.L. Burke's new release, Game On, Brandon Sanderson's Tress of the Emerald Sea, and my (terribly self-indulgent) reread of The Goblin Emperor. I already reviewed Game On, and my love for The Goblin Emperor is well-established (it's a cozy epic fantasy about a forgotten young man, barely out of boyhood, who gets put in the midst of court intrigue and politics and who chooses to not play the games and instead be kind and I love it, I love it, I love it), so I'll focus mostly on Tress. I am so behind on reading it, but I do see why people raved about it so much (far more than they seem to have raved about the other Secret Projects). I enjoyed the characters — Tress herself is a delight, and I really liked most of the supporting cast as well — and had fun spotting the various Cosmere connections. The magic system with the spore-seas and the abilities of the different spores was also fascinating and really cool both visually and conceptually. Oddly, though, the one thing I didn't love was the storytelling voice in some sections; even though I think it's cool that the story is narrated by Hoid, and while I liked most of his asides and flavor commentary, some sections just didn't hit right for me.
- The other highlight of the month, of course, is the return of Dracula Daily, a Substack newsletter allowing readers to read Dracula in real-time as a series of letters, diary entries, telegram entries, and other similar types of installments that land in your inbox on the appropriate day. This is the third time I've read the book this way, and I enjoy it every time.
- I also continue to enjoy my reread of the Chronicles of Prydain, especially since I read my two favorites in the series this month. The Black Cauldron features one of my top three favorite characters in the series (Adaon, the only one of the three who isn't part of the main band), while The Castle of Llyr is more generally a favorite because I like the story.
- Mistress of Wardwood is an anthology of stories related to The Erlking's Daughters, and it was also really fun. My favorite of the collection was "Inheritance," which focuses on Enzella and Micah, but all the books were really good. If you read The Erlking's Daughters and you want the anthology, you can get it by signing up for the author's newsletter! (That will also get you Aeronwy's Stolen Child, which is a reverse changeling story that I think sounds really fun and have pretty high on my TBR list.)
- As for the last two books pictured, The Song of the Rose and The King's Captive were both good stories, though they didn't wow me. To be clear, I can see other people really enjoying them, but neither was quite what I wanted from their respective concepts. I may still read some of the other installments in the two series, though, as there was enough I liked to get me curious.
- I'm wrapping up the month by being thoroughly self-indulgent once again and rereading Howl's Moving Castle (not pictured, because I'm in the middle of it just now), because it's May and I was tired and vaguely grumpy the last time I needed to pick a new book to read, and either of those on their own would normally be a good reason for me to reread this, and so both together managed to overpower all the should-reads. It is, as ever, delightful.
Watching & Playing!
- In addition to being the start of Dracula Daily, May also features the return of Re: Dracula, a podcast audio drama form of Dracula following the same real-time format as Dracula Daily. This is my second year listening, and this time around, I'm doing a bit better at actually listening to the episodes as they release (though I still tend to get behind on weekends). We're still pretty early in the season, so if you're looking for a new podcast, I highly recommend checking it out!
- I'm also continuing to enjoy playing Honkai Star Rail; as I've said before, it's a pretty good motivation to buckle down and get my writing done earlier in the day or evening instead of getting distracted by YouTube videos. (I may have complained about lower-than-ideal wordcounts, but trust me, the fact that those counts still mostly average around 1K is thanks to Star Rail motivation, not in spite of the game.) I did finally start the third main quest line and met one of the characters I've been most looking forward to meeting (Jing Yuan, to be specific). I actually got into the game after two different friends both raved about him. As both friends tend to have excellent taste in favorite characters, I figured I needed to find out more about him for myself, and so far, my impression is that he is indeed the Actual Best.
- My sister and I also took advantage of Memorial Day weekend time off to play more of Portal 2 Co-Op. We've done everything now except the secret sixth stage and had a grand time of it . . . though it did take us forever to get through the last two levels, one because we kept dying and one because we couldn't get the stupid portal where we needed it. Still, we finished the main game, and it was fun to spend time with her that way!
- I did actually watch a few things this month — well, rewatched, anyway. We watched Romancing the Stone back around Mother's Day while my sister was here, as we haven't seen it in a while and my sister wanted an adventure-type movie. Then I watched Charade (aka probably my favorite non-fantasy movie in existence) with my parents on Memorial Day weekend. Both were fun; I don't have much to say about them that I haven't already said.
Life!
- Praise God from whom all blessings flow, my editing and publishing grad school class is done. The last couple weeks of the class were more frustrating than I expected or than they needed to be (mostly due to communication issues and disagreements about how to interpret the final project instructions), but I got through them with a good grade, so I am grateful.
- And right after my class ended, my sister came down to visit over Mother's Day weekend! She arrived in time to meet us at Bible study, then stayed until Monday morning. Getting to see her was lovely, and we had a really nice time with her.
- Work was also generally quiet, as we're still in the lull between Easter and summer and people were out of the office a lot for either travel or training. The one exception was that our associate pastor had her last Sunday on May 19, so the week leading up to that date was pretty busy. We're all sad she's gone, but her role is being filled by another member of the programs staff, so I think the transition should at least go pretty smoothly. And we didn't have any tech issues on her last Sunday, despite a near miss with the livestream sound! (This might not seem significant, but our tech has a tendency to malfunction on or around significant Sundays, plus we had a substitute running slides and sound, so I was more than a little nervous and was praying very hard against any issues.)
- Work being chill and grad school being done has given me a little bit of extra free time and energy. Some of that has gone towards resting, and some of it has gone towards weeding and reorganizing my bookshelves. My scheme of having all my nonfiction and classics on one bookshelf and all my fantasy and speculative fiction on the other two was foiled by the fact that my textbooks are too tall for the shelf where I wanted to put them, but at least I won't have random stacks of books in front of other books. I'm not quite finished, but I'm nearly there, and I'm still holding out hope of having a free shelf where I can put owned-but-unread books so they're easier to find and prioritize.
- On the baking front, I made up for missing my Baking Yesteryear recipe in April by making two things this month. First, I made dream bars, which . . . well, people said they tasted good. The recipe didn't say to put parchment in the pan, but I should've done so anyway because I couldn't get my spatula under the crust to get the bars out in one piece, and I also think I chopped my nuts way too finely because my bars looked nothing like the picture. Then I made peanut butter styrofoams, essentially peanut butter meringues. These also didn't look like the picture, but they tasted good! And given that it was my first time making any cookie in that family, I'm counting them as a definite success!
- I've also been doing some fun stuff with crafting. Early in the month, I learned that one of the local librarians is into weaving and has a few small looms for weaving bands/straps. She was willing to bring them to the library so I could see them and try them to decide if I wanted to get into the hobby myself (and also for story research purposes). So, a few weeks after that, I got to try an inkle loom and a card loom! As I said, both are band looms, so they're making narrow straps rather than a full piece of cloth, but the inkle loom is larger, and you raise and lower the threads by hand, while the card loom is smaller and uses stiff cards with holes in them to raise and lower the threads. Neither is the kind of thing I could carry around and do wherever I happened to be, so I don't think this will turn into a major hobby, but I'm still toying with trying to make my own card loom so I can do that as an on-and-off thing . . .
- Aside from that, I crocheted my mom an African violet for Mother's Day, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I've since made the pieces for two or three more of them, but haven't gotten around to assembling them yet. Now I'm back to embroidery, working on a pin hoop for my Cosmere pins. (Fun fact: embroidering through a double layer of fabric is really hard on your hands, especially when one of those layers is felt! But I am managing.)
June Plans
- First of all, a housekeeping note: I will be taking June and July as a semi-hiatus from blogging. I'll still do my main yearly/monthly posts like Doings, my summer releases list, and my Mid-Year Book Celebration, and I'll do some kind of post for the DOSA Files release, but I won't be posting regular Friday 5s. This is partially for practical reasons — July is going to be super busy for me — and partially because I want to take a bit of a break. If all goes well, I should return to my regular posting schedule in August, hopefully with a bit of a buffer built up.
- My primary project for the month is finishing up Daughters of Atirse #2 and getting it out to beta readers. I am optimistically hoping to have it drafted by sometime in the vicinity of June 8 or 9, then take a week off to rest before doing fairly light edits and sending it on to beta readers. Sending the story out at an earlier stage actually worked well for Song of the Selkies, and I'm hoping it'll work better still if I get the book out further in advance of when it needs to be release-ready. As far as other projects go, I should make progress on my next D&D adventure, and I hope to continue poking at the Secret Star Project when I have spare time for it.
- At work, we're starting summer programming, but we're also in a transition period between the previous associate pastor leaving and the new one moving into that position, so we're a little less busy than we normally would be around this time. Not that I'm complaining; after this winter and spring, I'm still appreciating any quiet seasons I can get.
- As for the rest of my month outside of what I've already said, my main plans involve seeing family, continuing with my crafting, baking, and reading goals, and finding opportunities to rest and recharge (and also attempting to hide from my allergies, which seem to be worse than normal this year).
How was your May? Any plans for June? Are you reading Dracula Daily or listening to Re: Dracula? Is this a busy season or a quiet one for you? Please tell me in the comments!
Thanks for reading!
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