Progress on Cooking Up Magick and plans for NaNoWriMo. Are you participating in National Novel Writing Month this year? 

No, I'm not writing about a shotgun wedding...

Today is National Cheese Toast Day. My family called them grilled cheese sandwiches when I was growing up, and I always loved them. But my kiddo and I call them gruncheys.

I love to listen to audiobooks while I work. It occurred to me that as an independent author, I should do more to support my fellow indie authors, especially for their audiobook productions, because they are so expensive to make! So I took to my writing groups to ask for suggestions on good audiobooks to listen to. Beth Dolgner suggested I try out her audiobook series.

I’m not usually into cozy mysteries, but sometimes they are fun to read. Her series has the added benefit of ghosts, and I love ghostie anything, really. I especially loved the book title and title of the series--Sweet Dreams: Eternal Rest Bed and Breakfast Cozy Mysteries, Book 1.

Picture a rainy day, curling up in an easy chair with a mug of hot chocolate and a lovely book. Perfection. Except that I live in the high desert. It’s summer, and hotter than Satan’s asshole. Smoke from the fires of hell fills the sky (technically from the forested mountains around us), so… what I’m envisioning in my mind is a much nicer scenario. Instead, I grabbed a large mug of iced mocha, pulled down my blinds, blasted the A/C and used my writer’s imagination to pretend it was fall weather already. Then I jumped on her book.

World Letter Writing Day is September 1^st.

In honor of World Letter Writing Day, I thought I would include a letter from Paisley Dell to her Aunt Higgie back home. It’s funny how when we write to our loved ones, we don’t want them to worry about us, so we send sanitized versions of our lives, putting the best possible light and spin on our activities. Paisley is no different here.

Last month I showed you all the La Croix box the kitties liked to share on my desk. Well, I got a new little cozy catcave for them, and they both squeeze in there all the time now. They love it!

Great News!

In July, I submitted my short story “Black Velvet Ghost” to December Tales II, an anthology of ghost stories set to be published by Curious Blue Press in November. The very next day after I sent the email, the editor contacted me and told me he wanted it! Woohoo! A few days later, we signed the contract.

I just came across some of my old writings, and I thought it would be fun to share them. Some are funny as hell, and are experiences based on when I was a truck driver. Others are about life in general, our obligations, and some pretty deep thoughts. I figured I’d post them on the occasional Thursday as Throwback Thursdays.

For this Thursday, I thought I would share something I wrote this back in September of 2013, when I was a long haul truck driver. One of my favorite lines in this piece is, "Death by urine. How cool is that?"

Because my kitties have insisted on being within an arm's reach of me most of the time, they always tried to sit on my keyboard while I'm at my desk. Sometimes  they switched it up and slept in my in-box. I finally got smart, cleared off an official spot for them, and placed a box with a little fleece blanket there. It fits one of them comfortably. But since cats are actually made of water, they both flow in and around the box until they make themselves fit. Now Meli and Tribble snooze while I get my work done. Though sometimes they still get out, stretch, and demand scritches. 

I wrote a blog post in January about my reading list and how I was trying to read more of the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy Award and Goodreads Reader's Choice award winners and nominees, so I could get a feel for what makes a book award worthy. So far this year, I've read from that list:

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (Loved it!)
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (inriguing)
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (Loved it!)
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark (meh)
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson (3.5 stars)
The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab (LOVE LOVE LOVE. I reviewed this one in a blog post.)
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (Excellent, if angry making.)
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar (intriguing)

To see the full list of books I've delved into since the last post I wrote in mid-April, read on!

According to the blurb: "Created in opposition to Florida's Don't Say Gay bill, Written With Pride is an anthology exclusively filled with short stories by authors who all belong to the broad and beautiful spectrum of the LGBTQIA+ community. The stories range in style and subject matter, as well as genre-from contemporary to speculative fiction. Not all of them have happy endings, but members of our community who still believe in their voice penned all of them

Written by V.E. Schwab and published in 2020, Addie Larue isn’t a new book. But it was new to me, and I imagine there are some of you out there who haven’t read it yet, so I decided to review it, anyway. I’m glad I found it. It’s not my usual fare–I like books that have a lot of humor, or action, or are cosy, or… whatever this isn’t. But this book was so engrossing, I couldn’t stop listening to it.

The narrator, Julia Whelan, does a spot-on French accent, and a number of other accents, besides. I’ve always had trouble with female narrators taking on the male voice, but in this one, she does a wonderful job, and it doesn’t...