reading: progress update – Nikki Bradley

four

So it is the last day of January and I have written 5249 words for the month. I plan on writing more today, but I’ve planned on writing more all month so we’ll see how that goes. It’s a far cry from the hopeful 20,000 word goal I set for myself, but I can either freak out and stress over it or just acknowledge what happened and move on.

I’m going with the latter. The closest thing I had to a second dad passed away in the middle of the month suddenly (fourteen days ago). It wasn’t expected, it wasn’t known, he went in for a checkup, was sent to a hospital, transferred to two more hospitals, had two surgeries, didn’t wake after the second one, and passed away four days later. His daughter and an extremely close friend of mine was here and I spent the following week with her (all last week). I took her to the airport Sunday morning (four days ago) and have only just begun to settle into my normal routine again.

I started my grieving process three days ago.

I wrote a fourth of what I was intending to write this month and at the moment, I couldn’t give less of a shit. I’ll get there; I’m not worried. Instead of writing, I’ve been binge reading. And I’m okay with that. The words will come when I need them to come, when I want them to come, and after the emotional train wreck this month as been, I’m not going to punish myself for taking life as it comes.

Reading:

I’m not even going to explain/excuse why I read what I read, but here’s the list since my last post:

Running Wild by Sarah McCarty; 3 stars.
Damaged Daddy Bear by Leela Ash and Tabitha St. George (I know, I know); 2.5 stars. Review here.
Wild Instinct by Sarah McCarty; 3 stars.
Caleb by Sarah McCarty; 3 stars. Review here.
Valentine, Texas by Lori Wilde; did not finish.
Tangle of Need by Nalini Singh; 5 stars. Review here.

It was, essentially, a week and a half of grabbing books I thought would be quick and painless reads only to be left lacking before finally returning to a series I’ve been slowly reading because I love it so much, I’m terrified of overindulging to the point of losing interest.

Have to say, Tangle of Need is the 11th book in the series and I’ve read countless more short stories related along the way and I still love it as much as I did with the first book I read. I can’t wait to read the next one.

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash.

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I finished the Couch to 80k boot camp! I have a mix of relief and mild panic at completing it. On one hand, I have a wealth of newly discovered resources at my disposal now. On the other hand, I’m back to being my own motivation. And that’s…not been that great.

It was surprisingly hard to sit down and write last week after I completed week 8. Granted, I got sick and there’s been a death in the friend-family, so I’m not surprised that the last thing I want to do is write. On the other hand, I know writing will temporarily help extract all those churning emotions I can’t currently process, so I’m hoping to see how it goes.

I am, however, seriously considering started a separate project from my current one. I realize that this could be a distraction because I’m dissatisfied with the very rough first draft that I have written, but I’m also aware that this could be a need to diversify what I’m writing about. I’m not certain yet, but I’ll see how this week goes before I get further.

Current word count: Pathetically low.

Reading:

I actually did read one of the books I mentioned last week: Cover Me. (I know, I’m even surprised at myself.) You can see my review here. I am definitely interested in continuing on to the sequel, but we’ll see how that goes.

The second book I read was not on my potential list, but actually out of left field. I needed an easy thing to read that didn’t require a lot of brain power, so I read Delicious. It definitely has much more of a plot than it advertised, which I absolutely did not mind. I had a few minor issues with the book, but overall enjoyed it. Tyler definitely ended up being my favorite character.

I have no idea what I’m going to be reading this week. I know I have quite a few non-romance books waiting to be read, but I’m having a hard time bringing myself to read them. Part because two of them are by highly regarded male authors following a male character and I really don’t want to find out if they can’t write a female character well. It’s almost as if the longer I put it off, the better chance I have of being surprised. I hope.

We’ll see. I’ll probably dive back into a Sarah McCarty book, simply because reading her makes me happy.

Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash

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I completely forgot to post this yesterday. What a wonderful start to my new updating schedule. No pretty picture to make this post look nicer because I’m at work.

I can’t remember my final word count for last week, but I know it’s low. Much lower than where I ‘should’ be according to my word count goal. However, I’m still in the Couch to 80k Writing Boot Camp, so I’m okay with that.

Week 8 has been going…mixed, really. It’s focusing completely on our current novel – the novel that I have fallen out of love with. All I can see are problems and issues and I’m very tempted to scrap the whole things. Thankfully, the combination of having good friends and being extremely stubborn is working for me and I’m going to push through it. Even if it ends up crap, it’s my crap.

I definitely haven’t been focusing time to writing, so that’s a problem too. I have to figure out where best to build it into my routine and go from there.

Reading

Promises Linger was exactly what I expected it to be and I absolutely loved it. Something about McCarty’s way of writing as spoken to me since I first read her eleven years ago. Absolutely loved it, but take my view with a grain of salt because I am definitely biased.

Also (re)read Dark Prince by Christine Feehan. I read this book in high school and remembered thinking it was a good story, but the style of writing was far too flowery for my taste. Put it back on my to-read list because I wanted to take a second look at it, seeing as it is the first book of a largely successful paranormal romance series. I still stand by what I thought in high school: flowery. Way too flowery. Far too mushy for me to be able to deal with and while it was very frustrating, I’m glad I looked at it again.

Third book I read was an anthology, Legally Hot. You can read my review of it here, but TL;DR – On the scale of ‘kill it in a fire’ to ‘LOVE’, it was a solid ‘meh’.

Not really sure what I’m going to read next. I want to binge on a few things, but I need to break up books that are by the same author, else I overindulge and then get sick of them. Thinking about hopping genres and reading Storm Front, as it’s been sitting on my sofa table for two months now. However, the person who said I need to read the series has also said that it starts slow, so I don’t know about that.

Other options are The Name of the Wind, Cover Me, or The Chronicles of Chrestomanci. Watch me not read any of them.

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I officially started Week 7 of the Couch to 80k workshop I’ve been doing. Definitely a little late, but I took two weeks off for the holidays. It’s been a little bit more difficult to get back into the routine again of sitting down everyday to listen to the podcast, but I need to do it. Once I get it going, it’ll be easier to translate toward writing.

I’ve made the goal of writing 240,000 words this year. I have no idea if this is doable. I don’t know how many words I wrote last year, but at least 120,000. Doubling that should be interesting. In an amusing and rare misstep in mental math, I for some reason convinced myself this equaled 2000 words a month. It wasn’t until I sat down and realized why this seemed wrong that I was missing a zero.

20,000 words a month is definitely a challenge from what I’ve been writing, but much easier than the Nano months I did twice. If I look at it by week, it’s 4616 words each week. By day, it’s 658. I’ll get there. I’ll have to push myself, but I’ll get there.

I haven’t officially written anything yet so far, which will come to bite me in the ass later this month. It’s surprisingly hard to write outside of the workshop, so I’m going to wait until I’m completely done with Couch to 80k before writing separately. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll count the words written during those exercises, but I probably will. They might not be words toward a novel, but they’re words I’ve written. They still count.

Reading

My reading goal this year is 90 books. According to what I accounted for on Goodreads, I read 65 last year, but there were many I didn’t count. My actual goal was 70, but I was sucked into a manga series that has 19 volumes. In order to count each volume as a book, but still keep my original goal for novels, I upped the number to account for those volumes. As of right now, I’m at 21% of the total goal.

The manga series I read over the last week was Banana Fish. The next book I’m going to read is Promises Linger by Sarah McCarty. I’ve been hunting for this book for years and finally bit the bullet and purchased it for my Kindle. I can’t wait.

I’m hoping to post writing and reading updates once a week. It’ll help me keep this blog current and hold myself accountable for my goals. Now, to finally create that WIP page…

^{Photo by Clint McKoy on Unsplash.}