Monday Miscellanea, 6/6/22

Reading Notes

I’m a week into 20 Books of Summer and it’s going pretty well. I finished On Stranger Tides and will have a post about that in a few days. I traded out some of my initial summer book list because I want to (re)read a few magic books.

My next two books will be Magic in Theory by Peter Lamont and Richard Wiseman and Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer.

Deal Me In, Week 22
8♠️ “Bunny” by Ali Seay, @ Cemetery Gates
This was a wonderful little hit of Halloween as the temperatures in Phoenix begin to soar.

Goal Check-In

Writing & Entangled Tomes

• “Colors of the Sea” is still in a queue. Queue, queue, queue. Waiting in a queue. Because markets don’t want you to simultaneously submit even though they never respond as quickly as they estimate.
• Going to work again on what’s currently called Vegas Noir. I did some plot free-writing on it last week. I’m going to outline and see how it goes.

Shelf Maintenance

• 14/25 books read for Beat the Backlog.
• 118 days without acquiring a book.*
  * I’ve backed a Kickstarter. Technically, they haven’t charged my card yet, but my streak will end on the 16th.

Blog Notes

If you’ve never noticed, and I can’t blame you if you haven’t, Simple Tricks & Nonsense has a schedule: the Monday Miscellanea post, the Thursday reading post, and the Saturday movie post. Unfortunately, this schedule doesn’t really work for me, especially when I’m reading or watching movies at a good pace.

The problem is that I’ll finish reading a book, for example, on Friday, but instead of writing about it right away, I’ll procrastinate until the next scheduled “reading post.” By that Thursday, I won’t fell like writing about it. (Yes, I could draft posts in advance and publish them later, but that is. . . not how a procrastinator’s brain works.)

So, for the summer, I’m going to try a looser structure for book and movie “reviews” and not worry about a balanced schedule.