I am a little embarrassed to say that WordPress has a learning curve with its dashboard, especially when adding in widgets for newsletter signups and content forms, and I have utterly failed at both of these. There are separate websites where you can edit all the settings for your widgets, and I thought that by linking these widgets to my email, I would get notifications for both the newsletter signups and the content form responses through my email. But it doesn’t work quite like that–those are their own separate settings–and I didn’t discover this until tonight! So color me surprised when I randomly stumble upon dozens of each of these…

Last Sunday was the due date for my second submission for my Thesis II course. I spent the last two weeks grinding this word count and painstakingly editing the pages. And by the time I got to last Wednesday, I ended the day with 52k words after some heavy revisions and adding to the word count, leaving me with 4400 words needed to finish my submission. And I was not a happy writer. My days felt so stressful as the week counted down. I wasn’t sleeping well. I just felt overwhelmed by the entire process and some things in my personal life that were kicking up stress. I felt like…

We have an official Discord server for the MFA program I’m attending where we talk about all the things writing, college, and life. But for the month of June, many of us committed to writing every day. And some of us–namely me–completely failed at this! I had the best of intentions. I really did. But the first two weeks of the month, we were prepping to send the kiddos to visit their dad for the summer in Maine. Which took up all of my time as we hit doctors, dentists, eye doctors, and did endless amounts of new clothing and suitcase shopping. And then we sent them off, and I…

There’s an episode of “Jane the Virgin” where the main character, Jane, is consumed by writing her book. The words are flowing, the inspiration is there, and she becomes a slave to it all. She barely eats, barely sleeps, and hygiene has become a thing of the past. Well, call me Jane, because that is how I’ve spent these last two weeks. My days have been filled with self-induced insanity. If I were asked to pick an image that sums up this time spent with my book, it would look a little something like this: Because I kept asking myself, “What if I did…,” and let those questions take on…

My Rating for the mermaid’s voice returns in this one by Amanda Lovelace (be sure to check the trigger warnings for each of Lovelace’s poetry collections) Favorite Quotes: “& so she did what any rational woman would do– ever so calmly, she reached out & she tore the stars apart.“ “in one of our many worlds existed a girl who couldn’t handle how very sad & confusing life could be, so she approached one of her many overstuffed bookshelves, got up on her tippy-toes, & pleaded to the dozens of warped & well-loved spines, “i want nothing more in this world than to be one of you.” miraculously, the books listened.…

I fell down a world-building hole this week. But at least it was a productive one?! There are several sections in “The Kingdom of the Veil” where Erissa, Rhazien, and Novus travel across the lands or visit another area. Trying to keep track of which direction the characters were heading was a little difficult at times. I needed a visual to make sure their directional actions made sense with where everything was located, hence the falling in a world-building hole full of cartography. I was already working on a D&D map; it was an easy decision to obsessively pour over map-making software to build a visual of the world found…

It’s amazing how learning to DM is changing my writing process. I’ve been in a writing rut the last couple of weeks, which has proven to be a huge pain in the ass considering I had my first thesis submission of 10-15k words. I had set the goal of getting to the 15k word count, and I didn’t meet that goal. It’s hard when we try and schedule productivity, and it’s even worse when we don’t meet those scheduled goals. But in the two weeks I had to reach my word count requirement, I developed a severe upper respiratory infection and had an unrelated abdominal surgery. I ended up needing…

My Rating for Watering the Soul by Courtney Peppernell Favorite Quotes: “I learned to love the most important parts of me, because you did. All my fear, anxieties, quirks, and insecurities. I overcame the struggle because you held out you hand and offered to walk with me.” “There will be a time in your life, and it will be the most difficult set of moments you will ever go through. You will feel challenged at every road, burdened as though you are not enough. You will wonder if closing yourself off to the world is better than remaining soft. Some days, the anxiety will want to swallow you whole, and the…

Leaving book reviews for other authors can feel like a trap. Many authors, bloggers, editors, and other people in the literary landscape will tell you to not leave bad reviews for other authors. And I get it. While I know that not everyone will agree with leaving honest book reviews as an author, nothing drives me crazy more than seeing an author give five or four-star reviews for every single book they read. It is dishonest and misleading, especially with books that have significant sensitivity or representational issues. I can think of no greater example of this than The Pawn and The Puppet by Brandi Elise Szeker, which greatly offended…

So this is my super late start to creating a reading goal for the year. I always have the best of intentions when I set yearly reading goals, but I’ve never been that great at following through with tracking them. I’d like to change that this year. So welcome to my new blog series, Read With Me, where I’ll be sharing my thoughts and reviews on each book I read this year. My goal is to read 250 books in 2022! Am I insane? Probably. Am I going to totally crush this goal before the year is up? Absolutely! During one of the first classes I took for my MFA…