Updates | Bookstagram | FYI

Hey guys! I pause in my NaNoWriMo writing in order to come and tell you of a few updates in my life.

I get that I've been rather quiet on here. There haven't been any new book reviews, but there's been a THM recipe (which is totally easy to make and anyone can enjoy it)! I've been a bit busy with writing, and I've been in a bit of reading slump (Not by Sight drove me insane, I find the main woman character rather unlikable), but my latest book haul has come in.

I had to race a severe thunderstorm in order to get them from the mail box!

(haha... eh -_-)

I learned something today: you can ask Indigo - Canada's biggest bookstore - to swap a book you've just got in the mail for another if you were sent a damaged copy. Out of the books I got, The Tropic of Serpents: a Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan (the sequel to A Natural History of Dragons) was damaged with the cover being scratched up by extensive handling, and the cover was bent in a place. So, with my mom's advice, I called up customer service, and the nice lady on the other side of the line helped me swap it for a pristine copy of the book, and emailed me a tag for the parcel I'm going to send the copy I have now back.

So - when you run into the problem of your book arriving damaged, call, ask for a pristine replacement, ask for a return label, and say that you will return it. I don't know if it works with other book-store chains, but it should. It would be horrible if it didn't.

My book haul consists of five books - which I bought in order to take advantage of Chapters/Indigo's unplug for the summer promotion, which would net me 4,500 points ($10 worth) on top of however many I got for the books through the normal channel (which is awesome since I'm going back to college this fall). I've provided the covers, because they're all beautiful.

I didn't include The Tropic of Serpents since the copy I have is not the copy I'm keeping.

It's kind of funny that three of the books I ordered were blue, and two had green (because the dragon on the cover of Tropic of Serpents is green. I honestly can't wait to crack into these books. I think I'm going to start with True to You, since I had begun reading it when Bethany House Publishers wanted me to review it - but I ran out of time. I think I'm going to review it anyway, because I was so into it.

Another piece of news: I've finally got a Bookstagram (an Instagram focused on reading and books) up and running! My username is 'space.locomotive' - couldn't think of an interesting or witty book-themed one, so I went with the layman's term of a vehicle in my current writing project. 'Space locomotive' is another name for 'star train'.

I'm so looking forward to posting pictures of books! I've only posted one picture so far - of my TBR pile. But I hope to get a picture of my bookshelf and my newest book haul in the coming week - or maybe in the next couple of days.

Of course, my bookstagram won't only be for the books I review or take pictures of (I'll likely post a picture of the book I've just read and provide a link in the post to the review here), it'll also host pictures and updates of the stories I hope will one day publish. They'll be simpler echoes of what I post here n_n

Today was a good day, and it wasn't dampened by the thunderstorm we had this afternoon!

Though having to lower my wordcount goal for Camp NaNoWriMo another 10k was a bit of a bummer. I was hoping to have Murder of Whimsey relatively finished by the end of this month.

Everything's Okay at 20k

Once again I found myself lowering my total NaNoWriMo word-count. It has come to rest for the rest of the month at 20 000 words, because my month has been too busy for my original word counts of 25k and 30k.

Honestly, I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't going to make it to 30k. But I understand also that my family needs me and my brain can't stay focused enough to go the whole way. I'm a slow writer, and sometimes pressure doesn't work.

I'm going to skip Camp NaNo in July so that I can focus on other things. I need to get ready for college, and that means saving any money I can. I also need to focus on losing weight so that I can enter in to college without having to worry about how I look all that hard - and by then I should have THM down pat.

Writing may slow so that I can find time to read (I need to finish The Reluctant Duchess before May 1st so that I may review it and send the review off to Bethany House Publishers). I have so many novels in my To Be Read pile that it's ridiculous! And I didn't a request a novel for review in May because none of the novels they presented to me were of any interest to me. So May is open for whatever novel I choose to read.

I need to finish reading the last book in The Dragons of Starlight novel series by Brian Davis so I can move on. I have several ebooks I would like to crack open, such as The Secret of Pembrooke Park or The Dancing Master by Julie Klassen, or A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan, or Cinder by Marissa Meyer.

I should also crack open The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Hobbit, or Murder on the Orient Express so I can review another classic for the Back to the Classics 2016 Reading Challenge I'm in.

There's so much I want to do, but so little time, lol!

Well, I better get back to writing. I've got laundry to fold and change over as well.

P.S. Maybe I should devote time to learning German and French on top of all this...

Just a Pause

Camp NaNoWriMo April 2016 has now been going on for 14 days. Coffee and several Trim Healthy Mama-worthy treats have kept me going, and I can't believe how clear my mind has been! Thank goodness I was able to get through the "withdrawl" stage of the plan before I had to crack down on writing!

If been hitting a bit of a stall with my novel, so I thought I would talk about what's going on in my novel for a bit.

Well, when I began my NaNo novel project on the first of this month, I was going to write about a girl who came across a manor in the middle of the Ontario countryside and found out there was something timey-wimey about the place. But then I realized that I was horribly ill-prepared for it.

So I changed my mind and began to write a novel with themes referencing to World War II and the Holocaust, but set in a futuristic scene.  I'm enjoying it immensely, but I've hit a bit of a snag and the expected word-count of the day. Oh well, I'll just have to keep plugging on.

Right now, my novel is titled "Winter", and it takes place on a planet in a binary planet system called Desrosiers (pronounced: des-rosy-air, I think...). Its sister planet is Amsel, and its parent star is Miaplacidus - a star you can't see in the Northern Hemisphere (oh yes, it's real).

I got the name Desrosiers from the French last name meaning "of the rose gardens", so Desrosiers is the "Planet of the rose gardens". For indeed, Desrosiers is supposed to have some of the most beautiful rose gardens in the known galaxy, which is unfortunate, since the Miaplacidian government has decided to shut the Miaplacidian System away from the galaxy due to what they consider a national crisis - which is not really a crisis at all since they're basically hunting those with superpowers and arresting them because three rogue superhumans decided to attack the Prime Minister.

There's a lot more that I have to worldbuild about this story, so my NaNo might be nothing more than a skeleton-story until after. Yay.

Thank's for reading. I often find that if I write about the story, sometimes I find hidden gems that would allow me to pick up and continue on :)

Nail Polish Continents

Today, I looked at my nails and decided that they need to be redone before me and my family go camping the day after tomorrow. I still haven't painted my nails, and I probably won't until tomorrow.

But today, when I looked at my nails, what was left of the old white paint on my left middle finger instantly reminded me of a continent, and I suddenly found myself picking up my small sketch tablet so I could scribble it down, never wanting to forget it. (I'll have to take a picture of the boring outline of the continent and its island when I have the time.) This was one of the first times I had ever gained inspiration from my own person when I was examining how much nail polish I would have to remove before I could put some more on!

This little continent I've just invented will have to be stored for future reference, probably to be used in some sort of fantasy I might get to write in the future where the world it is on has scattered continents that look more like islands. I'm afraid I'll not be able to use it in this month's Camp NaNoWriMo. Ha.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, here's my word count.

Word Count: 18 327
The Word Count I'm supposed to Have Today: 22 580 or higher

I can do this! I can ignore all distractions and plow ahead. I have another story calling my name, but I'm trying to resist its call, and my mother was filling my head with ideas of writing a novel to tie all the loose ends of The Pretender (a show my parents have gotten me hooked on that I'm nowhere near done watching) together, since the channel it was being aired on abruptly shut it down without giving the producers any chance to finish it so that they could go on to air JAG.

(Though, I can't be mad at the existence of JAG, though, because if there was no JAG, there would be no NCIS or NCIS:LA.)

There's a bunch of other things trying to pull my attention away from NaNoWriMo, but I will not let them! (lol)

~ Mikaela