I know there are typos and grammar errors in the meme I’m sharing this week… but the sense of how quickly time slips through my hands is right on the money. And, I don’t care if it’s minus 260 F at the warmest on Europa, escaping to the stars and avoiding emails and work and obligations for a while sounds right up my alley. (For some reason for the past week or two I have had Frank Sinatra in my head singing “Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars.” It feels like an invitation to write another installment of a space opera when I have forcibly grounded my imagination for edits. The struggle is real.)
It’s the second week of the Reviewer Round-up I wrote about last week. This week is novel week, and there are more than 40 of us offering free review copies. The woman organizing this gives reviewers points for the number of reviews posted and offers prizes for completed (HONEST) reviews, so as an author, I was thrilled to get feedback on Dragon’s Pursuit. I’m really hoping for similar results for The Builders this week, so if you know anyone who’s looking for free reads and the chance at prizes if they post reviews what they’ve read, point them to the link above.
🙂
As far as reading goes, and maybe explaining another reason why this weekend slipped through my fingers, I found the latest Kait Nolan Misfit Inn story as well as a new author to me who was writing about gargoyles. They were both novellas, so no all-nighters reading, but I’m beginning to think I need to take a class in Nolan. smile I’m honestly not a huge fan of contemporary romance, and yet she sucks me in every time. Her stories are tightly crafted and after you’ve read enough of them, you start to feel like there are certain inside jokes for those readers of hers who have binged a number of her titles.
Part of the reason I was looking for that kind of escapism is an issue at work that has me reading about why we fall for narcissistic leaders; how to handle increased stress and build your resilience; how to measure the economic impact of having or lacking trust in your company; and how to cultivate gratitude, compassion, and pride on your team. None are easy topics, and neither is the situation driving the research. Interestingly, The Guardian published a story about women pushing back on patriarchy that felt related. We’ll see how it all plays out over time, but these situations make a normal work week more challenging than usual.
At least I got the bonus of going to the Black Panther with hubs for an actual date night. It was as amazing as all the reviewers have said, and I feel like it’s the majority of what we’ve talked about since. It’s certainly earned all the financial records it’s broken. What’s really fascinating is that there’s already a teacher who’s using the meaty themes of the movie to develop a curriculum to deal with topics like black revolution, black feminism, and the legacy of colonialism and anti-black racism. I love that people are engaging more seriously with popular culture, rather than looking for mere escapism, especially in the face of ongoing news coverage of the horrifying kind.
We averaged 3,602 steps per day according to my phone, so are gradually increasing again even though we both had several nights of disrupted sleep as we continued to recover from last week’s oral surgeries. My phone says that translated to an average of 6 hours and 4 minutes of actual sleep per night, so we’ll be working on increasing that this week. If I didn’t feel so regularly like I had to catch up on snooze over the weekends, maybe they wouldn’t feel so short, too.
Meantime, I’m down to three weeks to finish my ROW80 goals. The clock is ticking. I hope my ROW80 buddies are doing better with theirs than I am with mine. I’ll be back again next week to report, regardless.