dear reader —
I’ve been feeling the itch lately to start blogging again. An itch that only actual blogging seems to scratch. It’s nice, having a little corner of the internet all of your own. I haven’t done it in years, and it feels like time to return to the habit.
I hope any of my old followers don’t mind that I am recycling this site. I considered starting from scratch, but I’m honestly too lazy and reticent to commit to a new online persona. I came up with the new title of “a word”, but nothing seems to sum up any blog I might keep than justemmaly, so we’re keeping the link name. It’s a weird spelling, yeah, but hey, it’s just me! I can write whatever I want, and I will. Mostly stuff about goals, and writing, and reading, and maybe productivity. Those are the things I think of when I think of myself blogging. I’ll also be cooking and gardening a lot this year, but those are not blog topics I’m really interested in for myself. I’m also a mom of three small children, but again…I don’t feel like I’m really ‘mommy blogger’ material. I’m a lit nerd, through and through, and that nerdiness will abound on this webspace. If people want to read and share it too, cool. If not, even cooler, honestly. I’ve come to accept that I am straight up terrified of success (more on that another time), so if no one ends up reading this, that would actually be great — ha.
So Monday is the beginning of another new year, which I’m coming to realize more and more is just another arbitrary measure of time — however, it is a convenient one to measure one’s life by. So, I wanted to take a moment to post the ‘stats of my life’, if you will, like every other soul on the internet this week.
(The soul thing is becoming more and more important in a world where AI exists at its current level, isn’t it? Please don’t leave any comments about this — it stresses me tf out.)
Reading
101 Books Read
If we’re talking sheer numbers, this is the best reading year of my life. In total, I read 101 books. I was pregnant for most of the year, and then had a new baby which came with some extra stressors in those first few weeks, so I needed a lot of ‘fluff’ — so I read basically a ton of contemporary and indie romance, or, as I like to call them, “candy”. That’s not all I read, but if we’re talking percentages, it was probably more than 50% of the new-to-me books I read this year. The list below are some of my favorites of the year. Really just the first four, and then a couple extras that I did really like. This list does not include rereads (which are usually a large chunk of my reading every year).
Top Books
- The Simple Wild, K.A. Tucker
- Beartown, Fredrik Backman
- Funny Feelings, Tarah Dewitt
- Spells for Forgetting, Adrienne Young
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver
- Book Lovers, Emily Henry
- Fairy Tale, Stephen King
- Six Summers to Fall, C.W. Farnsworth
Writing
My goals at the beginning of the year were incredibly ambitious for my writing. Then I got pregnant, and all that went out the window. I get almost all of my writing done in the early morning hours before my kids wake up, and in case you’re not aware, pregnancy saps every ounce of extra energy you have, and then some. So…I basically switched from productive writing hours to sleeping in as much as possible every single day. I do not regret this. It was awesome, and exactly what I needed.
Given those circumstances, I came incredibly close to achieving the two goals I set for myself: finish the first draft of the second and third books in my medieval fantasy trilogy. I finished the second, and got halfway through the third before I gave up and went back to edit book 1 instead. This was the correct choice, and I think I’d have done the same thing even if I’d had all the writing time in the world.
Let’s recap what I got done in the writing sphere in 2023:
- 1 draft finished (book 2)
- 50% of book 3 finished
- started a short story
- started a contemporary romance project
- began revisions on book 1 of my series
The best thing I did in 2023 by far was build a baby from scratch. He’s awesome, and I’ll never get over how amazing it is to become a mother, whether it is the first, third, or tenth time (yeah yeah, I only have three).
2024 feels like it is full of potential, because we are all full of potential. I hope you can look back at your year this year and find the good in what you’ve accomplished, whatever it might have been.
Talk at you next time.
-e.
{a word} 