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AllLifeWrap-Ups

January 2020 Wrap-Up

Posted on by J.W. Martin

January is over? Already? Finally?

On one hand, I can’t believe it’s already February, but on the other hand it feels like Christmas was 6 years ago. How does that happen?

Anyway, it’s been a while since I did one of the monthly wrap-up thingies, but I did a ton of reading (more listening) this month. Then there’s the Cheapskate Challenge to check in with, and my very first use of an awesome bookish gift from my wife!

Books I read this month

TEN! I don’t think I’ve ever read that many books in a single month before. To be fair, the majority of them were audiobooks, but even so… TEN!

Strange Exit
by Parker Peevyhouse

 Digital ARC

The Girl in the Tower (Winternight #2)
by Katherine Arden

Audiobook

The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner #2)
by James Dashner

Audiobook

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
by Mark Manson

Audiobook

The Long Walk
by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

Audiobook

The Shining
byStephen King

Audiobook

The Winter of the Witch (Winternight #3)
by Katherine Arden

Audiobook

Mr. Monster (John Cleaver #2)
by Dan Wells

Audiobook

Obsidio (Illuminae Files #3)
by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

Hardcover

Own the Day, Own Your Life
by Aubrey Marcus

Audiobook

 

The Cheapskate Reading Challenge

After the first month, I’m happy to see that my score for the Cheapskate Reading Challenge is 20!

For anyone looking for an easy way to keep track of the points for the books you read, I’ve built a simple spreadsheet, available for anyone who would like to use it. All you need to do is:

  1. Hit ‘Make a Copy’ or you won’t be able to enter any data.
  2. Then just enter your book titles and select the category of each book from the dropdown menu.
  3. The spreadsheet will assign each book the proper amount of points and give you a running tally.

 

What I’m Reading Next

Lastly, I made my first use out of the most thoughtful and creative gift from the holiday season. My wife, whose creative endeavours never cease to surprise, made me a reading scratch ticket.

Each rectangle has a book title underneath. Leading up to the holidays, my wife talked to some of people that know a bit about what I might be planning on reading soon, and she even convinced me to re-arrange our bookshelf by ‘read’ and ‘unread’ in order to put to right kinds of books on the ticket. Book number one, Iron Gold! 

 

How was your January? How are you doing the Cheapskate Reading Challenge? And how is February looking for you?

 

Fun fact about this post: On a side note, look at how immaculately clean Iron Gold is without its dust jacket. There’s no way it’s going to be that clean by the time I’m done reading it. No way!

 

 

 

AllLifeWriting

The Week of No Blogging

Posted on by J.W. Martin

You may have noticed I pretty much wasn’t here last week. Probably not, though. Last week was nuts. There were highs, there were lows, frustrations, and feelings of success I have never experienced before. 

Let me go back the full week. It’s Friday as I write this, so last Friday my wife and I decided to throw the family in the van and go to autorama. It’s only an hour away, so it wasn’t a massive trip, but I had just heard Seth Rollins was making an appearance there. He’s my son’s favourite wrestler and the opportunity seemed too perfect to skip. As a bonus, the man helping Seth Rollins looked familiar. I’ve been a wrestling fan my whole life, so I was wracking my brain trying to figure out why as we stood in line. Then it hit me! The man in question was none other than legendary referee Tim White. I asked his to pretend to disqualify me in the picture but he refused and stated that he had never disqualified anyone in his career.

On Saturday, I took my son to a birthday party/sleepover only to find out that it was the wrong weekend. Luckily my son’s disappointment was quickly smashed by the plans to buy a bunch of junk food and invite some friends over to watch Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse. 

By the way, if you haven’t seen Spiderverse yet, you’re missing something truly special. Whether you’re a comic book fan or not, whether you like animated movies or not, this is something I feel like everyone should watch. It won an Oscar, for crying out loud! Just go watch it and thank me later. 

Sunday rolls around and the furnace starts to act up. I kept it running, but this would prove to demolish a good portion of the remaining week. More on that later. 

Monday passes without any real event. Work. Play rehearsal. And I call to have someone come look at the furnace. A lot of you can see where this is going.

Tuesday has be staying home from work until the technicians can diagnose my furnace. They do, and I need a new one. You might be thinking some technicians will always recommend a new furnace. But my furnace is almost 50 years old. Putting money into a furnace that old has never been recommended by anyone.

Now the real problem of the week settles into place. The old furnace has stopped working, and the new one needs to be ordered. I live in Canada, and it’s winter. For 2 days, we survived in the house with nothing more than those little space heaters for warmth. I have to say, they do an impressive job, but it was still cold ALL THE TIME.

So Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday go by like an iceberg floating in the Tundra. 

Thursday, I discover a twitter party event called Pitch Wars. Any unrepresented writer, with a finished unpublished manuscript, is invited to tweet a pitch for their book using the #PitMad hashtag. Agents taking part then browse these tweets and anyone who get a like from a literary agent is officially being asked to query that agent. 

I’m proud and thrilled to let you all know that over the course of a few tweets, I got 3 likes!

I know what some of you are thinking: Oh, big deal. 3 likes. 

To me, it’s a massive deal. It’s not a lot of interest, but it’s the most interest/interaction I’ve had to date. I sent the queries later that night. Strike while the iron is hot, right?

And that brings us back to Friday. Life seems to be back to normal, at least for the moment. And I have to say, I’m pretty exhausted. This week was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. I can only hope that it turns into the next step in my road to being published, as well as many, many years of reliable heat in my house.

Fun fact about this post: The header image is the first of many visual changes that this blog will see over the next while. I’d love to hear what you think about it.
AllLifeWriting

Writing on Wednesday… but on a Friday!

Posted on by J.W. Martin

Let me be 100 with you all for a minute. There’s been a lot of slacking since November ended as far as my writing goes. A lot of slacking. I need to put an end to that. So allow me to share a few goals for the first quarter of the year, and maybe I’ll feel a little more accountable to get these goals done.

Send out more query letters for Vicarious

REJECTED!

I sent a few around early November, but then I started reading articles about when NOT to send query letters. A lot people were saying the end of November is a bad time because of how many first draft NaNoWriMo projects are being lobbed at literary agents everywhere. They said the end of the year was bad because every one kind of checks out early for the holidays. And they said January is bad because everyone is trying to get back into the swing of things after the new year. I don’t know if ANY of that is true, but I’ll start querying again some time in February!

Finish writing first draft of Evolution

Evolution was my NaNoWriMo project. I had about 30k words done pre-nano and nano itself added another 50k. With somewhere between 10 – 20k remaining, I should end up about 100 all-in. 

Write first draft for stage play Out of Order

I’ve acted in a few plays, both comedies. It’s great fun if you ever get the chance. I’d also like to write one. Again, a comedy. This idea would take place in an apartment building lobby, where one of the elevators isn’t working (hence my not-so-clever title!) If the play turns out well, maybe the troupe I frequent will even perform it!

Write some of short stories bouncing around in my head 

Troglodyte – a struggle of a species trying to make the from water animal to land animal.

Zombie – a man dies, but remains in his body unable to move on. But instead of trying to eat the brains of the living he can only lament why he’s still here. 

AcetaminaPhil – a man is able to take pain away from others just by being near them.

Humans and the Things They Do When Standing on a Mine – a hunter steps on a mine and freezes in place. He thinks help has arrived when another man promptly comes along, but this new man is more interested in studying the hunter than helping him.

I have even more ideas rolling around up there, but these are the ones that I  feel have had the proper marination time. 

There it is. Hopefully by the second quarter I’ll be ready to take on a second draft of some of these projects, but that would require getting the first draft finished!

Fun fact about this post: writing it on my phone while lying in bed. 🙃
AllLifeWriting

Just Another 2018 Wrap-Up Post

Posted on by J.W. Martin

2018 was a great year! If you’ll indulge me just for a minute, walk with me through some of the highlights from Storeys of Stories.

I read WAY more books than I’ve ever read before in a single year. I crushed my goal of 52 books, ending up with 65. That’ll be hard to beat in 2019, but I’m going to aim for 70!

I read less of the books I WANTED to and more of what I felt I HAD to. I learned the hard way that its very easy to request way too many NetGalley books. I was requesting like someone who knocks out 200 books a year, and the majority of the reading with my eyes was spent on ARCs. I change that in 2019. If I wouldn’t be willing to buy it, I won’t be requesting it. No more, “I might enjoy that.”

      

My favourite book of the year was Bag of Bones by Stephen King. This was a really tough choice, by the way. I read a lot of book this year that I loved. Nevernight, Mistborn, Little Fires Everywhere, Station Eleven, Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe, They Both Die at the End, Gemina, and I could keep going.

My blog was up a million % in fun. I’m not going to bore you with stats. Why would you care? All I’m going to say is that I made some really great friends, strengthened some existing friendships, and had a blast the whole time. 

I created a blog meme. First Impression Fridays. And even though only a few people are into it so far, those that like it LOVE it. It’s a lot of fun writing a FIF, but even more fun to read them!

I finished a ‘final’ draft of a manuscript and started sending it out to literary agents. Since then I’ve received a few responses, but nothing beyond a “no thanks,” so far. *shrug* The road to being published is paved with rejection.

I completed NaNoWriMo for the third time. This was the 10th or 11th year taking part, so I was thrilled to reach 50K words. I plan on finishing it in by the end of February. We’ll see.

So that was 2018. And though I have no real complaints, I’m hoping for an even better 2019. What would a better 2019 be?

A year with even more reading.

A year I finally get around to redesigning and organizing this blog.

A year I find myself a literary agent willing to slosh through my manuscripts.

Another year with happy, healthy kids.

Another year with no complaints.

Fun fact about this post: It’s January 4th. How does it feel like we’re a month into this year already?!
AllLife

My Bookish Birthday Surprise!

Posted on by J.W. Martin

I’m not easy to surprise. Or… maybe I am. I don’t know. It doesn’t happen very often. But, on Saturday, my wonderful wife managed to surprise me. And it was incredible!

Birthday surprises are even more of a rarity. Since it’s 8 days before Christmas, people are usually way too busy already with work and family functions to add another event to the list. My actual birthday is today, Monday the 17th, but when I came home on Saturday the 15th, after a somewhat full day or errands, I heard frantic whispers of, “hurry, hurry!”

At that point, I was expecting to find my wife and kids with some sort of surprise. What I wasn’t expecting was my parents and my wife’s parents to be there as well. And I REALLY didn’t expect THIS:

BRAND NEW shelves to show off our many collectible obsessions such as Funko POPs, geeky decorations, and BOOKS!! I know. There’s a distinct absence of books in this photo. They will be added in due time. We’re still not sure the shelves are complete as is. We’ve talked about making them longer, adding in a few more of the “stair” style shelves, and maybe even flipping them upside down and mounting them to kind of frame in the long top for all those wonderfully geeky POPs.

What followed was a big family dinner, and a few drinks. A night that on more than one occasion I snuck away from everyone to look at these new shelves and imagine them packed with books!

Fun fact about this post: Look at all that room for future book hauls!!
AllLife

I was gone for a minute, but I’M BACK!!

Posted on by J.W. Martin

Ho-lee crap! Life.

The last 2 weeks of it have been an absolute whirlwind of chaos and overtime. It wasn’t a random 2 weeks that came out of nowhere. I work for an auction company, and we just finished our 2 biggest sales of the year. So the good news is: IT’S OVER! (for another year)

I didn’t write a hiatus post before it all began, because I foolishly believed that I’d be able to keep posting, even if it was fewer times per week. I’ll just stay up later. That’ll work for sure! I thought. Not knowing that I really would be staying up later, but that I had enough work to fill all of that time and then some.

But enough of that. It’s time to get back to it.

I have a handful of reviews I haven’t posted a thing for. So this week I’ll be putting up a mini-review blitz post to get them all done. I can’t wait to get back to my favourite memes Top 5 Tuesday and First Impression Friday. I’ve missed them. But above all, I’m looking forward to checking out what the rest of the blogosphere has been posting. (Yes. I’ve been THAT busy)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write some posts for this week. It’s good to be back!

Fun fact about this post: I’m excited to write posts, but my body is excited to GO BACK TO BED!