Welcome to my newsletter. I'd love to share my highlights from the past month.
Writing - Puzzles
Reading - Challenges
Life - Perspiration
Last week, I shared the cover reveal of my latest book, Swinging Through Life: A Flash Fiction Collection, on my website in the form of an online interactive jigsaw puzzle. I love the idea of jigsaw puzzles but, in reality, I have no patience for them so I made this one with only 24 pieces so I could solve it myself before I got bored. Do you have the patience to do big puzzles? Click HERE to check mine out.
Swinging Through Life is a collection of super-short swing-dance-themed stories. You might even come across a couple of familiar characters. If you enjoyed my other collection, Wife, Mother, Woman, love dance related stories or like stories you can finish before your coffee goes cold, then you'll love this.
I love to track the books I read on Goodreads. I've been doing it since late 2013 so I had a little poke around my reading stats today. My goodness, I used to read a LOT before I started writing. My highest page count month was January 2015 (when I was home with the kids for the summer school holidays and basically reading competitively for team challenges in a Goodreads group) 9,805 pages read over 32 books! Some of those were books I read to the kids but Stephen King made it into the mix so that more than made up for the shorter books. That year I read a total of 286 books.
I've been actively trying to cut back on my reading so that I have more time to write. This year I'm aiming for 75 books. Do you use Goodreads? Have you signed up for the yearly challenge? If you want to keep up with my current reads, connect with me on Goodreads.
I thought living in Darwin was hot. The humidity was like walking around in a sauna all day. I didn't realise that your shins could sweat until I moved there. But this heatwave in country New South Wales is something else altogether.
In Darwin, I could turn on the air-conditioning and actually dry off. We only have an evaporative cooling system in Wagga so when it's really hot (like this week) it just makes you sweaty. I managed to acclimatise in Darwin - the daytime temperatures were around 33 degrees Celsius (92 degrees Fahrenheit) all year long, the humidity levels changing from wet season to dry season. We hit 45 today and the same is forecast for Wednesday and Thursday. That's 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Crazy. I'm planning to take the kids shopping, just so we can find some relief in the air-conditioning. What do you do when it's really hot?
P.S. Yes, Daisy the kitten did climb the Christmas tree and knock it over on boxing day, once the presents weren't pinning it in place.
She has also learnt to climb the brick walls...
If you've read any of my books and have a couple of minutes spare, I'd love it if you wrote a short review on Amazon, Goodreads or Bookbub.
