Monthly Update (The first): May 2025

Welcome to my MONTHLY UPDATES. Woo!

This is where I tell you what I've been reading this month (or something what has inspired me). What I've been writing. AND Where I've been venturing!

Mostly it is a conglomerate of my waning brain cells merging into one, giant brain cell that is totally confused and needs someone to come into my brain and parcel it out into organized categories so I can think straight again.

What I read:

I've been reading a lot this year. Last year I made a goal to read 48 books-I got close (41) but I had a couple months throughout the year where I was pretty depressed and couldn't finish more than one book.

This year, I changed my goal in a couple of ways. First, my number is smaller (30), and I am putting more emphasis on nonfiction pieces. I am also okay DNF-ing (Did Not Finish- slang for avid readers) books much earlier on if it is not grabbing my attention. Something I wasn't doing last year.

I've always been a big reader. I love reading and writing just as much as I love traveling. I find that books which really tangle with my heart leave me with the same POST TRIP BLUES as any adventure abroad. This month is no exception.

Of the books I read this month my favorite was 'The Knight and The Moth' by Rachel Gillig. If you are wondering this book was just published, not even 5 days ago. But I snatched it up while in Italy and flew through it, feeling as though Gillig were reading my personal brainstorming journal.

It's a beautiful, gothic, romance-fantasy that has everything from stone gods to gargoyles to knights in not-so-shining armor to cathedrals and prophets and sisterhood.

I loved Gillig's prior duology, also gothic fantasy, but this newest piece is my favorite. It left me with those POST GOOD BOOK BLUES, and I am sure I'll re-read it this fall.

She does such a good job tying her themes together and bringing each character arc and sub plot together in a poetic circle at the end.

< Her clever and magical cover (USA Edition) 2025

What I wrote:

I've been writing a lot. Some posts for this blog, but mostly my own fiction, fantasy piece.

Of all the things I am passionate about, I feel most closely tied to my writing. I have such a sense of personal connection to it that showing it to the world feels like the most humiliating thing I could do and yet I have wanted to be a published author since I was eight and making 'sticker books' (a stapled collection of colored paper that I drew various pictures on and loaded down with stickers I found in my family room closet- don't worry each time I read the book aloud, the story completely changed).

But this piece I am working on is my longest running project. It's been in the works since the end of 2021, although if you were to ask me about it, I would say I haven't even finished the first draft.

That's because I've re-written so many scenes, re-plotted it countless times and ultimately every time I get close to completing my 'first draft' I feel as though it is too complex, too unorganized, too this or that and start again.

But I think that the biggest obstacle I have to get over is letting someone else look at it.

I remember when I wrote (or rather documented, as it was less a work of creative insight and more the scribbled notes of an imaginative ten-year-old) a little 'book' about our family's trip to Tennessee. I was very into 'spies' then. Convinced I was the next Nancy Drew or Harriet the Spy.

It was a child's project, a 70-page document that I worked on for weeks after, detailing our hikes, what we ate and my 'spying adventures': the 'suspicious' activities of our hotel staff and the people staying next door. People probably were wondering who that elementary age child was, sitting each night at the random table in the hall, squinting at everyone.

I even illustrated some of my 'suspects' and included pictures (edited to look like sketches on some early 2000's PC program).

Then I printed it out and gave it to my grandma.

She's the only person who ever read that. I don't know where that printed copy is today.

But she sat, for a whole hour and thoroughly went through the whole thing, in the end telling me it was wonderful and very interesting. I remember she asked me questions, taking my work as a ten-year-old detective very seriously.

This was really special to me. One of the clearest memories I have with my grandma.

Because I often doubt my writing will ever be taken seriously. I feel that my writing doesn't matter, I'm just casting words and sentences out into a void. Yet I still have such a strong desire, like an intrinsic belief that when I die my writing may be the only thing that lives one and therefore makes it matter. It is my impact. My footprint.

I think this is why it's been so hard to finish a first draft. Because the difference is now that I feel a need to have a perfect novel. A clever novel. An original novel.

I didn't have those expectations of myself as a child.

I was just excited to tell someone about my trip (and the imaginative mystery I conjured up in that hotel).

All that to say. This month, for my newest 'draft' I have 132 pages. The previous draft was over 450 pages. It's sad to cut away that much, but I expect there will be more to shave off, whittling this story down until it is something beautiful, delicate, impactful.

But my goal for my writing this month is to show someone my draft. I am sure it will be much like a collage, ideas and plots and characters jumbled together chaotically.

But I hope that I can overcome this obstacle of needing to have a perfect first draft before showing someone.

Where I went:

This month I went to Italy.

Was that the original plan? No. Portugal was.

But bad traffic, a missed flight and a call to venture back to the original center of western civilization sent me back to Italy.

We visited Cinque Terre, Pisa and Rome, all the big spots along the western coastline.

It was exhausting at first and the traffic leaving Rome on our way back to the United States reminded me why I would never drive there.

Cinque Terre was absolutely gorgeous as most of Italy's coast is. With bright, colorful homes, clustered into small fishing towns along the mountainous coast, Cinque Terre is a fabulous place to spend one's summer.

They have my favorite windows! Big and shuttered, with enough room to sit and sip on some espresso each morning as I watched to crystal blue tide ebb and flow.

Even though it was May, a shoulder month for travel, both Cinque Terre and Rome were packed with tourists. Their streets brimming with graphic tees and loud pedestrians.

That's it! A quick wrap up of May. Nothing crazy. Although I spent a lot of the month feeling this push-this need to move faster, be more productive, start new projects...I purposely tried to slow down. To consider the beauty of the strangers around me, the beaches, mountains and the good coffee.