{Wrap Up} July 2017 – Week 2 Wrap Up!

This week was a little rough for me in terms of reading and reviewing! I’ve been a busy bee this week, and trying to adjust my schedule to make room for writing time as well as reading and reviewing has been a challenge, but I think I’ve begun making headway. I only reviewed one book this week, but next week is already shaping up to be a bit more active, so I’m not stressing to much over it.

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What I Reviewed:

The Secrets She Keeps
by Michael Robotham

A suspense/thriller about two pregnant women living in London, and the lengths they each would go to build the family they’ve always dreamed of. I truly loved this book, and hope my review reflects that! If you’ve not seen it, click the photo above and check it out.

 

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What I’m Currently Reading:

Assassin’s Apprentice (The Farseer Trilogy Book I)
By Robin Hobb

Epic Fantasy. This has been an experience! I tried so hard to get this book wrapped up this week. I made it to 86%, but fell asleep before I could finish it last night. 😦 My review for it should be up sometime tomorrow though, so keep an eye out for that!

Gathering Darkness (Falling Kingdoms Series – Book 3)
by Morgan Rhodes

Yes, I’m diving back into my most hated series of 2017. I read books 1 and 2 earlier this year with The Falling Kingdoms Fantasy League on Goodreads. I thought book 1 was pretty poorly written, and book 2 was downright bad. That being said, this is the entry in the series that people typically state as being the moment that the series starts getting good, so I’m holding out hope for improvement. We’re reading this slowly – 5 chapters a week, so I probably won’t be finishing it and reviewing it until August.

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Books I Hauled:

I’m trying to slow down on book hauls for awhile until I catch up on my backlog of already owned books. I did end up buying one book this week, but it was a Kindle Daily deal so I don’t feel too badly about it and am going to consider it a personal accomplishment.

An anthology of sci-fi horror stories about my favorite movie monsters. These stories are set over the course of all 4 original Alien movies and center around the experiences of the Colonial Marines from Aliens, and their run ins with the classic creature across space and time.

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Netgalley Update

Okay, so I have zero self control. Last week, I said I was going to try and slow down on Netgalley requests now that I had my review percentage up to 93%, but I found myself back on Netgalley this week and figured there was no harm in requesting books that won’t be publishing for a couple of months. These are the ones I was approved for:

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
by Patricia A. McKillip

I’ve been meaning to read more classic fantasy books, and when I saw that this is a republishing of a classic fantasy that was originally published back in the 1970s, I jumped on the opportunity to read it. I’ll be reading and reviewing it around August or September.

The Tiger’s Daughter
by K. Arsenault Rivera

A fantasy tale with an Asian inspired culture and a f/f romance. I’m really looking forward to this! It’s showed up on my feed a few times and my friends who have read it seem all enjoy it. Review to come in September.

 

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Writing Update

Writing went pretty well this week! I’m very excited to be re-acquainting myself with my creative side and getting back into writing on a regular basis. I’ve tried to set aside a couple of hours each evening to just sit and write. It’s been a struggle to train myself to break bad habits: internet and phone usage in particular. With a bit of self control though I’ve actually managed to get some work done.

I’m very torn on what I actually want to write though. I have a few great ideas that I’ve been fleshing out, but they’re each for very different stories with very different characters, so I keep bouncing back and forth between which one I want to write first and which one I’ll set aside in the meantime. I did actually start working on one WIP that’s been bouncing around in my head for a long while now, so it feels good to actually be making slow progress on something.

I wrote 5815 words this week, bring my total wordcount since I started keeping tracvk up to 7410. This doesn’t include any outlining and planning I’ve been doing in other documents though. I’m excited to see that number continue to climb!

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How is your month going? Reading anything great? Writing anything? Let me know in the comments section below!

xoxo