^ I hate creating blog titles

I realized that I haven’t done any updates since the new year, and we’re now in March. Whoops.

After I finished one of my side projects, I hit a bit of a writing stagnation, which I followed up with doing the heavy revisions that needed to be done to The Miracle Man. That felt AWESOME (after avoiding them for a year, what), but was followed by another stagnant period where I didn’t know what I wanted to do next.

All of the things and none of the things and should I stop writing romance and yet as soon as I think that I want to do nothing but write romance. It wasn’t conducive to writing, to say the least!

However, I have been doing a bit of reading, which has been a whole different struggle in life #AlexWhining.

After watching all the Father Brown available on Netflix, I picked up the copy of The Innocence of Father Brown that I had lying around, since that character was the inspiration for the show. It’s very different, of course (they updated the show to after World War II, rather than early 1900s), but I can definitely see the character inspiration (as well as some of the story plots). It’s one of those books that I pick up once in a while, but I don’t think I could read through. Thankfully the stories all mostly stand alone, so they are easy to pick up and put down. They’re all also rather slow-moving, so stopping in the middle of a story doesn’t hurt much either.

I’m perpetually in the middle of The Left Hand of Darkness, and I’m not sure why I’m struggling to get through, except that I have such high expectations for it that if I don’t love it, I’ll feel like I let everyone down. Anxiety is weird.

I started Stephen Fair when I failed to read more of Left Hand and thought a YA novel might fix that. I was doing good, and then a m/f love interest was introduced and I lost interest. I don’t think it’s going to be problematic as my first impression gave, so I’ve been reading a little bit at a time, but while the idea has hooked me, we’re fumbling around in the real world too much and I need to sit down and just read it!

Black Torn, White Rose is my most recent purchase. It’s a collection of “adult” fairy tales by various authors. It’s a nice dose of short fiction in semi-familiar worlds (and settings I enjoy). I’ve read through two stories and look forward to the next. I’ll probably end up finishing this book first, because the short stories are engaging and easy reads and encourage me to pick up the next one.

Finally, this old “family” cookbook from the fifties isn’t really a “read” but I went through and found recipes that might actually be edible (spoiler, I skipped all the entrees). Maybe these bread recipes will work for me!