March was a wild month and I spent the majority of it in the UK! While I didn’t read as much I went to my first non US convention, did a whole lot of bookstore crawling in various areas, and saw a lovely spread of different towns & lifestyles. Is this where I also say I met the BF’s family and remarkably they didn’t hate me? Lol!
Ok let’s get this underway because there’s a bit of ground to cover:
April TBR:
This is easy so I’m doing it first. I’ll spend April mood reading but I have 3 more SPSFC semifinalist books to knock out and they are:
I appreciate their shorter lengths and will knock them out asap. April is #IndieApril and there are are two huge sales going on for the first few days of the month. If anyone wants to feature about indie – general content – or their indie novel on Brunch this month, let me know!
March Wrap-up:
I *technically* finished 11 books but 2 were started in February and at least three of the others were well under 200 pages. I have gotten into the habit of just sharing my favorite read from each month so … *scratches head* … I didn’t LOVE any of my March reads. Nothing was rated 5 stars. My gut says give it to Trailer Park Trickster by David R Slayton, so there we go.
I dismally hated my most anticipated read of the year: the Cormac McCarthy bait & switch. I wrote quite a bit on The Passenger (he’s lost his damn mind) and Stella Maris then dropped the brand new hardcover set in my giveaway box 🤦♀️
Either way, I read a solid and balanced mix of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery/thriller, and literary fiction. I hurt my brain but am happy with what I read and persevered through some difficult books.
So yeah. I did a lot of deeper writing this month, including some final thoughts on Avram Davidson that resulted in a cool email from his now publisher saying he likes my blog 😳 I thought I infringed a copyright or something and he was just saying hi! It also created a Twitter thread that ultimately made me question (once again) what it means to be well read. More on that next week.
I also did one Sunday Brunch interview with L.L. Stephens as part of a book tour!
Other than that I did two excellent literary crawls while in England and Wales and you can read the bookish travelogues if you want!
The Great London Literary Crawl
Hay-On-Wye, the first book town
Both posts were fun to write and I enjoyed the trip immensely in general.
Speaking of, I think everyone knows who I’m attempting to internationally date now so here’s a cute picture of us doing star trek at sci-fi weekender 😂 I did a TOS era outfit complete with knee high boots and big earrings 🖖
I didn’t have a ton of fun at the convention because honestly I didn’t know any names except Dacre Stoker (who went to college near where my family is from and we had a fun chat)! He also reminded me that there’s an industry for tourism related to folk lore and legends, and I plan to keep extending that to books as well with my travelogue posts. Stoker’s travel stories were the best. I also finally got into the party aspect (the key is alcohol, one of the bartenders was vastly superior to the others)
Otherwise it was entirely too loud music and boring talks, boring games, and one hilarious dude who was screaming obscenities at children, and everyone was so chill about it. If nothing else I appreciate UK parents a bit more now 😂
And…foul mouthed puppets.
March Blog Stats
Ok, let’s wrap this up with March Blog Stats: literally my best month ever! I had over 1000 visitors! Not views, visitors! Idk how but I smashed every single monthly record including views, visitors, and likes, and again most of my views came from search engines. I even beat out GrimdarkTober by a landslide which is my blog’s biggest draw every year.
So – thank you all!
My two main evergreen posts once again took the top views honors but I’m seeing a lot more posts starting to get regular views so maybe 🤞
Last but not least, I’ve been keeping track of my physical hauls & rough book spending. It’s hard because the spending was mostly in pounds ($0.80 to the 1€) so… I know I unhauled 7 books and bought 10. I’m proud of that since I was in a foreign country going book shopping and could have done much worse 🤣
What do you all have going on for April? How was March?
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