Binging is Not Just For Netflix

There comes a time when you have to face the truth, and my truth is that I can no longer blame the weather and/or the pandemic for my lack of progress. Now I can blame J.R. Ward. LOL

Okay, not really. If I hadn’t fallen behind in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series to begin with, I wouldn’t be feeling the urge to binge read to catch up now. It’s kind of reminiscent of my binge reading last year, isn’t it?

As you may recall, last year I started out on the Argeneau Vampire series by Lynsay Sands, and when I ran out of them I went on a Nora Roberts binge. Wow she’s written a lot of books, and thanks to shopping on Indigo online, I now own most of them. In trade sized paperback no less.

It took me until about August before my interest in Nora’s books began to wane (she does write a nice variety so they’re not all the same). In fact, I still have a few unread ones in my stack. Then I went on a Charles de Lint kick, re-reading most of my collection of his books, with several Alice Hoffman books thrown in at random. FYI Magic Lessons is so much better than Practical Magic, which I probably would have enjoyed more if I hadn’t seen the movie first.

I’ve got eight more books in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series to go, and after that it’s anyone’s guess what I’ll be binging on. Maybe Katie MacAlister – I have most of both her vampire series and her dragon series.

Most people prefer to binge watching television or videos, but with me it’s books. That’s not to say I haven’t done my fair share of binge watching Stranger Things, or Game of Thrones, or disaster movies, but nothing makes me happier than a stack of books and uninterrupted time to read them.

What about you? Binge watching or binge reading?

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Wordage Report

New Words:
Blood Ties – 620
Blog Posts – 616+408+693+988=2,695
Total = 3315

When you see the numbers for the blog posts, you might be fooled into thinking I made most of my “write 500 words a day” goal from last week. But although in the one sense it’s nice to see some actual numbers, I actually meant new fictional words, so only the words on Blood Ties count.

And alas I did no freewriting last week because I was too busy reading.

Editing:
2 hours and 35 minutes on Blood Ties

Publishing:
None

What I’m Reading:
Once again, this was my strong suit for the week. I didn’t get much further on the Kindle, but I really went to town on the tree books.

I finished the Shadows. by J.R. Ward (so sad!) and went on to read Blood Kiss, the Beast, and Blood Vow. Now I’m currently reading the Chosen and trying to go a little more slowly so I don’t spend the majority of my writing time reading instead.

Goals

Last week’s goals were kind of a bust. The daily words, editing, and reading should be a given if I’m seriously trying to get into a routine, so the only real goal was the submitting a story or poem for publishing, which I didn’t even really give a thought to.

Maybe I need to start smaller. Instead of four goals, I have just one, doable goal. Get an outline of some kind drawn up for Knightsong so I can start making some progress on it. This was the book beginning I was originally going to take to the Spring Thaw writer’s retreat in spring of 2020. The current date it’s been rescheduled for is October 2021 – it would be really nice to have the first draft finished by then, don’t you think?

Let’s get writing.