Pop Culture is Killing Me

I feel like my blogs have been really dark and personal lately, and while it's important to me to talk about personal stuff to form a connection with my readers and show who I am, I also feel like it's fun to keep stuff light and recap-y and, well, bloggy. And I like talking about pop culture. So much that it's almost all I do.

I'm working on a side project right now while I take a short break from everything, and it's just something to take my mind off stuff when I crave the motion of typing or thinking about storytelling. It's just an expanded version of a short story I wrote almost two years ago, but it's in a different pov and verb tense, and it's bery Richelle Mead. Or, well, as Richelle Mead as I get - my writing is a lot more mope-y and emo than hers, but still.

Anyway, while I'm writing I'm collecting a bunch of good music, bust last night I stumbled across Same Old Love by Selena Gomez and I'm loving this song. It's different than anything she's done before, but still familiar. I like that there's an electronic element, but she's letting it be pop. She's not forcing it to be a dance track and it's really glamour. There's something almost Amy Winehouse about it, and I love it. I've had it on repeat for an hour while I cooked eggs and fried mash potatoes for breakfast. Also coffee, because coffee.

It really fits the story, too, because the main character and her love interest are both the kind of girls who like to wear glamorous dresses and give sass. This is ya paranormal, but it's so chick-lit it's one of the funnest things I've ever written.

I'm also really loving Dangerous by Big Data, even though the music video grosses me the hell out, and Coattails by Broods.

I'm reading Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo, and I'm worried because there's so much to read I don't know if I can get to all my arcs in time! I don't want to waste the arcs, but these book shopping sprees might have me knee-deep in catch-up with my actual books so long the ebook arcs expire.

expensive habits...

I did just read a physical arc of Pretending to be Erica by Michelle Painchaud that her publisher sent me, though, and I have to say - I loved it. You can read my review of that here. I really like heist stories, so that was nice, even if it was more contemporary. But Michelle Painchaud is awesome on Twitter, and her book is full of some pretty awesome stuff too. Like cute boys and emotional trauma. That kind of awesome.

Right now I'm just hoping my royalties pay out soon because as soon as I get my next payment I can buy a new laptop off of kijiji or something and pick up the pace with work. I desperately need a new (well, new to me) computer, because mine is nearly six years old and ready to retire. Once I get a new one I'm hoping I can work more and do more as far as youtube videos and blogs and stuff go. I can also do more with Diverse Tomes, which would be nice.

As it is, you can find Diverse Tomes on Facebook and Tumblr now. It's a platform I use to talk about and dissect diversity - or the lack of it - in the young adult genre, and in other teen oriented culture. So that's cool, and you should probably check it out.

What else? I haven't had a red bull in so long that it's killing me. It's raining today and I'm going to light some incense and make coffee and do homework when I'm done writing this. I'll be writing and posting another blog earlier because I should post on this blog more. When I'm done homework I'll probably work on that project I was just talking about for a bit. And then crash.

Keep an eye out for a post on becoming a beta-reader or recieving arcs of this project because I want to put some out as soon as I finish it.

(I'm hoping to squeeze in one more release besides SOSAS in 2015, because Shadows doesn't come until 2016, ditto another project I can't talk about yet.) And then I have two books coming out in 2017 as well - a duology. After that I'm up in arms. I might aim for traditional publishing with anything after that, but we'll see how it goes...