Life Update – Grief and Moving Forward

 I’m going to try to keep this rather short, as I’d like to not dwell on the past year. You have to focus on moving forward and all that.

    About 7 or 8 months ago, right as I was beginning to draft and rework things for the blog my husband I found out we were pregnant. It was not a rough pregnancy but an intense one. I was passing out asleep at any time I was left alone, and I was sick most of the day I was awake. At about the 4^th month my symptoms cleared up but on the first day of our 5^th month (August) I had a miscarriage. We were pregnant with twin boys (we didn’t find out till that moment), but lost them. I spent a day in the hospital having delivered them, and we’ve spent the next three months dealing with that grief.

     My reading has changed a bit in that time. Grief will do that to you. I’m much faster to DNF a book, my 100 page rule is out the window. If I’m not pulled in within a few pages I’m quick to stop though I will skim forward as much as I can to see if my interest picks back up. I also am truly leaning into three genres: SFF, Romance and Non-fiction. I don’t have the patience anymore for a lot of family drama, or convoluted fiction. In an equally weird twist I can’t stand 90% of the Cthulhu-themed items I read. One of the first books I picked up after getting out of the hospital and getting past that first week of sobbing every few hours was an anthology of stories in that theme. Let’s just say if I had been reading a physical book I might have hurled it across the room. I’m not sure where that aversion, the anger, comes from but since then there has been only one that I can think of that I’ve read and enjoyed.

      I’m in a much better head-space, though I have my bad days, but I’m struggling with finding something to do so that I stay busy. I feel a bit useless overall. I’ve taken to planning and working on elaborate Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and characters, going to the gym, and reading constantly. So I’m going to work on rebooting the blog a bit. I can’t guarantee it’ll be consistent, my life is a little too complicated for that. However I’m going to try and post updates on my thoughts on recent reads, and I’ll probably also be devoting sections of the blog to other things such as my D&D planning (I started this a little before the pregnancy).

    I’ll be trying to keep my posts short, unless it’s a full review or a write up on a game session. I also will probably be going through a lot of back-list. I absolutely cannot afford a lot of new books so most of those I’ll get from the library when they’re available. Instead I’m going to be tracking my purchases carefully and trying to get some of backlog of books out of my house (I have close to 2000 at last count).

    Thanks for reading, and for sticking around if you’re a return reader. Have a good one!