How You Build a Bookworm📖🪱

Hey Fabulous Readers!

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the January newsletters aren’t going to be quite as thrilling as I had planned. My Mom had a serious health situation back in October, and she isn’t recovering well. I needed to pack up myself and Archie and move in with her for a while to help her with physical therapy and all the stuff she needs to get back on her feet — literally!

However, this means I’m away from my office, and most of my time and energy will be going to helping out my mom, not doing cool stuff for the books. So all planned stuff has been abruptly moved to February, and thus the two January newsletters are not going to be packed full with all the exciting stuff that was previously scheduled.

What this means for you is actually not bad news, because I will only have my laptop with me, and there’s not much I can do on my laptop except work on my next novel. So in between physical therapy sessions and stuff, I will be full steam ahead on Blood Depths, without other business distractions getting in the way. Since I know this is what you all want most from me, well, like I said, not bad news for you!

I was thinking about what to do with these two “lost newsletters” for this month while I was walking Archie this morning, and I decided what I could give you during this time-period was a couple “getting to know Raven” deep dives, since that’s always something you Fantabulous Newsletter Readers seem to enjoy.

But first, for those of you who were too busy to go grab the Sandu Xmas story, it’s ready and waiting for you — and has gotten some great reviews so far 🥰

Dracula’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Christmas: A Blood & Ancient Scrolls Series Holiday Story

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A delightful addition to the world of Blood Ex Libris!
I’ve been a fan of the Blood & Ancient Scrolls series since I first met Anushka crouching in the desert alongside a rodent. Getting to see where Sandu was in those endless months while she waited for him to fulfill the promise of their first tiny kiss is both satisfying and fascinating. This short story works well on its own, but adding it to the rich detail of Blood Ex Libris makes it all the better. It’s a great hors d’oeuvre to pull you into the rest of the series, or a lovely lagniappe if you’ve already read the series.

www.amazon.com/Draculas-Terrible-Horrible-No-Good-Christmas-ebook/dp/B0GBYWZLSY

To start us off, here’s… How You Build A Bookworm

The seeds for my eventually being the writer you know today were planted very early. My mom read me Lord of the Rings when I was five years old, and it definitely gave me a standard of what to expect from reading, one that the public school system was not prepared for.

And I wanted to read! I came home crying from the first day of kindergarten, and my mom, very worried, asked, “What happened at school?” And I responded, “I didn’t learn how to read!”

Eventually, the alphabet had been banged into my brain, and I was reading sentences. I was not enjoying those sentences, because the school was giving me books like Gordon the Goat. Now, Gordan was not having The Battle of Five Armies or engaging with dragons, or visiting Lothlorien. As I recall, the highlight of Gordon’s day was eating a tin can. Not very compelling stuff.

The next family story about me and reading comes when my mom was called into school because I was failing reading comprehension, in first grade. They were giving us these cards with a story on one side, and questions about the story on the other side. I was answering those questions not just wrong, but like I was on drugs at that tender age.

Luckily for me, the first grade teacher cared about her students, and she had taken time to ask me some questions, and had figured out that I had read the stories on the front of the cards, thought they were deeply stupid, had rewritten them in my head to be better stories, and was then answering the questions based on my far superior narratives 😂

That was probably the last time my mom got called in for any issues with reading or writing, because it very soon became clear that I was having troubles with math, and that became the issue for the rest of my schooling. Since girls weren’t expected to be good at math anyway, nobody troubled to notice that I am dyscalculic. My mom was regularly told, “She can follow the logic of the word problems, then she just gets lazy with the math part.” 🙄

So math became something I dreaded and did as little of as possible, and reading became my escape.

I needed the escape because from second grade on, I was rated as a glasses-wearing nerd, a bookworm and general loser. I was picked last in gym, I had no friends, and basically was a living example of a character from Revenge of the Nerds.

The glasses really were the final nail in my social coffin…

I avoided dealing with those issues by reading every fantasy book that would hold still long enough, making no distinction between juvenile lit and adult fantasy novels. (Starting things off with Lord of the Rings had really ruined me for reading at my age level.) For a nerd, I got very bad grades, because during class I was often holding a fantasy novel under my desk and reading it instead of paying attention.

All of this, of course, was excellent preparation for being a writer later. I agree with Robert Heinlein that “Writing can be learned, but not taught.” I think the best thing anyone can do who wants to be a writer is to read voraciously, through all genres and styles of writing. Doing that not only exposes you to incredible examples of writing, but also shows you how to do every aspect of writing. More importantly, it also teaches you how NOT to do things. If you are reading something and think a character is intolerable or the plot is slow and uncompelling, well, there you go, there’s an example of how not to write! 😁

I could talk about this forever, but this is definitely long enough for a newsletter! For those of you who made it to this point, you are fucking amazing and I appreciate you 🥰

To all my readers, I hope your 2026 has started a bit more smoothly than mine, but at any rate, I look forward to being in contact with you twice a month in the year to come. Please feel free to respond to the newsletters (just hit reply, it’s that easy!) and chat with me about stuff. (There is starting to be a bigger readership, but I’m still at the point where I am accessible to you all. If my plans work out, there will come a day when you write to me and get a reply from my personal assistant who will tell you I appreciate your email but am too busy to respond personally — but since we aren’t there yet, take advantage of it 😉)

Until two weeks from now, be good or be good at it!

💭 I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: drop me a note 📨

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