Holy Moly, it’s my November Reads! And some other updates too.

Reading Life

I finished 3 books in November, which I consider not bad going given the whole new baby needing constant attention thing. As one was a re-read, the yearly total is now 58 / 50 excluding re-reads. My goal at the start of the year, before I got preggo, was to read 60 – so hopefully I’ll hit that, although who knows what December will bring…

Skip to the end to see the list, but all of my November books were by women, 2 titles by Black writers and 1 co-authored by caucasian ones. Genre-wise there was 1 fiction, 1 non fiction and 1 poetry and essay collection so a bit more mixed than some months this year. I also began reading a book about baby development which is really interesting so far, The Wonder Weeks by Frans X. Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt.

Writing Life

I managed to blog 4 times in November which is pretty prolific. And I did a spine poem as part of Book Week Scotland, which was fun.

I also tried to think about my current book project, although haven’t written any more of it. I didn’t do NaNoWriMo, or enter the Bath Children’s Novel Award, but I considered doing both. I’m too tired to beat myself up about any of this. The cumulative effect of broken sleep is that I feel slightly less bad about marathoning French and Saunders or RuPaul’s Drag Race on Netflix when technically the baby has fallen asleep on me so I might be able to get a few words down. Well, that’s one of the effects. Others include being very hungry, crying, and snark.

Writer Life

Life this month has once again been pretty centred around the whole having a baby thing. We had visitors and went visiting (despite my best efforts I was the guy who brings a kid to an open plan office only for it to have a complete meltdown), made it out for a birthday lunch (which he considerately slept through), attended some parent/baby events (always reassuring to see how other people are coping), saw the health visitor, a nurse and the GP. First immunisations are bad and made us both feel bad.

We also went on many walks by the river, the sea and in the park. I am hoping that wandering through places of natural beauty every day will help us to locate a magical portal, supernatural being, or similar whimsical content which place us into a children’s novel scenario. Only the best for my kid.

The passage of time has become increasingly hard to follow this month. It seems to alternately go very slowly day to day and incredibly quickly when I remember that he’s ten weeks old already. This seems to be a common theme amongst new parents… Presumably he’ll be at school before I know it. Weird.

Books I listened to on Audible

Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward

Books I read with my eyes

Your Silence Will Not Protect You – Audre Lorde

Writing Children’s Fiction (Writers and Artists Companions) – Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery (re-read)