Recollections May Vary

That's the name of my new poetry collection that I put up on my KDP bookshelf Sunday night. I am not going to give a link or do any wretched marketing ~ I do not expect anyone to buy my book/s. The publication was merely to satisfy my OCD: I had 11 KDP books shelved (after I unpublished Anna's erotica/romance), and as everyone knows, I do not like eleven. So now I have 12, a nice even number, possibly the best even number, and I am satisfied. I wanted to write more poems, but I didn't have time because I noticed a few weeks ago that as of today Amazon is no longer going to accept the "mobi" file format, which is what I have been using all these years. They gave an explanation of what they would accept, and it might as well have been in Klingon because blah blah blah techy stuff. Instead of trying to understand it, I decided to fling my last book up on KDP with only 24 poems total and be done with the whole kit and caboodle (whatever that is). The main theme centers around the unreliability of memory, which is something that has interested me for a long time. Or has it? 

Anyway. That's the end of that. Now I can focus on reading and painting and other hobbies that don't stress me out like writing always did.

I read Losing Sophia by Sara Ennis, which could have been an excellent book if it had been written in third person, past tense and structured differently, but it was what it was, so I gave it three stars. The plot doesn't make a lot of sense because we aren't given much of a glimpse into the bad guys' (plural) motivations, since the chapters keep hammering us with the two sisters' POVs. I don't know what it is with thriller writers that they can't get this point of view business straightened out, not to mention eliminate the ridiculous obsession with present tense. The story takes place mainly in New Orleans, which satisfied my 2025 Reading Challenge requirement of a big city location. NOLA is big, right? Not everything has to be New York or London.

I also read Allegedly by Tiffany Jackson, which was for my book club and also satisfied the requirement of being told from a teenager's POV. It's about a mentally unstable yet very smart teen girl in a group home who may or may not have committed a murder. Everyone around her is horrible, from the other girls to all the adults who have screwed her over (except one or two). For a smart girl, Mary keeps making the dumbest choices, but she is only 15 and hasn't had any kind of good role model. Her mother is a nightmare. I normally would not read a story like this because it's just unpleasant, but part of the benefit of being in a book club is to read outside my rut of romance and mystery and possibly discover new genres/writers that I might not have on my own. The book was well written and very suspenseful, so I gave it three stars, but I didn't enjoy it.

OK then. Tomorrow's Wednesday already. I've been surprisingly busy both at work and socially. It's not a bad thing, but I do need to make sure to recharge with alone time.