My Ten Reading Goals for 2019

January 23, 2019January 22, 2019 / saraletourneau / 25 Comments

Are you one of those readers who challenges yourself to read a certain number of books every year? I’m… well, not one of those people. (*lol*) But I do have a consistent reading habit, and the reading goals I set for myself are more or less to guide my book choices throughout the year. For example, I try to prioritize brand new releases I’m interested in so I can stay on top of my favorite genre’s current market. And, as I shared in this post last year, I read at least one poem per day to help me comb through my extensive collection of poetry books.

But what about other goals, like finishing series I’ve already started? Or borrowing books from the library periodically? Yeeeeaaahhhh…. I haven’t been nearly as good with those. So I decided to organize my next year of reading with LOTS of goals. Ten, to be exact. I was a little afraid that creating so much structure could sap the fun out of reading. But now that I see what’s in my queue, these goals might help put a dent in my TBR pile and keep things interesting. Yay!

Without further ado, here are my reading goals for 2019:

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The Liebster Award Challenge

June 29, 2015June 25, 2015 / saraletourneau / 35 Comments

A big thank-you to KL Caley @ New2Writing for nominating me for the Liebster Award Challenge! This honor gives bloggers the opportunity to share more about themselves and then to “pay it forward” to other bloggers whose sites they enjoy. This version of the Liebster doesn’t seem to have a restriction on the number of followers for eligible nominees (whereas the Liebster Award received here did), so everyone is game this time around. 😉

Here are the rules for this version of the Liebster Award Challenge:

Thank the blogger who nominated you.
Answer the 11 questions that the blogger gives you.
Nominate 11 blogs that you think are deserving of the award.
Let the bloggers know you nominated them.
Give them 11 questions to answer.

So, let’s start with KL’s questions!

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Chronicling The Craft: 95,000 Words

November 13, 2014November 12, 2014 / saraletourneau / 8 Comments

Using Pictures As Visualization Tools For Writing

Chapters Completed: 23

Chapters In Progress: 6

Chapters Not Started: 5

“Chronicling The Craft” is an article series where I share my experience with writing my current work-in-progress (WIP), which is a fantasy novel. Every 5,000 words, I let readers know what I’ve accomplished since the previous article and share advice, discoveries, techniques, etc. Besides the word count in each article title, a “chapter ticker” at the top also tracks my progress as I use the skip-around / “writercopter” method to write the novel. Today’s installment celebrates the book reaching 95,000 words in length.

Wow! Apart from my writing vacations the past two Septembers, this has to be the shortest span of time between Chronicles. (“Chronicling The Craft: 90,000 Words” was posted on Sunday, November 2.) I haven’t had many non-writing plans recently, though, so I was able to dedicate ample weekend time to novel-writing. That likely won’t be the case for the rest of the month – or year – with the upcoming holidays and all the preparations I’ll need to make (shopping, baking, etc.). Better to take advantage of free time while it’s available, right?

Here’s what happened with the novel over the past couple weeks: Continue reading →