It look me a couple extra days to write this post because July felt like eons long. I started by taking a long weekend for the 4th of July, with the plan to get started on my next round of edits.
Well, if you aren’t aware, I live in Northwest Austin, near the Hill Country and that weekend was the weekend the Hill Country experienced flash flooding.
We had some flash flooding, too, and I think that weekend we had three or four separate flash flood warnings. It wasn’t anywhere as bad as it was out west, but there’s something so fucking Texan about everyone’s phones going off at H-E-B together for a flash flood warning alert.
And then it rained again the weekend after, and it rained this weekend, too. You literally can’t beat a drought without a flood, or two, or three here in Texas.
As someone who has been fascinated (and sometimes terrified) by weather my whole life, flash flooding is still one of those ones where I can feel my anxiety heightened during the whole event.
So the month started off with a bang and knowing that this was just a month ago, it feels like a warped sense of time.
Writing Recap
I did start my edits and got almost 33,000 words through the draft. I was hoping to be closer to 50,000 but a late start plus a couple busy weekends put me behind. But I will finish this draft this month.
Reading Recap
I didn’t read as much this month because I was focused on edits. I also realized I’ve been hitting the romance books a lot harder so I don’t try and convolute another thriller’s plots with my own.
One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune
The Lightning Bottles by Marrisa Stapley
Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood
With a Vengeance by Riley Sager
Run on Red by Noelle W. Ihli
Till Summer Do Us Part by Meghan Quinn
Clean Point by Meg Jones
Lost in Texas (travel) recap
It was a little local trip, but at the beginning of the month, I drove down to Bee Cave. On paper, Bee Cave is only 15 miles away, but it feels like a whole different world. The trip down 620 takes you to the beginnings of Hill Country, and they take advantage of it. When I drove over Mansfield Dam, the flooding hadn’t yet happened, so Lake Travis looked low. Three days later, the lake was rising.
For so long, I’ve struggled with consistency and for a brief moment this month, I felt like I had it, so now it’s a matter of capturing it again.