Hey guys! I’m back! My vacation has sadly ended :’)

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If you’re curious where I went: we spent 4 days at lake Chuzenji and then went to Hachinohe. I go to Chuzenji (or Nikko, same area) every year, because I absolutely love how it looks in the autumn and hunting for first autumn colors there is something I just can’t pass on. We had lovely weather this time around, managed to spend a lot of time exploring the marshes and also walk around the lake! We barely made it before the sunset (27km trail) but it was amazing and I will definitely want to do it again. Then Hachinohe… It was our first time in that town. And I didn’t really love it, but it didn’t matter – we didn’t go there for the city, we went for the Michinoku coastal trail. The entire trail has 700km so we obviously didn’t do the entire thing, but we walked along the coast for 3 days, exploring rural villages, beaches, and fishing ports. It was great! I’ll definitely come back to walk further. This time, during those 3 days, we managed to get from Hachinohe to Uge station (Google claims it’s 35km but we walked by the coast so it was probably a bit more, and we definitely stopped a lot to take pictures haha). Fantastic place!

Once we came back, I was mostly recovering from all the walking (150km total over the week!), checking off some appointments, and working on my new novel draft. Nanowrimo (National Writing Month – November) is coming, and although I’m not sure I’ll be able to squeeze out 50k words this time around (since I need to get back to the office after my holidays), I’ll surely be writing. I want to finish this draft before the year ends and then get back to the previous one, The Mind Drummer, to prepare it for querying in spring. Planning, planning, planning…

As for reading… I finished Red Rising and started the second volume. The pacing is intense. There’s almost constant action + twists every other chapter. Definitely better than many of the books I read recently so I’m enjoying it a lot. People complain about the main character being unbelievable and they’re right haha but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying the story (he’s basically a mine rat turned superhuman and it makes little sense but oh well). I tried reading Tinderbox but dropped it in the middle because the plot was going nowhere :))) I also tried The Gilded Ones but dropped it after two chapters – believe it or not, I wasn’t enjoying the murder-show that was happening there, and the cliche tropes in the setup. It seems I haven’t lost much, looking at the reviews. You might be wondering why I complain about books so much – I pick them up from the new releases lists, and I mostly pick debuts, because I need to know what’s coming out in order to specify comparison titles in the query letters to literary agents. Sadly, some of those debuts are either not that great or just very much not in my taste (I feel like lately the marketing and blurbs don’t really match the books themselves all that well…). So yes, there’s some frustration in all this. I swear I’m not all that picky lol If you want to read a good debut novel, I can recommend The Hand of the Sun King, Legendborn, The Gutter Prayer, or The Bone Shard Daughter.

All right, I’ll get back to enjoying the remnants of my time off haha… Back to work tomorrow… Enjoy the page and see you next week!