August 2024 Reading List

AUGUST (0 books | 0 pgs)

Obviously, I was unable to read as much as I have in prior months. September, however, is looking nice and ripe for some catching up on the books I meant to complete this month. If nothing else, I've already read 93 books and had planned on reading 80 for the entire year, so...not a bad time to take a break for a minute while life has its way with me. 

August found me busy with two of the remaining four stops on the 2024 "Book Tour" I've tried to complete, with one event in Blue Springs netting me 16 book sales and my reading/signing event in St. Louis netting me 8 more book sales. I had the pleasure of meeting a ton of great people at the local event and can't wait to meet more at the Phantom Pages Festival on Saturday, October 5th. 

I was inspired by several of the authors seen at the Blue Springs event, and decided to up my own self-promo game by buying a collapsible vinyl banner and creating some excerpted bookmarks. 

I began helping a local club owner rewrite their cocktail menu. That work is still in process, but I got to enjoy a night of menu tasting a few weeks back that was a great time (and the drinks were EXCEPTIONAL). The family I got to meet was lovely and the concept for the new space (called "Laila") is pretty great. Can't wait to see it come to fruition down in the West Bottoms. 

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And then there was the actual reading/signing event itself at Subterranean Books on Delmar. This was my second time hosting an even there and, per usual, the staff was fantastic and super easy to work with.

Several of my old friends from college appeared (see the photo below) as well as several friends from my raving/partying/DJing days. All told, I believe there were about 12-15 people that showed up for the reading and I got some great questions from them all. 

Work has also been exceptionally hard this month, what with client work ramping up in various ways. I won't expand too much on it, but this client work is...tough. It's been incredibly exhausting for the last few months, but it's also been a pretty serious learning curve on new systems. 

My trip to St. Louis contained some great conversations with some old friends. The first was my friend Kate, who was my Resident Advisor during my sophomore year of college. She suffered through our moronic escapades before taking her second semester to study abroad in Ireland. She not only came to my reading, but had a ton of great questions when we went out for drink and dinner the next night. A really phenomenal time with someone I'd not seen in person since 1998. 

The next great conversation was with my friend Blaine, who began as the friend of my longtime roommate John. We've grown much closer over the years and have always had great discussions about writing, writing philosophies, and writing practices. Plus we just have entirely too many great stories of our combined idiocy to reminisce over from the days when we first met. We've (mostly) grown up since then. There was also the requisite discussion of losing friends along the way to growing old, and how it's always an unfortunate bit of business considering all the great memories attached to those people. 

All in all, last week was a great week and I got to meet a lot of new people while seeing a ton of people from my past that I've been missing for quite some time. 

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Not much work done on An Atlas of Bone & Sorrow. Right now, I'm banking on it probably being completely done by the end of next summer, after which I've got a magical realism novel from my grad school days (tentatively titled Rise) that I'm excited to finish. It needs the second half finished and then a whole ass rewrite to be done, but the bones on that sucker are pretty great and I'm honestly itching to return to that world and darken it up a little bit from it's already darkened state. After all these years, I'm still very much in love with the premise and the majority of the characters, so I'm sure ending it will come relatively quickly once I jump back in.

Anyway, no books read this month, but plenty of literature news to report back regardless. 

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My grandmother on my mother's side passed on the evening of the 26th. I had received word before heading to St. Louis  for my reading that she was in declining health, and that it was only a matter of days before she would leave us. In the later years, her dementia had wiped her memory of me (and my siblings) some time ago. That was a tough loss to work through. 

She was the last grandparent to go. She was a musician (as an organist for her church for many years), but many of our summers were spent with her doing things across the city; visiting the Magic House or the McDonald's on the river boat or going up to the top of the St. Louis Arch. Every summer spent with her and my grandfather was a chance to see new things about where they lived for so long. 

She was always the last one to go to bed, making sure the house was clean and the dishes were done before scurrying off around midnight. She used to call us her 'bougies,' a name which cracked me up later in life. 

You can read her obituary HERE. 

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