October 2019 Month-in-Review and Blog Update

For the last year and a half I have published at least three posts each week across both blogs—a Music Monday post at Hillbilly Highways on Monday, a speculative fiction post at Every Day Should Be Tuesdays on Tuesdays, and a country noir or hillbilly studies post at Hillbilly Highways on Wednesdays.  Not to mention the occasional Throwback Thursday post at Every Day Should Be Tuesday and New Music Friday post at Hillbilly Highways.  It’s fun, but it’s also a grind.  All while I have been getting continually busier professionally and personally, bringing a tiny human into the world and twice having to drop everything for a week and head down those hillbilly highways on short notice to tend to a family emergency.

It isn’t that my pace isn’t sustainable.  It isn’t that there aren’t things that I would love to use one or the either blogs to leverage my way into.  But it isn’t worth the investment of time, and none of those things are worth more to me than opportunities in my day job.

Both blogs will continue, but posting will slow down.  You may have noticed that it already has.  I am shifting to something that looks more like two posts per week instead of three, although I will also hew less to such a strict schedule.  Reader experience may not change dramatically—I will keep posting book reviews, albeit probably shorter reviews.  Most of what will be lost are more filler posts, although I will continue these month-in-review posts, if only because they are useful for keeping track of my reading and book acquiring habits.  I do need to whittle them down.

Social media usage will slow significantly.  I may finally pull the trigger and delete my Twitter account.  The Facebook pages and group will remain, but I slowed my posting for a couple weeks and Facebook, cruel mistress that she is, killed my reach.

I don’t want that to detract from something remarkable—I finished five more books in October than I acquired, finishing eleven books and acquiring six.

 

October Reviews

• Warror of the Altaii by Robert Jordan
• Harlan County Horrors, edited by Mari Adkins
• Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger
• Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead: Typhoon by Wes Chu

 

Top 5 Posts at Every Day Should Be Tuesday

• Robert Jordan’s Warrior of the Altaii Foreshadows The Wheel of Time More Than His Conan Pastiches
• Can’t Wait for Can’t-Wait Wednesday: Warrior of the Altaii by Robert Jordan and The Walking Dead Compendium 4
• Review of Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger
• September 2019 Month-in-Review
• Review of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead: Typhoon by Wes Chu

 

Top 5 Posts at Hillbilly Highways

• Music Monday: It Ain’t Easy Being Me by Chris Knight
• SF: Harlan County Horrors, edited by Mari Adkins
• Nonfiction: Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll
• New Music Friday: Bakersfield Sound Box Set
• Oddments: Top 5 Hallowreads at Hillbilly Highways

 

Books acquired

• Warrior of the Altaii by Robert Jordan
• The Walking Dead Compendium 4 by Robert Kirkman
• Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States by Matt Grossman (review copy)
• What Adam Smith Knew: Moral Lessons on Capitalism from Its Greatest Champions and Fiercest Opponents by James R. Otteson
• I Love Capitalism! An American Story by Ken Langone
• Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser

 

Books started

• Harlan County Horrors, edited by Mari Adkins
• More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—And What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee
• Warrior of the Altaii by Robert Jordan
• The Walking Dead Compendium 4 by Robert Kirkman
• Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead: Typhoon by Wes Chu
• Between Worlds: Folktales of Britain and Ireland, ed. by Kevin Crossley-Holland
• Congregations of the Dead by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge
• Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard
• Down River by John Hart
• What Adam Smith Knew: Moral Lessons on Capitalism from Its Greatest Champions and Fiercest Opponents by James R. Otteson

 

Books finished

• Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger
• Warrior of the Altaii by Robert Jordan
• Harlan County Horrors, edited by Mari Adkins
• The Walking Dead Compendium 4 by Robert Kirkman
• More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—And What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee
• Catholic Social Thought: Encyclicals and Documents from Pope Leo XIII to Pope Francis
• Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead: Typhoon by Wes Chu
• Congregations of the Dead by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge
• Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard
• Down River by John Hart
• Between Worlds: Folktales of Britain and Ireland, ed. by Kevin Crossley-Holland

 

Books discarded (unread only)

• N/A

 

Mount TBR Counter

• October: -5
• Year-to-date: -5