It’s official: A Party to Murder is out! You can buy it and read it and (hopefully) enjoy it. Yay!!
Well, that’s the big news around here. Shortest post in history? Just kidding. Though, in all seriousness, this week was one long waiting game for me. I was on tenterhooks the whole time, waiting for January 8 to come, and now I feel … spent, LOL!
First week back at work was rough for other reasons too. All that “circling back on stuff” we said in December that we were going to do in the new year? Those chickens be coming home to roost now. Meanwhile, my brain is, like, “2026? We don’t know her.” We were on the struggle bus this week, but eventually managed to pull out of the station and start rolling. [Am I mixing my transportation metaphors here? Probably. I told you we were struggling.]
I’ve decided that I want to cut back on my phone screen time – specifically the amount of time I spend scrolling on Instagram and Reddit. Watching IG Reels is my main bugbear. At the end of last year, I noticed that, after a period of heavier-than-usual daily mindless scrolling, my attention span while reading books was starting to suffer. And then quickly improved over the holidays when I largely stayed off my phone, read a lot of books, and watched longform media like movies and shows (without, and this is key, scrolling on my phone at the same time). Reading stuff on Reddit doesn’t contribute to the problem (as much?) but it’s still a distraction I want to try to limit going forward. Reading a book is a better use of my time than reading random posts on Reddit, even if they’re marginally interesting.
I still need/plan to be on IG a bit – for content creation, community-building, networking, and book marketing purposes – but I want to replace my passive scrolling (content consumption) as my default “need to decompress” activity. Instead, I’m embarking on a reading challenge.
Sort of.
In addition to my regular reading, I’ve decided to get back into reading more classic literature. When I was younger, this used to be my go-to, but in the past decade, I’ve stuck mostly with non-fiction and genre fiction. Introducing classic lit back in the mix will certainly be a good thing for my development as a writer. I hope it will also act as a counterbalance to my social media consumption, by helping me to exercise my focused attention and critical analysis muscles.
There are many gaps in my classic lit background, so I plan to use this opportunity to fill some of them. I’m going to document my progress on my writing IG account – and, yes, I am aware of the irony. [In my defence, my videos require a fair bit of attention and patience because I’m a blabber, and I do try to be at least mildly informative.] Feel free to follow along if you’re curious to hear my thoughts/reactions on my classic lit picks. The first one? James Joyce’s Dubliners. The video will be up soon (my handle is murders_she_writes).
Have a great weekend!