June Goings-On

Upcoming Events, Women's Fiction Day, and Dipping My Toe Back into Limited Social Media

It’s June? It’s June! June, the month of gorgeous weather, roses blossoming (soon! soon!) and lots of events—book talks, a book club visit, meetings, graduation parties, and, thank you Lord, vacation.

First off, here’s where will I be speaking this month:

JUNE 5
Michigan Notable Book Author Tour – Grand Haven, MI – 6:00pm
Loutit District Library (407 Columbus Ave. Grand Haven, MI 49417) on Thursday evening, June 5th, starting at 6pm.

JUNE 11
Michigan Notable Book Author Tour – Holton, MI – 5:30pm
Holton Branch of the Muskegon Area District Library (8776 Holton-Duck Lake Rd. Holton, MI 49425) on Wednesday evening, June 11th, starting at 5:30pm.

JUNE 13
Michigan Notable Book Author Tour – Midland, MI – 6:30pm
Grace A. Dow Memorial Library (1710 W. St. Andrews Rd., Midland, MI 48640) on Friday evening, June 13th, starting at 6:30pm.

I hope to see you at one of these events!

Next, I’ve decided to try getting back on Instagram for the summer months and into September in order to easily share pictures of my garden and my trips up the Danube and to Scotland, so if you follow me there, go search out my profile, take a look at my latest posts, and give them a like or a comment so I pop back up in your algorithm. And if you don’t follow me there, you can do so here.

I really enjoyed being off social media for Lent and beyond, and I’m tentative in this partial return. I don’t want to let scrolling take over those free moments again. So this is just a trial run and I may find that I fail at using it the way I want to—which is just to post pictures and thoughts that you might enjoy experiencing. But if you do feel any sort of pleasure at seeing something I’ve posted, your interaction with it is what will keep those coming, because I’m just posting static pictures, not the videos to which Instagram gives preference.

Okay, what else, what else…

My husband is building a sound recording booth in our basement to more easily record his very popular and dynamic podcast—a retelling of The Pilgrim’s Progress—which he also produced as an illustrated book, which you can find here.

Once the sound booth is finished, he has a few shelving units to build and then I will be painting, painting, painting—shelves, cupboards, drawers, wainscoting, doors, and stairs. It will probably be a three-coat job and will take absolutely forever, but because this particular room is kind of the last big thing on the renovation list we developed when we were first buying the house, there’s a lot of incentive to get it done and feel like we are truly at home and not still dealing with stuff in boxes.

Finally, we are coming up on Women’s Fiction Day, which is June 8th. My books can easily be categorized as Women’s Fiction, but because that label may deter male readers, I typically talk more about how I write Book Club Fiction or Character-Driven Fiction. Some of my books I could categorize as Contemporary Fiction. Others are Dual Timeline Fiction. And the one I am working on now is strictly Historical Fiction. If I’m talking to publishing industry folks, I might use the term Upmarket Fiction, which is a genre that blends the strong characters, evocative prose, and deeper themes of Literary Fiction with the faster pacing and dynamic plots you would find in Commercial Fiction.

This is why I never know quite how to answer people who ask me what kind of books I write. There’s not a clear, single genre my writing occupies, like Romance (and all of its varied and breathtakingly specific subgenres). So I stumble around and throw out all these words and, eventually, say something along the lines of, “If the protagonists were men, it would probably just be called General Fiction.”

So how does one celebrate Women’s Fiction Day? I guess by buying/reading/reviewing some Women’s Fiction. Not sure where to start? There’s a curated list of Women’s Fiction titles over on Goodreads maintained by the Women’s Fiction Writers Association that makes it easy to start exploring. Or check out WFWA’s Hear Us Roar podcast to find debut Women’s Fiction authors.

Okay, that’s about it for today. Don’t forget to come see me in Grand Haven, Holton, or Midland!