Hello, readers!

I’m taking some inspiration from Ann Handley’s book Everybody Writes, and taking out many personal sections out of this newsletter. You won’t find any podcast or TV recs for the foreseeable future, but the book recs will remain (for now)!

Help This Newsletter Win The Indieverse Awards! 🏆

I shared earlier this year that this newsletter was nominated for the Indieverse Awards!

Well, voting is now officially open. If you love reading this newsletter, please vote for it at this link!

I’m also nominated for Underrated Indie Author, which is pretty awesome. If you agree with this, leave a vote for me! Thanks for your support!

2025 Indie Ink Award Nominations are OPEN! 🏆

The Indie Ink Awards are back, and the nomination phase is open until Nov. 30th, 2025! I was previously a judge for the 2024 Indie Ink Awards, but I would love for one of (or all of) my books to be nominated for the first round of voting (which will be in December 2025). If you enjoyed reading my book this year, please consider nominating any or all of them since they are eligible to be nominated for the awards! The eligible categories are as follows:

Any of the Harlow Mystery series books (Winner Takes All, Engagement To Die For, and Bloody Fantasia)

• Best book cover & cover artist (all the covers were made by me!)

• Best Friendship (Aubri Harlow & Bastian Faulkner)

• Best light read

• Best setting

• Best use of tropes

• Side Character MVP (Bastian Faulkner, Nick)

• Wittiest character (Bastian Faulkner)

Refilling The Well (my debut poetry chapbook)

• Best book cover & cover artist (all the covers were made by me!)

• Best light read

  

Stay Magical (my YA magical girl short story collection)

• Best book cover & cover artist (all the covers were made by me!)

• Best Friendship

• Best light read

• Best setting

• Best use of tropes

• Side Character MVP

• Wittiest character

Click here to learn more about the 2025 Indie Ink Awards and nominate them all before November ends! Thanks for your support!

Night Beats Interview 📰

I was recently interviewed by Night Beats again, this time to discuss my YA short story collection Stay Magical! ✍️📖 In this interview, we discussed my inspirations behind creating this magical girl short story collection, as well as my upcoming projects!

Thanks to the Night Beats team for interviewing me! 😄You can read it at this link.

Buy Stay Magical at this link! Also, nominate it for the Indie Ink Awards if you enjoyed reading it at this link!

What Am I Writing/Editing Recently? ✍️

Since writing the previous newsletter, I decided to put both Unnamed/Unlisted WIPs to the side for now. This is so I can focus on editing Sonnets of Winter.

And then…I finished editing the entirety of Draft #2 of Sonnets of Winter on Nov. 1st. 😱 No, I’m not joking, I literally got the entire round of edits done within the day!

Just before the end of October, I also was bitten by the “new idea” bug again…kind-of. Listening to MARINA’s Princess Of Power album (more on this in my music recs section!) and PEGGY’s Alice (Red Queen version) song gave me some inspiration but I haven’t quite figured out how to channel it into something that’s a full novel, let alone a short story. 🤔

Other writing-related activities include:

• I’ve been posting on my Youtube channel again! I’m mainly focusing on getting a few Shorts posted per month to remind Youtube that my books still exist. I also hope to dabble in making other content later down the road! I hope to get to that maybe in 2026 if not in the last one-and-a-half months of this year. 😁

• Did some freewriting. This was fun to do as a break from editing Sonnets of Winter. As a result of this, however, I ended up drafting the first drafts of a few short stories! 🙌

• Scheduled multiple social posts. Considering that the nomination phase of the 2025 Indie Ink Awards is ongoing and Black Friday is coming up, it makes sense as of why. 😆

What Am I Reading Recently? 📖

I thought I was getting somewhere with lessening the 100+ ebooks I have in my e-reader and sorting through physical books in my personal collection.😄 I’ve made a pile of physical books to get rid of, and figured out which ones I read recently to keep out of the ones I hadn’t previously read until now.

And then I got new books. 📚 They were either given to me as gifts, ones grabbed in free ebook giveaways like this past October’s Romance Book Blast event, or I borrowed some physical books from others to return at an undetermined date. 😅I’m also trying to not speed-read my way through these books, mainly for attention-span-lengthening reasons. My slower pace of reading vs. the increased pace of new books acquired isn’t helping the situation.

Despite the literary chaos, I did enjoy reading what I’ve gotten through so far, including

Other books I read include:

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (a re-read but worth it!)

• To The Moon by Jang Ryujin

• Cat + Gamer, Volume 1 by Wataru Nadatami

• BASE Status: Online: An Unlikely Hero's GameLit Journey by E. Engberts

• In Order To Live by Yeonmi Park

• Anything by Rebecca Stead

Outside of books, I read these articles on how watching horror films can soothe anxiety, how courage doesn’t mean being without fear, what to do if the internet is talking about you, and how our discomfort with uncertainty mainly comes from us making it feel worse than it actually is.