Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

 Another year is done, and that means it's time for my TOP 19 of 2023. This is, top ten books, top seven movies, top artist a la Spotify, and top game that I finished . No re-reads allowed, and also no re-watches, and I haven't played enough games for that to be an issue.  So, first up, easiest thing out of the way: according to Spotify, what was my top artist?  It was Marianas Trench. I listened to Ever After and Fix Me a whole lot this year. Over and over and over again. It has Aughts Boys reasons, I guess.  Top game? I actually finished four games this year. My favorite was definitely Pesterquest , mostly because when I got to the Dirk one at the end Unite: Synchronization started playing and I started crying, like, a little, and also I didn't let myself look up how to get good ends for any of them except for Dirk, because sue me, I'm a Dirk girl, and I just thought, you know, to myself, as it goes, like, WWDSD? And the answer was definitely look up how to win at ...

 

 

 

 A bitch loves a spreadsheet.  By a bitch, I mean me.  Let's take a walk through of all the spreadsheets I am desperately waiting for January 1st for, because then I can start using them.  First up, all of the ones that will be transferred from my '2023 Spreadsheets' folder to my '2024 Spreadsheets' folder on NYE.  'book series' is just a spreadsheet that gets sporadically updated whenever I pull a book from the book wall to read, but I haven't read/don't own the whole series. 'book wall' is a list of all of the unread books that I own. 'chores' is a list of chores that I add to my to-do list. 'creative income' has a different sheet for each year. I had the wherewithal to start it when I started self-publishing in 2020 and now it even adds everything for me like a good spreadsheet. 'every book i've read ever' is not every book I've read ever, but I did start it this year to attempt to make 'What's your ...

 

 Well, 2023 has come and (almost) gone, and I did, again, manage to publish 6 books, so good on me for keeping that streak alive. At the end of the year I will publish my sales and which of my books did the best (spoiler alert: it was One More Sad Song ), but let's talk about my writing plans for next year.  First up, I do plan on writing first drafts in April, July, and November. I'm hoping that if I do both Camps and then NaNo, I can not like, write a million first drafts. I haven't yet decided what these first drafts are going to be but like, I'll figure that out. Second, I do want to write between 25,000-50,000 words worth of short fiction, whether that be short stories, essays, blog posts... I do even count fanfiction in on this, because yeah, I do still write fanfic sometimes, and you can pry my AO3 username from my cold, dead hands.  And then the novels.  First up, I will be finishing Guillaume and Class B. They're the two holdovers from this year. Guillaume ...

 Say what you want about working in a school, but the last few weeks before Christmas break are just awash with illness. I have 19 fifth graders and I had a full class, one day, after Thanksgiving... someone's been sick every other day. This week I've been grimly fighting something off; it's called my lunch is sudafed now.  My kids are, thankfully, pretty chill. They're a decently good class. I have to get after them sometimes but it's not as bad as fourth graders or, GOD FORBID, the third graders. As we've been getting closer to the break time I've had a few of my first finishers of the 40 Book Challenge roll in... congratulations to the two ten/eleven year olds that have read FORTY BOOKS THIS YEAR IT WAS SUPPOSED TO LAST THE WHOLE YEAR.  But no. It's chill. If they read 80 I'll give them another prize. 

 This is different from the video that I'll film and inevitably post in four or five years because we are counting re-reads in this. Without further ado, the best ten and worst five books I've read this year.  10. Light by Michael Grant I did do a full Gone series re-read this year and as a whole the series does remain just about my favorite series ever. I have also just accepted that the last book is my favorite book in the series. Every time I've read the damn thing I've bawled my eyes out.  9. Germinal by Emile Zola I don't know if I'm going to be able to count this on my list of new books that encapsulates my favorites because I have read this before... just in French. I've been getting way into Zola this year. I read three books by him: this one, The Ladies' Paradise , and Therese Raquin. Germinal is the best. But yeah, Zola is so gddam good.  8. Okay for Now by Gary D Schmidt Unsurprising, considering that the first time I read this book, it was on...

 

 If I'm speaking realistically, IT by Stephen King is one of the books I've read the most times. There have been years when I've read it three, four times in a year... if I look at Goodreads, I have read this book at least ten times. Which is a lot of times for any book, let alone a book that is roughly 1100 pages long.  And so right now I'm re-reading it. It came up in the book wall, I was like hell yeah, it's taking me a while but it is 1100 pages long so I can take a few days on it, and goddam does it feel like home . I know these kids so, so well; so many scenes in this book are so, so good. I know a lot of people have read this book; it's obviously massively popular and the adaptations in the late 2010s obviously helped that out a lot. And like, yeah, those were great adaptations.  I also love the 90s miniseries, to be clear.  But this book. This book! God it's great! It's got fucking everything! Everything you would want from a horror novel! And so...

 

 So, it's the fifth of November, and for those of us who are uninitiated, that means we are five days into NaNoWriMo. This is my twelfth year doing NaNoWriMo. I have won every time, and, as the goal for the day is 8,333, and my total is over 14,000, I think it's safe to say that this year will be another success.  Even though I'm doing a Tinon book. I chose this. I did my randomizing thing and it gave me an Aughts Boys book and I was like, nah, I'm doing Tinon . Who AM I??? My one problem is that I mostly want to work on Guillaume. It's all i want to do, is write Guillaume. It's one that I feel like, this is the one! This is it! This Lord of the Flies homage! Or, rather, homage to the Lord of the Flies fandom of like 2011! I love it so much. Guillaume has three parts; or, it will: I'm on part two. Part one is over, part two is island shit, and I have the POV settled for that part, and part three will probably be the shortest but still a good time, and it...

 

 

 

 

 

 This long weekend, I finished two video games, so I figure I'd talk about them. I do want to point out that these games, which are Hiveswap: Friendsim and Pesterquest, have a purpose of 'making friends' with everyone. I just play through it once and if I don't make a friend I just sort of shrug and move on because who am I to fuck with fate. To be fair, I also only read choose-your-own adventure books once. If I die in three pages, I die in three pages. I do think this is a step up from when I was eight and read them straight through, so.  Um, I liked PesterQuest more, I think because it almost made me cry at Nepeta's and then did make a single tear escape my face when Unite: Synchronization played. I am not joking. That happened. I cheated once and looked up how to get Dirk's good end because that was all I really wanted, and I sat there, and I thought about it, and I thought, if there was a place where Dirk Strider could look up and see what he had to do to g...

 

 We have been in school for almost nine weeks. It seems insane, to me, even, that it's been this long already... but quarter one is over next week.  Most of these weeks have been full, Monday to Friday weeks. No breaks. We've had about five weeks without a Monday or Friday off, and while this sounds like, normal, and normally in my head I'd be like, oh, normal, it's noticeable. Maybe not with me, specifically, but with the kids .  One of the hardest things about switching schools, I think, is losing that innate classroom management. Also the fact that I moved to elementary school and that shit's different. But either way, in a small school where I saw literally every kid 7-12, by the third year I had built those relationships that made classroom management fairly easy. Now I not only have to start over, but an eight year old has less self-control than a fifteen year old. I don't know how many more years of elementary school I have in me. LOL, I do. It's call...

 

 I'm about twenty pages away from the end of The Bone Season . This book, which came out in 2013, was insanely popular when it first came out. I was on BookTube at the time, about a year before I started my first channel, and it was everywhere . Everyone was reading it. Now as I'm reading it and I'm realizing that it's literally just a dystopian book with a female main character who kills people and it was 2013 and I'm like, oh, right, yeah, that makes sense. One thing that's weirding me out, though, is how big of a deal people were making about the complexity of the novel and the world and the characters. People definitely made a big deal about not understanding The Bone Season, to which I have to say... w h a t?  Maybe it's just because it's technically an adult novel, I guess, and was mostly read by people who only read YA, and I read literally everything in English and French so maybe I have a better background, but... w h a t?  Don't get me wron...

 

 

 Yadda yadda, published the fifth Aughts Boys book and the first book in a new series ...  But that means that, with both of those out of the way, I can get back to some real writing. I can get back to my three projects that I have left to finish for the year: FLIP FLOP FELONY, GUILLAUME, and CLASS B. Will I finish them all before the year is out? Oh definitely fucking not. But I hope to finish at least one of the three. If all goes well, I will finish all of them. But what are they? Flip Flop Felony, you can probably guess by the title, is the third Abnormal Murders book. First page:    CHAPTER ONE: JUSTINE             “Jesus fucking Christ, Connor,” Adam muttered, heaving Connor’s new minifridge, in-box, up a flight of stairs to his dorm room. “God, why did we kill your family? Jesus Christ.”             “Yeah, they wouldn’t have done this even if th...