Let's talk about how you can't make everybody happy: I've never considered myself to be a people-pleaser (if you know me personally, please stop laughing), but I was definitely reminded of this fact when the early reviews for A Slice Of Mystery started coming in.

Reader 1 (excerpt):

"[...] Also, there was so much talk about her job, workflows and boring meetings [...] - at the beginning it was interesting, but soon I thought it took to much space and pushed the mystery to the background.[...]"

Reader 2 (excerpt):

"[...]Her social awkwardness, combined with her corporate career as a data analyst, is unusual. [...] Even moreso, if we could see some more business-specific behind-the-scenes in the different companies, perhaps tying into the mystery. I think that would keep things really fresh![...]"

There you have it - one reader thinks there's too much "job" stuff, while another wishes there was more! That said, once the series is over, I might create a few short stories that go deeper into the business-specific behind-the-scenes, but I'm not committing to it just yet - I'm planning to have five books with Abigail, four of them in the biscuit factory project, and one standalone, plus a Christmas-related short story, but I also have a lot of other stories with other characters I want to publish, so all I can commit to right now is maybe.

By the way, if you wanted to pre-order A Slice Of Mystery AND support your local bookstore, this is now possible! As of last week, the ebook is now available to pre-order from Bookshop.org (link to all retailers here).

Head over to The StoryGraph - I'm giving away 50 ebooks of A Slice Of Mystery (closes March 18th)!

While we're talking about The StoryGraph, I set up a "readalong" group, where you'll be able to chat with fellow readers about A Slice of Mystery.

Yes, the TBR pile is huge.

Yes, I did buy a few more books this month.

And yet, yes, I borrowed a couple of books from the library. It's not my fault. I was walking past it, it would have been rude not to go in.

The first one, I gave up on after a few chapters. This was really disappointing, as I've loved the first thirty or so books that this author wrote, but I tried to get into this new series, and I just couldn't, the style felt flat, compared to her previous writings.

The other was We Solve Murders by Richard Osman, the story was a lot of fun with just the right amount of absurdity, and the characters were loveable (I'm not sure which is my favourite, the ex-cop father-in-law or the seen-it-all, done-it-all romance writer!). The only thing I struggled with (which won't stop me from reading the next one), is that it's written (mostly) in present tense, and my brain kept on auto-correcting to past tense, since that's what I usually read.

Since I'm neither drafting nor editing at the moment (focusing on learning marketing, and trying really hard to not burn-out), I took the opportunity to read a bunch of books in French and Spanish (reading in foreign languages while writing confuses my brain), and I realised how much I'd missed reading these authors... I need to find a better balance in my life, and apparently, in my reading habits!

Lots of cooking and baking done - blood orange ice-cream, American scones (if you have a good recipe, please send it through, mine wasn't great) , kouglof (a specialty from the Alsace region in France), a pumpkin-and-chestnut crumble, red cabbage soup, and a beetroot curry (the recipe that made me like beetroots).

I've been meaning for a while to take some time off to recharge my batteries, but it turns out it's not that easy to go from 100 to 0, so I did my best to do as little as possible (and mostly failed), but I'm okay with that. I did tackle some tasks that had been on my to-do list for months (and were stressing me out), so that's good, and I pushed A LOT of tasks out to March and April - I've been doing my best to do only the most urgent and important ones. I'm going to keep going like this for a few more weeks, then, once I'm sure the burn-out risk has passed, on to revisions and edits (yay!).

Last minute update: I'm already noticing the positive effect of (relative) rest on my creativity: I drafted the first chapter of book 3 in the Abigail Palmer series! It's horribly messy and will probably need to be completely rewritten, but it's a start, and I'm calling it a big win.

PS: I find it really exciting to have readers on every continent! Or almost - know anyone in Antarctica? Ask them to subscribe, you'll make my day!

PPS: Do you want me to keep posting giant-jigsaw-puzzle updates?