Personal Digest Saturday: August 1 – August 7

Life news this week: 

• I got my first royalty check! Meaning I got paid for my nonfiction book's sales for the first time. I was paid an advance when it sold, but after that's earned out I get a percentage of every book that sells, and I just got paid for the books that sold between its publication date and the end of December 2014. It's neat. :)
  
• Pitch Wars went live with mentor bios! I'll be participating as a mentor in a couple weeks. My bio describes what I'm looking for in a mentee's unpublished, unagented book.
  
• I got to talk to my fiction agent about future stuff and we had a good old chat on the phone. We always end up off topic. Hard to do business sometimes with someone you also like! But that's how it should be.
  
• Also got to have a lovely phone chat with the Meggie. There's just nothing I can't tell her.
  
• I finished reading my friend's science fiction book Half-Wit and I'm still working on pulling together the feedback for him. He's thinking of entering Pitch Wars but I'm not sure if he will--we'll see if he has time to write a query letter before then.
  
• Jeaux and I met on Wednesday and our restaurant choice was Moe's for cheap burritos. We ate there and watched Gravity Falls and America's Got Talent at his house, and also heard the latest episode of Welcome to Night Vale.
  
• I redecorated for the first harvest, which was fun because for some reason I always get excited about filling the candy bowls with new seasonal candy. Yay orange slices!

New reviews of my book:

Just sharing some from Goodreads first that I never noticed before because Goodreads has a terrible system for showing new reviews and will mysteriously put older reviews at the top of lists that claim to be "newest first":

• No-rating partial review on Goodreads from Giulia, who is putting the book aside for now for Reasons.
  
• Four-star review from Hezekiah on Goodreads.
  
• Five-star review from Averie on Goodreads.
  
• Five-star review from Amy on Goodreads.
  
• Five-star review from Sarah on Goodreads. (This one was actually from this week.)
  
• Five-star review from J. DeCourtney "author Recapture Yr Health" on Amazon.

Places featured:

• A Place to be Ace discussed the difference between sexual attraction and sex drive, and quoted liberally from my book to do so.
  
• gloryandus on Tumblr quoted something from my book about being unpartnered in later adulthood.

 Reading progress:

• Completed reading: Benny and Omar by Eoin Colfer. Three-star review.
• Currently reading: Landline by Rainbow Rowell.

New singing performances:

Here I'm singing "Rush Rush" by Paula Abdul.


 
New drawings:

Webcomic Negative One Issue 0534: "My Place."

New videos:

None.

New photos:  

Me looking quite tired with my first royalty check.

Social media counts: 

YouTube subscribers: 4,901 for swankivy (22 new this week), 498 for JulieSondra (1 new). Twitter followers: 667 for swankivy (3 new), 1031 for JulieSondra (28 new). Facebook: 286 friends (no change) and 183 followers (1 new) for swankivy, 588 likes for JulieSondra (no change), 54 likes for Negative One (no change), 110 likes for So You Write (no change). Tumblr followers: 2117 (3 new).