What’s with this cold weather? Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning of summer, was cold and rainy. So that meant more time indoors, which was fine, except that I had to bundle up in a winter house dress over my sweats, just to warm up.

So what was the rest of May like?

We had the last meeting of our non-fiction food writing group the third week of May after a course of eight meetings dating back to the first week of February. Where did the time go?

I was interested to learn about an African American culinary history program on Netflix: link.

It’s based upon a book that was published sometime ago. I was even more excited to see that a woman I knew from years ago was a consultant on the program. Here’s the book.

Returning to my own food writing, I’m part of the group that will be ready to go early enough for the first publication. A number of other folks struggled to write, and I know that’s been a concern, that some of us are experienced writers, while others are totally new.

Nonfiction essay writing is so easy for me, that I didn’t have a problem with writing and getting things done on time. We’re to be done by July. I’m on my seventh draft–yes, you read that correctly! I’ll only have to tweak it here or there.

I remember taking a poetry class when I was in my early 20s. As part of a regular routine, I’d rework one poem at the start of every summer. It was a poem about the changing seasons and my favorite summer dress.

When did I first know I was a writer? It must have been junior high. I used to journal, I suppose, in my own rudimentary way.  I was a serious nerdy girl, clipping newspaper stories from my dad’s newspaper and making note of my observations. These were probably early inklings of my Meyers-Briggs INTJ type.

Nowadays, I’m likely to blog.

On the reading front, I finally catalogued all of the romance novels in my e-readers, when I’d already catalogued the other books some time ago. I merely add more books to the shelves or create new ones.

I joked in a tweet that this project was evidence, once again, of my history as a nerdy girl. I worked at the local library my senior year of high school.

But part of that project meant purging books I wasn’t likely to ever read. I had to make a decision. Whose books interest me the most nowadays?

It came down to inspirational romances and nonfiction written by mostly Anglican writers of apologetics.

So here I am with the books I’m reading nowadays. I might have mentioned one or two earlier in previous blog essays as books I hoped to read. I’m making my way through my to-be-read pile.

Copyright Barbara James, all rights reserved.