Kimberly Hirsh

Finished reading: Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole 📚

Finished reading: Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole 📚

Finished reading: Dark Desires After Dusk by Kresley Cole 📚

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ I tore through this one so fast. I think it might partly be because the heroine is a PhD candidate.

Finished reading: Dark Needs at Night’s Edge by Kresley Cole 📚

My favorite Immortals After Dark book so far. A burlesque dancer becomes a ballerina, ends up a ghost, and falls in love with a vampire who is trapped in the New Orleans Gothic manor that she haunts. 🌹👻🩰

Finished reading: Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night by Kresley Cole 📚

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ as always. Werewolves continue to not be my thing but I love witches.

Finished reading: No Rest For The Wicked by Kresley Cole 📚

Listen, all these Immortals After Dark books are 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️, okay? That’s just what’s up. I like this one better than the one that came before it, definitely more my vibe.

Hello, Internet! I hope you have a great day today.

📚🗨️ “This union was supposed to be for eternity—it followed that their courtship would be extended.” - Kresley Cole, No Rest for the Wicked

See, that’s why W and I were together for 10 years before we got engaged. ("‘Til death do us part" is for quitters.)

I added “Citizen of Romancelandia.” to my bio everywhere.

📚 This is your reminder that The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond is out today!

I’m currently doing Leonie Dawson’s 40 Days to a Finished Book ecourse and I love this that she said:

It’s a collage of words.

You don’t have to start at the beginning and write until you get to the end.

(If you use the link above to buy the course, I may get a commission.)

I’m taking a deliberate break from all things academia and academia-adjacent.

I spent the past 2 years working on a big project as the key academic personnel on the project. It’s not done; when my contract ended, I had to hand it off to my colleagues. (We couldn’t extend the contract for administrative reasons.)

I’m sitting on a couple of freelance academic opportunities but as I think about pursuing them, I know it’s just not time yet. I can feel internal resistance and it’s telling me that after being in an academic headspace for more than 8 years, it’s time to do something different for a while.

Do I plan to come back to these freelance gigs and be available for academic contract work in the future? Yes. Do I plan to return to FanLIS and fan studies more broadly after I fill my well? Absolutely! But right now, that’s not where I’m at.

It’s kind of like taking a sabbatical.

Finished reading: Two New Years by Richard Ho 📚

Winner of the 2024 Sydney Taylor book award.

Finished reading: The Truth About Dragons by Julie Leung 📚

A 2024 Caldecott Honor winner.

Finished reading: A Hunger Like No other by Kresley Cole 📚

Incredibly high spice level, all the chili pepper emoji 🌶️! A Valkyrie/vampire hybrid and a werewolf (there wolf) fall in love. I’m reading this as I listen along to the first season of Fated Mates.

🖖🏻 Odo is DS9!Data. (And I know, Data is TNG!Spock.)

Now I’m thinking about Odo’s maintenance of his humanoid form and how it can be read as an analog for neurodivergent masking. Like, he’s really trying to give back what he’s getting but it’s hard, okay? Faces are difficult. 🖖🏻

Finished reading: Fox Has a Problem by Corey R. Tabor 📚

Reading my way through this year’s American Library Association Youth Media Award winners. This won the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished beginning reader book. It’s super cute.

Finished reading: Nacho y Lolita/Nacho and Lolita by Pam Muñoz Ryan 📚

Pam Muñoz Ryan won the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. This was where NoveList Plus recommended starting with her work.

Finished reading: Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas 📚

A sizzling historical that has two refreshing leads: she’s a writer, not a bluestocking. He is a gambling club owner, not a duke.

🎮 Finished Link’s Awakening.

Super fun!

Parents who are freelancers/self-employed, what do you do when your kid is home sick? Do you just sort of give up on getting work done?

It’s three weeks’ worth of week notes at once!

My son M’s school has a “Day On” on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. They choose a theme for the day and hold a celebration where the whole school community, including parents, is welcome, and then spend the second half of the day on service projects. Our family only did the celebration part of the day this year, but next year I plan for us to help with the part of the day where you sort book donations to Book Harvest. I’m also planning to join the celebration for the choir next year.

The theme for this year was “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” The choir sang 3 songs I love: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” “Heal the World,” and “Stand By Me.” Middle and high school students read poems they had written. Pauli Murray’s niece and biographer Rosita Stevens-Holsey was the keynote speaker and shared wonderful insight into Rev. Dr. Murray’s life and work. I was so happy to have attended.

At the end of that week, I took a quick overnight trip to Baltimore to present at the American Library Association LibLearnX conference. In the end, my session was less a presentation or workshop and more a conversation, as we only had about 5 people attending. We were able to really customize the conversation to the participants’ interest. My BFF lives near Baltimore, so I got to have dinner with her the night before the presentation and hang out with her after, when we went to the Edgar Allan Poe house and wandered around a cute shopping area.

After I got home from that trip, I was exhausted and then a little bit sick, too. So I rested a lot and had a pretty quiet week.

Then this past week was more quiet time at home and handling administrative stuff like having my car inspected and renewing the registration, rescheduling a dental appointment I canceled due to a migraine, and completing the job application to be the half-time school librarian at M’s school.

It was a good time for consuming culture. I’ve been reading romance novels, The Age of Cage, and How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are. I watched Emily in Paris. I played A Link to the Past, which is phenomenal and deserves its status as a classic, and the Switch remake of Link’s Awakening, which is super fun.

Saturday M developed a nasty case of pinkeye. He’s on his second day home from school and on antibiotics for it and seems to be improving.

That’s it for this post!

The personal brand paradox wepresent.wetransfer.com

When a person aspires to be a brand, they forfeit everything that is truly glorious about being human.

What are you obsessed with right now? For me it’s the podcast Fated Mates, all things romance book-adjacent, and Parisian vibes.