Coffee Grinds 09: It seemed like such a great idea at the time...

Plus, my new hair obsession, outdoor movie nights, the band I have on repeat,AI, Dirty Pop, and more

Things I’m obsessed with this week: outdoor movie screenings, tapas, Dirty Pop, finally finishing one of my audiobooks, and celebrating my grandmother’s 90th birthday.

📚 Reading:

• I finally finished Dear Emmie Blue by Lia Louise! I ended up really enjoying this one, and am excited to see the author has some other books out. It turns out, it might actually be a great comp for my own WIP too.

  Highly recommend if you like: that blurred line between Women’s Fiction & Romance, love triangle involving brothers (this isn’t exactly that but, close) discovering yourself in your thirties, friends to lovers romance.

• Sunshine Nails by Mai Nguyen Loving this one so far. Especially because there are a ton of Toronto references, which, if you read this week’s To All the Friends I’ve Loved Before, you may have recognized some landmarks in there. It’s a city I love very much.

substacks I read this week:

How to Ease into Autumn by

Kendra Mase

37. Blind Date with a Book pt 2 by

Isabel Straka

love notes 20: 4 simple tips for reading more broadly by

Madeline Mills

A bookstore with no romance section? by

andrew jelinek

William Thacker, where are you? by

Ella

🫶Love

• This lightweight oil by Verb. I have fine hair but a lot of it, so oils don’t usually work for me. But this makes my hair SO soft and shiny without weighing it down.

• The feeling of finishing a good book and picking up another that you already know you’ll love.

• This super cute outdoor movie night showing Footloose and giving away free pizza, concessions, and snacks. Like so many of our date ideas, it seemed like such a good idea at the time. I don’t think they anticipated the crowd being what it turned into, because between running out of pizza, long wait times, promised popcorn that didn’t exist, and nowhere to sit/see/hear the movie once we did, we left almost as soon as we sat down. Still. Very cute and it led to…

• Spontaneous candlepin bowling, and dirty martinis with snowflake garnish. Hey, I’ll take it.

🎧Listened:

• Lots of The Format lately. (this is Nate Ruess’ band, before fun.) I’m blaming this binge on my recent read of Lo-Fi by Liz Riggs, which mentions the band a lot. Consider my love of The Format reignited.

• This Indie 88 inspired playlist

✍️Wrote:

• To All The Friends I've Loved Before: 06 Late nights and fire pits, the Drake after dark. This city I’ll always call home.

• REVIEW: 'Bunny' by Mona Awad is a wild ride that I still can't wrap my head around. Here are my thoughts.

• In what continues to be the last 1/4 of my own book that I’ll never finish, I am still, well, not finished. For the entire length of this book I’ve thought “if I can just get to (random point in the book) the editing will get so much easier! That hasn’t happened. Not once.

  I am SO CLOSE but every time I tweak something to make the book stronger it requires all kinds of edits and re-writes and with my workload being so insane lately I just haven’t been able to get there. I’m still working on edits daily, and I think it’s important to remember this isn’t a race.

  THAT SAID I NEED TO FINISH BY END OF AUGUST. For my own sanity. THIS IS THE WEEK. For real!

🍿Watched:

Elvis (second viewing) directed by Baz Luhrmann who I tend to really enjoy, but I get it if you don’t. His style is distinct and weird. Most movies don’t need to be almost three hours long, and probably this one doesn’t either, but I still enjoyed it. It’s sad, in the same way Judy or even Bohemian Rhapsody is.

Dirty Pop on Netflix. As a true Backstreet Boys fan in my early years, I was dying to watch this. It’s all about how the boy bands of our youth were made and features BSB, NSync, and a few others. They use AI to show clips of Lou Pearlman speaking from his book, and it’s really wild. Weird. Creepy. Scary. Impressive. I have a lot of feelings about it. But the three-part Netflix doc was really interesting and was super nostalgic. Definitely recommend.

🎧Ate:

• This super-food harvest bowl as part of my lunch meal prep this week

• Eastern Standard pretzels and queso

• An assortment of tapas as part of our date night this week —cheeses, patatas bravas, oh my!

🔭 Looking ahead:

• This week is my grandmother’s 90th birthday, and we’ll be celebrating with family (is that a good thing or not? I don’t know yet) on Friday, so I’m really looking forward to seeing her experience that. We’ve been going to see her once a week since I was a kid, but it’ll be nice to see her among friends again. She was such a social butterfly once.

• I feel like a broken record here, but work has been nuts. Being self-employed for the last decade, it’s a really good problem to have, but it does mean less time to write and when I’m soooo close to finishing this draft, it’s a little more painful not to be able to just get it done.

I hope you have a great Sunday!