New Year, New Blog Update

Last year I renewed my domain name for Indie Book Blog and realized I was paying a lot of money to run a website I wasn’t using as much as I had planned to.  It doesn't help that I can't seem to setup my email for this site on my phone. I apologize to anyone who has sent me an email and got no response. I turned 40 in 2025 and am trying to live life more intentionally.

 There are so many distractions these days: tv, podcasts, socializing, our phones, day jobs.  Even though I’m someone who is very content to sit in silence just reading a good book I am still very prone to these distractions.      

All these thoughts have motivated me to be more diligent about writing more for this website (I only wrote four posts last year).  I have a growing backlog of books that I’ve read but haven’t written reviews for.  There are other ideas I want to work on as well, such as interviewing publishers and authors, and writing a series of articles about publishing, whether it’s self-publishing or through an established press.     

My goals for 2026 are:

1)    to post twice a month or more if time allows it.

2)    update what I’m currently reading   

3)    promote more indie books being published

Currently this month there are two books I’m reading.  One is The Pot Job by Bart Schaneman, published by Trident Press and the other is Bonfire Gospel by Mallory Smart published by Bone Machine Inc.  I plan to post reviews in February.

For Christmas 2025 I received four fiction books from my parents-in-law.  Three of the books are by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists, The House of Doors, and The Gift of Rain.  The other is by Malaysian author Tunku Halim called Horror Stories.  So why all these Malaysian books? My parents-in-law are retired and spent several months in Malaysia in 2025.  My mother-in-law read a bunch of Malaysian books while there and thought I might enjoy these.  Tan Twan Eng writes literature akin to John Steinbeck and Tunku Halim is the Stephen King of Malaysia.  I look forward to reading them and hopefully will have reviews sometime this year.

My next post will be about the poetry reading I attended in Detroit this month.  Please stay tuned.