Posted Sunday, 25 October, 2026 by jorielov #SpooktasticReads, Charlie N. Holmberg, Jaime Jo Wright, Jorie Loves A Story, Jorie Story, Keeper of Enchanted Rooms, Stories of Jorie, Tempest at Annabel's Lighthouse, The Bell Tolls at Traeger Hall 0 Comments
[Official Blurb] The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news. A post to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog. This is your news post, so personalize it! Include as much as you want or as little. Be creative, it can be a vlog or just a showcase of your goodies. Link up once a week or once a month, you decide. Book haul can include library books, yard sale finds, arcs and bought books.. share them!
- Enter your link on the post-
- Sundays beginning at 12:01 am (CST) (link will be open all week)
- Link back to this post or this blog
- Visit others who have linked up
- Read this week’s #TheSundayPost!
Jorie’s life behind the blog:
As some of you might already be aware of – I attempted to ‘return’ to blogging and engaging in socially bookish ways with everyone this past May, during #WyrdAndWonder. I made an attempt to hold the course on those goals – and yet, most of those ideas melted in the sweltering weather and never fully took grip onto my blog or social channels of interest. I did a bit on Insta and less on BlueSky and only managed to ink out a post here on my blog – at the very start of the event. What has been holding me back for a long time was a lot of emotional grieving after my father passed last July (2025).
I’ve never lost a parent and thereby, it was a wholly new experience for me. My emotions would strike out of the blue at work and the anguish of that happening was worse than what prompted it as I wasn’t always sure I could get a hold of my emotions whilst working. I had some hard-hitting days needless to say and not everyone at work sympathised with what I was going through. We had a lot of changing staff and so, the persons who knew me the years leading up to my father’s death were all gone and the newer hires didn’t have history with me or know the story either. I respected that of course, but at the same time, I think if I saw someone emotionally fragile and they said they were still coping with the death of their father, I think I would do more in that moment than my co-workers did for me. I found that a lot of people – especially over the last year who were in my life in one way or another, felt that you should reach a point where your ‘over it’ and that you don’t even bring it up anymore. That’s fair to a point but most of us need at least a year to fully grieve and to reconcile our emotions, our hearts and the memories of the person we’ve lost.
Once we hit the one-year mark, Mum and I both noticed that we were fairing far better than we had in the past seasons. It was almost as if we had transitioned through a veil of time where grief and light co-merge and the light overtakes the grief to where you’re not emotionally stuck in a vacuum of memories and anguish. At least that is what it felt like for us – a cloud had lifted and we felt lighter somehow. And that all happened around the anniversary of my father’s passing.
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Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
Posted Sunday, 25 October, 2026 by jorielov in #SpooktasticReads, Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blogosphere Events & Happenings, Bookish Memes, JLAS Update Post, Jorie Loves A Story, Stories of Jorie, The Sunday Post
Posted Saturday, 23 August, 2025 by jorielov Jorie Loves A Story, Jorie Story, Stories of Jorie 1 Comment
[Official Blurb] The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news. A post to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog. This is your news post, so personalize it! Include as much as you want or as little. Be creative, it can be a vlog or just a showcase of your goodies. Link up once a week or once a month, you decide. Book haul can include library books, yard sale finds, arcs and bought books.. share them!
- Enter your link on the post-
- Sundays beginning at 12:01 am (CST) (link will be open all week)
- Link back to this post or this blog
- Visit others who have linked up
- Read this week’s #TheSundayPost!
Jorie’s life behind the blog:
It has been three weeks now since I shared the news of my father’s passing. The wall of fatigue that has been hitting me in waves whilst I work has been quite intense, but I don’t have the ability to take any more time off from working. I told my night boss I’d be returning to full hours on the 1st of September as well – not because I’m suddenly ready to return to full-time hours but because it’s going to be a necessity. I’ve been trying to moonlight a bit to off-set the lost hours from the night job but it is either wicked good or a lower than hopeful income gap solution. Thereby, I sorted out I need to finish out August on reduced hours but return in September to being double-stacked five days a week.
I’ve also reconsidered getting promoted at my day job – part of my hesitation were the expectations of the new job title and position; as it moves me into management. However, I’ve been running shifts by myself as a lead three times now in the last few weeks and I must confess, I’m enjoying the new challenge of it. Plus, I’m getting good at reading my co-workers – sorting out how to play to their strengths, put them on the right tasks and jobs and manage our time wisely. We’re getting things done on time or early and that makes me happy. I am also feeling more comfortable in this new position I’ll be rising into as previously I wasn’t sure I was ready to tackle it. I know a lot of my reasons for fobbing it off was due to my Dad’s situation.
Even before his health started to decline this year, I felt that I couldn’t take-on more stress and responsibilities than I was already doing on the job. I’ve been doing manager work without the promotion for awhile and I respect that they trust me in that role but to shift into that role officially took me a lot longer to realise I can do it. Now that Dad’s passed on, my upper managers took stock and notice that I really do need to move up and take-on the role I hesitated to accept. I spoke with them about my concerns, and they reassured me that I can play to my strengths and only tackle what I can personally handle whilst delegating other things to my co-workers and co-managers. That felt like a weight lifted. I’m not sure how long it will take to transition into that new role and pay scale but if it happens before the end of the year, I’d feel blessed.
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Posted Saturday, 23 August, 2025 by jorielov in Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blogosphere Events & Happenings, Bookish Memes, JLAS Update Post, Jorie Loves A Story, Stories of Jorie, The Sunday Post
Posted Sunday, 10 August, 2025 by jorielov Jorie Loves A Story, Jorie Story, Stories of Jorie 3 Comments
[Official Blurb] The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news. A post to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog. This is your news post, so personalize it! Include as much as you want or as little. Be creative, it can be a vlog or just a showcase of your goodies. Link up once a week or once a month, you decide. Book haul can include library books, yard sale finds, arcs and bought books.. share them!
- Enter your link on the post-
- Sundays beginning at 12:01 am (CST) (link will be open all week)
- Link back to this post or this blog
- Visit others who have linked up
- Read this week’s #TheSundayPost!
Jorie’s life behind the blog:
Despite everything going on this Spring, I was still hopeful I could keep reading and keep blogging – as reading has always been able to renew my spirits. Especially if life feels like it is derailing a bit or getting overly stressful. Stories bring me a lot of joy to dissolve inside and find a respite from the afflictions of life. Spring felt different this year all the way round. From the quirky weather to the intensive pollen in the air outside. Not to mention the fact, Mum was boomeranging in and out of the ER like it was suddenly in fashion to know the ER staff by name. Allergy season took on new meaning when you have to defend how you’ve had asthma the whole of your life when your doctor thinks that it’s a new affliction and not an old one that has resurrected itself back into your life. I remember how fun that was for Mum to have to keep going to the ER in order for her primary doctor to acknowledge she was asthmatic. Oy.
By May, I felt we had turnt a corner, despite the fact Spring was also the season we thought we might be losing our time with Dad. He wasn’t doing too well and as the weeks passed, we were preparing ourselves for our final goodbyes as it felt like he might not survive the season. He rallied a bit and came through it despite the fact we still had our concerns about the rest of the year. May was also the month Mum had to have emergency surgery, and it took the rest of the month for her to recover from it. I was trying to focus on Wyrd And Wonder as a wicked good distraction as for a bit there it was a bit touch and go as they felt it would be routine surgery but when it took longer than expected we were all worried. Nurses, surgeon and daughter alike. The month slipped through my fingers and most of the posts I had drafted are still unpublished. I found a lot of wicked good authors who befit the Nautical Fantasy prompts we developed as a team behind Wyrd And Wonder, too. It was one of those enjoyable pursuits of hidden niches of Fantasy that I loved to undertake – despite the fact I didn’t get to properly finish the journey in May.
By June, Mum and I were settling into a regular routine of visiting with Dad whilst I was balancing a full work schedule until I realised I couldn’t continue working full-time at night during the Summer. The weather (ie. the intense heat and humidity) was affecting me something fierce this year and as I noticed my health and wellness declining, I decided to reduce my hours which my boss understood, and we left it open when I’d return to a full schedule as Summer can be a long-standing season here. It was a nice pattern of normalcy after a very difficult Spring.
All along, I was still reading – still working on reviews and attempting to post what I had been working on for Wyrd And Wonder. I was so positive about my progress into certain stories – most of them I received for review – that I felt I could definitely finish them by early June. The best part about life though is we can’t see too far into the future. We might feel blindsided by the way things happen in life, but it is better to greet life as it arrives than to have forewarning about certain things ahead of their occurrence. So, for me, when I was updating about my reading progress on certain stories, I truly was making progress and was hopeful to be able to share my thoughts about them even if a bit after the ending hours of May.
Until my father was hospitalised rather suddenly in the early days of June. It was just ahead of my birthday and I was already stressed at work as we were regularly short-staffed and/or having our shifts changed. I was going with it and pitch hitting as best I could but when Dad was rushed to the ER out of the clear blue, it threw us for a loop. I still remember the night we received the call – we weren’t in towne but we came back immediately and arrived shortly after Dad. It was one of those long nights in the ER and then finally upstairs in the ICU. I was calling out at work for the next day long before we spoke to his doctors as I knew I wasn’t leaving the hospital anytime soon that night. Read More
Posted Sunday, 10 August, 2025 by jorielov in Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blogosphere Events & Happenings, Bookish Memes, JLAS Update Post, Jorie Loves A Story, Stories of Jorie, The Sunday Post
Posted Tuesday, 8 April, 2025 by jorielov (Narrator) Patricia Santomasso, A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, A.Y. Chan, Alexis Kossiakoff, Anna J. Stewart, D.J. Williams, Danielle Thorne, Heaven's Edge, Jennifer Silverwood, Jorie Loves A Story, Jorie Story, Prison Break Hostage, S.D. Henke, Scott Forbes Crawford, T. Kingfisher, The Auctioneer, The Beekeeper Next Door, The Heart of the Uni-verse, The Legendary Mo Seto, The Phoenix and the Firebird 4 Comments
![End of the Year [2024] badge created by Jorie in Canva. Jorie Loves A Story badge created by Jorie in Canva as well.](https://i0.wp.com/jorielovesastory.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/73/2025/01/EndOfTheYear_2024.png?resize=426%2C596&ssl=1)
The Questions for the 2020 End of the Year Survey are posted by Jaime @ the Perpetual Page Turner, who created this survey as a personal reflection of her year of bookish wanderings and readings, and never thought it would turn into a book blogosphere yearly event! I am thankful she encourages us all to participate even though over the past five years I haven’t had the best track record of joining in on the community in which she’s curated to share a summation of our readerly lives.
NOTE: I participated in this Survey in (2015) and (2020). I seemed to have skipped over the years betwixt and between then and now. I have plans to fill in those gaps but that is for another day. I also couldn’t find any updates from Jaime on her blog past (2021) which is why I kept the questions I had from (2020). She continued to blog but apparently did not continue with the survey itself.
*Please be Advised:*
This past year I read a heap less books than in years past where I would read upwards of over 150 to 200+ books. I read far less than most who focus on reading 50 books every year too. And, yet this year I was quite proud of the stories I did read and the joys they gave me as a reader. If you count all the stories I partially read – the year-end total would be *40*.
For a girl balancing two jobs – one of which is 40+ hours a week and trying to find the hours outside of work to focus on something less stressful – I consider (2024) a success! Especially as by Summer, 2024 I finally wrangled my own style of joining #bookstagram despite trying to join the community there in Autumn of (2023).
All things considered; it was a wonderfully wicked bookish year!
Be sure to brew yourself a cuppa joy as you sit, read and ponder which of my #BestOf2024Reads need to seriously become added to your own #TBR!
If you’ve filled something out like this survey (OR this actual one!) or a different kind of post altogether to summerise your readerly life in (2024) – be sure to share your link to your post(s) in the *threads below this post so I can take a gander at which stories | authors | series | genres joyfully intrigued, you throughout 2024! As I would like to expand my own TBR with the stories you’ve read yourself which could be a wicked good fit for me.
I have severely edited this survey to better reflect my last year as a book blogger and as a reader. Thereby, this survey is far shorter than in the years I originally filled it out and has a special section to celebrate my 12th Year as a Book Blogger as that truly was a milestone moment for me as a book blogger who’s struggled over the last few years to maintain her readerly life and bookish life online.
REMEMBER: if a story wasn’t my cuppa it could be one better suited for you and vice versa if you had a story which you felt fell short of your own expectations and might resonate with me better. Reading is subjective to our individual experiences within the stories themselves, and all our reactions are valid and important as they are markers of our readerly lives.
Let’s break this down a bit, shall we?
You can use this as a ‘preview guide’ of how to use my Story Vault. <— fully updated!
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Posted Tuesday, 8 April, 2025 by jorielov in Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blogosphere Events & Happenings, End of the Year Survey, JLAS Update Post, Jorie Loves A Story
Posted Sunday, 20 October, 2024 by jorielov #SpooktasticReads, Jorie Loves A Story, Jorie Story, Stories of Jorie 4 Comments
[Official Blurb] The Sunday Post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news. A post to recap the past week, showcase books and things we have received and share news about what is coming up for the week on our blog. This is your news post, so personalize it! Include as much as you want or as little. Be creative, it can be a vlog or just a showcase of your goodies. Link up once a week or once a month, you decide. Book haul can include library books, yard sale finds, arcs and bought books…share them!
Enter your link on the post-
Sundays beginning at 12:01 am (CST) (link will be open all week)
Link back to this post or this blog
Visit others who have linked up
Read this week’s #TheSundayPost!
Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!
I didn’t think Autumn would ever arrive this year! :(
I had an inkling of hope Autumn was arriving when I caught a whisper of cooler winds and crisper weather was starting to become the new normal! It is such a blessing from the harsher wrath of Summer and for me, truly, when the Autumnal tides start to turn into my hours – I find myself blessedly happier for a season that invigorates my soul! It is such a calmer time of year.
In regards to my life behind the blog:
I will admit, the past several months turnt out to be on the harder side of the ledger for myself and my family. Between bouts of illness and injuries to a hard-won Summer all the way round – to a resurgence of my migraines and some dreadful weather occurrences – it feels more like I’ve run into Autumn without realising what became of Summer! Oyy.
My Dad had some rough patches himself – and that was a difficult moment of time for Mum and I, too. I’ve had some good visits with him which gave me glimpses of the Dad I know is still with us even though more times than not it is hard to see that side of him. He’s gone through so many changes these past two years he’s been in long term care. That’s still an adjustment I feel because even though we’ve become accustomed to where we are in life with him right now, it still is so very different than it was before and sometimes that seems harder somehow. Mostly I try to put those thoughts aside and just enjoy the moments I am with him. I am sure other families who have gone through this know what I’m referring too.
As a special treat to ourselves, we resumed NetFlix and started to settle into watching “Young Sheldon” which was one of the last series I watched with my Dad. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel revisiting it again as I haven’t watched it since he entered the hospital all those months ago now. It was a bit like how I wasn’t sure if I would ever finish the Jurassic Park franchise until a new friend encouraged me to do that and now I’m glad I had. It was emotional for me going through the Jurassic World films without Dad and even, seeing the finale where everything concluded – but in some respects, I felt he was still there with me seeing it all himself, too. It was one of those quirky film series we got into as a daugher and her father – seeing that conclude this year was one bittersweet memory for me.
And, how that I’ve gone through Series 1-6 of Sheldon, I have the same reaction as I had with Jurassic. Time shifts forward but sometimes the mind and heart shifts backwards. I’m glad Mum took a liking to Sheldon – we both can’t follow him into the main series it was spun-off of as neither of us likes the humour of the ‘other’ show but prefer this one instead. Uniquely Series 7 isn’t yet available to be seen on NetFlix (or anywhere else without paying for the season itself) so part of me questioned why I didn’t research that before we started watching the show. We’re on this cliffhanger of sorts right after the tornado took out MeMaw’s house and like Mum, I would love to know how the series concludes although spoiler alert, I already knew George Sr. would pass on. I’ve become attached to George Sr. and part of me isn’t quite ready to let him go.
Between both my jobs and the weather, the months seem to be passing me by a bit too much lately. It is hard to find stillness when time keeps moving forward at such a fast pace. I try to carve out small moments of downtime and enjoy the days off I receive because I do work two jobs five days a week which sometimes can take its toll too. I’ve wanted to focus on my knitting but have barely touched it since earlier in Spring or late Winter; hard to tell when I last worked on it really! I also wanted to start travelling again with Mum – small day trips which we tried to get underway between Spring and Summer but alas, all the time just seemed to evaporate, and we only made it twice to have time ‘away’.
Despite the chaos of the recent storms and weather patterns, we have been blessed with a return to Autumnal temperatures which is lifting my own spirits quite a heap! I can start to wear my long-sleeved shirts and I’m about to dive into bringing out my sweaters and pullovers, too! Won’t that be grand? It has taken forever for Summer to conclude this year and I’m personally thankful the clingy humidity might soon be a thing of the past. I’ve already started drinking more lattes but I need to resume drinking more hot tea especially to curb getting anymore seasonal illnesses.
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Posted Sunday, 20 October, 2024 by jorielov in Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blogosphere Events & Happenings, Bookish Memes, JLAS Update Post, Jorie Loves A Story, Reading Challenges, Stories of Jorie, The Sunday Post
