My September 2025 Reads — A Book Review — Lauren M Hayes

Labor Day, sweater weather, getting darker earlier. In other words, September! Let’s recap what I did last month.

My daughter celebrated a birthday, and we had a little birthday party for her. We held it outside at a ziplining park, and it rained. 🙁 At least it waited until the end of the party to do so. I had just gotten my hair done too. Double 🙁 Tee-hee!

What else? I got my flu shot, my Covid shot and then promptly got Covid for the very first time. It’s been a month. I want to point out that getting the Covid shot DID NOT give me Covid. It was just an unfortunate coincidence.

I finished my first draft of my vampire book! Yay! It’s 46 chapters in all. I’m re-reading all of it and editing it now. It sits at roughly 147,000 words, and for my genre, it needs to be about 100,000 words if I want to go the traditional publishing route. So I’m working on trimming the fat and tightening dialogue and prose.

As always, if you’re interested in reading my first novel, The Secrets We Keep, it’s available to read here. This book has cheating themes and plenty of spice for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

What else did I do? Oh right! I did do a lot of reading. I read 16 books, one of which I DNF’d ( Did Not Finish), four of which are novellas, and one of…