As the narrator in your story, whether first or third person, you are in charge of reality and must be clear in its portrayal. State the facts; don’t guess what they are. Avoid overuse of terms like “apparently,” “it seemed,” “it appeared,” and so on.
Your POV character needs to state exactly what others are thinking and feeling at times. They are going to be more discerning than in real life. The reader needs to be clear about what is going on in the moment.
Stats:
Total New Books: 94
Total Including Rereads: 104
Average Rating: 3.8
Pages Read: 36,283
Audiobooks: 30
Ebooks: 12
Science Fiction and Fantasy: 50
Nonfiction: 20
Longest Book: Gone with the Wind (1,037 pages)
Runners-up: The Way of Kings (1,007), The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn (784)
Favorite Books:
I absolutely adored these books:
Home Before Dark (Riley Sager)
Woven (Bree Moore)
The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn (Tyler Whitesides)
The Wendy (Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown)
Honorable Mentions:
These were awesome, too:
The Devil Aspect (Craig Russell)
Age of Empyre (Michael J. Sullivan)
Starsight (Brandon Sanderson)
The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison)
Active Memory (Dan Wells)
Re-Reads:
I re-read some favorites, including The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson), The Amulet of Samarkand (Jonathan Stroud), and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (J. K. Rowling).
Top Nonfiction:
United States of Socialism: Who’s Behind It. Why It’s Evil. How to Stop It. (Dinesh D’Souza)
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (Bjørn Lomborg)
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (Garrett M. Graff)
Best Indie/Small Press Books:
Strangers (Michaelbrent Collings)
Woven (Bree Moore)
The Wendy (Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown)
Author Friends:
Some of my writing group friends have books out, and I made an effort to read more of them this year. These are the ones I got to, and they’re good:
Shatter (Nikki Trionfo)
Blood Creek Witch (Jay Barnson)
Crystal King (John Olsen)
Stonebearer’s Betrayal (Jodi Milner)
Series Progress:
I also tried to focus on sequels and was able to finish these series:
Beyonders (Brandon Mull)
Mirador (Dan Wells)
Magnus Chase (Rick Riordan)
Harry Dresden (Jim Butcher)
The Others (Anne Bishop)
Themis Files (Sylvain Neuvel)
I made small progress in these series:
Heroes of Olympus (Rick Riordan)
Discworld (Terry Pratchett)
The Queen’s Thief (Megan Whalen Turner)
The Guide and the Sword (Jared Garrett)
Chaos Walking (Patrick Ness)
Old Man’s War (John Scalzi)
Books I Edited:
These are books I did various kinds of editing for:
Age of Empyre by Michael J. Sullivan (beta read, gamma read/proofread)
Fly With Me by Julie Hahn (content, copy edit)
The Perfect Outcast by Melissa Ott Hansen (content, copy edit)
In the Wake of Captain Lord: A Tony Flaner Mystery by Johnny Worthen (copy edit)
Tips and Tricks for ADHD Writers by Robin Glassey (copy edit)
Spooked by a Suspicion by Risa Nyman (content, copy edit)
Nolyn by Michael J. Sullivan (beta read)
Least Favorite Books:
These were two-star books that I read for challenges:
Pompeii (Robert Harris)
A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (Ray Bradbury)
A-Z Challenge:
Going by author last names, I got all the alphabet except I, J, Q, R, U, V, W and Z. If I’m allowed to count first names as well, then I was only missing Q, U, and X. Authors with M last names topped the list at 19 books. S authors were close behind with 18.
☆☆☆☆☆
Science Fiction
These books are about time travel plus Dungeons and Dragons. It doesn’t get nerdier than that. The three short books are fast-paced and jam-packed.
I was intrigued right from the beginning all through to the end. It was a thoroughly enjoyable adventure. I was hoping for more at the end, but then I found out there will be a sequel.
The book is set in Britain and written with British punctuation and spelling with a little American style. It’s an odd combination. Some occasional strong language.
Nick is at Cambridge University at 16 and finds the laws of physics are kind of quirky around him. For instance, he keeps rolling 1s in D&D.
He still has to invent time travel and fight cancer, though. Okay, it’s pretty nerdy.
The D&D scenes were very interesting; that’s skilled writing to accomplish that. I loved how it paralleled real life. The ending was really exciting. All aspects of the story were just great: characters, setting, pacing, plot. The story was so immersive. (The descriptions of Nick feeling sick were so visceral; it reminded me of all the times I was throwing up in public from a migraine attack.)
It was so good: funny, suspenseful, heartbreaking; perfect pacing and great storytelling. I seriously don’t have anything to criticize.
Mother had very new-fangled ideas about nutrition and refused to buy me Golden Nuggets, on the grounds that they were 96 per cent sugar. Which, oddly, was my main argument in favour of them. Instead she bought joyless boxes of Shredded Wheat, the contents of which I conducted mechanical stress tests on by loading them with as much sugar as they could bear. “Do leave some milk in the bottle, dear!” Mother admonished as I attempted to drown the evidence.
There is an unwritten rule of tube travel, understood instinctively by every Londoner from young schoolboy to doddering ancient. You pretend it’s not happening. You pretend that half a dozen strangers are not squeezing against you to a degree that is usually reserved for orgies. You pretend that your nose is not inches from the unwashed armpit of a beefy man, that a young woman’s hair is not tickling your face, that you did not step on that person’s foot.
This final book covers several time periods. First, Nick and the gang are in 1992, when time travel is getting under way as a feasible technology. In 2011, Nick seems himself turn into Demus and has to face the fate waiting for him in 1986. And then ... Read and find out. There is a lot of suspense and humor and surprises and a cool D&D game. Really, this series is just about perfect.
I also love how time travel works in the series. In most stories, you vanish from one time and show up in another. But I’ve always believed that you wouldn’t just disappear from space when traveling through time. We naturally travel through time and space as it is. We have more control over our movement through space. So if you could have more control over moving through time, you’d have less control over movement through space but never disappear from either. Lawrence has had this same thought, and I really appreciate it.
I wanted that back. I wanted those days back. And even though I was standing in them, letting them flow by me hour after hour, I knew that could never happen. We get one shot. However you play it out. Fast forward it, rewind, it’s still the same: a single shot.
The universe doesn’t care about time. We care about time. Because we remember.
This set of homophone pairs often leaves out pique, which often gets spelled like one of the others.
Peek: to look while trying not to be seen
Peak: the top (of a mountain or career, for instance)
Pique: to stir, usually in “pique my interest.”
Trick to Remember:
Peek has two eyes to see with.
Peak is first or best, like the letter A.
Pique is to get you interested in something quirky.
Science Fiction — Science Fantasy — Urban Fantasy
This has Sanderson’s fingerprints on it but not his soul. The original Reckoners series is far superior. This book has some really good moments and others that are just off.
The story takes place in Texas. Lux is a floating city in the sky (because why not) that used to be Sugarland. Four Epics run it: Lifeforce, Languish, Stormcloud, and Wingflair. Lifeforce makes everybody there immortal, Wingflair keeps in floating, Stormcloud makes the atmosphere livable, and Languish can only dampen others’ powers. A small group of Reckoners is determined to take them down. But compared to a lot of other cities, Lux really isn’t THAT bad of a place.
I wasn’t crazy about most of the characters. They didn’t feel fully developed. They were more tropes than people, and if any of them died, I wouldn’t or didn’t care. It switches from first person with Jax to third person with other characters, including Epics. Languish was probably the most interesting to me.
So far this is available only on Audible. The narrator is pretty good except when doing women’s voices. He makes their voices super nasally, and I swear Paige’s voice changes half-way through. This is a result of trying too hard to represent the opposite gender. Dude, just talk.
The pacing is kind of all over the place. Some scenes are very drawn out; others are rushed. We spend so much time at the beginning with Jax’s childhood training that by the time he was ready to confront Epics, it felt like the book was about to be over. There are some serious clichés in here, too, like the fridging of Jax’s brother.
I was confused on a few things. I wasn’t sure why Lux had to be in the air. I guess to keep moving so they could pillage everywhere on the ground? It seemed like a lot of effort for a small reward. And when the city still floats even any Epics using powers. In the original series, it was stated that Epics could only be killed by their personal weaknesses, but here they’re saying if you can blow them up, that’s just as good.
I had a lot of issues with the science. It was wrong so often! I’ll accept mumbo jumbo for sci fi stuff, but basic science has to be right. I mean, this is stuff that is common knowledge. Here are three things that irked me: (These are minor spoilers.)
1. Objects fall at the same rate (barring air friction): In the book, the city falls a few feet, so all the objects also fall. In the book, the heavier, bottom objects fall faster than the lighter objects on top of them. This is wrong. I tried it at home just to be sure. (See here for the math behind it.)
2. You have to draw blood from a vein: In the book, characters just stick a syringe anywhere in the skin and suck blood like magic. No tourniquet, no special needles, nothing. You might suck up a drop of blood this way, but it won’t be good for anything.
3. Computer tech is very specialized: In the book, we have the All-Knowing Hacker/Tech Dude. He is good at everything to do with computers. No area is beyond his knowledge. This is impossible and completely unrealistic. It’s like expecting a concert violinist to also be an expert in all the other instruments, or a star football player to also be a star baseball, basketball, and hockey player.
At the beginning of your story, your characters may be reacting to a bunch of stuff happening to them: They lost their job, their house got bombed, they were wrongfully jailed, aliens abducted them, whatever. You just throw stuff at them and watch them struggle. But after the first half, your main characters need to do more than react to weird stuff. They need to take charge of their lives and stop reacting. This makes the story much more interesting.
Look at Star Wars with Luke: First he’s just reacting as he works on his farm with new droids. Then he makes a decision to go to Alderaan. He’s more proactive now but still inexperienced. At the end, he joins the X-Wing fighters to assault the Death Star—a very proactive decision. The story is much more satisfying because of it.
A plot in which the characters merely react doesn’t make a great story, and it doesn’t create character development. So if you find yourself floundering in the middle of the story, let your characters take charge of their situation. You can still throw stuff at them, but they should start taking back control.
