State of the Book Archives - Page 2 of 2

I’m thinking I should post more often here, and I hope that I actually will. Apart from my bad book reviews (I am almost finished writing „what I read in December“ but I will have to wait until the end of December to finish it, of course) I was thinking you might be interested in how my writing is doing. Since this is my writing blog.

Now I won’t pester you with long accounts of my struggle to work on my writing. Yes, I do tend to procrastinate, yes, my life is busy enough without trying to cram creative work in there but I don’t want to write a blog about my excuses for not writing.

Currently I am working on my contemporary fantasy series. I am a little reluctant to tell you all about the premise and story yet because I feel like I should have it reasonably close to finished before doing that. I’m afraid I might jinx it.

I can tell you that the series is called „Magically Real“ for now, the protagonist is a female jazz pianist, and the thing has witches, vampires, magic, and a lot of music in it.

So far I have three books in various stages. The first one is in revised first draft, and I’m hoping to revise that once again soon. The second is in rough draft, and I’m planning to start revising that starting in January, and the third one is what I am planning right now.

I am really bad at planning stories, I used to always just start writing but then I found that that makes the process of revision much harder, and so I have become a convert to the planning. Only I still need more practice doing that.

I would really want to have all three ready for publication some time next year, I’ll keep you posted about progress.

So I used to put a list out every year with all the books I had read the year before. Over time these lists grew longer and longer because at one point I had decided I wanted to read more actual books than just things on the internet.

I still aim to read the internet empty on a regular basis but I have also gone back to old book-reading habits.

I read a bit every morning, sometimes before getting up, always around and during breakfast, and always before I go to sleep at night, and at any point in between when I find myself with some time on my hands. I read when riding trains, and when knitting, and always a minute here and there.

And while that is a very good thing for me because I love reading, and reading more is a real pleasure putting out a list of 137 titles without comment doesn’t really help anyone. I guess the only person in the world who looks at this is my old friend Winterkatze who loves reading and books maybe more than me, and who is always looking for nice new books to recommend to me. Which I appreciate very much. But all in all the list is too long. And I didn’t want to start writing in-depth reviews of the books I read either, and so I had the idea – this morning – that making a list of books I read each month might be a great thing. And I would do it here on my writing-related site.

Because right now I don’t have a book out yet, and so this here blog has been sitting unused and lonely which is sad.

So there will be a monthly list of books I read here every month, and the occasional post about other stuff concerning writing and reading starting now.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.