A Book A Week, 2015, nearing the end...

So at of the beginning of June I'd only read 18 books of my postulated 52 for the year. Not bad for most people, but well short of my goal. I determined to do better! Crack down  and make more time! But...but...knitting! Bird watching! Orchids! Cooking! Sleeping! Yeah, yeah, excuses.

Including graphic novels/collections like Saga 4 and Saga 5, Rat Queens 1 and 2, Sex Criminals 1 and Fun Home, I've managed to start & finish -- in some cases just finish -- an additional 14 books, making my total for 2015 a measly 32 so far, with only 6 weeks to go. I just finished Tananarive Due's My Soul to Keep, not as quick a read as I first thought. I finished it thanks to a long bus ride midweek, despite also having a lot of seasonal knitting to do and a scarf pattern to write.

Finishing The Story of Spanish and The Emperor of All Maladies, which I read a few pages at a time for months and months, also count for 2015. I also finally finished Moonwise, both delightful and maddening; it went easier when we were staying in the country for a few days, where the setting of the book blended better with my mindset. Funny how that matters more for some books than others.

Reading Jazz Singing in bits and pieces as well -- it's history blended with Will Friedwald's opinions, in sometimes weird ways, but overall I'm glad I grabbed the book from a thrift store bin on impulse. It's hard to learn about the history of jazz from just liner notes and encyclopedia entries, and being partial to vocals I'm enjoying learning the stories of the men and women who shaped the genre. Good discography recommendations above all.

Hild and The Martian were both amazing, in very different ways. I picked up a copy of Hild just a week before we went to Readercon, with author Nicola Griffith as Guest of Honor. I wished I'd read it sooner!!!! so I could have appreciated her even more. Many have remarked on the book's power to transport you to another time and place in ways most fantasy authors wish they could, even though there really isn't any fantasy going on. I entirely agree. The Martian is about as different from Hild as two books could possibly be, but has a similar power to transport you to another place, inside another mind. I loved both books a lot. And I'm very happy Griffith is writing a sequel!

Three more of the best were "more of the same" books: The Magician's Land (#3 of that series), Last First Snow (#4 of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence) and Ancillary Mercy (#3 of Ann Leckie's deservedly highly-praised series). I dearly love a good trilogy, a good quadro-trilogy, a good long series of stories sharing characters and universe. (Seeing the news on Gladstone's blog that he intends a total of 10-12 Craft books made me squeal with unholy glee.) I also finally read Scalzi's Old Man's War, but I probably won't read the rest of that series anytime soon.

I'm a little bit awed by authors who manage to world-build within the confines of a single story or novel and then -- just walk away. How do they do that?? How do their brains work so differently from mine and George R.R. Martin's and Robert Jordan's and Anne McCaffrey's???

Working hard to finish Roboteer by my friend Alex Lamb, this is his debut novel and it ROCKS. Hard SF with great characters and riveting action. I'll be posting reviews!

Seven for a Secret: My book, it is ALIVE!

Seven for a Secret on Amazon Kindle.

Seven for a Secret on Apple's iBooks.

Seven for a Secret on Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Seven for a Secret on Kobo.

Seven for a Secret on Scrib'd.

Seven for a Secret on Inktera/Page Foundry.

Thanks to the miracles of our modern digital age, I was able to get my book published to several major ebook markets in just one evening! Still waiting for notifications from a couple. But this is pretty cool, I have to say. I was able to check the Amazon Australia site and provide a link to a friend down there. Amazing. Love it!

And, the book is also on Goodreads already, which totally surprised me. I intend to find out which market caused the entry to be generated.

Now I have to catch up posting reviews of my friends' books on Amazon and Goodreads! And return to my read-one-book-a-week attempt for the rest of the year. I was doing OK with that until I hit a few big ones...looking at my to-read pile of actual books, and the huge Kindle queue, I think I'll try to get to the shorter ones first!

I'm About to Commit Novel: SEVEN for a SECRET

SO this is the saga of my fantasy novel "Seven for a Secret":

Many years ago, I had a vague idea for a novel and brought a few random chapters of absolute crap to my writing group. Then about 9 years ago the whole idea suddenly clicked, and most of those chapters ended up in the shredder but a few scenes stayed.

I started with an idea for a slightly magical kid in Northern England in the 60s who fell in love with blues music and went on to become a rock star. Big twist, he'd discover hidden magic talents along the way. MEH. The click I needed was to have the kid always know he was magical. In fact, he's part of a growing tribe of born witches living under everyone's radar, but becoming bolder now that society is more tolerant of those claiming magical abilities. He was born already walking a hero's journey, knowing he's special, but he's pretty sure it's a mistake...pretty sure the daring feat he's born to achieve is hardly worth achieving. Other witches beg to differ. Which of them are right?

(Yes, the Chosen One kind of story is overdone and lame, but frankly I hate the "ordinary person suddenly sprouts magic and saves the world" kind of story too. In myth, the hero is always a demigod with the gods stacked against him. So how badly can a demigod mess up? See Jason & Medea, for starters. Yes, it is popular belief that ordinary people can perform magic, even if it's just casting an evil eye from jealousy. We all ask water spirits for wishes in return for coins -- that's simple divine intercession on our behalf, similar to prayer. Divination by tarot cards, love charms with herbs and candles, they're all part of popular belief that pretty much anyone can learn magic spells if they just try hard enough. In my story, In these stories that simply isn't true. I have no opinion whether it's true in our reality.)

Eventually the story arc broadened out into 4 books. I kept adding story complications, and my reallllllllly long "teen witch blues saga" grew backwards into Gerry's traumatic childhood.

I've been shopping book 1 to agents and publishers for several years now -- alas I now realize my early pitches were just terrible, and I do still have some agent queries out there and have more to send. But at my advanced age for a never-published author, I really have nothing to lose by just getting the damn book OUT THERE so I can STOP FIDDLING WITH IT and move on and finish books 2, 3 and 4, most of which are written. So doing this is both cathartic and practical! So there.

I created my own cover for the darn thing, too.

Catasetum Karen Armstrong FLOWERS YAY OMG!!

Fred Clarke of Sunset Valley Orchids rules the orchid universe. Well, at least parts of it. The Catasetum part, certainly. He has an eye for parent plants and a knack for making incredible crosses that are new things to the eyes of the world. After all, he made an orchid so very near black -- Fredclarkeara After Dark -- that digital cameras have a hard time revealing details and many of the images are just sort of blobby. (Really good photographers are able to overcome this challenge. Not so most of us.)

I've had a couple of Catasetums for years now, and itched for another from SVO. One of Fred's pioneering efforts is to create "mini" hybrids in this group, using species known to stay small and keep their offspring small as well. Well, that fits my plans, and my light garden, mighty well! So when Fred was speaking in New Jersey last year, a friend picked out a near-blooming-size Catasetum Karen Armstrong for me. It seemed pretty much ideal for my light garden conditions based on its parentage. I took good care of the plant through its brief dormancy, and was rewarded with an enormous new growth. And was further rewarded with a spike!

Catasetum Karen Armstrong is the hybrid of Ctsm. Susan Fuchs (expansum x Orchidglade) and Ctsm. denticulatum, so it combines "old style" mega-Catasetums with the species most notably being used to create the "mini" Catasetum hybrids. CKA is a great building block parent, but it's also a great plant in its own right. I wuv it. Trouble is now I want more...

No Man on Earth, by Walter Moudy

Yet another vintage SF paperback from our groaning bookshelves. It was published in 1964, though, so I'm OLDER than this book, and I do rather not enjoy the idea of being vintage. Still. It clearly belongs to another era of publishing, of slender action-packed novels with somewhat generic covers that looked a bit slapdash but were certainly colorful.

"A Science Fiction novel of a strange quest in interstellar space."

"Thad Stone was like no other man on Earth. Born with superhuman powers, he knew from his earliest days that he had been sired by no mortal man...In the world of 2081, Thad sets out to find his father -- a search that carries him into the farthest reaches of interstellar space. The search is long and at its end Thad discovers just why he had been given his superhuman powers..."

The back cover copy doesn't quite do it justice. A nifty story, well written. Lots of interesting touches for the space travel and confrontations.

This was Moudy's only novel, he also wrote a few short stories, and passed away in 1973.

In case you're interested, it's in very good condition, shows shelfwear, otherwise clean, binding tight, no loose pages. Berkley Medallion paperback #F987, 50 cents. 176 pages.

Sundog, by B.N. Ball

Been a while since I visited our VAST collection of (mostly) inherited vintage science fiction novels. While I was happy to see many of them find new homes via eBay, the majority still reside with us. Slowly but slowly we're working our way through them, I love the covers, and the breathless cover copy. This guy's head looks all xplody, but maybe in a good way?

This1969 paperback from Avon was 1st American printing, Prev. 1965 British publication.

The front says: "A power from outside our universe had imprisoned mankind in the solar system -- until one man dared to confront the captors."
The back cover says: "An unthinkably vast, invisible, and absolutely impenetrable screen imprisoned man within the solar system. Cut off from the stars, men applied their ingenuity to themselves, setting up a world of total control -- where even dreams were programmed."

Hm, that sounds a lot like a very popular current SF novel that's got a lot of attention!

This was Brian N. Ball's first novel. He's since produced a number of sf series and standalone novels, even including a couple of Space:1999 novels.

A Book A Week, 2015 So Far

Last August I decided to Get Serious about the ridiculous To Read pile of books in our house. By reading them. Crazy, I know, but I was determined. And Goodreads made it easy to log all those books and put them in order. But it also made it easy to keep adding new books to the "want to read" list...things from hot-topic Facebook and Twitter posts about the world of authors beyond cis white guys* (of which there are MANY) (many non-cis, non-white, non-guys that is), new books by authors I already love, older books I apparently overlooked. I read mostly science fiction and fantasy right now, with a few scoops of music memoirs, history, and natural history/science. 

August 2014: Since I've got 39 books in my To-Read section on Goodreads, and lots more than that just sitting on the actual shelves of the actual house -- and a few on my Kindle-for-Android app for good measure -- this ought to be easy. Especially since most of them aren't Huge Thick Weighty Tomes, but a bunch of reasonable length novels. (Aside from Vernor Vinge's "Children of the Sky" and the final 6 books of Neal Stephensons "System of the World", that is.)

Those last 22 weeks of 2014, I read 17 new books of varying lengths. A couple were essay format ("The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs and Rock 'N' Roll") and so made good um, smallest room reading over the course of weeks. I finally discovered the amazing work of Graham Joyce, Max Gladstone and Hannu Rajaniemi; was pleasantly surprised by JK Rowling's "The Casual Vacancy"; was amused by my first Georgette Heyer; and rather disappointed in a few things too. (That will be a future post.)

So here is the midpoint of 2015, and I still haven't tackled "Children of the Sky" but I have finished 18 other books, including both of Ann Leckie's existing Imperial Radch novels, more Graham Joyce, and the curious debut from Ian Tregillis. I really enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death? and its unsettling mix of tech and magic. I thought Throne of the Crescent Moon was a good first novel in a grand tradition of fantasy sword-and-sorcery, I quite liked The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson, and its blunt/elegant imagining of the mind of a creature of myth. The Goblin Emperor is on the Hugo ballot, and while it's a lovely story of a young man rising to an occasion and taking the world on his shoulders, the fantasy element just isn't compelling, or really even necessary. 

I'm also keeping up with my non-fiction list, reading The History of Spanish and, when that's done, The HIstory of French. There's also a lot more music books on the shelf. I finally finished Joe Boyd's "White Bicycles" and am ready to move on to a few more stories of 60's art. There's also more Amy Stewart books about bugs and flowers. They're fun and easy to grab onto.

I'm pleased to still be close to the desired pace. Especially since the Goodreads To-Read list is now over 80 books. And those are just the ones I've remembered to list. 

NOTE: In modern America we now live in an age where ALL THE BOOKS can at least be mentioned and seen, even if far too few of the people who still read books of any kind feel the urge to find and read more than a few of them. We are finally seeing more English translations of books from authors writing in languages other than English, and not just Tolstoy and Dumas and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco. Now we have translated Chinese SF like "The Three-Body Problem" available, and more to come. We have more authors than ever who are writing from alternative or minority points of view, whether of culture, language or gender: Kazuo Ishiguro, Samuel Delany, Geoff Ryman, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Lord, Kij Johnson...all these authors are pretty accessible, and a good place to start.