We’re almost a week into February, but I’ve been having a pretty productive reading year, so I’m going to start doing monthly roundups of what I read during the month. Let’s Go!

The first book I finished in January was Smokejumper: A Memoir of One of America’s Most Select Airborne Firefighters by Jason A Ramos.

This was a fascinating glimpse into the training of elite firefighters, the ones who jump from helicopters into difficult terrain.

I’m from California, so wildfires are not foreign territory to me – I remember driving by literal camps full of firefighters from all over the state fighting the fires in the hills within view of our house growing up. This was particularly interesting for me because it mentioned fires I remember hearing about in the news.

The next book was Network Effect by Martha Wells.

I fell far down Murderbot rabbit hole towards the end of last year, and Network Effect was just the next rung in that ladder. I do wonder if listening to these on audio created a different experience for me than reading them would have, but I’m not sorry for it. I love to see the expanding of Murderbot’s emotional and social interactions.

This one deals with a lot of changes and ups and downs for the character, and I don’t want to be spoilery to anyone who hasn’t read these yet, but it is such a worthwhile train to get on.

The third book I finished was The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels by India Holton.

I have been wanting to read this for a while and some reviews complain that it is a little too far outside the realm of believability, but my dear, that is what makes it fun. This is a play on Victorian ladies’ societies, but this particular society is for lady pirates – with flying houses, to boot. They use their flying houses to commit all manner of dastardly deeds such as assassination attempts, thefts, and even chasing obnoxious children down the street – but all while following proper decorum.

The whole thing was delightfully bonkers, and the rogue LI was a lot of fun.

Next was Maya and the Rising Dark by Rena Barron.

By chance, I read this only a few weeks after having read Susan Cooper’s classic The Dark is Rising and it was interesting to have those experiences so close to each other. Maya and the Rising Dark is about a girl whose father has gone missing, and to her surprise she learns that he and also MANY of the adults in her neighborhood are secretly gods who defend against the dark.

I think my favorite thing about this story was the way that it encapsulated the feeling of neighborhood folk who are all in each other’s business. And more than that, it hinted in a fun way about how everyone you meet or know casually has a sort of secret life that you know nothing about.

I almost don’t know how to talk about She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan. This book is exceptional. It tiptoes on horror and supernatural themes in a way that feels very natural, especially if you are familiar with Asian narratives and spectres. It follows the life of a young peasant girl expected to be nothing, who steals the fate of her brother who was promised greatness, but dies, as she sees it, without even fighting to live.

I can’t say this one doesn’t hurt a bit, because it does. There are acts of pure ruthlessness and one in particular that feels hard to come back from. But it has such lovely quiet moments, too, and there’s a real elegance to the progression of the rivalry between the dichotomous characters who are both outside of gender norms.

Next was The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson. Clearly I have been sleeping on Jackson’s work. This and She Who Became the Sun were both part of a 12 books recommended by 12 friends challenge that I’m doing for the year, and I hadn’t heard of this at all when I asked for recommendations, but I’m glad this came to me. I have never read Carrie, or seen much of the movie, but I think it’s well-enough understood that I had a feeling of what I was getting into: a retelling of Carrie that coincides with a Southern town’s first integrated prom night.

The word I want to use to describe this book is: deft. It juggles race relations, the different ways a parent’s beliefs and actions reflect on and affect their children, the desperation of trying to change a situation that feels outside of your control, and struggling to define yourself when others are so willing to do it for you, all while making this less about blame and more about the things that lead people to make the choices they make. It was really well done.

The last book I finished was a reread (relisten?) to Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor. I’m discovering that as I get older that I often need a bedtime story… and for maximum effect for me (i.e. so I don’t have to worry about if I’m missing anything too much when I fall asleep) I have been relistening to old favorites, and I debated including it on here at all, since it’s an older reread, but I thought it worthwhile to mention that I seem to have particularly vivid and interesting dreams when I fall asleep listening to lush fantasy rather than my own anxiety-spun thoughts.

This has been a chock-full reading year so far. These are all audio but I’ve been working on a few in hand, too. Those do tend to take me longer, and I’m trying to lessen my dependence on audio to a degree, but it’s so useful when you can do more than one thing at once. What have you all been reading?

I have been knitting away on this little cowl for weeks now. It’s been a learning experience, both in double-knitting (those vertical grey stripes on the bottom half) and in fair-isle stranded knitting (the colorwork on top). This is actually a double-sided cowl, so when I’m done with the pattern the striped bit will flip up and be the inside of the cowl. It’s merino stranded with mohair and I am v. v. excited about wearing it, so while I am a very slow stranded knitter, I’m hoping to get this finished while it’s still cool enough to wear it.

And there’s that word, hope.

Really, this cowl represents so much of my current feelings. A wish for myself and others to stay safe. Looking for bright in the darkness. And, so much hope.

Wednesday was… a lot. I was working from home that day so I was able to listen to (not so much watch) the Inaugural proceedings, and while I don’t feel like we’re out of the woods yet (obviously there is still so much work to do! – I mean I work in healthcare, I. Know. This.) I have so much hope that we can kick hatred back into the smallest of shadows and bring on a brighter and better tomorrow. I know I am not the only one to say this, but Amanda Gorman’s reading said this better than I ever could.

This young lady. When I was 22 I was invited by a professor and former Santa Barbara city Poet Laureate to read at a poetry night at a museum and I thought THAT was big (it was for me, and Barry Spacks believing in me was huge). (I promise I’ll keep writing poems, Barry.) But Amanda Gorman is on another plane altogether, and honestly it thrills me to see such a vibrant, talented young woman be called the nation’s first Youth Poet Laureate.

Someone on MSNBC said that it felt as if it’s been a battle between Old America and New America and that Amanda’s reading was like a declaration that a new, more inclusive America had won. I hope so. I am hoping that Biden’s long experience, bipartisan respect, and reliance on experts (experts, everywhere!) can bring us forward to where the U.S. really ought to be in terms of innovation, equalilty, and infrastructure. Not to mention finally dealing with the pandemic (epidemic, as it should rightly be called now) in a responsible way.

I have hope. I have hope.

2020 was a hard reading year for many people. For me, though, the only thing keeping me sane was audiobooks. I devoured audiobooks this year. Many, I’ll admit, rereads of things I knew felt like magic to me, like Maggie Steifvater’s Raven Cycle, or Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. I also returned to other forms of comfort, like Percy Jackson and a reread of The Hunger Games as narrated by the incredibly talented Tatiana Maslany.

2020 was also the year I finally finished The Wheel of Time. It isn’t and never will be a favorite of mine, but Brandon Sanderson ended it well, and that’s what I was hoping for. My favorite new reads of the year were the first book I finished, The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis, Darius the Great is Not Okay/Deserves Better by Adib Khorram, which both made me sob like a baby, and the hilarious, insane trip that is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It was also the first time I read Jurassic Park and The Lost World, or any Crichton at all, to be honest.

This was a really great year for reading for me, but I’m grateful I’m a person who can listen to audiobooks, because while this is the most books I managed in a year almost ever (53), it also would have been utterly impossible without audiobooks, as the only one I managed all the way through in book-form was Maggie Stiefvater’s Call Down the Hawk, and even that took me ages.

One of the things that has been keeping me sane through the pandemic has been keeping my hands busy, and a lot of that has been knitting.

This particular piece is part of a mystery knit-along that has been over for more than a month now, but I’m slow so I keep moving along. It’s helpful for me to have a tangible thing I’m working on while I’m writing, something to keep me focused and keep my brain quiet so I can untangle story plots.

Have you been working on anything creative during the pandemic?

But 2017 has started, for me, with clearer and stronger intent than any year before. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but for the first time in a long time I feel energized and ready to do it. More than that, I can’t wait do do it.

I’m not expecting this year to be an easy one, by any means, but I’m going to make it a joyful one. I’m going to spend it being more of what I want to be and less of what I don’t want to be. I’m going to get off my phone, go back to using the internet as a tool rather than as a numbing device, and finally stop making excuses for my writing.

It’s taken me a lot of growth to get to this point, to go from wanting to being ready and willing to be genuinely myself and take hold of my power. To decide to be accountable for each and every day. That’s what I want this year to be. That’s how it is going to be.

I feel like last year was the recoil before the pitch. There’s going to be a lot of forward-movement from here on out.

I thought I would take a quick moment here, though, to post a couple of the songs that have been fueling this editing session. 

Rhodes – Breathe

Tinderbox – Broken Trees

There are other songs that I’ve been listening to, but these are two especially strong ones. They are just the perfect mood for my WIP and everything I want to capture in my story. 

What have you been listening to lately?

But this story would not let me go. Even when I finished it and I knew, and I mean KNEW that it wasn’t ready. That it was NOT in a place that I could send it out to the world and give it the chance it needed. But I also didn’t know, at the time, what it needed. So I wrote some other stuff and tore my hair out a bit and worked and relaxed and didn’t look at it much. Finally with gentle nudging from my CP and not-so-gentle nudging from my husband (let’s face it, I needed it at that point!) I started working in earnest on the rewrite. I sort of knew what needed to happen, but it started slow.

So I did the thing I like to do to keep my creativity fresh… I made things. Other things. Things that have very little to do with words and writing (though not nothing, all the time).

Here are a few examples of some things I’ve been making/indulging in the last few weeks:

This is, clockwise:

1) yarn for a new yarnie project—I’m going to be making this Abalone vest, all goes well… I usually knit shawls and hats, so….,

2) I wrapped a new pair of headphones with embroidery floss on account of I thought it would be pretty and I often break my headphones at work and am sort of hoping this will provide extra protection, though I don’t really know that it will. Mostly, I thought it would be pretty.

3) Really  all this is is a rub-on decal that I put on my book journal—where I write notes to myself about whatever I’m reading while I’m reading. It’s not much, but it made me love the simple plain old thing much more. I’ve had the journal for years and finally used it for this because I was never interested in using it for actual journaling purposes. Oh what a difference a little bit of pretty makes! I prettied the title page a bit, too… Oh I just had a lot of fun with it.

4) A year or two ago I bought a bag of floof scraps (read: roving, AKA fiber AKA what yarn is made up of) and I’ve decided to lay it out in somewhat of a gradient and just spin it all up into one long yarn that may or may not all make sense together. We’ll see.

And as I was doing all of this… along with another top secret project for my mom and one or two other things… I’ve kind of solved my stump over what needs to happen to make my manuscript sale-able. Sellable? WORTHY OF SALES.

Something worth buying, anyhow. Something cinematic and poignant and full of grim justice to go along with the pretty, pretty I had before.

Even The Mr agrees that my new ending idea has a lot of potential. And that’s big.

So excuse me if I’m busy the next couple of months. This baby is finally getting ready to see the world.*

*You know… eventually. Or at least a few dozen (?) agents’ eyes.

Photo by Lisa Moreira

The company where I work is huge to a point that I cannot fully comprehend, because of the fact that when I am there, the building is mostly empty except for my floor—I work graves. And while the graves world is a very strange one—especially in a medical lab on the outskirts of a not-large city that is overwhelmed with both very religiously conservative and simultaneously very liberal views—but it is a funny little microcosm of Salt Lake society, and Utah as a whole.

The better part is this, though—it is a microcosm of humanity as a whole. Now, maybe not a very evenly represented one, of course (this is Utah, after all!) but still a more mixed view than I’ve seen anywhere else in the state in my time here. My company is a tapestry of the cultures existing in Utah—Thai, Polynesian, Arabic of more than a few shades, some African American, and of course a lot of variations white. The Mr and I contribute to some of this diversity ourselves, though we are more of a mixed variety than some.

But more to the point, there are characters of all shapes and sizes (not to mention fuzziness vs. spiky ratios and again, religious/political extremes) and it is a constant reminder to me of how very complex people can be, and how very different from each other, and this is important in writing because in fiction people should be complex and different from each other, also. Yes, there are archetypes and you can use them freely—but remember that without specificity, things are forgettable (read: boring).

I’ve been thinking about this because of a girl I work with. She likes bears. Well, likes is a mild term. She loves bears. She admires bears, and is mildly jealous she does not get to sleep through winter the way that bears do. I showed her a link the other day with a lot of different kinds of animals being really adorable (because hey… that’s what people do these days)… and she responded with: “Bears!”

Me: ………and others

Her: But I like bears.

And that was how that conversation went. On the one hand, I was mildly frustrated. But there are so many other animals in the glorious animal kingdom! I wanted to argue, even though bears are certainly very nice. I just personally cannot devote so much love and adoration to a single species, when there are creatures such as turtles and owls and foxes and wolves and mountain lions and—!!!

Okay, so I get worked up about a lot of kinds of animals.

ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL PEOPLE!

But this friend of mine…. she likes bears.

And that’s okay. Because on the one hand there’s me, who likes lots of animals and finds them all delightful and wondrous…. and then there’s my friend, who likes bears. Specific. Something tangible and describable and… characteristic.

Not to say that I don’t have a character, but let’s face it, I’m an introvert/writer/person-watcher whose superpower is typing 85 wpm. I take a lot of getting to know.

Which isn’t bad in a fictional character, either. I’m not trying to say it is.

But neither is liking bears. Some people just really, really like bears.

Photo by Lisa Asanuma

And by Spring, of course I mean Summer (almost) but here in Utah the two seem to disappear into each other quickly.

In any case, the last I noticed cognitively, it was mid-December. The last I blogged it was latter-February. So, something has gone wrong here.

And that thing is: shame.

Oh, Lisa, you have tried so hard not to let this thing get to you, but then here you see it has been lurking in the corners for the past few months, without so much as letting you know.

It has been nearly a month since I opened my WIP. My second-draft, bringing-it-so-much-closer-to-awesome-this-time-around WIP. And the thing that has keeping it shut on my computer, more than my busy schedule or my attempting to spend down time with my husband…. is shame.

I had not realized it while it was happening, but shame was slowly overtaking me, creeping into my mind and heart ever-so-slowly that I didn’t realize it was there.

Because. Well, I’ve been in this game for a long time. And while I know that most first novels are ‘put it in a drawer and try again’ awful…. this isn’t really my first novel, and it is (as claimed by others, not just me!) NOT unsalvageably awful. I even have a plan to get it done and make it really good—or at least good enough to get a yes, so far as I can imagine, and that will have to do. I can get to the point where I admit that it is good ENOUGH.

So why the shame? Largely, I admit, it is because of the casual naysayers. I don’t tell most people in my life that I’m working on a novel, or that I have a completed draft, largely because this novel is SO much more complex than all of the other stories that I’ve worked on, and yet I want THIS one to be my debut, so I’ve put others on hold, and because of this, when I do say that I have a completed first draft of a novel, people assume that I’m close to getting it published.

Pssh. As if this is a thing you can just go and do. (Okay, if you’re going the Indie Route, sure, you can… but that has never been my particular dream).

So when people at work casually tease me with “So when can I buy your novel?” or “So when are you doing to publish that book?” I bristle and freeze.

And it makes me not want to work on the book. I’ve been reading, but not blogging, and ultimately, not writing. I’ve been letting other people’s dismissal of my dreams get to me. Which is utterly shameful.

So instead I take pictures of geese and ducks and their babies. Not a bad venture, by half, but…. not my dream. (Disclaimer: this is not actually a full-time venture)

And I’m not ready to let this dream go. So I’m hoping to rouse my spirits and get my focus back on. Yes, I’m busy, but I can’t ever get any writing done if I don’t make time for it. I can’t bring this fantastic adventure to life and into the minds and hearts of readers without finishing, finishing, finishing.

And in the meanwhile… perhaps a Tales From the Hollow Tree story. I have been desperately wanting to get back to writing shorts. Definitely, definitely no more hiding from my blog or WIP, though.

And if you have any tips for channeling a baddie when you are really a very nice person (you know, depending on who’s asking)… please send them along!

I have been away from this blog for a little while now, and there are a couple of reasons for this. Mainly, my laptop was on the verge of death. Teetering at the edge of the dark chasmy abyss, as it were.

And well, the past couple of weeks have been BUSY.

First there was Books are for Lovers on Valentine’s Day, and this was The Mr and my haul:

Jasper Fforde, Brandon Sanderson, and some bookplates, because one can never have too many bookplates. True fact.

And then after doing two days of overtime at work (that’s 9 days of graveyards in a row, folks!) The Mr and I ran around spending our tax return on a new laptop (YAY!) and just as if not even more exciting: a washer and dryer.

Now. I know that doesn’t SEEM more exciting, especially as they are used and when all is said and done, the laundry still has to be done, but at least it doesn’t have to be done at a laundromat a city over anymore! (Yes, really) Oh the glory of just throwing in a load of wash when you need to. It is a wonderful thing.

The really exciting thing about the last week, though, is that I finished editing The Guardian’s Fall, the third and final installment of The Guardian Circle Series by Isabelle Santiago. YOU GUYS. I am SO EXCITED about this book! It wraps the series up just beautifully and I can’t tell you how much I love it. I’m super proud of my girl Isabelle, too, because she had to push herself really hard to get this book where it was (and I was not going to let it go out not fully formed!), but she did such a fabulous job.

If you haven’t yet had the delight of looking into The Guardian Circle Series yet, I am officially inviting you. Book one, The Guardian’s Mark is available for a limited time for $0.99!

What you’ll find here:

– Fantastic world-building, including a faceted, multi-cultural world centered on one (questionably balanced) religion

– Elemental magic, which is my favorite kind!

– Mesmerizing forbidden romance

– Underdogs and moral dilemmas

– Friendships that cross lifetimes

– Did I mention great world-building?

Pick up a copy of Guardian’s Mark today. Book 2 is also available, and Book 3 is just around the corner!