​Well, 2018 was an excellent year for me for reading! Last year I didn't quite make my Goodreads Challenge goal, b​ut this year I exceeded it. I set a goal to read one book a week but at the end managed 66 books! I was especially surprised I pulled that off because I had intended to switch to audiobooks for almost the first whole half of the year because I was training to do the Camino de Santiago. (My blog post about audiobooks here.)

In the summer, I summarized the books I’d read so far (this post). Here’s my year-end update:

Well, writers, NaNoWriMo has almost finished.
I’m at 46,000 words at the moment, but I know from looking at my calendar that I won’t have 50,000 before the clock strikes midnight on November 30. That’s OK, though—I’m still happy with this year’s progress!

It's always an amazing feeling at the end of the month to see how many words I was able to corral into sentences – today, I had the opus so far printed so that I can start a read-through and plan some of the larger editing that it will need– and that reminds me again why I still like this challenge and why the NaNoWriMo challenge is still valuable for me, even 15 years after I first attended a write-in.
This project (in my last post  I called it an “Agatha Christie homage”), is still fun. As I told my critique group tonight, it's the kind of project that becomes more fun as I work on it. Which is great! It is, however, a bit less Agatha Christie-ish then in my original conception, but I think it will definitely be a stronger book for some of the changes that I have made to it while I wrote.

As I told some friends when I started out, my goal had been to do an 80,000-word challenge this month, not just the usual 50,000-word challenge. But I am fascinated with the idea of being able to put out an entire rough draft in the time span of one month (I also tried this in August with a different manuscript) and each time I learned something, and each time I am happy that I did it.
I will catch up on the other 30,000 words in December – after 50,000 in November, 30,000 seems like a breeze.
The challenge I set for myself in August was slightly different—I wanted to dictate the entire manuscript. This month, I alternated between typing and dictation. I dictated large amounts of the manuscript, but then I went back over the dictated areas and filled in those passages a bit more. I don’t seem to think as visually when I’m narrating out loud as I do when I’m tapping on a keyboard. I am going to try to train myself into being able to do both as well. 
I’m still learning how to be an effective and efficient writer with dictation. (If you have any tips, please let me know in the comments!) It really saves strain on my wrists, and I'm finding that it is opening up the creative side of my brain in ways that I hadn’t expected. (An example: my husband alerted me to the fact that I “do the voices” when I’m dictating dialogue.)

One technique that a guest of Joanna Penn recommended on her Creative Penn podcast was to dictate each scene three times. Once as a short summary, then as a slightly longer summary, then as a full scene. The technique I’m currently using is evolving, but so far it seems most natural to write  a short summary by hand in my general outline, then dictate the the scene in ten-minute increments and then finally go back through and embroider some bits later, either by hand on a printed copy or typing into the transcription. That brings me to what I'm calling the zero draft. I'll bring the rest of that up to a more readable standpoint and look at some of the big picture things on my next go round.

Then I'll let it sit. 

And then I'll ask for feedback.

(Gosh, this is a long process!)

NaNoWriMo is a good thing for several reasons. One of the biggest reasons is the community. Even when I lived in China, I still found people to talk about NaNoWriMo with. I met them in Hong Kong, and Guangzhou and other cities, where we would meet at a cafe, write and talk about novels. NaNoWriMo is also good as a daily discipline. While I already have the discipline of writing every day, I don't always move fiction projects forward every day. 

This month, I still had more fiction binges than steady work, but the NaNoWriMo participation, and the general hubbub of other people on social media and in Write-ins, really do move me forward on things in a way that  reinforces some of my own daily discipline. And it's also a challenge!
One of the most important things that NaNoWriMo has taught me is that I can manage long documents. That's important also for my freelance work. I recently had to edit several 50-page reports for clients. That's a large amount of text to take in at once! But when you compare that report to a 50,000-word fiction document, it’s a lot more manageable.
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Did you participate in NaNoWriMo this year? How did it go?

And I’m hosting Write-ins at my coworking space to help support local writers. See the blog post about it on the coworking website here: http://blog.locusworkspace.cz/2018/10/making-dreams-reality-with-nanowrimo.html. If you’re in Prague, please attend!

Happy Halloween! In honor of the spooky season, here are three haunting books I’ve read recently. (Figuratively haunting; none of the plots are truly paranormal.)

The Witch Elm (UK title: The Wych Elm) by Tana French

You knew this book was going to head the list, didn’t you? I’ve been jabbering on to anyone who will listen about French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels (including at last weekend’s Halloween party, where someone confessed he wasn’t on board, WHAT? It’s OK, we can still be friends…). 

The Witch Elm is her first standalone novel, and when I started it, I’ll admit to being worried. In the first half, it seemed like it stepped out of the crime genre a bit too far for my expectations. But soon, the plot got going and the immersion in the main character’s psyche hooked me. 

The book centers on the question of what it means to be “lucky.” And what happens when you aren’t lucky (we could also put here, “privileged”) any longer. I don’t want to spoil anything (I’d say you shouldn’t even read the  Goodreads interview with the author) so I’ll leave this really vague. Just go read the book. 

For the past few years, I’ve made a habit of going over my goals every few months. Usually, I focus on financial, creative and professional goals but I realized this year that, since I’m doing the Goodreads Reading Challenge (with a goal of a not-so-exciting 52 books this year) it might be fun to look back on the books I’ve read so far in 2018. 

Here they are:

Almost ten years ago, while living in China, I had laser eye surgery

My eyes have always been bad—and one was worse than the other, causing depth perception problems (yes, that’s what I’m blaming my poor performance in high school PE class on. Okay?). I’d worn contact lenses since I was 15, but for a few years, my eyes had become increasingly sensitive and irritated by the lenses. I tried switching to glasses full time, but suffered vision headaches and just generally hated having something resting on my nose every day. 

After the procedure, the doctor advised me to reduce the strain on my eyes, and particularly the time that I spent looking  at computer screens, for about six months. 

At first I thought I’d be fine—I planned to listen to music and sleep a lot. But no, it was a lot harder to cut back on reading than I had thought. We had a vacation coming up, to Xinjiang Province in far western China. What was I going to do on our long bus and train rides? 

The answer: audiobooks.

Now, some of my readers here might know that I was homeschooled as a kid, and whether that's the reason or not, it has never been quite comfortable for me to take information in only by listening. I don't particularly enjoy listening to the radio, other than for music,  and when I took lectures in college, I took as many notes as I could so that I could read them back later.

Knowing this, my husband picked out the first book for me to listen to. We thought it would be easier for me to enjoy if it was a book I’d actually read before on paper. He chose George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. He’s an OG GOT fan, and I had recently bought him paperbacks of the full series (well, whatever was published up to that point; we didn’t even know there’d be a TV series then!) at an English-language bookshop in Macao. So one of my first experiences with audiobooks was listening to the narrator describe Westeros as we sat on a train going across the yellow Taklamakan desert near Kashgar. 

On later trips that year, I listened to Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich and other authors I enjoy read aloud. Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys and his own reading of The Graveyard Book stayed with me particularly. I listened on a ferry down the Yangtze, *tried* to listening while going to the gym (but the music was too loud and to be honest, going to the gym is another thing I’ve never been able to get into…), and stayed up late at night in cheap hostels in India, mosquito netting inches from my face, riveted by one plot point or another. 
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But once the doctor approved me for reading screens again, I let my interest in audiobooks lapse. Until this year.

While training for our hike in Spain next week, I’ve started listening to audiobooks again, as well as podcasts, to make the miles pass under my boots faster.  Plus, since I’ll have to carry everything I need for the hike in a 26L backpack, I don’t really have room to take a paperback (one paperback is not enough for a week trip anyway). My Kindle’s small and light, but I would worry about damage to it if it rains. These past two months, I’ve learned  I’m still a newbie listener, and often have to back up to re-hear what happened if my focus is pulled elsewhere. I would never be able to listen to audiobooks and drive a car—that seems like a superpower! 
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I've just posted my June rewards for Patreon supporters!

Here are the covers for the $5 reward (a short story in my series about an all-female  assassin agency) and the $3 reward (a travel tale about the time I hiked Mt. Emei, one of China's four sacred Buddhist mountains). 

If you pledge today, you'll get these rewards plus previous months' stories as well! Note that I also offer critique sessions for the higher reward tiers--perfect if you'd like a writing buddy, editor, and cheerleader!  www.patreon.com/BethGreen

My May rewards for Patreon supporters post today! Above are the covers of the $5 reward (a short, short story about a fast-moving river and a now-or-never chance) and the $3 reward (a travel story set in Prague during my English-teaching days). Pledge today and get access to these rewards and last month's too:  https://www.patreon.com/BethGreen.

What is Patreon? It's a microfunding site for creators. You get cool things to read (and fun cat memes) and I can spend a bit more time on projects I'm passionate about!  Learn more here or check out the intro video on my Patreon profile page.