Another year down, an another reading challenge crushed! In 2019, I was drawn to books set in new places. I continued my fascination with compelling but unlikable characters and, in retrospect, I clearly didn’t read enough non-fiction. I’ve linked to the books I recommend. 

Anthologies/collections
Fishy Business, ed. Linda Rodriguez (my story “Exit Interview” was published in this anthology of Sisters in Crime Guppy chapter members!)
Ghost Stories, ed. Tanya Eby (audio-only; my story “The Clockmaker” was included!)
Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell (this collection was so good I hated to finish the last story and give it back to the friend who lent it to me but at the same time I hated to keep it in the house with its whisper of “why aren’t you writing like this?”)
The Ostrich Street Anthology, ed. Ashley Melucci (A collection from Prague writers!)
Strange Stones by Peter Hessler
Rogues, ed. George RR Martin
Wrong Turn, ed. Tanya Eby
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Literary fiction/contemporary fiction/women’s fiction
Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty (As you can see, I was on a huge Liane Moriarty kick this year!)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang 
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Something Might Happen by Julie Myerson
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (We went to Naples so I was curious! I enjoyed this but I don’t know if I’ll read the sequels.)
Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult (One of the only books from this year I don’t recommend. It follows a character falsely accused of rape. Maybe edgy when it came out but a hard plot to sit down and enjoy now.) 
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Mystery & thrillers
The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne (So! Good!)
 The Lost Man by Jane Harper (This, The Current, The Marsh King’s Daughter and the Inheritance Trilogy were my favorite reads this year.)
The Current by Tim Johnston (I want to write like this guy. Great book.)
The Gatherer by Colleen Winter (I met Colleen at ThrillerFest in 2017 and am excited to recommend her debut futuristic adventure story set in Canada)
Little Voices by Vanessa Lillie (Vanessa and I are in an online writers group. I loved this twisty novel—her first—which came out this year!)
Dark Picasso by Rick Homan (Rick is a fellow member of Sisters in Crime and the Guppies. I beta-read a previous installment in this series. Love the characters and the art plots!)
Hunting Annabelle by Wendy Heard (This was a dark, twisty, fun book that I bought because I listen to the author’s podcast Unlikeable Female Characters. Check both out!)
The Lost Night by Andrea Bartz (I bought this one because the author was on the aforementioned podcast. An exciting read set in New York City.)
The Tourist Trail by John Yunker (I loved the setting of this one—a penguin sanctuary at the southernmost tip of South America—and the environmentalist plot and subplot)
Keep This to Yourself by Tom Ryan (I recommend this to anyone who enjoys young adult mysteries! Really good small-town plot.)
My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (I read this for the Nigerian setting but the plot was just as interesting.)
The Killer Next Door by Alex Marwood
Trust Me by Hank Phillippi Ryan
Pretty Girls by Karen Slaughter
Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood
Wife of the Gods by Kwei Quartey
Skeleton Run by John DeBoer (The author is a Twitter friend of mine. I enjoyed this thriller and will seek out more of his work!)
Scrublands by Chris Hammer (Set in Australia—I read it while we were preparing to go on our own trip there this summer.)
In a Dark Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie
This Night’s Foul Work by Fred Vargas (Read this for the French setting, which was fun. But the plot did not work for me.)
The Forgotten Girls by Alexa Steele
Next Girl to Die by Dea Poirier 
The Paris Diversion by Chris Pavone (still! so! many! lists!)
The Suspect by Fiona Barton
Blinded by Stephen White
Simisola by Ruth Rendell
The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell
Swimsuit by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
Death of the Demon by Anne Holt
Nemesis by Agatha Christie
Killer Takes All by Erica Spindler
Shocking Pink by Erica Spindler
Night Film by Marisha Pessl (This was a strange book but after a few months of reflection, I think  I kind of loved it, kind of hated it. It was original, at least!) 
A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny
The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn (Read it because of the controversy. If you’re not familiar, enjoy the ride!) 
Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton
A Stranger in the House by Shari LaPena
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (A re-read. Sadly, I didn’t like the new movie with Kenneth Branagh—did you?)
Night Moves by Jonathan Kellerman
Bone Box by Faye Kellerman  (I love love love this author but this novel’s plot was super tone-deaf (it centered on a transwoman who Rina Decker finds murdered and did not pull off the balancing act required for that subject). I can’t recommend it.)
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Nonfiction
When by Daniel Pink (I’m going to need to read this again so it soaks in!)
The Last Days of August by Jon Ronson (An Audible original about bullying and the porn industry. I’m counting it as a book.)
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Sci Fi/fantasy
The Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods) by NK Jemisin (As a whole, one of my favorite reads this year)
The Light Between Worlds by Laura Weymouth (Sad but compelling Narnia tribute. The author is a Twitter friend of mine. Can’t wait for her next title!)
Melmoth by Sarah Perry (This is a quiet, weird, fantasy set in Prague and if you like creepy stuff you should read it.)
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (I enjoyed this but didn't realize when I started it that she never finished the storyline in this series.)
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R R Martin (Read before I watched GOT S8, so my positive thoughts about this book are from a happier time.)

What were your favorite reads last year?

Exciting news for this fall! My short story “The Clockmaker,” a paranormal thriller set in Prague, has been released as part of an audio-only anthology from Blunder Woman Productions.  

Find it at your favorite audiobook source, including…

Audible
LibroFM
Scribd
Audiobooks.com

(Not signed up for any audiobook service yet? Hot tip: you can usually do a free month-long trial!)

See the video linked below to learn more about the setting and the story!

​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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