Hah! I’m on time this month! Yay! And you’ll get a second Recommended Reading during Thanksgiving week. 🙂 And yes, this month, we’re heavy on the Linda Fairstein. I binged, did a workshop, and had a lot of personal stuff to deal with. So I didn’t read much else—except work in manuscript form that I’ll […]
Continue ReadingSpent most of July writing and then collapsing on the sofa in front of the TV when I was done. Dean and I binged on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, loved it, and for me, that took some of my writing time. (One more episode! Just one more!) Plus I had to line edit a volume […]
Continue ReadingWhile I was reading the Ruth Wind/Barbara Samuel book listed below, I was also reading a recent issue of RT Book Reviews. I noticed something that surprised me. Almost all of the novels in their historical romance section were set in the Regency era. A goodly 80%, and most of the rest were set in […]
Continue ReadingI got an amazing amount of fantastic reading done in September—and I didn’t feel like I had read enough. Yet I look at this list, and realize I somehow squeezed a lot of reading in. Wow. My tastes were pretty eclectic in September. Romance, mystery, nonfiction—it’s all here. These are my top picks from a […]
Continue ReadingThe best essay I’ve read so far this week comes from fantasy writer Tom Simon using his H. Smiggy McStudge persona. H. Smiggy McStudge writes little posts called “Told By An Idiot,” and whoa boy, it gets a bit pointed from there. This week’s takes on a head-shaking post on the Huffington Post by someone […]
Continue ReadingConsidering how busy I was in July, I’m surprised at how much reading I managed to get done. It’s that chair, I’m sure of it. 🙂 I also read a lot of books not on this list, some truly awful books from some of my favorite writers. I realized that I loved one writer because […]
Continue ReadingRead a fun middle-grade novel this month, and realized that while I had loved, loved, loved the first book in the series, the second disappointed—not because it was worse than the first. It might have been better. It disappointed because half the fun of the first (from an adult perspective) was the riff the novel […]
Continue ReadingAgain, I did a lot of Fiction River reading this month, and you will see the results over the next year. The first volume of Fiction River, Unnatural Worlds, appeared on April 23, and please consider the stories in there as part of this recommended reading list. I’m not going to tell you my favorite […]
Continue ReadingAgain, I did a lot of Fiction River reading this month, which took up some of my fiction reading. So you’ll see my recommendations in the upcoming issues. It’s so fun to be editing again—and it’s fun to be doing it part time. I got stuck in two novels in the middle of the month. […]
Continue ReadingThose of you who read this blog regularly know I have a magpie brain. I find shiny things here and there, and then I put them together—not to create a nest (I have one, thanks)—but to help me form a realization or to figure out the solution to a problem or to reinforce things I […]
Continue Reading