Hello, everyone! Welcome to 2022! I hope y’all had a fantastic holiday season!
I am happy to report that I have maintained my writing streak of at least writing something for my books everyday since a little before November, so that is actually a goal I intend to keep for this upcoming year. That said, I am still making progress with Book 10, and I’m refining the plot for Book 11 as I ponder things. My holiday plans for the week did get cancelled right before they were supposed to happen, so i was a little bummed about that, but overall, the week went well.
I am liking how the current chapter is going for Book 10, though it is getting rather long. I do have a couple good places where I can break the chapter into smaller chapters if needed, so I may be taking advantage of those once I see how long this current chapter is. After this I think I’ve only got another five chapters to go. That said, since a couple of those are likely to also be long, that count might change. Still… Things are progressing nicely, and I’m looking forward to what’s coming next. I’ve also been trying to do a bit of plotting and research for the early part of Book 11. This way, I should be able to jump right in to Book 11 once I finish Book 10.
For reading, I finished JV Hilliard’s The Last Keeper. Overall, it was pretty good. I think it was a pretty decent start to the series. However, there were quite a few point-of-view (POV) characters, and sometimes with the switch from one POV character to another, I found myself putting the book down in-between those shifts. (There were four ‘main’ POV characters, but there were another half-dozen or so additional POV characters.) The other point I was… less than pleased with was the fact that the end of the book felt like a chapter break. I understand that cliffhangers are one way to do things, but this felt more like “the book is getting too long, so I’ll just chop it off here” as opposed to “the end is crafted in such a way to maintain tension without being abrupt.” I’m not going to say I won’t buy the next book whenever it comes out, but I’m not convinced I will, either.
In other news, I also discovered a book called Way Station by Clifford D. Simak while I was researching the solarpunk genre. Way Station seems to be out of print (it was published in the 1960s), but I was able to listen to the audiobook of it. I have to say, it was nice to see a spiffy premise, and then read (or listen to) the book and find out the story and execution was just as spiffy as the premise sounded. Essentially, the book is about a man who runs a way station for aliens as they stop at our planet on the way to what lies beyond. And the man is the last survivor of the American Civil War at 124 years old, despite only looking to be in his thirties (yay for alien tech). Overall, the general tone of what lies beyond us reminds me of Star Trek, which is kind of spiffy since the book came out a few years before Star Trek. Admittedly, I don’t know enough about solarpunk to know whether the is a good representation of the genre or not, but it was a nice way to spend an evening.
So, for this upcoming week, I will continue working on Book 10 and plotting Book 11. I will also return to Mercedes Lackey’s The Fire Rose. I’m about a third of the way through that one. Other than that, I’m going to try to set up something of a schedule that I can maintain, in addition to assorted daily goals. I’m not sure what that schedule will look like just yet, but what with the new year and all, it seems like as good a time as any to try something new.
That’s all of this update. Thanks for reading!
~ Theresa
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