01 December 2010

Day 249: a general update


Holy butts. NaNoWriMo is over and I can stop talking about it now. I had a great time. I wrote my 50,000 words. I had great fun doing it, but I'll be good not killing any ponies for awhile. I have forayed a little tiny bit into editing, mostly making notes and fixing some word choice errors. I'm mostly looking forward to reworking some of the less funny stories, or the ones that are a little too dark or mean to work in the Rupert canon. On top of the 50,000 words, I read 10 books and wrote about 16,000 words for the blog, and that's only as of Nov. 27.* Go me.

Anyway, this is a general update, so here's what I'll be reading next. Most of these are actually Not My Choice books, meaning I somehow got them from free. I won a contest over at Forgotten Bookmarks and got a whole slew of books. Yay! Um... They're mysteries. I don't love mysteries, but since they are popular with readers, I really ought to make myself more familiar with them, and nothing gets me to read stuff I don't normally like better than free books. We'll start off with the My Choice books.

Everybody Marries the Wrong Person by Christine Meinecke.
Those of you who follow my Twitter account probably already know I've started (and likely finished) this one. At that time of writing this post I am reasonably okay with the content inside. I'm not sure I much appreciate the insinuations that not having a steady work history means I'm a red flag and “underdeveloped”, but maybe Mrs. Fancypants makes over $150 a hour is a little out of touch with what it means to be a 20-something in today's economy. This was published in 2010, to put it in perspective. I do like the title and tend to agree with the sentiment, I'll get more into that in the post though and hopefully have more detailed information to share with you about the contents of the book rather than my impressions to date.

Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah.
I was sitting in the teen room working on my blog,** when this title jumped out at me. I loved the cover too and I think it's rather topical. I'm actually surprised I haven't heard anything about this title. If it's any good I will likely be looking to add it like crazy to lists on Goodreads and otherwise promoting it. We all know how I feel about inclusiveness and the need to take big deep breaths before doing something stupid like calling everyone a terrorist just because they were a certain kind of clothes or have a certain kind of skin color or practice a certain kind of religion.

Drowned Sorrow by Vanessa Morgan.
This was sent to me after I was approached via email by the author. The premise of dangerous water interested me. Some of you might remember my posts about The Wave. This was on the short side, so it also fit with my reading plans for NaNoWriMo. Unfortunately it didn't get to me soon enough for me to slip it into my schedule, but it's higher up on the reading list than some of the others.

PushBack by Alfred Wellnitz.
Hoooooray dystopian fiction! This is a book I won from Goodreads, and possibly one of the few I've been eagerly awaiting. I think I might actually jump on this one as soon as I get home from Thanksgiving... But we know how bad I am at waiting and who can resist a county ruled by hyperinflation and white supremacists gone mad(der) after gas reaches $50/gallon. Stranger things have happened.

Murder on Ice by Ted Wood.
Uhhhh, we're getting into the stuff I feel obligated to read because I won it. I'll put four more on the list here, but don't be surprised if they never get posts. This one involves uh, feminists, and being trapped in a cabin in the woods and there's a blizzard... or something. Maybe it will remind me of Dead Snow, Nazi Zombies were a pretty good time.

Confessional by Jack Higgins.
Trained assassin priest. I have no idea, why do people get paid to write these?

The Final Judgment by Richard North Patterson.
College murder. Oh boy, these are gonna be fun.

Kill and Kill Again by Hugh Pentecost.
Dead body in a car. Whodunnit?

*Note: I was roughly 5-6 days ahead on my blogging when NaNoWriMo started, I did not count those posts or books in my count here.  I imagine by the time Nov 30 actually hits I will have written closer to 20,000 for the blog and read at least one more book... hopefully two.
**It was the middle of the day on a weekday when none of the kids would use it, fyi.

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