Celebrate the Small Things: 28-2-25

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things.

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

I had a thing booked in with my old colleagues, but it has been postponed, so I now have a little more free time on my hands.  Unfortunately I think it's going to be eaten up by gardening and house stuff, but I'm hoping I'll also managed to claw myself a little time to write.  I'm determined to get at least the first chapter of this new book drafted.

One of my colleagues finished A Stranger to Kindness this week and loved it.  None of the things I was worried about seemed to bother her - she didn't even seem to notice them - so that's good.  I've got a few more people reading it, so hopefully I'll get some more feedback soon.

I caught up with some old friends and colleagues last night, which was fun.  Always nice to see old friends again.

I dyed my hair pink and it keeps freaking me out when I see myself in the mirror.  It's not exactly the pink I was hoping for, but it's actually quite cool.

And that's about it for celebrating this week.  What are you celebrating?

Books I've read: The Island of Sea Women

 

This one was recommended to me by several members of my book group.  As they are all very discerning readers, I jumped on board.

And it was fascinating.  I'd never heard about the deep-sea-diving women in Korea known as haenyeo.  I didn't know that on the island of Jeju, the society is matriarchal, with the women doing the work and men taking care the house and kids.  So I found the subject matter incredibly interesting.

The book follows two friends, from quite different backgrounds, through their lives across some of Korea's most tumultuous times.  Young-sook is the daughter of the head of the village diving collective and is expected to follow in her mother's footsteps.  Mi-ja is the daughter of a know collaborator with the Japanese who is sent to live with her aunt and uncle on the island .  Badly mistreated by these relatives who don't really want her, Mi-ja is taken in by the collective and becomes best friends with Young-sook.

Over the years, these two friends come together and split apart time and time again, their lives constantly entangled even as they weather marriage, children, war and political change.

The premise of this book was amazing and I learned a lot from reading it.  Unfortunately, I was not quite so in love with the way it was written.  The book is told in first person, and therefore I expected to be very close to the narrator (Young-sook) and to experience the events of her life through her eyes.  Yet the book was strangely unemotional.  A lot of extremely harrowing things happen to Young-sook, but I never felt like I was living through them.  As a narrator she told the story of what happened and then told the reader how it made her feel, rather than showing how she reacted to what happened and allowing the reader to understand the feeling.

Which was a shame, because I think the book would have been way more powerful if it had really punched the reader in the feelings.  

But I didn't dislike the book - it's more that I was a little disappointed that it didn't sweep me away I believe it could have.  It was still fascinating and I'm very glad to have learned as much about this culture and this unique society as I did.

So I do recommend it.  But maybe not so much as an absorbing read, as a fascinating document of an unknown society.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women follows Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls from very different backgrounds, as they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective. Over many decades—through the Japanese colonialism of the 1930s and 1940s, World War II, the Korean War, and the era of cellphones and wet suits for the women divers—Mi-ja and Young-sook develop the closest of bonds. Nevertheless, their differences are impossible to ignore: Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, forever marking her, and Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers. After hundreds of dives and years of friendship, forces outside their control will push their relationship to the breaking point.

This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a unique and unforgettable culture, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous physical work, and the men take care of the children. A classic Lisa See story—one of women’s friendships and the larger forces that shape them—The Island of Sea Women introduces readers to the fierce female divers of Jeju Island and the dramatic history that shaped their lives.

Weekly Goals 24-2-25

 How is it almost the end of February?  That's nuts!  How did that even happen?

I made a very basic - I'm talking two or three sentence - start to the new book brewing in my mind on Saturday, so my goal for this week is to finish that chapter.  I'm not sure if this is a single POV book or a dual POV book yet.  I thought it was going to be a single POV, but the more I think about the characters and how far into the story they might actually meet, the more I wonder about making it dual POV.  So I might play a little with that.  I feel like Arlo will have a pretty strong voice if I let him have his own chapters, but I'm not sure if we need him to alternate with Devon.  Maybe he just needs his own chapters here and there...  I'll figure it out.

So that's my main goal for this week.  I hope to get feedback from some readers on A Stranger to Kindness so I can make the last edits on that  and get it everything sorted out to start querying - which terrifies me.  I love Harley and Wolfe so much, having this book rejected is going to hurt more than any book has ever hurt before.

I'm not going to have a lot of writing time this week, but I want to have made at least a little bit of progress on this new book before Easter.  I have 10 days off then and am aiming to use that time to write this book, but it will be so much easier to blitz it if I've already got a little way into it.

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 21-2-25

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things.

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

It has felt like a long and busy week, so I'm grateful for the weekend. Although, I have a lot on this weekend, between teaching and various social engagements.  I'm a little annoyed about it because I actually want to write this weekend.  But I suppose another week to muse on the new story brewing in the back of my brain won't go amiss.

Yeah, I know I said I was going to work on one of the old, half-finished books I have lurking in my hard drive, but unfortunately another character has begun nagging me to tell her story and I feel like I need to listen to her.  I think she's going to be an interesting character to explore...

I've taught at the gym almost every day this week, so I'm a bit tired.  But it has been going well.  I just have to get through my Sunday class and I'll be back onto my regular schedule.

Film Society starts up again on Monday, so I'm looking forward to that.  Another year of great films awaits!

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've read: Compound Fracture

 

I read something about this book that made me really excited to read it when I found it at the library the other day.  I don't remember exactly what it was I read, or why it excited me so much, but the actual reading experience was not as amazing as I had hoped it would be.  It has amazing elements - a trans, autistic narrator, a bigoted small-town setting, a generations-old feud and socio-political commentary.  Unfortunately, the sum was not greater than the parts.

The protagonist is Miles, who is transitioning and hasn't let everyone in his life know yet.  The book starts with him writing an email to his parents, letting them know, before he heads off to a party where he's beaten half to death by the son of his family's arch-nemesis.  The beef between Sheriff Davies and Miles' family is almost a century old, stemming from a miner's rebellion kicked off by Miles' great, great grandfather.

This relative from the past hovers over Miles as he recovers in hospital and appears at his side at key moments through the rest of the book as Miles tries to find a way to get revenge on the boys who hurt him and find peace for his long-suffering family by ending this feud once and for all.

Unfortunately, ending something as long-running and deeply ingrained in the fabric of the town as this feud isn't easy, and before too long, Miles has blood on his hands and bodies to dispose of.  As he tries desperately to keep those he cares about safe, the stakes just keep getting higher and the body count rises.

There is a lot to like about this book.  Miles is an interesting POV character with a raw, authentic Appalachian voice.  I did take issue with some of his inner monologue because it grated on me that Miles considered himself right all the time, regardless of what was happening.  And a lot of what was happening was not right, and Miles' part in what was happening was also not right.

I also really struggled with how evil the sheriff and his son were written.  There was no attempt to give any reason for their ongoing hatred for the Abernathy family other than the fact these two families had hated each other for generations. I know this kind of long-running family feud is possible, but it didn't feel real to me and as a result, both Noah and the sheriff felt underwritten and cartoonish. 

I also had problems with the way Miles' family were written.  Their reactions to his coming out were confused and all over the place, and the fact they encouraged him to go alone to an abandoned mine to confront a kid who had put him in the hospital only a few weeks earlier, didn't sit well with me.  Especially since they were supposedly so overprotective of Miles.  What kind of overprotective parents send their kid off to face a bully with a gun?

It felt like a lot of the characters were written to fulfil representation of a type more than sitting organically within the story.  Which is a shame because some of these characters could have been interesting if they'd had a more invested role in Miles' journey.

I also could not help noticing that while there were a lot of autistic, queer and trans people in this town, there were no people of color.  I understand that this part of Virginia is very white, but it seemed unlikely that there was not one single person who wasn't.  It's painted as a very conservative, right-leaning town, yet somehow, by the end of the book, most of the townsfolk are siding with the socialist trans kid rather than the sheriff whose values would align far more with their own.  Which also didn't sit quite right with me.

So, I don't think I can really recommend this one.  It was not an unenjoyable read, but so much of it didn't quite ring true to me that I feel uncomfortable about it.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

Bestselling and award-winning author Andrew Joseph White returns with a queer Appalachian thriller, that pulls no punches, for teens who see the failures in our world and are pushing for radical change.

A gut-wrenching story following a trans autistic teen who survives an attempted murder, only to be drawn into the generational struggle between the rural poor and those who exploit them.

On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.

The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud’s latest victim as the sheriff’s son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.

In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles’s bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidentally kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff’s heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they’re willing to put everything on the line—is Miles?

A visceral, unabashedly political page-turner that won’t let you go until you’ve reached the end, Compound Fracture is not for the faint of heart, but it is for every reader who is ready to fight for a better world.

Weekly Goals 17-2-25

 I have quite a few goals this week, but whether I manage to get through them all is another question.

I've started making a query list for A Stranger to Kindness.  I'm not racing to send it out - I still have a few more people reading it - but I'm getting prepared.

After asking which book people were interested in seeing more of last week, I decided that the next project I'm going to work on is Pieces of Luke.  I was surprised to discover I'd actually written close to 40K on this one before giving up on it for some reason.  I've read through it, and the pacing is way off, which is probably why I abandoned it.  But it shouldn't be too hard to fix, so I'm going to give that a go.  Fingers crossed it works and I can find my way back into these characters.

My goal is to get the first two chapters whipped into shape, but we'll see how I go.  I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have to work on it this week, but at least I have something to work on.

I have a lot of gym work this week and a lot of choreography to remember, so a big chunk of my week is going to be making sure I know all that before the relevant classes.  Luckily this week I'm only teaching half of each of the new ones because we do it in pairs on new release week.  Gives me a little more time to learn the rest!

And that's about it for goals this week. What are you hoping to achieve?

Celebrate the Small Things 14-2-25

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things.

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!  And Valentine's Day if you like that kind of thing....

I've managed to write a piece of flash fiction every day this week, which makes me happy.  None of them are particularly great stories - I give myself 30 minutes to write up to 1000 words to a prompt - but there's been some fun prompts this week that have pushed me.  I don't really plan to do anything with these flash fiction pieces, but they're good to keep my writing muscle limber.

After asking which idea people like the most, I've dug stuff out of my hard drive and I discovered that I'd actually written almost 40K on one of those stories, so I'm just reading through it - it's called Pieces of Luke - to see if it's any good and if I can feel my way back into the story to finish it.

This weekend I plan to do my edits to Stranger and then get it off to some other readers to get some feedback.  Pipe up if you'd like to read it.

I have a lot of gym work this week because it's new release week.  My head is so full of choreography right now, it will be a miracle if I make it through the classes I ave to teach tomorrow without getting something wrong.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: Black River Orchard

 

So...  This was a creepy one.  I honestly don't think I'll look the same way at apples ever again.

First up, I'm a big fan of Chuck Wendig, the dude.  He writes awesome blog posts, is super fun on social media and gives great advice to writers.  I'm relatively new to him as an actual author, mainly because he writes horror and horror isn't my automatic go-to genre.  I usually enjoy it when I read it, but I don't usually seek it out.

Anyway...  This book follows a whole bunch of characters in a small Pennsylvania town where a new variety of apple is making some significant waves in the community.  There's the newly arrived lesbian couple who are struggling to overcome problems in their marriage, an poor orchard owner who has just managed to get his land back and is determined to make a success of it, his daughter, a wannabe influencer who is desperate to get out of town for college, with her boyfriend, the school's star runner.  And there's the couple whose rental property is a haven for those interested in exploring the boundaries of their sex lives and an older gentleman who has spent many years searching for rare and interesting varieties of apples.

Alongside these people are a creepy cabal of powermongers who keep the town running and whose rituals border bacchanalia.

When the orchard owner starts selling a new varietal of apple, the whole town changes and the only ones who can see the darkness descending on the population are the few who don't - for a variety of reasons - eat the apple.

I found this book quite creepy and  I usually don't find horror books that disturbing.  Apples are such an innocuous thing, a sweet, delicious, healthy treat.  Giving something like that these sinister properties and dark powers gave me genuine chills.  Like I said, I'm probably never going to look at apples quite the same way.  A lot of what happens in the book is deeply ridiculous, yet it still left me unsettled.

I guess it worked...  And as a bonus, I learned an awful lot about apples and how they grow, are bred and how many different varieties there are that we never get to see.

So I'd recommend this one if you are looking for a book that will make you deeply uneasy.  And perhaps even make you quicken your step as you walk through the fruit and vegetable section of your local supermarket.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb: 

A small town is transformed by dark magic when a strange tree begins bearing magical apples in this new masterpiece of horror from the bestselling author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something else is changing in the town besides the season.

Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: Strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.

Take a bite of one of these apples and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.

This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples… and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?

And even if buried in the orchard is something else besides the seeds of this extraordinary tree: a bloody history whose roots reach back the very origins of the town.

But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. And a stranger has come to town, a stranger who knows Harrow’s secrets. Because it’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

Weekly Goals 10-2-25

 I ended up having a much busier weekend than I anticipated and I didn't have time to even start on the revisions to A Stranger to Kindness that I want to make.  So that's my main goal for this week.  To get those revisions started/done so I can get the book out to some other readers while I start compiling a query list.

One of my CPs is a nurse and she told me that some of the medical stuff in the book isn't 100% correct, so that's going to need to be changed, among other stuff.  But overall, the revisions aren't going to be major - unlike some other books I've written which basically needed to be gutted and re-strung.

I aim to write at least four pieces of flash fiction this week too. Just to keep that writing muscle limber until I decide on a new novel to write.  I know I have a few that I started and didn't finish for whatever reason, so it's probably time to go back and take a look at those to see if any of them are worth resurrecting.  

Actually, you could help...  

Would you be more interested in: 

a) a book about a girl and her band who decide to try and rig an American Idol type contest to get their own music on the map

b) a book about a girl going on a road trip with her boyfriend and her brother's ex to meet the people who received her brother's donated organs

c) a book about a boy who is psychologically abused by his girlfriend

d) a book about a child criminal turning 18 and being released under a new name for her safety

e) a book about a girl going to a prestigious ballet school and getting sucked into a dark underworld after an injury sidelines her for a time.

I think those are the ones I have lurking that I might be interested in working on.  There are others, but I don't feel like any of them have any real potential so there's probably not a lot of point to dragging them back out.

I have a heavy gym schedule over the next couple of weeks because it's our new release period, so I'm teaching a lot of new classes which I'm not 100% confident with yet.  But I'm sure we'll get there.  Sunday is going to be fun...  I'm going to be teaching/participating in 3 classes in a row, all with different choreography.  That will be a challenge!

What are your goals this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 7-2-25

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

Well, actually it's a long weekend for me, because yesterday was a holiday and I took today off too.  To work on my book.

I read through the whole of A Stranger to Kindness today, making notes where I want to add or change things.  There was surprisingly little.  The book is actually good.  I don't usually think that about my own stuff when I go back and re-read it, but this time, I was very pleasantly surprised.  

And one of my CPs has finished it too and gave me some beautiful feedback.  She says the characters are so vivid she feels like she'll be looking out for their holiday pics on Instagram (among all the other wonderful comments she's made).  

So I'm feeling pretty good about this one.  If anyone is interested in beta reading for me, I'd love a couple more opinions before I get too confident....  Just sing out!

I've decided to stop posting my shorts on Medium because for some reason (I can't get a reply from anyone there) they've stopped me from being a part of the partner program which means I won't earn anything from people reading my stuff.  If someone gets back to me about why they've revoked me,  and puts me back in the program, then I might start posting them again.  So sorry to anyone who was enjoying the weekly shorts...

And that's about it for celebrations this week.  I'm just so thrilled that the new book works and that I'm happy with it!  

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've Read: One Last Stop

 

This was a fun, frothy read which was much needed between two pretty heavy, thriller-type novels.  

It's about perpetual loner, August, who moves to New York after failing to find her place in several other places.  She expects New York will be no different and is determined to go it alone here too.  But as soon as she moves into her new apartment and meets two of her new roommates, things begin to change.

Her roommates just won't let her hibernate in her room.  They drag her out and before she knows it, she has a job at a quirky all-night pancake diner and people she might even call friends.

And then there's her commute to college on the subway and the gorgeous girl who seems to always be on the train when August is. Soon, the subway ride is the highlight of August's day, especially once she meets the girl - Jane - and discovers how terminally cool she is.  But a few things just don't add up and August begins to suspect there is something very, very odd about Jane.

As they talk more, August discovers Jane doesn't just look like a cool punk rocker from the '70s; she is a cool punk rocker from the '70s.  Somehow, she has become trapped in time and place and has spent decades on this very train, interacting with generations of people as they come and go.

August makes it her mission to find out just why Jane is stuck here, where she came from and if she can escape whatever is keeping her locked in this particular place.  As she uses the detective skills her obsessive mother instilled in her, August makes discoveries about her own past as she digs up Jane's.

I actually really enjoyed this book.  The characters were all interesting and quirky in their own unique ways and this was a very different kind of time travel story than others I've read.  The mystery of who jane was and why she got stuck there unfolded organically amongst the other plot threads which all tied neatly together by the end.  Which is always very satisfying.

It's an easy read and I breezed through most of it in a single afternoon.

So if you're looking for something a little fun, maybe as a vacation from some heavier reads, this is definitely a contender.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables at a 24-hour pancake diner and moving in with too many weird roommates could possibly change that. And there’s certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures.

But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train.

Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges and swoopy hair and soft smile, showing up in a leather jacket to save August’s day when she needed it most. August’s subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her. Maybe it’s time to start believing in some things, after all.

Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop is a magical, sexy, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.

Weekly Goals 3-2-25

 It's a short work week this week with Waitangi Day on Thursday (and I've taken Friday off too, because why wouldn't you?).  And with a four-day weekend ahead of me, I plan to dive into revisions on A Stranger to Kindness.  One of my critique partners is almost finished the whole book, and one of the others is around halfway, so I have some notes to work on already.  But before I do anything, I'm going to sit down and read through the whole book myself, making my own notes on places I think I need to do some work.

Then, I'll do the work.

Once that's done, I plan to see if I can find a couple more beta readers to give me feedback before I do the micro-edits to tighten up wording and remove all my usual filler words.

I hope to have this one ready to query by Easter.

Other than that, I don't have big plans for the week.  I have two new release classes to learn for the gym, so I'm hoping to finish learning the R30 I started working on this weekend and start on the Ride class.  I swear they get easier to remember the more you've done.

And I hope to make it to the movies over the long weekend too.  There's so many great films on at the moment, it's really hard to keep up.  I need to find time to see both The Brutalist and Emilia Perez but neither have been on at times that suited me the last couple of weeks.  Fingers crossed this week will be different.

What are your goals this week?