Raima Larter's Blog, page 2

Thankfully Reading

November 27, 2024

Fourteen years ago, in 2010, I participated in an online reading challenge over the Thanksgiving weekend and I just discovered that it's happening again! This event is hosted by Jenn, a book reviewer in the DC metro area where I used to live. Count me in!

The point of the challenge is to encourage people to relax and enjoy the holiday rather than stressing out over cooking and shopping and travel. People who participate use the hashtag #thankfullyreading to post updates about their reading throughout the weekend. I'll still be cooking, but will definitely be reading in those moments when I'm waiting for the bread dough to rise, the pie to bake, etc.

I am especially grateful to be able to participate in this challenge this year, since it wasn't that long ago I was finding it difficult to read at all. I posted about that here and am happy to report that this year is totally different. In fact, I've met and surpassed my Goodreads Challenge of 25 books for the year and have just started my 28th, another installment in the Corduroy Mansions series by Alexander McCall-Smith. These easy-going, cozy books are just the thing I've needed to read this year...which may explain why I've already read 8 of them! Onto to #9.

And for my US readers, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Happy reading!

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November is coming....

For the last 13 years, I have participated in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. I've not always "won" this event, which generally requires writing 50,000 words during the month of November, but I've always benefited from it. I've completed and published two novels that started in NaNo, drafted two novellas that may someday see the light of day, and made progress on two more novels. 

This time I hope to draft more material for a book I started last summer. I love the sense of immersion in another world that happens when I participate in this event, and I'm looking forward to starting again tomorrow.

One note, I feel I should make: the NaNoWriMo organization has had a number of difficulties this year, largely stemming from their lack of moderation of social media spaces they maintained for young writers. The organization's response to this is posted here, so I won't repeat all this - and I don't actually know all the details. 

This controversy has led some participants to leave, but I've decided to stay. I feel the current organizers are doing their best in a difficult situation. I don't believe we should leave, or threaten to leave, whenever a group (or, ahem, country) does something we disagree with, It doesn't solve anything or help anybody to walk away when someone disappoints you. 

So, I'm cleaning my desk and making room for a new writing project. See you on the other side, with (hopefully) 50,000 new words that haven't yet been written.

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Goodreads Giveaway

I am giving away 5 signed paperback copies of my latest book. Sign up at Goodreads for your chance to win!

Goodreads Book Giveaway The Kiss Catastropheby Raima Larter

Giveaway ends September 21, 2024.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

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New Release!

Get your copy here!

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Publication Day!

And it's here! My new novel has just been published today. It is now available in paperback and hardcover but you can pre-order the e-book version, which is due out July 1. As the book percolates through the system, it will become available at local bookstores and through bookshop.org. And I'll have some copies on hand. Let me know if you'd like one!

Although not my first novel, this is my first science fiction book, and I'm very excited about it. I hope you enjoy it!

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Coming Soon!

My new novel will be available in just a little over a month! 

Publication day is set for June 3. Here's a short synopsis for you:

It is 2071, 29 years after Earth's Great Climate Catastrophe. Syd, a chemist at a powerful mega-corporation, meets Jake who takes her to a cave that contains a portal to another planet, Cascadia an oceanic world suffering its own climate crisis. Meanwhile on Cascadia, Ruddy, a poet employed by the Ministry of Poetry is pursued by resistance forces of an enslaved minority, the In-Between, who see him as the key to their deliverance. An explosion strands him and an In-Betweener scientist on Earth and the four must join forces to save both planets from their climate crises.

I will have pre-order information for you soon, so stay tuned!

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Happy Birthday

Five years ago today, my first novel was published, and things have not been the same since! Although Fearless was the first to be published, it wasn't the first novel I'd ever written. In fact, it was the third. The second one (Belle o' the Waters) came out a few months after Fearless, and as to the first? Well, let's just say it is STILL a work in progress. Maybe some day!

You can still buy Fearless directly from the publisher, New Meridian Arts. Another way to purchase it is through Bookshop.org, which allows buyers to designate their own local bookstore to receive a portion of the funds. It's a great deal and helps support both independent publishers and independent bookstores. Fearless is also available on Amazon and B&N. 

And, yes, I can send you a signed copy if you'd like. Find those here.

Finally, to celebrate this milestone, I'm excited to announce that my latest book, Motherhood and Other Magical Realms, is available as a free Kindle e-book all this week! From Feb. 27 - March 2, you can download this collection of sometimes weird stories for no money at all. Someone once asked me if the collection is "memoir," and I had to laugh -- because, no, it isn't, but yes, it IS in a way! All of these stories came from my life, even the ones that some might feel are impossible (like the one about humans who live on the moon). 

Thanks for all your support through the years and happy reading!

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A Return to Reading

I have always been a big reader. I zipped through books as a kid like I was drinking water, and although my interests evolved over time, I really never stopped reading. Until I did.

The Covid pandemic brought a halt to my ability to read a book. In recent years, I've logged my reading on Goodreads and, as can be seen in the above screenshot, my reading took a nosedive just as Covid surged. I suspect it wasn't just the pandemic that caused this, but everything happening in the world - I couldn't let go of reality long enough to lose myself in a book, and it shows in my reading challenge statistics.

The low point occurred in 2021, with only 3 books read. Two of these were books written by friends; the third is a book of poetry that I don't even remember reading. It distressed me that I wasn't reading, but not enough to do anything about it. 

And then I was asked to write a selection for the Washington Independent Review of Books column Bedtime Stories, where authors write about what they're reading. Panic! What could I do....but be honest. So, I was, and talked about how I couldn't focus on books anymore, but fondly remembered books I'd read in the past. It's still posted here, if you're interested in reading my rambles.

In 2022, I decided I needed to at least try. I started with another book by a writer I personally know: "The Other Ones," by Dave Housley. This turned out to be a great read, but I still couldn't get into novels. The next book I tried was nonfiction: "American Republics," by Alan Taylor. This fascinating history of the US and Canada in the period before the US Civil War kept my attention all the way through, and I was able to read the whole thing.

I tried a few more novels after that, and really enjoyed "News of the World," by Paulette Jiles. I'd never heard of this author, but found this short novel in a Little Library in my neighborhood. The short length helped me finish, but the story and the writing were both fantastic. That year, I also enjoyed "Sleepwalk," by Dan Chaon, a bizarre but totally compelling thriller about a near-future world much like our own.

I still felt like I was not reading, though, and months would go by without me picking up a single book. I decided enough was enough; I needed to approach this the way I do my running. I needed to go back into training - put myself on a schedule and read at least one book each month. It worked!

Last year, I exceeded my Goodreads goal of one book a month, and I have kept the momentum going. I am currently on my fifth book of the year in 2024, so have gone back to my goal of 25 books per year, a goal I never had trouble reaching before the near-end of my reading life. 

There are no shortage of books to read, after all. One favorite among the five I've read so far this year is Jill McCorkle's new book, "Old Crimes: and Other Stories," which I found on the "New Books" shelf at the library. I've become a regular at the local branch of my public library. This is the way it should be. This is who I am: a reader.

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Annual Writing Report

For months, I've been feeling as if my writing was not going well, either in terms of submitting things or even spending time doing it. It was both a vague feeling, as well as a fact based in evidence. I'm the sort of person who keeps track of things, and I could look at data such as pieces submitted, hours spent on writing, etc, and see that things were bad.

The first thing I noticed was that I just haven't submitted very much this year. I have finished a few pieces and sent them out, but only 24 times so far in 2023. This is much lower than my submission rates in recent years, as shown in the above graph. The lowest number of submissions in recent years is for 2019, when I was battling breast cancer. There's at least an explanation for that! This year is lower than even 2019, so I needed to dig a little deeper to understand what's going on.

In addition to keeping track of submissions, I also log my writing time. Despite having totaled these hours up each week, I really didn't have a good sense about how much I was writing, since I never looked at monthly or yearly totals, much less at any trends.

So, last week, I started adding up entries in my little writing log book. When I saw that I'd written for a grand total of three and a half hours in the entire month of April and only 45 minutes (total!) in September, I knew this was going to be a bad year. I kept on tallying things, calculating the total hours spent writing for each month, then averaging over the months of the year. I did this all the way back to 2017, the year after I received my MFA, and was shocked to see the result:

 That first year is probably an anomaly, since I had so much work in the pipeline from my master's program and the writing just poured out. The next year is low, but I don't trust that number since I apparently did not keep track of any writing for most of the year. 2019 is, again, the year I was battling illness, but then things get back on track.

Until they don't. There is a clear and obvious decline, year by year, in the amount of time I spend actually writing. If one were to lay a ruler on the above graph for the last four years and ask where this is headed, it looks like one would predict that Raima will stop writing completely in two years time.

And I don't want that. Not by a long shot! So, something needs to change. I've already set a rule for myself that I will write for at least 15 minutes every morning Monday - Friday, and so far I've had a pretty good initial week. This is a slightly early new year's resolution, and my plan is to continue doing this into the new year.

Last year at about this time I announced that I was starting a new position as Assistant Fiction Editor for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine. I have done that for over a year now, and was elevated to Nonfiction Editor several months ago. We are still going strong, and it's been a real pleasure to work with the other editors and staff of this great scifi publication. Although it's been a lot of work, I can't really blame my lack of productivity (summarized above) on this volunteer position, since I've been reading for literary journals of one sort or another for several years. This type of work has been, and continues to be, a real joy and I have no intention of giving it up.

In addition to the distressing data shown above, I had a some good news in my writing life this year. My flash fiction piece, Maude's Place, was published by Flash Fiction Magazine back in January. This was the only new piece I had published this year, but Big Blue Marble was reprinted as part of the 5th year anniversary anthology for Utopia Science Fiction. Perhaps with some of the new year's resolutions noted above, I can improve on these statistics next year. I'll keep on keeping track and will report back in a year. 

Wishing everyone the best in the coming year!

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Fifteen Years

Note: the following was posted earlier today on my long-running blog, raimalarter.com. Thanks for subscribing to the Substack feed.

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of my blog! I never expected when I started this blog way back in 2008 that it would still be going strong 15 years later. But here we are.

I've had some ups and downs in publishing frequency, and have sometimes not posted for several months at a time, but have never missed an entire year - although 2015 looks a little bleak, with only 4 posts, all published in December of that year. Since I was in the midst of an MFA program at the time, it's probably understandable that I didn't have a lot of time to blog that year. And although I've been determined to do better in 2023, I've sometimes only been able to write and publish once a month. As usual, I vow to do better next year!

I remember the night when I decided to try my hand at blogging. I was working on an early draft of a book, Spiritual Insights from the New Science, which was eventually published many years later. I wanted to try out a few ideas for this book with short blog posts, but didn't know how to get those posts in front of interested readers.

And then I learned about Twitter. This was in 2008, so a very different social media era than we are in now--and to be honest, I didn't really understand why someone would want to use something like Twitter. However, when I learned that it was possible to post links as part of a tweet, I saw at least one use for it. I could write a longer post about a topic I was interested in, post a link to it on a tweet, and try to connect with people who might have an interest in that topic.

It actually worked - until Twitter started to change and became something called X and is now a place I never want to use again. In those early days, I found thousands of people who were interested in the things I was interested in, and Twitter (and, eventually, FaceBook as well) became the portals through which I could bring people to my blog and, in turn, to information about other things I might be publishing (like stories and books). 

The social media landscape is in a state of flux, though, and I've found ways to get the word out about my blog posts and to connect with readers. We will see if I'm still writing blog posts in another 15 years. I hope so!

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