Cassandra Page's Blog, page 30

The colour of happiness: emotions as colours in the Isla’s Inheritance trilogy

Those who’ve read my debut novel, Isla’s Inheritance, will be aware that one the talents Isla discovers is the ability to read people’s emotions via their auras. Until she gets used to and learns to interpret the colours, this is quite overwhelming for her.

Over time, Isla built a mental list of what the different colours mean. As for me, as her creator, I had a physical list that I often referred to while writing, to make sure that I kept the colours consistent. Building this list meant I often wrote Google searches like “what is the colour of happiness?” It was interesting to see the variety of responses this turned up, and of course everyone is going to attach different moods to different colours, depending on their cultural background and personal associations. (I had happiness as a shade of pink when I wrote the books, but now I’d make it canary yellow.)

A good example is red: in Western countries it tends to be associated with passion; with strong, hot emotions. Because Isla is Australian and has that cultural filter, those are the associations she has with shades of red, whereas if she’d been from an Asian background she would probably have associated red with happiness and prosperity.

Isla’s experience of emotions of colours is almost — but not quite — like synaesthesia. I have a friend who has grapheme-color synaesthesia, meaning that her perception of numbers and letters is shaded by a colour (she doesn’t associate numbers with colours; she sees numbers as having colours). The difference in Isla’s case is that she doesn’t experience every emotion she sees as a colour. She observes it in more of a detached fashion — albeit one that swamps her vision until she gets used to it.

Here is a sample of some of the different colours I used in the trilogy, and the emotional associations that I made with them. I often used adjectives, because as you can see, you can have the same basic “colour” meaning a few different things. (Wikipedia was a fantastic resource for this!) The examples below are all toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum:

Sickly yellow – fear

Amber yellow – caution

Vibrant orange – terror (beyond fear)

Soft pink – compassion

Salmon pink – embarrassed, like a blush

Deep pink – happiness

Scarlet – lust

Blood red – angry, aggressive or enraged

Rose red – love

Red shot through with black – when fury has crossed over into mindless, ragey violence

For me as a writer, the most fun part was finding creative ways to describe emotions and colours mingled together. Here are some examples from Isla’s Oath, which comes out on 20 January:

Jack seemed calm—his aura a uniform light blue, like a winter sky—and I resolved to emulate him.

Jealousy and grief clashed in her aura, lime green and silvery grey.

His aura was primarily the deep blue of suspicion, but a slow tendril of sickly yellow fear curled there too.

I’d seen fear before, sickly yellow and pulsating. This boy’s fright was beyond that, a blazing orange that hit me like a punch to the gut, knocking the wind from my lungs.

What emotions do you associate with different colours? Are there any I’ve listed that you disagree with? I’d love to hear from you!

Review: ‘Eleven Weeks’ by Lauren K. McKellar

Eleven weeks.

Seven tequila shots.

Five siblings.

Two boys.

One heartbeat.

***

Stacey is good at pretending.

She pretends that the boy she’s in love with doesn’t exist.

She pretends that she’s happy to live and die in this small town.

She pretends that her life is carefree while her best friend’s world crumbles before her very eyes.

But Stacey’s got a secret …

And it’s going to ruin everything.

Note: Eleven Weeks comes out on 28 January. I was fortunate enough to get an ARC.

Stacey is Kate’s best friend in the first book in this series, The Problem With Crazy. During Eleven Weeks, we follow Stacey’s story during more or less the same period of time that The Problem With Crazy covers (I think Eleven Weeks starts a little earlier, but it ends at the same point).

Kate always came across as a caring friend but also as a girl who likes to party. She was a cheerleader in high school and not particularly academically inclined. It’s not that she’s stupid, just that she found boys far more interesting than homework — the sort of character that in your stereotypical teen movie would be the mean girl. Except Kate’s not the mean girl; she’s lovely, and totally supportive of Kate throughout her struggle with her father’s Huntington’s diagnosis (and her wait to find out whether she has it too).

When you find out what was going on during that same period of time — the things that Stacey is dealing with on her own, because she doesn’t want to burden her friend — you realise that Stacey is selfless almost to the point of self-destruction. There were times I wanted to just shake her and say tell your friend, but of course I knew she wouldn’t, because otherwise we’d have known about it in the first book. ;) I imagine that in the third book, when Kate finds out what Stacey was hiding from her, she’s going to kill her.

As far as what Stacey’s big secret is, I won’t spill it here, but I think you can guess it pretty easily from the blurb. One thing that is misleading in the blurb is the bit about “two boys” — it makes it sound like there’s a love triangle in Eleven Weeks, which I’m happy to report there isn’t. There’s just Michael, the friend who clearly likes her but that Stacey thinks is too good for her. Michael is adorable.

I felt so bad for Stacey, despite her frustratingly stubborn determination to keep her secret for as long as possible. It becomes clear pretty quickly that, even though she was popular in school, she has almost no sense of self-worth. It’s the cause of her continued rejection of Michael, and of her lack of ambition. The way her family constantly runs her down, doing everything but describing her as a dumb blonde to her face, is simply awful. I wanted to beat her mother and sister around the head with a blunt object at several points.

Some people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.

Stacey is also quite naïve about certain things, but no more so than any other teenage girl in the same boat as her. Still, she tried her best to handle everything (once she got over the initial shock and denial).

Eleven Weeks has its teary moments, but I didn’t find it quite as soul-shattering as The Problem With Crazy, which broke me over and over. I’m really looking forward to the next book in the series, mostly because I really want to see Kate end up with Lee, and for everyone to live happily ever after! (Although given Lauren has form for breaking hearts, I’m a little nervous about that…)

A week to go: ‘Isla’s Oath’ teaser

Isla’s Oath comes out in a week. A WEEK! I have no idea where the time went, but that kinda snuck up on me! To celebrate (and to hide my panic), I decided to share a teaser. Because everyone loves to be teased, don’t they?

If you’re interested in preordering, here are some handy links…

Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon Australia | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | iBooks

Excerpt from Chapter Six

“I’m so sorry, Dad! I overslept.”

He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost eleven. It’s not like you to sleep so late.”

“I know, I know. Late night.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Dominic?” Although his tone was neutral, anxiety clashed in his aura, too bright for first thing in the morning.

Wincing, I glanced around, wondering where my aunt was. “No. Other stuff.” This keeping secrets thing was hard work. “I’ll tell you later. Do you mind waiting while I get ready?”

“Not at all. Your cousin’s out in the shed; I’ll go see what he’s working on.”

The shed was Ryan’s art studio. I didn’t go out there anymore, because there were several shelves of Dad’s ironwork along the back wall. I used to store his dozens of gifts to me out there, having no use for that many candleholders and coat hooks. Since my eighteenth birthday, when my duinesidhe heritage manifested, I had extra incentive. Proximity to that much iron made me lose my lunch.

Dad had offered to take the ironwork back. Sarah told him not to. “It might come in handy. You know, for stuff.”

Probably thinking of the duinesidhe that attacked him, Dad had agreed.

Refreshed after a quick shower and with minty-clean teeth, I went out onto the back porch. “Dad! You ready to go?” There was no answer, and anxiety made me grip the railing in tight hands. Only a couple of months ago I’d found Ryan passed out in the shed. “Dad? Ryan?”

“Here.” He stepped into the shed doorway and beckoned me. “I think you need to see this.”

I shook my head, staying where I was. “See what?”

“Ryan’s latest painting.”

“Can he bring it out?” I asked plaintively.

“Oh. Right.”

There was a murmured conversation in the shed. I clenched my jaw with impatience. After a couple of minutes, Dad and Ryan filed out and up onto the porch. They weren’t carrying the painting. “It’s too wet to move,” Ryan explained. He had a smudge of paint on the side of his nose, and his face was pale. “But I took a photo on my phone.”

“Clever.” I smiled.

He didn’t smile back as he handed me the phone.

At first the photo, small as it was, appeared to be an abstract style uncharacteristic of Ryan’s work—his usual preferences were either realism or comic book. The photo was comprised of curving yellow, red and orange lines, with a black shape underlying them. I shaded the phone’s screen from the sun’s glare and zoomed in to get a better look.

My eyes widened. Flames encompassed the entirety of the painting, from edge to edge, licking at the black sticks of trees and rolling across familiar ground.

It was Mount Taylor.

“Do you think this is an aislinge vision painting?” I whispered. A cold ball settled in the pit of my stomach, its tendrils of ice seeping through my body.

He nodded.

Kickstarter, Stacey Jay, and sexism…

Warning: this is a long post. I have my rantypants on.

So there was a(nother) scandal in the YA world this week. An author going by the pen name of Stacey Jay — I gather she writes romance too, under another name — set up a Kickstarter project to try and fund the second book in her YA series. She apparently published her first book traditionally, but the sales weren’t enough to make the publisher want to go ahead with the series. However, they were  enough that she could make a viable go of the sequel if she self-published it.

So she set up a Kickstarter, attempting to raise enough money to cover the costs of a cover artist, editing, layout, etc. As part of that, she also included the cost of her time to write the book. She did this because writing is her sole source of income, and because if she was going to take time out from other paying projects to write the sequel, she’d need to be able to feed her kids. You can see the Kickstarter here.

This started a bit of a storm on Twitter. I didn’t see it myself at the time, but I’m told that there was some discussion about the struture of the Kickstarter rewards, some about the idea of wages vs advances vs preorders, some on whether Kickstarter is the program to use at all, and some about the ethics of asking for the cost of living as part of the price of writing a book.

Regardless of the intent behind some of the discussion (I spoke to one person who said it was mostly a discussion about the system), some of it was vitriolic (“who does she think she is?!”), and Stacey Jay took it as an attack. She cancelled the Kickstarter. Her blog post went viral, and a lot of big names latched onto that last point of discussion, about writers being fairly remunerated for their work. Chuck Wendig and Laura Lam blogged about it. Maggie Stiefvater retweeted the blog with a comment saying she agreed 100%.

Then Chuck Wendig tweeted something I’d seen others tweet, although not in the same words:

He was accused of sarcastically subtweeting a group of women, and of being sexist.

This left me scratching my head, because I hadn’t been aware that the bulk of the discussion about the Kickstarter had been by women. I suppose if I’d considered it, I would have realised, because most YA authors are women. But until then, it didn’t seem to have been a factor.

Still, the subject of authors being paid (in money, not “exposure”) isn’t exactly a women’s issue, so the gender makeup of the two sides of the debate shouldn’t be a barrier to others taking part in a discussion arising from it. The fact that the bulk of the discussion was on one issue, rather than the full spectrum of the original discussion … well, that’s just how conversations work. They don’t always go the way we want them to, especially online.

Sidenote: The claim that Chuck Wendig has a big megaphone to broadcast with because he is a man is undermined by the fact that Maggie Stiefvater — who has almost twice as many Twitter followers — said the same thing. I’m not saying that his white male status hasn’t helped him along the way in his career, because there’s no doubt that privilege shortens your odds in the “luck” part of the success equation, but I’d suggest hard work, clever marketing and talent play big role in his success too. And Chuck is the first person to admit he has received “hetronormative white dude” advantages. His self-awareness earns him mad props in my eyes.

Anyway, yesterday, Stacey Jay tweeted the following.

She’s been doxxed.

(If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s when someone hacks or does intensive research on a target and then publishes their personal details online. Wiki has a page defining it.)

I saw her tweets this morning, my time, and wanted to Hulksmash something. I feel sick. Really ill, and so bad for Stacey Jay that it hurts. Because this isn’t about the pros and cons of asking for money to cover your bills anymore, or whether Patreon is better than Kickstarter, or whether a $20 reward including promo material was poor form. This is about someone’s privacy being violated.

Regardless of what you think of authors using Kickstarter to fund writing a book, we can all agree that doxxing someone is a dick move, yes?

To be clear, I don’t think for a second that the person behind the doxxing was one of those involved in the original discussion. No doubt some “hacktivist” shit-stirrer saw the scandal and decided to make a name for themselves in the cyber community by targeting Stacey Jay.

And this is where I think sexism has played a part, moreso than in the original tall poppy syndrome or the commentary around it. Because doxxing someone contains an implicit threat. I know where you live. It’s been used a lot by the less savoury side of the GamerGate scandal, to try and shut up those on the opposite side. Usually, it must be said, it’s used to target women.

I hope Stacey Jay reports the doxxing to the police and they are able to find the perpetrator — although I’m not optimistic about that. I hope she can find some peace after all this. I even hope that she reactivates the Kickstarter to take advantage of the publicity all this has caused, although given the doxxing I doubt she will. If I were her, I wouldn’t.

And the truth is that I’m scared to post this, because I’m a female on social media, and I’m afraid of drawing the wrong sort of attention. Of having people leave vindictive negative reviews on my book, or of being doxxed myself. Because it has happened to others.

But seeing others doxxed and being cowed by that makes you collateral damage from the original attack. It’s completely messed up. This is what #YesAllWomen is about.

And that is my rant.

Review: ‘Fight For Me’ by K. A. Last

“How can I fight for you when I don’t know what I’m fighting for?”

When Grace Tate became one of the fallen to protect a vampire, it got her into more trouble than she’d bargained for. She’s angry at Charlotte for hiding the truth, and with Josh living in the city and Seth missing, life is harder than ever.

It’s about to get a lot harder…

Grace doesn’t want to leave Hopetown Valley, but when Josh ignores her calls she decides to go and search for him. She doesn’t expect to run into Seth as well.

When she reaches the city, Grace learns that Charlotte is the most hunted vampire in Wide Island. The city vamps want her blood, and the angels are after her soul. Grace gets caught in the crossfire of a battle she never wanted, but to win one war, she has to fight another.

Torn between the one she gave up everything for, and the one who sacrificed everything for her, Grace has to face Charlotte, and the past, if she wants to fight for her future. But how can she fight for someone who doesn’t want to fight for her?

Every choice Grace makes becomes a battle, and in every battle someone has to die.

I read this book last October, but as it comes out next week — 17 January — now seems like a good time to post my review. That also means it counts towards my 2015 Aussie Women Writers challenge, and I’d already beaten the 2014 one. Winning!

Fight For Me is the sequel to Fall For Me, a series about a protection angel named Grace Tate and her human twin brother, Archer. Grace reincarnates over and over as a twin of the Tate boys, down the family line, an arangement that means she has a telepathic link with each one and lets them be an awesome vampire-hunting duo.

Everything’s going swimmingly till Charlotte shows up and drags Archer, Grace and Josh — Grace’s boyfriend — into her mess. Fight For Me picks up after the dust settles. Of course, the peace and quiet don’t last long.

While Fall For Me was a good read — fast-paced, with a plot twist at the end that made me gasp — Fight For Me is great. I think Kim really hit her mark with this one, maybe because the initial worldbuilding has been taken care of and she can really sink her teeth into the story. (See what I did there?)

In the first book I didn’t like Josh very much; he got super jealous of Grace and her love/hate relationship with fellow fallen angel Seth, and his attitude kind of bugged me. Fight For Me is dual POV between Grace and Josh, which worried me at first, but although Josh is clearly still very troubled in the second book (because spoilers), seeing it from his perspective made me understand him better. He’s still not my favourite — if I had to choose a boyfriend for Grace, I’d choose Seth. But Josh still redeemed himself somewhat in my eyes.

My favourite character in both this book and the previous one is Archer, Grace’s brother. He’s a total smartass, and isn’t afraid to tell it like it is when Grace is getting a little overwrought. But at the same time he’s protective of her. He’s basically what Xander from Buffy would be if you made him a slayer too.

As with Fall For Me, Fight For Me had an awesome plot twist at the end, and again I didn’t see it coming, although in hindsight the clues were there. I love that!

Finally, the epilogue makes it clear there’s at least one more book in the series, which is always exciting. I love a trilogy!

The Aussie Women Writers challenge

Cassandra Page:

Today over at Aussie Owned and Read, I’m talking about the awesomeness that is the Australian Women Writers Challenge. Get you some!

Originally posted on Aussie Writers:

The Australian Women Writers’ Challenge is part of the growing world-wide movement to raise awareness of excellent writing by women. It helps readers to challenge the subconscious stereotypes that govern our choice of books to read. We are excited to be entering our third year and hope that we can help you do something about this issue.

I’ve always read a more-than-average number of books by female writers — I’m guessing maybe a third of my reads were by women, although I don’t have any data to back that up — but almost all of them were by Americans or Brits. When I realised this, it left me scratching my head. I love reading book set in my own backyard, and I want to see a healthy Australian publishing industry (partly for selfish reasons, I admit), so why didn’t I read more Aussie books?! Eventually I realised that a lot…

View original 433 more words

Review: ‘Dead Witch Walking’ by Kim Harrison

All the creatures of the night gather in “the Hollows” of Cincinnati, to hide, to prowl, to party … and to feed.

Vampires rule the darkness in a predator-eat-predator world rife with dangers beyond imagining — and it’s Rachel Morgan’s job to keep that world civilized.

A bounty hunter and witch with serious sex appeal and an attitude, she’ll bring ‘em back alive, dead … or undead.

I’d never heard of Kim Harrison before, but now I’m wondering why. I discovered her when I asked on Twitter for some urban fantasy audiobook recommendations before Christmas; on Boxing Day I had to drive my son interstate to spend some time with his father, and wanted something to listen to on the way back. Nicole Evelina recommended this series.

My favourite thing about Dead Witch Walking is the world-building. Rachel Morgan’s world is one where, following a terrible virus outbreak halfway through last century, the supernatural creatures all got outed by virtue of the fact that there weren’t as many humans to hide amongst anymore. Now they live in plain sight, tending to stick to their own communities but otherwise part of society.

Rachel, a witch, starts out working as a runner (a type of cop) for Inderland Security — sort of like the FBI for supernatural types. But she decides very early on that she’s tired of getting all the milk runs rather than the real jobs she knows she can do. She’s confident in her own abilities, although that does tend to lead her to be reckless at times. She decides to quit, and two of her IS colleagues, Jenks the pixie and Ivy the living vampire, quit with her to go freelance.

Unfortunately the IS has a policy of not letting runners leave in the middle of their contract, and the consequence is to take a hit out on them — presumably to discourage that sort of behaviour from everyone else.

The hit on Rachel was the one thing I was left scratching my head over. It is commonly known that the IS do this; even the human version of the IS, the FIB, knows about it. But somehow it’s sanctioned? I guess because the FIB figures so long as no one else gets hurt, it’s the supernaturals in-fighting, and whatever, but I just would’ve expected the law enforcement bodies to frown on assassinating people, even if it’s then done on the sly.

The characters were fun. Jenks is sarcastic and has as much attitude as any of the full-size characters, only packed into a pixie-sized package. Imagine if Tinker Bell was able to speak, and that’s what Jenks is like. Rachel’s recklessness is offset by Ivy’s OCD-level of planning, which causes tension between them at times. The other source of tension is Rachel’s paranoia that Ivy wants to eat her. While it’s understandable, it does get a little old after a while. Fortunately, there is character growth on Rachel’s part throughout the book, and I liked her courage and willingness to admit when she’s screwed up.

A comment on the audiobook: the narrator, Marguerite Gavin, was very versatile. She managed to capture Rachel’s general no-nonsense narration — that businesslike delivery — while still acting out her moments of fear and the other characters. One of my beefs with James Marsters’ delivery of the Jim Butcher books is that his delivery is done in a sort of lazy noir drawl that he never breaks up, no matter which character he’s voicing. Gavin is much better (sorry, James!).

Bloggery: 2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. This probably won’t interest anyone but me, although the fact my most successful post this year was about hyphens isn’t lost on me.

[image error]

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

New year’s resolutions: 2015 edition

Top Ten Tuesday is a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, and it is loads of fun. You should all partake of it. PARTAKE! (Please imagine I said that in my best Dalek voice.) This week’s theme is: “Top Ten Goals/Resolutions For 2015 — bookish, blogging or otherwise!”

I’ve discovered over the last two years that blogging about my goals is a really great way to hold myself accountable, and make sure I actually do the things I set out to do.

2014 recap

Celebrate the launch of Isla’s Inheritance in October (or thereabouts). Convince as many of you as possible to buy it. Check. Sort of. I dunno if I’ve convinced as many of you as possible. I mean, I haven’t paid people with kittens or threatened dire consequences if people don’t. But people

have read it, and left nice reviews around the place. So I’m pretty happy about that.

Finish writing and editing the third book in Isla’s trilogy, so it’s ready to go to Turquoise Morning Press when they ask for it. Check. Right now, I’m actually halfway through re-reading it after the second-round edits from TMP. I really love this story, you guys. I know we’re not meant to have favourites among our children, but of the Isla’s Inheritance trilogy, the third book in the series, Melpomene’s Daughter, is definitely my favourite. Shh!

Find a home for Lucid Dreaming, whether that be via the agent/traditional press route or the small press route. This is the one resolution I have’t yet been successful on, for reasons that would require another blog post. But I have a plan of action. Hopefully I’ll be able to share something with you around the middle of next year. (By the way, there’s a lesson in this for everyone: don’t set goals that are outside your control. You can’t make people offer on your manuscripts, and sometimes people love them but don’t offer on them anyway, for market reasons or list reasons or whatever. Publishing is a tricky thing.)

Start writing something else. Possibly a sequel to Lucid Dreaming, although there’s that steampunk I’ve been thinking about for aaaages. I’m currently 18,000 words into the aforementioned steampunk, although the steampunk elements are actually pretty light. A year later, I describe it as historical fantasy. :) I also self-published a novella under another pen name, Tammy Calder. It’s 8500 words long.

That means in 2014 I wrote…a lot of words. Probably in the order of 70,000, counting Melpomene’s Daughter, although I didn’t track it. And that doesn’t count blog posts and reviews. Whew. Chuck Wendig estimated he wrote 750,000 words this year, but we can’t all be Chuck, I guess! (I can’t even grow a beard.)

Read. I’ll set my Goodreads target to 40 again, see how it goes. Kicked this one out of the ballpark.

2015 goals
Reading goals

Read lots of books. I’ve set my Goodreads target to 40 again, with the caveat that childrens books and novellas don’t count. If I read 10 of those, I need to read 50 titles overall. Otherwise I have to wear the cone of shame.

Read a variety of Australian books. I’m also doing the Aussie Readers challenge over at Goodreads. For that, I need to read 12 books by Australian writers in 12 different genres. I’ll post my choices in a blog post in the new year. I’m looking forward to it — it’s a very exciting list!

Read books by Australian women. I’m also going to do the Australian Women Writers challenge again in 2015. There’s a lot of overlap between this list and number two, I confess — currently my Aussie readers challenge list only includes one bloke. Still, since this year I read and reviewed 11 books by Australian women, my plan for 2015 is to set my own goal of 15. I think I can do it, and it means this challenge is pushing me further than the previous one. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Writing and publishing goals

Release Isla’s Oath and Melpomene’s Daughter on time, with as much fanfare as I can manage. The former is scheduled for release on 20 January, and the latter for the week of 20 April (I don’t have an exact date). SO EXITE! Isla’s Oath is already available for preorder and is on NetGalley, but I still have some promo stuff to finish off. And as I mentioned, Melpomene’s Daughter is still in the editing process. Busy busy busy.

Finish my historical fantasy. The four other novels (and even the novella) I’ve written have been urban fantasy, and the novels have all been in the first person. Switching to historical fantasy and the third person has required a massive change of gears. But I’ve wanted to tell this story for three years now, and the thrill of actually seeing it come to life is pretty high. Sure, there are growing pains, but that’s to be expected. And fixing it afterwards is what edits are for!

Give Lucid Dreaming the attention it deserves. I love this book, you guys. At least as much as Melpomene’s Daughter. I’ve neglected it a bit this year — having three books scheduled for release over the space of seven months does tend to eat up your time — but 2015 will be its year. I promise. *pats manuscript reassuringly*

Write another novella for Tammy Calder. Enough said about that. ;)

Blog at least twice a week. This will require some planning, since I’m going away to the coast with my son and some friends for a week at the end of January (a few days after Isla’s Oath comes out — oops), but I can do it. I don’t need to sleep, right?

What are your goals for this year, reading, writing or otherwise?

My 2014 Goodreads challenge wrap up

This year I really embraced the reading challenges (both the Goodreads and the Australian Women Writers one) and you can really tell. Last year I read 40 books, whereas this year I read 61 — excluding picture books. Originally my goal was to read 40, but when I got there I discovered I’d read 12 novellas or childrens books. So I increased it to 52, figuring that way I’d get at least 40 full-length novels.

Here are my reads as I write this (from most recent to least recent). I haven’t counted books I wrote, even though I’ve read three of those this year, plus a novella. ;)

A few observations:

Roald Dahl (13%) and Kevin Hearne (also 13%) were a feature. Both were writers I listened to on audiobook, the former with my son in the car, the latter not so much. :p
Female writers were heavily represented at 59% of my reads, which I’m really happy with. Eleven of those, or 18%, were Australian.
Eight (also 13%) of the books I read were self-published.
There were four novellas (6%), nine childrens books (15%), and one non-fiction, which means I read forty-seven full-length novels. Win!

I think I’ll aim for 40 full-length novels again next year and see how I go!