Goodreads, Good Year

Hey, look!

See my 2014 books here.

I'm kind of amazed that I finished. I was so far behind when I staggered over the finish line of the semester, and immediately dove into my to-read list, but as the end of the year approached I started to panic and searched through all my free Kindle books for short ones so I could get to 52 books by the end of the year.

Fifty-two books. I know, that's kind of sad for someone who loves reading as much as I do, and the total does include a handful of textbooks, I'm afraid. But, this has been quite a year for me professionally, given the number of major events my employer put on this year, all of which I was responsible for tweeting, emailing, facebooking, and storyifying all over the place. (By the way, my employer now knows about Storify, and he wants to Storify every freaking thing. I have to explain to him at least once a week that not everything should be Storifyied.. I created a monster.)

Brighter reading days are coming. I have one more semester of grad school and then I'm free to read and write without feeling guilt or pushing my luck on letting my homework go until the last minute. I'm setting my reading goal higher this year-- probably 75 books-- and I hope to have to bump it up a bit well before the last two weeks of the year.

And while my to-read list is overflowing, and the queue free books stored neatly on Amazon waiting for me to download them is almost as long (the two groups are mostly mutually exclusive), I always welcome reading suggestions from my beloved blogging buddies. What should have high priority on my to-read list this year?

(And if you're looking for suggestions, here's my Goodreads read list, sorted by rating. Enjoy.)

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

For those of you who aren't following my every move on Facebook or Twitter, here's the latest:

Five years, five wins. NaNoWriMo is AWESOME.

I did a bit of a NaNo Rebel thing this year-- halfway through the month, the conflict that was driving my original story kind of fizzled out. I was enjoying that story a lot and would like to revisit it, but I knew if I wanted to finish NaNo it was time to bring out the big guns...

... so I went back to the same novel that I've been working on since 2011, the one that's seen me through one NaNo, two Camp NaNos, and all the writing time in between. I'm happy to say that not only did I win NaNoWriMo, but I finally finished the first draft of this infernal novel. It's going in a drawer for a few months until I get round to deciding what to cut and what to keep, which (let's face it) will probably not happen until after my spring semester ends.

Happy December 1, everybody!