Writing-wise, 2011 was packed:

1. I wrote a new novel called Labeled which I started on January 2, 2011, and finished the first draft of on June 4, 2011.
2. I migrated my blogfrom my a computer in my house to WordPress.com, a decision I have not regretted for even a moment. I’ve seen the traffic on my blog rise consistently through the year, though it is still not exactly where I want it.
3. I got an Agent!
4. I bought a new laptopfor my writing.
5. I reviewed 49 books. I actually can’t believe I read that many books this year. It’s rather amazing.
6. I did multiple major revision passes to my books Nowhere Wild, Army of the Risen and Labeled. Each one is inching closer to being ‘done-done’.
7. I volunteered heavily at the PNWA Conference.
8. I won first placefor a short story I wrote for a local writing contest.
9. I was a founding member of the Puyallup Writers Co-op.
10. I read my first books on a Kindle. I’ve now read a few more since that initial shock to my system, and though I don’t hate it anymore, it still feels a little bit wrong.

Personally, I also had some major events not related to writing:

1. I became an American Citizenin May 2011.
2. I had had two surgeries (one on each foot) and dislocated my shoulder once. These medical issues allowed me to spend a lot of time writing this year, and also prevented me from doing much else that was interesting, so this part of the list is a little bit short.
3. I traveled back to Canada for my parents’ 50th Anniversary.
4. I started getting back into shape.
5. I worked a lot from home.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something that I will need to add as soon as this gets posted. But for now, that’s what I got. 2011 was an odd year personally, but I’m proud of what I accomplished on this blog.

2012 will be a little different. I will continue to do book reviews, but I will also branch out into other areas – more human interest stories and opinion. I want people to get to know me through this blog, to learn about my books, and about where my passions in life are. Hopefully my writing will move to the next stage in 2012, and with that, will come even bigger changes personally and professionally. All of which, you will read about here. I hope to see you back here frequently, and leaving comments on a regular basis.

Good-bye, 2011. It’s been real. And hello 2012. I can’t wait to see what’s in store. As long as the Mayans turn out to be wrong.

In 1998, Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction for his book, Guns, Germs and Steel – The Fates of Human Societies. It’s a fascinating look back at 13000+ years of human history and the evolution of civilization, and why / how one group of people prevailed over another, and why some groups faded away completely.

Diamond’s goal in the book was to show that the environment the people lived in had a greater influence on their success that did the nature of the people themselves. He wanted to refute the racist arguments that Europeans have so dominated the world for the last six hundred years because they were somehow borne “smarter” than those born in Africa or New Guinea. He approached this goal by backtracking from 1500 AD, where the Spanish were just beginning their lopsided series of battles with the natives of the New World. Why was it that 160 Spanish soldiers defeated an army of 80,000 warriors? How did a few shiploads of men invade continents with 20 million people, and reduce those societies to rubble in just a few short years? How did European societies evolve into such powerful nations, while those in Africa, Australia, north and South America failed to reach the same levels?

The answer, as Diamond writes, is in the geography, and in the environment. Powerful societies developed in moderate climates, with east-west axis, available domesticable herd-animals, and most importantly, the cereal-grain crops which helped to lift hunter-gathers into farmers who could support the overhead of having permanent craftsmen, government and military. Diamond documents numerous societies from their points of origin (traceable through both archeology and linguistics) to their modern day descendants. The book is filled with interesting anecdotes and short clips of historical incidents which help to support his hypothesis.

I am an amateur historian at best. Many times in my life I’ve regretted not studying history more in school. I actually considered switching to a history major for a while in college, but by then I was already three years into my Physics/CompSci degree, and couldn’t afford 4 more years of schooling. My exposure to much of history has been constrained to the Anglo-European age, from 800 AD to present day, and much of that has been from reading historical fiction. This book stretched me well outside of my area of knowledge, and filled in numerous gaps. I feel ‘smarter’ for having read it. It’s a book I recommend to anyone and everyone who has even the slightest bit of scientific or historical curiosity. I’m not saying the book doesn’t have flaws in its logic. There are plenty of people out there willing to criticize it for one reason or another. But it at least makes you think, and makes you question your own assumptions about how the world developed.

Diamond’s writing style is inviting enough that anyone with a high school degree should be able to read it, though some aspects do require the critical thinking that I believe isn’t introduced until college. There were a few times where I found myself questioning his conclusions, only to find him addressing that exact issue a few pages later.

If there is a fault to be found with this book, it’s that some chapters become quite repetitive. The four aspects of geographic advantage are documented so many times that you begin to think that a chapter or two could have been cut in order to shorten the book, and little would have been lost.

As a fiction writer, I find reading historical-non-fiction inspiring – not in the sense where the tragedies of mass extinction by small-pox infection is enjoyable, but in that in each society, there were key moments, or key situations that changed everything. The ‘high-concept’ plot, driven by the singular hero that must save the world (or cause its destruction) has not always been fiction. The intrepid explorers who sailed a thousand miles from New Guinea to Hawaii in outrigger canoes with no guarantee that Hawaii even existed are not so different from the fictional crews of the space-ships we authors send out amongst the stars. The native man defending his village against invading demons armed with magical weapons that spout fire is not so different than our heroic police officer in Boston who must stop the aliens from destroying his city. There is fiction in history and history in fiction, and a book like this serves up ideas for novels by the bucketful.

If you’re looking to expand the scope of your reading beyond your fiction list, give this one a try. If you like science / history, definitely add this book to your list.

Mesa Selimovic was a Bosnian born writer, and Death and the Dervish, written in 1966,  is one of the most acclaimed books to ever come out of Yugoslavia. It’s a story about a dervish named Sheikh Nuruddin in an 18th Century Sarajevo monastery, during the time of the Turkish occupation.

I would love to be able to say that I enjoyed this book. Actually, I would love to say I finished this book. I stopped 37 pages into it. I tried numerous times over the last few years to get farther into it, and even gave it to a friend of mine who I always see reading what I would call “Acclaimed Literature”. He couldn’t finish the book either. He made it almost to fifty pages.

Since I didn’t finish the book, I don’t really feel qualified to review it, nor can I tell you what happened without plagiarizing other reviewers. But yet, here we are, in a book review.

If you look around the internets, you’ll see many glowing reviews for Death and the Dervish – a lot of five star reviews, in fact. Yet, I couldn’t finish it. I’m split on why this is. There are two possibilities:

1. I was not patient enough for the book, and it really was going to get better.
2. I have reached  the limits of “acclaimed literature” that I enjoy reading.

Either way, there was something about the beginning of the book that I didn’t like. It’s pretty easy to identify what it was: the pace. The book spends an inordinate amount of time inside the tortured mind of the main character, examining his every fear and every desire. The writing is detailed and drawn out, manic its sentence length and content. Sentences are tremendously long, sometimes hundreds of words, with numerous semi-colons. By the time you reach the end of the paragraph, you can’t remember what was happening at the beginning. By the end of the chapter, you’ve forgotten the name of the other characters in the room.

My inability to read a book as highly acclaimed as this book makes me feel like a failure as a reader. I don’t feel intelligent enough to read this book. It requires a level of concentration I am no longer capable of maintaining (though I doubt I ever have been able to do it). Perhaps it is a cultural thing: the battle between Eastern European writing from the middle of the last century, and a mind that has grown accustomed to the faster paced writing of modern America and young adult fiction.

I’ve criticized books before for bad writing – lazy writing; objective reasons for saying “this is a poorly written book”. I can’t lay that charge against this book. There is heart and soul in this writing. You can see that by looking at any page. But the style excludes readers like me from enjoying it. And that is key to why I read fiction. I must enjoy it at some level, or at least feel like it is adding to my knowledge of the world. My reasons for disliking Death and the Dervish are purely subjective. It just didn’t hold my attention because it was too slow. I didn’t know I had limits like that.

I guess now I know.

Divergent is set in the futuristic, and partially destroyed city of Chicago. The city is broken into 5 factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless and Eurdite. Each faction values one human trait over all others, to the point where citizens who turn sixteen must choose between one of the factions, based on their desire to be selfless, peaceful, honest, brave or intelligent, respectively.

Beatrice Pryor is a child of Abnegation parents, who are leaders of the city. But she doesn’t feel that selflessness is her calling. A special test that she takes prior to her choosing confirms that. But what it does tells her will turn her life upside down, and make everything she does dangerous to herself and to her family.

This is a Young Adult book, and it reads like one. The action is fast-paced, the emotions border, at times, on what would be called melodrama in an adult book. But it is very well written, and keeps the reader turning the pages, or in my case, clicking the forward button on my Kindle. It’s a book everyone writing YA should read, to see how to do the things that separate YA books from regular adult books. There are few things that you have to either suspend your disbelief about… you know, besides the whole dystopian thing. I hope that in the next book, some of these questions are answered. I’m not going to reveal them here (because they seem central to plot). But they do make me want to read the next book, which I think comes out in May of 2012.

There is no doubt this book is YA, and if you aren’t into that, then you might cast a scornful eye at it from time to time. But if you do enjoy YA, this is one you should definitely read, and would be a great book to give to the young adults in your family.

One of the impacts of being incapacitated so much is that I’ve gotten way out of shape. I put on a significant amount of weight this year, and have only been heavier once in my life. It’s not a comfortable feeling, and I was not happy when I looked at myself in the mirror. It also affected my energy levels, and that’s not a good thing when you have two little kids that you want to play with. They learn by example, and when they see you sitting around, they tend to sit around too. Running around with my kids outside for 15 minutes put me back on the couch for a half day, unable to do much more than waddle to the kitchen and back for an ice pack.

Back in the late 1990’s, I did a lot of long distance bicycling, but by the end of November of this year, the thought of even walking a mile was exhausting.

So, at Thanksgiving I took advantage of a Black Friday sale and bought a new toy. Well, it’s not a toy exactly. More like a slave-driving-taskmaster that will whip my butt back into shape.

It’s a LiveStrong 10E Elliptical Machine. I had actually tried out a bunch of Elliptical machines over the last few months, and kept waiting for this one to go on-sale. It seemed to be the best balance between price, size, and features, and fit my stride pretty well. It also has a pretty small footprint compared to other elliptical machines, which is key if you aren’t going to put it in your garage.

It was delivered a week ago, and I’ve done 4 workouts on it since. I love it. At first I couldn’t do 15 minutes on it, but now I’m up to a full 30 minutes, and am starting to increase the workout level. The machine is smooth, quiet, and stable. We’ve got it set up in our bedroom, and I can either turn on the TV or put music or a podcast on my IPhone and dock it to the built in speakers. The 30 minutes fly by.

After just 4 workouts (plus my usual weight lifting on alternate days), I feel so much more energetic. When I know I have an evening workout planned, I’m already looking forward to it when I wake up – much the same way I used to look forward to my long distance rides fourteen years ago. I don’t think it will take long for me to drop the extra weight I put on this year and get back into shape.

The only problem I’ve had with the system is with the “download / upload your workout” capabilities advertised with the system. Supposedly, I should be able to go to LiveStrong.com and upload my workout history via a memory stick and chart my progress over time. I haven’t found the page on the site that allows me to do this yet, and I’ve pretty much given up on that. It’s just not documented very well if the capability is there, and I’m not going to keep hunting for it.

If you’re looking for an elliptical machine, or if you’re out of shape and you’re serious about getting back into shape, I think this is a good place to start, and I’m looking forward to a much better 2012 because of it.

What’s remarkable is that this is December. In the PNW. And we have sunshine. On a Saturday.

Crazy. I know!

Other than that, I’ve been heads-down editing since the middle of September, first on my book Labeled, and then on my book, Nowhere Wild. Both edits are now complete. The first 25 pages of Labeled is in front of my writer’s group and I plan on submitting that for the PNWA Literary Contest next year. Entries are due by 2/17/2012. I’ll spend a bit of time over the next couple of weeks cleaning up the synopsis. and getting everything ready to send out.

Nowhere Wild is also in the hands of my writing group. I’m a little nervous about getting feedback this time because my writing group is pretty spectacular when it comes to writing credits. Plus, I’m getting close to the end of my rope on just how many full edits I can do on a single book. I know I can do ‘as many as it takes’, but I’m really hoping I can get to the point of “It’s pretty damn good. But you have an extra comma on page 236”.

With both of those stories wrapped up, I’m taking a short break over the holidays to do some reading… and some blogging. I’ve got 3 other books that could use a good edit, but my brain is telling me to take a short hiatus. Only one of those three is stand-alone (Army of the Risen) . One is a book that will probably never see the light of day (To Cage the Eagle), but that doesn’t mean my OCD won’t let me try to make it better, and the other is the sequel to Nowhere Wild (Nowhere Home). I’ve learned my lesson about working on the sequel before the first book is finalized. It’s going to need to be completely re-planned and rewritten since the plot of the Nowhere Wild changed so much, and I don’t want to do that more than once.

It may sound like I’m down on writing right now. I’m really not. I want to do more of it. I’d love to be able to turn out books like Zane Grey or Stephen King. But I don’t have that kind of time in my life right now, and I need to pace myself. My goal is to become a better writer so I don’t have to do so freaking-many editing passes through each book before it is ready to send off to my agent. So I guess I am just down on editing, not writing. I wish the two weren’t so… connected.

I can’t wait to start on a new story, and I’ve been resisting looking at my “What if” file to see which idea seems to have the best legs. But I want to make sure at least one of these stories I’ve already got done is “out the door” so I can dedicate a long stretch of time to a single work without worrying one of the old ones is waiting for another turn with the red marker.

So that’s the plan for the next two or three weeks. If I can just keep that “What if” file closed, everything will be just… oooh… wait… What if there was this guy, see…

We meet once a month at the Puyallup Public Library. The meetings are usually on the first Monday of the month, though occasionally we bump it back a week to accommodate holidays like Labor Day, and in next month’s case, the New Year’s closure of the library.

We’ve had pretty good turnout each month, though it hasn’t yet been consistent. We’re hoping for 15 people per month. Once we reach that interest level, we plan to begin having guest speakers and other events.

For now, our focus has been improving our craft through critiques and writing exercises pulled from Noah Lukeman’s wonderful book The First Five Pages.

The meetings are open to everyone from teenager on up. More information can be had at our new Facebook page. Click the like button, and you’ll be notified of any announcements or changes in the agenda.

Hope to see you there.

I had no idea what Neil Gaiman’s American Gods was about when I picked it up at the local library a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even bother reading the cover before I brought it home. I had added it to my ‘must read list’ earlier this year when it came in at #10 on NPR’s list of top 100 Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of all time. When I saw the book on the shelf at the library, it practically leapt into my hands.

Not knowing the topic of a book, or the style of the author, can lead to an interesting experience in those first few minutes of reading. I was just coming off reading C.C. Humphrey’s wonderful (but disturbing) book Vlad, The Last Confession, and I was ready for something light – something I could read in a couple of days. American Gods, at 588 pages, is not light in weight, nor in words. This is literary fantasy, so you know you’re going to have to work to get it – to get all of it. But the book has a good, strong hook, and pulled me in before I realized I wasn’t reading something fluffy.

Shadow has recently been released from prison early due to the death of his wife. On his way back to his home town for the funeral, he meets a man who knows him all-too well, and seems to always be one step ahead of him on his journey. At first aggravated by this, then irresistibly pulled in by this man, Shadow soon finds himself dropped into the middle of the battle to end all battles, where gods themselves tremble in fear.

As the book started, I tried to figure out what I had read that was similar to this. I can think of two stories that come close: Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim, and Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. Kadrey’s book is more… ruthless… and King’s epic series, is , well, more epic, given the fact that it’s seven books, not one. If you liked either of those works, you should like American Gods.

As I said, this book is literary fantasy, which means that it is not always an easy read. The pace is lot slower in this type of work than say, in a John Scalzi book. There are long paragraphs of description and irregular prose… words and sentence structure there more for the artistic effect than for the story. That’s not a bad thing. It’s definitely not what I write, and I noticed it a lot more because I am editing one of my stories right now. I have to be hyper-conscious of not doing some of the things that Gaiman can do because of the type of book this is. In one memorable section, I saw back-to-back sentences with 130+ words. They are there for effect, and I understand the effect he was looking for, but in the style of story I write, those practices would be far more jarring to the reader and would likely be trimmed at an early edit.

If you are a hard-core fantasy or sci-fi reader, this book should be on your list. It’s a good book, with interesting characters, and it held my attention. It’s definitely not what I would call an easy read, but it is worthwhile, and a good book to curl up with on a cold, winter evening.

No too long ago, I raved about C.C. Humphrey’s book, A Place Called Armageddon. At the risk of becoming repetitive, here we go again – another C.C. Humphries book set in the dark times of the mid-1400’s, another book worthy of the term ‘Historical Literature’, and another book that deserves critical acclaim for its prose. An oh… the single most disturbing scene I have ever read in my life – two paragraphs that still give me the chills a week later.

This is the story of Vlad the Impaler, not the Count Dracula Bram Stoker made famous through his tales of vampirical practices. Vlad the Impaler – Vlad Dracula, Prince of Transylvania, Son of Vlad Dracul. Son of the Dragon. He was known by a dozen different names, and the fact that he was known by all these names at the time he lived indicates just how well-known, and how well-feared he truly was.

The story starts with the capture of the three people who knew him best: his best friend, his mistress, and the priest he confessed to. The first twenty pages are a bit convoluted, as each of the three is brought before a papal commission, bound to find the true story of the man. The true story begins with Vlad’s childhood, as a hostage in the hands of the Sultan Murad and the father of Mehmet, the boy who would become Vlad’s life-long enemy. From there, we follow Vlad as he grows and becomes a man, and from man to legend. Along the way, we trace the battles he fights and the atrocities he commits.

As we follow him, we see the world through his eyes, and his reasons for doing what he did. We’re forced to pity him, to root for him, to like him, then to pity him once more. Humphrey’s does an excellent job of playing with our emotions and taking practices that would be abominable today, and making them necessary for the common good of that time.

This is not an easy book to read, and parts are not enjoyable – nor should they be. This is not commercial fiction – you have to really read and let the words flow over you. Every paragraph is hammered in the forge of Humphrey’s craft. But it is a book worth reading because of that craft, and because it is interesting in its topic and fascinating in its detail… and disturbing in its images.

If you like historical fiction, I highly recommend this book. If you’re looking for sparkly vampires… go somewhere else, kid. This is deep, and it’s dark and it will be hard to forget.

In case you are wondering, the two paragraphs I spoke of earlier… two paragraphs that will haunt me forever… the end of page 101 and the start of page 102. I dare anyone to read those two paragraphs and not clench every muscle in their body. Very few books have ever caused that sort of visceral reaction in me, and the only other one I can think of off the top of my head was Stephen King’s The Shining, albeit for completely different reasons.

Read. Enjoy. But be forewarned.