Blog – Kit Campbell Books

Too Easy

Afternoon, squiders. How’s your week been?

So like we talked about last week, I hunted down World’s Edge, and I read it this week over a couple of days. (It’s about 100K.)

I actually really enjoyed it.

But I got to the end and was like, well, this is really good! I’m not sure it needs a lot of revision work.

Which is bull, I’m sure. It’s got to be, right? No one writes a perfect first draft.

I mean, it’s not perfect. The sailing terminology is haphazard (sometimes the viewpoint character will call something by the correct name and then explain it/learn about it later). There’s a ton of typos, so I wrote certain bits really quickly. The internal arc for said viewpoint character definitely needs some work, and the ending is rushed and poorly described, and it needs to tie into said internal arc better.

But in general, it’s really solid. Aside from the above, I’m not seeing anything terribly obvious that needs to be added in (though there is a conversation that I wrote as a drabble that is referenced a few time, and that needs to just go in the book itself).

Now, it is said that you write the first draft for yourself, and the second draft for your readers. The first draft is definitely working for me, and it’s entirely possible that I’m missing something that I’m not seeing.

So where do I go through here? Do I do my in-depth revision planning with the hopes that it ferrets out things that aren’t working (and not that I’m wasting my time)? Do I do a lighter version of the prep and focus on the things I saw as being wrong? Do I do a superficial edit to fix wording and typos and throw it at my critique group to see if they point out bigger picture issues I’m missing?

I’m not sure yet. And I won’t really have a chance to think too hard about it until the first week of April, after the first weekend of my leadership course and the drop-off for the consignment sale is done. Until then I’ve got to focus on getting those done (and not freaking out in the meantime).

What do you think, squiders? What would you do in my place?

Hope you’re having a lovely March!

Pondering Accomplished

Good evening, squiders! How are you doing?

I’m a little overwhelmed around normal everyday things and this leadership course I’m staffing at the end of the month, and the consignment sale. (I think I’ve talked about both of those before. Let me know if not.)

Last week I noted that now that I’m submitting Book 1 to agents (I got my first rejection this morning) I could go back to my revision, but that my brain was thinking about other stories instead. And through talking through that with you guys, I realized that maybe that particular revision (the scifi horror novella) is not the right revision to be working on at the moment.

I have spent some time looking at all my projects (mostly revision, some new stories vaguely outlined) and pondering things, and I have come to the following conclusions:

1) If I am querying a YA fantasy, it makes sense to work on another YA fantasy. If an agent calls to make an offer, or to see if we’re a good fit long term, and they ask what I’m working on, and I have changed both age range and genre, that could be a turnoff for them. I noticed that many of the agents I put on my querying list were asking for YA fantasy but not necessarily science fiction or horror, and if they wanted YA fantasy, they didn’t necessarily want adult fantasy either. (Not everyone, obviously, but enough.)

2) I write a lot of first drafts, and then I put the story away to eventually get to in my revision cycle. This has perhaps hurt me in the long run because I have a lot of stories that need revision and I will probably never get to all of them. (And maybe some of those older ones should be forgotten anyway.)

3) A lot of my existing stories could be rewritten (or if not yet written, modified) to be YA, so that’s good. Probably.

So what have I decided?

Of my existing revision projects, only two are YA fantasy: Broken Mirrors, which we talked about last week (the one that is straddling the line between MG and YA and doing neither successfully), and World’s Edge, which you can find here on the blog, since I wrote it for Nano in 2019. World’s Edge takes place in the same world as the trilogy (just 700 years before) as well. World’s Edge is borderline YA, as it was also an experiment. I wanted to write a story where the viewpoint character is not the protagonist. So the main character is 16, but the character driving the story is an adult. A little fiddly, for sure.

Of those two options, World’s Edge seems like the right choice, as it’s the right genre(-ish) and the same world as the book I’m querying, and Broken Mirrors is a disaster.

That said, I have no idea what state World’s Edge is in. I finished the draft in 2020, I think, and haven’t looked at it since. (A common issue, unfortunately. I have gotten better about going all the way through the process, but not all the time.) It could be a mess, or need a lot of work.

So the general plan is to read over World’s Edge and see what state it’s in, and then make a determination about whether it’s a good project to start now. And perhaps we look at writing a new project if it’s a mess. Something age and genre appropriate.

On we blindly stumble! See you next week!

A Handful of Demos

Howdy howdy, squiders. Still pondering what to work on, and to be honest I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it as I’m staffing a leadership training at the end of the month that’s taking a lot of my time, and I’ve got to drop stuff at a consignment sale the day after. I’m hoping to more proactively look at my project options tomorrow or Thursday.

At the end of February/beginning of March, Steam had a special demo event for games coming out this year. I downloaded six and played five of them (the sixth got taken down before I got to it, so sucks to be that game, I guess) and thought I’d talk about them.

Whisper of the House

This is one of those games where you unpack and organize houses. It was surprisingly relaxing, plus there were some time travel elements and the hints of something more going on. The demo was about an hour long. I did get stuck once (and the hints were no help) but figured it out. (The books had to go on the bookcase.) I put this one on my wishlist to look at more when the full game comes out.

A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe

A cute little puzzler. Demo took about 20 minutes. Artwork is cute too. You play as Asocial Giraffe, and you have to figure out how to do things without interacting with anyone else. The animation if someone does talk to you is pretty funny, and the puzzles reset pretty easily. By the third puzzle I had the whole idea down. I’m not a huge puzzler fan, so while I enjoyed the demo, I won’t be playing the full game.

Wanderstop

I really wanted to like this game. You play as Aria, a fighter trying to become the best trying to recover from a series of setbacks by training more, except you get sidelined by a random tea shop in the woods. The game itself seems to be about tea–planting plants, drying tea, making the tea, etc.–and I would assume there’s a storyline about learning to take care of yourself and so forth.

But the gameplay was horrible. My computer isn’t too shabby with graphic-heavy games, but this was so jerky it became impossible to play. I gave up about 45 minutes in when it became obvious that it was lagging too much to continue. There’s no reason for this game to be as graphic-intensive and laggy as it is based on its subject matter.

Is This Seat Taken?

Another puzzler, but more of a traditional logic puzzle than Asocial Giraffe. You have a variety of little shape people, all who have wants, and you have to place them all in places where they will be happy. Demo took about 25 minutes and went though…four stages, I want to say. There’s a bit of a storyline going on as well. Cute game, fun puzzles. I’d play it. I put it on my wishlist.

Einstein’s Cats

Demo took about 30 minutes. Very similar to Is This Seat Taken? except you have a variety of cats and boxes/baskets on shelves to place them in. The most logic-y puzzle of the bunch. I was perfectly happy to put cats in boxes, but my daughter got a little bored. I will say that sometimes you were not given enough information to solve the puzzle, which was a little annoying but easily overcome.

But Kit, you might say, why are you looking at silly puzzlers? Well, I think Steam put the games it thought I would like best on top (there were a lot of available demos, and I did not go through all of them. Six seemed like a reasonable amount of demos to go through and I stopped after that) and I do tend to play a lot of shorter games. Mostly that’s because I don’t tend to have the attention span to get through longer games easily–it’s not that I don’t love a story-rich open world RPG, but I’m not going to get very far, and I’ll probably play a bunch for a few weeks and then not touch it again for months, if ever.

(Not to say I won’t get through an open world RPG, but it’s going to take me a hot minute. I have a lot going on, and gaming is often pretty low on the priority list.)

Did you guys play any demos in Steam’s promotion? (I don’t actually know what it was called, I kind of stumbled into it) Did you find anything interesting?

Oh, the Wandering Brain

Happy ~~Saturday~~ Sunday, squiders! I’m having a great day, and I hope you are too! (My Saturday ended up being so great, I never finished the blog post.)

Now that we’re actively submitting, we can go back to the revision for my scifi horror novella.

So, of course, my brain is off on every possible tangent unrelated to said novella.

For example, several years ago I wrote a YA horror novel called What Lurks Beneath the Bleachers. It started as a joint epistolary novel I was writing with my friend Kate, each of us writing letters as a separate viewpoint character. Kate wandered off in the middle of it, and I eventually (with her blessing) rewrote the whole thing myself, keeping a letter at the beginning of each chapter.

I later went back and rewrote it, and I ran it through the critique marathon once (where it got shredded) and have not touched it since.

But it does live rent free in my head, and I would like to get back to it at some point. I wrote one of the main characters, Ali, in another joint novel that I wrote with a different friend, and I have a third book partially outlined that would take place after Bleachers.

So every now and then my brain will randomly start listing the things that need to be fixed:

Technology has to be added in (I started it long enough ago that not every teenager had a cell phone)
Tone needs to be evened out (some chapters are funny, some are scary, but it flip flops and not helpfully)
Removal of the letters? (arguably the core of the story, but do kids even write letters anymore?)
Go to single viewpoint? (might fix tone flipflop)

All lovely thoughts, although not currently relevant.

(Although, since I’m trying not to add more revision projects onto my plate, if I change enough things, it may actually count as a new story in my head?)

(No, bad Kit. Focus.)

Another story that I would like to get back to someday is called Broken Mirrors, which is and always has been an awful title. This was the first book I ever revised, and I actually queried it for a bit. It’s fairy tale satire about a witch and a princess who are best friends. Like Bleachers, it suffers from tone issues. I wrote it to be YA (the characters are 15 and 16) but tonally it reads more like MG because of the fairy tale silliness.

So, again, my brain randomly decides that This Too Needs Fixing instead of focusing on whatever I’m actually working on.

Except unlike Bleachers which has some obvious fixes (if it’s horror make it horror, you ditz), Mirrors has yet to solidify one direction or the other. Do I make it MG to keep the sillier aspects of the story? (YA is not allowed to be silly. I don’t know why.) Do I make it more serious to make it more YA? If I go MG, do I actually know how to write MG?

(It basically breaks down to how tied am I to Aunt Gertrude living in a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest vs. how invested am I in the romance subplot.)

(Jury’s out.)

But it doesn’t actually matter, because neither Bleachers nor Mirrors are on the immediate schedule of writing projects. First we do the scifi horror novella, then we work on the paranormal cozy mystery, somewhere in there we write something new, and THEN we can look at other things.

Unless, you know, I get an agent and need to work on Book 1 edits, and go on sub, and all that jazz. And then I assume I move directly onto Books 2 and 3. Who knows! Chaos.

Maybe I should throw the schedule out and put all potential projects in a hat, and draw one out. Screw schedules! Schedules are for nerds!

Part of me wonders if there’s some deeper psychological thing going on, like deep down I’m frustrated that the scifi horror needs more work than I initially thought, or I’m worried I won’t be able to fix it, or something.

Maybe I’m just not in the mood to write horror.

Who knows! Not me!

But if I am going to move on to something else, now might be the time to do it, while I’m still not too far into the revision.

I may ponder that, actually.

Good talk, everyone. See you on Tuesday (or maybe Wednesday)!

My Daruma Has an Eye!

Good afternoon, squiders! Exciting developments in these parts.

(I’m not sure who put Taig in mad mode in the background. I suspect a child.)

We talked about my daruma doll a month back or so, but for those who missed it and don’t want to look, darumas are little Japanese dolls that you wish on. I brought mine back from Japan in 2014 for the sole purpose of querying Book 1, and we’re just going to ignore how long it’s been since I bought it until now.

They come with blank eyes, and you color in one when you make a wish, and the other when the wish comes true.

Two weeks ago I expressed frustration with how things were going with juggling the Book 1 submission materials and revision prep for my scifi horror novella and had it helpfully pointed out that maybe I was trying to do too much at once. I sat down and thought about it, decided it was probably true, and stopped the revision prep to focus solely on my submission material.

Well, squiders, my submission materials are done, my agent list is made, and I’ve already sent out three queries. Right now I’m making a moodboard and a trope list for pitch events on Blue Sky (and I guess maybe Twitter but ew).

So, yes, all I needed to do was focus.

Which is infuriating.

I wrote a book once about working on multiple projects at the same time, and in general I stand by the techniques mentioned there, but I did include a section on working on only one project at a time, because that is what works best for different people and different times.

And I suspect as long as I could, I would have procrastinated on the submission materials. I think getting the focus on the agent list really helped, because it gave the whole submission process some tangibility. It wasn’t just “make submission materials and yeet them into the void,” it was “oh, here is an end goal, I need these things for these specific people.” Also, now I can see if agents I want to query are going to close soon (or have just opened), which gives the process some immediacy as well, and is why we have queries out.

So, we’re actively doing this. The eye has been colored.

Wish me luck!

Promo: Dragon Flight Anthology

Good morning, squiders! I’ve got an anthology for you today for anyone who loves a good dragon story!

Fantasy

Date Published: January 23, 2025

Publisher: Dragon Soul Press

Caution: Dragons ahead.

Prepare to delve into fiery worlds full of dragons. From hatchlings to ancients. From tame to wild. Many have their own goals, and most want to see the world reduced to ash. To reshape the world in their own reptilian image. Others struggle to survive, but heroes rise among them.

Which side will you choose?

Featuring 27 stories by the following authors: Vicki Erwin, Bruce Buchanan, Demi Michelle Schwartz, Sadie Lielle, Andreas Flögel, Desirae Gracyn, C.L. Hart, Kristen Argyres, Sandy R. Stuckless, Jessica Lee Minneci, Rae Evans, S.E. Reed, Larry Hodges, David O’Mahony, Mae Thorn, M.L. Quinn, Racquel Sims, Sierra Jackson, Daniel DiQuinzio, Ana Cordoba, Gabriella Balcom, D.J. Elton, Ann Stolinsky, Charles Barouch, Arwyn Sherman, Kiera Kearsey, Binod Dawadi, and J.E. Feldman.

A Night In the Magical Menagerie

Can creatures with radically different motivations get along?

In this fantastical tale a fox named Tod and a tortoise named Torte are brought to the Forest Environment of the Magical Menagerie of Celephaïs by the Outer God Nyarlathotep and his daughter. The friends encounter a wheelbarrow full of peculiar fruit and several exotic creatures. Will they enjoy a good life in their new home, or is this strange place as filled with peril as the one they escaped?

Excerpt

In the Forest Environment of the Magical Menagerie of Celephaïs, a fox and a tortoise gave one another a puzzled glance as they examined a wheelbarrow filled with strange yellow fruits.

“Before Nyarlathotep and his daughter left us here last night, they assured us that King Kuranes’ gamekeepers would care for us,” the fox said. “I am not sure the gamekeepers know what they are doing. What are these, and how is one meant to eat them? They are covered in spines like a hedgehog, and the green growth on the top poked me in my nose! Come to think of it, Torte, I’m not sure I trust Nyarlathotep or his daughter. After all, he is the great Cosmic Trickster, and surely, the apple does not fall far from the tree.”

“This is only a name imparted to him by humans, Tod,” Torte said. “Humans are a peculiar lot. Nyarlathotep was forthright with Captain Sammy, and he has been forthright with us.”

“I defer to your intuition, my friend. You are slow to anger and take the time to thoroughly assess situations. Very well, rather than postulating malice on the part of Nyarlathotep, I postulate that he does not know what my kind eats and nor, apparently, do King Kuranes’ gamekeepers.”

“Perhaps these were left here for those animals that eat fruit,” Torte said. “I have never before seen the like of them, but they have a pleasant scent. On the other hand, perhaps they were left here inadvertently. Upon discovering their mistake, the gamekeepers will return with the correct foodstuffs.”

“If you believe they have a pleasant scent, I will knock one to the ground for you,” Tod offered.

About the Author

C.L. Hart had a stormy start to her life. She was born at 6 A.M. the morning after Valentine’s Day in 1965 during a raging blizzard.

She has been a fan of horror and weird fiction for as long as she can remember. She used to read horror comics under the covers with a flashlight as a child.

She started reading Edgar Allan Poe when she was six years old. In her early teens, she discovered H.P. Lovecraft. She pretended to lose the copy of At the Mountains of Madness that she borrowed from the school library and paid the fine so she could keep the book.

Ms. Hart blames the team at Chaosium Role-Playing Games for renewing and strengthening her obsession with Lovecraft’s writing. She lives in a small town on the northeastern plains of Colorado in an appropriately old and storied house with her son and cats. She enjoys watching the normal people pass by as she records the happenings in the weird worlds of her imagination.

C.L. Hart writes poetry and nonfiction as Cara Hartley, and erotica as Lil DeVille.

http://naughtynetherworldpress.start.page

Purchase Today

Huh

Sorry I was such a downer on Tuesday, squiders. I’ve been doing some thinking. Bookstooge, on my last post, mentioned that I might have over-committed myself. And I laughed to myself and was like, no, no, everything is fine, I am operating within normal parameters.

But then I stopped and was like…but am I?

When I had the idea of working on my scifi horror revision around working on the submission materials for Book 1, the idea is that I would have waiting periods while I waited on feedback, and that the scifi horror novella was essentially ready to go with only a few tweaks.

But let’s look at how things are actually breaking down.

The scifi horror novella is actually in pretty bad shape. In my memory it was essentially ready to go, because it was the first thing I ran through the critique marathon that didn’t get torn to shreds. But in actuality it has basic worldbuilding and character background issues, and the whole end of the story is not working.

Aside from just sitting down and hammering out the worldbuilding/character stuff (which isn’t necessarily hard, just needs to be done) I need to at least rearrange the whole second half, if not throw part of it out and rework.

My endings are not normally a problem, so this may take longer than normal while I work through how best to process this.

In my head, I was going to start the revision in November, be done by early January, and have stuff ready for both the winter critique marathon and my in-person critique group. Then by mid-March I could be done with the whole revision process and start submitting it.

Obviously this has not happened. It’s mid-February, the actual revision part hasn’t even started because I’m still figuring out everything that needs fixing, and meanwhile my submission stuff ALSO isn’t getting anywhere because I’m letting the revision take most of my mental fortitude.

So, yeah, maybe I am over-committing myself.

Or at least, what I’m doing isn’t working, and it’s always good to occasionally look at your progress and process and whether or not it’s helping you meet your goals. It’s okay to change, after all.

I do think there was a peer pressure aspect to it as well, to have stuff ready for the critique marathon and my in-person group. But I’ve missed the majority of the marathon at this point, and I let the in-person group know that I won’t have anything ready.

I’m going to focus on my submission materials until they’re ready to go, and then I can give both projects the attention they need, and maybe I won’t feel so overwhelmed about the whole thing.

See you next week, squiders!

One Step Forward, 15 Steps Back

Oh, squiders, when I was in my 20s, I was so productive! I could hammer out 3000 words a day easily, and maybe even some of them were good. I had time to dance and cosplay and basically do whatever I want, and I could be knee deep in five different projects and actually make progress on all of them.

(Or so it feels, with the tint of nostalgia.)

It’s been a rough week. I haven’t touched my revision prep since…Thursday? And aside from QuestPit last week I haven’t touched my submission materials at all. My brain is still hyping up a new project with no details (genre? length? format? end goal?), and meanwhile there are back-burning projects like that SkillShare class I started but never finished lurking and causing vague anxiety.

My computer’s operating system randomly corrupted on Friday and had to be completely rebuilt (which I’m still dealing with, as I find programs and settings missing and have to relog into my entire life) which cost me time I could work over the weekend.

My hip/back pain now has the added complication of ankle pain. I fell Thursday night (I was at someone’s house and their dog got out, and I was watching the dog instead of where I was going). My legs are built interestingly (I have no reflexes–I know they don’t hit people in the knees with hammers anymore but mine have never done anything) and I can’t sprain my ankles, but I think I may have done something to the tendons. At first I thought it was nerve pain from everything else but now I suspect I injured it in the fall.

And, of course, what helps the back pain makes the hip pain worse, and what helps the hip pain makes the ankle pain worse…

I’ve got volunteer commitments I’m behind on as well. It’s a group project, as it were, and it feels like I’m back in high school doing the whole thing myself while my teammates show up to the meetings and never agree on anything or do anything outside of class.

And my youngest is sick.

I’m tired, squiders. Oh so tired. When I get free time I’m spending it on silly things like phone games or YouTube videos because I can’t get up the energy to work on anything else.

Burnout is a real thing, but it’s frustrating. And I don’t know that we’re there, but I do wish I was getting somewhere.

Something to think about, if this trend continues.

I hope you’re feeling better than I am. See you Thursday, in theory.

Stupid Ideas

Happy Wednesday, squiders! Well, it’s at least it’s still Wednesday for me.

I don’t know if I mentioned, but I’ve been having back/hip pain lately. Every few days it morphs into something new and awful, which is great. Super awesome. Not distracting or anything.

On any given day it’s hard to tell what is going to hurt and whether or not I’m going to be able to sit at all, so making progress has been very uneven.

So, of course, my brain is like…you know what?

We should be trying to do more.

Specifically, we should be working on an additional writing project.

On top of the submission material/query readying for Book 1 (I put out a pitch for QuestPit on Blue Sky today, though I don’t think I quite have the process down right. Everyone seems to have high concept Thing 1 x Thing 2 and graphics, but that’s something for another day) and the revision prep for Rings Among the Stars.

You see, surely it would be best for my mental health and general productivity if I were, to say, work on something specific each day.

Which…what does it think I’ve been trying to do?

Trying to stuff more projects into my day is not going to get more done. I can multitask and compartmentalize to a point, but when one is struggling to get things done, adding more things is not often the answer.

(I won’t say it’s never the answer, because everyone and every situation is different, and there is a reason they say that busy people get more done.)

So, great that my brain has volunteered this idea. It didn’t bother to provide any specifics, such as what story or writing I should be doing. Not something like morning pages or journaling, but something.

Very helpful.

Anyway, on we plod, making progress, though never as quickly as one would hope.

I hope your week is going well, squider!

Inappropriate Gift Books

Howdy ho, squiders. How goes?

(The good news is that my site is on the new host and seems to be functioning just fine, so victory!)

I finished reading Hunt the Stars by Jessie Mihalik this morning.

This was my spouse’s Christmas Eve book from two years ago. See, at some point, I read about an Icelandic (I think it was, anyway) custom where they give each other books at Christmas. I guess the Icelandic people read a lot of books, especially in the winter, because of the lack of light and all that. And I was like, oh, that sounds like an amazing tradition, and ever since we’ve done the same.

The books are given on Christmas Eve, the first gift everyone gets, with the idea that we will all sit and read together, which rarely happens but the idea is there.

For many years, I’ve taken care of the kids and my spouse, and then he just needs to do me. This worked well when the kids were younger and I could gift them childhood favorites and classics (my youngest still routinely reads her copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon even though she’s solidly in upper middle grade generally), but as the kids have gotten older it’s become more difficult.

(In general, everyone does read their Christmas books pretty quickly, even if we don’t get to them on Christmas Eve itself. I’m actually the worse offender, typically because I’m already in the middle of a book or three, and also because my spouse tends to get me literary science fiction which is fine, but I have to be in the mood for it.

Two or three years ago he got me Fairy Tale by Stephen King, which I took one look at the thickness of, and is on my nightstand, unread, to this day.)

(This year he got me The Ministry of Time which I am enjoying but still admittedly reading very slowly.)

My youngest is still pretty easy. She likes fantasy, horror, and mystery and will give pretty much anything a try. However, like me, she’s often in the middle of several books at once, so her follow through isn’t the great.

For fiction, my oldest reads epic fantasy exclusively. Efforts to branch him out into related genres like science fiction or straight adventure have failed, and he won’t touch anything scary. For a while this was fine, but he’s quickly gone through most everything I’ve read (he read all of Discworld in about three months) and so I’ve had to flail about to keep finding him things.

(When I was a kid, I used to troll through the library and pick up books with the “scifi/fantasy” label and then see if they were interesting, but he refuses to do this, despite my repeatedly saying that this is the best way to discover books.)

My oldest is not yet a teenager even though he looks/acts like he’s 15 or 16, so I was sticking to YA fantasy (he reads at a ridiculously high level, and sometimes reads college textbooks on areas of interest for fun), which led to me getting him The Sunbearer Trials as his Christmas Eve book a few years ago.

This was a Mistake.

I’d noted it was a popular YA fantasy book with good reviews, and it was mythology-based, which he also likes (he read everything Rick Riordan put out).

He came to me and was like, “Mom, this book says “$@%#” in the first line.”

That’s on me. I hadn’t thought to check for language, and I’d given my 10-year-old a book with the f-word featured prominently.

(I have since learned to stick to older adult fantasy series when possible, because modern YA fantasy can be pretty intense on the sex/violence/language fronts.)

I’d thought that was my only major faux pas on the Christmas Eve book front. Until I read Hunt the Stars here.

As I said, I gave this to my spouse two years ago. I tend to get him science fiction because I find that’s one of his favorite genres. (Though maybe I should stop–I’m not sure he’s liked any books I’ve gotten him in the last three or so years. I picked this year’s off his Goodreads Want to Read list and he’s still not enjoying it.) I normally look at published-that-year, well-rated science fiction, which is how we ended up with Hunt the Stars.

He dutifully read it (he always does) and then gave it to me and said that maybe I should read it. I put it on the shelf but didn’t touch it because typically we don’t read the same sort of science fiction. But I picked it up last week because I have now read four books that were lying around in the last month, which is more than I read all of last year.

(Brains and urges are weird.)

(But I ran out of bookshelf room and then books must be read so they may be purged.)

(Also maybe I’m procrastinating reading potential comps? Not sure. Picked one up this morning but need to read some of the other library books first.)

Squiders, this book is a romance.

It hits all the romance beats. It has explicit sex scenes. The series (this is the first book) does that romance series thing where each book features a different, related couple.

It does have interesting worldbuilding and space travel and intrigue as well, but it’s definitely a romance.

I don’t know my spouse’s feelings about romance as a genre but he’s not seeking them out. And he tends toward literary science fiction, which this is not.

I suspect this was the same year as the Sunbearer snafu, so I was in excellent form that year.

Alas.

This past Christmas my spouse decided he was going to do the kids’ books instead of me, and he did fairly well (I did have to send him to switch out my youngest’s book because she already owned the first one he brought), and the kids really liked the series he picked out for them, so maybe he can do it going forward.

Maybe I should have him pick out his own books too.

Hope you’re doing well, squiders, and are reading excellent books! See you next week!