Year-End Book Recommendations: 2012

Happy New Year, all! I hope you had a great night last night. Here are the best books I read in 2012--in chronological order, since I couldn't begin to rank them by quality. Well, except for the last one, which was probably the best I've read in a long, long time.
 
I put off posting this list for several days, because I started reading Lindsey Barraclough's Long Lankin and suspected it might earn a place here if I finished it in time. As it turned out, I didn't even get halfway through before the end of the year, but expect to see Long Lankin on the 2013 list if it keeps going as well as it started.

Note: When I say that these were "the best books I read," I mean that they're the reading experiences I enjoyed the most. Different books on this list serve different purposes, and I try to keep that in mind when I read. That's why Suzanne Collins is next to Dostoevsky. : ) 

Drumroll, please:

2012 Halloween Story: Over the River

Over the River

by Katherine Traylor

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Sabrina couldn’t sleep with the moonlight shining in her eyes.

Her friends were having no such trouble. Jenny and Mark were sound asleep, cuddled up in their zipped-together sleeping bags. Brian had been snoring for half an hour. But Sabrina, pressed against him, was as alert as ever.

She’d tried snuggling closer to Brian, and moving farther away. She’d unzipped the bag for a breath of air, and zipped it back up when she’d gotten too cold. She’d rolled over, covered her eyes, counted sheep, and tried to meditate. But wherever she turned, the halogen light of the full white moon shone through her eyelids, keeping her wide awake.  

At last she couldn’t take it any more. She eased herself out of the doubled sleeping bag she shared with Brian, patting his shoulder when he whimpered in his sleep. Shoving her feet into her old yellow Crocs, she walked to the edge of the woods.

The air was cold tonight. Shivering, she rubbed her arms and stomped her feet. She’d put on sweats over her flannel pajamas, and the socks she wore were the fluffy SpongeBob ones her sister had given her for Christmas, but the wind cut through everything like scissors through gauze. Strange that it should be so cold: usually it didn’t get below fifty this time of year.

She supposed she could go into the house. It would be warmer. But the door was probably locked,and she didn’t want to wake Jenny for the key. Anyway, what if she encountered Jenny’s parents? They seemed like nice people, but she hardly knew them, and she didn’t feel like making small talk. Better to stay out here.

She could stir up the coals and roast some marshmallows, but she’d already brushed her teeth. She hadn’t even brought a book. 

Frustrated, Sabrina stared into the forest. The moonlight fell in broad beams through the leafless trees, chasing the shadows from the underbrush. Far below, at the bottom of the hill, the Little River glittered like tinsel. They had walked along the shore this afternoon, before sunset, but the place looked very different at night--fairy-haunted; forbidden.

She paced restlessly around the edge of the campsite, peering through the trees for a better look at the water. Every few steps she saw a flash of moon-bleached sand, a twinkle of water. Then, suddenly, a path came into focus.

She didn’t know how she had missed it. It was a wide, straight track between the trees, leading right down to the water. It looked much more passable than the glorified deer-trail they’d followed that afternoon. She could probably make it in her Crocs without twisting an ankle. And it wasn’t that far: the murmur of the water carried clearly over the chilly night air.

She could go down now, have a little walk, and come back without waking anyone. It would only take a few minutes. She might even be tired enough to sleep when she got back. Still, it seemed wrong to go off and leave her friends without saying anything.

Sabrina turned to wake them--let Jenny or Brian, at least, know where she was going. But they were all sleeping so peacefully--and she knew they’d tell her not to go. It wasn’t safe to wander by herself at night.

Making a quick decision, Sabrina shoved her hands in her pockets and started down the trail.

State of the Book #3: April 29, 2012

Hello again! I hope you're all doing well out there in the ether. It's been a lovely day here in Piedmont North Carolina-- clear skies, sunshine, warm but not too warm. Since I'm a bit of a vampire, I mostly kept to the shade-- got to preserve my ghastly pallor, after all. I did drag myself to the Y for a Zumba class, though, and while I was there I saw a food-truck festival, part of our local campaign against Amendment 1. I had all my gym stuff with me, so I couldn't stay long, but I did have a  Locopop and a nice little walk.  I'd like to live closer to downtown someday, so I could get to stuff like that more easily.

As for the book, you'll be happy (I hope) to know that I'm now editing Chapter 3. The new working title is THE WOODS AND THE CASTLE, though that might very well change when I get closer to the end. The manuscript now weighs in at about 31,000 words-- around half the projected total. So far I've been putting out about a chapter a month, but I'd like to do better than that-- it would be great if I could finish before the end of July. 

After WOODS/CASTLE is finished, I have decided to get started on the SNOWBERRY rewrite. It looks like it'll be a trilogy-- there seems to be a natural law that requires every YA fantasy writer to produce a trilogy. It's much easier coming up with titles for this project, for some reason: the second book will keep the title of SNOWBERRY, and the first will be called PUCK'S LUCK. 

I've also been working on the short story I mentioned last time. I'm on the second draft now. You may recall that I was supposed to have it done three weeks ago? I seem to have a much harder time writing short stories than I do novels-- which is unfortunate, because they're extremely educational. You can read two of my earlier stories here and here. 

I'm off to Game of Thrones night now-- missed last week and immediately regretted it-- so that's all she wrote for now. Have a great week!

--Kate

Warmth in Winter (Winter Story 2011-12)

Here is my much delayed winter short story, "Warmth in Winter." It's about sentries, spies, snowshoes, and hungry ghosts. I hope you enjoy it! (You can read my Halloween story, "Under Glass," here. That one is about a girl terrorized by something that lives in her mirror.)

Warmth in Winter

Jenna was glad they’d taken Peter’s body back to town to bury. Eerie as the silence was, the moaning of his ghost would have been much worse. Even so, she wasn’t sure how much more of this cabin and this winter she could stand.  

Dangerous confidence

I went to a book signing tonight. Marissa Meyer was at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, promoting her novel Cinder.  I unfortunately missed the reading, due partly to my propensity for tardiness and partly to a wrong turn at Albuquerque, but it seemed to have been a very nice reading, and the bookstore was lovely. The author herself was sweet and charming and well-spoken, and her signature message is adorable: "May the glass slipper always fit." (The book is now on my shelf, trying to cut in front of the other books on my to-read list. I think it's about to get into a fistfight with my copy of Anna Dressed In Blood.)

---

Seeing people promote their books-- hearing authors talk about their careers-- inevitably makes me desperate to be one of them. I feel like telling people, I'm like you! I'm an author, too! You can't see it, but I'm almost done, and soon my book will be published and it will be on the shelf like yours! Even though it's not finished yet. But it's almost there, and it makes me crazy with anticipation sometimes. And ambition, as well. 

The thing about writing is that until you are published-- until you have an actual, physical, beautifully-bound book with your name on the cover-- authorial ambitions are generally seen as empty daydreams. "Yes, dear, you want to write a book, just like everybody else. Maybe you'd better do something else in the meantime-- you can always write in your spare time!" 

And I want to say, No! Not me. I can do this. Other people might give up, but I'm going to make a career as a writer. Someday I'll have a whole row of books on the shelf, each more beautiful than the last, and people will see them in the bookstores and point them out to their friends. And then their friends will pick up one or two of them and take them to the register, and maybe read them and fall in love with them and point them out to their friends, later. And all the while I'll be writing more.

And on that note:

Neurotically yours

Someday I'm going to be a big, famous, published author, and my agent is going to yell at me for never updating my blog. It's not my fault... really... I'm just not a blogger at heart, I guess. Now, microblogging, yes: I will blog me some microblogs. Facebook, always, of course, and more recently Twitter for all things writing-related. For big blog posts, though, either I take so long to finish them that they're no longer relevant when I'm done, or they veer too far into personal territory and I leave them unfinished and unpublished.

I love you guys. (Not least because right now "you guys" consist mostly of my dear friends, my mom, and my sister.) But I don't think I'll ever be the kind of person to put a lot of in-depth personal baggage into a blog post. Even admitting that I have in-depth personal baggage is getting a bit too personal for me. I do like books, though, and occasionally I'll do a short book review on Goodreads. Should I cross-post those here? Would that help?

I am working on a short story right now that's making me twitchy with excitement. I've come to the (much-belated) realization, lately, that editing is the primary part of an author's job. Producing words is good, but (for me) easy: I can hammer out a thousand words in about ten minutes if I desperately need to. Reworking them into something I can stand behind, though... that takes a LOT of time and attention. "Under Glass" I finished pretty quickly, but mostly because I dedicated the better part of two days to writing and rewriting it. From rough draft to the form I posted here took... let me see... oh, really? Just six days? It seems like it was longer than that. The story I'm working on now, though (it's tentatively called "The Fairy's Kiss") has been in the works pretty much straight-on since October 5, and it's still not done. It's not the length, either: currently it measures just over 3,000 words. It's just... I want it to be perfect.

And I guess every writer wants their work to be perfect. And I guess every parent wants their child to be perfect. (I have committed to using "their" as a gender-neutral singular possessive pronoun, y'all-- just as I have committed to the Oxford comma. I AM AN AMERICAN REBEL.) And sometimes, as I'm working on this story and I rearrange something and it just clicks into place, I think that it might closely approach the vision I had of it in my head.

And sometimes I look at it and think it's crap.

I think this is just the artistic life in general, after all. I'm sure actors and painters and composers have the same neuroses. I know singers do. And maybe it's a part of human nature, to simultaneously be proud of and disgusted by what is, in essence, a representative of YOU.

Or maybe it's just me.

But I am really excited for this story to be done, and I am really hoping that it lives up to my dreams of what it could be.

So I guess I got some goopy personal baggage in here after all. I hope you guys are proud of me!

XOXO, and happy Thanksgiving--

Kate

Under Glass (Halloween Story 2011)

I spent this past weekend in western North Carolina, in the home of my good friend Brittany. She had the lovely idea of celebrating fall with a creepy-story write-a-thon à la Mary Shelley and friends. Here is my entry, all polished up. I hope that you'll enjoy it.

Coming Attractions

Rule I keep forgetting: If a thought is too complicated for a Tweet or status update, blog about it!

I keep starting blog posts and not finishing them. This is not entirely because I am lazy (though of course that is part of the reason). The big thing is that (drumroll) I am a very private person. No, really. I'll start a post about, say, existential angst, or body image, or what I think is wrong with the world-- and then I'll decide I'm revealing too much about myself, click "Save Now" to let it cool a bit, and never go back to it again.

Talking about books, though, is easy. Talking about my constant struggle with my writing process? For some reason I'm comfortable with that. So here you go:

I'm thinking about posting scenes from a story I'm working on in webcomic-style updates. That is, instead of a whole story (to be posted, um, when I finish it) you'll get a polished scene at a time until I'm done with it. This will start when I have a finished handwritten story transcribed and mostly edited-- so you're probably looking at about a month or so. But at least it's something.

New thing

So: if you were wondering: I'm (probably) starting a new thing. I will try to start each day's writing with 20 minutes on whatever short story is in the works. Once I finish a piece, I'll submit it down the list of the SFWA's qualifying short fiction venues, in descending order of probable interest. (I doubt, however, that I'll have the patience for the ones that don't allow online submissions.) If none of them bite, I will put the piece up here. That way you (three) get to see what I'm doing, and I get to... practice submitting things.

The first story is tentatively called "Snow on the Beach."

Before writing this, I tabbed up a lot of those venues' websites for a look-see. It just so happened that Apex Magazine has a story about an undine. Who loves a good undine? You know I do. Best: It's not fantasy so much as horror. Very funny; very creepy; beautifully written. An author to watch!

That's all.

Short Stories

I have made a new rule for myself: until I'm done with my 2000 words, I'm not allowed to do anything online but check my email and look at writing-related sites. No Facebook. No Stewart. No Colbert. I thought it would improve my productivity dramatically, but I'm lagging a bit today.


One of the writing-related websites I've been looking at is sfwa.org. (Joining SFWA is one of my most concrete career goals.) They just put up a post about the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, which is held in New Hampshire in early summer. It looks thrilling, and I wish I could go. Maybe some year. 


While I was poking around the Odyssey website, I read the following on the Syllabus page: 


"You are strongly encouraged to work on short stories while at Odyssey, because most writers improve their skills more quickly when writing short stories."


I'd never thought about that before, but it certainly sounds as if it might be true. I've never really thought seriously about short stories as anything but side projects, but of course they'd be good writing exercises-- you can see the results of new techniques immediately, and rewrites aren't too traumatic if something doesn't work out. It's a great medium for experimentation. As it happens, I just started notes for a new short story today. I think I might try to keep one going on the side-- something to do after the word count is done for the day.