Woman of Letters

Tag: wrap-up season 2011

  • Wrap-Up Season 2011: Everything Else

    As a writer and reader, these have been my most successful and exciting years ever. But the rest of my life has gone fairly well, too. I wasn’t too sure what to expect when I moved to Oakland. Most of my college friends are across the water, living in SF, and I thought that I…

  • Wrap-Up Season 2011: Books That I Wrote About This Year

      This year, I increased the number of capsule reactions (1-2 paragraph write-ups) of books I read. Thus, I ended up writing about way more books than I ever have before. All told, I wrote 123 books. I’ve listed them below, along with links to the relevant blog posts. In a surprisingly large number of…

  • Wrap-up Season 2011: Revising The Novel

    In June, I finished a novel in eight days. My intent was to spend the rest of June revising it and then to send it out in July or August. It seemed silly to write a novel in eight days and then spend months and months revising it. So, the day after I finished, I…

  • Sold another story to Clarkesword; submitted my first-ever novel query; finished my eighth year of writing

    As I think I mentioned last year, December 20th, 2003 was the day when I completed (and submitted) my first short story. As such, today marks the end of my eighth year of writing. Last year, I surpassed every writing-related benchmark of my life, except for two (most words in one day and most words…

  • Wrap-Up Season 2011: Predictably Good Books, Part Two

    The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis – This fall I visited LA for the first time in my adult life, and found myself utterly entranced by the place. Before this year, LA had never really existed for me as a distinct place, where people lived…a place where I could go. If I thought of it…

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    Wrap-Up Season: Predictably Good Books, Part One

    I knew these books were going to be good before I read them, and I was right. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens – It’s surprising how little personality David Copperfield (the character) actually has. The entire book is fairly episodic, and the only real throughline is David Copperfield’s involvement with each episode and character, but…

  • Wrap-Up Season 2011: Surprisingly Good Books, part two

    The Jungle by Upton Sinclair – This is the novel about Chicago’s meat-packing industry that put the nation into such an uproar over how their meat was prepared (at one point it implies that when workers fall into the renderer and die, their meat is just be added into the sausage) that the government created…

  • Wrap-up Season 2011

    Another December, another wrap-up season. This year I’m planning on following the same general scheme as I did last year. I’m going to write about the books I’ve read about this year, dividing them into four categories according to my reactions to them: Predictably Good, Surprisingly Good, Mixed, and BAD!! Then I’ll have a post…