Tag: reading

What I Read: June 2023

Summer has been a mix of lazy days with massive productivity. At home, I’ve been letting myself indulge in hours of Tears of the Kingdom gameplay with my kids and also reading the first Harry Potter book aloud to my two youngest ones (their first time!). We’ve also been teaching my daughter how to ride a bike: both exhilarating and heartbreaking knowing that she’s the last one! On the weeks that my older kids are going to camps at BYU, I have spent the whole day on campus, practicing for the fall and putting my head down to get through edits while my husband watches the younger ones at home. I’m also prepping for our big family road trip for the summer–we’re driving all the way to New York on a self-guided church history tour, so there’s a lot of planning to be done if we’re to survive with our relationships intact. I hope you’re all finding time to relax and staying cool in the heat!

The biggest writing news from June was the publication of “Reclaiming the Desert” at Wayfare Magazine. They paired my story with amazing artwork of the Utah landscape by Brekke Sjoblom. Her geometric landscapes really fit the futuristic yet natural solar punk feeling I was going for. I’m thinking I have to buy one of her works for my wall now. Anyway, the story is free to read, and once you’re finished, you can take a look at my author’s note to find out about some of the real-world science behind the setting.

I was also invited to present my paper on Mormons writing about aliens to the Mormon Transhumanist Association at their June gathering. (Reading list from the paper here.) Turns out, the MTA has a lot of speculative fiction fans, which in hindsight should have been obvious. They had some great discussion points for me to consider which will influence my future work on the history of LDS speculative fiction.

Our final two episodes of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree before taking a summer break are about space Jews in season three of the Mandalorian and the movie version of the Les Miserables musical.

And if you’re reading this when it’s posted, we’re at the beginning of week two of the “Around the World in Mormon Literature” contest by the Mormon Lit Lab. I’m on the Lit Lab board and it’s been exciting and exhausting to see all the work that goes into producing a multi-language contest. Please read along with me and vote for your favorites! (Not to bias you, but I’m loving the invented folklore of “The Five Angels of Eden” by Claudio Oliveria.)

And now, on to the book reviews!

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What I Read: May 2023

School officially ended and summer officially begins! We had a successful camping and kayaking trip at Deer Creek Reservoir to kick off the summer. The lake is so much fuller than it was last year. The rocks I remembered being halfway up the beach were almost completely underwater! A testament to Utah’s insane water year.

Kid-sized kayaks are amazing
Playing Phase 10 is an important part of our family camping culture

Some really good writing news this month: I sold a story! “Birthright” will appear in an anthology of speculative fiction detective stories by Inklings Press! This story features a very costly magic system that twists the relationships in a family to the breaking point. I’m sure it will be a while before the anthology will be available, but I’ll keep you up to date on it. I also turned in my edits on “Reclaiming the Desert” to Wayfare, so hopefully you’ll see that one sooner.

On the other side of the writing desk, I’ve finished the developmental edits for my portion of Irreantum‘s genre fiction issue. I should be diving into copy edits soon. The stories we received for the issue are truly amazing and only getting better with every draft. I’m excited to share them with you.

For Mother’s Day, we released an episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree about the portrayal of Mothers in the Media. Our other episode was one of my kids’ favorites for me to prep for, an episode of the Australian sensation that is Bluey.

This month was a bit light on the reading with all the end of school activities, but I’m hoping to get back on track with the summer months before grad school takes over my reading list in the fall. That is, if I don’t spend all my spare time exploring Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom. I cannot believe they made a game this good with a reused map. Every minute of the seven year wait was worth it.

Book reviews after the jump!

Continue reading “What I Read: May 2023”

What I Read: December 2022 & 2023 Reading Projects

I hope your holidays were much more calm and bright than mine. I don’t think we had a single day of the winter break where someone wasn’t sick, including major bouts of vomiting. There was also a good amount of family drama and about a week of rain. Oh well. Such are the holidays.

I hit about half of my word count goal in December, 4500/8000, but as I had forgotten to account for Christmas break, I consider this basically a win. I finished my short story “Memory” and sent it in to Writers of the Future two whole weeks early. They sent out a few emails saying that not a lot of people had entered this quarter, and I feel like this story is my best one yet, so I’m crossing my fingers for it. I’m also still working on my “Landscapes of Faith” essay which is currently wandering every-which-way with no particular purpose.

christmas cookies on white ceramic bowl
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

In publication news, on the last day of 2022, my essay “Self Portrait in Cookies” came out in Young Ravens Literary Review, issue 17, on the topic of womanhood. Hopefully later this month, I’ll write a little author’s note about this essay, but in general, it explores the relationship between baking and womanhood. Bon appetit!

And over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we released a Christmas special about adaptations of A Christmas Carol as well as our final episode of season one, discussing The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.

For January, I’m lining up my ducks in a row to get my application for graduate school completed and still working on my proposal for the 2023 AML Conference. I’m thinking something on Mormons and aliens right now. The deadline for the Irreantum genre issue I’m co-editing is also coming up (Feb 1st!). I look forward to reading all of the interesting submissions, so make sure to get yours in.

2023 Reading Projects

four pile of books on top of brown wooden surface
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I’m starting some new reading projects for 2023. I enjoyed the idea of my 5×5 Challenge last year and made some good progress on most of it. But I think I need more structure so as not to put off the books I want to read in favor of the shiny new things I see. This year, I have two major reading projects (three, if you count the year of Sanderson–6 new works by Brandon this year!). First, I’m joining up with the Hardcore Literature Book Club on Patreon to dig into some classics, partly to prepare my brain for grad school and partly because I ran some stats on my Goodreads data and found that the majority of my lifetime of reading is things published in the last 20 years or so. That’s something I hope the HLBC 2023 reading list will correct. (I will probably drop off once/if I go back to school in the fall.)

I’m also planning a personal study of the Inklings in 2023. I’ve got a schedule of approximately a book a month, starting with a history of the group, then working through a fiction and non-fiction book each by Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers (who isn’t technically an Inkling, I know, but I keep hearing so much about her that I figured I might as well include her). Interspersed with these are some of CS Lewis’s works of literary criticism, which are some of the few of his books I haven’t read. If you’re interested in following along, here’s the reading list, though I reserve the right to adapt as needed.

Now on to the book reviews!

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What I Read: October 2022

If I told you that I was sewing Halloween costumes at 9 pm on October 30th, you’d get a good picture of the kind of month I had. Lots of work on my dad’s campaign and getting the Reflections contest up and running, plus all the craziness of Halloween with four kids. All of it good work, but lots of time away from the writing I’d like to be doing.

Word count for October fell short again (3770/4000) but not surprising. I missed about a week of time attending the LDSPMA Conference. I learned a lot at the conference (I focused this time on podcasting rather than writing) and met some great people who I hope to work with in the future.

white and black skull figurine on brown wooden table
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

This month’s writing was mostly focused on academic projects. I finished a book review of Into the Headwinds which is going to be published by Dialogue. But the more exciting piece was finishing my statement of intent to apply for the English MA program at BYU. I’ve got everything all rounded up, just waiting on letters of recommendation. I did begin a new short story at the end of the month called “Memories” focusing on a robot nanny. First draft has already gotten some good feedback from my writing group this week, though lots of changes to make of course. I’m really enthusiastic about the prospects for this story.

Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree released two episodes last month, one on Top Gun Maverick (I didn’t think we’d get so many moral lessons out of a summer blockbuster!) and a Halloween special on Midnight Mass.

During November, I’m going to continue polishing “Memories” and start a creative nonfiction piece about the culture shock of moving from Utah to Seattle and back again. If you’re reading this on the day it’s published, you can catch me tonight at 7 pm MT at the launch party for the Mormon Lit Blitz’s second anthology. I’ll be reading “The 37th Ward Relief Society Leftovers Exchange,” and just basking in all the other really interesting authors who’ll be there. Next week, I’m attending Dragonsteel 2022 for the release of The Lost Metal. At the con, I’ll be recording a special episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree talking about Mormonism in the Mistborn series, which is something I’ve always planning to write about. Come and listen in if you’re at Dragonsteel! Due to all this busy-ness, I won’t be attempting NaNo this month, but I’m already eye-ing Camp Nano in April for a return to longform writing.

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What I Read: July 2022

woman standing near marble pillars
Photo by Andrew Neel on Pexels.com

I’m back! A two-week vacation in DC with my husband for our 15th anniversary plus a short family vacation with my parents and siblings was just what I needed after the hecticness of June. Though vacations have their own special brand of hecticness, the packing and unpacking, the chaos of not having any sort of routine or rhythm. Now there’s less than a week until the kids start school again (assuming they can all stay healthy, which given what’s been happening here the past few weeks is in doubt).

And I got a piece of good news last night: my short story “Birthright” received an Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest for volume 39, quarter 2. It’s not one of the top spots, but it does put me in the top 500 or so out of the thousands of entries they received. This was my first time entering, so this result makes me optimistic about my future chances–and my fiction-writing in general. I had almost talked myself out of fiction writing, having decided that I’m more of an academic and want to get an MA rather than an MFA. But now I’m all excited to start writing stories again.

Speaking of stories, this month’s book reviews include DNFs (that’s “did not finish”) and a lot of extra vacation reading. Nine books in all, which is pretty high for me. Check them out after the jump.

Continue reading “What I Read: July 2022”