Reading wins! (and a few fails)

 Hello, hello, my friends. How is your December going? As a Public Service Announcement - just in case you haven't noticed, it's going to be the New Year in a couple of weeks. Eeeeek! I don't think I'm ready. Are you?

Luckily, I've have my new KU subscription to distract me every time I start to panic. I'm afraid I've had a few DNF as I poke my way through the post-apocalyptic offerings. A prime example is the series I started and posted about just a bit ago. I finished Book 1 and thought I could keep going.  Sadly, I must confess. I gave up. It became the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink of series.

I was hooked with the Nazi U-boat found frozen in the Antarctic iceberg. I kept going with the plague type story line. But, then we had aliens, quantum time fluxes, we had resurrection ships a la Battlestar Galactica, we had... well, I was simply too exhausted as a reader to go on. Each one of those tropes would have kept me reading on their own through many a book. To toss them all in to one series? Even I, the lover of torrid and tropey pulp fiction (and every single bad movie the SyFy channel made in its heyday), had to give.

On the author learning curve side of things, that series was a great example of 1) how simpler is better when it comes to telling a story (what is the story I'm telling), and 2) the importance of scene and sequel. There has to be time in the story for the reader to pause, reflect, and then regroup to read on. I have taken more than a few classes on this aspect of writing and I have learned more from being unable to finish this series than I did in any of them. 

But, pssst. Come close and let me whisper. I've started a new series. And, it's starting out SO GOOD!!! My fingers are crossed as I keep going, but it's definitely a solid run of enjoyment. The nutshell description is: an EMP takes down the US power grid and releases the captive of a sadistic psychopath who wants her back.

Can you hear my little trill of excitement?

What have you been reading to round out your 2022?