Ha ha. Tricked myself. I’ve been hunting around on this site for my May book of the month post, taking quite some time to realise there wasn’t one because I didn’t finish any books in May. Oh, how depressing. I did, however, finish a book in June. So I’m combining those months, and giving you an update on my writing progress during that time, all in one (probably pretty brief) post.

The good news is that my beautiful time-drainer has just hit three months of age and is sleeping a lot more consistently, to the point where in these first couple of days of July I’ve read half a book already! So things are looking up on the fiction front.

Without further ado, the book of the month for May and June is … After the Fallby Kylie Ladd. Granted, there was no competition, but it was nonetheless a great book. Kylie Ladd is an Australian author (remember, I love Aussie writers) and I “met” her on Twitter somehow recently, which inspired me to get her book out of the library (sorry Kylie, I know I should have bought it, but I have post-birth-of-baby budget issues!).

After the Fall was particularly interesting to me because it uses chapters written from the point of view of different characters, much like my Bratislava novel draft but with even more characters and no systematic rotation of them. I have to admit to being a little confused at first, because I couldn’t get the names of the characters straight in my head, but that’s probably because I only had a chance to read just a short chapter or two at a time. By the end, that was no problem. I enjoyed seeing how different characters interpreted the same situation differently, a technique I’ve tried to use in Bratislava as well.

And to complete the monthly update, yes, I did actually do some writing in June. And a tiny bit in May too. I finished up this round of edits on Bratislava and submitted it to the Allen & Unwin/Vogel award. Yay! I was desperate to enter this year as I’ll sadly be too old next year. Oh and you may note I say “this round of edits” because even during that process I had some new ideas of some more tinkering I could do. I really hope some publisher will take pity on me someday and just publish all my draft novels so I’m not continually tempted to “fix” them, as I’m sure not all the changes are for the better!

Stay tuned for the July update which I hope will be more a productive month. Fingers crossed.

Tags: Bratislava novel, Kylie Ladd, Twitter, Vogel award

Posted in Goals and Motivation, Reading Fiction, Writing Fiction | 1 Comment »