Kay Hudson

Welcome to 2016. My resolutions are always pretty much the same. Write more. Publish something. Declutter the house. Lose a few pounds. Read more.

I actually did pretty well on that last one in 2015. I had read 48 books in 2014, and joined Goodreads. So when Goodreads put up the reading challenge, I aimed for 50 books in 2015. I actually finished 72.

Now, admittedly, some of those books were fairly short. Epublishing has opened the field for novellas and short novels; books no longer have to reach a certain length to be financially viable if they don’t have to live on paper. Even so, Goodreads tells me that I read 20,131 pages last year (up from 13,641 in 2014).

I depend on Goodreads for page totals, and who knows how accurate they are on ebooks? But I do keep my own list of the books I read, and I can report that in 2015 I read nineteen romances, twenty-six mysteries, seven science fiction/fantasy novels, five general fiction, and fifteen nonfiction books, eleven of those related to writing or DIY publishing. This year I read 38 books on my Kindle, slightly more than half, up from my previous average (since I bought my Kindle in 2011) of about one third ebooks. (Maybe that would justify replacing my near-antique keyboard Kindle with a nice new paperwhite model.)

I must have been lucky or cautious in my choice of reading material: Goodreads tells me that my average rating was 4.4 stars, and I do try to rate and review what I read. I also know what goes into writing a novel, so perhaps I’m inclined to be generous.

I have not done a lot of writing this year. WordPress tells me I only published 38 blogs, less than one a week, in 2015. I’ll try to do more of that in 2016, keeping up my essay writing skills. I still have quite a few of those 72 books to tell you about, so I’ll start on those next week.

I did finish writing the third novel in my Jinn series, Jinn on the Rocks, but now I need to do considerable editing on the three Jinn books before I can seriously approach publishing them—when I wrote the first one, Jinn & Tonic, I had no idea I was starting a series, and the world of Pandemonia has expnded quite a bit. I’ve been reading and researching the self-publishing process, and it does sound like such a lot of work. Marketing doesn’t appeal to me at all. So I’ve been dragging my feet.

I think this year I’ll aim for reading 60 books—five a month, I can do that. And I’ll start the decluttering with the old office. And stick with the exercise bike. And start a new manuscript.

Happy New Year, and I wish you the best of luck with whatever you hope to accomplish in 2016.