Books Read in 2017

As I've previously done in the past for anyone interested in seeing what I read myself in my spare time, below are the titles of the books I've read so far this year. With only two months left in 2017, I probably won't get a chance to read any more. Writers of the Future and work are keeping me pretty busy. As usual, I won't say anything about which were good and which were bad; those opinions are always highly subjective -- one man's trash and all that. Looking forward to reading more after the holidays. Have any good stories you'd recommend?

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child – White Fire (audiobook)
Robert Ludlum – The Sigma Protocol (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – Deeply Odd (audiobook)
Richard Matheson – I Am Legend (audiobook)
Lincoln Child – The Forgotten Room (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – Odd Thomas (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – Breathless (audiobook)
Stephen King – Delores Claiborne (audiobook)
Clive Cussler and Thomas Perry – The Tombs (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – Forever Odd (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – Saint Odd (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – Odd Interlude (audiobook)
Stephen King – The Dark Tower Book I The Gunslinger (audiobook)
Stephen King – The Dark Tower Book III The Waste Lands (audiobook)
Stephen King – The Dark Tower Book IV Wizard and Glass (audiobook)
Michael Finkle – The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit (audiobook)
Stephen King – The Dark Tower Book V Wolves of the Calla (audiobook)
Stephen King – The Dark Tower Book VI Song of Susannah (book)
Stephen King – End of Watch (audiobook)
Dan Brown – The Lost Symbol (audiobook)
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child – Crimson Shore (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – What the Night Knows (audiobook)
Dean Koontz – Brother Odd (audiobook)
David Baldacci – The Hit (audiobook)
Orson Scott Card – Xenocide (audiobook)

2016 Reading List

It was Stephen King who said if you want to be a writer, you have to do two things: write a lot and read a lot. I spend more hours during the day reading than I do writing. But I don't read because I want to be a better writer; I read because I simply enjoy it. I love escaping my mundane cookie-cutter daily routine and going off some place exciting with adventurous people. My primary escape routes are my car during my long work commutes, and my bedroom late at night when I should be sleeping.

Below are the books I read in 2016. Not all were winners and not all were complete losers, but a few turned out to be grand slams. And in the process of reading, yeah, I do learn what good and bad writing looks like so I can either use it or avoid it in my own writing.

Since one man's trash is another man's treasure, I won't tell you which stories were good and which were bad; you'll just have to find that out for yourself. But I will say I never checked anything out from the library that didn't at least look promising.

Admittedly, the list is heavily slanted this year towards Stephen King and David Baldacci. The Baldacci books come from his series of Camel Club adventures and are mostly just fun to read (mostly). And the King books? Well, what can I say -- his escape hatches always swing on well-oiled hinges and the doors are never locked. So without further ado, here are last year's stories in the order I read them:

Hell’s Corner by David Baldacci
The Camel Club by David Baldacci
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Blue Labyrinth by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Finders Keepers by Stephen King
Revival by Stephen King
Stone Cold by David Baldacci
The Twelve by Justin Cronin
The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin
The Last Star by Rick Yancey
Horizon Storms by Kevin J Anderson
Gideon's Corpse by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Everything's Eventual Part I by Stephen King
The Magician's Nephew by CS Lewis
Dune by Frank Herbert
Under the Dome by Stephen King
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
The Collectors by David Baldacci
On Writing by Stephen King
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic

Here's a simple math formula for all us writers out there:

Better Story Telling = Writing + Reading²

Just as deep space travel depends on the relationship of energy to the mass of an object times the speed of light squared (e=mc² for all those not familiar with Einstein's theory of relativity), being a great writer also depends on universal principles. In fact, the difference between a hobby writer and a great story teller is very similar to the difference between an amateur astronomer and, say, Galileo Galilei. One enjoys spending a couple of hours a week using his instrument to scan the sky and, occasionally, happens upon something interesting. The other completely immerses himself in his field, applying what he already knows to come up with new ideas that completely change how we think about ourselves and our universe.

Nicolas Copernicus studied the pioneering works of Aristarchus before developing his own revolutionary views on heliocentrism. Isaac Newton often pondered the moon's orbit around the Earth while gazing from his bedroom window at apples falling from a tree in his mother's garden (contrary to so many cartoon stories, he was not struck in the head). In fiction, Doctor Victor Frankenstein pored through books, spending years in laboratory research before assembling his fateful beast.

The point is this: in order to be better writers, we need to be better readers. That means reading...a lot! A couple of years ago, I sat down at my computer with a burning desire to write science fiction. Needless to say, I'm still trying to finish the same story. I realized one of my biggest obstacles was the fact I was trying to write science fiction, but it had been years since I had actually read any science fiction. I was out of practice, out of vocabulary, out of style, out of research, out of context. I was trying to write the science fiction I remembered as a kid without realizing that science fiction had progressed and surpassed everything I remembered.

When the year 2012 rolled around, I made a commitment to myself and to my writing. I made a list of books I wanted to read and used the opportunity to study the craft of published writers in my genre. I wanted to learn how they wrote, how they captured my imagination, how they allowed me to visualize the worlds they created, how they made me keep turning pages long into the night when I should have been sleeping, how they expressed the messages they felt needed to be told about humanity and the fate of our world.

My goal was twelve books, one for each month, with a promise that I would learn from the best and the worst. Even if I didn't like a book, I would read it anyway to learn why I didn't like it, making mental notes about what worked and--just as importantly--what didn't, so I wouldn't make the same mistakes.

So the key to good writing is good reading and reading a lot, which is why reading gets an exponential square in the equation above. When I dedicated myself to my reading and to my writing, I found that I had more time than I thought. After just the first quarter of the year, I had already read my twelve novels for the entire year. Here was the list:

Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov

House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

The Atlantis Code by Charles Brokaw

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Changelings by Anne McCaffrey

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

The Bradbury Report by Steven Polansky

War of the Worlds by HG Wells

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Daniel X by James Patterson

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Granted, most of these were in audiobook format during my daily commute to and from work. But the format doesn't matter. And I didn't stop with just twelve either. I've discovered that listening to audio books is by far preferable to hearing Adele or P!nk or Taylor Swift sing for the bazillionth time about lost love. Think about it, how many times can you really hear the same song over and over again before you tire of hearing it? And I don't miss any of the talk or commercials on the radio.

It was Isaac Newton who once said, "If I have seen further it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." The important thing is to read a lot and learn from the masters how to construct a compelling story. Read a lot and write a lot and little by little your writing will improve until, one day, you can see further because the high road on which you travelled was paved by those who came before you. Happy reading!

Using Alpha and Beta Readers

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes almost that many people to shape a story into a best selling work of art. If you open the front pages of any novel, you’re bound to see a list of people to whom the author feels indebted for their assistance in getting his book published. Spouses, parents, children, editors, and agents are among those typically mentioned.

I’d like to discuss two groups of people who probably don’t normally get recognized, but without whom a story would probably never even make it into the hands of the editors and agents in the first place. These are the Alpha and the Beta readers -- those insightful, sensitive individuals who so generously give up their evenings and weekends to read through your manuscript, then lovingly rip your story to shreds! (And just when you thought you were handing them your next best seller...)

“Oh, the pain!” you cry, clutching your heart when you see all that red ink scribbled in the margins and crammed in between the lines. And yet, at the same time, you can’t help but appreciate their feedback, knowing deep down that what they’ve told you is honest and true and probably for your own good, or at least the good of the story.

The problem is this: we can never truly review our own work with a high degree of objectivity. We’re simply too close to our stories, too close to our characters, too close to the settings and all the action. There’s nothing wrong with being so close, but it does severely limit our ability to see all the individual trees through the forest.

Most of the time for me, writing is simply a process of trying to make my fingers type fast enough to keep up with all the action going on inside my head. I see every color. I smell every drop of rain. I feel every wound that’s inflicted and every throat that gets strangled. I taste every morsel of crumbling moldy bread. I hear every laugh and every scream.

I do my best to capture all these experiences and arrange them on the page in exactly the right order using exactly the right words so my readers get to see and smell and feel and taste and hear exactly the same things. But it’s never exactly the same.

After all, it’s my imagination and I’m the one creating it and shaping it and trying to make it all fit together neatly. But what seems so clear to me can often appear vague or ambiguous to anyone who hasn’t shared my experience. Maybe I meant to say one thing, but ended up saying something completely different. Or I might have neglected to include that one tiny detail or snippet of information the reader needs to make an important connection later on.

As hard as we try to get everything just right, its simply impossible for us to keep track of it all and nail every thing every time in every scene. During our first pass edits and proof-reading sessions, we can easily overlook minor flaws and pale descriptions because we’ve already lived it and our memories automatically fill in all the blanks for us.

Not so for our poor first-time readers, who have no such experiences to help them out. That’s why Alpha and Beta readers are a writer’s best resource for finding areas in the story that aren’t working exactly the way we intended. Let’s take a quick look at each type of reader and see how their unique roles can help a writer tell the best story possible.

Alpha Readers
Alpha readers are the triage doctors and nurses, the general practitioners whose patience and experience allow them to take our mangled bleeding manuscript and fairly quickly assess which areas are probably still okay, which ones might need to be cauterized to staunch further loss and, most importantly, which parts may have to be amputated to save the whole body.

What are some of the skills and characteristics that a good Alpha reader needs to possess? For starters, they have to be good communicators with strong interpersonal abilities. The primary role of an Alpha reader is to deliver bad news to the writer in such a way that the writer feels happy to hear it. Not that the Alpha reader has to sugar-coat the bad news or tip-toe around the eggshells of a writer’s personal insecurities -- heck, any good writer should have developed a thick skin by now after all those rejection letters. But it does require a certain amount of tact and skill when discussing a story critique.

Alpha readers also need to possess a good understanding of basic story telling concepts like plotting, tension, character arcs, pacing, point of view, dialogue, and conflict. When Alpha readers receive a manuscript, their job is to look for the big holes and flaws in the story:

1. Which parts of the story seem too rushed? Too slow?
2. Are there areas in the story that seem cliche or that otherwise lack originality?
3. Are the characters and settings intriguing and imaginative?
4. Does the tension seem to rise towards an inevitable climax?
5. Does the ending seem natural and satisfying?
6. Does the narrative elicit appropriate emotional reactions and levels of involvement?
7. Are there parts of the story where the reader is pushed away and reminded that there are better ways of spending her time?
8. Are there any inconsistencies that need to be addressed? (The detective drives a blue Ford Torino in the opening scene that inexplicably turns red in the next.)
9. Does the dialogue between two minor characters serve a purpose, or is it just two people arguing for no apparent reason?
10. Are there too many clues that give away the ending too soon? Are there not enough clues, making the ending feel contrived or requiring a resolution via deus ex machina?

As you can see, good Alpha readers need to be grounded in a broad range of basic story telling concepts. Because of this, and also because of their experience in giving and receiving critical feedback, the best Alpha readers tend to be other writers.

Once the author has had a chance to correct any glaring issues identified by his Alpha readers, he’ll make another round of changes and send the manuscript off to the next group -- the Beta readers. If Alpha readers are the general triage unit, then Beta readers are the specialized cardiac and neuro surgeons.

Beta Readers
Good Beta readers enjoy reading. A lot. In fact, if given the choice, Beta readers would probably choose reading over just about any other activity. Beta readers also tend to be a highly sensitive and emotional group and may even seem to be on the verge of developing OCD tendencies towards the proper use of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. These are the people who will review your manuscript and, with a great air of triumph, point out every typo they found that your twelve gig duo core word processor overlooked. Beta readers will let you know:

1. That you accidentally used the word ‘allude’ when you meant to write ‘elude’.
2. That you use too much passive and not enough active voice.
3. That you have a bad habit of slipping into the past perfect tense.
4. That  you probably meant to write ‘category’  when you typed ‘cat orgy’.
5. That you’re confusing the colon with the semi-colon.
6. How irritating it is that you dangle your participles so much.

When Beta readers return your manuscript, you’ll read through their critique notes, then slap yourself upside the head for the number of times you read that same passage and missed something that glaringly obvious.

But that’s why Alpha and Beta readers are so essential to a writer. Since they’ve never seen your story before, since they’re not emotionally bound to the characters and the settings and the plot, they can spot problems you didn’t even know were there. So the next time you write out your special acknowledgements section, remember to give a shout out to all those brave pre-readers who helped bring your story to life and raise it to be the very best you could make it.