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Goodreads Project, part 6: Fantasy

December 15, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

I’m working on a Goodreads project, reading a book from each of the fifteen categories Goodreads uses in its Best Book of the Year Award contest. If you click back through my last five blog entries, you can see reviews of the books I read in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Thriller, Romance, and Romantasy. When I started, readers were still voting. Since then, Goodreads has announced the winners. I’ve now reached the sixth category, Fantasy. To my surprise, I…

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Goodreads Project, Part 5: Romantasy

December 9, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

I’m still working on my project to read a book from each of the fifteen categories in Goodreads’ Best Book of the Year contest. As I’ve been reading, voting has proceeded, and the winners have now been chosen. You can see of list of them here. Today’s category is Romantasy, a combination of Romance and Fantasy. The category is new this year. I’ve read that Goodreads created it because so many submissions combined these two genres. They’d have dominated either…

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Goodreads Project, Part 4: Romance

December 6, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

I’ve reached the Romance category–Part Four of my project to read a new book from each of the fifteen categories in Goodreads’ Best Book of the Year Award. I reviewed books from the previous three categories here (Fiction), here (Historical Fiction), and here (Mystery and Thriller). From the Romance category, I chose to read Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood. My Romance Confession Before I review the book, I should confess that, even though Romance is the best seller of any…

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Goodreads Project: Part 3, Mystery and Thriller

December 4, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

I’m working on a project in which I read a book from each of the fifteen categories Goodreads uses in its best books of the year contest. The first category was fiction. You can see my comments on that category here. The second category was Historical Fiction. My comments are here. The third category was Mystery and Thriller. I’d already read The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman. But by the rules of my project, I had to choose a new…

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Goodreads Project: Part 2, Historical Fiction

December 2, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

I’m working on a project in which I read a book from each of the fifteen categories Goodreads uses in its best books of the year contest. The first category was fiction. You can see my comments on that category here. The second category was Historical Fiction. I had already read Weyward by Emilia Hart. But by the rules I set for my project, I needed to choose a new book too, and I selected Go as a River by…

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Goodreads Reads: A New Project

November 23, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

In my experience, people are happier if they’re working on a project. I’ve blogged about this before. By project, I mean some set of actions that people undertake freely. It’s what collectors do, for instance, or quilters, or runners training for a marathon. When Goodreads published their list of finalists for best book of the year in fifteen categories, I saw a potential project. I decided to read one book from each category. If I’d already read a book from…

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My Favorite Reviews

October 10, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 2 comments

What kind of reviews stand out to a writer? As I write this, Amazon has The Wysman on sale, the paperback for $4.84 and e-book for $2.99. Here are my two favorite Amazon reviews of this book, both about the main character, Jarka, who was born with a club foot: First, from a 5-star review: “Often – especially in movies, but plenty of times in books – a character can be injured or have some condition that’s only their nominally,…

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Character at home vs. Fish out of water

July 5, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes a writer situates a character at home, in a place they know well. Other times, writers toss their character into an unfamiliar place so they’re a fish out of water. Both choices present some challenges for the writer. I recently read C.J. Sansom’s Dark Fire and John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society, one right after the other. They’re very different books in a lot of ways. Dark Fire is set in Tudor London, displayed in all its political intrigue,…

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Winterturn: A Finders Keepers Story

June 20, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

One thing I could always count on was that my brother would boss me around. Or try, anyway. Also, he’d act like a horse’s behind. So I guess that was two things I could count on. Anyway, it didn’t surprise me that he scowled when I stopped to look down Mudpit Lane. On the pond at its end, past the red guardian ribbons, kids were sliding on the ice while an excited dog chased them. “It’s getting dark,” Roth said….

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Obsidian, AKA Dragonglass

May 3, 2023 Dorothy A. Winsor Comments 0 Comment

In my latest book, Glass Girl, the central character, Emlin, is a glassmaker. Because the book takes place on a volcanic island, Emlin and her sister glass crafters are interested in their island’s obsidian. As you probably know, obsidian is glass that forms from lava if the minerals in the lava and the surrounding soil are of the right kind. It would usually be found on the ground in the lava flow, but you occasionally see it in some surprising…

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