Control: New Reading Project

Amazon.com: American Starfleet Independence eBook : Lewis, Dalton: Kindle Store

I, Dalton Lewis, had failed as a writer in an important aspect of a writer’s life. I had enough with spending years in which I read only a dozen or so books. That wasn’t enough. For a writer to only read eighteen books last year — that’s how many I read — is not acceptable. It’s just not good enough.

I decided to read a book a week going forward. It’s a good, strong, reasonable goal. I’m five weeks into this goal and I read a book a week for the first four weeks. I’m proud of the results so far in this project. I’ve read literary books, I’ve read pulp sci-fi, and I’ve read classics. It’s been quite the whirlwind of reading. Here are the first four books that I read:

1. The End and the Death, Part Three — by Dan Abnett: This is the tenth book of the Siege of Terra series, which is the conclusion of the fifty-plus-book Horus Heresy book series in which space marines fight chaos space marines over the guardianship of the galaxy. I thoroughly loved this series of ten books. Horus Lupercal decides that he has had enough and that the asshole human in charge — the Emperor — has to go and that demons need to be in charge. He starts a war to stop the evil humans and help the benevolent demons to take the galaxy from them. The space marines following the Emperor want to stop the evil demons from taking over everything from the heroic humans. Who’s right? Who’s to say. Sanguinius, a space marine vampire angel, is a particularly strong character, being the best of everything. The Siege of Terra is an excellent space opera series to read if you want to read ten books of sci-fi action.
2. Stardust — by Neil Gaiman: Every critic in existence has already pointed out that Gaiman is one of the best writers in the world right now. That’s true. He’s great. The only question now is: how great? Is he going to be remembered in a hundred years? Five hundred? I certainly don’t think that I will be, but he might be. He might be. This little fairy tale about a boy looking for a fallen star — and finding that nothing is as it seems — is a beautiful little book. I read it when it came out twenty-five years ago and re-read it a few weeks ago. It is still an excellent story in that it understands people and how they act and behave. It subverts expectations in all of the right ways.
3. Treecat Wars (Star Kingdom #3) — by David Weber and Jane Lindskold: This is a silly little teenage romp through young adult problems like relationships with boys, friendship troubles, having too much schoolwork, and your alien best friends getting framed and possibly murdered. So normal stuff. There’s a little bit too much narrative summary in parts of this book — and it’s silly teen stuff. Still it’s not bad — a good fun read if you’re into that sort of thing.
4. The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien — ah, yes, I read one of the great ones. If you somehow do not know then this is book # 2 of The Lord of the Rings, the most famous fantasy novels of all time. I was surprised at the amount of talking about situations and conflict between the main characters that was included in the story — there’s a lot of conflict between people who have a lot of problems. There’s a lot of dire trouble for our characters, too: Frodo doesn’t have an easy time of it — wandering through orc territory without many fighting skills and dealing with Gollum. Merry and Pippin have problems with getting kidnapped and then with helping the ents, and Gandalf and Aragorn and company have to deal with an ailing king and his evil advisor — and Saruman. Everyone has to deal with devastating problems and face difficult choices.

That’s my progress so far this year. It leads to a new goal.

The goal?

To be a better writer and publish a better book.

I’m writing the second book in the American Starfleet series, and the first book was my biggest seller. Thousands of copies were downloaded, and 15,000+ pages were read in the reading library. I’m working on a sequel to be better than the original — stronger characters, better storylines, better action, and more dramatic conflict. We’ll see if I can succeed. I think that reading a book a week will enormously help me to write more effectively.

Thanks, and take care, friends.