June Reading List Poll

In January and February, I ran two highly successful polls where I asked all the readers of the blog to help me pick my reading list for the following months. The first one was for novels, the second one for comics. I managed to meet the reading goals for the first of those polls, but am still progressing through the second one, mostly because I’ve been traveling a bit too much of late, and reading time has generally been at a premium due to work and more time devoted to my writing.

However, I should be done with it by the end of this month, so keep an eye out for updates on that.

In the meantime, here’s my next reading poll, and this one is for novels once again. Hit the break to find out more.

A Big Thank You

One week ago, my comics reading poll smashed past my target of 450 votes. I had set targets levels at 300, 350, 400 and 450, and it was almost a record time for the total polling. You guys all rock. However, your response went on to exceed all my expectations.

March Reading List Poll – Comics

So, given the success of my first such reading poll (details here and here) last month, I’m kicking off the next one, and this is for comics/graphic novels of all sorts. Getting back into the medium last year was fantastic and I read some truly great stuff. As always, there’s a lot of reading for me in the future, and to have some semblance of decisiveness about it, since I can never do that and just cherry pick stuff at random, I’m opening it up to all of you.

Monthly Report – January 2013

This is quite a bit late, and I apologise for the delay. Lots of things going on this month, and not all of it good, so things have been off-schedule for a while.

In my blogpost titled “2013 – What Now? Some Resolutions Maybe?” I mentioned that I was not going to set myself any individual project word-count goals, and that my big aim would be to do 450,000 words for the whole year. January, on the whole, wasn’t all that great since there were two trips to India involved (one coming back in the first week, and another going there in the last week), so that crimped by writing quite a bit, not to mention that my slump and procrastination continued.

Try as I might, I can’t fix this stupid procrastination. There’s always something that comes up, that totally screws with my writing moment and I end up doing nothing. I have no idea how to get it sorted. The reading progresses great, just not the writing.

Eh, whatever. It’s still better than doing absolutely nothing for a whole month! So here’s how my writing and reading in January went down.

February E-book Giveaway (Update)

As I mentioned here a couple days ago, if my February reading list poll hit 500 votes by midnight on January 31st, I would do a giveaway for a few eBooks. Since the polling hit that level a few short hours ago, the giveaway is live.

But first…

Reading List Poll Addendum – Giveaway!

The response to my Reading List Poll has been tremendous so far, with almost 400 votes in from dozens of folks. It’s been really fun to see how the standings have worked out over the last few days, and it appears that the top 6 are mostly locked in. Thing is though, I want to spice it all up a bit and add some more excitement to the whole thing.

So this is what I’m going to do.

• At 425 votes, I will share a piece of news that I’ve been sitting on for the last couple weeks. It relates to my growth as both a blogger and a reviewer, so it goes without saying that I’m seriously very excited about this.
• At 450 votes, I will do another reading poll for March, and this will be for comics instead of novels. This should be rather interesting, given the medium, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops.
• At 475 votes, I will make sure to read all the top 10 books on the poll for next month, and review them as well. This is gonna be a tough one, but I’m all for it, if you all can get me to that level!
• At 500 votes, I will do an eBook giveaway for a selection of titles (as yet undecided) from some of the publishers who are on the reading list poll (the publishers, not the books on the reading list!). This is my first time doing a giveaway, so this is even more excitement on top of everything else.

That’s what I’ve got. What do you think? Any suggestion as to other vote levels? Or anything else? Tell me in the comments!

Update: The Giveaway details

The giveaway will start on the 1st February, and run till midnight on 7th February. There will be a separate post for it.

These are the books I’m offering for the giveaway, to provide incentive for more voting (guilty as charged!) —

• Black Library – Short story pack that includes Josh Reynolds’ Gotrek & Felix: Berthold’s Beard, Anthony Reynolds’ Horus Heresy: Dark Heart, Mike Lee’s Nagash: Picking The Bones, and Gav Thorpe’s Dark Angels: Battle Brothers.
• Black Library – one pick from Josh Reynolds’ Gotrek & Felix: Road of Skulls and Gav Thorpe’s Dark Angels: Ravenwing.
• Tor Books – One pick from Kendare Blake’s Anna Dressed in Blood and David Brin’s Existence.
• Solaris Books – One pick from James Lovegrove’s Age of Ra and Jonathan Strahan’s anthology Engineering Infinity.
• Del Rey Books – Rob Reid’s Year Zero.

The Reading List Poll

If you take a look over at my “Reading List” page, you’ll see that I’m pretty much busy till the end of the month as far as reading concerned. In about ten days, I will start working out my reading for the next month. Usually, I just make a list of ARCs (whether print or digital) that I have, as well as other books I want to read and hash out a list of about 10 or so that I find interesting enough.

This time, I thought I’d do something different. I’m going to do a poll on this, and give you guys some options to help me pick what books I should read. I’m intentionally making this a list of 20 so that there’s a fair bit of competition going on. On midnight 31st January I will pick the top 10 off the list and that’s what I’ll be reading, in order of votes cast.

Who knows, I might even make it some sort of a regular feature! One other request: please leave a comment as to why you picked a certain book. It will be much appreciated!

Options after the break!

2012 Reading Challenge: Shenanigans Continue

Deciding on doing a reading challenge for the year, especially one as ambitious as 200 (now 250 of course) prose publications (novels, anthologies), audio dramas and comics, was a huge step back in January. And as you can see from my progress, I’ve been keeping up with the challenge demands fairly consistently and am actually a little bit ahead.

Which brings me to this post. Diayll, over at the Mother/Gamer/Writer blog is doing a reading challenge as well, and where hers differs most prominently from mine is that she is hosting it rather than just taking part in one like I am. It is a really exciting idea as hers is quite focused on manga, comics and video game novels.

You can find the details of the challenge here.

Suffice to say that this is a really good fit for me, considering that I’m reading a ton of stuff this year anyway. The benefits of taking part in Diayll’s challenge is the networking aspect of it and just exploring what other people read outside of my (rather) small circle of more mainstream reviewers (not that I’m mainstream by any means, at least not in terms of my exposure to the blogging community).

So yeah, that’s that!

And maybe I could even get into manga this year! Finally!

My Goodreads profile.

January Report

So the month is coming to an end and, in all honesty, it has been quite the ride in terms of both my reading and writing. As I mentioned in my end of December blogpost here, I had certain writing goals in mind that I was going to be sticking to for the new year and when I wrote everything down, my writing goals were quite ambitious. Later on, I posted here about my reading goals for the year as well and these two were equally ambitious, if not more so. Given that the first month is about to end, I thought I’d take the time to review those goals and see where I am currently in accomplishing those goals.

Follow Through

Ack, another long gap in blogging! My apologies folks. Went away on sort of a family vacation/attending a friend’s wedding to India and the schedule was quite hectic, not to mention that the first five days of this vacation saw me suffer because I had no access to internet! A travesty I assure you.

But I am back though and I have several things to talk about.

First off, the Black Library spring submission window is now more than two-thirds over. I have yet to finish my novel sub (Project Salvation), or the two short stories that I also want to submit for the window (Projects Honour and Long Hunt). Fingers crossed.

I am pretty sure the novel wil not be picked up, for two main reasons. One, Steve Parker is already doing a Deathwatch novel which means my chances are really slim as he is already an established author. Two, I am an aspiring writer which means that in the era of Hammer & Bolter  and the Space Marine anthologies I am more likely to get my short stories in rather than novels. But as my friend Ben Warren pointed out to me the other day, best case is that I am marked out as potential talent. Which would be sweet as well.

Secondly, as per my earlier mentions on the blog about doodling a second novel, I have decided it will not be submitted in the current window, but whenever the next one opens. I have yet to finish my already scheduled subs and this would add way too much to my workload. I will continue to work on this once the window is over, continuing to plan stuff for it. It is an idea I really like as the majority of the Angels of Retribution chapter will feature in it. It is going to be full of Space Marine action goodness, which is never a bad thing.

I have also started as well to plan out a second set of submissions. These are all with a very specific theme and event in mind, and are inspired in part from Project Honour. I am really excited for this as its very much untapped territory in terms of published material. I have been told not to plan future stuff like this but I love the entire idea too much and I am far too stubborn to give it up. So yeah.

So far, this ambitious idea spans at least five short stories and a novel, with a second tie-in novel that acts as a sort of prequel and will be a Space Marine Battles novel. I have been scouring the background sources for all sorts of canon information and it has been fairly exciting. I think I will simply call this Project Honoured Duty. Make of that what you will.

Next off, my friend Paul Colbourne from over on the Bolthole who runs a movie review blog asked me to join his site as a contributor. After a very careful consideration that lasted all of 5 seconds, I accepted. My first ‘official’ review is now up – Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D. My review does have a minor spoiler so beware. You can find Paul’s original review of the film here as well.

I am also thinking of doing a spoiler-heavy review here not sure yet.

Saw Green Lantern 3D as well last week. It was superb. Typical superhero plot but thoroughly enjoyable. For the unaware, there is a tie-in video game also out, called Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters. Movie review incoming within the next few days.

Bolthole’s June RiaR comp is finished as well. The voting and stuff all happened here. The feedback I got for my entry, Initiation was very welcome. No votes for me but ah well. The July comp should be going up soon 🙂

I have now also finished reading Age of Darkness, the latest Horus Heresy offering. It is a superb anthology. Almost all the short stories are excellent and give us a very welcome and intriguing insight into the beginning of what really happened in the seven years between the Istvaan V Dropsite Massacre and the Siege of Terra. Most of these stories take place roughly two years after the former event so a lot has changed. Next up on the reading list is Victories of the Space Marines which features Sarah Cawkwell‘s Primary Instinct. Looking forward to reading it for some super cool Silver Skulls action. After that I have Legends of the Space Marines and Fall of Damnos to read. Hell yeah!

Gotta go now, but see you all later. Got more stuff to mention! Keep an eye out in the links section on the home page as well. It is going to be updated soon.