It's 100 degrees outside, and sunny, and about 5 percent humidity. The air conditioner is working, the fumes from the painting I've been doing are *mostly* contained to that room. Can't do anymore on that until tomorrow, so I'm a bit at loose ends, which is about the only time I update this thing.

Been doing reasonably well on my goals. Been reading a lot (24 books!), but it doesn't feel... purposeful. I don't feel I'm learning as much as I should from it (although I am enjoying reading more!). I gulp-read: I read the bulk of Goss' four-hundred-page "Alchemist's Daughter" in one insomnia-plagued night. I feel a tad guilty for having left no reviews; I feel I should let a book sit and write a review after some processing time, and then I rarely make that time.  I suppose that's why e-readers ask you to review the book right away; I'm not the only one whose, "I'll do it later" becomes "I didn't get around to it."

Hm. Let's see. I had four skills I wanted to work on: dialogue, description, vivid sense-based experience, and more efficient, faster revision. Of the books I've read this year, which ones carried those skills off the best?

Can't really tell how efficiently a finished book was revised, although one can tell if revision wasn't really *finished.* Hm. None of the books come to mind, although I would say the "third-and-a-half-wall conversations" in Goss's "Daughter" that ended up working so well would have been easy to excise, and I'm very glad an overzealous editor didn't do so.

Vivid sensory writing that worked for me: China Mieville's "Station," Cat Rambo's "Hearts,"  Cassandra Khaw's "Food," Gaie Sebold's "Babylon," worked best.  Sarah Gailey's "River," Nina Kiriki Hoffman's books.

Description: I have to go back to Mieville, who blew me out of the water, and Khaw and Gailey. Also Yoon Ha Lee's "Raven" and "Revenant," for telling concise details, as opposed to Mieville's pages of it. Nnedi Okorafor's "Akata" and "Phoenix," for middle ground. 

Dialogue: too many to list: Yoon Ha Lee, Rambo, Vernon, Valente, Goss. Mieville, Gailey. I don't recall anything I read this year having dialogue that wasn't good, in fact.

So I should probably be using these novels to help me do my own writing better; take apart a scene, a conversation, a description  and see how it worked, how it was crafted. Worth an attempt.