Audely Bensen Writes

The Last Heir to Blackwood Library by Hester Fox was a fun, quick read about a woman who inherits a house and has to fight to save herself once she's inside. It's definitely gothic, and fell somewhere in the middle of speculative and horror. There's romance (but it's not a romance), and there's a mystery that the main character struggles to solve given the particular challenges of the library. This was definitely a curl-up-on-a-gloomy-day book, and I read it when it was way too warm outside. 

  This year, I'd like to start posting more about the books that I'm reading outside of just the speculative books. When I'm not deep in the weeds of drafting, I like to read non-fiction to refill the creative well. Usually I read after work, in the space that has replaced my commute. Throughout August and September, there were weeks where I read 3 non-fiction books at once: one during the morning writing hours (since I was meant to be taking a break from writing), a different book during the commute time, and a third in the just-before-bed slot.  I can't wait to share the book that I'm writing now that pulls from all of the ideas captured in this stack.  To gather my thoughts for Predacide, I read:  Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. This book was very academic, so it was a slow read. (In addition, the author is very Latin American in syntax. Even though this book is in English, reading this brought me back to the Spanish Lit classes I took in co...

  After listening to an early interview with Kritika H. Rao, I knew I had to read The Surviving Sky. Doubly so when my writing group friends began raving.   I bought it (which has become more rare as I try to be a responsible library user) and I can't undersell the emotional impact of holding a doorstopper in your lap.  Once I picked this book up, it was so hard to put it down. At the same time, I did not want it to end. In order to savor the first-read, I forced myself to read no more than 50 pages a day, because otherwise I would have stopped working and sleeping to devour this book.  In addition to the fascinating world-building and the stakes that kept me glued to the page, I really loved how the relationship progressed in this book. More than the relationship itself, I thought this book was an excellent example of how the relationship itself has an arc, and each character's relationship with their relationship also has an arc and changes throughout the bo...

A snapshot of my garden in July Quarter 3 recap:  July:  I spent all of July continuing to clean and tweak Dandelions. In the round of revisions that continued from June, which mostly focused on the continuity of the world-building, I added 10 percent to the total word count. Then I did another pass focused on line edits, using my macro to flag all of my overused words and passive verbs. Once those passes were done, I shipped Dandelions out to betas. Outside of writing, July was more travel: to Wisconsin for a cousin's engagement party, to Chicago for my brother-in-law's surprise birthday party, back to Wisconsin for a family vacation.  August: August was a month of rest. For the first half of the month I did no writing, instead focusing on finishing up some beta reads. I also did a ton of research for a new book idea. In the second half of the month, we went back to Wisconsin for another family vacation, and then for the week after I took a week off and relaxed: I hiked...