Audely Bensen Writes

  January: A surprise 36-hour trip to Vegas 2025 was a ride. One that I would desperately hope not to repeat.  I increased the number of times I left the house for fun by nearly 50 percent compared to last year, while significantly decreasing the amount of travel relative to the last couple years. My husband and I went on a whirlwind trip to Vegas in January; a friend and I road tripped to South Bend in February to celebrate another dear friend's incoming baby; in May my sister and I hiked in Virginia; and throughout the summer I took three separate trips to Wisconsin (one with friends, one for work, and one for family). The rest of my house-leaving involved meeting friends, going to the library, and searching for my new favorite local coffee shop (which I found, eventually, in November!) At the day job I weathered four rounds of layoffs (with no guarantee that we're finished yet), and I got promoted to a role that I wanted and felt was earned, while simultaneously dealing wit...

Just after finishing a very fun beta-read for Nicholas Binge I was fortunate enough to stumble across a "new sci-fi" display at my local library that featured his two latest books (as well as a whole host of other books I ought to get my hands on. Since I'd been trying very hard to limit myself to three new books per library visit, I grabbed Ascension and keep walking.  First takeaway from Ascension: very hard to spell. Finding it on Goodreads afterwards to log the read and to write this post has been very, very challenging.  Second takeaway: In reading two of Nick's books back to back, I can really see the 'voice of the author.' It comes through in the themes of the story, even as each book is very distinct. That was very heartening to see, since lately with each new writing project I reach a point where I ask myself, "is this the same story I just told in the last book?" The things that I care about, and the emotional weight that I place on certai...

I hit a new reading record in 2025! I finished 137 books. Wild!  A few trends drove the change:  Compared to 2024, I had a 100% increase in the amount of sci-fi/fantasy I read. However, if I take out the binge-re-read of the entire Tortall universe from the spring, then I'm actually about equal with last year's read. This year my SFF reads skewed much more literary than in prior years, and I barely read any straight fantasy - everything was either fantasy romance, fantasy mystery, or speculative future books.  I increased my mystery/thriller reading by nearly 200%, driven mostly by my discovery that the J.D. Robb books are not the plain P.I. mysteries I thought they were, but a very fun futuristic sci-fi romance criminal procedural mystery series. Very fun, very addictive. And that led me to branch into more newer thriller and mystery authors that I otherwise might have skipped, too.  My non-fiction reading went back up to 2023 levels. This year I read very widely, d...