Friday Fives: Best Books and Best Laid Plans

This week’s Friday Fives question at Paper Hangover is “What are your FIVE favorite books in 2011?” I already listed these for this week’s Road Trip Wednesday, so for your convenience, I will re-list them (in no particular order):

• UGLIES by Scott Westerfeld
• THE CATER STREET HANGMAN by Anne Perry
• DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth
• LEVIATHAN by Scott Westerfeld
• BEHEMOTH by Scott Westerfeld

If you want to know what I had to say about each of these, check out Wednesday’s RTW article. Also, one of these books is my book of the year. Which one was my absolute favorite read of 2011? Check back here on Saturday to find out!

Since we’re nearing the end of the year, and it seems a bit naff to just repeat my RTW for Friday Fives, let me give you five goals I want to accomplish in 2012. Again in no particular order:

Finish my WIP. I would love to get it polished, beta read, and query ready–but finished will do for starters. I still have some research to do, and there are major plot points I’ve yet to work out, and these are things I don’t want to rush for the sake of completing a goal–or even for the sake of querying it. The number one rule of querying (well, one of the number one rules… :D) is never query a novel you don’t think is ready to be published. It should be complete and polished until is squeaks and you can see your face in it before it ever gets into the hands of an agent. Not that an agent won’t find things to change and tweak–but you should feel as if you’re giving the agent your best. And that takes time and work. So, I want to finish the WIP with a view to querying sometime in 2013.

Write more-especially fiction. As if working on my WIP isn’t enough, I need to be writing more–whether it’s the blog, or short stories, or flash fiction–whatever. If I want to be known as a writer, then I need to be doing more of the writing thing. And I probably need to scale back on the blog writing and give more attention to the fiction writing. As sad as I know that makes you all (I wish), I really can’t sustain writing blog articles every day when I need to be working a lot more on my fiction. I may have to adhere more strictly to The Schedule (see tab above).

Read at least 50 books. I’ve almost accomplished this goal for 2011, so I want to set it again for 2012 hoping that I will actually surpass this amount. I can’t hope for my writing to be any good if I’m not feeding my imagination with great stories.

Read more YA. I especially need to read more YA next year, since this is the genre I’m writing, and there are so many great-sounding YA novels out there that I didn’t get to in 2011. And there are some great YA novels due to be published in 2012 (INSURGENT, the next in the DIVERGENT series, for example).

Spend more time encouraging my kids to read. There are things I can do as a parent to encourage my kids (especially the younger ones) to read more. As a homeschooler, I want my kids to grasp the idea that if they can read, they have the basic skill needed to learn anything. The world’s knowledge and wisdom is spelled out in letters both in books and online. I need to do more to encourage them to improve their reading skills, and learn to love reading, and also to be discerning readers (both in terms of determining what’s a good story, and in terms of filtering good and bad information), so they can take learning into their own hands.

There are other things I want to do in 2012, but these are five that I really want to pay attention to next year. So, what are your top reads of last year? And what do you plan to accomplish next year? And don’t forget–if you have nothing better to do for a few minutes on Saturday, check back here to find out which of my top five books of 2011 is my BOOK OF THE YEAR!