The year in books is off to a slow if interesting start, beginning with some short stories.

"The Endless Lives of Kama" by William Delman at Daily Science Fiction explores the consequences of prescience. It can be enjoyed with or without pondering the deeper layers within the story, but those who enjoy oracle type stories will surely delve more deeply.

"ILU-486" by Amanda Ching is predicated on the notion that there is a war on women coming from the right. Don't get me wrong; the story's premise (women are outlawed from using birth control) serves as much as a warning about guarding inherent rights as anything.

However, the overblown "men are evil oppressors" message is at best a gross oversimplication and at worst factually untrue. Women are as much the enemy as men when it comes to rights grabs, the primary evidence being all the left-leaning women who gladly hand their lives over to cradle-to-grave government care.

Talk about shortsighted.

Me, I think that if there's a war on women, it's coming more from the left than the right, what with militant feminism turning young women into whiners and leeches. But that's just me. You have to make up your own mind.

Political message notwithstanding, "ILU-486" is a thought-provoking look at what happens when people, women in particular, are outlawed from having control over their own bodies (which, as a libertarian, I believe is an essential, fundamental precurser to any freedom).

I'm trying to put a little more time into short stories, since I have piles and piles of short form fiction magazines hanging around in my to-be-read stack. Hopefully I'll finish some of those up this month so I can share them with y'all.

Late last year, I made an effort to hunt down book-related groups on Facebook, so that I could interact with readers and authors and maybe find some cool new reads. One of the groups I stumbled upon was Books of Horror, an incredibly active and helpful group. I used to read a lot of Horror, back in my teen years when I was reduced to reading what was in our home library during the long summer months when Mom and Dad couldn't get us to the library due to work.

Through Books of Horror, I met author Mike Duke, a truly demented individual. Trust me, that's a compliment. "The Awakening" is one of his shorts. At first, it seems like your standard gore-fest, but the farther into the story you get, the more you realize that's not all there is to it. Then the twist at the end. Dude! I totally didn't see it coming. It's rare for a story to surprise me like that.

I'm not normally one for trigger warnings (seriously, just don't even go there), so I'll just say that this falls down on the Slasher Horror side of the aisle and leave it at that.

I began reading Iterate and Optimize: Optimize Your Creative Business for Profit by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant late last year during my end-of-the-year business overhaul. I've had it in my to-be-read stack for a while now, so I thought I'd give it a whirl and see if any useful tidbits could be applied to my own creative endeavors.

I read this one concurrently with the authors' previous title, Write. Publish. Repeat., which I set aside halfway through reading it as I'd already read it once. More importantly, reading both books side by side and comparing them to my own journey as a writer made me realize that I am (mostly) still in the "write, publish, repeat" phase of my career. Yes, I need to go back and "iterate and optimize" (by fine-tuning blurbs, for example), but right now I need to focus primarily on writing.

Still, I did pick up a few ideas that I'd like to try in the future, so I'll likely be hauling both books out again for re-reads at some point down the road.

Amazon sent me an offer for a low-cost trial run of Kindle Unlimited in December, so I decided to try it out and see what the fuss was all about.

My first two reads were a continuation of the Vampire for Hire Series by J. R. Rain, one of the more well-known indie Urban Fantasy writers. I'd read Moon Dance, the first book in the series, a while back and enjoyed it, making this series a natural pick for my trial run.

I wasn't disappointed. Vampire Moon is a fast-paced paranormal detective story filled with interesting characters and not-so-subtle nods to classic Horror stories and characters. My main gripe with it was the repetition, which seems to be a common complaint among other readers, but that didn't really bother me until the third book in the series...

Vampire Moon ended on a huge cliffhanger. Since I was reading it through Kindle Unlimited, it was super easy to click through to the next book and borrow it.

This is how they hook you, people.

Anyway, American Vampire, the third book in the Vampire for Hire Series, turned out to mostly be about something other than the American Vampire. The story was super repetitious at this point and went over the same backstory elements so many times (elements that had already been repeatedly explained in the previous two books), that when it ended on another huge cliffhanger, I decided to simply stop reading the series.

So Kindle Unlimited drew me in and the author's style spit me back out. Hey, you win some, you lose some.

Still, it was an interesting premise and the stories are intriguing. The first book is definitely a must-read for any serious fan of Urban Fantasy.

Right now, I'm splitting my reading time between short form fiction magazines, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell, and Blindsight by Peter Watts.

I received the latter during a Christmas book swap held within the Books of Horror Facebook group mentioned above. It's written in a straightforward, somewhat literary style, which I'm enjoying, and skims the line between Science Fiction and Horror. I love SciFi Horror. Good ones are so hard to find, so I was fortunate to receive this gem from my Secret Krampus.

The Knowledge is one of those books that can be picked up and put down at will, due to its nature. I will likely switch over to another non-fiction book soon as I have a ton of non-fiction I'd like to read this year, including Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History by Keith O'Brien, which I received for Christmas.

My editor's birthday is coming up in March, and in honor of him, I've borrowed a witchy literary fiction book from him to read soon (The Witch's Daughter by Paula Brackston), one I gave him on a previous occasion. His obsession with those style books began with The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe and has continued through some fairly intriguing reads.

Maybe I'll do a post soon about those, or better yet, have him do a guest post.