{"id":2629,"date":"2015-01-15T22:40:16","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T12:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?p=2629"},"modified":"2016-04-17T23:06:32","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T13:06:32","slug":"australian-women-writers-challenge-2014-wrap-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/?p=2629","title":{"rendered":"Australian Women Writers Challenge 2014 – wrap up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n

\"awwbadge_2014\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, another year another Australian Women Writers challenge<\/a>. In 2014 I read 10 books by Australian women and reviewed all 10. The reviews can be found here<\/a> in all, and\u00a0individually:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Ambassador’s Mission<\/em> by Trudi Canavan<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. The Rogue<\/em> by Trudi Canavan<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. The Traitor Queen <\/em>by Trudi Canavan<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Winter Be My Shield<\/em> by Jo Spurrier<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Black Sun Light My Way<\/em> by Jo Spurrier<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. North Star Guide Me Home<\/em> by Jo Spurrier<\/a><\/li>\n
  7. Secret Lives\u00a0<\/em>by Rosaleen Love<\/a><\/li>\n
  8. Musketeer Space<\/em> by Tansy Rayner Roberts<\/a><\/li>\n
  9. Kaleidoscope<\/em> edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios<\/a><\/li>\n
  10. The Female Factory<\/em> by Lisa L Hannett and Angela Slatter<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In previous years I found it relatively easy to complete the challenge, whereas this year I was reading right up until Christmas, and had to post the last 6 reviews into January. I’ve been reflecting on why I had more trouble this year with the challenge.<\/p>\n

    First up, it can’t be denied that I don’t actually get time to read very many books in a year. 10 books actually represents a not insignificant percentage of my total reading for the year.<\/p>\n

    Secondly, due to my work and home schedule, I did find myself diving into some less challenging “comfort reading” of series that didn’t tax my brain too much. This included reading a set\u00a0of Star Wars novels\u00a0and revisiting one of my reading loves of my teenage years, the Wild Card series. While these novels had a mixture of female and male authors, none of them were by Australians. This took out a fair chunk of my reading time between about July and October in 2014 – and didn’t help me contribute to the challenge at all.<\/p>\n

    But when I strip out these “time poor” excuses, I also noted another trend. Over the last couple of years I have been reading more women (and Australian women) authors. However, I’ve continued to buy books by a mixture of men and women, but just not reading a lot of the books by men. As a result, my “to be read” shelf has become weighted towards\u00a0male authors. So when I started to feel guilty about the to-be-read shelf and decided to try and reduce it a bit before buying more books, I found myself reading mostly male authors. This seemed to hit a bit of a critical mass during 2014. Something to keep an eye on in the future.<\/p>\n

    What else have I noted about my 2014 reading? Six of my ten novels were made up of two trilogies. Reviewing books in trilogies so close to each other was challenging – my reviews felt repetitive to me and I found myself without many interesting things to say.<\/p>\n

    I also cheated a bit in this years challenge. One of my reviews was of a work in progress by Tansy Rayner Roberts, who is releasing\u00a0Musketeer Space<\/em>\u00a0as a serialised novel. So the book isn’t actually finished yet. I also reviewed\u00a0Kaleidoscope<\/em>, which is an anthology made up of many writers, only a few of which were Australian. However it was co-edited and published by an Australian woman, so I decided to stretch the definition a little.<\/p>\n

    In both cases, including the reviews was partly to help me hit the target, but was also because each endeavour represented something innovative and a bit different creatively, showing Australian women at the cutting edge of what the speculative fiction scene is doing at the moment. I’ll leave it to others to judge whether those reviews were “really” part of the AWW challenge – I’m still claiming a challenge “win”!<\/p>\n

    I also realised that I’ve leaned pretty heavily on the Twelve Planets series published out of Twelfth Planet Press, and that\u00a0The Female Factory\u00a0<\/em>(my last review of the year) was book 11 of a 12 book series (although I believe a “13th planet” may have been added to the lineup). So, I’ll have to look a bit further afield in 2015!<\/p>\n

    Once again, the AWW challenge has pushed me to seek out and read more books by Australian women. I’m definitely signing up for the 2015 challenge – and if you’re reading this, you should too!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    <\/p>\n

    <\/p>Hi,\n

    Welcome to Mark Webb’s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse – I’ve only recently started writing and there isn’t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0my biography<\/a>, see …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[128,14,15],"class_list":["post-2629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","tag-awwc2014","tag-review","tag-specfic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2629"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2636,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629\/revisions\/2636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}