This is K.M. Loyland.

and you are listening to the 450 second episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

Just in time for all the Christmas busyness to kick into gear, I finished up the second of my first draft

edits on Dreambreaker.

And the really good news is that I'm, as ever, a ding-dong with numbers.

You may remember a few weeks ago I was lamenting that I only managed to trim 8,000 words off the first edit.

Well, I miscounted along the way.

Turns out I actually did meet my goal of cutting. Well, I miscounted along the way.

Turns out, I actually did meet my goal of cutting 20,000 words.

So, Merry Christmas to me.

This means the book now weighs in a felt Santa Clausian weight of about a hundred and 98,000.

I'd still love it if I could whack some more off but realistically that's probably not

going to happen. So I'm just super happy to get this little darling in under 200,000 words.

It's still the longest book I've written, but as I always say, a book's got to do what a book's got to do.

I'll be taking a couple weeks off from the

podcast due to Christmas craziness. There will still be posts on the blog

though every Monday so be sure to stop by and by the next time we talk I hope to have finished my third

proofreading-centric edit and be ready to start in on the outline for the

third and final book in the series. So Merry Christmas everyone and I hope you enjoy today's topic my top reads from 2018. As we close out another year of reading, I find myself with a renewed appreciation and vigor for the importance and the blessing of reading.

Having devoured books at the hungry pace of 100 plus a year for at least 15 years,

I didn't start keeping track until 2002,

I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable and even disturbed by the fact that my reading

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