Since I do so many book reviews here on the blog, I thought I would take a brief look back at my year in books:

Number of books I read: 53. I think this is down a little from 2008. I’m hoping to read at least 75 books in 2010. On the flip side, I wrote four books and heavily revised another one, which I think is up from 2008. It all evens out in the end.

Genres I read: All types of fantasy and romance, spy thrillers, action-adventure books, westerns … pretty much everything but non-fiction and science fiction (I’m not a huge fan of those genres).

Authors: I read lots of my old favorite authors (Donald E. Westlake, Robert B. Parker, Kresley Cole, Jeaniene Frost, Lee Child, etc.) and several new people too (Scott Lynch, Alex Bledsoe, Kristan Higgins, etc.). I’ll try anybody once.

Best reads of the year: I absolutely loved Smooth Talking Stranger by Lisa Kleypas; Graceling by Kristin Cashore; and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Those are all books that I wish that I had written — they’re just that good. Honorable mentions go to The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch and The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe, two epic fantasy novels that kept me turning the pages (and surfing Amazon to find out when the sequels come out).

Saddest read of the year: Get Real by Donald E. Westlake because he passed away in 2008 and there probably won’t be any more books by him (unless he had something in the works prior to his death). I’ll miss Westlake and his clever sense of humor. Ditto for his alter ego writing as Richard Stark. But luckily, he left me a lot of great books to re-read over the years.

Most frustrating read of the year: The Professional by Robert B. Parker. As much as I like the Spenser series, I’m getting a little tired of seeing the same character over and over again — namely, the psycho, nympho woman who uses sex to get what she wants and isn’t too smart about it.

YA mania: I’d forgotten how good young adult books could be. But with everyone buzzing about titles like Graceling by Kristin Cashore; The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; and Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead, I read several YA titles in 2009 — and some of them were among my top reads of the year. I’ll be reading more YA in 2010 — and maybe writing one myself.

So there you have it. Some of my thoughts about the books I read in 2009.

What about you guys? What were some of your top reads in 2009? Share in the comments. And happy reading in 2010!

And now, here’s the review for the last book that I read in 2009, Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder. This is the first book in her young adult fantasy Study trilogy.

Yelena is scheduled to be executed because she killed the young man who raped and horribly abused her. But she is spared and offered the job of being the poison taster for her country’s Commander (leader) instead. It’s a dangerous job, but it’s better than the hangman’s noose. Soon, Yelena is learning all about poisons, thanks to her mentor/boss Valek, as well as trying to avoid a powerful general, whose son she killed. But there are other people who want Yelena dead, and being the poison taster is just the beginning of her troubles …

I’ve heard lots of good things about this book over the years so I decided to check it out. I enjoyed it a lot. Yelena is a strong, capable heroine, and I also liked Valek’s manner-of-fact manner. The magic and poisons were interesting, plus Snyder’s descriptions are very lush and elegant in places, as you’d expect in this type of epic fantasy YA.

My only quibble is the fact that everyone in the book wanted to either a) use b) kill or c) profit from Yelena and her skills and magic. Seriously, it seemed like everyone was out to get the poor girl all at once and all at the same time. I would have liked just a little less of that kind of nonstop action and more scenes with Yelena and Valek. I also found the Commander’s zero-tolerance policy to be a little strange (you can’t kill anyone for any reason, not even in self-defense like Yelena does).

But overall, if you’re looking for a new YA book to try, check out Poison Study. Thumbs up.

Up next: Deep Kiss of Winter by Kresley Cole and Gena Showalter.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

I don’t talk much about my day job here on the blog, but looking back at 2009, there was just more sheer drama at work than in any other part of my life. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.

For those of you who don’t know, I work at a daily newspaper as a features page designer. That means I’m responsible for downloading press releases, editing stories, selecting photos, posting stuff on our Web site, and designing the actual feature pages that folks see every week, like the food and book pages (among many, many others).

So where did all the drama come from? Well, first of all, in the spring, we were told that we all had to take 2 weeks of furlough time — or 2 weeks off without pay. Mainly, because newspapers in general are absolutely tanking in the economy right now, and the company needed to save as much money as possible.

Then, in the fall, the powers that be upped it to 3 weeks. That’s right, I had to take 3 weeks off without pay in 2009. But hey, it was better than being laid off all together (which did happen to some folks at my newspaper).

That was plenty of drama by itself. But there was some sad news as well — one of the copy editors was diagnosed with a pretty serious brain tumor. I’m wishing him all the best with his recovery.

And, of course, perhaps the strangest thing was the fact that one of the editors was charged and convicted in regards to a child pornography case.

One of the features writers claims that we have enough drama for a soap opera. After this past year, I have to agree with him — we could call it As the Newsroom Turns …

Anyway, here’s hoping that 2010 is a little calmer than 2009 turned out to be!

What about you guys? Any drama in your lives in 2009? Share in the comments.

I got a nice surprise over the Christmas break — a great review of Spider’s Bite from Romantic Times magazine. The reviewer gave the book 4 1/2 stars, which is the best rating that I’ve ever gotten from the magazine (and the first of what I hope is many more to come). Here’s the top half of the review by Jill M. Smith:

When it comes to work, Estep’s newest heroine is brutually efficient and very pragmatic, which gives the new Elemental Assassin series plenty of bite. Shades of gray rule in this world where magic and murder are all too commonplace. The gritty tone of this series gives Estep a chance to walk on the darker side. Kudos to her for the knife-edged suspense!

One of the editors, Faygie Levy, was also nice enough to do a little Q&A with me on Spider’s Bite. So my thanks go out to both Jill and Faygie. Both the Q&A and the review can be found in the the February issue. Hope you can check them out!

And I also have some other good news to announce. Stay tuned for more …

In the meantime, I’m doing the happy dance!

A while back, someone asked me what an elemental was and why my Spider’s Bite is the first book in the Elemental Assassin series. (He was wondering about the name of the series). Well, here’s the answer.

Basically, in Spider’s Bite and the other books in the series, an elemental is someone who can create, control, and manipulate one of the four elements — Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone. (And yes, the letters are capitalized because I thought it would make things clearer for readers).

Gin Blanco, the heroine of the series, is an Ice and Stone elemental, which means that she can control not one by two elements. For example, her Ice magic lets her make small shapes, like cubes, crystals, and the occasional knife. Her Stone magic lets her make her own skin as hard as marble and hear the vibrations of the stones around her. In my world, people’s actions and emotions permeate the environment around them. So for instance, Gin can tell if someone has been murdered inside a brick home and that sort of thing. And she can do other things with her elemental magic besides what I’ve mentioned here (powers to be revealed in future books).

The Elemental Assassin series also features vampires, giants, and dwarves, because I wanted to include a variety of folks/creatures/magic users.

So how did I come up with a book about elementals? Read on.

Several years ago, when I was first getting serious about writing, I wrote a pretty crappy epic fantasy novel. Seriously, it was all kinds of bad — your typical farmgirl-with-a-great-destiny plot. I shudder to think of it now. Shudder-shudder.

But one of my secondary characters was an assassin — and I eventually realized that she was much more interesting than my farmgirl heroine was. So I decided to write another epic fantasy with an assassin as the main character. I tried and tried and tried … writing a couple of different drafts/chapters with different plots and different characters, but I could never get it just right. So eventually I moved on to the Bigtime series, among other things.

But I kept thinking about writing an assassin story and during a lull in between my work on the Bigtime series, I finally decided to forget the epic part and go with a modern, urban fantasy. And finally, the character and story started to click for me.

But the assassin needed magic, since this was an urban fantasy. All along while writing the various drafts/chapters, I’d had a half-formed idea of having the assassin be able to use some kind of Stone or Ice power. (I also thought about putting golems in there too based on a really strange dream that I had one night).

But if my assassin could use Stone magic, then I wanted my villain to be able to use some kind of Fire power (because who isn’t afraid of being burned alive?). However, having only two kinds of powers seemed a bit limiting (you never want to limit your magic too much). So somehow, somewhere along the way, I decided to put two more types of magic in there — Air and Ice — because they were the opposites of Stone and Fire (there’s a lot of duality in my magic system). And thus, the magic portion of the Elemental Assassin series was born.

Now, elementals are not a new idea. I’ve read fantasy books over the years where folks can control the weather or water or whatever. But I thought it would be cool to have an elemental as my main character simply because of the powers that I could give her. I also think it helped to make Spider’s Bite more marketable because elementals aren’t in every book — and they’re certainly not as common as vampires and werewolves these days. Agents/editors are always saying that they’re looking for something fresh and different, so I tried to give it to them.

So there you have it. Some of my inspirations for Spider’s Bite and the Elemental Assassin series in a nutshell. Frightening, isn’t it?

Got questions? I’ll answer them in the comments …