A Year in Books

I realized today as I was memorizing my parking spot number (D2) that I’m probably more of a Star Wars fan than I thought (I visualized R2-D2 to remember it of course). However, my primary geekdom remains and will always be my bookworm habits.

Last year my friend Erin revealed that apparently the average American only reads 4 books a year. She decided to track how many books she read during the year to see how it compared. Given my own love of reading and obsessive tracking habits, I decided to do the same.

Now I didn’t actually start tracking the books I was reading until April (since Erin’s post wasn’t until the end of March to give me the idea), so I don’t have a full year’s worth of data. Even with missing a few months I realized there are actually a lot of interesting trends I could determine from the numbers.

Let’s start with the simple logistics. I had two sheets I used to track information. One was my number sheet where each month I tracked the numbers of books I finished reading during the month. Initially I had broken this down in two columns, print books and iPad books. I quickly decided I wanted a third column to track which books were actually re-reads that I had read at some point before. On the second sheet, I simply listed for each month the name and author of each book I finished reading, highlighting in blue any re-reads. 

As the months passed I realized there were some issues with my tracking mechanisms. Because I didn’t add a book to the sheet until I finished reading it, what would happen frequently is that I would read the bulk of the book one month but finish it the first or second day of the month where it was actually tracked. This shows especially in November. I didn’t do any reading in November because of NaNoWriMo, except that I had a book I was reading that I finished on November first simply because I only had like 40 pages left.

The other main issue is that this setup doesn’t capture all of my reading, only the books completed. I’ve discussed before how I don’t really read in a linear fashion, and many times I start a book and then give up. The thing is sometimes these are VERY large books, and I read 200-300 pages before I give up. That’s a lot of reading that’s not being accounted for!

Still, while keeping that in mind, I think nonetheless I gathered enough information to start identifying some of my reading trends in a year.

Let me throw some numbers at you. I read a total of 65 books from April 1 through December 31^st. Not bad for a year. 40 books were print, 7 were on the iPad, and 18 were actually re-reads.

Typically I read about 6 new books a month. I had a least 1 re-read a month as well, although technically it might average out to 2 per month.  

There were 3 months during the year that bucked the trends a bit, and I find it very interesting to consider what happened during those months.

In July, I actually read 12 new books. My first thought was maybe I had started a very engaging new series, but looking back at which books they were, actually only 2 were in the same series.

August was the next month that was a little off. I read far less in August (only 4 books tools). Most of the books were re-reads, I only read 1 new book in the month.

The last month that didn’t match the normal pattern was September. September was split evenly between new books and re-reads, but all the new books I read that month were on the iPad instead of print.

Those 3 months just so happen to be part of our “busy season” at work. Given what I remember of the year and what I see on the spreadsheet, I’ve drawn some interesting conclusions about what happened.

The first conclusion is that when I’m stressed/unhappy I read more. Although August was a little lower that was partially because of people visiting and things like that, but both July and September were higher than the average. As the stress/unhappiness continues, I tend to fall back on re-reading. Looking through the specific books I chose to re-read, I realized I have some “comfort books” and that I turn to them to cheer myself up.

The second conclusion is that despite all my complaining about e-reading, when push comes to shove it works. Why did I have more iPad books in September? I had started the Mortal Instruments series, and I decided to download them on the iPad as other people in my family were going to read them too (we share an account). Plus when I finished one I wanted the next in the series instantly - none of that driving to the bookstore stuff when wincest is on the line! And despite the fact that I was reading on the iPad, which I always say doesn’t feel like a real book and I can’t do it easily at home, I managed to get through 4 books on there in one month.

All in all I think I did pretty good for a year of reading. I’ve started tracking my books for 2014 (2 finished so far), but I still need to think through if I want to make some edits to the spreadsheet. It might be interesting to start tracking the books I abandon and maybe later figure out if there is a pattern to that as well. Plus at some point I should look for a method of tracking non-traditional reading, like fanfiction and manga. I’m also excited to see if trends change year by year. Maybe I start to read less, or read more. Who knows! 

A Reader's Rant

There are many things in life that irritate me – airport delays, people that tell me what to do, people that tell me what not to do, people that wear peach lotion – just to name a few. If you’re noticing the pattern (typically it involves people and their actions), yeah I’ve noticed that too. I have very low tolerance for stupid mistakes that could easily be corrected. This is why I go absolutely BONKERS over the fact that almost all written articles these days contain typos.

Seriously, it’s getting to be ridiculous. Especially considering that technology will now even catch some of our errors, and the rest could be caught with a quick edit.

I'm allowed to laugh, I'm an English Major

For the most part it’s not even grammatical errors, or if it is, it’s one that looks like it was just overlooked, not that the author lacks a basic understanding of grammar. Despite assumptions from friends, I’m really not that much of a grammar nazi. Some grammar and writing conventions are outdated or restrict the sentence flow. Especially the rule about ending with a preposition.

I had a teacher in high school that actually started trying to follow this rule, and would reword his sentences to make sure they didn’t end with a preposition. We thought it was funny, because half the time the sentence ends up weird.

Personally, I prefer writing to flow the same way a person talks. I still think there are different levels of writing, just like there are different levels of talking. I don’t use the exact same phrases with friends as I do with clients. But I don’t completely change my style of talking either.

If it sounds like I’m being hypocritical, complaining about writing errors and then excusing ungrammatical writing, I understand. Actually I have a few areas where I totally admit my hypocrisy, but this is not one of them. You see, what annoys me with writing errors are the stupid mistakes that could have been fixed if somebody had just checked for them. It’s not even the writing I’m mad at, it’s the laziness of not having someone proofread.

I’m talking about obvious errors here. I’m not even too hung up on things like “to” instead of “too.” Those sort of things are actually easy to overlook if you’re rushing (although why someone is rushing through instead of taking the time to properly look over their work is a good question).

When you write, you get in a certain mind frame. It’s quite simple to misread your writing so that you don’t catch errors. In fanfiction, most writers have what they call a “beta.” It’s basically an editor. Somebody to read through your work and check for those types of errors before you post.

Now sometimes a writer will post a new story, or a new chapter, without their beta checking through it. Some writers never use a beta (which actually includes me, I’ve never had a beta for my fanfiction). Typically they will include an acknowledgement or apology for any errors that do come up.

But that’s fanfiction, it’s not published, it’s just people screwing around for fun.

I’m more concerned with accredited media. I check Yahoo and MSN articles fairly often. It is becoming ridiculous how often I find simple errors in the articles. Seriously isn’t somebody getting paid for this writing? How can they push out news stories without doing a simple check of the article??

Again, I’m not even talking about little things like whether or not the Oxford comma is being used (although while we’re on the subject – if you do not support usage of the Oxford comma we should no longer be friends. Just saying). This is an example from earlier this week on yahoo. 

Somehow a random stream of words ended up in the middle of an article. Twice. Was this supposed to be a link? HOW DID THEY MISS THIS!?

Granted, with an online article I suppose they figure they can always edit it later. You have no idea how furious I get when this happens in printed materials.

Last month I borrowed a book from my friend Kevin called Armor. It was pretty fabulous. I think of it as a nice mix of Starship Troopers, the book, and Starship Troopers, the movie. But the typos. OMG. Every time I talked to Kevin about it (he actually hasn’t read it yet) that’s all I could talk about. There was a bajillion of them! All over the place! Like huge, glaringly obvious errors. More than once it actually duplicated an entire section of text further down the page, in the middle of a different paragraph. You can just guess how disconcerting that made the reading experience.

I’m currently in the middle of an excellent zombie book. It may be my new favorite zombie book ever (although actually I don’t have a current favorite zombie book, as I get halfway through reading them and then freak the heck out of myself and have to stop). It’s brilliant, as it explores the world 20 years after the zombie outbreak, and how it’s changed the way the news is reported and accessed. It’s called Feed by the way if you want to check it out. But even in this book I have caught more than once random question marks appearing in the middle of a sentence.

So if my sentence is supposed to be “people are sucking hardcore and not catching these stupid mistakes” it instead becomes “people are sucking hardcore and not? Catching these stupid mistakes.” These are not questions, just sentences, and the question mark doesn’t even appear in a logical place.

Now with fanfiction, an author can choose whether or not to use a beta. With published material, I always assumed that before investing good money in publishing a story, someone at some point would invest in a proofreader. Am I wrong? Are we sacrificing edits in order to deliver results faster?

I give you free reign to laugh at me now when my posts have little typos. It’s happened before, and I try to fix them whenever I can. I do check through my own writing at least once before putting it up, but I can’t catch everything. It would behoove me to have someone else check through as well, but this is just a blog for me to play around. I promise if at any point in life I’m going to have something published for real, it will be read over so many times that at least the informal proofreaders (me, plus friends and family I guilt trip) will have sections memorized.

After all, my momma raised me that if you’re going to do something, you don’t do it quick, you do it right.

 

When Life Gives You Lemons... (a defense of fanfiction)

There’s been a lot of talk recently about fanfiction. Some authors have been saying they don’t approve of it, and why their work is off limits. I respect their opinions, but honestly some of the comments are just a little nasty, and seem to misunderstand the point of fanfiction.

My college roommate and I actually bonded over fanfiction. We had been randomly assigned, and didn’t have much contact before coming to college. Just a few emails that managed to completely freak her out, poor thing, when I mentioned my bird alarm clock. For my part, I had initially thought I’d been assigned a guy which had thrown me in a tizzy. This is what happens when you skim emails. I caught the name “Patrick” without noticing that “Hall” right next to it. 

Roomie & me trying on funny hats

We were pretty typical random roommates the first week. We tried to hang out sometimes but often left to do our own thing. In the room, we were incredibly polite to each other. Although we had some similar interests, we didn’t exactly click initially. There was just too much awareness that we were stuck in a room together and didn’t really know the other person. What was appropriate to share? What would super offend the other? It wasn’t until my roommate came back in earlier than expected one day and caught me reading fanfiction that our barriers came down. Here she loved fanfiction too! It was a guilty pleasure we shared, and from there we found more and more shared interests and habits, until we became inseparable and people started to referring to us as a combo package instead of separate individuals.  

I’m more of what one calls a fanfiction lurker. I read TONS of it. Not constantly. I definitely go through cycles, but when I’m getting my fanfiction fix I’ll read for hours straight. To me, fanfiction is the ultimate expression of fan devotion in writing. It shows that somebody loves the world and characters you’ve created so much, that they want more of them. They want a chance to play in the world. If it’s a series that’s over, they want a chance to envision what comes next for the characters. 

Now some of the comments about fanfiction have implicated that fanfiction authors don’t have enough creativity to write their own material, or that it’s a waste of their time to devote so much effort to working with someone else’s creations.

Again, I disagree. Many great fanfiction authors write their own stories as well, and some are working on novels. And sure, some stories are just as long, if not longer, than a typical book. But fanfiction gives authors the opportunity to practice their craft and have fun with it. Writing should be fun. It also is absolutely an art that must be practiced in order for one to excel. If you’re trying to write frequently, and you have a fandom you love, why not combine those things and write new adventures for your favorite characters? It’s a great exercise.

Writing (good) fanfiction is surprisingly tough. You have to stay true to characters that your audience already knows, but you don’t want to fall in the trap of using just a few main traits to define them. You need to think of new ways to describe places, characters, and situations without using the exact same verbiage of the original creator, or the tons of other fanfic authors. It’s like being given a prompt in a writing class. While you’re following certain conventions, it’s up to you to come up with something unique for your story. Unlike a class though, you have so many more people working with the same prompt. How do you represent the fandom you love so much, without being cliché and writing the same thing as everyone else?

Within any fandom you’ll find certain themes that have been done to death. There are also some themes that pop up across genres that have created a language used for the fanfiction world. Familiar words like lemons take on whole new connotations, while new terms like mary sue and mpreg are created.

There are also trends in the writing style of fanfiction. When I first started reading it, way back around 2000, most fanfiction was written in a style with characters performing *actions* or lines and activities described in a play type format. There was a lot of interaction from the author as well. It was fairly frequent to see the author inserted at some point in the story, describing their control over the characters. At that point in time fanfiction was more lighthearted. It allowed people to write and read, while still making fun of itself.

Now fanfiction is both more serious, and less precise. Good fanfiction has evolved into real stories. The author is more removed from the process, although there is still a tendency to have author notes at the beginning or end. Unfortunately, while fanfiction now takes itself more seriously, there has also been an influx of authors with less writing skills. A whole new generation thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to write stories in txt talk or lack even basic punctuation.

The tone of responses has changed as well. Before, fanfiction was not widely known. At this point, it seems like almost everyone has heard of fanfiction, and unfortunately, they are only acquainted with the bad examples. Thus great fanfic writers start to write less and less as they get few constructive comments and far more flames.

I happen to write fanfiction. Not very often, to be sure. Nothing extraordinary. But I find it very calming. When I write fanfiction for some reason I tend to write fluffy, silly pieces. I don’t do that in my own writing. My stories tend to be far more angsty. Fanfiction provides me with a way to write the type of stories that for whatever reason I can’t write with my own characters.

Additionally, I often find myself loving the side characters of a story, movie, or series. Fanfiction lets me get to further explore and get to know characters that get very little screen time. It lets me rationalize their choices and actions, and sometimes reflect on my own life as I often write about characters I identify with. Fanfiction, like any type of writing, is basically another form of therapy.

So before you judge the world of fanfiction, let me ask you, have you ever discussed a movie, book, or tv series? Have you ever spoken to someone about a fandom you love, analyzing plot or motives? Complained that you should have seen more of Snape’s back-story, that Anakin turned evil too quickly, or that X-Men 3… well basically ruined everything about the series? Then you’ve started on the path to fanfiction. The only difference with fanfiction is that the authors have taken the time to write out their own interpretation instead of just discussing it.

Someday if I’m a famous author, it’s totally cool to write fanfiction about my world. My momma taught me young that imitation is the highest form of flattery.