The Den of Ubiquity

11:12pm: Story Hebdo, February 11, 2012: The Duke's Portrait (2)

( "I'm not cutting off my arm," Duke Orland said. )

11:52pm: Story Hebdo, February 4, 2012: A Triumph

( Misha entered the final chamber cautiously. )

9:56pm: Story Hebdo, January 28, 2012: The Duke's Portrait (1)
( "Count Lumus, of--" )

5:10pm: Story Hebdo, January 21, 2012: Hideout
( Sam Manchester's breath came in gasps as he stumbled through the woods. )

10:08pm: Story Hebdo, January 14, 2012: Shortest Route
( "So this is a Fermat car, is what you're saying?" said Neil Fremont, scratching his head. )

10:06pm: Story Hebdo, January 7, 2012: Hatching
( "Casualty report?" Randall Swather asked, looking out over the water of the reservoir, almost invisible in the moonless night. )

9:56pm: What Do You Mean It's Not In The Computer?
In the spirit of New Year's resolutions and all that, I've got a couple which I'm going to try out.

1. After talking to papersky at Pure Speculation last year, and also after spending three freaking weeks slogging my way through Steven Erikson's Toll The Hounds in October, I decided I needed to spend more time reading, or at least get more reading done. In the last two months of 2011 I set myself quotas in an attempt to get every book read in 3-4 days, in keeping with my previously-observed rough average of two books a week. I managed to get up to 81 books by the end of the year (17 of those in November and December, which is about 1/6 of 100 but 21% of what I actually read). So this year I resolve to read at least 100 books.

Just to be clear, because my counting method is a little odd--what I track here is prose fiction books. I track per volume, and not by any other unit, so I would count a standalone novel, a volume in a series, an omnibus, and a separately-published novella each as "one book". Also, I do tend to read a number of graphic novels, comic strip collections, non-fiction books, and other miscellanea--these do not count towards my total. This may seem a little arbitrary, but mostly it's because I maintain two parallel reading streams, one for prose fiction and one for everything else, and the "everything else" tends to be harder to track. I'll pick up one book and read it for a while, and then I may grab another one at the library and read that one, and if I lose interest in a book, it may sit around for months with a bookmark in it, but I could pick it up and finish it again, or just give up on it entirely. Whereas my fiction reading is more linear--I start the book, and I finish it before I start another fiction book.

With my quota, what it amounts to is that I count the pages in the book, decide whether I'm planning to read it in 3, 3.5, or 4 days (or possibly more or less, but I'd generally pair a longer book with a short one), then set myself a number of pages as a goal for that day. If I make those pages early in the day, then I will try to use any remaining reading time on one of my alternate-stream books, or play iPod games, or whatever. This means that I try to avoid doing those other things until I have finished my quota, which is the trickier part. If I can't finish my quota, for whatever reason, without staying up to some ungodly hour, then I try to just adjust my quota for other days, and be more strict with myself. So far it's been working, but I haven't read any outrageously long books under this system...I've got The Way of Kings, The Other Lands by David Anthony Durham, and another few thick-looking books sitting on my to-read shelf, so we'll see how those work out.

Since I am trying to make every third book or so a reread these days, I'm still counting those as well, even if they don't count as "progress" in the sense of reducing the number of unread books I own. (On the other hand, I do sometimes decide not to keep them after rereading them, so it can help that way.) I have another reread of the Harry Potter series planned soon, so with any luck I can match of some of the thinner ones of those with thicker books to read. The other books I read, I try to alternate between newer books and older ones, so it tends to go "reread--newer book--older book--reread" etc. I wouldn't necessarily claim that I'm going to make absolute progress on the number of books I've bought but haven't read yet, but maybe I'll fall behind more slowly...

2. Two of my Livejournal friends have recently taken part in something that at least one of them called WEDAY, "Write Every Day All Year", hwrnmnbsol this past year and crisper the year before that. I find it inspiring, but considering how many things I am trying to juggle in my spare time already, I don't think I could make it work. Instead, I am planning something on a weekly rather than a daily basis, which I am probably not going to call WEWAY because it doesn't resonate as well for me. I like the way that the French word for "weekly" is "hebdomadaire", so maybe I'll try to incorporate that somehow. Or I could just wimp out and call it A Story A Week or something. Suggestions welcome.

Anyway, these stories will probably be fairly random, probably around 1000 words in length, and probably posted on Saturdays, which will both coincide with the end of the first week of the year, and also alternate fairly well with the Vorkosigan Reread project where I'm posting on Tuesdays. I'll post the stories right here on this Livejournal, in all likelihood. I think I've passed the point where I'm particularly concerned about wasting my first publication by posting stories on the Internet, since I never seem to send stories out to magazines anyway, so I'm just going to be throwing them out there. I'll probably find this resolution a little harder than the reading one--and they might end up at odds with each other--but it's just once a week, I can manage that, right?

9:40pm: A Crow Short of The Murder
Sometime in 1992 (June 18th, to be precise), I decided that I wanted to keep track of what I read. Actually, I'd had the idea a few times in the past, but I'd bogged down in the format to store it in or something. But in 1992, I had this program called Framework II on my second-hand XT 8088 computer, which had a spreadsheet/database mode, and it seemed like the way to do it. I've kept it up since then, in different formats--after I couldn't run FW2 anymore, I just used a text file, until I put it into Microsoft Access, where it still resides. This list is almost completely dedicated to fiction; for some reason, though I've thought of it many times over the years, I have never gotten around to doing an equivalent list for nonfiction reads, even though I spend close to half my time reading non-fiction these days.

( So here's the list of what I read in 1992, for anyone who's interested... )
So, despite starting my tally almost halfway through the year, I still got 71 books read in that time, which meant I probably read at least 120 books overall, ten books a month, or so. I don't think I was reading nearly as many nonfiction back then, but there might have been a few. Anyway, let's sum up:

71 books: of those, 22 were from the library, 4 were actually magazines, 3 were my wife's manuscripts, and 6 were rereads, so that's 64 "real" books, and 36 of those, just over half were books that I owned and had not read before--books that "counted" against my quantity of "unread books", which was the count of books that I owned and had not read yet.

Of the non-magazine books, they are surprisingly evenly divided between Fantasy (24), Science Fiction (23) and Mainstream (18). I guess the Mainstream number is the most surprising, because I think of myself as a genre reader. A lot of the calls are kind of hard to make, though--Witch World is set in a fantasy-that-later-turns-into-SF, the Marquez book is sort of "magic realism" but I counted it as Mainstream, and yet Not Wanted On The Voyage I counted as Fantasy. I'm inclined to say that it averages out.

Also, including the magazines, there were 13 anthologies or collections, leaving 58 novels. 24 of those novels were in series--or thereabouts, since it's not always clear when a novel is part of a series. (For instance, Journey To Aprilioth may be in the same world as Songs From The Drowned Lands, but they're not closely related...)

I don't think there was any other I read more than two books by (unless you count the three of my wife's manuscripts)--those authors are Lin Carter, Andre Norton, K.W. Jeter, M.J. Engh, and Robert A. Heinlein. I do usually like to space out reading an author's books, unless I'm doing a series reread, and even then...

That's probably enough dissection. At some point I may get around to doing 1993, or the first half of 1993. Who knows, someday I may even catch up...

11:44pm: The Vorkosigan Saga Reread
As I mentioned a few months ago, I had started doing a reread of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, and six months later, it's still going...I'm into the third book, The Warrior's Apprentice (well, the third by some reckonings--chronological, but omitting one earlier book because it's too far back and I'm not as fond of it), and it's pretty exciting. All I need are, well, a few more readers...so if you're interested and not reading it, then become a reader of it! Even if you haven't read the books, all you need to do to fix that is to read the books, and you should do that anyway.

11:22pm: The Something And The Time
This one I remember--we were supposed to do a villain POV.

( Nothing. No time. Only the one. )

11:18pm: A Friendly Glass of Wine
This exercise was based on a selection of pictures that one of our writers' group had downloaded from the Net and printed out. I can't remember the exact picture I chose, but there was a guy wearing goggles of some sort and toasting an empty chair across from him.

( Evgeny Ohagan punched his request into the replicator and waited while it processed his order. )

11:16pm: Wrong Number
This one is from so long ago that I don't remember if it was a writing exercise, or what prompted it. It may even be from before the age of cell phones, so keep that in mind.

( Gilton looked up briefly as McKinney entered the apartment. )

11:12pm: Exit Light
This is probably another writing exercise, but apparently I've forgotten the exact challenge. Perhaps something to do with a dark and stormy night?

( On that dark and stormy night, when the lights went out, Conrad was ready, even if nobody else was. )

10:59pm: Raising The Stakes
This was a writers' group exercise in "raising the stakes". It amused me to try to incorporate as many possible ways of interpreting that phrase as I could.

( Halvard opened the carved wooden door, closed it behind him, and sat down at the table across from Braxton. )

10:28pm: Bollocks and Knickers
I've fallen off my steady posting pace a little recently, for which I blame a busy weekend and my attempt to start a reread of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series over on WordPress. Anyway, this is my newest writing exercise for the Cult of Pain, and it was based on one of the prompts for the 2011 Whittaker Prize writing competition, supplied by one of the Cult's members.

( "Bollocks!" )

4:28pm: Franchise
I think this assignment was "write a story that has something to do with food".

( Arlen Waller sat in the exclusive dining room of the Fine Blessing and sipped his tea. )

9:24pm: The Hounds of Montmartre
Another one of those lost weekly prompt stories. Full disclosure--I have never been to Paris, nor even to Europe; all of the details in this story were gleaned from Google, Wikipedia and/or Mapquest. Also, this story does not really have a whaddayacall ending.

( Luc Perrault gasped for breath, but he dared not slow down, not yet. )

9:27pm: Dark Memories
Another one from the series of weekly prompts, and again, I don't remember the prompt. So, here's a little story.

( Desmond Thayer took a last glance over the month's accounts. )

8:15pm: Charming The Prince
One month our writer's group were trying to do a story a week. I think we managed to get through three of them. I can't remember what the prompt was for this one, but I'm quite pleased with it, except perhaps the ending...

( The music came to an end, and all the couples on the floor gracefully came to a stop, the gentlemen bowing and the ladies curtsying. )

11:37pm: Ninjas Vs. Pirates
The exercise this time was based on a page which served up random selections from the Evil Overlord Advice List and other related lists. And, because I do like me some random, I also used the Random Pirate Name Generator.

( "It is just as you predicted it, Master," Hashi said to Master Kenyama. )

11:40pm: Guest Rights
This story started as another writing exercise, a vague one to do with creating an addendum to the Ten Commandments. The best I could come up had something to do with the sanctity of the guest-host relationship. Which made me think of vampires...

( Ganis woke up suddenly to the sound of knocking. )

9:30pm: The Bone of A Dead Man
This was a "decathlon" exercise, exactly a thousand words long, where every hundredth word, as well as the first one, was specified before the assignment.

( Decompose more slowly, I told my body. )

11:21pm: The Fall & Rise of Crimebot
This story was based on this "Movie Plot Generator" book I found at the library. It was a "Mix & Match" book where you selected three "plot" elements, a little simplistic, but there were some funny combinations. This was one of them...

( Crimebot had a lot of time--5.36 minutes--to think on its way down to the lake, as it spread-eagled itself to minimize its terminal velocity. )

10:01pm: Damage Report
Found this handwritten in one of my clipboards. I think I did it at a writer's group meeting, perhaps as part of a timed exercise or something; I don't remember anymore.

( "Damage report?" Lord Zarkon asked. )

9:41pm: The Specialist
Another writing exercise, from a couple of years ago now. For this one, the various members of my writer's group were given specific assignment to write in a genre they were unfamiliar with. In my case, that was the sports story. This one is dedicated to my dad, who took me to a bunch of Edmonton Eskimos games when I was a kid.

( As soon as Johnny Shuster kicked the football out from under the hand of the holder, Mike Boston, he knew that it was going low. )