Reading, a little at a time.
Sometimes, you have to be quite ingenious if you are going to find the time to get your book read. There are hours and hours of reading in a novel (I would say six to ten, on average) and how do you fit that into a hectic modern lifestyle?
Some of my techniques include:
Anyway, pastiche over; the point of the matter is it can be quite hard to fit blocks of reading in, especially with all the other distractions life has, never mind the things that actually need to get done. People are time poor and have short attention spans; are short pieces of writing the way forward? Anthologies, collections of short stories, poems, serialised novels?
Serial fiction is an old idea (Charles Dickens, for example) but things like Shadow Unit, and even fanfiction generally, breaks narratives down into easily digestible chunks. There is a website called DailyLit which allows you to read books by email - they send you a part each day, to read from your inbox. Apparently the thing in Japan at the moment is to write a novel by text - you text one line at a time to a website until you have the whole thing.
I love thick, papery books, the smell and the weight of the them; I love losing myself in the author's imagination for hours at a time. They are the most elegant pieces of technology - all you need is a source of light, and they will work are well now as in a hundred years' time. I am excited by these new ways to read and to write (I am so looking forward to the next season of Shadow Unit), but I will never give up my stained and crack-spined novels.
Some of my techniques include:
- staying up late - I can sleep after chapter 9.
- getting up early - I can get out of bed after chapter 10.
- reading in the bath - although coordination is necessary to avoid a soggy book.
- reading whilst cooking, or eating - simple food that can be spooned up doesn't interfere with reading
Anyway, pastiche over; the point of the matter is it can be quite hard to fit blocks of reading in, especially with all the other distractions life has, never mind the things that actually need to get done. People are time poor and have short attention spans; are short pieces of writing the way forward? Anthologies, collections of short stories, poems, serialised novels?
Serial fiction is an old idea (Charles Dickens, for example) but things like Shadow Unit, and even fanfiction generally, breaks narratives down into easily digestible chunks. There is a website called DailyLit which allows you to read books by email - they send you a part each day, to read from your inbox. Apparently the thing in Japan at the moment is to write a novel by text - you text one line at a time to a website until you have the whole thing.
I love thick, papery books, the smell and the weight of the them; I love losing myself in the author's imagination for hours at a time. They are the most elegant pieces of technology - all you need is a source of light, and they will work are well now as in a hundred years' time. I am excited by these new ways to read and to write (I am so looking forward to the next season of Shadow Unit), but I will never give up my stained and crack-spined novels.