The Marathon Method

I'm coining the personal term "Marathon Method" for my complete domination of reading in the last 6 months. I set out to read all of the Harry Potter books before the last movie, giving myself a deadline and a tough but still reasonable increment to complete each book in (1 month per book) and as you may remember I came in at least a month early. I even finished the last book, The Deathly Hallows, in 2 days! I'm fairly confident in saying that 700+ pages in 2 days is the most I've ever read in my life in such a short period.

Now I've moved the method on to the Wheel of Time series, and it's working wonders. I don't have a good record of when I was reading or finished the first two books in the series, but they were easily within the 2006-2008 time frame. That's 3 years for TWO books! I'm sure I read other books mixed in there, but still, I know for a fact I would finish one of those books in about 6-8 months if I was lucky. With my confidence built from the Harry Potter marathon, I set roughly the same goal for Wheel of Time - 1 book per month - in the hopes of finishing before the final book comes out. The book was supposed to be out in late 2011, but has been pushed to 2012 so I will easily be able to meet this goal.

I finished the 3rd Wheel of Time book, The Dragon Reborn, around 12/1/2009. I finished book 4, The Shadow Rising, on 9/30/2010. 10 months for one book. Book 5 - the Fires of Heaven - was finished on 10/27/2010 and book 6 - Lord of Chaos - was finished on 12/4/2010. I've taken what used to take me 6-8 months and relatively easily brought it down to roughly a 1 month task. The greatest part of this is that I don't really feel like I'm spending that much more time reading than I used to.

Lately I've been brainstorming how to apply this concept of getting myself motivated and moving on things to other parts of my life. I'm still working out how to apply it to my drawing, but I think applying it to gaming could be a pretty direct correlation to reading. Issue #1 is that there are a LOT of videogames that I want to play and beat, some from years and years ago that I just never got around to beating.

Here's a list of the games, most of which we already own or have borrowed from someone (Josh most likely) and that's why I'd like to get through them finally:

• Metroid Prime (and I'd love to beat it with 100% completion)
• Other games in the Metroid Prime series (2, 3, etc)
• Fallout 3
• Assassin's Creed
• Assassin's Creed 2
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
• Mass Effect
• Mass Effect 2
• Dragon Age
• Bioshock
• Bioshock 2
• God of War
• God of War 2
• Little Big Planet

These are the games that I'd like to continue playing, or play more, but aren't necessarily a "beat it and be done" scenario:

• World of Warcraft
• Starcraft 2

I am thinking about simply progressing down the list above, because I know for certain that I'd start with Metroid Prime because that's one of the oldest games I have yet to beat. I need to steal a wii controller from my in-laws house first!

Reading Update: I've been breezing through A Crown of Swords finally, almost making up for how slow I was going back in late December. I'm now 86% through the book and I fully expect to finish it today or early tomorrow. Then I think I'll move right on to Path of Daggers, and then maybe after that book I'll jump over to the first book of the Dark Tower series and/or A Game of Thrones.