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.

Numbers Game for Wheel of Time

It's basically a theme here for me to talk about obscure and practically (spell checked to piratically at first, awesome) meaningless math and numbers, but here I go again. I'm not sure why I do it, but inevitably if I'm looking at a spreadsheet or doing something progressive I begin to break it up and analyze it probably too much.

When I set my goal to read all of Harry Potter within a few months, I set up an excel spreadsheet that listed each book, the page counts for them, and let me input my progress and see % completion for each book as I went as well as the entire series. With 7 books most of which were roughly 700 words, this was a daunting task for me at first but actually went very quickly. I finished a solid 2 months early, which is better than I ever expected to do! After that, Becky challenged me (again, it's always her fault) to do the same with Wheel of Time so that I would be set to read the final book by the time it comes out in late 2011. The pace that needs to be set for that to happen is roughly one Wheel of Time book a month, and so I created a spreadsheet and have even gone one step further and I've begun tracking my progress by date every few days in the same spreadsheet.

The result of this tracking is that I am finishing roughly 1% of the entire series (counting only the 12 books that have been released so far) in about 3 days. I'm currently 42% of the way through the 5th book, and at the moment it syncs up nicely that I'm reading 10% of the book in 3 days that is the same as 1% of the whole series. Right now, including the four books I've finished previously, I am 35% of the way through the entire Wheel of Time series (released to date). When the newest book is released in a week or two that number will be skewed somewhat by the addition of ~700-800 new pages, but that's not a huge deal when looking at the whole. To be more precise if the new book is exactly 800 pages that will only set my series completion back by 2.5% but it will make my overall progression go a bit slower. If I assume that after that I will be completing 1% of the series every 4 days, I'll still be finishing up in roughly 260 days which is well before the 1 year mark.

I'm very happy with this information, because it means I should easily be able to throw in a book or two in the next year that isn't from Wheel of Time and still reach my goal pretty easily. Perhaps I just use numbers and math to make myself feel better?

Harry Potter Complete!

In just two days I couldn't help but fly through the 7th and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I've surprised even myself by finishing the series WELL before November 19th, when the first part of the final movie comes out in theaters, and am hoping that I've now made a habit of making progress in my reading and I've already jumped back into Wheel of Time book 4, The Shadow Rising, and hope to finish it very soon. It's funny, because I was hoping to finish it by the end of LAST year, but we'll see how it goes now.

The change for me has been incredible, because I absolutely hated the first 2-3 Harry Potter movies because of the seemingly inane plot twists and, to be frank, ridiculousness of some of the things presented in the movie. It wasn't until Goblet of Fire that I started to enjoy the movies, and then with Order of the Phoenix I began to see the wider world behind it all and became a fan. I believe it was around that time that I finally read the first book, and enjoyed it but also didn't really desire to progress through the others at the time.

I was content to see the movies without reading the books, and I can now tell anyone who expresses the same opinion to me that this is absolutely NOT the way to go. I enjoy the movies so much more now that I've read the books, there are tons of little things thrown in that you simply don't notice or that literally make no sense at all unless you've read the book. The climax moments in Prisoner of Azkaban were confusing and didn't come over well just watching the movie, but once you've read the book and know the story behind it all the characters are nothing short of impressive and quite moving. So if you're one of those people who is watching the movies without reading the books, I can't tell you enough: Read the books as soon as you can!

It took me roughly 70 days to read all of the Harry Potter books from start to finish, and though I was going for a 41 pages/day pace I ended up at a healthy 58 pages/day. This was far from consistent throughout the 2.5 months, because I didn't read at all during GenCon and then read the entire last book in the course of two days, but it's a good average pace for sure!

I finished the book around 2am last night because I just could not put it down, and was very interested in the general feeling of loss that came both as I went to sleep last night and this morning. I mean loss in the sense that reading these books has been something I've simply been doing for the last 2.5 months, and now that thing is complete. I'll move onto reading other books for sure, but there simply won't ever be another time that I'll be reading the Harry Potter series for the first time.

This just looks nice:

Reading Extravaganza

Last night I finished book six of the Harry Potter series, The Half-Blood Prince, and promptly read the first 40 pages of the Deathly Hallows because it was my first real foray into uncharted territory with the series. This isn't entirely true because the amount of information and number of events that are in all of the books but don't make it to the movies is staggering, especially with book six where there are some key explanations of the origin, history, and even major motivations of the primary villain that are skimmed or completely skipped in the movie.

I am currently 83% of the way through the entire HP series, which means on Saturday and Sunday of this weekend I read a full 10% of the series and put myself WAY ahead of schedule. This is exactly what I wanted to do, but to be honest the books made it easy to accomplish. I now often find myself contemplating exactly what it is about certain books (HP being at the forefront right now) that make them so popular, interesting, easy and enjoyable to read.

As I've said a few times before, the crazy thing to me is that in just over two months I've read through six books, which is incredible for me considering the books are from 300 to 800+ pages which I would normally read much slower and do one book over the course of 1-2 months (or more). Both Becky and I are really hoping this continues even after I'm finished reading HP, because she is dying for me to get through all of the Wheel of Time books that are out so far, thankfully I have a bit of a head start because I'm currently almost all of the way through book 4, out of I guess 11+ books? Good god, that's going to be crazy.

Also on my reading list:

• Dune (the second time through will be awesome)
• Dark Tower
• 1984
  
• many and various HP Lovecraft short stories
  
• Game of Thrones (maybe?)
• Fall of Public Man and Conscience of the Eye (by Richard Sennett, Architecture/design/sociology books)
  

I'd actually love for anyone reading this to make further suggestions, if I haven't already read it I may end up adding it to my list and you will have greatly contributed to my edification in the wonderful world of books!

Now That It Feels Like Fall

Autumn is my favorite season of the year, so I am very happy that it is September and the weather is beginning to get cooler, windier, and pleasantly sunny. Another great thing is that our good friend Matt just bought a house about a mile from ours and we will most likely be spending a lot of time hanging out at his place or at ours now that he has moved out of the downtown area. In that vein fall also means that many people will be a lot busier on their weekends as we get closer to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas and New Years so I'm hoping I can keep my D&D game and other activities with friends going through the busy times!

As far as reading goes, two weeks ago I had a day trip for work down to Jackson, Mississippi which marks my first journey actually into the Central time zone (I've flown over it once before) and my first time in a southern state that wasn't also on the east coast. During the four flights I had (in one day, which I do not recommend and hopefully won't be doing again anytime soon) the fortunate part is that I demolished the middle section of the 5th Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix, which I finished reading two nights ago and have already started on The Half-Blood Prince.

Despite one of the most annoying villains (Umbridge), a lack of Dumbledore before the last 150 pages of the book, and Harry acting like the worst kind of teenager he could - Order of the Phoenix is at the moment my favorite of the books I've read so far. Goblet of Fire seems to be the favorite of a lot of people who read the books when they first came out, but to me the plot involving Mad-Eye Moody and how that turns out has always seemed very unsatisfactory to me. I'm avoiding any major kind of information that might be spoilers, but I'd be happy to discuss it further with any hardcore HP fans out there.

At the moment I am just starting the 6th book but am now 67% of the way through the entire series and very happy about it. Order of the Phoenix, as the longest book, pretty much accounts for 22% of the series which is ridiculous so reading that book took me from 45% through the series all the way to 65% so it definitely feels like the turning point of getting through all of the books. On top of that, I only have this one book left before I'm into completely uncharted territory (for me), though honestly the last few books have so much that was not even touched on in the movies that it feels like largely uncharted territory already.

The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black

The chapter of that title in Order of the Phoenix will no doubt end up being one of my favorite chapters of the entire Harry Potter series. Sirius Black is hands down my favorite character, and thanks to the movies (and to my wife) I also know where the character is taken in this book and I won't spoil it but I am very much looking forward to what is done with the character above and beyond what I've seen in the movies.

This month's more frequent blog posts marks the most times I've posted to this blog in any given month since May-July of 2008 which was coincidentally when the 4th Edition of D&D was released and when I started running my still ongoing D&D campaign. Back in early 2008 we'd also just bought a house, so it's understandable that I had a good bit to blog about back then. Still, these day this blog is just another form of output for me to continue pushing myself to be productive. It's kind of sad to think of these blog posts as being productive, but after going back and reading the ones I wrote in 2008 I am very happy that I recorded what I did of my life back then and am very much looking forward to that moment in the coming years when I look back to these posts. As the last year should evidence, a hell of a lot of things can change in a relatively short period of time. Even just August of last year I never would have guessed where I would be at the end of 2009, or for the first half of 2010 and then onto the last few months. Life has had its up and downs but I consider myself very fortunate that I see a hell of a lot more ups even considering things like my unemployment and financial situations.

Reading update: If GenCon had not set me back, I would be hitting 50% through the entire Harry Potter series tomorrow. Monday of last week I was a full 7% behind schedule but as of today I am at 48% through the series, and 17% of the way through Order of the Phoenix already (I was only 3% through it yesterday). I am pleased with this progress and will most likely be even further ahead of schedule, like I was originally. The truly exciting part is that once I get through this book and The Half-Blood Prince I will actually be reading stuff that I haven't seen a movie about or have any real idea what happens in.

Reading Update (Day 48)

I easily finished The Goblet of Fire last night and updated the progress bars to the right just now with over 230 pages read since Friday, and I'm already 30 pages into The Order of the Phoenix. The end of book 4 is when, almost literally, all of the shit hits the fan for the Harry Potter series. If anyone reading this has NOT read the series already, please let me know and I'll refrain from talking about spoilers has I get into the more eventful books. It's odd for me right now because even with the Goblet of Fire movie I wasn't that into the series, it wasn't until the beginning of the Order of the Phoenix movie that I became really hooked on the whole thing. Once I was sold on that, and all of the awesome things that happen in the fifth movie and then The Half-Blood Prince movie, I had a desire to go back and read through all of the books. It wasn't until Becky decided she wanted me to read Deathly Hallows before seeing the movie that I was inspired to do this whirlwind marathon of reading.

Again I'll say it, this isn't a lot of reading for most people (people who read a lot, that is), but for me reading the 1800+ pages that I've read since early July has got to be a continuously growing record for me.

Random note: The newest Massive Attack CD - Heligoland, which came out in February of this year I believe, is really good. Thanks to Andrew the O who was the one that tipped me off they had a new album, even though I don't think he listens to them he knew they were a band I love and pointed it out to me.

My reading progress at the moment is 3% of the way through Order of the Phoenix (the longest book) and 45% through the entire series. If I had continued with my post GenCon delayed schedule I would only be at 41% so I've made up 4% extra in the last week but still need to reach 50% in the next two days to catch up to my pre-GenCon reading schedule of 1% per day. I don't think that's going to be very difficult, because the fifth book is very engrossing as major events and turning points are starting to occur and things are breaking out of the "school year" format that the first two books stuck so rigidly to.

New Drawings

My friend Quinn (who runs the At-Will blog about awesome 4th Edition D&D stuff) has asked me for artwork a few times, also I've bugged him to ask me for artwork, but in the past as usually happens with me I didn't get any of them done in time. Last night I resolved to change that, here is the result.

What Quinn asked me for was a corrupted purple dragon, named Etherkai, that is nicknamed the "Nightmare Dragon". Here's what I produced in a little under 2 hours last night.


Black & White - pencil on drawing paper, done in about 30 minutes.


Colored Pencils on drawing paper, done in about 20 minutes.


Some Photoshop work to get rid of the texture I wasn't a fan of (especially in the sky).


More Photoshop work to make it darker and to make the dragon appear more "scarred", at Quinn's request but I was planning on doing something like this anyway.

Considering the total time invested, about 2 hours last night though I did a bit of sketching over the course of last week to get a pose and layout I liked, I'm pretty damn happy with this. I'd love for the dragon to have more action to it, and to add a bit more interest into everything, but it was do THIS or not do it at all and I've promised myself I'd get more things done like this even if I'm not 100% happy with how they turn out.

Reading update: I'm 43% of the way through Goblet of Fire, putting me at 34% of the way through the entire Harry Potter series. Still "behind" where I was originally in my reading schedule but very much ahead of schedule to finish before the first Deathly Hallows movie.

August is Here! Already?

25 days since I started reading the first Harry Potter book, and now I've just started the fourth - The Goblet of Fire. This puts me 27% through the entire series, so I'm still slightly above a 1% per day rate which is good. I've definitely slowed down over the last few days, and hitting the first 700+ page book (over twice the size of the first two on its own) hasn't helped. Thankfully with Prisoner of Azkaban the overarching plot has started rolling along even faster so I should be able to blast through the larger books with more ease. I really can't believe how much of the content of these books was either left out of the movies or only barely hinted at so that you'd never know anything about it if you hadn't read the books.

This week, Wednesday morning to be exact, GenCon starts and it should be an incredibly fun time! I need to run out to Kinkos (yes it's not called that anymore, I'm sticking it to the man or something...) and get a small number of business cards printed because I didn't get my act together early enough to get a larger number printed beforehand.

That brings me to a different issue / story, Becky and I moved into this house two years ago and I made one of the upstairs bedrooms my "office". During the summer our upper level is consistently 5-10 degrees warmer than the rest of our house. Our bedroom has always had a ceiling fan so that solves the problem, but my office would get uncomfortably hot during the summer and fall so that it was tough for me to be at my computer for any significant period of time. On top of that, when we got our puppy Freyja the office was still inside of "cat territory" so I couldn't keep an eye on the dog and be on my computer at the same time. This resulted in me not being on the computer at home very much, which wasn't a huge problem but it definitely cut into my work on Critical Hits, playing games online, and working in Photoshop (among other things). All of this to get to the point that earlier this year I decided to move my personal computer and desk down to our basement, which is effectively one big gaming room - it has our TV, two sofas, lots of chairs, game consoles, movies, board games, video games, RPG books, and a big table for gaming all accented by a Rohan flag we got several years ago for our apartment hanging on the wall. So as of early this year it also contained my computer, which has been very handy for running D&D (and using Character Builder pre/mid game) but it also allowed Becky and I to spend time together while one of us plays a game on the TV and the other on my computer. Yes, this is how my wife and I spend time together quite often. We love it. :D

So this left us with an empty bedroom upstairs, that in my unemployment remained pretty much as it had been just without my computer and a few more things stored in it. Then in mid June, I got my awesomely awesome job where I'm working from home and needed to set up a home office. Seems pretty damn convenient doesn't it? I'm glad it was! Okay so the point of this story is that then I had to set up a home office upstairs where my old "office" was, this time with a ceiling fan installed to make it bearable (and thank god for that, it's fantastic!) - this meant my "office" environment was moved downstairs, then moved upstairs again, and in that move a LOT of things have gone missing.

So a lot of my time these days is spent trying to find stuff, and I'm not just talking about physical things even though there are a ton of them, but computer files also. See, even worse is that my home computer got some really nasty spyware and viruses on it shortly after I moved it downstairs (basement herp?) and so I had to reformat it. This has led to even MORE shifting around of folders, files, and now I've been trying to get everything back to some semblance of organization again. All of that explains why I didn't get my business cards sent off to be printed before this week. Good story, right?

Oh and then I found $5. Okay, now it's a good story. (If you don't get it, ask and I'll explain. :D)

12 Days of Reading Down

Twelve days of reading Harry Potter and I'm 19% of the way through the entire series, which is 780 pages and probably the most pages I've ever read in nearly two weeks. I'm using these posts to help keep track of my reading progress along the way, so I'll also say that I'm 30% of the way through Azkaban right now. Although the HP books are relatively low word counts per page, that's still something I'm pretty proud of - then again Becky or many of my friends could read all seven books in the course of two weeks, but I've found over the last few years that I retain a LOT more of what I read than Becky does.

I am hoping that one result of this goal is that I'll not only get back into reading regularly, but also that I'll be a faster reader by the end of it. I'd love to go back and re-read some of my favorite books - they're also some of the first books I read for recreational because I wanted to start with the classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, and then there's Dune which I'm dying to read again sometime soon. The problem is that there are so many other books that I want to read that I haven't even read yet, like the rest of Wheel of Time, the Game of Thrones, Dark Tower, and I'm sure there are tons more that I can't even think of right now.

I've been experiencing some really bad feelings when I'm working here at home and am not immediately busy, my mind wanders back to unemployment and I get extremely worried. It's going to take quite a bit of time, probably at least equal to the 7 months that I was unemployed, for me to get completely comfortable again. There are some very dark places that my mind wanders to, and that's something I'm not accustomed to at all.

In my moonlighting as a game designer, which really just means that I randomly think of game ideas and mechanics throughout the day (most of which are terrible), I've been brainstorming some rules mods or changes for 4E. I'm not sure if anything will come of them, but I am hoping to get my Githyanki racial rules completed soon and also post a bunch of helpful things for 4E that I've been working on for quite a while (years really) that I am soon going to reopen and complete. They will almost certainly end up on Critical Hits, but I may talk about some of the process and other thoughts here once they go up!

Heat Waves and Hot Pages

The pages are hot because I've been tearing through them...get it? Hot pages! Ah nevermind...

On July 8th I was only 1% into the entire Harry Potter series, which was ~40 pages into the 1st book. Four days later I was 70% through the 1st book and 5% into the whole series. Now I've been reading them for 8 days total and I'm 210 pages into the second book (62%) and 519 pages into the series or 13% of the way through. That's well over the 1% a day that I need even after July 19th so I'm fairly confident with my goal of getting through the series in time for the last movie. I was wondering if the 1st book was such light reading because I'd already read it a year or two ago, but the second book is going just as easily and I'm really enjoying it. There are a lot of complexities to the characters that are only hinted at in the movies but come across a lot stronger in the writing, which is probably the part I'm most enjoying. It also helps that I don't remember much from the first two movies because I hated them so much and only watched them once all the way through.

At this rate I should be done with the books sometime in October, but I may also get burnt out on the specific style of writing / topics at some point in the middle. If I get significantly along I may take a break to finally finish The Shadow Rising since I'm on a kick of reading so much lately.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Reading Schedule

You may have noticed on the right side here, I've added the first Harry Potter book to my reading progress bar list. This is strange for me because I have never before gone on to read something while not finished with my current book. Wheel of Time stalled for me for no particular reason, but because the last Harry Potter movie(s) are coming out starting in November Becky has encouraged me to read through all of the books before seeing them. I've already read the Sorcerer's Stone but I can't remember very much of it and so I started reading through it again. If I'm going to get through all 7 books before November 19th, then I need to finish pretty much 2 books a month. I'm already 15% through the first book so I'm hoping to give myself a good head start and crank through all of these in pretty good time (for me, that is). I'm a slow reader, I know!

I will be finishing The Shadow Rising as well, but I'm hoping plowing through the HP books gets me back in the habit of reading regularly and then I can actually get through the Wheel of Time books as well.

The first 3-4 Harry Potter movies were interesting but ultimately I hated them, the plot twists in the first three especially were (in my opinion) horridly done as far as cinema goes. It wasn't until the later movies and the more epic wizard stuff started happening that I got sold on the franchise, however I do admit that the first book reads a hell of a lot better than the first movie was to experience. Plus having Gary Oldman as a friendly but mysterious character would sell me on pretty much anything.

Edit: All seven books = 4,100 pages - because the later books are 600-900 pages long vs. the first few being 300 each, I'll definitely need to speed through this but I'm still trying! Entire progress can be seen on the right along with a series total at the bottom. 1% down so far!