#Book Lengths

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[fictionadventurer]

Maybe Jane Austen's real genius was that, unlike other authors at the time, she didn't have long sections where characters share their backstory. Or rather, when she did it, she set it up like a mystery so we'd want to know the backstory.

Instead of having a character be like, "Here's three chapters about my life," soon after showing up in the novel, she'd sprinkle little clues through the story that make us wonder, "What's Colonel Brandon's deal?" and then closer to the end of the story, Colonel Brandon would tell us what his deal was. We'd wonder "Why does Mr. Darcy do all those horrible things?" and then he'd give an explanation that includes a lot of backstory.

And these infodumps always come in response to significant moments of the story. She'd engage our minds and our emotions and then give us the infodump at a point when we care about the information it contains. Compared to some other authors (even some that came long after) it seems like a significant innovation.

[geryone]

Song of Songs, Sylvie Baumgartel

[itsladykit]

Realized the other day (while listening to a podcast about a book) that writing beautifully isn't really my aim. I don't aim to be quotable. I don't aim for beautiful prose.

I want to be functional. I want the words to disappear so thoroughly that my readers can see and hear my characters. As a writer, I want to be nearly invisible.

And you know what? That realization gave me some peace and cured some of my feelings of inadequacy.

[herstuf]

Steve and Eddie form a very strange almost-friendship after the whole Vecna thing that is entirely reliant on the kids being little shits and then rolling their eyes at each other about it. They bond over finding ways to drive Dustin crazy, and the fact that Dustin thinks it’s so weird that they became actual friends even with all the Vecna stuff.

And then Eddie asks Steve if he wants to join DnD one day and Steve actually agrees and Dustin Loses His Shit.

He talks about it nonstop the entire week leading up to the session, hypes it up while simultaneously berating Steve for never agreeing before. Eddie and Steve continue to trade eye rolls over his head every time.

Then the session arrives and Steve is definitely confused. The character sheets are complicated, the multiple die confused him, and he doesn’t really understand the scene Eddie sets- but it’s okay because he’s got the spirit! He’s very enthusiastic and willing to listen to everyone’s advice and recommendations and it’s going very well until they get to Eddie’s big road block of the day.

There’s a giant Paladin blocking their path and it quickly becomes obvious that nobody, together or separate, can him fight and win. Eddie likes to do this sometimes, throw in a character they have to do something other than brute force their way around.

The kids start arguing of course, Mike and Lucas think they should pay him off- Dustin and Will tell them that’s stupid he’s a paladin he’s can’t be paid off. Gareth offhandedly says they should seduce him, and everyone laughs for a second before getting right back to arguing about what to do.

Steve asks if they can go around and is immediately shot down by six shouting voices, and he quickly retreats from the debate. Nobody’s seems to notice, except for Eddie of course, but he only keeps half an eye on him while also trying to focus on the debate. As much as he wants to coddle Steve a bit, he knows it’s better to let him get used to how the game usually goes than trying to go ways on him. Steve would t appreciate that anyways.

Gareth brings up seduction again and they contemplate for a few seconds before saying no, that none of them want to be the ones to do it, and besides they all know Eddie never lets the seduction tactic work when they can’t convince him. They keep arguing.

Nobody else was paying attention to Steve anymore, too caught up in the discussion, so Eddie is the only one that hears Steve quietly whisper, “I wouldn’t mind seducing him.”

Eddie chokes on air, Steve turns bright red, gaping at him in mortification, and everyone else is just like “what the fuck just happened.”

Meanwhile Steve is looking anywhere but at Eddie, Eddie is blinking wildly at him. Eventually, after a very awkward pause of silence, the debate slowly begins again, ignoring the two of them on Dustin’s recommendation that “they’re just being weird, ignore them, anyways-“

The argument keeps going and Eddie can tell it’s going nowhere so he turns to Steve and says “roll for persuasion.”

Cheeks still red Steve carefully takes the die Eddie points to, and lets them fall. They’re not quite enough but it’s not like Steve really understands that. He scoops the die up just in case anyone looks over. He doesn’t need to be accused of playing favourites, even if he totally is.

“A successful roll, well done Stevie. How are you going to seduce him?” Eddie asks, still in a quiet tone so the others don’t hear.

“I was thinking,” Steve says and swallows, “that maybe I’d ask him about his sword. I’d say something like “that’s a very handsome sword you have there, nearly as handsome as you are.”

Eddie kind of wants to laugh, kind of wants to cry, because Steve really hasn’t gotten the hang of voices, so he’s not acting like a character, and because that’s a terrible pickup line. And yet Eddie’s cheeks are heating up and he’s very quickly making some recalculations in his mind for the rest of this campaign.

“What do they call you?” He asks in the voice he used for the Paladin before.

“Sir Hair-ington, but if you want you could call me Stevie,” Steve says, and he’s looking in Eddie’s eyes and that is not the first name of his character, not even close. Eddie swallows thickly and blinks, pulling his gaze from Steve’s, who immediately shrinks back.

“Sir Hair-ington successfully seduces the Paladin, and he agrees to let you all pass,” Eddie shouts over the noise of the others, who are still arguing.

Everyone at the table goes dead silent and stares at him and Steve. Eddie can tell Dustin is about to Say Some Shit, so he glares hard at him until he looks away, mouth snapping closed.

“The Paladin asks if he might join you,” Eddie says to Steve, finally turning back to face him, and Steve turns even redder and nods. The rest of the group keeps staring at Eddie incredulously, but luckily no one says a word. The Paladin joins them and it takes all of two seconds for Eddie to decide to pay his cards out on the table. Just to make sure he’s being clear.

“Greetings travellers, thank you for allowing me to join you,” he says in something that is almost his normal voice, and definitely not the one he used before, “my name is Sir Edwin the Eighth, and I look forward to our many adventures together! Especially you, Sir Hair-ington.” And he adds in a wink for good measure.

Gareth sends him a deeply unimpressed look, but Eddie doesn’t even seem to see it because he’s too busy watching the way Steve’s eyes light up and his lips turn into a bashful but wide smile.

A week later when Dustin shows up at the trailer unannounced and walks in on the two of them making out the first words he says are, “I KNEW Sir Edwin the Eighth was supposed to be you!”

[peachesanmemes]

I saw your DD graph asking for other ideas, so... if you still have any desire to do further Dracula graphs I'd be curious to see how the word count per character breaks down (not how much they speak but how much they write. Adding all their diary entries together, etc.). Obviously Mina wins by default from having typed up the whole novel but outside of that detail, how much did each person author?

Thank you so much for this ask! What an interesting data set this one is! Lots of unexpected information.

So first off, if you just want to visualize the author breakdown, ta-dahhhh!

Seward was staunchly in the lead, talking his head off and burning through those wax recording drums like no ones business. Poor Mina for having to transcribe it all. In total his words made up 39.3% of Dracula. Nearly 40%!

Seward unsurprisingly had the most individual entries overall at 47, and had the longest streak for being the narrator in an entry at 10 days (09/02 - 09/11) with Mina following right behind at 9 days (08/10 - 08/19)

Mina surprisingly was 3rd overall both in word count and number of entries. She wasn't even in the top 3 for most words in a day which is as follows.

1 - Seward October 3rd - 9942 words

2 - Seward September 29th - 7206 words

3 - Jonathan October 3rd - 5944 words

Van Helsing only had 9 entries total but still came in number 4 for word count, in front of Lucy. It's interesting to note that the amount a person writes doesn't correlate to the amount of time they are being written about/appear. Which is why Arthur and Quincey don't even beat out the newspaper clippings for words, lol.

There are lots of authors we only hear from a single time, like Sister Agatha. So I've decided to make a small fry pie as well. (Authors under ~500 words)

The captain of the Demeter and Van Helsing both had more days written than Lucy! Though I didn't break up number of entries, like when the log of the Demeter had 3 or 4 on one day or Lucy wrote a letter and in her diary.

If there is any data I haven't presented here that you're interested in feel free to tag me or shoot me an ask like this lovely person did!

[andromedaa-starss]

man i love the les mis musical but it really doesn't do its characters justice 😭

[tallertysupremacy]

If I had one wish I would wish for the circle era to have the sort of fandom that the marauders era does

[boy-in-red-dress]

It's out...

Here

[ufofrommarss]

His hair gets longer every time I draw him…..

[a-soft-fluffy-girl]

Callout post for Seanan McGuire, author of the hit book series, Wayward Children-- I mean criminal mastermind

As you can see by this very official and very clearly cited and sourced and verified claim with no basis, my adorable and precious and sweet cat has been THIEFED and SCRUNKLED and SMARTENED by none other than @seananmcguire , author of the recently published Lost in the Moment and Found, part of the Wayward Children series (which is quite good-- I mean a fiendish ploy to catnap my baby girl).

Pictured above, is the DESCRIPTION of what they had DONE to my BABY by my best friend ACE RESEARCHER.

SUCH EVIL.

Here is my poor little baby who has done no wrong ever in her whole life and is just a little creature.

Look at her. Sleek. Commanding. Pristine. Orange and therefore dumb as a bag of rocks.

How daaaare you take my baby and un-himbo her. How daaaare you scrunkle such a sleek child. This needs to be dealt with promptly with the fullest extent of my power!

MORE CAT PICTURES.

So yeah anyways if you could spread this around that'd be great because everyone needs to see my child-- I mean get more eyes on this series-- I mean BRING SEANAN TO JUSTICE.

[the-way-astray]

i think my problem with the point five books thing is not the books themselves, so much as it is the marketing and way they're presented.

for those that aren't aware: point five books have a generally understood meaning/connotation that authors and fans both sort of know. it's basically code for "book that is not mandatory to understand the story, but it's there for fans that want extra content". usually this comes in the form of short story collections or whatever else the author may want to do. sometimes it's just a single short story. for example, a proper way for kotlc to utilize point five books would be to for instance, make a book 7.5, which has keefe and fitz's flashback short stories in it. extra bonus content from flashback (book seven), but you don't have to read it to understand the main story itself. you'll be okay without it. that is what a point five book actually means, as far as the wider literary world is concerned.

but books 8.5 and 9.5 in this series are not extra bonus content. you very much do have to read them to understand the main story. if you read it book eight, then nine, then ten, you will be lost or miss important stuff that's crucial to understanding the story.

just call it book nine. just call it book eleven. all this will do is label the books properly and not confuse people. and people will be confused. we aren't seeing the effects yet, because books are still coming out and everyone in the fandom keeps up with shannon's updates, so we all know what's up. but trust me, in a few years, after the series is over and new people get into it, they will be confused. they will skip straight over book 8.5 or 9.5 unknowingly, and it won't be good.

my theory is that someone on shannon's team wants to make this series seem shorter than it really is. because that is the only logical explanation here. you could describe this series as having "nine and a half books" now, instead of ten, and by the way the series is officially marked, that's not incorrect. but it is. this series has ten books. because there are ten mandatory books that you have to read that are out right now. stop calling books that aren't supposed to be called point five books as point five books!!!! this isn't quirky, it's just going to throw people off.

this is super, super confusing for people that aren't "in the know" with this series, so to speak, and there will be people that read this series incorrectly because of this. i have been a casual fantasy series reader for pretty much my entire existence on this planet, and let me just tell you, this is not how this works. at all. if i didn't know books 8.5 and 9.5 were mandatory, i would skip over them completely, going on my understood knowledge of how these epic fantasies are generally structured.

just market them correctly. praying to the heavens for shannon's team to stop. this is actively hurting your readers!!!!

*i assume it isn't shannon herself who is coming up with this strategy

[that-butch-archivist]

"Tess was a performance artist and part-time jewelry maker who now worked as a set designer. [...] The first night we spent together, I taught her to knit — my classic seduction technique (High Femme Camp Antics, or HFCA) — and about frisson, that carbonated feeling that accompanies a crush. We stared at each other for a long time, unblinking. Because I knew that this otherwise might take forever (lesbians!), I finally asked Tess point-blank if she felt a frisson for me (HFCA). In response, Tess kissed me hard, with teeth. I knew she wanted to fuck, but I pushed her hands away dramatically when they crept under my skirt (HFCA). I told her that I didn’t typically sleep with people so soon (HFCA), which was true not for any real reason but because I was privately humiliated by my body (HFCA). Instead of letting her fuck me, I scratched Tess’s entire torso with my long, pink fingernails (HFCA). “Her fingernails drifted down my neck, across my shoulders,” Jess Goldberg, the butch narrator of Stone Butch Blues, says of a high femme whose camp antics thrill her. “I’d forgotten the sheer pleasure of a high femme tease.” “Your fingernails are full of frisson,” Tess said as morning light began to stream in through the window above her bed. “I know,” I said. I recently read a collection of funny stories by Lesléa Newman, high-femme chronicler of dyke life in the 1990s (the materialistic, shopping-addicted Golden Age of HFCA). In one story, a butch named Flash arrives to pick Lesléa up and take her out to dinner. Flash politely tells Lesléa that she looks nice. “The average femme would have taken that to be a compliment,” Lesléa dishes. “But this high-maintenance femme hadn’t spent the last two weeks shopping for the perfect outfit and the last seven hours bathing, shaving, bleaching, filing, polishing, combing, brushing, drying, moussing, spritzing, spraying, and applying five pounds of makeup to have all her efforts summed up in one little four-letter word.” Flash’s flimsy compliment doesn’t satisfy Lesléa’s desires to be seen, appreciated, and worshiped, and so Lesléa starts from the bottom and works her way up, prompting Flash to compliment her shoes, her miniskirt, and finally her hair in a grand, shimmering pyramid of HFCA. But even as she performs satiation, Lesléa is insatiable. Her antics fail at getting her precisely what she wants from Flash, because there’s always something unsatisfying about getting what you want by asking for it. Lesléa’s desire glows from within the frame of her HFCA, distilled and exposed and unmet. Can I Come Inside, my high-femme sex game, deals primarily with unmet, outsourced, and circumnavigated desire. In Females (2019), trans lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu argues that femaleness is a universal, existential condition rather than a gender or a sex — a condition of being and of consciousness that involves letting others do our desiring for us. At stake in Can I Come Inside, as well as in HFCA at large, is a femaleness that both craves and rebels against its tendency to outsource desire. In playing Can I Come Inside, I, like Lesléa, ask Tess to do my desiring for me, and Tess in turn defers her desire to me: the game is strictly my desire, one that she insists she does not share. Even though it mandates a performance of aggressive desire from Tess, there’s no doubt that Can I Come Inside is about my desire; it’s my game; I make the rules."

-- An excerpt from "High Femme Camp Antics," an essay written by Jenny Fran Davis. (Emphasis in bold my own.)

[moghedien]

i genuinely love that they've had Lanfear constantly bring up her ex but they haven't revealed who it is because literally every non-reader just assumes its Ishamael which is objectively the funniest thing ever. like I think they'd both be EXTREMELY offended at just the thought of fucking each other. like you're getting balefire for that one

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

It's not as dramatic as saving Bertie's life, but I think this is a really sweet gesture from Jeeves in Much Obliged Jeeves/Jeeves and the Tie That Binds. Bertie is stressed out and wants to go somewhere quiet and familiar to calm down and get some distance, so Jeeves offers to pretend to have made a careless mistake so Bertie can do that without hurting Aunt Dahlia's feelings.

He didn't NEED to do this. It wasn't part of his grand plan. The Jeeves in My Man Jeeves wouldn't have done this. It's up there with impersonating Bertie on the phone to spare him an unpleasant conversation (Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit) for demonstrating character growth.

[peachesanmemes]

Total length of each Dracula Daily entry!

Figured I would repost it this year in a less specific date way. Scroll if you don’t want to know! - I’m only tagging this as potential spoiler, as it only relates to the story in a meta way.

Total, the journey takes 189 days, 111 of those have entries (58.73%)

Bram’s longest on streak is 19 days - September 17th to October 6th

Bram’s longest off streak is 11 days - June 6th to June 16th

In the top three positions for length we have September 29th “An Eventful Day” - 9,034 words October 1st “The Attack” - 10,259 words October 3rd “A Day Full of Action” - 15,883 words

There are 160,720 words total, making an average of 1,448 words per entry, (though 22% of the total book is in the top 3 days)

Google says it takes around 5 minutes to read 1,000 words

October 31st has 420 words (yes really)

Let me know if there’s any more data you want! I love making graphs!