#dracula entry lengths

[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!

[silver-dusted-scribbles]

ok just listened to the first episode of re: dracula and everyone should listen to it because it’s absolutely amazing.

the first entry was nine minutes long. a completely average and respectable length for an audiobook chapter. but… i’m worried about The Update. y’all know the one. how many hours of dracula are we going to be listening to???

[citizen-of-the-fandom]

Thinking about how we haven't heard from our friend Jonathan in a while, and one of his last entries said "I now know the length of my life" and it was mid-june, that was the day Dracula told him, that was how long he had left, and right now it's about a week away, it's--

[aurora-australis-tumbles]

There are a lot of reasons why Dracula Daily and @re-dracula punch so hard emotionally — realizing Jonathan is fearing for his life on day two, experiencing the sheer length of his imprisonment, the Demeter’s increasingly horrifying entries — and one of them is weekends like this.

What do you mean after a full week of absolutely banana pants entries we’ve gone radio silent??? You can’t just write up your will and then… what? Sit in silence for two days? I happen to know that Professor Van Monologue is physically incapable of that, so what is happening people??

[aggressivelyarospec]

Dracula (the original 1897 novel) is the ultimate aro/polyam solidarity book. 

Firstly, forget everything you think you know about Dracula from the movies or pop culture. The things that might give you pause, like the sexy blood-drinking and romance with Dracula… None of that is in the book, nor accurate to the book even in subtext. The real story of Dracula isn’t focused on romance and sex, but instead friendship.

Friendship is such a heavy theme in this book. All of the characters have such strong, dedicated, and healthy friendships with each other. All the allos I’ve seen read this book even admit that and heavily discuss it.

The main “straight” romance in the book is literally the most well-written and respectful romance I have ever seen in media. Despite the time period the book was written in, the characters treat each other as full equals, actually love and respect each other, have full trust in each other’s love with no jealousy or concern of cheating (at one point in the book, the woman literally laughs because of how silly the idea of her boyfriend cheating on her was!). They are Entirely dedicated and even get a little blasphemous with it, despite being an otherwise very Catholic book.

(Not to mention they both give off major trans and bi vibes.)

The other romance in the book features a woman turn down 2/3 of her suitors. These 2 men hold no ill will towards her for this, but fully accept it and vow to be friends with her forever. And you get to fully see the genuinity and strength of their care and friendship and the lengths they are willing to go through to help and save her. All the suitors themselves have a very strong friendship with each other, with no jealousy in sight.

For the aros, it's a book about unconditional platonic love. Everyone joins and works together to try to save her. Both old friends working together, and new people brought in that very quickly become just as close. And when I say close, I mean “We just met but I will die for you” strength.

For the polyamorous folks, it's a book with so much of that friendship combined with homoerotic subtext and no jealousy in sight. It’s incredibly easy to see all of the characters in a polycule, from the friendship to subtext to thematic parallels. (And most of the modern fandom does!)

I also recommend reading the book via Dracula Daily! The book is an epistolary novel, in the format of exchanged letters and entries all with in-world dates. Dracula Daily sorts all of these entries into their chronological order, so you follow the order of events alongside all the characters. And as there is an in-universe explanation for why the book is written in entries and all of them dated, it's amazing to read day-by-day and get to that reveal in the story. To sign up, Dracula Daily is a free substack subscription by Matt Kirkland. You can sign up for it any time, and the emails start on May 3rd and it runs until Nov 7th. If you do decide to join, check out the Dracula Daily tumblr tags to read and analyze along with everyone else doing it! (But be warned, some people are on re-reads so there may be spoilers, but most folks will tag them for first-timers!)

There’s also Re:Dracula, which is an audiobook podcast that uses the Dracula Daily chronological format. They have different actors for each character and add tons of music and sound effects. It's a really great and book-accurate adaptation, and they lean into the bisexual subtext whenever they can, which is very fun. To listen, you can find it on any podcast service, and it's also on Youtube. (And their tumblr is @re-dracula)

Additional Information: Novel, Horror, Gothic Fiction, Fantasy Trailer: N/A

Added!

[rivermask]

Tumblr Book Clubs I am Currently Following, in order of how hard I think they would be to catch up on if you wanted to join the fun:

Around the World Hourly (Around the World in Eighty Days with entries sent according to the in-story hour of events, started Oct 2)

The Public Domain Book Club (started Frankenstein for the month of October on Oct 1)

Lord of the Rings Newsletter (started late September with some very long posts, but will be variable length as they follow the dates of events in the story)

Dracula Daily via Re:Dracula (chronological Dracula by Bram Stoker - OK, you've missed most of this one, but the audio format is very engaging - you could still catch up for the exciting conclusion!)

My Dear Wormwood (The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis - 22 short letters so far, posted on a weekly basis)

What Manner of Man (original vampire romance by St John Starling - 24 shortish and very fun chapters so far, posted on a weekly basis)

Whale Weekly (Moby Dick by Herman Melville with roughly chronological timescale - we're 70-some chapters in but there are often long breaks between them so you could probably catch up)

Les Mis Letters (a chapter of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo every day for a year - catch-up difficulty level: impossible)

Please add your own!

[keepsmagnetoaway]

X-Men Annual 6 (November 1982)

Chris Claremont/Bill Sienkewicz & Bob Wiacek

The X-Men annuals are reliably fantasy-themed and bizarre. What X-Men Annual 6 asks is, "what if they were really good, too?"

He's fucking back, bitches! This double-length story is effectively a straight sequel to Uncanny 159, right down to having the same artist, Bill Sienkewicz, who works in a wonderful style that's partly jagged and contemporary and partly a pastiche of 50s horror comics.

Because this is an annual, a story that's not really particularly fixed in the continuity, nothing canonically major can happen in it, which is why previous entries have generally involved the X-Men being spirited away to somewhere utterly bizarre for a hived-off adventure. This is sort of similar (and there's even a lengthy dream sequence, for extra inconsequentialness) but the art here, alongside the meaningful villain - it's Dracula, not some random space prince - makes it all much more impactful and enjoyable.

Via Ororo's backstory, we even get to dip into a different spooky-dooky setting for a while, on top of a crumbling European castle.

It all ends up, also, with an extremely (and half-intentionally) funny escape for Dracula, whom the X-Men and their ally, Rachel van Helsing, kill...

...but fail to fully destroy, because an ickle stone goes "BONK!" on Logan's head.

Extremely funny end to an extremely enjoyable annual.

[nausikaaa]

oh Dracula is so bloody evil in today's entry. Jonathan finally stands up himself and says he wants to leave, so Dracula takes him to the front door and summons a pack of wolves. i was listening to Re: Dracula out on a walk and actually said "oh, dickhead!" out loud.

he won't just force Jonathan to stay, he goes to lengths to make him say he'll wait until morning, when they both know he doesn't want to and won't really get to leave. he's punishing him for asserting himself. Jonathan breaking down and crying right there in front of him broke my heart, he's truly given up any attempt at pretending he's alright.

and then at the end, Dracula doesn't even try to hide his discussion with the weird sisters (i do love that Jonathan calls them that) right outside of his door, because now he has full confirmation that he can say and do whatever he pleases, and Jonathan won't make the mistake of standing up for himself again.

[tinierpurplefishes]

I just looked up the specs for wax cylinder phonographs, and it looks like the commercially available ones in the 1890s had about two minutes of usable recording time per cylinder. The longest I can find mention of were some that Edison experimented with that could hold perhaps four minutes.

This came up because I'm reading Dracula, and Dr. Seward records his diary on them. The thing is, he goes on and on and on at great length, and I'm really curious how fast he must have been talking to fit one of these entries on a single cylinder.

[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!

[fandomcrazy6226]

Liveblogging Dracula Daily - May 12

Brought to you on June 26th. Yeah, I've fallen really behind, but I'm gonna try to just straight-through all of these missed entires tonight so anybody who's really following these uh... have fun with the rapid succession. Do y'all think I should put some like.. "previous"/"next" links at the end of these posts? It's about at the length to need a masterlist

Anyway, here's the entry! From what I remember this one has wall-crawling

Always good to start with facts, and better to separate them from your own memories/opinions. Objectivity is a virtue. Wait he spends all day reading and then all night talking? Jonathan I'm begging you get some sleep, you desperately need it

So Dracula is asking a bunch of questions. Question 1, can someone in England have multiple solicitors? Answer 1, yes, you can have it sounds like as many as you want, but only one can be working at a time. That's all understood so Dracula then asks if he can have more than one for like... specialty jobs.

Oooh, an example! Ok, so he asked for Jonathan's help because he doesn't live in London so that only Dracula's needs would be served... sure. And so he wants to know if he can get another solicitor to help shipping things to different areas where those other solicitors would live so it's more efficient. I guess that makes sense? Efficiency 100

And apparently there's a Solicitor Code of Conduct that says that... son of a Jesus what do these words mean I feel like I'm translating Shakespeare... the client can have one solicitor who can then direct other "local" solicitors to do local things, and the client doesn't have to do anything. Am I understanding correctly???

Ok so Dracula wants to direct his own solicitors and starts asking about paperwork and forms, and apparently he might make a really good solicitor (how many flipping times am I gonna have to type the word "solicitor")

Awww, he's so alone. And he's gonna be there for another month? Yeesh. "My needs only were to be consulted" selfish prick! This man needs to get married to his amazing fiancee!

Yeah, still a prisoner. I forgot that like... he's really not here by his own will anymore. And Dracula the master manipulator over here telling him to keep things secret and straight-up LIE to people that he's doing fine. Sharp teeth!

Heck yeah, have a secret code with your fiancee! I should make up a code to use with my boyfriend if we ever need to, that would be fun.

Spying on his mail is either gonna be a really smart move or a really stupid one, but considering how Jonathan seems like one of the brainier horror protagonists I'm guessing it's a smart one

Ok I'm gonna note this just for posterity, one letter is for Samuel F. Billington, No. 7, The Crescent, Whitby (copy-paste works wonders), the second one is for Herr Leutner, Varna, the third is for Coutts & Co., London, and the last one is for Herren Klopstock & Billreuth, bankers, Buda-Pesth. I'm guessing these are all other solicitors

Oh, boy, we're getting a warning! Don't fall asleep anywhere but your own room or you'l have... really bad dreams? That doesn't sound threatening but I'm gonna guess those bad dreams lead to something more sinister

Good idea having the crucifix over your bed, that's probably a good protection. Like maybe it protects your whole bed. Wear it when awake and hang it when you sleep

Again this scenery is so pretty when he describes it, I almost wish this was illustrated just so I could see it. I'm sure people have drawn passages like this, maybe I could look into those later

I'm.... fucking sorry??????? He's not only climbing, but climbing face-down??? I mean that's probably better, the way this is described if he'd been face-up then he'd've spotted Johnathan looking but like jesus Cuh-rist!

"I saw the fingers and toes"... was he climbing barefoot? Is he that level of freak?

Yeah I'd be pretty scared out of my mind if I saw some old dude with various biological impossiblities climbing a wall upside down with no shoes on. Gawd Dayum.

PREVIOUS / NEXT

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

I saw a post estimating the length of re: Dracula based on the length of the text entries of Dracula Daily, and i definitely reblogged it, but alas the I can't find it in my tags

Does anyone have it?

[vickyvicarious]

Today's entry is interesting. I'm tempted to say Stoker made a mistake with the dates (again; he does this several times) because everything Mina says seems like it should be separated by more than a single day from her last entry. If Jonathan's letter about leaving Castle Dracula just arrived, it would be reasonable to expect a wait of a few days before another one, even if he were still mailing a new letter at every stop or whatever. Of course, that could be why Mina says she doesn't know why she's feeling so uneasy about him - she recognizes it's illogical to be so nervous if he's traveling. But the explanation for those fears (even if everything about his letter were honest) might be that Mina still hasn't heard directly from Jonathan herself. If Mr. Hawkins has received a letter, she should have too by now - maybe she doesn't expect anything new, but she knows Jonathan would have written to tell her that he is coming home as well, and she's waiting for that letter to arrive. She's probably hoping he sounds more like himself/speaks at greater length and detail to her than he did to his boss. And of course she feels impatient about that.

So the thing about Jonathan can be rationalized away, even if the emotions feel like they'd make more sense with a gap of a day or two to build up this much anxiety. The lines about Lucy are a little harder to do the same, though... in yesterday's entry Mina spoke for the first time about her sleepwalking, and like it had only just begun. But today "Lucy walks more than ever, and each night I am awakened by her moving about the room." That definitely sounds like it has been more than a single night since the last entry, and going from talking about how Lucy is looking forward to Arthur arriving (like it will happen in the future) to today saying he's been suddenly called away (like otherwise he would be arriving here around this time) also feels odd, timing-wise.

I think I would want to move yesterday's entry a few days earlier in order to make the chronology work better. Nothing huge, just two or three days maybe.

[pandoramsbox]

Sci-Fi Saturday: Invisible Agent

Week 23:

Film(s): Invisible Agent (Dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1942, USA)

Viewing Format: DVD

Date Watched: 2021-11-19

Rationale for Inclusion: 

As I wrote in my post about Dr. Cyclops (Dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1940, USA) a few weeks back, most of the purer works of science fiction in the 1940s were being produced in serial or short format, whilst features were mostly horror hybrids, and frequently linked to past Universal Horror movies or adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As a result, this post will be the last one on sci-fi films of the 1940s, and also will finally feature one of the Universal Monster sequels.

While the sequels to Frankenstein (Dir. James Whale, 1931, USA) leaned more into fantasy and horror, the sequels to The Invisible Man (Dir. James Whale, 1933, USA) showed more cross-genre compatibility. The first sequel, The Invisible Man Returns (Dir. Joe May, 1940, USA), sticks to the horror, sci-fi roots of the original with the added thriller narrative of a wrongly convicted man trying to prove his innocence of a murder. The second sequel, The Invisible Woman (Dir. A. Edward Sutherland, 1940, USA), goes the comedy route, and narratively has little to do with the prior films apart from its title. The third sequel, Invisible Agent (Dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1942, USA), puts the invisibility serum of the original film towards the war effort in a sci-fi espionage film. Two more sequels followed, The Invisible Man's Revenge (Dir. Ford Beebe, 1944, USA) and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (Dir. Charles Lamont, 1951, USA), which were a return to horror and comedy, respectively.

For all its cultural dominance during the 1940s, World War II rarely shows up directly in feature length sci-fi films of the era. Part of that has to do with the United States' late entry into the war, but also other mediums, like comic books and radio, being the preferred showcase of spectacular worlds and technology. The novelty of its espionage plot is why, out of all the Universal Monster sequels that also fit in the sci-fi genre, I thought Invisible Agent warranted inclusion on this survey.

Reactions:

Continuity within the Invisible Man series is frequently casual, since unlike the Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolfman films, no characters exist in multiple films. Invisible Agent does narratively connect back to The Invisible Man by having protagonist Frank Griffin Jr., alias Frank Raymond, (Jon Hall) be presented as the grandson of the first film's Dr. Jack Griffin, who possesses a copy of the recipe for the invisibility serum. Never mind the fact that in The Invisible Man Jack Griffin was not married, nor shown to be a philanderer, and deliberately destroyed the only existing copy of the invisibility serum formula; the filmmakers probably figured their audience would not have seen the 1933 film, or at least not recently enough for the change in continuity to be an issue.

Retroactive continuities, or as we say today "retcons", have been fixtures of popular media since popular mass media first took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, anyway. So it is safe to presume that audiences in 1942 were apt to just accept the changes with minimal reaction or thought. Increased access to past works in the post-modern, digital age have prompted a more negative response from devoted fan communities when continuity is deviated from. As a fan spoiled by access who typically watches The Invisible Man annually, I definitely responded to the retcon in Invisible Agent by thinking that it made no sense based on what was present in the original film.

However, retconning aside, having the grandson of Dr. Jack Griffin use the invisibility serum to help the United States government and Allies, instead of giving it to the Axis Powers, or maniacally sewing anarchy as a free agent with it, was the story that the era demanded. The film unfolds as a competent sci-fi, spy thriller with gimmicky yet clever effects moments to convey invisibility that were the true hallmark of the series.

The whole narrative is itself a work of Allied propaganda, but it only goes explicitly heavy handed during a speech of Griffin's whilst trying to get information out of the incarcerated Gestapo Standartenführer Karl Heiser (J. Edward Bromberg).

Given the history of German emigrants playing Nazis in American films during the war, it may be a surprise to modern audiences to discover German emigrant Peter Lorre in yellowface playing a Japanese agent, Baron Ikito. Lorre, who worked his way from France to England to America to get away from the Nazi regime as quickly as possible, had previously played Japanese detective Mr. Moto in eight films between 1937 and 1939, so audiences were accustomed to seeing him play Japanese characters. Between his experience playing Moto, and Lorre's skill as an actor, his performance of Baron Ikito is fairly neutral for a yellowface performance, albeit problematic by its very nature. 

Invisible Agent is an interesting cultural artifact. Its narrative is built on a respectable sci-fi concept and it places middle of the pack when it comes to Universal Monster sequels.

World War II and Nazis factor more deeply in later retro and period piece science fiction works than during the actual 1940s. It is somewhat disappointing, but if anything is an incentive to look more into the print offerings of the era.

Next week we move onto the 1950s: flying saucers, aliens, and all manner of atomic terrors.

[littleliongirl16]

Made a hyperspecific alignment chart!

In my mind, here's what the axes mean:

Chaotic to Lawful: how easy the epistolary element is to understand! This is less about whether the piece of media is confusing overall and more about whether the epistolary element is hard to follow, though they do bleed into eachother. For the record I don't think the confusion is bad in any of these stories, some of them just make you work slightly harder or wait slightly longer for information. For example in The Magnus Protocol we get various records and correspondences without full context because these people don't know the OIAR is listening in and arent intentionally giving it context. This makes some of the episodes, like the plant one, take more effort to understand. And in the short story Frequently Asked Questions About Your Craniotomy, the story is told mostly through the narrator's tangents while she's actually answering questions about craniotomies, so you do really have to wait for information.

Good to Evil: this is the scale of how much people would actually talk like that in a letter/diary/whatever form of epistolary it is. For example, Frankenstein? Nobody writes letters like that! Oh my god! Robert Walton mails his sister the novel length entire life story of his doomed crush instead of giving her more detail on his arctic expedition that she didn't know whether or not he would die on! Hell, Robert writes a good portion of his own life story that his sister definitely already knows in his letters just to give the audience context! Frankenstein doesn't heavily rely on being epistolary, though, it's just a framing device and an amusing one at that. Also despite the fact that I labeled them as good and evil, unrealistic epistolary definitely isn't bad. In both Welcome to Night Vale and Frequently Asked Questions, the strangeness of these characters rambling about their personal lives (and being allowed to ramble about their personal lives) in their respective radio show and FAQ is played for both humor and important, sometimes shockingly emotional characterization. Meanwhile Griffin and Sabine is a pen pal love story that feels a lot more like how people really write letters. To be fair, the author has the advantage of writing the characters' correspondence since their first meeting, so they're learning things about eachother for the first time with the audience. Dracula includes some diary entries that are really too detailed for the character to realistically remember all that from their day, but it goes in the good category because for the most part it feels like the information included is information the characters want to record or convey, not only something the author needs to get to the audience.

[draculadailytracker]

Do you know how many days there are emails from our good friends? I'm trying to track it on my reading tracker by episodes but it won't let me leave the total blank

Answer under a spoiler cut because I know some people don't want to know in advance~

You'll get Dracula Daily emails on 111 days. (Source: this post by @peachesanmemes. It includes detailed graphs and some statistics about entry lengths, which vary greatly.)