My Brain on Books XIX
I am reading for The Office of Letters and Lights the folks who bring us NaNoWriMo today as I love what they are doing for literacy with their Young Writer's Programs and because I've participated in NaNo every year since 2004. I have been blessed to have it in my life and would like to give something back if only kudos and link love. I'm putting this plug at the top in hopes some who stop by will check out their site and see all the great things they do to foster love of reading and writing and story in kids.
This post will be organized like a blog inside a blog with recent updates stacked atop previous ones. I may be posting some updates on Twitter @Joystory and the Joystory fb fanpage. But this is where I do anything more than a line or two. Including mini-challenges that don't require a separate post..
In spite of that I read three books start to finish in one day. It has been years since I've done that. Two were audio's from the BARD digital library.. The last was via the text to speech function on my Zen 7in tablet. In all three I increased speed by 25-50% which shaved 30-40 minutes off every three hours.I began with Night Errands as mentioned below then:
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrick Backman
Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington: Understanding Political Doublespeak Through Philosophy and Jokes by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein
First time in decades that I've read three whole books in one day. Audio is quite a different experience tho and I wouldn't reccomend speed listening to fiction or poetry. Non Fic works fine sped up tho. In fact I seem to listen better--comprehend and stay focused. Wonder if that is another Autism trait...It's like maybe there is too much time for my mind to wander between words when speech is at normal speed.
yikes! it took me an hour to prep this update. It's now quarter to six. 42 hrs awake.
10:00PM - Finally finished Night Errands. Now I'm itching to pick up a pencil and write a poem.
Thot it would be done by early afternoon but stuff happened. People stuff. Then when I got back into the thon I started visiting the Dewey page and social media #readathon.and lurked. Made a few posts which I thot would take me three minutes but took me thirty at least. Each. After such a long hiatus (basically nothing but the thons and NaNo for over a year) Im clumsy and clueless. Lost. Because someone's been moving the furniture around, changing the rules. Facebook is the worst of the bunch. On my fb Joystory page there is so much clutter. Bad enough for someone with good or half good vision. Which isn't me. Some of it seems to be links to instructions on the new features but today is not the day to deal with that. But the really irritating stuff is all the soliciting for money to boost posts, buy visits, link love, ads etc.
I can not afford it; Just a fact. But every time I see one my mind plays the mini-movie of me saying no to some eager entrepreneur who won't take no for an answer until he perceives the shame his persistence engenders in me and his eager welcome turns to disdain. And I feel like a loser.
That's the way my story-making mind works. It takes anticipated and remembered social encounters, makes a mish-mash of them gives them the soundtrack of anxiety (think Jaws) and plays them in endless loops. It's like I've been trapped in middle-school for fifty years! I stand before every adult--even those forty years younger as a sixth grader with empty hands before the teacher gathering up the test papers at the end of class
Awake or asleep I can't get away from it. Except by imposing another story--a movie, novel, poem made by another or my own elaborate storyworld
Why does fb have to be so in your face? Other platforms inform about their monetizing options without crawling all over the real-estate of your screen and popping up on top of what you are working on.
Well, that was a bit of a detour.
9:00 AM - It's that time again. Dewey's 24hr read-a-thon. My 19th. It snuck up on me. It's a miracle I remembered at all seeing as how I've not been posting anywhere since the last one in April..
I prepped my Thon post and set it to publish without me so that I could actually read for the first hour instead of fiddling with writing and editing and sharing.
All fun things to do but it's not reading!
One hour became 4. Entirely audio book via BARD: Braille and Audio Reading Download, a service of the National Library Service for the blind and physically handicapped, providing downloadable books and magazines.
I was 'reading' Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams, a collection of essays by poets relating how their dream life influences their poems.
I started with audio because my eyes were fried from nearly six hours of reading on screen between ten last night and four this morning. I had been prepping my devices with ebooks and lost track of time. One of my talents.
So, since I woke around noon yesterday---I'll hit 24hrs awake in 2.5 hours. Sigh. Even my chances of making it to the finish line at 5am Sunday are not a good bet.
I'm going to be posting briefer and hopefully more frequent updates via my fb Joystory page and Twitter. And possibly Google Plus.
4:44 AM - l am prepping this ahead and scheduling it to post at 4:44 AM which is also when my alarm is set. That gives me time to get up and take care of biological business including fixing coffee and water bottle.
Am including the intro meme here so I don't have to spend the first hour preparing it as so often has happened before. In fact much of it is copy/pasted from the April Thon.
I'm going to spend the first hour actually reading!
Intro Meme:
1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?
Longview, Washington USA. On the north side of the majestic Columbia River approximately 25 miles from the coast and 50 miles from Portland, Oregon as the crow flies.
From my Mom's house. The house I lived in from age 18 to 21 and again since January 2013. See earliest posts under the label Lifequake for explanation.
2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?
For fiction: And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
by Fredrik Backman
For Nonfiction: Advancing bookmark in Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.
The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey
But mostly I'm looking forward to free range reading. The most important part of my plan for this thon is to not have a plan.
3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?
Imitation crab salad.
And Chocolate. Anything chocolate. Even if it has to be chocolate powder out of the can.
Not at the same time!
Truth is I'm not sure what my options are as I let this sneak up on me so Ed is bringing my no prep meals and snacks when he visits this afternoon.
4) Tell us a little something about yourself!
I'm legally blind from RP aka Tunnel Vision with less than 2 degrees of vision left. I can no longer read even large print with my left eye. I now prefer ebooks for the ability to enlarge fonts and control line width so I don't loose my way between end and beginning of lines. I used to read nearly 1K words per minute but now read slower than I talk. Very discouraging.
I've had a mood disorder since childhood featuring depression, anxiety, panic and insomnia. Several times professionals have considered the possibility of bi-polar but finally ruled it out definitively in late 2015 when they diagnosed me with High Functioning Autism aka Asperger's. Over fifty years of feeling 'wrong' and not knowing why. I've spent the months since reading nf about the autism spectrum and novels and memoirs featuring autistic individuals which has gone a long way toward helping me understand much that once confused and shamed me. Since I have several of those books in progress I'll probably dip into them today.
5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to?
The most important difference
0 tell me a story:
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