How Much Am I Reading?
January 16, 2009
First, let me share the fact that my kids don't have school today because it's cold. Yes, it was -26 degrees this morning (currently about -6) when they make that decision, so school is closed. This is rare, even for Michigan.
Now, onto today's odd subject. I was curious to find out how much I read every day. Because I thought I read tons. Not just the two books I read concurrently, one fiction, one nonfiction, but newsletters, magazines, newspaper articles, blogs, online articles, etc. So today I'm going to experiment by tracking everything I read. When it comes to blogs I'm not going to count going back and reading comments or even count really short blog entries like today's BookEnds LLC blog entry. I'll update as we go. At the moment, it is 8:19 AM Eastern Time.
8:19 AM EST
--a short chapter of HALO: The Cole Protocol by Tobias S. Buckell while I ate breakfast.
--Dark Daily: Are Corporations Poised to Dramatically Reform U.S. Healthcare? (online newsletter)
--Murderati: Cliff Jumping by JT Ellison (blog post)
--SpyScribbler: There Went The Nesting Instinct (blog post)
--WSJ.com Health Blog: Feds Delay ICD-10 for 2 Years (blog/news post & my response to the title was "Yay!" for anyone who cares)
--WSJ.com Health Blog: Pfizer May Cut Sales Force By Nearly A Third (blog/news post)
9:46 AM EST
--TIME Magazine: Can Israel Survive (first page, haven't finished article yet)
--Erica Orloff: Writing to Sell Vs. Selling What You Write (blog)
--Newsweek Online: The Best & Worst of Bush (article & slideshow)
Plus I'm proofing a chapter of the Laboratory Industry Strategic Outlook 2009, chapter 3, which unfortunately requires that I verify data from chapter 5, plus I need to go online or somewhere (?!) to find recent stock analysi on a couple companies and the whole thing feels like a hairball.
2:06 PM EST
--MSN.com: American painter Andrew Wyeth dies at 91 (news article & bummer, I liked his stuff)
--WSJ.com Health Blog: Feds Seek to Raise Testing Bar for Pap Smear Interpreters (blog article. Interestingly, though not surprising to me, when tested, cytotechnologists did a better job of analyzing Pap smears than pathologists, who have MDs, did. As someone who worked in a lab for 18 years, this doesn't surprise me much at all. Most docs couldn't find their own laboratories with a roadmap).
4:30 PM EST
--Paperback Writer: Building and Growing (blog entry)
--WSJ.com Healthcare Blog: Roche Cutting Hundreds of Manufacturing Jobs
--WSJ.com Healthcare Blog: Medtronic Pays Surgeon '$20,000 or More'--Much, Much More (yeah, because for the university he works for he has to declare additional income from companies up to $20,000. Once it's over $20,000, he can just say $20,000 or more. Except in this case, it turned out to be $20 million. Why can't I ever get in on consulting deals like that?)
Midnight
--Nathan Bransford-Literary Agent: This Week in Publishing (blog entry)
--MSNBC.com: Cindy McCain Approached to go 'Dancing.' (online article)
--USA Today: I get it and I'm not entirely sure I read anything all the way through, but I skimmed or read some of maybe a dozen articles
--read the rest of the Time Magazine article about Israel
--read maybe 15 pages of Legacy of Ashes, a NF book I'm reading on the history of the CIA
--read a couple chapters of the Halo novel
posted by Mark Terry at 5:17 AM
7 Comments:
Interesting to track that... hmm. Might have to try that sometime.
For the record, it was -12 this morning in my little corner of your fair state.
Your reading log reminds me of The Artist's Way chapter where you have to give up reading for a week. I think it's in Week 5. Either way, I remember realizing it was going to happen in the next few days, so I literally gorged on reading to prepare for all that time I wouldn't spend reading.
It's amazing how much time we actually spend reading, isn't it? You're not even counting reading the Local on the 8s on the Weather Channel, to clock when we go up a degree...
Love your blog.
I make it a point to read fiction 2-3 hours a day. I was tending to feel that part of my life was a tad self-indulgent because it doesn't directly turn a profit, and it had dwindled down to 2-3 hours a week, for awhile. So with the New Year and the New Schedule I made it a priority. It's just who I want to be as a writer, I guess. I don't count blogs, though. That IS self-indulgence for me!
My blog? I'm honored! I have this image of you reading it and going, "Phew! And I thought I was emotionally inclined!"
Chris
--I think the actual temp was probably -12 or something with a wind chill of -26, but it was 5:00 and my wife woke me up to tell me, so it's amazing I got the message at all.
SS
--well, I did think, "Hey Spy, chill." :)
When do you write? (as in your current project not the blog) Or do you write on other days?
What about your guitar?
Richmond,
In between. Friday was a very exasperating day for me, actually, because the latest market research report's galley came back to me with specific things to check. The nature of these reports is that if you change something in one chapter you end up having to double-check all over the place to see what changes were made. And in this case, not only did we have to check chapter 3, but I had to go to chapter 5 to double-check the updates, which affected chapter 3, then my editor didn't like some of the calculations done before (wish he had noticed that in October when we proofed the manuscript) and asked me to look at these and re-do the necessary sections, which may be tremendous.
Then I interviews a very fast-talking guy in the afternoon. The interview lasted 20 minutes, but it took me almost an hour to transcribe the interview--5 single-spaced pages! And I spent some time going through some of my job sites to look for work and I'm working on a major marketing period to drum up work in a different area of work, so I spent time doing that.
I didn't actually get to the novel on Friday, although I either work on fiction first thing in the morning or at the end of the day when better paying work is out of the way.
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