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Why I don't read many novels these days
This entry is actually less relevant than it was a year ago when I first talked about writing it - in 2014, if you include kids' and YA books over 200 pages, I read a total of 15 novels, a third of which were Yuletide canon review. Which was still better than 2013, during which I read Les Miserables. And some Daniel Pinkwater rereads for Yuletide. (I wasn't tracking them as carefully then, but durned if I can remember any more.) And granted if you're going to read one novel over the course of a year, Les Mis is a good one to pick, but compare that to when I was in high school and reading, conservative estimate, 350 books a year.
This year I have managed 31 novels (11 of them YA) and if I really push to make my goodreads challenge by the end of this month, I'm on track for at least 36 this year. Which is, I guess, good by most folks' standards, but 16-year-old me is looking at my overloaded bookshelves and shaking her head sadly. And adult me is looking at the library patrons who go through ten a week with abject jealousy.
I still read a lot! I read 160 adult nonfiction books in that year, plus comics, picture books, poetry, some novellas and short stories, and this and that other things. Not to mention fanfic - some judicious sampling of my AO3 page says I've read about 9,000,000 words of fanfic this year, an average of 25,000 words a day. And I still read quickly - I can read a 350-page novel in four or five hours tops, with no interruptions. It's just that I seem to have to make a deliberate effort anymore to sit down and read a novel, when it used to be like breathing.
So, what changed? I've made a bunch of attempts to write this post out, and it keeps being an incoherent mess, but I think, honestly, what it comes down to is: I'm more-or-less a grown-up now.
Which isn't to say that novels aren't for grownups! But when I think about all the reasons I come up with...they center around that.
Maybe the most obvious is: my time is my own now. When I was a kid, it wasn't. I'm not that much busier now, but when I was a kid, a significant amount of my "busy" time was "sitting through necessary bullshit". I would get up way too early to make sure I had time to catch the bus, read while waiting for the bus, read on the bus, read under my desk in class, read in the cafeteria at lunch, read in the hallway between classes, read when I finished my classwork early, read while waiting for extracurriculars to start, read during the boring bits of the extracurriculars, read while waiting for my ride home, read on my ride home, eat a quick dinner, read while pretending to do pointless homework, pretend my homework was done and go hide and read so nobody would notice it wasn't, and then read under the covers late at night so I didn't have to lay there and think about doing it again tomorrow.
....which sounds kind of bleak when I put it that way. But I was reading a lot of good books! And I did do other things. Sometimes. But on the average day, deciding what book I was going to read was basically the only chance I got to choose how I was spending my time. (Even when I had a little bit more free time, anything I chose to do - use the shared computer, watch the shared TV, do an activity in the shared space, leave the house after reporting in detail what I would be doing and getting it pre-approved - would not be private and unexamined in the way that reading a book was.)
And the thing is, I wouldn't say that there is necessarily less pointless bullshit in my adult life. Adult life has lots of necessary bullshit. But at least right now, most of the bullshit is stuff that I have at least theoretically voluntarily chosen for myself, and could stop doing and do something else if I wanted, so I feel bad about completely tuning it out in favor of space empires. I feel like if I have deliberately offered this pointless bullshit a place in my life, I at least owe it the courtesy of trying to care.
Which is why fewer novels.
Because good novels still have the power they had when I was sixteen, of completely pulling me out of myself, making me forget where I am and lose track of how much time has passed, and if you make me stop reading a good novel partway through, I will be a completely useless zombie.
So these days I pretty much only pull out a novel when I know I will have a block of at least four hours when I don't have anything else to do.
And those blocks are pretty rare these days.
Even when I was long-term unemployed, when you'd think I'd have plenty of large blocks of free time, and I definitely wanted to get out of my head, there was always stuff I should be doing, that I couldn't tune out the way I could tune out pointless bullshit high school homework, that was telling me, "you need to do this other more important thing first, then you can relax and read". ('Get a damn job', maybe most prominently, but also 'do your volunteer work', 'write something you could sell,' 'do housework,' etc ad infinitum.) I wasn't stuck in a classroom or a car with absolutely nothing more productive I could be doing. Which isn't to say I was actually doing the productive stuff, but "I'll just read this 15-minute fanfic and then do it", repeatedly for six hours, somehow sounds a lot more reasonable than "I'll just read this entire novel and then do it."
And good fanfic can be just as absorbing as a good novel, but I can say "I want to read something that will take just ten/fifteen/twenty/thirty/whatever minutes and be done," - the average length of fic I've read this year is 10,500 words, but the median is only 3500. And you can't do with a novel, and is even kind of hard with a lot of pro short fiction: why they haven't started consistently putting exact word counts on online fiction magazines yet, I don't know.
(Interestingly, in my limited collection of SF magazines from the 50s, two of them include exact word counts in their tables of contents: "Other Worlds" and "Imagination". The others - "Astounding," "Galaxy", "Future", "Fantastic", "Worlds of Tomorrow" - only sort into Novelette/Short/Serial, which is sort of helpful in figuring out how long they will take to read, but given the range of variation in those categories, isn't that helpful. These days "Clarkesworld" and "Lightspeed" and "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" don't even do that much. Also interestingly, perhaps coincidentally, "Other Worlds" and "Imagination" are by far the least prestigious, have the most female visibility in their masthead and lettercolumns, and are the only ones in the pile I've read all the way through.)
And nonfiction might take me a long time to get through, and require more brain to understand, but I can stop and start it in small bites without having to reboot my brain afterward. (When I was a kid, sure, I'd keep having to interrupt my novel reading to pretend I cared what was going on around me, but I didn't have to actually engage with it very hard, so that was fine.)
So there's usually something to read that's just as good as, and more convenient than, locking myself out of the universe for half a day.
Plus, because I read novels so much less often, I've gotten in the habit of thinking of them as a treat, something I should wait and read when I can enjoy them properly. I'm an adult, I control my own time now, right? And when I was a kid one of the things I most looked forward to in adulthood was being able to read all I wanted without interruption. So I should save the novels until the right time opens up.
There are other reasons novels are less of a thing for me now, though.
One is that I have friends now.
...okay, no, that sounds even sadder. Rewind. When I got into college, I had access to a) high-speed internet, and b) cable television, and I binged on all the pop culture I'd missed in my childhood of reading novels all the time. And eventually I got into online fandom, too. And I got really used to having familiarity with a shared cultural canon: to be able to make a reference to something I'd seen or read or watched recently, and have the people around me have some clue what it was, or at least be vaguely aware of its existence. Slash/Media fandom especially is like that: we may not all have seen Starsky and Hutch, but we have a shared basic understanding of what it is. We may not all have read the fic where John and Rodney are curtains, but we all understand the context enough to react appropriately when somebody mentions it.
I like being able to do that. I like it when the stories that are important to me are also part of the weave of the community that is important to me. There's a reason most of the novels I have read lately have some sort of particular relevance to the communities I'm in, even if it's just that they're perennial Yuletide fandoms.
In high school I'd pretty much given up on having that kind of easy communication, because even if I did have access to the touchstones that were important to the people I had contact with, most of it was stuff I was aggressively un-interested in. And there were other SF/fantasy nerds in the school, and most of them were reading the same stuff I was: a few super-popular authors, and then trying to backread the whole history of the genre, so that even if we didn't get the cool kids' references (...I was once shown a schedule for a rock concert that listed "Jimmie's Chicken Shack", "Reel Big Fish", "Red Hot Chili Peppers" and "Squirrel Nut Zippers" on the same stage, and said something about the food concessions sounding interesting), we could at least get SF's references to itself. Since high school I haven't even had that: the SF book nerds I have found tend to have interests splintered among tiny little subgenres, so we don't even really share our SF references.
This disadvantage was pointed out to me starkly when I was hanging out with some geeky friends lately and we were having a fun conversation studded with shared references to everything from internet cats to 70s cartoons to Game of Thrones, and I wanted to say something about the SF novel I'd just read, and realized that they would have no idea what I was talking about and if I tried to explain, it would totally derail the conversation.
And, if I get the same amount of enjoyment either way, why would I want to give my time to something isolating rather than something that connects?
When I went to those book-focused SF cons this fall, I thought maybe that was the solution: that this would be a bunch of people who would get all the SF lit references I'd been saving up, these are after all people who are so into reading SF books that they voluntarily go to cons for it, it'll be like going to con.txt and having nearly everyone understand when you talk about merging spirit animals or the prefects' bathroom, right?
But weirdly, no. There was surprisingly little fallback on the long history of SF books at those cons; there was more of it at ChessieCon, oddly, than at CapClave, given that CapClave prides itself on being a con for avid readers. But maybe it does make sense, since ChessieCon is descended from a con for a particular series, so the regulars are more used to having a manageable shared canon. (I have more Thoughts on this, but it's better suited for a post about the cons themselves.)
And, of course, there's the other reason why it's more tempting to read or watch something that has some connection to my online fandom social groups: if I read a novel and finish it, that's it, it's done, no more.
Afugh.
How do they expect people to live like that? Honestly.
If I read something that has a fandom, and finish it, it opens me up to a whole world of fanfic that expands the story in every possible direction, and that is still being actively written, and that will actively encourage me to share my own ideas of what more there is, so I don't have to get rudely dumped out of the world just because I came to the last page, or whatever.
Last pages are so last century. Give me infinite canvas via AO3 and fandom.
There are a couple other reason I came up with on my old drafts of this post, but most of them boil down to combinations of I'm a grownup now, and stories with fandoms are more fun.
Like: A lot of novels I read these days just aren't very good. Part of it is that 95% of everything is crap, and I'm just more practiced lately at filtering out the fanfic crap, and even when I fail at that and accidentally start reading crappy fanfic, it's not 300 pages of crap lurking at the bottom of my bag that I ought to give a fair shake to since I hardly know the characters yet, eh.
But also: I know more now. And I read a lot of nonfiction. And have a store of random facts and contexts that is so vast it sometimes even worries me. I got a degree in geography basically because that's the major where you get to learn about everything in the entire world (plus some bits of space). And as I'm older, I'm also more confident now in what I know and don't know. But the effect of that is that I'm way too good at finding holes in worldbuilding now (and this isn't just an SF thing - other genres if anything tend to have worse worldbuilding.) And it's one thing if your worldbuilding has a few holes, it's another thing if your bad worldbuilding invalidates your entire plot and makes your characterization nonsensical, and the better I get at poking holes in worlds, the more likely that is to be the effect.
Sometimes instead I read stuff by people who are trying to do their research, and I end up going "ok, you know your stuff, you are clearly basing this off this real-world thing. Only the related real-world thing is about 10,000 times cooler and more interesting and complicated and with a more realistically diverse cast, so why am I reading your lies instead?"
And in fanfic, I don't really care if the worldbuilding is full of holes or it's just watered-down history or whatever, because really in fanfic all you have to do is be as good at worldbuilding as canon (usually not hard), and if you screw up badly, eh, it's not that important, because someone else has written another fanfic that is almost the same but gets that thing right (and screws up something else.) And people who read fanfic know what they're looking for, they have context, they know how to look for the next fanfic and the next, they aren't a lonely kid who's been handed something by a grown-up or stumbled on it in a store and is going to latch onto that one story as The One That Makes It All Make Sense. With fanfic, it averages to OK, and it's not that important if it doesn't, because the bar is low, and there's always multiple perspectives on everything.
I have a higher bar for pro fiction. And somewhere I got it into my head that it's more important: every novel is a chance to get it right in ways nobody else has before, and with a pro-published novel it's a story that multiple people in positions of power decided was more important that other stories they could have chosen, and poured tens of thousands of dollars into, and that readers are going to think has authority because it's by a real writer. So when I attempt to read a pro published novel that it turns out is a pile of suck, it bothers me a lot more than when fanfic or selfpub fiction is.
And here's something I definitely blame on online fandom: when I read pro fiction, I am taking a risk that this book is going to spend the whole time screaming at me, "HEY YOU, YEAH YOU, YOU KNOW YOU AREN'T A PERSON, RIGHT? HERE LET'S LIST ALL THE THINGS THAT MAKE SOMEONE A PERSON THAT ISN'T YOU HAHAHAHA AND YOUR FRIENDS DEFINITELY AREN'T PEOPLE EITHER WHY ARE YOU EVEN FRIENDS WITH THEM." I used to be accustomed to just filtering that out and making do. But now I'm used to fanfic, and fanfic is way more likely to scream "YOU ARE A PERSON! WE ARE ALL PEOPLE! WHO SAID YOU AREN'T A PERSON? TELL ME WHO, I'LL FIGHT THEM, I'LL FIGHT THEM WITH THE POWER OF HEALING COCK."
I'm not saying fanfic always does well at that - it's often hamhanded and misguided at best, and frequently exclusionary by carelessness, and some of it's at least as bad as the pro stuff - but someone trying and failing to affirm me is still way better than someone deliberately making a case to exclude me, with the entire weight of the publishing industry behind them and a fair chance at a movie deal. And I'm not saying that all pro fic does that, either - a lot of pro fic I've read recently does give me the same feeling of belongingness that fanfic does - but most of the pro fic that does that are the ones I've read because of fandom recommending them to me. And half the time they turn out to be written by fanfic authors anyway. (I mean. I complained pretty stridently about fic with asexual characters in my previous post, right? But I couldn't even do that post about profic with asexual characters, because so much of what little does exist is way behind even getting to where I can make that complaint about it; a pro story where character A says "I'm ace" and character B says "ok, no sex then" is so lightyears beyond what I expect of profic that it's, well, it's Ancillary Justice.)
And the real difference is that when I start reading a fic, I go in with the expectation that it won't try to spit in my face; when I read a pro fic, even if I'm most of the way through and it seems like it's good, I'm still bracing myself the whole time for the sudden and inevitable betrayal. And that's just tiring.
And then there's the problem with reading a really good novel that I know is really good and that I know I will love: I'm writing more now. I always wanted to be a writer - at least since the first day of first grade when we had a free-writing assignment and the teach took mine away when I wasn't finished, anyway (someday I will write the rest of that story, it had potential) - but it's only since I got to college, and really the last five or six years, that I've been putting out enough words consistently enough that the writing-down itself is a major part of my life, and that I've learned enough about how I write to start to understand it.
And one thing I've learned is that what I'm writing is really dependent on what I'm reading, and if I read the wrong thing, there goes any chance of finishing that wip anytime soon, because my brain will be switching gears. Especially if it's a novel that's going to really absorb me. So I have novels I would love to read that sit next to my bed for months on end because I know that if I read them, all of the stories I'm really invested in right now will fly out the window. (This also applies to the pile of DVDs.)
Nonfiction is safer: or, at least, there's usually a nonfiction book sitting around that's closely enough connected to what I'm writing that I can treat it as research. And with fanfiction, I can usually easily find fanfic with the same characters or mood I'm writing, or at least read something that I know is going to be blandly comforting enough that it's not going to push around levers in my brain.
Not even to mention that any time given to writing is time spent not reading.
So, basically: Read less, write more.
I'm going to keep trying to push to read more novels (I'm really enjoying reading more of them, even if it seems to be coming down to 'Sunday mornings and waiting rooms only'). I want to at least have a good enough list that I feel ok about nominating for the Hugos. I think next year I'm going to try to push harder for pro short fiction, though. And catching up on my shelves at home rather than new stuff.
This year I have managed 31 novels (11 of them YA) and if I really push to make my goodreads challenge by the end of this month, I'm on track for at least 36 this year. Which is, I guess, good by most folks' standards, but 16-year-old me is looking at my overloaded bookshelves and shaking her head sadly. And adult me is looking at the library patrons who go through ten a week with abject jealousy.
I still read a lot! I read 160 adult nonfiction books in that year, plus comics, picture books, poetry, some novellas and short stories, and this and that other things. Not to mention fanfic - some judicious sampling of my AO3 page says I've read about 9,000,000 words of fanfic this year, an average of 25,000 words a day. And I still read quickly - I can read a 350-page novel in four or five hours tops, with no interruptions. It's just that I seem to have to make a deliberate effort anymore to sit down and read a novel, when it used to be like breathing.
So, what changed? I've made a bunch of attempts to write this post out, and it keeps being an incoherent mess, but I think, honestly, what it comes down to is: I'm more-or-less a grown-up now.
Which isn't to say that novels aren't for grownups! But when I think about all the reasons I come up with...they center around that.
Maybe the most obvious is: my time is my own now. When I was a kid, it wasn't. I'm not that much busier now, but when I was a kid, a significant amount of my "busy" time was "sitting through necessary bullshit". I would get up way too early to make sure I had time to catch the bus, read while waiting for the bus, read on the bus, read under my desk in class, read in the cafeteria at lunch, read in the hallway between classes, read when I finished my classwork early, read while waiting for extracurriculars to start, read during the boring bits of the extracurriculars, read while waiting for my ride home, read on my ride home, eat a quick dinner, read while pretending to do pointless homework, pretend my homework was done and go hide and read so nobody would notice it wasn't, and then read under the covers late at night so I didn't have to lay there and think about doing it again tomorrow.
....which sounds kind of bleak when I put it that way. But I was reading a lot of good books! And I did do other things. Sometimes. But on the average day, deciding what book I was going to read was basically the only chance I got to choose how I was spending my time. (Even when I had a little bit more free time, anything I chose to do - use the shared computer, watch the shared TV, do an activity in the shared space, leave the house after reporting in detail what I would be doing and getting it pre-approved - would not be private and unexamined in the way that reading a book was.)
And the thing is, I wouldn't say that there is necessarily less pointless bullshit in my adult life. Adult life has lots of necessary bullshit. But at least right now, most of the bullshit is stuff that I have at least theoretically voluntarily chosen for myself, and could stop doing and do something else if I wanted, so I feel bad about completely tuning it out in favor of space empires. I feel like if I have deliberately offered this pointless bullshit a place in my life, I at least owe it the courtesy of trying to care.
Which is why fewer novels.
Because good novels still have the power they had when I was sixteen, of completely pulling me out of myself, making me forget where I am and lose track of how much time has passed, and if you make me stop reading a good novel partway through, I will be a completely useless zombie.
So these days I pretty much only pull out a novel when I know I will have a block of at least four hours when I don't have anything else to do.
And those blocks are pretty rare these days.
Even when I was long-term unemployed, when you'd think I'd have plenty of large blocks of free time, and I definitely wanted to get out of my head, there was always stuff I should be doing, that I couldn't tune out the way I could tune out pointless bullshit high school homework, that was telling me, "you need to do this other more important thing first, then you can relax and read". ('Get a damn job', maybe most prominently, but also 'do your volunteer work', 'write something you could sell,' 'do housework,' etc ad infinitum.) I wasn't stuck in a classroom or a car with absolutely nothing more productive I could be doing. Which isn't to say I was actually doing the productive stuff, but "I'll just read this 15-minute fanfic and then do it", repeatedly for six hours, somehow sounds a lot more reasonable than "I'll just read this entire novel and then do it."
And good fanfic can be just as absorbing as a good novel, but I can say "I want to read something that will take just ten/fifteen/twenty/thirty/whatever minutes and be done," - the average length of fic I've read this year is 10,500 words, but the median is only 3500. And you can't do with a novel, and is even kind of hard with a lot of pro short fiction: why they haven't started consistently putting exact word counts on online fiction magazines yet, I don't know.
(Interestingly, in my limited collection of SF magazines from the 50s, two of them include exact word counts in their tables of contents: "Other Worlds" and "Imagination". The others - "Astounding," "Galaxy", "Future", "Fantastic", "Worlds of Tomorrow" - only sort into Novelette/Short/Serial, which is sort of helpful in figuring out how long they will take to read, but given the range of variation in those categories, isn't that helpful. These days "Clarkesworld" and "Lightspeed" and "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" don't even do that much. Also interestingly, perhaps coincidentally, "Other Worlds" and "Imagination" are by far the least prestigious, have the most female visibility in their masthead and lettercolumns, and are the only ones in the pile I've read all the way through.)
And nonfiction might take me a long time to get through, and require more brain to understand, but I can stop and start it in small bites without having to reboot my brain afterward. (When I was a kid, sure, I'd keep having to interrupt my novel reading to pretend I cared what was going on around me, but I didn't have to actually engage with it very hard, so that was fine.)
So there's usually something to read that's just as good as, and more convenient than, locking myself out of the universe for half a day.
Plus, because I read novels so much less often, I've gotten in the habit of thinking of them as a treat, something I should wait and read when I can enjoy them properly. I'm an adult, I control my own time now, right? And when I was a kid one of the things I most looked forward to in adulthood was being able to read all I wanted without interruption. So I should save the novels until the right time opens up.
There are other reasons novels are less of a thing for me now, though.
One is that I have friends now.
...okay, no, that sounds even sadder. Rewind. When I got into college, I had access to a) high-speed internet, and b) cable television, and I binged on all the pop culture I'd missed in my childhood of reading novels all the time. And eventually I got into online fandom, too. And I got really used to having familiarity with a shared cultural canon: to be able to make a reference to something I'd seen or read or watched recently, and have the people around me have some clue what it was, or at least be vaguely aware of its existence. Slash/Media fandom especially is like that: we may not all have seen Starsky and Hutch, but we have a shared basic understanding of what it is. We may not all have read the fic where John and Rodney are curtains, but we all understand the context enough to react appropriately when somebody mentions it.
I like being able to do that. I like it when the stories that are important to me are also part of the weave of the community that is important to me. There's a reason most of the novels I have read lately have some sort of particular relevance to the communities I'm in, even if it's just that they're perennial Yuletide fandoms.
In high school I'd pretty much given up on having that kind of easy communication, because even if I did have access to the touchstones that were important to the people I had contact with, most of it was stuff I was aggressively un-interested in. And there were other SF/fantasy nerds in the school, and most of them were reading the same stuff I was: a few super-popular authors, and then trying to backread the whole history of the genre, so that even if we didn't get the cool kids' references (...I was once shown a schedule for a rock concert that listed "Jimmie's Chicken Shack", "Reel Big Fish", "Red Hot Chili Peppers" and "Squirrel Nut Zippers" on the same stage, and said something about the food concessions sounding interesting), we could at least get SF's references to itself. Since high school I haven't even had that: the SF book nerds I have found tend to have interests splintered among tiny little subgenres, so we don't even really share our SF references.
This disadvantage was pointed out to me starkly when I was hanging out with some geeky friends lately and we were having a fun conversation studded with shared references to everything from internet cats to 70s cartoons to Game of Thrones, and I wanted to say something about the SF novel I'd just read, and realized that they would have no idea what I was talking about and if I tried to explain, it would totally derail the conversation.
And, if I get the same amount of enjoyment either way, why would I want to give my time to something isolating rather than something that connects?
When I went to those book-focused SF cons this fall, I thought maybe that was the solution: that this would be a bunch of people who would get all the SF lit references I'd been saving up, these are after all people who are so into reading SF books that they voluntarily go to cons for it, it'll be like going to con.txt and having nearly everyone understand when you talk about merging spirit animals or the prefects' bathroom, right?
But weirdly, no. There was surprisingly little fallback on the long history of SF books at those cons; there was more of it at ChessieCon, oddly, than at CapClave, given that CapClave prides itself on being a con for avid readers. But maybe it does make sense, since ChessieCon is descended from a con for a particular series, so the regulars are more used to having a manageable shared canon. (I have more Thoughts on this, but it's better suited for a post about the cons themselves.)
And, of course, there's the other reason why it's more tempting to read or watch something that has some connection to my online fandom social groups: if I read a novel and finish it, that's it, it's done, no more.
Afugh.
How do they expect people to live like that? Honestly.
If I read something that has a fandom, and finish it, it opens me up to a whole world of fanfic that expands the story in every possible direction, and that is still being actively written, and that will actively encourage me to share my own ideas of what more there is, so I don't have to get rudely dumped out of the world just because I came to the last page, or whatever.
Last pages are so last century. Give me infinite canvas via AO3 and fandom.
There are a couple other reason I came up with on my old drafts of this post, but most of them boil down to combinations of I'm a grownup now, and stories with fandoms are more fun.
Like: A lot of novels I read these days just aren't very good. Part of it is that 95% of everything is crap, and I'm just more practiced lately at filtering out the fanfic crap, and even when I fail at that and accidentally start reading crappy fanfic, it's not 300 pages of crap lurking at the bottom of my bag that I ought to give a fair shake to since I hardly know the characters yet, eh.
But also: I know more now. And I read a lot of nonfiction. And have a store of random facts and contexts that is so vast it sometimes even worries me. I got a degree in geography basically because that's the major where you get to learn about everything in the entire world (plus some bits of space). And as I'm older, I'm also more confident now in what I know and don't know. But the effect of that is that I'm way too good at finding holes in worldbuilding now (and this isn't just an SF thing - other genres if anything tend to have worse worldbuilding.) And it's one thing if your worldbuilding has a few holes, it's another thing if your bad worldbuilding invalidates your entire plot and makes your characterization nonsensical, and the better I get at poking holes in worlds, the more likely that is to be the effect.
Sometimes instead I read stuff by people who are trying to do their research, and I end up going "ok, you know your stuff, you are clearly basing this off this real-world thing. Only the related real-world thing is about 10,000 times cooler and more interesting and complicated and with a more realistically diverse cast, so why am I reading your lies instead?"
And in fanfic, I don't really care if the worldbuilding is full of holes or it's just watered-down history or whatever, because really in fanfic all you have to do is be as good at worldbuilding as canon (usually not hard), and if you screw up badly, eh, it's not that important, because someone else has written another fanfic that is almost the same but gets that thing right (and screws up something else.) And people who read fanfic know what they're looking for, they have context, they know how to look for the next fanfic and the next, they aren't a lonely kid who's been handed something by a grown-up or stumbled on it in a store and is going to latch onto that one story as The One That Makes It All Make Sense. With fanfic, it averages to OK, and it's not that important if it doesn't, because the bar is low, and there's always multiple perspectives on everything.
I have a higher bar for pro fiction. And somewhere I got it into my head that it's more important: every novel is a chance to get it right in ways nobody else has before, and with a pro-published novel it's a story that multiple people in positions of power decided was more important that other stories they could have chosen, and poured tens of thousands of dollars into, and that readers are going to think has authority because it's by a real writer. So when I attempt to read a pro published novel that it turns out is a pile of suck, it bothers me a lot more than when fanfic or selfpub fiction is.
And here's something I definitely blame on online fandom: when I read pro fiction, I am taking a risk that this book is going to spend the whole time screaming at me, "HEY YOU, YEAH YOU, YOU KNOW YOU AREN'T A PERSON, RIGHT? HERE LET'S LIST ALL THE THINGS THAT MAKE SOMEONE A PERSON THAT ISN'T YOU HAHAHAHA AND YOUR FRIENDS DEFINITELY AREN'T PEOPLE EITHER WHY ARE YOU EVEN FRIENDS WITH THEM." I used to be accustomed to just filtering that out and making do. But now I'm used to fanfic, and fanfic is way more likely to scream "YOU ARE A PERSON! WE ARE ALL PEOPLE! WHO SAID YOU AREN'T A PERSON? TELL ME WHO, I'LL FIGHT THEM, I'LL FIGHT THEM WITH THE POWER OF HEALING COCK."
I'm not saying fanfic always does well at that - it's often hamhanded and misguided at best, and frequently exclusionary by carelessness, and some of it's at least as bad as the pro stuff - but someone trying and failing to affirm me is still way better than someone deliberately making a case to exclude me, with the entire weight of the publishing industry behind them and a fair chance at a movie deal. And I'm not saying that all pro fic does that, either - a lot of pro fic I've read recently does give me the same feeling of belongingness that fanfic does - but most of the pro fic that does that are the ones I've read because of fandom recommending them to me. And half the time they turn out to be written by fanfic authors anyway. (I mean. I complained pretty stridently about fic with asexual characters in my previous post, right? But I couldn't even do that post about profic with asexual characters, because so much of what little does exist is way behind even getting to where I can make that complaint about it; a pro story where character A says "I'm ace" and character B says "ok, no sex then" is so lightyears beyond what I expect of profic that it's, well, it's Ancillary Justice.)
And the real difference is that when I start reading a fic, I go in with the expectation that it won't try to spit in my face; when I read a pro fic, even if I'm most of the way through and it seems like it's good, I'm still bracing myself the whole time for the sudden and inevitable betrayal. And that's just tiring.
And then there's the problem with reading a really good novel that I know is really good and that I know I will love: I'm writing more now. I always wanted to be a writer - at least since the first day of first grade when we had a free-writing assignment and the teach took mine away when I wasn't finished, anyway (someday I will write the rest of that story, it had potential) - but it's only since I got to college, and really the last five or six years, that I've been putting out enough words consistently enough that the writing-down itself is a major part of my life, and that I've learned enough about how I write to start to understand it.
And one thing I've learned is that what I'm writing is really dependent on what I'm reading, and if I read the wrong thing, there goes any chance of finishing that wip anytime soon, because my brain will be switching gears. Especially if it's a novel that's going to really absorb me. So I have novels I would love to read that sit next to my bed for months on end because I know that if I read them, all of the stories I'm really invested in right now will fly out the window. (This also applies to the pile of DVDs.)
Nonfiction is safer: or, at least, there's usually a nonfiction book sitting around that's closely enough connected to what I'm writing that I can treat it as research. And with fanfiction, I can usually easily find fanfic with the same characters or mood I'm writing, or at least read something that I know is going to be blandly comforting enough that it's not going to push around levers in my brain.
Not even to mention that any time given to writing is time spent not reading.
So, basically: Read less, write more.
I'm going to keep trying to push to read more novels (I'm really enjoying reading more of them, even if it seems to be coming down to 'Sunday mornings and waiting rooms only'). I want to at least have a good enough list that I feel ok about nominating for the Hugos. I think next year I'm going to try to push harder for pro short fiction, though. And catching up on my shelves at home rather than new stuff.
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Thiiiis. I mean I basically read nothing anyway but if I WERE, like. At least online-writer-people/etc, it seems to have OCCURRED TO THEM I'M HERE? and if I bitch about never being there, at least about half the replies I get will be "gosh I never thought of that" or "YES LIKE THAT" instead of that being maybe five percent vs the waaaaave of shit that basically comes down to "you're not important."
(Which reminds me of my firm assertion that while fandom/etc may not be perfect in any way shape or form about disability, holy fuck are they still on-average worlds away from face-to-face stuff.)
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(And lest anyone think this complaint is specifically about good ol' boys' SF, paranormal romance and non-genre-labelled 'women's fiction' are just as bad, because they tend to be super-into defining 'woman' in a really narrow way and excluding everyone else. At least the good ol' boys' stuff will sometimes just leave me out of it entirely.)
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One of the things that I enjoy about the hidden object games Big Fish puts out is that they at least have, like. Women who have to rescue their families from aliens. Or bad elves. Or women whose big thing is that they are in fact detectives and they have this huge swathe of people who know and recognize them, but no romance. Or are math professors trying to save their students, ffs. And those are still more narrow than they could be.
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I do read some fiction still. The library overdrive app, which I do a lot of reading in lately, tells me I've read 38 novels since early August when I figured out how to set the tracking thing up. There are some more I've read in print and bought and read in the app where I also read long fic, but it's harder to count those. I've been reading more mysteries lately than fantasy or science fiction.
I was really thrown out of a novel recently when the author has the main character paint a door wrong. It's the little things, I guess.
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...you have to explain about painting the door wrong now. Wrong color? Wrong method? Wrong paint?
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I've been unable to really read books, the way I used to read books, for a few years now-- and I've been unsure why. I've attributed it mostly to chronic pain and attention span issues. But it's these reasons here too. I'd rather read fic, or blogs, or watch TV. And I've felt bad about it because being a reader (of novels) was this big part of my identity. I've been trying to let that go.