The Odin Protocol OR The Writer, Goofing Off

[rolanni]

So, last night, I gave myself a scare.  I picked up Cygnus, and pressed the On button, meaning to reading another paragraph or two of Stealing the Elf King’s Roses.  But what came up was not the Galaxy 7.0 Plus home screen, but an Android standing over the words,

DOWNLOAD IN PROCESS
Do not turn off target!

…while in teensy tiny print up in the left-hand corner, it said, ODIN PROTOCOL…and some other things I can’t remember right now.

OhmyghodIbrokemytablet, is what I said.  Steve thought matters were less dire, which is how we work — in any given situation, I believe The Worst and Steve believes the Best.  Rarely are either of us right.

So, anyway, back to the computer to look up ODIN PROTOCOL, which seemed to fall somewhere between dire and awful.  I logged into the Samsung page, tried to email support, but the drop-downs were broken, pinged live chat and got Henry, whose solution to the problem was a hard reboot.  Which, I figured, if I was going to do that, I might as well…just…lean…really…hard…and…long on the Off button, and hold my breath.

…which I did and!  The tablet rebooted and all is well.

Cabana boy!  A glass of wine over here for the grey-haired lady with the cool tech!

Phew.

So, anyway.  This morning, I spent a couple, three hours formatting Legacy Systems (an eChapbook containing “Intelligent Design” and “The Space at Tinsori Light”) for Smashthing.  It is now up and live, right here   Thanks very much to Smashconsumers, for your patience.

“Tinsori Light” has, yes, been taken down from Splinter Universe.  And, no; there’s no paper edition of this volume.  Still haven’t figured it out.

While I was formatting “Tinsori Light,” I bethought me of something a reader told me at Boskone last week.  As I was reading it aloud, she told me, she noticed that there were things going on in “Tinsori Light” that she had missed when she had read it to herself, because she had been so eager to “get the story.”

This intrigues me.  I am not, myself, a fast reader, and, as a writer, I sort of hold the opinion that writers put all those words down in a specific order for a reason.  Certainly, if there were a way not to have to write 100,000 words to hit Novel, and speaking as someone who is well-known to be lazy, I’d be perfectly pleased to do that.

So, you fast readers — how do you read “for the story” and how do you know which words are important?  This is a serious question.

Note:  I’m not dissing the woman I talked to; we had a nice chat about reading protocols and the difference between reading to one’s self and reading aloud to an audience, and she helped me forget that my cellphone was dying, so it was all good; but the conversation did get me wondering…which, yanno, may be less good.

Or not.

So –?

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

Dialogue and non-verbal communications

[daughterofhonor.livejournal.com]

Hey,

Hm, how do I read? I, too, will read certain novels very, very quickly, yours being at the top of that list. I will then immediately turn around and reread it (as in, not even putting the book down before I begin again).

I do not do this with any book making an argument; I cannot read it as quickly. I have to consciously skim-read those (read introduction and conclusion, first and last page of a chapter, first and last paragraphs of a section, first sentence of paragraphs and sometimes first and last sentences on a page in between) if I need to get through them quickly.

I do not read most novels as quickly as I read yours and a select few others. Here's why I read them quickly: I care about the characters. I want to know they're going to be (in at least some sense of the term) okay.

Here's what I read: dialogue and some of the non-dialogue sentences setting up and/or connecting dialogue. Anything in italics (eye is drawn to them, and they sometimes show what the character is thinking). I'll begin to read non-dialogue sentences, and if they're too much description, I end up skipping them. If they're action, I'll normally read that, although sometimes I find myself having to stop and go back and reread a bit more slowly to capture not necessarily the actions that happened, but the sense/meaning/importance of what happened.

Unlike the readers above who liken devouring a novel to creating a movie in their head, I skip the description simply because I *can't* see most characters, settings, whatever in my head. It's enough for me to know whether it's a safe or unsafe, dark or light, posh or barren landscape. I can't remember what people look like (in real life or in novels), I know how they appear to my intuition. In real life, I depend more on non-verbal communication than most people, I think. The Liaden characters blaze to life in my intuitive eye, read through their dialogue, their actions, their responses, and a vague sense of their surroundings and persons. Because of this, your descriptions of the links between life-mates just make sense to me.

I try really hard to like most fantasy and science fiction that others suggest to me, but many of the books are so description-laden and the characters non-intuitive that it takes me months to read them (because it goes.so.slow. thereby making me not so eager to read it) versus mere hours to read yours and Bujold's and Michelle Sagara's and Georgette Heyer's books. I love Tolkien, but I might as well resign myself to lugging large books around for a year if I'm going to reread him. Also, my mind wanders off when too many descriptions abound, making it even slower, since then I have to go back and reread it again.

Because of this intuitive reading, I also have a hard time with certain books that I may, in the end, love. The first time I read C.S. Lewis's _That Hideous Strength_, I had to put myself in the bathtub and not let myself get out until I was done because the sense of evil is so pervasive. Although I love Madeleine L'Engle's _A Wrinkle in Time_, I have a similar problem with it. I had to read the last Harry Potter book straight through before going to bed because I knew that if I stopped in the middle and tried to sleep, all I'd get was a bunch of nightmares because the characters were in too much danger.

That's probably as clear as mud to someone who doesn't read that way, but hey, I tried. :)
Stephanie