This was not a stellar week on the book cover front. I made a small amount of progress, mostly educational. I did put some time into thinking about my books in general. It could take a while to get a decent cover done. I don't want to put the books on hold any more than I have to. I need to figure out a schedule in which I can split time between the covers and the books. I also need to prioritize the books. The B'Vellah War series needs to be finished. The Avatars series needs to be worked on. The non-fiction book needs to be finished and out the door. Non-fiction is where the real money is, but I like doing fiction more. At the moment I don't see myself doing more than the one non-fiction that's in progress, although hypothetically there could be one more after that. I have no idea what it would be. The bottom line is that I need to focus more on the business side of writing. I need to take it from hobby to business.
This week I did proofreading for a friend of mine on a small book. It didn't take overly long, but it took longer than I thought, because it wasn't ready to be proofread yet. Not nearly enough editing work had gone into it. There's a lesson in that about only putting your best work forward and not getting trapped in an artificial deadline. This person had rushed the project based on a deadline that wasn't real. I've done that, too. It's something to learn from and not make that mistake again. It did inspire me, however, to think about my own work, which is why I was thinking so much about it this week.
I've been wanting to do an update on my French progress, but every week something else comes up. This is my week. Around December I had a bad month with my French reading. Part of it was because of how slowly I read it. I can make it through a paragraph and feel good about myself only to hit a sentence that makes me look up three words to even get the gist of what it says. I can muddle through that. The side effect is it's harder to want to put time into passages in books that are largely filler. Dead spots. Slow spots. Spots where the reader is waiting for something to happen. When I'm in one of those places and have to look up a lot of words on top of it, it's hard to grind through it.
I haven't been pushing myself very hard. French is a hobby not a job. For reading, I was trying to read every day when I had a few minutes of down time. Sometimes, I made extra time, if the book was a page-turner or if I wanted to get farther along. Weekdays were easier than weekends. I don't feel like working on the weekend. Weeks and weeks ago, I made a change. I had this idea before that I could read a million words and gain a certain fluency. I passed that a while ago and surely two million. I read Hunger Games and Divergent last year. Those alone were at least 1.2 million words. I don't feel fluent. My reading is much improved, of course. I finally decided a million words to fluency isn't realistic. It might take closer to ten million.
In English, it takes about 12 science fiction books to hit a million words. That's for a word count of 80,000 words. French is much wordier. I don't know how many it takes in that language. The change I made was to give myself a minimum page count per day of what I need to do in order to read at least one book a month. That gives me well over a million words a year. I check the number of pages and divide by 30. For one book, it was 12 pages a day. For another it was 11. I find that in reality I read more than that. Instead of stopping cold, I'll finish a section or a chapter, if I don't have far to go.
By making a schedule of pages, I find it easier to get through those slow spots. I just stop at my page count, and I'm done. :) If the book is interesting, I can keep going. It hasn't been too long, but I'm seeing an improvement in my reading speed and an improvement in my listening comprehension on YouTube. Last year it could take three weeks to get through a book. The book I'm on now is going very fast. It might take two. My feel of the sentences is changing. My understanding of the words is changing. It's hard to explain. It's slowly starting to feel more like it does when I read in English. I'm hoping to get up to a book every two weeks this year. That would give me at least two million words.
By making that small change with the page count, it took a mental pressure off that I was feeling. I felt like I wasn't reading enough. Some days I wasn't, but I know that feeling is wrong. Now I can relax and try to enjoy it rather than seeing it was a chore I have to get through to reach fluency.
Have a great weekend.
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