utter randomonium

It’s funny, you know. I cannot imagine reading a book a week on any kind of regular basis, and yet that’s pretty much exactly what I do. I mean, sure, if you separate paper books from audiobooks, I average a little under 8 days and a little over 10 days per book, respectively. But if you add them together, I finish a book roughly every 4.5 days.

Of course, this challenge isn’t for folks like me, for whom reading is already a major part of daily life. I could probably finish a book in a week if I only read one at a time. I suspect many of my readers are in a similar situation. But if you would like to read more, this is a good list of tips. (And it’s a pretty humorous post to boot.)

The 50 page rule, however, is not one I can stick to. That would mean never reading for less than an hour at a time (I’m a very slow reader), and that’s simply not possible. But I suppose it’s a reasonable goal to strive for if you have trouble finishing books.

You’ve heard of the 3-Day Novel Contest and 24-Hour Comics Day; now there’s a 24-Hour Zine Thing: create a 24-page zine in 24 hours. The difference is that you can do it anytime within the month of July, which is actually a good idea, since you don’t have to worry about missing it for an entire year just because you happened to have a wedding to attend on a certain Saturday (or whatever).

Yes, I know this is late notice, but I just heard about it myself. I won’t be participating myself (my July is filling up fast), but I wanted to share it in case anyone was interested. My zine-making experience is quite limited; please let me know if you do it. (I like to live vicariously, what can I say?)

Hat tip to TangleCrafts for the heads up.

I totally slacked on this and forgot to post this in time for people to actually sign up, and for that I apologize, but I suppose I might as well let y’all know what I’m up to this month: Thing-a-Day. Based on an idea by the incomparable Ze Frank (whose videoblog The Show was simply excellent and I miss it), the challenge is to create something new every day for the entire month of February and post it publicly on the community blog. It doesn’t have to be a big thing – I plan on doing a small drawing each day in a new sketch book I got for free – but it does have to be something and it has to be completed. (At least, I assume it does. You can’t really claim to have created something until it’s finished, right?)

Anyway, I’m participating. This year’s blog format is on posterous, so everything’s going there. I’m uploading them to my gallery as well, because I am just that kind of exhibitionist. The scans aren’t very good but that’s not really the point. The only really irritating part of all this is that I appear to be in a much later (earlier?) timezone than posterous, meaning that my 3am post on February 1st was timestamped the 31st. What do folks in Europe do? Oh well.

If I remember, I might post a month-end wrap-up about the experience, but if this post’s slackitude is any indication, you can expect that it to actually happen sometime around mid-April.