Miscellanea Exotica

When you come right down to it, I am a geek. Specifically, I'm a geek who loves lists. Kind of always have been. When I was, say, about eleven, I decided to pull out a notebook and make a list of all the books I owned, title and author. For the record, I'm pretty sure the number hovered around 800. Yeah, I had a lot of books. But, see, knowing how many books I had, and which books they were, and where I had them stored (I had so many, I had to be rather creative in regards to storage) wasn't enough. I had to know how many pages they all had, and how much that added up to. So I spent days going through every book I owned, writing down the page count, and then even more days going through with a calculator adding it all up. And then I wanted to know how many words that was, so I started trying to come up with an estimated wordcount per page. Looking back on it, I might have been (and might still be) just a little OCD.

When I got my first computer, and discovered spreadsheets and databases, well. Things started getting a little out of hand.

Then I got into fanfic and discovered del.icio.us. My obsession with tagging is actually a little frightening.

In the spirit of my obsession, I spent a couple of days going through the upcoming Big Bang descriptions and posting dates, and created a database of the ones that I thought looked interesting. I'm currently resisting the temptation to start creating multiple tables and adding several new fields of descriptors, like: Have I read anything by that author before? If so, did I like what I read enough to save it to delicious? If not, did I like it, but just not enough to save it? Am I interested in reading the fic because the description sounds good, regardless of the author, or am I willing to look at it because I trust the author regardless of whether I found the description interesting? Or is it a fic with an interesting description written by an author I trust? Am I really eager to read the fic, or is it just something I'll take a look at? And so on.

But anyway. My point is that I figured out how many Big Bangs I'm currently planning on at least attempting to read (112, for the record). And that got me thinking. I still have a bookmark folder filled with fics (mostly Supernatural and CWRPF) that I want to read but haven't had a chance to get around to. The folder is quite large. I'll never ever lack reading material. But, I knew that a few of the fics in that folder were Big Bangs from previous years. So, I decided to go through and tag all them, to see how many. It took all night, but I finally discovered that I still have 38 Big Bangs from 2009, and 11 from 2008 bookmarked and waiting to be read.

But figuring out how many I had waiting to be read was not enough. It got me thinking: how long would it take me to actually read all of those? And wordcounts are much more useful in figuring that out than just numbers of fics (after all, a fic of 100,000 words would take considerably longer than one of 20,000). So I went through every one of the Big Bangs that I have bookmarked, and put the wordcounts into a spreadsheet (separate columns for 2009 and 2008), and added it all up. I have 2,158,612 words (give or take, since most of the given wordcounts are approximate, and even I'm not obsessed enough to go through all of them to get accurate counts, even with my handy-dandy wordcount addon for Firefox) worth of fic to read. In addition to the 112 fics (minimum of 20,000 words each, so a minimum of 2,240,000 words total, with an absolute guarantee that pretty much every single one of them will be over the minimum, with many of them being considerably over) for this year.

And still my obsessive geekery is not satisfied. I have read that the average mass market paperback holds an approximate average of about 300 words per page. My own investigations (which involve pulling random books from my shelf, counting the words from a random line on a random page, and multiplying it by the number of lines on the page) suggest something closer to somewhere between 400 and 500 words per page. In the spirit of compromise, I decided to divide the wordcounts by 400. Which means that for previous years' Big Bangs, I have approximately 5,397 pages worth of fic to read. At an average of perhaps 400 pages per novel, that's about 13.5 novels. For this year, there will be a minimum of 14 novels worth of material. If I assume that the average wordcount for this year will be similar to last year, and that the 49 wordcounts that I currently have in my spreadsheet offer at least a semi-valid sample, then the average wordcount will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 44,053 per fic. So, for 112 fics, that's 4,933,970 words. Which boils down to about 31 novels.

This has actually been kind of embarrassing. I swear, I'm not actually obsessive compulsive. Except possibly where it comes to my delicious tags -- 16 bundles holding 1,498 tags might be a little excessive for most people, particularly given how often I feel compelled to go back through my 800 bookmarks to add entirely new descriptors.

And for those of you playing at home, this post has been 957 words long.

So, I decided to start trolling through some rec lists for J2 fics, particularly Big Bangs, opening promising looking fics in new tabs. Yeah, the tabs got completely out of control, and I now have a bookmark folder with thirty-nine entries.

Keep in mind that these are roughly thirty-nine Big Bangs, or otherwise quite long fics. Most of them are over 20k words, and a few of them are over 100k.

This is getting a little out of hand. No way am I going to have time to read all of this. On top of school, and the actual, honest-to-god books I'm in the middle of. I'd really like to be able to finish The Book of Lost Things.

I'm so tired right now, I just can't think about it. Thank god tomorrow (er, today?) is a holiday. No class for me... though I do have to do homework. Guh.

Well. Bed, for now. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.