![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenicseasI wrote a post last month where I talked about my shifting genre preferences, both in reading and writing. This month I'd like to write something similar, except with regards to the length of stories I'm reading these days.
I started reading SFF short fiction in 2020, mostly because I was unemployed, no one was hiring, and I had very little better to do with my time. It didn't really ramp up until 2021, where I read almost a thousand short stories. That number has decreased since and has slowed down to maybe 100 per year for the past two years. I suppose that number is still a lot, but I typically read 3-4 of these stories at a time, and that takes maybe an hour per week, so it's not a particularly large time commitment.
Last year I decide to take the time and start reading actual books again, and I've been doing that almost every single day since May. This book-reading time happens before I go to bed, and it lasts until I start getting tired. That could be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour.
Ever since I started reading books again, my desire to read short fiction has waned significantly. There are plenty of weekends where I'll straight-up skip reading any short stories – not because I don't have the time, but because I just don't want to.
I've been thinking about unsubscribing to some magazines that don't suit my current preferences in order to make things more manageable, but the problem remains that, for the most part, I just don't want to read short stories. I've barely read any books for the past ten years, and I really want to get caught up on that.
If you've been following my blogging for any amount of time, you'll have noticed the Recommendations posts I put out regularly. I used to do one every month, listing all the short stories I read that month and thought others should read. Now I do one every quarter, and that's entirely related to the lessened amount of short fiction I'm reading these days. Some months, I don't have anything to recommend.
So, if I switch to prioritizing books and only read a few short stories here and there, the Recommendations posts are going to look a little different. I don't know if I'll be doing them quarterly after this year. Maybe ever half a year? Maybe at the end of the year?
Yes, it's February and I'm already thinking about how to do things in future years. I know I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
I started reading SFF short fiction in 2020, mostly because I was unemployed, no one was hiring, and I had very little better to do with my time. It didn't really ramp up until 2021, where I read almost a thousand short stories. That number has decreased since and has slowed down to maybe 100 per year for the past two years. I suppose that number is still a lot, but I typically read 3-4 of these stories at a time, and that takes maybe an hour per week, so it's not a particularly large time commitment.
Last year I decide to take the time and start reading actual books again, and I've been doing that almost every single day since May. This book-reading time happens before I go to bed, and it lasts until I start getting tired. That could be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour.
Ever since I started reading books again, my desire to read short fiction has waned significantly. There are plenty of weekends where I'll straight-up skip reading any short stories – not because I don't have the time, but because I just don't want to.
I've been thinking about unsubscribing to some magazines that don't suit my current preferences in order to make things more manageable, but the problem remains that, for the most part, I just don't want to read short stories. I've barely read any books for the past ten years, and I really want to get caught up on that.
If you've been following my blogging for any amount of time, you'll have noticed the Recommendations posts I put out regularly. I used to do one every month, listing all the short stories I read that month and thought others should read. Now I do one every quarter, and that's entirely related to the lessened amount of short fiction I'm reading these days. Some months, I don't have anything to recommend.
So, if I switch to prioritizing books and only read a few short stories here and there, the Recommendations posts are going to look a little different. I don't know if I'll be doing them quarterly after this year. Maybe ever half a year? Maybe at the end of the year?
Yes, it's February and I'm already thinking about how to do things in future years. I know I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
Tags:
