10,000 Pages

About two years ago, I was driving home from work. I had recently joined a writer's group and had made a commitment to myself to start writing more. A story popped into my head. During my 1 hour commute, I was flushing out the details of the story and was ready to put it to word processor as soon as I got home.

I park the car, hop out, run downstairs to my computer and start typing. I spend about an hour working on one paragraph. I was getting frustrated. The vision was in my head, but the words were not coming to me. I reread what I had written - utter crap.

At this time in my life, I was lucky to read 1 book a year. If I spent time on the couch, I found myself more often watching the ample supply of re-runs on our TiVo DVR. I had an epiphany. If I wanted to learn to write properly, I needed to get up off my TV watching ass and sit down on my book-reading ass. I needed to learn how to write by reading good examples of writing (or even bad examples for that matter). I set forth a challenge to read 52 books in 1 year.

Quite a lofty goal, eh? Going from 1 book to 52 books. Still, I didn't want to cheat and read 52 children's books to get it done. So I stated that the average length of book I needed to read was 300 pages. Thus, I changed my goal from 52 books to 15,600 pages.

In 2008, I didn't hit that goal. I came up short. Though I would have hit the goal if I included all the audiobooks that I listened to. I ruled those out because I really don't retain much information from those. I read 33 books and just under 11,000 pages.

Now knowing what a realistic goal might be, I set my 2009 goal for 10,000 pages. I fell short again. I read only 27 books totaling about 8000 pages. Still quite remarkable considering that I was only 2 years removed from 300 pages a year. Granted, in 2009, I had a good reason for distraction - an infant son, but I make no excuses. I am happy with what I achieved.

So now it is 2010 and the challenge began for me again in January. I have just completed Joe Abercrombie's Before They Are Hanged which brings my yearly total to about 1300 pages. I estimate that reading 1 chapter a night can get me to 10,000 pages - though I don't always have the chance to read even that much.

If you're interested in reading more, join me in the challenge. Try to get to 10,000 pages - or set your own goal that is more realistic or challenging for you (maybe more, maybe less). No rules. Set a goal and go!

P.S. The image is of the library at Trinity College where the Book of Kells is kept.