Chapter Two: Rules Are Made To Be Broken; We'll Just Call This A Stern Suggestion

So as with any challenge, something about this needs to be hard. Hence I figured out a few rules.

1. No talking about Fight Club.

Officially I can't make this the first rule, having never read or seen Fight Club. But everyone else makes it their first rule, and I'm nothing if not an obedient member of the mindless flock. Right.

2. Since this is based on NaNoWriMo, who deems a novel as "175 pages, 50,000 words", that seems to be a good jumping off point for daily reading. I'm going to revise it to be just 175 pages, since doing a word count would take me three months.

3. For this one month challenge, I'm going to stick with novels. When I go for the big year-long adventure, I'll most likely branch into some non-fiction works, like biographies and history books. Manuals, textbooks, travel guides and plays don't count. Well, maybe plays, but not in November.

4. No reading novels that I have already read in the past. This seems like cheating to me. Slight exception for anything that I may have started but not completed.

I'm asking myself a lot of questions in my head. The most prominent one is "Who shot JR?", but since this doesn't apply to the current endeavor, I'll push it aside for the timebeing. I'm trying to decide, is it going to be just reading 175 pages a day, or actually 30 titles? Inevitably I'm sure I will come across some that are shorter in length than others, and days where I will be finishing one book and then immediately starting another. It would be ideal to find 30 titles whose pages, when added and divided, would average around 175 pages a day, but that's more math than I'm willing to commit to figuring. But I don't want to read 30 short novels, or just be plowing through my 175 pages daily as if it were a loathed school assignment.

NaNoWriMo doesn't say that a participating author must write on a daily basis, therefore, I will not be forced to read every single day. For me that's basically saying "Hey, it's ok if you don't want to breath today", but I can't predict what may happen to prevent me from being able to sit down daily.

I've decided that my first book will be Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. It's been on my list to read, especially of late, but I also recently learned that the book was written for the NaNoWriMo challenge, and therefore seems only fitting.

In the next few days I'm going to time myself reading, just to see what kind of time it will take daily to read 175 pages.

Also, all the links of book titles will redirect you to the Books-A-Million page for that product. Go buy it, so I can continue to work at BAM and buy more books!