Why don't I count fanfics as reading?
Diel's Does it count as reading? - Fanfics & Novels has provoked a full reckoning within me. I read the post and realised I don't 'count' reading fics like I do reading books. Why don't I? Why had I never even considered it?
I keep notes on the books I read, which has a secondary effect of counting what I read. Personally I set very little store by that number. But I never put fics into that log so they never get literally counted.
So why don't I count fics? I'm a big fan of fanfiction. The existence of it, legitimacy of it, value of it, act of it. I'm on the 'can be just as good as if not better than published writing' band wagon and have read self / indie pubbed work that was definitely once fic. So it's not like I draw some distinction.
It's not length either. Doing some maths on my bookmarks reveals an average length of 49k, which stacks up against short novels. Some are 130k, an extremely healthy novel. Plenty of fics are far, far, far more.
Perhaps it's the piecemeal delivery of chapters that makes it feel less like a book. But I like how it harkens back to the serialised in magazine's style. And why then wouldn't I count completed works that I was able to read straight through? Why not rereads I had downloaded to my ereader - functionally exactly the same experience?
Is it because it's on the web so feels more like reading an article than a book? Except, as I said above, often it's not on the web. And I do count books I read as webpages from Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg.
Thinking of one example in particular. 120k, complete, I have it as an ebook, the writing is some of the best I have ever experienced anywhere. I fully believe it could and will be tradpubbed one day. Why don't I put it in my reading log?
There is some tracking on ao3 and also the breadcrumbs of comments and so on. So maybe I feel that's 'counting' enough? But my reading log as it stands paints a very incomplete picture of what I actually read. It's falling hundreds of hours short, if nothing else.
I'm not sure I'm going to start adding fanfics to my reading log. But I'm sure as heck going to be thinking about why I don't and what that means.
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