9 Ways To Sneakily Get More Reading Time:

Can't find the time to read? Luckily you have me. Here are my top 9 tips for getting more reading done!

1. Buy your spouse and children movie/sports tickets.

 Get them all out of the house at the same time and out of your hair. It’s great if they can all do something together, but be careful not to get roped in as a family event. If you do somehow get roped in, take your book in your bag and feign diarrhea, then leave. Meet up with them again when it’s over. You should have earned at least two hours of reading, even if they were in a public bathroom or the foyer of a cinema.

2. Pretend you’re having an affair, but it’s with a book and you’re lying on a blanket in the park.

Having an affair requires a lot of subterfuge, lying and finding blocks of time to spend with your illicit lover. However, since no one really wants two lovers interfering with their reading time, make your torrid betrayal with a book. Or several. You hussy.

3. Hide in your car in the garage.

What is a car really, but a cone of silence? Four walls, a roof and some chairs that you can sit in and ignore your kids and that bloody computer game they love so much.  They can’t ask you for a drink and snacks if they can’t find you. Just slip into the garage, cuddle up in the car and get a few chapters in before they seek you out, like some hellish, unwelcome game of hide and seek.

4. Say you’re going grocery shopping, order delivery and go to the library.

Did you know you can have groceries delivered these days? Organise your shopping list online, place your order for later that evening then tell your family you need to go to the grocery store because they eat like horses. Only the grocery store is really the library and you get to spent the afternoon in the blessed quiet, surrounded by books. Stop somewhere and get chocolate on the way home too.

5. Fake your own death.

Sometimes, your family and friends can be doggedly persistent or have stopped falling for your other ploys to get them to leave you alone for one goddamn hour. In these cases, I highly recommend faking your own death and moving to another country under an assumed name. Pick a country with a good postal service for all those amazon orders! And, of course, somewhere with picturesque reading spots. New Zealand is nice.

6. Sleeping spells.

If you don’t want to leave everything behind, you just want some time to yourself and that’s not an unreasonable thing to ask for, goddamnnit, then it might be worth investing in some magical supplies and simply casting your own sleeping spells. Like all DIY projects, it can take a bit of time and there is a learning curve. If money isn’t an issue, you can always hire someone else to do it for you, but doing it yourself can also be considered a skill boost which can be beneficial when looking for a raise or a new job. Two birds, one very sleepy stone!

7. Pact with the fairy king.

If you’ve read enough books, you probably know making pacts with fairy kings is a terrible idea. However, if you’d read enough books, you wouldn’t be looking for solutions to let you read more books, would you?

8. Use a time machine to travel back to when you were a kid and had school holidays and used them to annoy your mother so she couldn’t read.

Remember when you were a kid and it was holidays and you were bored so you annoyed your mother who was just trying to put her feet up and read for moment? She wants you to remember that moment. She has been looking forward to this exact scenario for almost all of your life. Revenge is sweet.

9. Become a fourth dimensional being and exist in a reality that transcends time.

I feel like this one is self-explanatory.

If you’re looking for something new to read, can I recommend you take a look at Zaide Bishop’s Bones of Eden Trilogy? Its available for pre-order and has mutant crocodiles, queer themes, far too much killing for a romance series and super intelligent pigs.

You can find them here:

www.zaidebishop.com

Author Voice VS Character Voice

Sometimes people write such awful, villainous characters and people ask: ‘Is the author secretly a horrible monster to be able to come up with this stuff?’ George RR Martin and Karin Slaughter come to mind on my own bookshelf.

Other times, authors try and tackle delicate, depressing, violent or otherwise disgusting topics and just end up coming across like they are in favour of it. Instead of readers being awed by the villain, they’re just disgusted with the author.

So today, I want to talk about the character’s voice, VS the author’s voice. In the hope that you can avoid this particularly treacherous pitfall.

There is, hopefully, a difference between the beliefs and ideals of your characters and yourself, as the author. If all your characters believe what you believe—including your villains—you would struggle to have any conflict and it would, overall, be a very boring story.

However, if you are trying to write a racist character, how do you do it well without coming across, as, well, racist?

I just read this line in a story:

‘They had two of the most gorgeous children you will ever meet; a blonde haired, blue eyed dream of a girl and her strikingly handsome ten-year-old brother.’

Its narrative, not dialogue. So, its information from the author to the reader. Has the author ever met ten year olds? Do they really think ‘strikingly handsome’ is applicable to a ten-year-old? I’m not sure about you, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable, as I suspect I have just read a story written by a paedophile.

Creepiness factor aside, this issue has come up before in my writing group, where material comes across as racist, sexist or otherwise offensive and the author becomes incensed, saying ‘It’s not me, it’s the character!’

However, there is a huge difference between information we are given by the author and the character’s point of view, thoughts and feelings. If you want to make a character racist, sexist or controversial in some way, you want to make damn sure you know the difference.

Let’s take the above example. How would I take the same information and make it not weirdly sexualising of a child? Easily. Take out the sexualising words.

EG: ‘They had two of the most adorable children you will ever meet; a blonde haired, blue eyed angel of a girl and her cutely freckled ten-year-old brother.’

Okay, that’s much more comfortable. But what if we wanted the reader to be uncomfortable? What if the POV character is a paedophile and we want to show that without sounding like a paedophile ourselves? We looked for a deeper POV.

EG: ‘He gripped the chain link fence, watching the children swing higher and higher in the playground. She was the most beautiful little girl he’d ever seen, with her lithe, pale legs and short pink skirt. As the swing, peaked he’d catch a glimpse of blue panties.’

I feel dirty writing that, but you get the idea. However, if I strip out the POV elements, it’s even worse:

EG: ‘She was the most beautiful little girl, with lithe, pale legs and a short pink skirt. As she swung on the swing, you could catch a glimpse of her blue panties.’

Hopefully, you see the difference. Generally speaking, deeper character POV is better anyway, as it fosters a deeper connection between the reader and the character. If you are writing a villain like this, the deeper POV will make the reader much more uncomfortable, which is the goal.

Let’s look at another example:

EG: ‘Unable to fight, the women were all in the basement, where they would be safe.’

This is sexist, because it is implying the women are in the basement because they are unable to fight. What you need to do, is show the women are in the basement because whoever is in charge believes they are unable to fight.

EG: ‘Amid protests, Captain Greggory sent the women and children to the basement, claiming they would be safe there.’

Everyone is going to make a mistake like this eventually. Even my sweetest, most tolerant friends, and my fiercest social justice friends, have tripped up and misworded something in an unflattering way. If someone says, ‘this is racist/sexist/offensive’, don’t argue and explain why it’s supposed to be. Check the attribution, assign it properly.

Remember, give someone ownership of your offensive beliefs, if you don’t, to the reader, they’re YOURS.