This is a Friday meme now hosted by Patricia of FiktiveWelten. Every week she asks a question that you can answer. Everyone who would like to participate, just answer her question, link to her blog, and write a comment under her post to let the others know that you are participating. The entire rules you can find here.

This week she wants to know if I have a review ritual – like reading and making notes during the reading process, or reading and writing notes kind of simultaneously and then writing the review. And she would like to know if I write it first on a notepad or type my text directly into my laptop.

Well, I start writing my review the moment I get the book. No, not right away, but when I find five minutes between other things, I open a word sheet for it, type in all the basic data, and my first impression about the cover. Save it for the moment, and do whatever my schedule for the day is telling me I have to do, too. That can mean that I have to finish another book first or do some other stuff. Though reading is my passion, it is not my entire life *laugh*

Then I start reading. And yes, I always make notes during the reading. I have an extra notepad and a pencil lying around and I carry them with me when I leave the house. Where I go, the book goes. But I actually make my notes in kind of an automatic mood. I am not really thinking about it. Even at night when I wake up because a thought hit me. When that happens, I grab my notepad half asleep; write down whatever my subconsciousness is telling me, turn off the light and go back to sleep. Only the next morning, when I look at the notepad I see what worked inside me during the night. When I am finished with the book, I lay it on my desk or if it is at night, on my nightstand and write my stars – which I give by instinct or if you like that more, how I feel at that particular moment – and then I sleep one night over it.

Always.

The next day I take all my notes, turn on my laptop, and start writing. In all those years since I am reviewing books, next year in March it will be nine years, I figured out that I need to write my reviews the very next day. Otherwise, I am risking changing the mood I am in and that makes it more difficult for me to write how I feel about it.

Writing the review per se is easy. I type how it flows right out of my fingers – if I may say so. It happens very rarely that I change something. I do not breed over it for days or rephrase something.

Never have.

I learned very early that my best reviews are those ones, which I wrote in one swoop.

But don´t think I am not looking over them one last time. I do that. When my review is finished I usually do something completely different before I go back and put them into the system. But the work at that point is more correcting spelling mistakes, setting a missing comma, or look for a synonym if I used a single word too often within the same passage or the review at all.

And when all that is done, I enter everything into the system and save it … Then I start reading the next book – and the same procedure begins all over …


How do you handle your reviews?



Happy reading & reviewing


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2 comments:

  1. Oh well, I really should make notes during reading aswell. The whole review procedure would be much easier. Plus I better should write my rewiev immediately after finishing the book. And maybe I should try and type it directly in the system, much faster ...

    I have to think about this ... ;o)

    XOXO
    Patricia

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only because that´s the way how I handle the reviewing process, doesn´t mean it works for everyone. Just do it the way you feel good - and everything is fine :-)

      Delete

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