Solo

Following this poll, jo_lasalle and I are thinking that we're going to give organising a MDSZ readalong once the English (and German) editions are out a shot. We have a few follow-up questions at this point for those who are interested.

EDITED  TO SAY: some kind souls reminded us gently that not all the volumes come out at the same time, so we're going to have a look at calendars and publishing dates and figure out a reading schedule. Thank you kindly. :)


A few notes on what we're thinking:
theuntamed_mdzs

• We're planning to put the posts up at the comm. (Should issues arise, we can also host them at our own DWs, but we don't expect any ATM.)
• The English translation is going to come out mid-December; because of our own schedules in the run-up to the winter break, if we're the only ones organising it, we couldn't start before early January. Sorry about that!
• We think weekly posts is a good rhythm, but we also couldn't reliably do two posts a week, so the schedule interval isn't part of the poll.
• The posts themselves will be pretty low-frill.
• The comm disallows anon commenting, but Open ID commenting seems possible, so people who don't have a DW account can also comment with a Twitter or LJ account. (Our experience is that people who don't do DW, don't do DW, but, in theory the option exists!)
• Jo will also be reading the German translation in parallel, and will likely make a dedicated thread per post for anything people might want to discuss that's specific to the German edition.
• Commentary and comparison with other translations very welcome! We just wouldn't take point on that because the English and German translations is all the parallel reading we personally can manage.
• - Commentary on the original Chinese also very welcome! We don't speak or read Chinese so we definitely can't take point on that, but any dedicated thread or un-dedicated observations will be received with delight.
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The open questions and subject to the poll:

1) How many chapters per week?

Hitting not too fast but also not to slow for the majority of people will be trickiest, hence the poll.

If you have a look at the Novel Chapter Summaries, you'll see that there are 113 chapters, and they are grouped into themes. A theme is usually between 4 and 8 chapters, sometimes more, even more rarely less.

• We could go for a theme a week, which would be pretty easy in terms of organisation and keeping track, but would also mean some pretty uneven lengths. (Just checking the early themes has a variety of 10k to 26k.) Would mean somewhere between 20 and 25 weeks of discussion posts, which is quite long.
• We could generally go for themes, and combine the really short one, and maybe split the really long ones. Again, would mean somewhere between 20 and 25 weeks of discussion posts, which is quite long.
• We could combine themes where they're short and keep the long themes intact, so higher word count per week, shoot for ~12-15 weeks of posts.
• We could go for a general rough word count regardless of themes. (We admit it's been long enough that we read the Exiled Rebels translation that we don't remember if the themes are really reflected in the narrative structure and how chapters hang together)

2) Spoilers or no spoilers.

Would we assume / ask people to pretend that anyone reading along has only read the chapters so far, or assume that by this point nobody is reading this translation entirely unspoiled, i.e. discussion can include mentions of "future" events?

Would we want to avoid spoilers for other adaptations?

(If the general discussion isn't supposed to have spoilers, there could still be a thread that's specifically spoiler-inclusive and labelled thus, but, it does mean more work, and potentially more bitty discussion.)

3) Day of the week that's good for discussion



Input welcome! Anything important we've missed?