A Brief Look Into The Insanely Detailed World That Is Paul's Mind · 3:48am Apr 28th, 2019

Greetings, you curious readers! Seeing as I frequently get questions regarding when/how things will happen with my weekly review blog, I’ve decided it’s long-past time to show exactly how I organize everything. This blog will be a rundown of my methods for selecting what stories to read, when they are to be reviewed, and so on. It is, basically, a direct walkthrough of my actions, following along as I schedule a blog for this week in realtime. This will likely be a long and winding path, and may bore a lot of you, but it exists so that I can point future inquisitive souls to it instead of having to answer the same questions again and again and again (as I have).

First, the TL;DR version to save the less inquisitive of you a lot of time: Every Saturday I remove the most recent week in my “Reading Schedule” and add a new one, ensuring that I always have six weeks scheduled. Note that this is the schedule for what I will be reading in a given week, not the schedule for when the reviews will come out. The reviews themselves are handled in a separate spreadsheet, simply titled the “Schedule”. The Reading Schedule is itself defined by the Schedule, which gets updated whenever all stories currently on it have been scheduled for reading. both can be accessed from my User Page.

Also involved is a Long-Term Schedule, which always takes precedence. The Long-Term Schedule is somewhat hidden in the Reading Schedule (it can be found on the Data tab on the far right). Any story over 70k words in length gets added to the Long-Term Schedule, which at the time of writing this is booked to August 2020. This might seem excessive, but I learned in the past that big stories are the best way to destroy a schedule and put me behind, so it is entirely necessary.

That’s the most basic summary. Now I’m going to go into the real deal, which is going to be overbearingly detailed to show exactly what I go through for the sake of managing a consistent weekly review blog. Hopefully the lessons I learned from developing this process will serve me well when I finally get around to starting up my own personal review site in (hopefully) the next three or four years.

Part I: Advancing a Week

My scheduling activities are usually on Saturday, although I will sometimes do them a few days early if I know I’m going to be busy over the weekend. The goal is to always have six weeks of reading material prepared. The first step is to clear out the most recent week from my records.

Here we see a full six-week schedule. It can be found in the Reading Schedule in the Data tab. I’ll get into what most of the colors mean later. The important thing for now is that the entire first week, April 21–27, is in a dark green. This color signifies that the material has been read already. Thus, the first thing I need to do is remove this week from the schedule. There are a lot of ways to do this, obviously, but I’ve learned the best way is to highlight everything below that week and drag it up over the old week. This has the advantage of preserving all the code that is running in the background; the alternative is annoying and messy.

Now we can see that the next week to be added to complete the required six week schedule is that of June 2–8. Before we do that, we have to erase the April 21–27 week from the other parts of the schedule.

This is the Long-Term Schedule. It can be found in the Reading Schedule under the Data tab, though you’ll have to scroll to the far right side of the sheet to see it. Any story that is above 70,000 words in length gets put into the Long-Term Schedule. I’m only showing the first 30 weeks of the schedule here, but at the time of writing it is booked straight to August of 2020. All I’m doing now is taking away the very first week (April 21) from the Long-Term Schedule. Since there are no calculations dependent upon this list, I can do so in any way I choose.

And here we are with the first week removed and all other weeks moved up on the schedule. Again, I’ll get to the colors and their purposes later, although I will point out that the grey has shifted from Week 10 to Week 9. This is an important indicator for how far ahead/behind I am, as we’ll see in time.

The last thing to do for this step is move to the Wordcounts tab of the Reading Schedule. This is the tab I use to keep an exact record of how much I read on a given day and week, and is a critical element of my planning. It is also linked to the schedule in the Data tab, which is why the image below show errors.

That top week was April 21–27, i.e. the week I just removed from the Reading Schedule. Once again, it needs to be cleared, and once again, it is best to do it via the drag-drop method to preserve the code in the remaining cells.

And now the first part is complete. We can move on to the the actual scheduling, which begins with my top priority. Before doing that, however, let’s go over how to read the Reading Schedule itself, as this will help understand a lot of its elements at a glance.

Tangent: Understanding the Reading Schedule
The Data tab of the Reading Schedule is the most heavily used piece of my day-to-day business, at least as far as horsewords are concerned. It determines what I am going to read every day and provides other useful information at the same time. Let’s take a look at what the schedule has for me next week:

As we can see, the schedule is large enough to accommodate up to six stories per day. If that sounds like too much, just wait a bit. The goal of any given week is to read a soft average of 30,000 words a day. Hitting that number exactly is impossible, but I can work to make it as close as possible (more on that later). To accommodate this goal and keep everything moving smoothly, I usually divide up larger stories into small pieces, preferably at around 10,000 words/day, which means I can read three large stories on any given day. This week is also unusual in that I broke that rule for Saturday and Monday, but this is made up for by how one story on each day goes unread. Now let’s look at a single set.

Here we see two stories being read in the week, All the Queen’s Horses and Broken: Love. Because these stories are larger than 10,000 words, they need to be divided up into multiple days. The second column indicates what chapters, if any, are being read for the story. So we can see that on Wednesday I will only be reading the first three chapters of Broken: Love. Stories that I finish in one day will get an “N/A” because there’s no need to list chapters. The third column is the actual wordcount of the chosen chapters. For Wednesday, that would be 7,383 words.

What about the colors? Let’s take a look at the entire week once again:

The colors are indicative of when reviews are due. There are six colors used, in order: blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, and red. For this week, we can see that Thursday, May 2 is marked in orange. Also in orange is the story Back and There Again. This tells me at a glance that Back and There Again is set to be reviewed on May 2. By the same token, the story All the Queen’s Horses is in red, indicating that its review is due out with the next red week (which would be May 9, because red comes after orange).

There are exceptions due to unusual circumstances. For example, both Twilight Sparkle’s School for Fantastic Foals: Winter Break and Surviving Sand Island are marked in blue. However, Surviving Sand Island is so incredibly long that I had to start reading it more than six weeks ahead, meaning that it is actually set to release with the blue week after next. Even so, in most situations the color code is pretty straightforward and easy to follow.

Now let’s go into special weeks. For starters, let’s take a look at May 12–18:

Notice how the Thursday has no color and how there generally seems to be less to read? That’s because May 12–18 is a Break Week. Break Weeks always occur after a red week and before a blue week. On Break Weeks I post no reviews and only read half the normal amount of words, or 15,000 a day. That may still seem like a lot for some people, but for me it’s a big break. Now let’s take a look at the week of May 5–11:

Big difference, right? Notice that the first day of the week is highlighted in black. That’s because this week is a Bibliophile Week. On Bibliophile Weeks I give myself the option (but not requirement) to read ⅓ more words, or 40,000 words a day. I rarely decline the opportunity, as these weeks are valuable for keeping me ahead, particularly when a lot of longer stories are coming or I can clearly see I’m falling behind. If my blog schedules are short, I could get as many as four blogs reviewed and prepped to go with just one of these, although it usually comes down to two and some change. In this particular instance, there’s material being read from five different blogs, three of which will be completely finished by the time the week is over.

Next, and what I don’t have a visual example of, is the Workaholic Week. Workaholic Weeks appear with a dark red highlight of their first day. On these weeks I raise the maximum wordcount for a given day to double the norm, or 60,000 words(!). It is extremely rare that I do this, but I’ve learned it’s important to keep them in the schedule regardless. I only go that full length in situations where I need to build a huge lead, such as if I know I’m going to be unable to read/review for a couple weeks due to vacation or something like that. Pretty sure I’ve only done it three or four times. Under more normal circumstances, I’ll sometimes take advantage of these to dump two or three days worth of reading a single story into a day, allowing me to get creative with where big stories fall in the overarching schedule.

Last but not least, let’s take a look at the week of June 9–15:

No, your eyes don’t deceive you, it really is entirely in black. A dark schedule like this, with the first day marked in pink, is a Vacation Week. On these I have no requirement to read anything at all. I didn’t used to have these, but I eventually came to recognize signs of burnout. By setting regularly scheduled Vacation Weeks I found I can nip that problem in the bud easily. By the end of the week I’m usually anxious to get back to the job, whatever fatigue I’d been building lost as I feel the renewed urge to keep going. Ironically, I hate when these show up in the schedule because they also mean no progress.

You’ll notice, however, that this week’s Thursday is marked in yellow. Yes, I still post a review blog on Vacation Weeks. And before anyone asks, no, Vacation Weeks and Break Weeks are not allowed to overlap, although they can be scheduled back-to-back with one another.

That’s all the primary aspects of the Reading Schedule covered. Now we move on to...

Part II: Scheduling Large Stories
The Long-Term Schedule always takes priority over other types, as they are planned months or even years in advance. The first thing to do is figure out what longer stories are set to be read during the week to be scheduled, June 2–8:

In the Long-Term Schedule, the sixth week is always marked a tan color to allow me to quickly locate it. Here we see that the stories Surviving Sand Island and Before the Dawn are scheduled reading for this week. Now let’s go back to the Reading Schedule and find June 2–8.

I’m also including the previous week to help with the example. As we can see, Surviving Sand Island has already been scheduled. This is because it’s extensive length means it requires longer than six weeks of scheduling to get through, and I need all the numbers to maintain my calculations. More on this in a minute.

Before the Dawn is in place but hasn’t been truly scheduled. Combining the two weeks, we can see that Before the Dawn is set for ten total days of reading. Why? The story is exactly 102,232 words, and I want to limit it to roughly 10,000 words a day. 102,232 divided by 10,000 is 10.22, so spreading it out ten days is reasonable.

Now we get to the part of scheduling, which requires me to visit the Wordcounts tab. There I have already created a mini-schedule for the story:

This temporary schedule tells me that last week I was 1,404 words above the desired wordcount for the story on Saturday. On the left is the total wordcount and the wordcount-per-day (102,232 divided by 10). The second column shows the wordcounts-per-day of the previous week, directly linked to the other spreadsheet. The third column is how far ahead or behind I was on reaching the desired overall wordcount for each day. So for the first day I was 1,622 words behind, and the second day I was behind 3,018 words, but on the third day I closed the gap to be only 489 words behind. In summation, these mini-schedules are how I keep from reading too much or too little of a story on any given day.

Now I need to set the mini-schedule up for the next week. This starts with summing how much I read of the story in all previous weeks:

Next, I calculate what the wordcount would be if I was able to match the daily wordcount exactly. In this case, we know that Before the Dawn was scheduled for six days of last week, so that’s 10,223 times 6:

Now I subtract the actual wordcount from the planned to get how far ahead/behind I was at the end of the week. The result should match the last day of the previous week:

Next, I change all the links in the second column to associate with the new week. This will make them all appear blank, since there currently are no numbers in the target week for this story.

As of the image above, I’ve removed the last two days (because there are only four left to schedule) and calibrated the calculations to account for being 1,404 words ahead. All that’s left is to actually schedule the story. Checking last week’s schedule, I can see that I stopped scheduling Before the Dawn at Chapter 16, which had 3,969 words:

I’ll find that point in the story itself and check the wordcounts of the next few chapters:

It is very important to note that just because it says “Chapter 16” in the chapter’s title, that doesn’t mean it actually is chapter 16. My chapter numbers in the schedule are based on how FiMFiction.net counts the chapters. Some authors may have an introduction before their “Chapter 1”, in which case their “Chapter 1” is FiMFiction.net’s chapter 2. There are also bonus chapters, tangents, joke chapters, and all sorts of other things authors do that have to be accounted for. It’s far easier to just go by FiMFiction.net’s numbers than whatever cockamamie nonsense the authors get up to.

Now, according to my mini-schedule above, I need to get at least 8,819 words in on the first day (Sunday) to get where I want to be. Let’s try adding in three chapters and see where that gets us:

Looks like that puts me at ~2,600 words ahead of schedule. That’s quite a bit, so let’s see what happens if I take that last chapter away…

That puts me at 1,491 words behind schedule. The gold standard is to get as close to zero (or perfectly on-schedule) as possible, so in this case it’s better for me to just do the two chapters. I now know exactly what I’m gunning for on the next day. Let me go ahead and mark the chapters in the Reading Schedule proper so I’ll know when the day comes exactly which ones I’m reading.

So now you see how I add individual days. Let me go ahead and finish scheduling Before the Dawn.

Now I have the rest of the story scheduled, and the zero result in the third column of the mini-schedule confirms I made no mistakes. Before the Dawn is now completely scheduled and I have no more need of the mini-schedule, so it gets deleted.

At this point, all the big stories have been scheduled for the new week. Now it’s time to set up the Wordcounts table for the new week.

Part III: The Wordcount Table
As you’ll recall from Part I, I went and removed the Wordcount table for the previous week. Now I need to add the table for the new week. The Wordcount table is exactly like the mini-schedule for Before the Dawn, except that it is for the entire week rather than a single story. Let’s start with the basic dates setup.

Should be self-explanatory. Next, I set up the daily wordcount calculator. This is nothing more than an independent summation of the wordcounts for each day:

Notice that I include all six story blocks, regardless of whether there are any numbers in them. At this point I have no way to know where the stories will fall, so it’s important to be all-encompassing. Anyway, once that’s done I have the current wordcounts based only on the longer stories I already scheduled.

Now let’s sum up what all those wordcounts lead to. Notice that I’m pulling this number from the Reading Schedule, not the summation I just did, as I only ever want this specific calculation to show the results of the bigger stories.

Now let’s see how that averages out on a day-by-day basis. This is as simple as dividing the calculated total by seven.

It’s time to set up the calculations for the week. This works exactly the same as the mini-schedule calculations, so I’ll just add them in now.

So now I know exactly what my overall wordcount for the week is, the average wordcount per day, how far ahead/behind that wordcount I am for every day, and the pretty little zero at the end means there were no mistakes. Of course, we aren’t even close to done. This was the easy part. It’s now time to include the smaller stories from the blog schedule.

Part IV: Adding Shorter Stories
To start that off, we need to determine how the total number for the week fares against my weekly allotment of horsewords. This is a normal reading week at 30,000 words/day, so the total wordcount for the week is 30,000 times 7, or 210,000 words. Subtract our 110,489 from that to get:

So now we know that I have 99,511 words left with which to schedule more stories for the week. Now, at long last, it’s time to visit the Schedule, which holds the actual review blog schedule:

Normally, the Schedule shows the next six blogs that are to be released, including every story in those blogs and their total wordcounts. What week are we looking for? The one that is farthest along on the schedule, which more often than not isn’t going to be shown by default. Fortunately, I’ve set up drop-down boxes to make finding that blog easier. Note that all six weeks have this drop-down, so I can use any one I want for the purposes of scheduling. Opening up the drop-down reveals the furthest blog scheduled is for June 27.

Selecting June 27 from the drop-down menu will show all the information for that week:

Right away, I know that June 27 is a red week (so it precedes a Break Week) and has 71,961 words’ worth of stories assigned to it. Every blog is 10 stories.

Like the Reading Schedule, the stories are color-coded. Stories in yellow are to be read, or will start being read in the case of longer ones, within a week. Stories in green have been read and reviewed already. Stories in grey have been added to the Reading Schedule but are more than a week away from being read. Stories in white have not been scheduled at all.

The only story left in this week for me to read is Painted Jack, which is only ~5,600 words long. Obviously, that’s nowhere near the ~99,500 words I need to fill up my queue. This means it is time to add another blog to my schedule. Which, in my opinion, is the fun part.

Yes, yes, I know. I’m weird.

Part IV-B: Adding a New Schedule
The first thing I do is visit my Records tab in the Schedule. The Records tab holds the raw data of each of the last 20 blogs and is where the main page gets its information to form those nice, neat tables the dropboxes conveniently let me navigate. Here’s just a glance:

That’s two stories of information over 20 weeks. Multiply it by five horizontally and you get an idea of how big it really is. Anyway, I’m first going to delete the top week (January 24). I like to keep it at no more than 20 weeks to keep the drop-down menus from getting impractically huge.

I then add the new week. Normally this would be the last date in the list plus seven days, but June 27 is a red week. There is no blog posted on the week after a red week, so instead I have to add 14 days:

The system now knows July 11 is one of the weeks and will automatically allow me to select it from the drop-down menu. Doing so produces a blank table (note how the snazzy coding colors the date appropriately too. Pardon me while I preen).

Now I need to get the stories to populate the table. For this, we go to the Miscellany tab. Scrolling a little down from there, we find The Lists (queue angelic hymns).

Explaining the inner workings of The Lists will be covered in a later section. For now, all you need to know is that I’ve pre-selected the stories that will go into the coming week. The pre-selected stories are the ones colored pink (or Light Magenta 3, as Google refers to it). I will now add these stories to the July 11 blog schedule. Stories are always added in the order: RiL, Known Authors, Requests, Recommendations, and Sequels/Completes.

The first story on the RiL list is Melody’s Island. It’s this one, in case you want to follow along:

TMelodys' Island

Here's my take on story-fying "Tropical Octav3". I hope you enjoy it.

Cyanjames2819 · 17k words · 10 0 · 982 views

For those of you wondering how I know a specific story is the one I want when I’m only going by title, I place stories on bookshelves for the lists. If a story isn’t on one of my bookshelves, I know it’s not the one I’m after. If I can’t find it from a quick, traditional search, I can always browse the appropriate bookshelf to find it.

Alright, so let’s head back to the Records tab and add this story. It’s pretty simple, really: I just need the title, author, wordcount, and type. Once those are added to the Records tab, the schedule will update appropriately.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to do this for nine more stories. BRB…

Done! As we can see, this is set to be a big week with ~700,000 words read for it. The majority of that comes from Surviving Sand Island which, as we saw earlier, is already scheduled. With that in mind, we can go ahead and grey it out. Note, however, that I can’t just change the color. No, I use Conditional Formatting to do this. Why? Because any one of these six tables can and eventually will hold the same data as the blog date gets closer and closer to air time, so it’s easier to have tables do that for me automatically. So...

Doing some quick math, that leaves 217,272 words to work with. But then we see the story Wayward Sun is over 70,000 words in length. That means it’s already pre-placed in the Long-Term Schedule, which in turn means we don’t have to worry about including it in our current efforts. Taking that out leaves us with 135,848 words. Even without combining that with Painted Jack’s 5,574 words, we have plenty to fill up our reading schedule.

Part IV: Adding Shorter Stories (Continued)
Now we have to pick out what stories will go into the week we’re trying to schedule. Painted Jack’s in by default. We’ll add it now by putting it in the same calculation we used earlier to determine the total wordcount for long stories in the week. Heading back to the Reading Schedule’s Wordcount tab…

I see what I have left to work with. Let me head back to the June 27 blog and mark Painted Jack as scheduled…

So June 27 is set. Now I pick from the remaining stories available in the July 11 blog. This is entirely arbitrary, so let me just select a few…

There. I like to tackle bigger stories first and use smaller ones to fill in gaps, so that’s what I did here. Adding Discord: End of Empires puts me over the 30,000 words per day limit, but only marginally, so I’m fine with it.

Now I’m going to set up temporary calculations to determine on a daily basis how close I am to the 30,348 words per day average I’m getting. Unlike the mini-schedule for Before the Dawn earlier, this time I need to keep in mind how far ahead/behind I am and how close I am to the daily average, which is why I add this set of calculations. I can’t reasonably satisfy both limits, but it helps to know both at any given moment due to how the numbers play out (as we’ll soon see).

Alright, time to actually add those stories to the Reading Schedule! I start with the biggest one and work my way down. In this case, the biggest is Episode 2: The Return to Flatts. That would be this one, for those of you trying to follow along:

TEpisode 2: The Return to Flatts

With the death of Fluttershy, Discord confronts the Princesses as to their treatment of those deemed to be the unicorns with the abilities of "old magic". Meanwhile, Edger, Pinkie Pie, and Caramel find their paths join in one place.

mr lovecolt · 37k words · 20 3 · 1k views

At ~37,000 words, I don’t need to think much to know it’s going to be spread out over four days. Fortunately, the chapters are of a reasonable enough size that scheduling it should be easy. Shifting between it and the Wordcount table, it looks like the story will fit nicely in the Wednesday–Saturday range, so I’ll slip it in there. Wednesday has ~42,000 words available according to the ahead/behind numbers, but only ~9,700 according to the daily wordcount limit, so we’ll use that as our target. Let’s add the first three chapters to Wednesday and see where that gets us…

That puts us at 1,125 words over the average limit. Given that the third chapter is 3,555 words long, it’s a given that taking it out will put us farther away from that nice zero we’re after, so this will be fine.

Now I’ll continue this process for the rest of the story. Sparing you the details, here are the results:

Notice that I stuck to the 10,000 word/day limit, even though I had more than enough room to blow past it in the last three days. This is usually to give myself room to maneuver with the other stories, but in this case I saw a convenient opening and grabbed it. You learn to do that once you’ve been practicing for a while. Anyway, you now get the basic idea, so I’m just going to fill in the rest of the week:

Sunday is unusually high in wordcount, but I’m okay with that. Really, Sunday’s the best day for it since it’s usually pretty open for me, so when I get in a bind I tend to drop the troublemakers there. I also apparently have a typo somewhere, as my final result is 10, not zero. But I’m okay with this. I might be proud of my Twilight Sparkle-ness, but even I have my limits.

The schedule is now complete for the week. I can delete the temporary calculations on the right, because they are no longer of any use. I can be satisfied that another week of scheduling has been—

Wait! We’re not done! There’s still the front of the Reading Schedule, the part that all users see first and, as I’ve learned from past conversations, the only part a lot of people tend to look at. What am I talking about? This thing:

This complicated little marvel shows a highly simplified version of the Reading Schedule. I’ve learned that most people aren’t like me and don’t need or want to see the details. All they want to know is when I’m reading their story and when will its review come out. This page is for them. I’m not going to go into how it works, only that it took me a lot of experimentation to make it auto-update the entire page and consistently show the next five weeks of my reading material at a glance.

But there’s one part that I couldn’t automate: formatting for new blogs. Basically, every time I add a new blog week to the Schedule, I need to add those stories to the conditional formatting for this page. All ten of them. Well, nine in this case; Surviving Sand Island was already added out of necessity. Luckily, the coding already exists on all the cells, so all I have to do is copy the rules once for each story. And yes, I do routinely go in there and delete the formatting for read stories. Otherwise I’d have a huge list of outdated material.

And that’s that. Now the scheduling is done. You’re probably sighing in relief, glad to finally be finished with all this nonsense and go do what you want to do, right? Hold the phone, buddy! There’s still one more step that needs addressing.

Part V: The Lists
Now that the Reading Schedule for July 11 is done, it’s time for me to pre-select the stories that will go into the week after and update my lists. You remember The Lists, right?

Thought not. Well, I didn’t forget, and the first thing that needs doing is to clear out the stories I just added to the blog schedule:

Much better. As you’ve undoubtedly noticed, here too is a color code. Orange stories are over 70,000 words long and thus fall into the Long-Term Schedule. Yellow stories fall into the same category, but haven’t been applied to the Long-Term Schedule yet. I’ll get into why in a minute. Blue stories are over 10,000 words in length but under 70,000, which get special treatment. Pink stories (there’s that Light Magenta 3 again) are stories that have been selected for guaranteed inclusion in the next blog to be scheduled.

So let us begin this. As always, Long-Term Stories get first priority. I only apply one per week to the Long-Term Schedule. To explain why, let’s take a look at the Long Set list:

This is just a tiny look at the overall set. It was made as a means of controlling what kinds of stories go into the Long-Term Schedule, with the intent of preventing any one type from going in over and over and over again and locking other types out. In this case there are only two available and both are the same type, so it doesn’t matter. But what happens if I uncover a 70,000+ RiL story? Or a Known Author story? I wanted to make sure every type of story gets a chance.

Why is this so important? Because, as I mentioned much earlier (I’ll forgive you if you forgot), at the time of writing the Long-Term Schedule is fully booked straight to August 2020. That’s sixteen months out. Any story that goes into that list already has a huge wait. Filtering what goes in is the only way to provide at least some assurance that stories from all lists have a chance of not getting pushed back even more ridiculously than they already will be.

Anyway, Storm Vine is on top of the list now, so let’s add it to the Long-Term Schedule. That would be this story:

TStorm Vine

Tempest Shadow returns to her village to help run her family's vineyard. Along the way she tries to make amends with her family and friends.

zalla661 · 84k words · 209 8 · 3.4k views

Let’s go all the way to the bottom of the Long-Term Schedule and see what our options are.

Since Storm Vine is only ~80,000 words long, I’ll round down and call it a one-week story. I can put that pretty much wherever I want safely, so let’s start it in the same week as The Sword Coast:

I colored it red to indicate that the review will be due the week of July 19, 2020. Sorry, zalla661. Hope you’re still around at that time to read it.

So that’s done. Let’s remove it from the Long Set and color it orange on the Lists.

You’ll note I didn’t immediately bump The Freeport Venture to the top of the set, which is to give other stories of different types an opportunity to appear first.

Alright, next step. We need to determine what the next review blog to be scheduled is and if there are any Long-Term stories that will appear in it. Heading back to the top of the Long-Term Schedule gives us the info we need:

First, note that I’ve changed the grey number from Week Nine to to Week 11. This is because we just finished scheduling that week so that’s where I am on the overall review schedule. Five week lead. Not bad.

Anyway, the week of Thursday, July 14 is the next one that will need to be scheduled. That’s a cyan week, and The Mailbox Compilation is colored cyan, so it will be due out that week. Let’s go ahead and mark it in the Lists.

One down, nine to go.

Now we need to prep our mini-schedule.

The Mini-Schedule is a little tool I put together, similar to the Wordcount Table, that helps me keep a given review week’s wordcounts to certain limits. This is a relatively new feature I developed to help me have better control of the wordcounts going into each week. The ideal is to keep the total wordcount below 90,000, not counting Long-Term stories. Why 90,000? It’s less restrictive than 70,000 but small enough that I can reliably get a blog-and-some-change out of each reading week, assuming the Long-Term stories aren’t taking up too much space. Exceptions are made for blue weeks, which I sometimes use to play catch-up and take out a lot of big, 10,000–60,000 word stories (which explains why the blue week we scheduled earlier was ginormous).

Anyway, one slot has already been taken up by The Mailbox Compilation, which is why the limits are set to nine stories in the screenshot above. This is a fairly common setting, which is why I set the cutoff for mid-length stories at 10,000 words. Now we need to pick nine stories, preferably spread out among the list types, that will hopefully fit the 90,000 word limit.

First, I’ll check my Medium Set of stories:

Yeouch, Hybrids is big. I normally gun for two blue stories per blog, but with a story that big it may be tricky. I’ll go ahead and add Hybrids but will hold off until I see what the other stories offer.

Already, we’re down to ~52,000 words left to play with, and there are still eight stories to go. I’m going to slightly prioritize RiL stories this time, if only because I’ve got significantly more of them than any other type, so I’ll try to get four of them (including The Mailbox Compilation). The first option is At the Heart of the Blizzard, so let’s check it out.

TAt the Heart of the Blizzard

A ski trip promises to be a fun and exciting vacation for Sunset Shimmer and her friends. But when the girls are caught in a blizzard, the house they find to shelter them might not be as benevolent as it appears.

Oroboro · 6.7k words · 424 11 · 7.2k views

Oh, an Oroboro story! Score. ~6,700 words? That’s well within my range, so I’ll go ahead and add it.

Moving on in similar style, I go ahead and add Basking and Diyoo Wan’ Thum?, both of which are well below my 10,000 word Medium Story limit. I next move on to the Known Author list, from which I’ll try to add three stories. I’ve already got Hybrids as one and the rest are all blue stories, so I’ll have to start at the first uncolored story. Poison Apples checks out, so on the list it goes.

With ~38,000 words left, it’s looking like it’s safe to add another blue story from the Known Authors list. Rather than add my third KA story to the mini-schedule, however, I’m going to check my Request and Sequel/Completed Stories lists, just to see what they have to offer.

A-ha! And here’s why I did that: How to Remove a Unicorn Tooth is 11,000+ words long. I didn’t know that going in. Because of its length it qualifies as Medium (blue) story and gets added to the Medium Set:

This means it has to go before Tirek is Doomed, which I might have scheduled first had I not checked. The next (and last) Request story is Break Away: The Alicorn Amulet Collaboration, which is a whopping 49,000 words long, so there’s no way it’s getting in this week.

All that’s left is to check this Sequel, Braiding. It falls under the limit, so it gets added.

At this point I’ve still got ~31,000 words I can add to this schedule and three stories left with which to do so. At this point it’s clear to me that How to Remove a Unicorn Tooth and Tirek is Doomed can both easily fit, so I’ll go ahead and add them.

I’ve only one slot left and less than 10,000 words to go. I’ve four RiLs, one request, one sequel, and three KAs. I think I’m going to add another RiL, for the same reason as before: abundance. As expected, the ridiculously named OH CRAP OH CRAP OH CRAP OH CRAP falls well under that limit, so…

And so I’m done. We’ve pre-selected ten stories so that if needed I can quickly grab them and add them to the Reading and Review Schedules next Saturday, while staying under my wordcount budget.

Conclusion
That’s it! I have now revealed in grueling, unnecessary detail exactly the kind of thing I go through every Saturday just for the sake of my review blog. Rather extensive, isn’t it? It took me all day to write this, but on a normal Saturday it usually takes an hour, two tops if I fit a lot of blogs into a single reading week. I know it’s a lot and I fully expect 0.01% of anyone who starts this to get to the end, but I hope it at least allows some people to appreciate what I’m doing.

And even if they don’t, my inner Twilight Sparkle is satisfied. What more do I need than that?

Anyway, I’ve spent way too long making this blog when I should have been writing horsewords, so I’m going to end this here. Feel free to ask questions or tell me I’m a total freak and/or nerd (both are perfectly accurate). I’ll see you in the next review blog.

Report PaulAsaran · 947 views · #Blog Tutorial #Paul is Insane #Paul Needs a Spike

Comments ( 16 )

Viewing 1 - 50 of 16
- Newest First
- Oldest First

SpitFlame

SpitFlame #1 · Apr 28th, 2019 · 7 · ·

Jesus Christ.

Viking ZX

Viking ZX #2 · Apr 28th, 2019 · 3 · ·

Wow. This is a seriously impressive look at both the amount of work you put in and how much work you put into just doing that work. I'm amazed you still have time to write!

Ice Star

Ice Star #3 · Apr 28th, 2019 · 3 · ·

It should be illegal to be this organized.

PaulAsaran

PaulAsaran #4 · Apr 28th, 2019 · · ·

5050491
It’s only on Saturday, and it normally only takes a couple hours. The actual reading only takes huge amounts of time (on normal weeks) if I have to write a lot of reviews that day. Proper time management helps a lot, obviously.

PaulAsaran

PaulAsaran #5 · Apr 28th, 2019 · · ·

5050555
Coincidentally, you now know when Wayward Sun’s review is coming out.

If it is a crime to be this fabulous, I’ll accept the jail time with a grin.

derpicdn.net/img/2012/6/23/16113/large.png

Merc the Jerk

Merc the Jerk #6 · Apr 28th, 2019 · 1 · ·

KorenCZ11

KorenCZ11 #7 · Apr 28th, 2019 · 1 · ·

5050485
Seconded.
5050564
If I had the time management skills you do, I would be in a much better place in life, goddamn.
Can I draw you cover art? My art might not be as good as some of the others you have, but I kind of want to. Especially if you have something that still needs it.

PaulAsaran

PaulAsaran #8 · Apr 28th, 2019 · · ·

5050616
You mean you’re just... offering some? I never thought I’d see the day someone just wanted to draw cover art for me, but I’m not going to turn up my nose at the suggestion. Thanks!

I’m satisfied with the vast majority of my cover art as it stands, but I can think of one story that might be a suitable test of your artistic talent:

EDinky Doo and the Quest for the Sacred Treats

Too sick to protect Ponyville, the Paper Knight sends her noble squire Dinky to find the Sacred Treats before Nightmare Moon arrives to eat all the foals of Ponyville. A true Nightmare Night legend!

PaulAsaran · 18k words · 57 3 · 1.2k views

Honestly, this is one story that could use something different from what it has, but finding something that suits it is next to impossible. If you’re as interested as you claim, then I offer this story up as a trial. I have no set ideas or intentions, so read it, think about it, and shoot me a proposal. We can hash out the details afterwards. Have fun!

KorenCZ11

KorenCZ11 #9 · Apr 28th, 2019 · · ·

5050644
Aye. Shouldn't take me too long. I finally finished an old piece of mine that I had worked on sporadically over almost half a year and I'm in a drawing mood with nothing to work on.