Nothing But Reading Challenges discussion
The Floor is Lava
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Team Lava No More
Round 1 Countdown: 10. First published on the 10th of a month
9. A book with at least nine characters (need to have a speaking part, do not need to be main characters)
8. A book that has a carnivorous animal on the cover
7. A book written by an author who has published at least seven books (as listed on Goodreads)
6. A book that is number six in the series
5. A book that was first published in the 1950s
4. A book where the audio version has at least four narrators
3. A book that is part of what was originally a planned trilogy, but became a longer series (can include .5 books added later)
2. A book that has two authors (as credited on Goodreads)
1. A book which is the author's debut novel
Hi team!I think we all know one or two people on the team but I thought I would start us off with some introductions. I live in OKC with my daughter (6 years old), our large and hairy Great Pyrenees mix, and a mischievous tabby cat. My daughter and I are both love cooking shows, travel, and she pretends to like to garden with me even though she lasts only about 15 minutes. In my professional life I work as the Director for Youth, College, and Young Adult Ministries for the Episcopal Church in Oklahoma which basically means I run programming state-wide for all of our congregations and do a lot of consulting work. I travel quite a bit but I'm home until mid-September thankfully. I read a lot of historical fiction, literary fiction, and the occasional fantasy/sci-fi but will try anything once.
hi team! I live outside of Pittsburgh with my husband and 2 of my kids. My oldest son is a marine out in California. We have our own mini zoo with a dog and 4 adventurous cats. Obviously, I love to read but I also love to scrapbook and do other crafts as well. I previously ran a document center for Ricoh & Canon before that (also a certified wedding & event planner) but I decided to stay home with my kids and pursue my own event planning business later. We cyber school our 2 younger children and it is one of the best things we have ever done.
I read mostly anything except nonfiction. My favorites tend to be fantasy & dystopian. I am addicted to GR challenges and I can't wait to dig into this one with you guys.
Hi team!I live in New Jersey, bottom half of the state across the river from Philadelphia, with my husband and our 2 cats. I currently work in finance which feeds my spreadsheet addiction. I don't have any travel planned during the course of this challenge, unlike wheel, so I won't have to worry about chunks where I can't read.
I mostly read romance, mystery/thrillers, and urban fantasy with the occasional sci-fi thrown in. I typically don't read non-fiction or any fantasy not set in our world, but I will pick one up if the premise interests me enough.
In addition to my own collection of books, I have a great library system as well as Kindle Unlimited so I can usually find something to fit most tasks.
Hiiii!! I’m so glad to be a part of this team. I am currently living just north of Phoenix, Arizona. I say currently because my family and I like to move often. I am a stay at home mom to two wonderful girls. I love to read pretty much everything but if I had to narrow it down I’d say I love fantasy and mysteries. Thanks, Donna, for the invite!!
ooh I love Kindle Unlimited and Scribd as well. Between those and the Carnegie library system, I have close to an unlimited variety of books. There is on occasion a book I can't get but I will sometimes buy it if it looks interesting enough.
Yeah! I need to send you all the spreadsheet - can you all PM me your emails, Donna I know I have yours and I will send along the link?
😄 will do, thanks!!
Kate wrote: "Yeah! I need to send you all the spreadsheet - can you all PM me your emails, Donna I know I have yours and I will send along the link?"sent you a friend request so I can PM you :D
edit: is it the same spreadsheet that is in message 2?
It is! Would have been helpful had I scrolled up! But glad we are now friends. :)
I could have sworn I sent you Minx's email but I might have gotten distracted.
I am glad too! Sent you the emails anyhow 😀
I have access to edit the spreadsheet already, but let me know if you still need my email.
And wow, somehow missed we are only a week away from this challenge starting. With it being the last week of wheel, it just slipped my mind that this started so soon.Should we start working out who is going to claim what tasks in the countdown?
I wasn’t sure if the tasks on spreadsheet were examples or the real deal. I have a book for each one so I am open to any of the tasks. Ya’ll can grab what you want and I’ll read whatever is available. 😀
I also have books that work for each task. I didn't want to grab any yet in case others only had books that worked for certain ones.
I need to review the rules again. My brain is still on Wheel! I am normally a pretty flexible reader but let me see what I have that will fit. :)
Put the first set of prompts up in our reserved spots for easy reference. I went ahead and reserved two and if you all want to reserve a couple as well then we can fill in the other ones.
Was wondering about working with the other team with Judith, Lexi, Jenny, etc. Thoughts?
I reserved 2 for now.Kate wrote: "Was wondering about working with the other team with Judith, Lexi, Jenny, etc. Thoughts?"
I'm fine with this. It could help with filling in some of the more difficult tasks in safe zones 1 and 2.
Kate wrote: "Was wondering about working with the other team with Judith, Lexi, Jenny, etc. Thoughts?"What does working with a team entail? I know there was talk about alliances in the original posting but I didn't look into it.
I am going to wait for Donna to fill in her books and then I will take the rest :D
I looked through the previous BOM books read and I have a list that I can read for safe zone 1 and for 2 I also have books that can fit those tasks.
So I had too much time on my hands this morning and I played around with different scenarios to try and find the maximum amount of points we could get.I found that oddly enough using smaller words in safe zone 3 is better and the words 'by', 'on', and 'in' get you the best points per letter in the word. Plus there are multiple instances of 'on' and 'in' and the rules state you can read a word more than once so long as it is in a different task # (Questions thread, fifth one answered).
◈Q: Can we repeat words for Safe Zone three or must each word be unique?
◈A:You can only spell each word once ; but it a word is used twice (e.g. "an" is in more than one task, you can spell it for each instance it is used)
Assuming we read the maximum number of books for our category (40), I found 2 scenarios that would get us 1,300 or 1,260 points in the first round depending on which safe zones we do.
- The 1,300 point scenario would involve us reading the 10 countdown books, skipping safe zone 1, reading 4 books for safe zone 2, and then reading 26 books for safe zone 3.
- The 1,260 point scenario would invoice us reading the 10 countdown books, skipping safe zones 1 & 2, and the reading 30 books for safe zone 3.
I have a Google Sheet I can PM you guys if you want to take a look so we can keep our strategy hidden.
Melanie wrote: "So I had too much time on my hands this morning and I played around with different scenarios to try and find the maximum amount of points we could get.I found that oddly enough using smaller word..."
please PM me, I would like to take a look at this and YES! I love your strategies!! I am all for the most points we can get! :D
Minx wrote: "please PM me, I would like to take a look at this and YES! I love your strategies!! I am all for the most points we can get! :D"Ok, I just sent you the link. I think I set it up so that if you have the link, you should be able to edit. So if you come up with any other scenario that works, go ahead and add it.
Melanie wrote: "Minx wrote: "please PM me, I would like to take a look at this and YES! I love your strategies!! I am all for the most points we can get! :D"Ok, I just sent you the link. I think I set it up so t..."
got it, thanks!!
This is great! I just sent you a PM with my email address. I can send Donna's along as well. I'm so glad we have a strategy. That was one of my biggest frustrations with wheel as I'm used to have a team that likes to be strategic. :)
In terms of working with the other team, I don't know if they would be interested but I can ask them on our chat thread. I think it might be helpful for farther on when we are having to repeat read. That being said, they are in our group to compete against too.
Kate wrote: "This is great! I just sent you a PM with my email address. I can send Donna's along as well. I'm so glad we have a strategy. That was one of my biggest frustrations with wheel as I'm used to have a..."I just sent you the link, go ahead and forward it to Donna. I set it up so anyone who has the link can edit (I couldn't figure out the email only option), which is why I wanted to PM it to you guys.
If you come up with any other high point scenarios, feel free to add them.
Also if it would help, once we pick which route we want to go I could add in another tab so we could plan the books we want to read for SZ3 then we could just move them to the official sheet as we finish each word.
I will play around with it tonight. I am wondering what the highest totals could potentially be but I'm not sure I want to spend all that time. :)
Yeah I spent about an hour and a half on it this morning, but most of that time was putting together how much each word was worth. I may try looking some more later to see if there's any higher points combination.
I grabbed 3 tasks on the Countdown stage. 2 of them are short books (under 170 pages) and the 3rd book is under 300 pages. So I can knock them out in a day. If I finish those and there are openings available I will grab 1 book opening at a time. **I know we have to finish each stage completely before moving on to the next one :D**
I do have a book that can work for the 1950s slot if no one wants to read for that one.
My strategy is to find books with low page counts so that I can read them super fast. I know that we are all essentially splitting the 40 books 10 a piece BUT if someone can't read the ten I am more than willing to help out there.
That's a good strategy Minx on the shorter books. I also picked easier reads for the countdown books with a short book (124 pages) and a quick read (cozy mystery 292 pages) so that I can finish them by Tuesday night.I figure the faster we get through the countdown books the better as long as we all read for at least one of the tasks to avoid injury.
Speaking of that. Donna, do you have something that works for the remaining tasks (1, 2 or 5)? If needed, I can switch out my books if tasks 9 or 10 work better for you.
After the countdown tasks are done, if we decide to go with the strategy I suggested for max points that involved Safe Zone 2 (scenario 1 in my sheet unless someone else found one with more points), I do have books that work for all of the tasks in that zone except for #2. I just couldn't find a cover that had enough red with H-O-T in the author name.
Melanie wrote: "That's a good strategy Minx on the shorter books. I also picked easier reads for the countdown books with a short book (124 pages) and a quick read (cozy mystery 292 pages) so that I can finish the..."For Zone 2, I have books for 1 & 3 if needed, will look for #2 right now. :D I was looking last night and I think I might have something that will work. :D
Also with the TinEye, do we include or exclude the background when looking at color percentage. Thanks. I just can't remember.
Minx wrote: "For Zone 2, I have books for 1 & 3 if needed, will look for #2 right now. :D I was looking last night and I think I might have something that will work. :D Also with the TinEye, do we include or exclude the background when looking at color percentage. Thanks. I just can't remember."
I believe for TinEye we include the background when looking for color. So you have to uncheck the box that excludes it by default. At least that's how I remember it being, but I could be confusing the rules of this group with another.
Melanie wrote: "Minx wrote: "For Zone 2, I have books for 1 & 3 if needed, will look for #2 right now. :D I was looking last night and I think I might have something that will work. :D Also with the TinEye, do ..."
ok, well I found a book that works for #2 with Everything included :D, so I am good for that one if no one else wants to read for it.
Also for #1 in Zone 2 I found a book that is 104 pages that works, so it would be a fast read.
Sorry been busy finishing up WAT IV. What did I miss?
can someone send me a link so i can edit the spreadsheet?
Melanie wrote: "That's a good strategy Minx on the shorter books. I also picked easier reads for the countdown books with a short book (124 pages) and a quick read (cozy mystery 292 pages) so that I can finish the..."I already have a book picked out for 5 and I am working on finding books for 1 & 2. I shouldn't have a problem finding anything. I just can't edit the spreadsheet.
Donna wrote: "I already have a book picked out for 5 and I am working on finding books for 1 & 2. I shouldn't have a problem finding anything. I just can't edit the spreadsheet. "That's great then we have all the countdown tasks covered.
I don't know how to add anyone, but how I got access was I PMed the mod account my email address along with a link to the team spreadsheet. So hopefully that will work?
Donna wrote: "When does this challenge start?"Here is the link to the countdown.
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
It starts at 7AM EST this Monday, the 12th.
There was a spot on the spreadsheet to request access from the owner so I requested access. Not sure how long it will take.
I am debating a book that I want to read for the 2 author category. Not sure it really counts. It technically has 2 authors listed on the book and on GR. However, the one author is fictional so I am debating if it really counts for this challenge. It is a Murder She Wrote book. I will probably just grab a different book to be sure that it counts.
Donna wrote: "I am debating a book that I want to read for the 2 author category. Not sure it really counts. It technically has 2 authors listed on the book and on GR. However, the one author is fictional so I a..."I don't think a fictional author would count, lol, although it should since she is listed.
Team Members
❅ Kate
❅ Melanie
❅ Donna
❅ Minx