#tracking reading

Each of these are set up for different purposes- overview is for completed works. These are the Read Statues I use in this overview (please ignore how crazy the numbers are)

Reading, Read Next and To Read all seem self explanatory to me and have been there since I started this spreadsheet/database ages ago. Priority Creators are writers who I have read almost if not all of their published work and I want to keep up with them as they write more. But... It's not necessarily my ONLY favorite writers- Prolific Priority (dumb name everything else I came up with was too long. I wanted it to be at most two words) are for people who have an EXTENSIVE back catalog of fics creators I trust who I've read and loved their work but it's not keeping up like Priority Creators-- it's catching up. Fandom Firsts a bit self explanatory- this is a creators first and only work (for now) in the fandom I'm currently hyperfixating on. I don't necessarily prioritize them but I like knowing in case they end up becoming a favorite writer! Basically it's a fancy system to break up my TBR from being in the thousands lol. Off The Presses— Was this work released in the last month essentially? These will filter back into the other categories if I don’t get to them it’s just something I like to be aware of.

Podfics overview (self explanatory (I record podfics so I like sorting by those separately because if there's a podic I'm listening to it!)) it looks practically identical to the regular overview just filters for if there is a contributor listed or podfic box checked.

WIP Overview- one of my most useful views imo-

It has extra read status' of Up to Date and Updated- Up to Date being fics I'm subscribed to and hoping for updates and Updated being recently updated fics I wanna catch up on! It’s also just nice to keep track of when things were last updated before I start them. Off the Presses actually means something slightly different here than traditional overview— that’s work I haven’t started reading but have checked and it has updated within the last month— I’m not completely against reading abandoned work (I even have a separate fic status for it) but wanna be aware of it before I start.

By Title and Format I don't really use Title is fics I'd consider making into podfics personally but it's gotten out of hand and I don't record nearly enough to ever actually catch up on it, format was an attempt at having the Completed and WIP overviews in one place- it was cluttered and I didn't use it. Now it breaks down by one shot or multi chapters and then length but I rarely actually use it because it has to be a uniform division of word count and it's just a lot of scrolling when set to 10,000 but anything more than that would have 500 word drabbles with like 20,000 word oneshots.

Missing Information? Like I mentioned I will add sections, recently I wanted to track where in the canon timeline I read most fics and this is a view where I've been trying to go back and update that most easily.

Bulk Addition- despite my excessive fic TBR I will still browse for new and old fics that clog up my tabs just as bad as the next person and I will just put the info in here it's set up most like a spreadsheet with a WIP, One Shot, Multi Chapter breakdown because One Shot is the default so it's easiest to be quick and accurate this way.

Skipping Chart for a sec-- checking is just a big list where I can search without it being broken up by any status or filters so I can try avoiding duplicate entries or find something specific by name, tag or creator. It’s basically my simplest version of a retrieval tool.

Chart is my designated 1 chart Notion will let me have for free I can and do change it relatively often if I am interested in something- here are a few options I go back to:

How many words am I reading each month?

How many words are the fics I’m recording each month overall?

Is there a month that more works I recorded were published?

And most recently— Where in the canon am I most likely to read a fic for? (I have Ambiguous, Multi Season or True AU options if it is truly too hard to tell but clearly since I just joined the 9-1-1 fandom a lot of the fics I’ve been reading take place post s7.)

Okay so the first section I consider a like Retrieval Information section– It answers questions like have I read this? Where can I find it? Who wrote it? Is there a podfic? Who recorded it? What stage in the writing process is it (One Shot, Multi Chapters, Work In Progress, Abandoned)? Was it written for a challenge/ is it in a collection (excluding personal favorite collections which there are so many of on ao3 I swear- pet peeve but I get it I was once one of those people, now I have a database that I've sunk too much time into lol)

The sorting section is actually automatically filled out based on the Creator information, I explained my tbr sorting is based on favorite, prolific, or new to the fandom authors so it's easiest to trust pull that information from the Creator record in a roll-up property because then I can move everything in a group if I miss something at the end of the week when I'm adding things.

Story info is pretty self-explanatory in my opinion, I pulled all of it from ao3 though I will fudge the information if I read a fic on Tumblr that isn't cross-posted. The pages it's not really useful per se. Just something that I think is interesting. It's also based on the PDF versions that you can download on ao3 and even then not really because I just averaged out the pages on one fic and have been dividing page numbers by that number for ages lol. Timeline I mentioned in my previous post. It's all based on 911 because I am currently hyperfixated on it to a degree that is genuinely… not great.

Authorized Tags… I'm still working on this. This is the time consuming project. I decided to make the multi-select property Tags– which has an insane amount of tags in it, which are all kind of jumbled because I was using different language for all of them like for instance “Evan Buckley is a Teacher” and “Bartender Buck” are both tags in that property but also it's just in that section so I can't even see everything that's in there and at this point there's over like 200+ tags that I can't really search very well and I can't really browse fics in the tags easily so it limits use in that way. Also, there's no real organization so everything that could be tagged wasn't there- also creators all use tags in very different ways so a lot of that was me tagging fic as I read them because this is a personal database, it's just what I want to do. But basically Authorized Tags is *loosely* based off of Authorized Heading from my cataloging course lol. Basically I've cleaned up the language and created more of a type and tier organization (“Evan Buckley is a Teacher” and “Bartender Buck” are now “Teacher! Buck” and “Bartender! Buck” respectfully and are specific character tags under the broad character tag of “Not a Firefighter! Evan Buckley”) so I'll be able to find things easier… when I finished retagging the like 3000 records that I've been tagging multi select up until now 😭. This is also giving me the chance to pull my OOC/Bashing tag into a little alien 👽 check box- like I said the tags are mine some creators tag way more extensively than me, others imo under tag– bashing isn't a DNF for me and I just ignore it when fix are tagged “Specific Character! Bashing” because sometimes people will tag that when it's just canon accurate behavior in my opinion? And again actual bashing doesn't bother me *most of the time* but it is one of the things that I want to know about effect on first glance if I'm going to reread.

Series was a single select property up until my last post actually… it was much easier to convert because unlike tags not every fic is in a series lol. But also I am going to go back and see if there were any fics that aren't in what I would consider a series but are how some creators use series like a place where they collect their one shots or a bunch of fic that they wrote with a single trope or even personal entries to fandom challenges, I also decided to use this database to track works that were inspired by other works if it's a very direct correlation– like if there's a sequel or one shot in the same world written by another Creator. The previous/next relations direct to other related works within the database, if Fic 1 is previous to Fic 2, Fic 2 is next to Fic 1. You'll be surprised how long it took me to add these fields or you'll think it's overkill– it's both. Part of the reason that I really needed these is because both the tags and the series properties were select properties. I could tag a fic as a sequel fic but that didn't directly connect me to its predecessor, I can see that'll work as part of a series but I would still have to leave the record to then go and look to see what else is in that series. It's kind of a non-issue. Obviously all of this is non-issues. This is way too in-depth for what it is. But it's going to be even more of a non-issue now that Series is a separate database but I'll probably still keep it for conveniences sake because if nothing else it is convenient.

Housekeeping– when did I start and when did I finish the fic? Was it a favorite? Was there a quote that I took note of while reading it?

Meta-Metadata (I had that labeled as just metadata for an embarrassingly long time considering literally the entire record is metadata…) I used to have a record created property but it broke somehow. I don't know I want it back. I'm going to try at some point. I just haven't gotten around to it. It's not like a useful thing. It's just interesting to see how long after a record is created I back get around to reading it you know? But the two check boxes there are formulas attached to the read status. The first one includes up-to-date works as read And the second one only includes read read works as read– I like keeping up to date with a few authors so if they have work in progress work that I am keeping up to date with, I want it included in their tally on their record. So I have two separate roll-ups for read lol.

You'll see on the completed record that the only thing that I have written in the bottom part is reread dates. I don't know, I've never felt the need to take notes outside of the records? Or if I do, it's very rarely. I haven't really figured out a way to record reread dates in a way that doesn't seem clunky to me so I just put it there.

But yeah as you can see way too extensive lol a lot of these properties won't apply to every fic and are therefore hidden when empty (a few are always hidden in the collapsed view (Next/Previous notably) because if I'm looking for that information I'll look for it, you know?)

So here is a completed record of one of my favorite fics!

As you can see, a few things have been collapsed the labeling is always hidden because I don't really need it it's just so it's not a wall of properties on the back end, but you can also easily find the information that's important in my opinion?