Time Stands Still & Time Speeds Up

Hello and welcome to my end-of-month blog post!

You can read last month’s newsletter here.

Following the very loose pattern I decided to set, these posts are a chance for me to write about one of the things I love: Stories. These are also a chance for you to read about something you love as well. (Because if you are reading this, I’m guessing that you enjoy stories too.) If that’s true, pull up a chair, get cozy, and let’s talk about the peculiar relationship between time and reading stories.

Time sometimes seems to move at its own pace and disregard its previously established rules. There are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and twenty-four hours in a day, but there are moments when a second can feel like a day and a day like a second. It speeds up and slows down and rarely goes the way it’s supposed to go.

Strange, isn’t it?

One of those odd moments is when you’re reading. Time and reading seem to have a peculiar relationship, as I said above, as I’m sure you’re well aware. Hours upon hours can pass whilst reading before you notice that they’re gone. Where did the day go? Why is it dark outside? I was supposed to go grocery shopping! I was supposed to go to work!

The opposite effect is also true. Sometimes, it seems as though no time has passed at all since you started. You finish a page, a chapter, or even a whole book, and only the briefest of time has slipped away in the real world. I still have the whole day ahead of me! I can get some work done around the house! Or I can read another story…

In my first book, A House Named Haven, I elaborated on this strange phenomenon:

Time seems to move differently when one is reading. It moves more lethargically. But like the silence reading brings, the lethargy is not uncomfortable, nor does it leave one wanting. Perhaps time seems to slow down because when one is reading, they are in a different time and place while doing so. In a book, one might read through days, months, even years of time before an hour in the real world transpires. Perhaps that is why one’s perception of time is so different from what it actually is.

The rate of time’s passage doesn’t change whilst we read. Rather, it’s our perception of time that is affected by reading.

In books, we can read through someone’s entire life in less than an hour. Only then do we realize that time in the real world passed ever so slowly. All of those experiences, moments, and memories packed into sixty minutes or less. In books, we can also get so immersed, so lost in the story that we lose track of how much time in the real world has actually passed us by!

I’m not quite sure what to make of the peculiar relationship between time and reading, other than to make a note of it and say what I said before. “Strange, isn’t it?”

With May wrapping up and the month of June ahead, here are a couple of exciting things to watch for on this blog site:

My satirical blog series “Poking Fun at Fantasy Tropes” continues with a new post coming out in the middle of the month. And I’m continuing to post short stories on the blog twice a week! (We’re almost halfway through the 52 short stories!) You can find them all right here on the blog for your reading pleasure. These are all from my book, Collected Short Stories: Volume One.

Speaking of books, The Storytellers (the second book in The Tale of Rose and Ed) turns 1 in June! My oh my, where does the time go? Probably wherever it does when we read books. 😊

That’s all for this end-of-month newsletter—now go read some stories and stop time for an hour or two, or speed it up and read the day away. Whichever you prefer!

Until next time,

Al