Melanie’s Comments (group member since Sep 01, 2014)

Melanie’s comments from the Nothing But Reading Challenges group.

Ok, so something I want to point out as I'm making meals that I noticed a lot of.

Dessert items (excluding honey & sugar which can be used in coffee or tea) and any drinks (excluding water) cannot be used if the book is less than 500 pages. So if your book is shorter than that, there is no need to track the items as they can't be used. Tracking them just makes more work for you and since this challenge is a lot of work, it might ease some of the work by not tracking those items.

Ok finished work a bit later than expected. So I just need to make something quick for dinner and then I'll start making meals and adding my remaining books read. I have nothing else to do tonight, so I'll be at it for a few hours and can hopefully get all the meals we need created.

Jade aka MrsTosh wrote: "Hey guys, I am only just back from my holidays today, can I still add to the sheet or am I too late? Thanks"

You still have time, we have 31 hours until the deadline.

Sorry, work has been busy and I haven't been online much the last few weeks.

I plan to get on after work tonight (so about 9 hours from now) and add my missing books as well as start to create meals. I'll move everything to the official sheet as I add it and create the meals.

The only section I will likely need help with is descriptions of the meals on the Shop Front of the official sheet. So I will post later once I've started adding meals and if anyone can go in and start adding descriptions, that would be great.

Sorry my week has been busier than expected and I haven't had time to play with the spreadsheet. I didn't realize we had to have stuff moved so far before the round is over, so thought I had more time. I'll try and make time in the next day or so to add my missing books as well as make meals.

Saar The Book owl wrote: "- I've added the books, pages and dates to the teamsheet. Where there isn't still a date added, please add the date or if the book isn't finish, can you give a sign?"

The planning sheet includes books people plan to read in the round in addition to the ones they've finished, so there will be books on there that haven't been read yet. Just skip the ones without a date finished when it comes to moving stuff over and planning meals.

Saar The Book owl wrote: "- looking at the sheet, we can't combine spell it out and scavenger hunt"

Correct, it has to be one or the other. My thought was using the scavenger hunt is the best option, so would use that and would only go spell it out instead if the book doesn't have enough usable scavenger words.

Ok so I didn't have time to add my books and play with meals today. I will get to it tomorrow though, so we can see where we're at as of then.

Ended up not having time as the toilet in our house randomly started leaking water at the base so we had to pull it up as well as the floor and replace the seal and lay new floor tiles down. Got it done and no issues now, but it took most of the day and I am too tired now for anything but laying down and watching TV. Plus I'm pretty sure I also broke one of the toes of my left foot when I accidentally kicked the toilet while it was moved so we could fix everything. So overall, today was just not my day.

I have a few books to add to the spreadsheet which I'll get to tomorrow or Saturday morning, haven't had a chance to update it with work being busier than expected. I'll also take a shot at creating meals with the books we've finished so far Saturday morning.

Well I didn't have a good month in terms of Netgalley books. I added 6 but didn't read any. I definitely need to focus on Netgalley ARCs in October.

I'm in again. I really need to make a dent in my backlog considering I'm hoping to clear it by the end of the year.

Start of month:
Books on shelf: 49
Feedback Ratio: 84%

Books (ordered by pub date):






Added:


Finished:


Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy | My Review
Any Rogue Will Do | My Review
A Beautiful Corpse | My Review
Cowboy SEAL Redemption | My Review

End of Month:
Books on shelf: 50
Feedback Ratio: 84%

Marie (UK) wrote: "Melanie wrote: "Marie (UK) wrote: "For some reason GR is refusing to edit my post
I will have to re file it..."

There's currently a bug related to saving edited posts. GR is working on it, but th..."

Oh hey, they've actually fixed it already. Much faster than I expected.

Marie (UK) wrote: "For some reason GR is refusing to edit my post
I will have to re file it..."

There's currently a bug related to saving edited posts. GR is working on it, but they have no ETA on a fix.

Lau Maia wrote: "Please help me clarify...

Should I log my books to the official spreadsheet or will the captains do it?"

For now, we're just logging everything on the tracking sheet so everything's in one place to plan the meals. Then after we've built the meals, the books will be moved over. That way we don't miss any books or duplicate any of them.

I feel like I'm so boring as I prefer plain pizza with no extra toppings.

Chris wrote: "Question: should I be including repeats in the scavenger hunt items? The novel I'm currently going through is set in the UK/Ireland, so tea is frequently mentioned throughout."

From the Q&A thread:

Q: For the scavenger hunts, if my book has multiple mentions of an item (e.g. wine): can I use each time to produce 20 wine drinks or can I only use the food once?

A: Multiple wine drinks. Kind of like the coffee example in the spreadsheet. The trick is that you may not have enough customers to drink all that wine so the "easy" option isn't always best


So they can be used multiple times, but it isn't always the best to do so. So I say list multiples maybe a few times, but don't worry about every mention as we likely won't use them all.

Lau Maia wrote: "I might have broken out spreadsheet??? :D
It might new some minor adjustments to the lay out :)"

I've fixed it, so it should be fine now.

For your book "Anjo mecânico", I turned off text wrapped on the scavenger hunt item cell. So everything is still in there, the text just doesn't wrap anymore making the cell very large.

Then for the ones that are graphic novels, I just manually changed the max # and category cells as I don't feel like playing with formulas right now to look for if it's a graphic novel then to ignore page count and only use the Fresh category. I'll work on that for going forward.

Chris wrote: "Looking at the spreadsheet I do see that y'all are recording location information. I'm listening to two audiobooks - how would y'all like location information recorded from there?

I might also try..."

I saw this come up in the questions section and the mods said to use the chapter the word appears in for audiobooks.

Jade aka MrsTosh wrote: "Just wondering how we are logging our books, I have just finished my first one, and will finish another later tonight. I have added it to the spreadsheet. And kept a note on my iPad of foods mentioned and letters that can be used for a spell out etc."

You can add them to the tracking sheet (link below). The tracking sheet has spots to fill in the letters and foods. This way we can see everything in one place and plan our meals accordingly sine the main sheet doesn't have a way to track these things. A couple of us have finished books so you can see how to fill it in, but let me know if you have any questions.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

I have a fairly busy weekend as it's my husband and I's anniversary tomorrow, so I may not be able to read as much as I like until the week starts.

But I did manage to fit in a short novella tonight that just meets the page count minimum for Fresh meals (Crash and Burn by James Rollins).

I have no interest in Chain of Gold or Circe, so I won't be doing those BOMs. But I own a copy of Truly Devious, so I'll definitely try to participate in that one.

I actually had a good Netgalley reading month in August. I managed to finish 14 Netgalley ARCs, although I did add 10 which means my numbers only went down by 4. But hey, it's progress. Plus I got to 3 of my oldest ARCs from 2018, leaving only 3 from 2018 to go.

Start of month:
Books on shelf: 47
Feedback Ratio: 84%

Added:


Finished:



1. The Ultimate Betrayal | My Review
2. Come Home to Deep River | My Review
3. Cross Her Heart | My Review
4. Furyborn | My Review
5. The Wicked Sister | My Review
6. A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas | My Review
7. A Secret Surrender | My Review
8. Lethal Nights | My Review
9. Checked Out for Murder | My Review
10. An Affair with a Spare | My Review
11. A Cowboy State of Mind | My Review
12. See Her Die | My Review
13. My Favorite Cowboy | My Review
14. What Cats Want: An Illustrated Guide for Truly Understanding Your Cat | My Review

End of Month:
Books on shelf: 43
Feedback Ratio: 86%