Chapter & Character Discussions (Please Read)

[Penny & Bryce Linsenmayer]

No: HPFGUIDX 5795

Hi --

It's Wednesday, and we've had no chapter or character summary for this
week.  I just tried to find out who is responsible for this week, but
Melanie's site with our weekly assignments is not working at the moment.

I've just set up a new poll to see how people feel about continuing
these chapter & character summaries.  We have over 400 members (so I'd
love to get 25% turnout on the poll if possible!).

I'm finding that it's always up to me to nag at the person who signed up
to get their chapter & character discussion done for the week, and
oftentimes, I don't remember myself that it's missing until mid-week.
I'm also noting that the summaries don't seem to be stimulating a
tremendous amount of discussion.  Ebony raised a number of fun questions
in her Chapter 18 summary last week, and as best I recall, no one made a
stab at responding (including me).  I think some summaries have
stimulated discussion (Fudge for example), and so, I decided to poll the
group.

We are getting into the more meaty chapters & the more complex
characters.  This means 2 things in my mind: (1) the likelihood to
stimulate discussions increases and (2) the time & effort that will be
required to create the character summary for the more complex characters
increases tremendously.  If, as a group, we're not too terribly
interested in continuing the discussions, then I'd rather cut it off now
rather than have people going to alot of work to create character
summaries for the major characters who appear in all 4 books.

So, please vote in the poll, and feel free to send your general thoughts
to the list.  I personally always enjoy reading them, but haven't
necessarily felt compelled to chime in very often (or haven't had the
time when it was relevant).  I thought Ebony posed some rather
interesting & fun questions last week, but I was extremely busy so I
punted on that.

To be honest, my overall thought is that I wouldn't mind so much if they
weren't stimulating discussion *if* it wasn't always up to me to put out
reminder notices.  I just don't have the time to keep up with one more
thing.  I keep a datebook, and my dates for Ch 35 & Hermione are already
pencilled in for next April.  They'll be done ahead of time in case the
baby decides to arrive early but you get the point.  If everyone was
keeping up with their assignment . . . it would be nice.

Vote!  Another chance for your vote to be heard (<g>) --

Penny