#dracula entry lengths

[peachesanmemes]

I saw your DD graph asking for other ideas, so... if you still have any desire to do further Dracula graphs I'd be curious to see how the word count per character breaks down (not how much they speak but how much they write. Adding all their diary entries together, etc.). Obviously Mina wins by default from having typed up the whole novel but outside of that detail, how much did each person author?

Thank you so much for this ask! What an interesting data set this one is! Lots of unexpected information.

So first off, if you just want to visualize the author breakdown, ta-dahhhh!

Seward was staunchly in the lead, talking his head off and burning through those wax recording drums like no ones business. Poor Mina for having to transcribe it all. In total his words made up 39.3% of Dracula. Nearly 40%!

Seward unsurprisingly had the most individual entries overall at 47, and had the longest streak for being the narrator in an entry at 10 days (09/02 - 09/11) with Mina following right behind at 9 days (08/10 - 08/19)

Mina surprisingly was 3rd overall both in word count and number of entries. She wasn't even in the top 3 for most words in a day which is as follows.

1 - Seward October 3rd - 9942 words

2 - Seward September 29th - 7206 words

3 - Jonathan October 3rd - 5944 words

Van Helsing only had 9 entries total but still came in number 4 for word count, in front of Lucy. It's interesting to note that the amount a person writes doesn't correlate to the amount of time they are being written about/appear. Which is why Arthur and Quincey don't even beat out the newspaper clippings for words, lol.

There are lots of authors we only hear from a single time, like Sister Agatha. So I've decided to make a small fry pie as well. (Authors under ~500 words)

The captain of the Demeter and Van Helsing both had more days written than Lucy! Though I didn't break up number of entries, like when the log of the Demeter had 3 or 4 on one day or Lucy wrote a letter and in her diary.

If there is any data I haven't presented here that you're interested in feel free to tag me or shoot me an ask like this lovely person did!

[impossibleclair]

Me: oh boy new Re: Dracula! I can fit that in while I do this short chore

Spotify: This episode is 19 minutes!

Me: ...OH, OKAY?!

[ntshastark]

.

[silver-dusted-scribbles]

ok just listened to the first episode of re: dracula and everyone should listen to it because it’s absolutely amazing.

the first entry was nine minutes long. a completely average and respectable length for an audiobook chapter. but… i’m worried about The Update. y’all know the one. how many hours of dracula are we going to be listening to???

[citizen-of-the-fandom]

Thinking about how we haven't heard from our friend Jonathan in a while, and one of his last entries said "I now know the length of my life" and it was mid-june, that was the day Dracula told him, that was how long he had left, and right now it's about a week away, it's--

[aurora-australis-tumbles]

There are a lot of reasons why Dracula Daily and @re-dracula punch so hard emotionally — realizing Jonathan is fearing for his life on day two, experiencing the sheer length of his imprisonment, the Demeter’s increasingly horrifying entries — and one of them is weekends like this.

What do you mean after a full week of absolutely banana pants entries we’ve gone radio silent??? You can’t just write up your will and then… what? Sit in silence for two days? I happen to know that Professor Van Monologue is physically incapable of that, so what is happening people??

[theoscout]

Hear me out: Dracula D&D (5e) AU

Jonathan's a battle based bard. You need charisma when you're a solicitor. Feel like his charisma was the reason he was able to survive in the castle for SIX FUCKING MONTHS without dying or getting chained to a wall, he got it bad but let's all admit he could have had it a lot worse! Also his bribery phase is pretty entertaining LOL. Think he'd be in the college of Swords or Valor.

Mina's a rogue. From what I understand of her, she's got a wide breath of knowledge that a rogue would have, and she's a teacher so she'd kind of have to be like that. Unsure about subclass because I can't decide between Inquisitive or Phantom.

Quincey's a ranger because obviously

Arthur's an artificer, just because from how it looks, it seems everyone's using him as the Uncle Pennybags of the group, and that's what artificers tend to end up as. Possibly a battle smith, with the steel defender being one of his dogs

Lucy's a Druid. I was originally going to make her a cleric for symbolic and ironic reasons, but I just get druid vibes from how she talks from re:dracula and there's also a bit of symbolism in how Dracula can corrupt nature.

Jack's a wizard because he's interested in advancing knowledge and goes to great and memeically unusual lengths to archive his work. Possibly an enchantment wizard because of how he's interested in studying human minds. He'd write his diary entries in his spellbook using the same method for transcribing spells and use all his expensive ink and stuff in the process.

Renfield's a barbarian, he's been described as being very strong and I'm pretty sure you need a strong constitution to eat all those birds and bugs without getting an upset stomach. Strength and constitution are what barbarians are best known for. Beast barbarian because it gives a bite attack and I just KNOW that Renfield's the kind of person to bite people LOL

Abraham Van Hesling's probably a multiclassed character, but I suppose that if he had any 'main' classes he'd be a bard or rogue for the sake of skills. He'd be all over the place. His player probably optimised him for maximum skills. Probably a Lore Bard or Knowledge Cleric if we had to stick with one class.

[rivermask]

Tumblr Book Clubs I am Currently Following, in order of how hard I think they would be to catch up on if you wanted to join the fun:

Around the World Hourly (Around the World in Eighty Days with entries sent according to the in-story hour of events, started Oct 2)

The Public Domain Book Club (started Frankenstein for the month of October on Oct 1)

Lord of the Rings Newsletter (started late September with some very long posts, but will be variable length as they follow the dates of events in the story)

Dracula Daily via Re:Dracula (chronological Dracula by Bram Stoker - OK, you've missed most of this one, but the audio format is very engaging - you could still catch up for the exciting conclusion!)

My Dear Wormwood (The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis - 22 short letters so far, posted on a weekly basis)

What Manner of Man (original vampire romance by St John Starling - 24 shortish and very fun chapters so far, posted on a weekly basis)

Whale Weekly (Moby Dick by Herman Melville with roughly chronological timescale - we're 70-some chapters in but there are often long breaks between them so you could probably catch up)

Les Mis Letters (a chapter of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo every day for a year - catch-up difficulty level: impossible)

Please add your own!

[nausikaaa]

oh Dracula is so bloody evil in today's entry. Jonathan finally stands up himself and says he wants to leave, so Dracula takes him to the front door and summons a pack of wolves. i was listening to Re: Dracula out on a walk and actually said "oh, dickhead!" out loud.

he won't just force Jonathan to stay, he goes to lengths to make him say he'll wait until morning, when they both know he doesn't want to and won't really get to leave. he's punishing him for asserting himself. Jonathan breaking down and crying right there in front of him broke my heart, he's truly given up any attempt at pretending he's alright.

and then at the end, Dracula doesn't even try to hide his discussion with the weird sisters (i do love that Jonathan calls them that) right outside of his door, because now he has full confirmation that he can say and do whatever he pleases, and Jonathan won't make the mistake of standing up for himself again.

[tinierpurplefishes]

I just looked up the specs for wax cylinder phonographs, and it looks like the commercially available ones in the 1890s had about two minutes of usable recording time per cylinder. The longest I can find mention of were some that Edison experimented with that could hold perhaps four minutes.

This came up because I'm reading Dracula, and Dr. Seward records his diary on them. The thing is, he goes on and on and on at great length, and I'm really curious how fast he must have been talking to fit one of these entries on a single cylinder.

[fandomcrazy6226]

Liveblogging Dracula Daily - May 12

Brought to you on June 26th. Yeah, I've fallen really behind, but I'm gonna try to just straight-through all of these missed entires tonight so anybody who's really following these uh... have fun with the rapid succession. Do y'all think I should put some like.. "previous"/"next" links at the end of these posts? It's about at the length to need a masterlist

Anyway, here's the entry! From what I remember this one has wall-crawling

Always good to start with facts, and better to separate them from your own memories/opinions. Objectivity is a virtue. Wait he spends all day reading and then all night talking? Jonathan I'm begging you get some sleep, you desperately need it

So Dracula is asking a bunch of questions. Question 1, can someone in England have multiple solicitors? Answer 1, yes, you can have it sounds like as many as you want, but only one can be working at a time. That's all understood so Dracula then asks if he can have more than one for like... specialty jobs.

Oooh, an example! Ok, so he asked for Jonathan's help because he doesn't live in London so that only Dracula's needs would be served... sure. And so he wants to know if he can get another solicitor to help shipping things to different areas where those other solicitors would live so it's more efficient. I guess that makes sense? Efficiency 100

And apparently there's a Solicitor Code of Conduct that says that... son of a Jesus what do these words mean I feel like I'm translating Shakespeare... the client can have one solicitor who can then direct other "local" solicitors to do local things, and the client doesn't have to do anything. Am I understanding correctly???

Ok so Dracula wants to direct his own solicitors and starts asking about paperwork and forms, and apparently he might make a really good solicitor (how many flipping times am I gonna have to type the word "solicitor")

Awww, he's so alone. And he's gonna be there for another month? Yeesh. "My needs only were to be consulted" selfish prick! This man needs to get married to his amazing fiancee!

Yeah, still a prisoner. I forgot that like... he's really not here by his own will anymore. And Dracula the master manipulator over here telling him to keep things secret and straight-up LIE to people that he's doing fine. Sharp teeth!

Heck yeah, have a secret code with your fiancee! I should make up a code to use with my boyfriend if we ever need to, that would be fun.

Spying on his mail is either gonna be a really smart move or a really stupid one, but considering how Jonathan seems like one of the brainier horror protagonists I'm guessing it's a smart one

Ok I'm gonna note this just for posterity, one letter is for Samuel F. Billington, No. 7, The Crescent, Whitby (copy-paste works wonders), the second one is for Herr Leutner, Varna, the third is for Coutts & Co., London, and the last one is for Herren Klopstock & Billreuth, bankers, Buda-Pesth. I'm guessing these are all other solicitors

Oh, boy, we're getting a warning! Don't fall asleep anywhere but your own room or you'l have... really bad dreams? That doesn't sound threatening but I'm gonna guess those bad dreams lead to something more sinister

Good idea having the crucifix over your bed, that's probably a good protection. Like maybe it protects your whole bed. Wear it when awake and hang it when you sleep

Again this scenery is so pretty when he describes it, I almost wish this was illustrated just so I could see it. I'm sure people have drawn passages like this, maybe I could look into those later

I'm.... fucking sorry??????? He's not only climbing, but climbing face-down??? I mean that's probably better, the way this is described if he'd been face-up then he'd've spotted Johnathan looking but like jesus Cuh-rist!

"I saw the fingers and toes"... was he climbing barefoot? Is he that level of freak?

Yeah I'd be pretty scared out of my mind if I saw some old dude with various biological impossiblities climbing a wall upside down with no shoes on. Gawd Dayum.

PREVIOUS / NEXT

[peachesanmemes]

Total length of each Dracula Daily entry!

Figured I would repost it this year in a less specific date way. Scroll if you don’t want to know! - I’m only tagging this as potential spoiler, as it only relates to the story in a meta way.

Total, the journey takes 189 days, 111 of those have entries (58.73%)

Bram’s longest on streak is 19 days - September 17th to October 6th

Bram’s longest off streak is 11 days - June 6th to June 16th

In the top three positions for length we have September 29th “An Eventful Day” - 9,034 words October 1st “The Attack” - 10,259 words October 3rd “A Day Full of Action” - 15,883 words

There are 160,720 words total, making an average of 1,448 words per entry, (though 22% of the total book is in the top 3 days)

Google says it takes around 5 minutes to read 1,000 words

October 31st has 420 words (yes really)

Let me know if there’s any more data you want! I love making graphs!

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

I saw a post estimating the length of re: Dracula based on the length of the text entries of Dracula Daily, and i definitely reblogged it, but alas the I can't find it in my tags

Does anyone have it?

[vickyvicarious]

Today's entry is interesting. I'm tempted to say Stoker made a mistake with the dates (again; he does this several times) because everything Mina says seems like it should be separated by more than a single day from her last entry. If Jonathan's letter about leaving Castle Dracula just arrived, it would be reasonable to expect a wait of a few days before another one, even if he were still mailing a new letter at every stop or whatever. Of course, that could be why Mina says she doesn't know why she's feeling so uneasy about him - she recognizes it's illogical to be so nervous if he's traveling. But the explanation for those fears (even if everything about his letter were honest) might be that Mina still hasn't heard directly from Jonathan herself. If Mr. Hawkins has received a letter, she should have too by now - maybe she doesn't expect anything new, but she knows Jonathan would have written to tell her that he is coming home as well, and she's waiting for that letter to arrive. She's probably hoping he sounds more like himself/speaks at greater length and detail to her than he did to his boss. And of course she feels impatient about that.

So the thing about Jonathan can be rationalized away, even if the emotions feel like they'd make more sense with a gap of a day or two to build up this much anxiety. The lines about Lucy are a little harder to do the same, though... in yesterday's entry Mina spoke for the first time about her sleepwalking, and like it had only just begun. But today "Lucy walks more than ever, and each night I am awakened by her moving about the room." That definitely sounds like it has been more than a single night since the last entry, and going from talking about how Lucy is looking forward to Arthur arriving (like it will happen in the future) to today saying he's been suddenly called away (like otherwise he would be arriving here around this time) also feels odd, timing-wise.

I think I would want to move yesterday's entry a few days earlier in order to make the chronology work better. Nothing huge, just two or three days maybe.

[mydetheturk]

So I'm reading today's entry for Dracula right? And the line, "At length, we saw a four wheeler drive up" has me cracking up. Because I know - I KNOW - it's some sort of carriage but all I can imagine is Arthur and Quincy on a modern ATV in their late victorian menswear. And it's the FUNNIEST mental image

[pandoramsbox]

Sci-Fi Saturday: Invisible Agent

Week 23:

Film(s): Invisible Agent (Dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1942, USA)

Viewing Format: DVD

Date Watched: 2021-11-19

Rationale for Inclusion: 

As I wrote in my post about Dr. Cyclops (Dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1940, USA) a few weeks back, most of the purer works of science fiction in the 1940s were being produced in serial or short format, whilst features were mostly horror hybrids, and frequently linked to past Universal Horror movies or adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As a result, this post will be the last one on sci-fi films of the 1940s, and also will finally feature one of the Universal Monster sequels.

While the sequels to Frankenstein (Dir. James Whale, 1931, USA) leaned more into fantasy and horror, the sequels to The Invisible Man (Dir. James Whale, 1933, USA) showed more cross-genre compatibility. The first sequel, The Invisible Man Returns (Dir. Joe May, 1940, USA), sticks to the horror, sci-fi roots of the original with the added thriller narrative of a wrongly convicted man trying to prove his innocence of a murder. The second sequel, The Invisible Woman (Dir. A. Edward Sutherland, 1940, USA), goes the comedy route, and narratively has little to do with the prior films apart from its title. The third sequel, Invisible Agent (Dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1942, USA), puts the invisibility serum of the original film towards the war effort in a sci-fi espionage film. Two more sequels followed, The Invisible Man's Revenge (Dir. Ford Beebe, 1944, USA) and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (Dir. Charles Lamont, 1951, USA), which were a return to horror and comedy, respectively.

For all its cultural dominance during the 1940s, World War II rarely shows up directly in feature length sci-fi films of the era. Part of that has to do with the United States' late entry into the war, but also other mediums, like comic books and radio, being the preferred showcase of spectacular worlds and technology. The novelty of its espionage plot is why, out of all the Universal Monster sequels that also fit in the sci-fi genre, I thought Invisible Agent warranted inclusion on this survey.

Reactions:

Continuity within the Invisible Man series is frequently casual, since unlike the Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolfman films, no characters exist in multiple films. Invisible Agent does narratively connect back to The Invisible Man by having protagonist Frank Griffin Jr., alias Frank Raymond, (Jon Hall) be presented as the grandson of the first film's Dr. Jack Griffin, who possesses a copy of the recipe for the invisibility serum. Never mind the fact that in The Invisible Man Jack Griffin was not married, nor shown to be a philanderer, and deliberately destroyed the only existing copy of the invisibility serum formula; the filmmakers probably figured their audience would not have seen the 1933 film, or at least not recently enough for the change in continuity to be an issue.

Retroactive continuities, or as we say today "retcons", have been fixtures of popular media since popular mass media first took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, anyway. So it is safe to presume that audiences in 1942 were apt to just accept the changes with minimal reaction or thought. Increased access to past works in the post-modern, digital age have prompted a more negative response from devoted fan communities when continuity is deviated from. As a fan spoiled by access who typically watches The Invisible Man annually, I definitely responded to the retcon in Invisible Agent by thinking that it made no sense based on what was present in the original film.

However, retconning aside, having the grandson of Dr. Jack Griffin use the invisibility serum to help the United States government and Allies, instead of giving it to the Axis Powers, or maniacally sewing anarchy as a free agent with it, was the story that the era demanded. The film unfolds as a competent sci-fi, spy thriller with gimmicky yet clever effects moments to convey invisibility that were the true hallmark of the series.

The whole narrative is itself a work of Allied propaganda, but it only goes explicitly heavy handed during a speech of Griffin's whilst trying to get information out of the incarcerated Gestapo Standartenführer Karl Heiser (J. Edward Bromberg).

Given the history of German emigrants playing Nazis in American films during the war, it may be a surprise to modern audiences to discover German emigrant Peter Lorre in yellowface playing a Japanese agent, Baron Ikito. Lorre, who worked his way from France to England to America to get away from the Nazi regime as quickly as possible, had previously played Japanese detective Mr. Moto in eight films between 1937 and 1939, so audiences were accustomed to seeing him play Japanese characters. Between his experience playing Moto, and Lorre's skill as an actor, his performance of Baron Ikito is fairly neutral for a yellowface performance, albeit problematic by its very nature. 

Invisible Agent is an interesting cultural artifact. Its narrative is built on a respectable sci-fi concept and it places middle of the pack when it comes to Universal Monster sequels.

World War II and Nazis factor more deeply in later retro and period piece science fiction works than during the actual 1940s. It is somewhat disappointing, but if anything is an incentive to look more into the print offerings of the era.

Next week we move onto the 1950s: flying saucers, aliens, and all manner of atomic terrors.