Robynettely

I must have worked on that wretched Toothbrush novel for two hours today, and my second draft still isn't done! When will this stupid thing be finished? I'm only about three-quarters of the way through! I can't stop moving scenes! Reality is setting in. Maybe my goal was a tad unrealistic, considering my lack of commitment to achieving it. Will I really be ready for a line edit by Friday? I think not. Is this the despair that JL was referring to (I think it was she who said that despair is an integral part of the rewriting process), or am I just some kind of lazy dilettante? I think I'll just go watch "Monarchy" on TVO.

Today I took a half-day (afternoon) vacation from work, and I actually worked on my wretched novel for two hours! What a better way to spend the afternoon than buying more pairs of jeans and shirts I won't wear at the mall. One of the other TWs got a marked-up manual back with a big rant on it about how a DIP switch is actually an entire block of controls, and each individual control is a "post". Well, she thought that was silly, and went on a walking tour of the office asking different people what they would call the individual components and the entire thing. The best answer: one of the engineers told her that he doesn't know what it's called in English, but if you translated it out of German, it would be a "mouse piano". That has got to be the coolest technical phrase ever. It almost makes me want to learn German.

Why I read it: This is part of my project to read books by the bloggers I read, so I'll know whether I should take their advice. The blog is http://www.whatever.com/ , if you're one of the 3 people on the planet who doesn't read it. I got the book as a PDF as a free download from Tor, just for signing up. What I loved: The idea is neat. I can tell he's been a marketing writer, because the marketing material that is part of the story is very realistic. What I hated: This was not the book for me! I think I may just hate science fiction. Or at least outer space science fiction. Even though I wrote one once. (It's filed away.) The cover references comparing Scalzi to Heinlein should have been a giveaway, because I don't think I ever finished a Heinlein book, even though I've got Stranger in a Strange Land around here somewhere, and really wanted to finish Number of the Beast (but just couldn't). I felt like there was no plot to speak of. Guy goes into sp...

Now, I must tell you my story about last night's band practice. In the summer, we don't have access to the high school we normally practice in, the high school being closed. So we use a church basement. Last night was our third rehearsal there for this summer. The first week we played there, a filmy grime covered everything and there was a smell of mildew, due no doubt to a recent flood. The second week, there were massive hepa filters with giant plastic tubes (a foot tall) leading to the windows. They were quite loud. We turned them off so we could hear ourselves. This week, same as last week, we went in through the basement door (so the drummer, tuba player, etc. don't have to carry their instruments through a series of narrow stairwells, etc.) as usual, shut the hepa filters off, set up, sat down and started playing. And about 45 minutes later an older gentleman came in and asked "Is Mrs. X here?" (Obviously names changed to protect the not present to defend th...

Yesterday evening I again looked at my draft of toothbrush. Third day in a row! Target: "readable" draft by 15 August (2008). Tasks remaining: Finish second pass Stop moving sections around Read the whole thing before inflicting it on others (probably includes a line edit) Um, good luck with that? Every day I write a page in my current first draft (I always have one. Sometimes it's a short story, or a screenplay. Currently it is a novel). Yesterday morning I was writing along, and one of my characters said something that ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED me. She made a wild accusation at one of the other characters, and I said to myself, "OMG (actually I swore, but you know what I mean), how did she know that?" And then I realized, she's absolutely right. I've got 300 pages written here in long, dreadful, poorly developed prose (a first draft is just a shell to fill in with a story later on, right?) and this character was, well, that way the whole time, and I had no id...

Worked on the wretched TBC again last night, for probably an hour, moving scenes around to make them make sense. Seems I had no action for about the first 30 pages of the story. Now at least something happens. I move one thing, and then I have to move about six other things to make it make sense again. And then this afternoon I looked at the second half of the print-out I made weeks ago. I've barely touched the second half lately, so I was thinking I should have a go before I printed it out again. OMG, dispair really is an integral part of the writing process. I booked my vacation for 18-22 August, and my goal is to have a readable draft by then, to fob off on my poor, unsuspecting sisters. Maybe I should go back to the beginning again, since that's the part they would start with...

We were all standing around, water cooler style, and there was a lull in the "how I spent my Canada day" conversation" stories. So, I said "We were sitting on a patio on Sunday evening, and Ed had just ordered a coffee, when he said to me 'I have a confession to make.'" You can imagine how everyone's ears perked up. I continued my really quite lame tale. "And he said, 'That coffee I served you this morning was decaf. I'm really sorry. I bought it at the corner store by accident. They changed the colors of the cans, and I grabbed the wrong one by mistake.' And I said something about how I accidentally put 1% instead of skim in my coffee one time at work because the cafeteria switched milk brands. And I said I forgave him, and I didn't even have a headache, though I did sort of feel draggy all day." I thought I'd kicked too much the day before or something. "And then we bought real coffee at the corner store," I...

Why I read it: Cybils nominee. What I liked: Excellent sense of humour. I read the boy the part where Georgie is reading the Book of the Undead, and it's like bad greeting card poetry, and he said he wanted to read this when I was done. That's always a good sign. What I hated: I felt like I was reading a sequel, though there was no indication anywhere in the book that this was the case. There were tons of references to back story. Also, it seemed like there was an awful lot of tell in those portions. --later-- So I looked on Amazon, and in fact this is the sequel to "The Wall and the Wing". It would have been nice maybe to have that indicated somewhere on the cover. Unless that book did remarkably poorly, and they wanted people to read this one as a standalone, or not feel obligated to read the first one first. This somewhat angers me. Though to be fair, the blurbs on the back were all for "The Wall and the Wing". Maybe that was a hint I just didn't k...

Why I read it: A few weeks ago I read a "Big Idea" by Kate Elliott, I think to announce "Shadow Gate", the second book in the series, on www.whatever.com . In the piece, she said the idea for eagle reeves came from her husband, who is a cop, and a really crappy ABBA song. I was, of course hooked. What I loved: The world seemed really non-European to me -- very, I don't know, Chinese maybe. The Qin might be like Mongols, and the Sirniakan Empire might be the middle kingdom, I don't know. The people aren't blond. There aren't elves or fairies, but demons and gods. I loved that the author let me feel smart. She never told me, but let me guess what Kesh's treasure was, and then have a self-satisfied glow when I found out. She didn't say where Bai had been, but let me guess, and again turn out to be right. Characters have nicknames and I get to figure it out on my own. In fact, when a character is listening to other people he doesn't know,...