Robynettely

Why I read it: It was on the list in my notebook of things to read, and then Gwenda Bond referred to it and "The Lottery", so I requested the book from the library. I might have mentioned I was on vacation last week. I read three books. This was the first. Tastes like chicken: Weirdly, Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child". What I liked: I liked a lot. The foreward by Jonathan Lethem mentioned "The Lottery" as being something every North American kid read in school, and I didn't remember it by the title, so I pulled out my Norton Anthology of Short Fiction from University, and sure enough, "The Lottery" was there. So I read it, and yes, I had read it before. I remembered being angry at the ending the first time I read it, and I was angry this time too. I don't think I read it in University, because there was no underlining in pencil or red ink like there was on some of the other stories. Anyway, I thought the way we viewed "We hav

Last week I went on my annual Maine vacation, where I usually see my dad and one if not more of my sisters. Before I went, I had to work a Saturday morning in order to get some TW projects done, so I used the office printer to print "Toothbrushing Club" on scrap paper (It adds an extra dimension to the story to see hardware installation instructions on the backs, right?). I stuck it in a binder, and I took it on vacation with me, meaning to mark it up with a copy-edit while I was away from the computer. Didn't do that. Anyway, I showed the binder to my dad and my sister, but neither of them was exactly chomping at the bit to read the thing. They flipped through, I guess. Saturday morning, my dad asked to look at it again. I thought, awesome, this is my chance for some actual feedback! Apparently not. My dad totally fixated on "What font is this?" Times New Roman (windows default body text) "What size is it?" 10, again the default. "Is this doubl

Why I read it: Read an obit of the author a couple of weeks ago, and it made me regret not having read anything by him when he was alive. Then, when I was at the library a couple of weeks ago to see if anything I'd requested had come in, I perused the shelves so as not to leave empty-handed, and this was a name I remembered (and in fact the first book in what appeared to be a series that I had written down on my "list"). What I liked: I haven't read much horror, except for the occasional Stephen King that I picked up at relatives' houses when I was trapped there, and the like. So I don't even know if this is typical of the genre, or even really falls within the genre. It seemed to me like a well-done deal-with-the-devil tale. It had engaging characters, a believable location, etc. I got the feeling from the obit that Disch was a "somebody" in science fiction circles. I liked that part of the story took place in the past, and then moved into the fut

You Are Fencing You're competitive but not brutally so. You compete to make yourself better. You find having an opponent to be challenging and rewarding. You are fierce when you're in a competition, but you don't wish your rivals any real harm. What Olympic Sport Are You?

A couple of weeks ago on Monarchy was about Queen Mary and her confinement when she was confused and thought she was pregnant but really it was all in her head. This wretched novel is the same. 401 is a number pulled out of a hat of course, but still... Today I wrote two lame scraps of the backstory into the text, and then I fell back on my favourite activity, moving sections around! Soon every scene will have been in every spot, except the first and the last! Actually, I have this Excel spreadsheet (like apparently Justine Larbalestier suggested but doesn't really use, and that's fine, but her novels clearly don't have this massive flaw in that they... I don't even know what's wrong with it except that it's not as good as it should be) anyway, I started trying to apply a normal time frame, a schedule to events, like, you know, weekdays have to come between weekends, and you can't have a whole string of tuesdays in a row, and I couldn't even make that wo

Or so it seems. Worked on the wretched thing for about an hour and a half. Wrote two scenes that were from my notes from last weekend. The two scenes were all about my fairies' motives. Oh, and their clothes. Fairies' clothes are very important. Tried to make two of the settings more consistent, but probably just made them more boring and illogical. I found myself trying to do keyword searches in order to find all the instances where things were, well, not what I'm going for now (what I was going for last year being something completely different). Some of the techniques I use in technical writing, like "search and replace" just don't translate well to fiction, where consistency of terminology would make my prose seem as boring as, well, a computer manual. And no one wants to read those. Considered adding the backstory I thought of a couple of days ago, but couldn't bring myself to do it (I will -- it needs to be done). Refigured one character again. How

Wow, the publisher and editor must have had a lot of confidence in Susanna Clarke. This is one fat book for a first novel. And there are some bizarre (though consistent) spellings. Or maybe I was reading an English edition. (I just looked it up, and the one that I kept noticing, "shew", is archaic, according to Oxford, so I guess it's an affectation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Why I read it: I must have seen reviews of it. I asked for it for two or three years in a row for Christmas, but nobody obliged (maybe because it's so long). So, one day I was at the library to see if any of the books I had requested were available (they weren't), and I wandered over to the paperback shelves, and there it was, so I picked it up. I had been idlely looking at the Bernard Cornwell titles, I think, trying to figure out which I had read. What I liked: Pretty much everything. It's written very much in the style of a Dickens novel, and fortunately, I like

Today I was reading "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" and I realized the problem with the Toothbrushing Club is that the fairies are too benign. And to think on about Tuesday I was considering just taking them out, they bored me so much. Not anymore. Onward!