Robynettely

Sunday I made a big push to the finish of volume 4 (it's all written in spiral-bound notebooks). And now I have 99,110 words. So close to 100K! Not that it's an important milestone, but it would be neat. And now I have only the final volume to type, 160 pages. It would be so neat to have this all typed.

My Word doc now stands at approximately 87,000 words. Today I got a new message: Word can no longer display spelling and grammar errors, as there are too many. Nice. I was thinking, maybe I should enter some of my characters' names into the auxiliary dictionary?

Last night I dreamed that Neil Gaiman is the reincarnation of Mark Twain.

This novel is a void, and not in a good way. In the 80K I've typed, there are about five recurring characters. There are about five locations. It seems incredibly un-populated. Everyone sits talking for pages and pages, but only with one another, and then they move to a different location and talk with other people. I need some action (other than the one exciting violent scene I have, which I love). I've started populating it. I'm creating characters. I'm adding locations. Yesterday, I created two characters for the main characters to interact with, and I've scouted locations for them. (For some reason, I need real locations to visualize.) I need to decide where to put a hell mouth, somewhere near the DVP and Lawrence ave. It can't be at Don Mills mall, I'm using that for something else.

I might have mentioned before that when I started typing this novel, I found that I had written two-and-a-half chapters, and then restarted at Chapter one, with Chapter 3's content, switching from first to third person. Today's amazing accomplishment is that I managed to get things straightened out so I have the same number of chapters as chapter numbers. This entailed merging two chapters into one, and another two into one, and deleting one entirely. I know it's incredibly unimportant, and I could just renumber things, but as I'm still typing (I've got 80K typed!) it would be a little messy. So this just feels good.

Why I read it: Recommended by my friend Nadine. Also, I read an interview with the author in Salon? where she listed off a few things that you can do now to survive in the future. Bookmark: Library receipt. Tastes like chicken: "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo. This book is packed with anecdotes about different disasters, and people who survived, and people who didn't. Kind of a compare-and-contrast. What I liked: This book used references in what I think of as the Rolling Stone style. That's where the author refers to an expert, and then repeatedly re-refers to them using some clever note, like "Robyn, the tech writer" so I could remember quickly and easily who they were, and what they were experts on. A lot of the newspapers and magazines I read don't do that, and in long-form journalism, I often find myself searching back for who the heck this person was. That drives me nuts. By the way, I think of it as Rolling Stone style because that...

Saturday night, I stayed up editing chapter 3 until just before 2am, which turns into 3am when you factor in the time change. I've managed to consolidate three bad chapters into one that actually progressess the plot. Sunday night I noticed I was about 12 pages from copy-typing the end of second notebook (of five, but the first was very short), so I stayed up until past 1am typing that (and on a school night, too!). The justification, in my own mind, was I wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, what with the night before messing up my circadian rhythm, and the time change meaning it felt like "just" midnight. I'm well past the 50K mark, which is great. While I was pulling out the next notebook from the filing cabinet, I came across the original plan for this book (not the sheets, one per chapter, that describe what's going to happen, but the folder that contains my original character sketches and an outline). I had intended this book to be 60-69,000 words long. ...

Why I read it: This book was recommended on various blogs I read ( this one and this one come to mind, but maybe others as well). It was up for a cybil. I was trapped at the mall for an hour last Sunday, and so I went to the bookstore and kind of accidentally read the first 40 pages. And after that it just sort of came home with me. I showed it to the boy in the car on the way home. He finished it on Wednesday. Tastes like chicken: Ys by Joanna Newsom . I know it's a CD, but it makes sense to me. Bookmark: Store receipt What I liked: Wow. This book totally hooked me. I read a bunch of pages last night while sitting around in public, and I laughed out loud. I totally cared about Katniss. The scene about Rue's bread made me cry. The story takes place in a future society that has risen up out of the ruins of the USA. There's a capitol, somewhere in the rockies, and 12 districts (used to be 13, until there was a rebellion and the 13th was destroyed). Katniss lives in distr...

The Big Read ( http://www.neabigread.org/ ) said that, on average, adults have only read six books on this list. So ... copy this list, remove my yeses, add your comments, and put in a total. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - YES 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – YES 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - YES 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – YES 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - YES 6 The Bible – Parts 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - YES 8 1984 - George Orwell - YES 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - YES 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - YES 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - YES 12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – YES 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – we have it… 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – we have it… 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier – started it… 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - YES 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger – Started it… 19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - 20 Middlemarch - Geo...

Last night I typed up a rather nice flying scene. Of course, the destination was rather pointless.

Oh, my god. Sometimes when I'm typing this stuff up, I come across something so unbelievably horrible I'm speechless. I seem to have created the most new-age Satan ever. I quote: "Too bad the humans got the story of what happened so wrong,” Lucifer said. He moved on to another picture. It was the standard hellish torture scene – humans writhing, demons whipping, blood and pain and shit. “I figured that was your doing,” Vivianne said. The story of Eden, not this painting. Though it was well-done, too. “I won’t argue. It could have been one of my minions,” Lucifer said. “You don’t have a lot of fans down here.” He led her past another painting, of a Hell on Earth. It might have been Hawaii, paradise being destroyed by the fires of the deep. Humans usually caught the majesty of nature in this type of scene. Here, it was about Hell’s dominion over Earth. It was somewhat offensive, perhaps. “All your work?” Vivianne asked. “Oh, no,” Lucifer said. “I’m gifted with them all the t...