Robynettely

Last night I read 80 pages of the novel. I'd meant to read 100, so I would only have 100 left, but it didn't work out. I wanted to only have 100 left, so I could read the last pages and be done by the end of April, but the end of April doesn't include a weekend, so I guess that's not going to happen. This is my first pass through, where I'm marking scenes to be moved, and taking out things that are blatantly repetitive or inconsistent with the characters or the plot or the world. One of the scenes I read was one (I call it the Nevis scene) that I knew I was going to have to take out, because it was a thread I had started and then abandoned. And then a neat thing happened. I was reading the preceding scene, and I realized that scene needed to connect to something, and that was why I had written the following (Nevis) scene. But as I was scratching things out and crafting it so the Nevis scene was no longer there, the scene suddenly had a point, and a completely differ...

Why I read it: We have an extremely small library in the R&D kitchenette in my office. Every day that I heat up lunch (when I don't go out, or have something that's better cold) I would pick this book up and, if no one felt like talking to me, read a page or two while I waited for the microwave. I'm sure it was better than the alternatives -- Law for Engineers, Better Designs in Half the Time, etc. This book took me two or three years to read. Bookmark: My memory. I read the same page over and over for weeks, I'm sure. Tastes like chicken: "Dreaming in Code" would be the closest fit. This book traces the development of a computer codenamed Eagle at a company called Data General. It's non-fiction, and published circa 1980. I was at around page 80 when I realized that these people were making something much bigger than the computers I think of today -- not a mainframe so much, but they were really happy when it fit in a freight elevator. What I like...

I wrote a prologue to the wretched thing.

Why I read it: Jeff Vandermeer linked to her post about not having a contract for another book or some such thing. So I started reading her blog, and I noticed that she was part of what I think of the SU cabal which makes me curious. And then she had a post about please taking her books out of the library, or buyng them, or whatever it is that we do, and talking about them (even if you're just talking to yourself, as I do here). So I did -- the library thing, I mean. And I read it. Bookmark: Yarn receipt for ten balls of Jamieson's 2-ply. Tastes Like Chicken: "Skin Hunger" to start, maybe because of the two concurrent but relatively unrelated storylines. After while the storylines merged and it seemed more like Catherynne M. Valente's "In the Night Garden". It seems similarly literary, they use a lot the same big words, though structurally they're very different. The chapters are very long, and the story is written from two first-person perspect...

Why I read it: It was mentioned in a Toronto Star article (I can't link to it because it's behind a fee wall) about repurposing big box stores (which is funny, because I can't think of any buildings featured that were big box stores). I requested it from the library. It appeared. Bookmark: library receipt Tastes like chicken: Robert Fulford "The Accidental City" What I liked: I haven't read much about architecture, so this really made me notice stuff. It's a collection of essays, photos, interviews, and drawings about concrete architecture in and around Toronto, most of which was built between the 50s and the 70s. There are sections about proper working with concrete, the goals and objectives of different buildings (the Robarts Library, for example, may be a fortress of a building, but it seems to suit the goal of being a repository for books. It's not about being friendly and pretty, it's about keeping books in). On Sunday, we went to Charles ...

Why I read it: I'd seen the author's name mentioned various places, so on that list of authors last year at Christmas, This name was on the list. The boy had expressed interest in the cover , and I wanted to read it before he did to vett it for adult themes. Oh, and I happened across her LJ account , and CRK seems like an interesting person with an interesting process. Bookmark: White Birch Books (North Conway, NH). Support your local independent! Tastes like chicken: A cross between Thomas M. Disch and China Mieville. The book follows the adventures of a three-piece band in Birmingham, Alabama (a female singer/bass player who works in a coffee shop to pay the bills, her heroin-addict guitarist boyfriend, and the drummer, who's a mechanic by day). In their extended circle are the local goth kids who are in thrall to a woman named Spyder, who... has some issues. Some of the goth kids have an ill-advised peyote ritual in Spyder's basement, where Spyder's psyche kee...

I decided to organize my novel along a 3-act structure, partly as an exercise I suppose because I have a synopsis that wants some attention. Yesterday I made a new outline of the first act. I have to write maybe a third of the scenes still, and a couple need to be moved and sort of retasked. Today I started the second act. Of the nine scenes in Act 2 so far, I have to write six. Ack. It's like not even having a first draft at all! You know, I wrote extensive outlines, treatments, and stuff for this novel when I first wrote it, and it still sucked. Maybe I shouldn't have bothered. Except I suspect those outlines kept me going, some days.

I was reading the techdirt blog at work today (I was making help files at the same time, which sucks up all my system's resources, so there's nothing I can do except surf and write emails to my sister) and came across a story about a band that is trying to put together an album. Rather than have a contract with a record company and an advance and all that, they are trying to get a minimum number of people to commit to paying up-front (I presume not actually pay yet, though I couldn't find the article just now to. UPDATE: it was this ). Someone should do the same thing with novels. If I could get a thousand people to commit to buying my novel for $5 each, I could distribute it as a PDF with no DRM and be probably better off this time around than if I found a publisher. Well, except that people sneer at people who self-publish, and I'm not so stupid as to think I don't need an editor. Then I'd have made $5K, and sold my novel, and if those people who paid me for i...

Why I read it: For Christmas this year, rather than listing off a stack of books I wanted, I listed off a stack of authors, and let my sisters and dad and people pick the books for me. My dad bought me this one. Right now, I read it because I wanted something shorter and quicker than the last leaden tome, because I have a library book around here also, but it's non-fiction, and I was in the mood for fiction on Sunday. Bookmark: What bookmark? Tastes like chicken: Justine Musk's "Uninvited" for the edgy YA feel, and "Blood and Iron" for the seelie/unseelie court stuff, the kelpie, etc. It's the story of a girl who grew up with fairies for playmates, but then she left town to be dragged around behind her mother's band. She's 16 now, and back in Philly where the fairies are. A little bit she seeks them out, but they fall on her as well. She spends a lot of time navigating between the human teens and the fairies, trying to seem normal, though that...

I finished typing my first draft. It's 125,558 words long. I think I can shorten it. The ending lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. I converted it to manuscript format and printed out all 531 pages of it. I have some reading to do.

Today, in a comment where an engineer was giving me a block of text to put in a manual: "Could you use your magical writing skills and make it more appealing?"

But not counting much further, because there are only 40 more pages to type. And then I get to read the whole thing and delete a whole bunch of lame stuff. Awesome. And finish my synopsis, once I know how it ends.

Why I read it: I was hearing a lot about this book a couple of years ago. I think it was reviewed on Salon . There were a couple of mentions on Language Log . So, I asked for it for Christmas. My sister bought it for me, but lost it in her driveway or something, so she gave it to me at my other sister's wedding in January of 2008. I started reading it just before Christmas 2009, and used it as my carry-around book until this last week, when I did the final push and finished it. Bookmark: Promo for Rick Blechta's new book. Tastes like Chicken: Probably that Katherine M. Valente book I read last week, because of the story-within-a-story nature of this, and those other three vampire books I read back in January. This story is written from the perspective of present day, and follows a young woman's quest to learn her father's history, and this is entwined with his faculty advisor's history, which is entwined with a pack of monks travelling around in Romania, Turkey,...

Why I read it: There was a reference to the author on some website or other (might have been Jeff Vandermeer's ) telling about a new book coming out. The library didn't have that one. It had this one, though. Tastes like chicken: That other (vampire) book I haven't finished yet (I'll finish it soon. Next. Really.). C.S. Lewis's A Horse and His Boy (Narnia). The flavour seemed more Persian than Arabian to me, though I can't think of anything Persian I've actually read. But maybe that's because I know more Persians than Saudis. Bookmark: Cardboard packaging from a USB key I bought a couple of weeks ago. What I liked: The detail was very rich. It made me want to wear more colours. Unlike the afore-mentioned vampire story, which is also stories within stories within stories, these ones are more lightly related. The vampires are all closely related, about the same place, and the same vampire. These are characters pausing to tell their history, their ...