Robynettely

Why I read it: Because I'd read the previous one ("Melusine") and wanted to find out what happened next. Bookmark: Library receipt. Tastes like chicken: "Melusine", obviously. What I liked: Started right where teh other one left off. Didn't make me wade through pages and pages of recap, but explained the necessary bits, in character, very quickly. I suppose it didn't hurt that Felix had little memory of what had gone before, which meant that he couldn't explain it, and that Mildmay is quite a reticent dude, so will only tell what you really need to know. The voices still really worked. I liked the new characters, and the ones that improbably popped up again. I liked the timbre of the world. The storyline had a sort of inevitable progression, which made none of it seem contrived. Not so much: Tough one. I didn't have that much time for reading in the last month, so this took a while to get through. But I read the last 150 pages in a binge la...

Last night while driving around, the boy asked me why he couldn't read my novel (I changed the name again, by the way. Now it's called "Apocryphal"). I said "because I'm afraid my writing comes off like Stephanie Meyer's." So he said "Then just add in a secret fantasy boyfriend, and everyone will love it." I hemmed and hawed about that, and he said "Add in an Angel secret fantasy boyfriend. Maybe two." And I said "All the angels hate my main character." So he suggested "Add in some demons, then." And I said "There's already about fifty." To which he replied "Cool." There you go, success awaits.

When I finished typing the first draft, I printed a copy out, and did a mark-up where I deleted all the sections that were completely not relevant, and tagged ones that needed to be rewritten to a different end, and did some of the more simple rewrites. Friday I finished the data entry of those changes. My new word-count: 106,656. That's down just shy of 19K words. Now, I get to go through the vast pile of notes I've written on scrap paper, and see what needs adding, and then print it out again. Last print-out was 531 pages. Ouch! I wonder what the next one will be?

... as a tech writer, one time someone in QA suggested to me that I write a manual with a plot, where the user has various problems putting the product together and getting to work (it was a hardware manual). I got out of doing the revision by saying that it would probably increase the word count. I could have quoted Tina the Tech Writer, and said that "unfortunately it was not to be, because User A was not attracted to User B, because he was a bald engineer." Alas, I did not. The person who suggested this to me used to accost people on Friday afternoons and draw pictures on his whiteboard that involved the cliff-shaped kingdom of man, and the opposing cliff-shaped kingdom of God, and the cross-shaped thing that joined them. HR had warned him about doing that, but unfortunately he was a good QA guy. We all learned to stay out of the lab on Friday afternoons. Today I got to the end of the mark-ups on Draft 2. Now I have a whole bunch of scenes to write, and I can print it out ...

Though if getting blurbs is the biggest problem I have with my novel... ahem. Considering the problems I'm having with its structure, that would be a pretty big problem indeed. Last night I moved four chapters. Yay, I'm moving chapters again! As I said before, ahem. I'm going through my first mark-up. At p. 408, I'm down to 108,000 words. I think that's a good thing, as I have to add at least three sections in the beginning (I've written fragments of them) and three at the end. Oh, and three in the middle. I haven't written any of the middle ones, and I only have a vague idea of the end ones, though they are incredibly important, as they have to do with de-deus ex machina-ing my ending. If deus ex machina is a verb. Which it's not.

So far, just about a perfect day. I was awakened at 9:15 this morning by a raging thunderstorm that was depositing bouncy-ball sized hail on the lawn. The rain stopped (eventually) and didn't start again until I was almost done with my morning run. I made a pizza rustica for lunch, and it was awesome, even though I screwed up filling the breadmaker (I find dough is pretty forgiving), and I have about three more servings for later. Now I get to go to karate. I wrote a Fragment of a Missing Scene (I have a little pile of these). And later, I'll put some of those handwritten edits to the wretched novel.

Yesterday was Paddle the Don, an annual event where people get to put canoes and kayaks in the West Don River just below the Ontario Science Centre and paddle down to Lake Ontario. Of course, I found out about it when the registration was already full, and I don't have a canoe or kayak anyway. We stayed up far too late the night before watching Season 2 Disk 2 of Slings and Arrows, so we weren't even awake until two hours after the event began. But, after coffee and a quick surf-o-the-web, we drove down to Portage 1. I'd never heard of it before this year, though I've been living in the neighbourhood for nine years, and one of the volunteers we talked to told us he'd been doing his post (putting in at Portage 1) for seven years. He told us he'd never seen anyone go over the falls at Portage 1, though he had seen an empty canoe go over .To me, that suggests a safe, well-run event. Also at Portage 1, I overheard that they had released water at the resevroir/dam fi...