Robynettely

Why I read it: I was in need of some polishing tips, last minute, for "Apocryphal". I tore the house apart looking for it. I pilfered it from my dad 18 months ago. Now I've read it, I should give it back. I distilled it down to a single checklist for myself first. Tastes like chicken: All the editing courses I've taken. None of the story structure. This book is about the scene and paragraph level. Bookmark: Checklist I made. What I liked: There were some pretty simple things I could do to brush up my prose. That was nice. I searched for "said", and for "ly", "as" and "ing", just to quickly polish things. Other tasks took a lot of time. Not so much: After a while I got bored and started skipping the samples. Lesson: Well, make that checklist for myself. I read all the "Apocryphal" stuff out loud, and wow, that was interesting. I use too many commas.

But Sunday we were out walking in a park in Scarborough (not the blight that people say it is -- Meadowvale park is really cool -- and the river was totally in flood. I'd love to go back and see what it's normallly like, on a dry day) and saw raspberry bushes with unripe (a week or two out) berries. That's probably why I was craving them. Unfortunately, they're just not something I keep in my fridge. Friday I sent in my application/submission package for Viable Paradise. Now, I wait. And work on the other 63 chapters. I hope I can keep some of the drive going. It would be nice to be able to let someone read the whole thing, maybe in August, with a reasonable sensation that all the scenes are there, and in the right order.

Why I read it: The title had Leopard in it, and as my brain was working on "Water Leopard", and "Sea Leopard" is sort of similar, when Ed left it on the floor in the living room, I picked it up. It's a library book. Bookmark: Chapters Love of Reading Foundation Tastes like chicken: I guess that Hugh Laurie book I read a couple of years ago was a send-up of this genre, though I didn't really realize it at the time, as I haven't read much of this genre. It's a submarine thriller. I think Hunt for Red October (the only other submarine thriller I've read, even though they're lying everywhere in our house) is a better book. What I liked: Written in the early 80's, so it didn't know what we (think we) know now about the USSR at the time, and their resources, and stuff. Plot: British invent a cloaking device and put it in a submarine. They fail to take it out when they send the sub out on manoeuvers, and then the Russians enact a plan to...

Why I read them: A few weeks ago I was on a long-ish drive, and I was thinking the way I do. There's this billboard near my house that had a Spanner ad on it for a while, and in the ad the model was wearing a leopard-spotted skirt. The background was white, with black rosettes with blue in the middle. I was thinking of stealing the colourway for "Leopard print cardi" from Knit.1 Fall 2007. So then I was thinking, it needed a better name. I chose "water leopard". And a story idea was born. At around the same time, one of my coworkers told a couple of stories about his life when he was a little kid in Vietnam. It blew me away that someone who had been a boat person was now leading a normal middle-class life... I guess I had a failure of imagination and somehow thought that once a boat person, always a boat person. My bad. So the water leopard story had to take place in that sort of place. To get a feel, I got some library books. Bookmark: Library receipts (...

I really hope I'm spelling that right. Elizabeth Bear , when she's working on a project, sometimes has a daily list she fills out... how many words, mean things, etc. One of the items is "Words Word don't know". Asthenosphere is one for me. Whee!