Robynettely

Today while I was having my (adult) karate class, over in the kids' class, I heard a black belt tell the 10 to 14-year-olds, "Yesterday I went to a really interesting kinesiology convention." And I thought to myself, they probably don't think that's a really interesting convention. Also today, my karate friend who is reading my karate zombie novel told me he's on page 205 (of 285). I'm amazed by that. He said he was trying to guess which characters were based on which members of our dojo. I guess that could keep you going. And I just spent the last hour rolling grape leaves for a potluck tomorrow. The problem: we're having a snowstorm right now. The potluck might not have anyone at it, if no one can get to work. At least stuffed grape leaves are a meal, if I'm the only one there. What if it's only me, and someone who made a cake?

One of my karate buddies volunteered to read the karate zombie novel from November, but then never gave me his email address. Maybe he's waiting to give me his business card or something. Maybe I shouldn't have told him so many times that the novel is unreadable. I need to practice in a mirror saying "just skip the boring parts" perhaps.

Boston Cupcakes: according to the cookbook, mace gives them a special New England twist. Um, yeah. But everyone liked them. I am happy to say I don't hate the dolphin story so much anymore. Sick to death of it, yes, but not hatred. This is an improvement. A couple of days ago on 43folders.com there was a suggestion about taking things from conception to completion (shut up, despite having posted a link, I'm writing this from memory rather) in the shortest time possible. With the dolphin story, I have not done this. For some reason a few weeks ago in editing, I dumped like four pages of exposition into the first act of the story. It's a short story. It can't take that sort of weighing down. In the last couple of evenings, I've taken most of that back out. What I think I can improve: 1. Write a better first draft (probably less with the endless exposition). 2. Edit more efficiently. Maybe if I practice editing things I've written recently, I will start to write ...

So it's like the third or fourth day in a row that I've been looking at the Dolphin story, and the beginning is SO boring, and nothing happens until about page eight (of 26), and there's tons of exposition. And the writing is crap, and there's no point even fixing it, until I know which paragraphs should actually stay. And I've moved so many things around now that there is no flow. Every place where two paragraphs used to flow one to the next, now there's invariably some chunk of nonsense dropped in the middle. I will never finish anything, not even this 5000-word story. But at least I got it back down to 5000 words. That's something, I guess. Oh, and the ending is pretty good, I think. At least, it's good compared to the rest of the story, which is crap.

Manners. First draft novel. 80% complete. "Dolphin". Short Story. Editing -- just finished the 3rd draft. Got the POV right now. "Bezoar". Short Story. Third draft. Made some really good progress with this one this month. Last night in my big mission was to make it clear in the first five pages what this story is about, because I seem to have a problem with that. And rather than write first, then knit, I edited and knitted at the same time. When I try to make the changes in the soft copy today, I guess I'll see how that worked. Printed some of the karate zombie thing, never really worked on it. Felt like going back to Toothbrush maybe. Extremely poor focus this month. My interior life has gone all haywire. I need beta blockers or adderal or both.

"Unicorn" - Just came back again. That's twice. On today's list I have to get it out to #3. This is the first time in my life, I think, that I've ever sent something out twice. Always in the past, and remember this was in the dark ages of juvinilia, I would send something out, and no matter how pleasant the rejection letter (and I did get a few personal ones) I would always decide that the story sucked and file it away. I probably still have those files. I should pull the stories out and find out how badly they really did suck. Writing avoidance project: Instead of actually working on the novel, I bought several books to read for research. So I guess at some point I'll have to actually read Dante and Milton, and some actual apocrypha. This time next month, it would be sweet to have another story circulating. God, I wish I didn't edit so slowly. Though last night I did manage to do the "write first, then knit" thing that I mentioned before, and ...

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" by Mark Haddon . I saw this book on many "best of year" lists maybe four or five years ago, but I'm not sure I ever put it on a list. The boy was reading it for school, so I picked it up and read 106 pages the first day, and then finished it two days later when the boy brought it home special so I could finish it (he'd already finished it). He thought Christopher was arrogant. I thought Christopher did some amazing things, especially considering his challenges, and his parents were a pretty disfunctional lot, and it was a good thing he had Siobhan, a sane, rational adult. I gather from the intro that the author spent a lot of time with autistic people, which made the characterization good. The details -- lists of items, etc. -- were hysterical and totally appropriate for the character to notice. Some of them I sort of skipped over, like the descriptions of the signs in the train station, but the box of meusl...