Robynettely

First Draft Chickpea. In April I had written three pages. I’m trying to move to a different level here, where maybe my first drafts aren’t all completely crap. So I started by knowing how it was going to end, and having a story in my head. It went kind of to hell towards the end, but I can fix it in post, right? My draft wound up probably 3000 words long. One Degree. At some point in April, I lost my notes for this, which I guess was a good excuse not to work on it. After Chickpea fizzled to a lame ending, I found my notes while doing some filing, and it became my page-a-day, which wasn’t what I had intended for it, but whatever. Medusa. Another Chuck Wendig challenge, 1500 words max. Wrote a first draft Monday (May 17). “Take Down the Lot of You”. Chuck Wendig challenge, 1000 words max. Wrote first draft May 30, wound up with 1700 words. Editing "The Rabbits". Could this only be the fourth draft I just did? Removed about 2500 more words, and it was easy, down to 6600 wor...

“A Book of Tongues” by Gemma Files. I bought this one at Ad Astra after hearing her read (I got it signed! I can’t read what it says!), and I started reading it, and OMG I could totally hear her reading voice in every word. And it was laugh-out-loud funny. Though perhaps my idea of funny is not everyone’s. One of my coworkers asked if I’d read “Not wanted on the Voyage” by Timothy Findlay a few days ago (actually, he sort of assumed I’d read it, which was true) because his son is reading it for school and having a rough time getting through it, because it’s so grim. And I said, sure, there are some dark bits, but it’s so funny! Anyway, like for example in this book one character is describing a horrific stoning of a presumed witch, and another character says “Only way, sometimes,” and I thought that was so funny! But I can see where other people might think it’s sick. “Ha’penny” by Jo Walton. After I read this in January, I said I wanted to buy about ten Farthings and give them away....

The challenge was here . I watched Tangled last weekend, and thought, someone should do a mashup, since both were about magic hair and eyes, but so different. If I'd done another draft, I would have made Medusa angrier. She doesn't come off enraged enough yet. But for now I'll just call it done. She had been born bald. When it grew in, her hair started blonde and curly at the back, dark and straight at the front. The curls worked their way forward, and the darkness worked towards the back, and by the time she was of age, Medusa had a magnificent head of hair. That had been a problem. Her beautiful long coils of hair had hung to the middle of her back, setting off her stunning eyes, high cheekbones and ripe, red mouth. Because of those looks, she thought she could get away with anything. Anything in this case was stealing lettuce. The punishment was that her hair was turned to snakes, anyone who looked in her eyes was turned to stone, and living on a desert island. The Templ...

This week's challenge was to write a story with some cussing in the title. I seem to be a bit doomed with this challenge, as I didn't find out about it until Monday (my fault) and then Blogger was down last night. I pulled out a first draft I'd had lying around since maybe December 2009, and cleaned it up through three drafts. So without further ado: Edited September 29, 2011: I took it down because I edited it and actually submitted it somewhere!

I think I upped a level in story last night. I was really close yesterday, when I was walking to work after writing my morning page, and realized that a choice I was making with my setting was going to make my story work completely. Then I had decided to do a “final” pass on Bezoar, because the weekly challenge didn’t really speak to me. I was reading along, and I realized that a scene I was working on was “a character asks another character to do something, and then he does it.” No tension there. I needed some reason for the one character to make the other character do something, and the other to resist, but then do it anyway. And I had a throwaway line that I’d tagged about the setting, that I was really going to throw away, because there was no good place for it, and I realized that if I made that line into the tension of the story rather than deleting it, and moved it to the front, then my characters had a reason to do things, and a time frame. Stories need tension. Characters can’...

“My mother she killed me, My father he ate me” edited by Kate Bernheimer. Yet another library book, this one a request. A collection of modern fairy tales. I’ll admit I don’t know every fairy tale on the planet, and in fact I might only know a couple of dozen of the more obvious ones, probably from Disney books and movies. I thought the Gregory McGuire intro was annoying, but then I read the first story, and I had to google John James Audubon, because I had no idea what he was really like. What I totally enjoyed was that I could chat about the story as being about Baba Yaga, and people knew what I was talking about, because these are all archetypes. That’s what (in my opinion) copyright has removed from Canadian literature – we can refer to the same places, but we can’t build archetypes the same way, because that’s “stealing”. The Karen Joy Fowler and Stacey Richter stories were standouts. A couple of the stories were just punishment. And I see it’s been nominated for a Shirley Jackso...

First Draft Pause. I had a really hard time with this one keeping it on track. I knew where I wanted the story to go, but I just couldn’t get it to go there. It’s going to take a lot of editing to make it into the story I want it to be. Ian’s Dad’s Ashes. Start-to-finish April 18, 2011, 1900 words. Geese. First draft was 261 words and 16 sentences and took about 20 minutes to write on April 26. Since the target was 3 sentences, I had some work to do. However, my strategy was to write the whole story and “fix it in post”. Chickpea. Short story, just started. It’s a post-zombie-apocalypse retelling of The Princess and the Pea. At three pages long, it’s still in the stage where I like it, before I wreck it by trying to write it down. Editing “Bezoar”. Mostly I carried this around. Since I restructured the ending, I needed to read the ending again to make sure it made sense what I’d done, and smooth it out. Ian’s Dad’s Ashes. Typed April 19, 2011. Second draft April 20, 2011 (1400 wo...