Robynettely

OWW: 0. Bad member. “Anansi Boys” by Neil Gaiman. I actually finished this a bit after midnight on Dec 31, so it should have appeared on last month’s list, but whatever. It’s been lying around the house for years, and I finally picked it up and read it. I don’t know why I put it off for so long. It was very funny and charming. NG has such a comfortable voice to read. “The Freedom Maze” by Delia Sherman. Another novel shot through with references to other books, which is neat. This was a quick read that I didn’t expect to tie up as nicely as it did. I think what I liked was that the changes that happened to Sophie were real, she really did have a growth spurt in the six months (20 minutes) that she was gone. That’s something that’s always bothered me about Narnia and its ilk, and also about more adult (is there a better word for this subgenre?) portal fantasy, like “the Mirror of her Dreams”, “Fionavar”, etc. is that the characters don’t seem to be temporally affected by their secondar...

Updated to add: Actual content! Apparently I can’t type text in the content field, only in the title and tags fields, from my phone. The Toronto Standard has (or had) an entertaining feature, “Ideas, free to a good home”. I’m full of this sort of idea. Christy Matheson is one of them. You know how Pat Robertson said a few months back that if your spouse has Alzheimer’s disease it’s okay to divorce them , because they’re dead to you anyway? And Newt Gingrich kind of had affairs on his sickly wives (at least one of them) instead? Well, I was thinking: how does someone who needs to have an affair on their sickly spouse go about meeting the right person to do that with. One thing I learned from “ The Other Boleyn Girl” was that it’s more appropriate for a king to have an affair with a married girl than a single one. So clearly, my hypothetical person married to an Alzheimer’s patient would need to meet another like-minded individual in similar circumstances (of the opposite sex of cours...

Do you ever have a thought, and then it disappears because someone distracted you, and you spend a whole lot of time wanting that idea back, and then you remember what you think it might have been and it’s actually something quite stupid, like “I should google my coworker’s name” or "I wonder what John Scalzi is up to today?" I wonder if I’ve ever really forgotten a brilliant story idea, or if they were all that crap.

It's been weeks and weeks (at least four weeks) since last I did one of these challenges . I'm fighting the idiot self-imposed conviction that everything I write has to have a supernatural or fantastic or SF element. That's just stupid. “The name of this place is pretty offensive,” the woman said as I set her beer on the bar. "Not my fault," I said. "It was named that when I got here." "Still, you're making light of people's suffering." She might have been 43 (just a guess), with long hair in a ponytail, still mostly blonde. She wore paint-spattered jeans and a tee-shirt. "They're all dead. And I think it's more a statement about our cleaning staff. Lanes should be clean." The man who came in and made a bee-line to her would have been two or three years older, fit like a runner and suited like a lawyer. His hairline was receding. He wore a wedding ring. A bowling alley must have seemed like a good place to meet; neithe...

First Draft “Fairfax”. Started month with 43,000 words, near the beginning of Chapter 17, having written portions of my second outline. Now I’m past 54,000 nearing the end of Chapter 20. I should be more than half done! We’ll see about that, in about six months. . . Editing Toothbrushing Club. (Middle Years novel). Last time I posted, a week into December, I had gone through the first half, with the goal to have draft 3 by Christmas break. In this, I was successful. There was a lot less moving scenes around, and a lot more writing entire scenes, towards the end. I knew the ending was awful, and had written a note after reading the whole thing to basically delete the last five pages, and I wrote something else entirely. The whole thing is printed out and ready to read again, but I think I should give it a week or two. This is the first time I’ve ever really properly done a “middle” draft of anything this long from start to finish. The document is 53,000 words long which seems sort of ...

OWW: 4 “The Courts of Chaos” by RZ. You know, Corwin is one of the most awesomest characters ever. He’s like basically a god, and yet he doesn’t win all the time (wrestling with his brother, sword fighting with his other brother), doesn’t get what he wants, doesn’t ultimately save the world all by himself. . . Roger Zelazny is awesome. “Fool Moon” by Jim Butcher. Library book, #2 of the Dresden Files. I found it easier in this one easier to keep track of the characters than the first volume. “Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. The information was really interesting, and that kept me reading, but I found this book obnoxious. If it was a little dated in sections, that can be forgiven because it was written in 1990. However, if you’re going to take a tone that says “wow, everyone else is so stupid!” which is how the ‘humor’ seemed sometimes, your research and editing really has to be absolutely impeccable. Torontoans? Who calls us that? “Motel of the Mysteries” by David MacAulay. This wa...