Robynettely

I wish I remember how we got on the subject, but I don't so I suppose I should let it go. But Ed asked me would I take advice from Anne McCaffrey (yes), Robert Jordan (yes), Nathaniel Brandon (yes), GRRM (yes), Orson Scott Card (yes).* And then he said "who wouldn't you take writing advice from?" I can't think of anyone. Advice is what it is, I think. As a writer, I'm open to people giving it, though I can pick through and choose the bits I want to actually use -- an acquired skill, from OWW and VP and working as a TW. But then, later this may change. Updated to add:  I just remembered who I said I might not take advice from, after thinking and thinking. I said William Shatner, because I'm not sure he really wrote all those Tekwar books. But thinking about it later, being an actor and having read many, many scripts, I bet he's got a really good sense of plot. *Not sure I got all the names right, but they're not important -- the gist is.

Yesterday I had a dentist appointment very early in the morning (8:30), and so I didn't have a chance to do my normal Fairfax writing routine. Normally I sit down and write as fast as possible to get the page (250 words) down before 8:15 when it's time to nag the boy and go to work. So I wrote my page in the evening instead. And because I was avoiding an editing project, I wrote it much earlier than I normally would have, for an evening. On weekends I write my page in the evening because I'm asleep at 8-8:15 in the morning, and when I get up I have a different routine that doesn't end with nagging the boy before going to work, or start with making myself a lunch to take with me. Anyway, all of this is to say, that I wrote p. 367 on the top of the page and had a mild epiphany. I have been working on this thing for over a year. If you subtract out the times when I had punishment pages (where I forgot or was too extremely exhausted to write my page one day, so the next d...

One of the places I go when I need a brain break is zenhabits.net . I don’t always agree with Leo, but he’s got an interesting perspective. He recently did a post called “the three-day monk habit” (go read the post  and poke around, he’s got lots of good ideas, and come back). This one is one of the ones I disagree with. See, I write every day, and I don’t do any of the stuff he suggests.   I write 1 st thing in the morning so I circumvent free will, I don’t listen to music because it would distract me, I doubt constantly, I don’t gradually increase because there’s no time in my 20-minute writing block, and I don’t have any momentum.  I am apparently totally a three-day monk. The best way for me to do something is to find a way to turn it into a sprint. Editing, I have to sit down and slog through as fast as possible. Last year when I was editing that novel, I broke it into six sprints, and sat down with it for hours at a stretch, then took some days off from it...

First Draft   “Fairfax”. Yeah, so I’m up around 85,000 words now. I may be eight chapters from the end, so I’m going to wind up with about 105,000 words. That’s more than I’d planned, but gets it done before November. This year I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo again, so I’m already planning for that. When this is done, one of my activities will be to type up one of the other novels, I think “St. Praxis”. These are the carrots I hold out in front of myself to keep things progressing.  “Lucky Kate”. First draft started. Editing Wrote about 15,000 words into something that I won’t really talk about right now, that I also took some words out of. Might have written more than 15K there, actually, as I did remove some blocks of text as I was putting in those other ones. The net gain was 15K.

Two of these I had started in April, so that month wasn’t as much a wasteland as it looked like (and I was sidetracked for a good reason!), and this month isn’t as awesomely prolific as it looks, either. “Headhunter” by Timothy Findley. At Ad Astra, this was described as an urban gothic fantasy, so I thought I’d read it. I’ve read at least one other of his books, “Not wanted on the voyage”, which I read at least twice, so I figured I’d like the style. The story is Heart of Darkness but takes place in Toronto, which even if I didn’t like the story and the characters would make it an entertaining read for me, since I’m deeply involved with the setting. (I often say that there are a whole lot of different reasons I’ll watch a movie, and it doesn’t necessarily have to have a good plot, decent characters, or engaging acting to keep me entertained – it can also have really awesome art direction or fabulous costumes or an amazing setting. Many people are not so tolerant. Books are simi...