Robynettely

Last night was picture night at circus, so we aren’t really supposed to learn anything. However, I did get a skill! A few weeks ago, we started working on pullovers. This is essentially the same as a parallel bars skill in gymnastics where you grab the bar, do half a chin-up, pike your feet up and pull to get your hips over the bar. A month ago I couldn’t do it. Three weeks ago, the coach told me if I couldn’t do it, I could jump onto the hoop and do twice as many controlled pull-downs (the second half of the skill, where you go down the same way – it uses the same muscles, but is easier because gravity helps) as everyone else. This led to an amazing set of bruises across my lower abdomen.  Last week I tried, and I could do it if I put my feet on the sides of the hoop as I went up in order to get my hips high enough.  Last night, I pulled over, all the way! Four times!  Also, I learned skin the cat, because it's on my conditioning list, so it doesn't

First Draft   “Vulgar Pony”. Short story. So I was maybe 80% through when I realized that this was an odd perversion of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, and that the idea it had started with was the one thing that didn’t fit in the story. I need to learn to be careful to just let the story end rather than dragging it out because I don’t know what I’ll be writing next. “Lucky Kate”. I had to go back and write the middle of this story. See below. Also, in addition to 2+ pages of fish head, I had nearly a page of fish tail too! Editing “Imp Face”. Typed and made tons of notes for how to fix it. What’s there was a good frame, but it needed the other half of the story to be written between the lines. But this seems to be my process – write something and then put the story into it. I was sure I had printed it, but had to scour the house looking for it. After an editing pass on it, I had a spare half hour one evening and sat down and read the whole thing again with

“The Crippled Angel” by Sarah Douglass. Ed got it out of the library, and said that even though it was a book 3, it stood on its own, and was fabulous. So I read it. SD certainly has a deft hand, though I found some of the characters’ behaviour inconsistent. That might be because I didn’t read books 1 and 2. Also, a bit too much tell for me sometimes, especially of stuff I’ve been told before, or shown. Sorry to hear she’d died. The decline of Mary was fabulous. “Rosemary and Rue” by Seanan McGuire. The boy got this for his birthday because he loved Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy, and then he forced it on me. Not that I suffered that much. We were on holiday and I was reading that endless book about French sociology, and I wanted to go seal-watching and mentioned selkies, and the boy started asking me if I’d read this, rather peeved-like. I meant to, really I did! So, I started it. Wow, it started well and kept turning up the heat. The boy was right. “A Local Habitation” b