Robynettely

Good news! July can end now. Last night, just before midnight, I finished the second draft of Wind/Water/Salt. Which is a good thing, because the first weekend of August is an extra-long (4-day) weekend, and we wouldn't want to delay that, would we?

First Draft “Limering”. Around 67,000 words. I discovered about a week ago what happened during the big mystery at the heart of the story, so I’ll be able to end it eventually. Editing “Wind/Water/Salt”. I’d like to say I got fed up and just finished the second draft, but alas that didn’t happen. I think for July I will just finish the damn thing. There are about 110 pages to go, so that's reasonable. Let's just say July won't end until this draft is done!  What happens is I go along, and I find something big that needs changing -- a character needs to be somewhere else than where I have her, and this has impacts across various chapters until things right themselves and I have a few clean sections. In order to make this stuff work, I have to gut some chapters, and then I just write these dreadful one- or two-sentence fillers. "Her hands were still in shackles. He had the tools lying around, and so he cut them off." And move along. But I have ma

“Homeland and other stories” by Barbara Kingsolver. Someone gave it to me when they were done with it. I was hoping for magic realism, but there was just too much realism to me. A couple of the stories were good, but most made me go Meh. The one that took place in the Petrified Forest stuck with me, and the one about the family road trip to Cherokee, Tenn. They were good stories and everything, but. “Parasite” by Mira Grant. At first I was wondering if six years was long enough for an adult to start from nothing and be a functional adult, but then I thought, kids have it rough because they’re trying to learn all these things while they’re experiencing constant change at the same time, so sometimes being in a non-growing body with consistent (even if cyclical) hormones would be easier to learn. There were almost too many similarities between this and Newsflesh, but ultimately I didn’t care, it was a fabulous read. “Shattered Pillars” by Elizabeth Bear. Book 2! “The G