Robynettely

Sometimes I’m reading an article about Cultural Appropriation or something (e.g., http://www.salon.com/2016/09/26/writers-imagination-vs-cultural-appropriation-in-search-of-common-ground/ ) and I think about Canada and Canadian culture. I know people who won’t read Canadian books just on principle (I tried to force a Guy Gavriel Kay book on someone once, and after about a year he conceded, and told me afterward he wished I hadn’t told him GGK was Canadian because he would have read it sooner). We consider Canadian movies to be low-budget crap. Orphan Black is so good, we don’t even consider it Canadian. I once saw George Stromboulopolis say “Americans see someone famous and say someday I’m going to be that guy. Canadians see someone famous, and they say Someday I’m going to   bring him down.” Paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. And now we have a serial killer going around Hollywood killing people in Canadian ex-pats’ houses. Well, in my imagination, anyway. Two is a tre...

1st draft Continued Season 11 Writing Excuses exercises. This month I got to write a couple of short stories for these. “The Stairs Going Up”. 2500-word short story, done. “The ex-magician’s apprentice”. 4000-word short story, not quite done.   Editing “Labyrinth Moon”. My crazy plan with the Online Writing Workshop is to finish stories, send them out and get them their rejections (if that’s what they garner…) and then put them on OWW in order to get critical feedback because I get rather a lot of the form rejections. There are only two stories in my backlog that meet the requirements, so this month my goal was to finish a couple of things and get them circulating so they can accrue those rejections. And here we are, sigh. I got to the point where I couldn’t look at it anymore and set it aside. Maybe next month? “The Cicatrix Diary”. Ignored. “Volcano”. The problem was the first scene was 3x as long as it needed to be. It’s shorter and better now. The...

“Massacre at Mountain Meadows” by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard.   Sarah Monette (KatherineAddison) read and reviewed it a couple of weeks ago, and it sounded really interesting, and then I accidentally requested it from the library, so then I was stuck. But this was actually pretty interesting even if it wasn’t what I meant to read next. I'm always fascinated by the way proper historians think. Good history books are aware of what ideas they don’t have facts to support, and these authors made it very clear what they were guessing about. Plus it’s a fascinating piece of history that I knew nothing about.  “TheThief” by Megan Whalen Turner. Reread because I came across book 4 at Bakka. My notes say I first read this in September of 2006. It’s still a fantastic read. I love how Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia are the names of countries and their regents. “TheQueen of Attolia” by Megan Whalen Turner. Because what was the point of reading...