Robynettely

1st draft I’ve been spending my daily time on WWS as much as possible, since first drafts have never been my problem, and editing and finishing things and letting people read stuff have. A friend told me to do a contest, so I wrote a 2000-word story using the same main character from the haunted house project, which now has to be cut down to 1300-1500 words, but I have a month… Editing “Wind/Water/Salt”. I've hung onto this post for a week now, hoping I'd manage to get chapter 4 posted to OWW. I did take up Chapter 1 OWW commentary. I so wanted to put up Chapter 5 as well but I just couldn’t get it together.  Connecting Critted 9 Got back 2 but one was an EC so it was worth it. I have come up with an amazing (!) process for getting through the crits people give me. I read the chapter first to myself with some goal in mind, and realize WHAT CRAP it is. Then I read those other assessments that aren’t nearly so harsh. ...

“The rib from which I remake the world” by Ed Kurtz. This one must have been recommended by Gemma Files, whose tastes align oddly well with mine.   I devoured it. “vN: the First Machine Dynasty” by Madeline Ashby. Somewhere I heard that the opening is awesome and disturbing and full of robot cannibalism. What’s not to like there! It was a fast read. Sometimes it felt too easy to get away from the characters we weren’t interested in, while everyone who caught up was someone we cared about. “Devine Fury: a History of Genius” by Darrin M. McMahon. The first two chapters were pretty harrowing, because they were all about geniuses with whom I am not familiar. Once it got to Mozart and Newton and the modern chapters, it was a little better. The second half was better, though the book seemed a little obsessed with Hitler’s genius, and there was about one woman mentioned: Mary Shelley, who wrote a book about a genius in order to avoid having another boring threesome with som...