Robynettely

“Moon brow” by Shahriar Mandanipour. The reviewer in Locus gave this one a negative review, but that made me want to read it, maybe honestly because I need to get a handle on modern Iran for Persephone and I haven’t made a vast effort to find resources. Research can be so all-encompassing. I have made some ridiculous assumptions in my notes, and it turns out some of them are okay. Others lead to backstory I guess? The review I read said this book was no Persepolis, in terms of its in-cluing for western readers. I’m not sure that’s a reasonable comparison. I had a conversation with the boy about this: not all books are “meant for me”. Persepolis was written (I think) to explain modern Iran to the French. Moon Brow was written to explain the 1979 revolution to younger Iranians? Just a theory. I liked the ending. I also had no idea why this was reviewed in Locus. There was no real F&SF or horror content. If I had all the time in the world it would be neat to try t...

Persephone Sometime last month I made a pile of sheets for the seven basic plots, and wrote different structures for some of the different ones. Not all of them. This gave me an ending!   Last month I read a book that made me realize I need a timeline of backstory, so I took a sheet of paper and folded it in three. The central one was “world” and the left and right were for A and L. It became real clear real fast that I had a lot of timelines for A but only vagueness for L. She’s got actual times and dates now! It’s good.  “Wind/Water/Salt”. Chapter 15: This was getting pretty close to done by the time I posted in March. I think I got too bogged down in mechanics. I finally managed to get it up though. Maybe I’m getting faster? Chapter 16: When I posted 15, this already felt close. I was working on it this morning, and it's looking really good... Chapter 17: The plan isn’t to be running out of chapters to edit and working forward because I’ve forgotten to print...