Robynettely

LHC #192: "The Sisters of Straygarden Place" by Hayley Chewins. Hard copy. I guess middle grades don't read as many e-books? Not the book for me, maybe. I had trouble keeping track of the characters. The boy and I were talking about Themes a week or two ago, and I couldn't really see one here.  LHC #193: "City of the Plague God" by Sarwat Chadda. eBook, also middle grade. Much more to my liking.  LHC #194: "The Mask of Mirrors" by M.A. Carrick. The start was too stressful, I almost abandoned it. That was partly because it's really fat. The constant trying to guess who the rook was seemed silly, and some characters seemed sort of abandoned, but I guess that's what sequels are for. At least I don't have to rush; book 3 comes out next August.   LHC #195: "The Fireman" by Joe Hill.  Audiobook. Started it because I'd run out of podcasts and was doing deploy prep at work. I meant to listen to it while finishing the last 60 ro

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Worked more on the ending (which despite what I wrote last month wasn't done, just rewritten what I'd written before). The one POV's ending is kind of done-ish, and I had a revelation about the other POV's, which makes the whole story make sense.  Short Stories:  Went through all the comments on the one I put up last month and pulled out another one from the archive. Then the boy challenged me to read the crits on the one I posted recently, so I did, and we talked about the ending, so maybe I'll work on that. Then I was reading twitter which gave me an idea about how to fix another story, which I started to do instead. The point is, lots of plans, no action.  Critted  9  Got back  4  Did I mention I decided to scale back my reviews to two per week to give myself time to actually work on my own projects? I did. Did I work on my own projects? Hahaha

LHC #188: "How to Future" by Scott Smith with Madeline Ashby.  Hard copy. Maybe I wasn't the right audience for this; I found it maddeningly vague. Read too much like a business book. I might have too many strong opinions to be a good futurist.  LHC #189: "Bright Eyed" by RM Vaughan. eBook. Easy read. I totally enjoyed this.  LHC #190: "The future of another timeline" by Analee Newitz. Audio book, and rightly so, because there was a song! It took about 90 minutes to have a sympathetic male character. The characters will stick with me though, it was very good.  LHC #191: "From cradle to stage" by Virginia Hanlon Grohl (Dave Grohl's mother). eBook. She's a delightful writer. I loved this book. I loved the stories about moms of adults who aren't done with their lives, the treatment of the music industry not as a soap opera, but as people who are passionate about music, not about being famous. 

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Finished rewriting the the scenes near the ending. Much better now. Now I just need to write most of the Lindsay storyline. The boy asked to read it when it's done, and I said it might never be, which might have been too honest. I think I can finish it.  Short Stories:  I had to put something on OWW, so I forced myself to finish reading this and taking out the really obvious problems. This took about 10 hours longer than I expected.  Critted  9  Got back  4  I need to keep putting things up for review! I had to reorganize my time a little bit to work on my own stuff and not just other people's. Which was a net good.  Submissions  0  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting I Yam pullover  (self). Done. It came out awesome. See the picture above.  Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Since I Yam is done, I worked on the first sleeve. When this is done, I have some

 LHC #184: "Amberlough" by Lara Elena Donnelly read by Mary Robinette Kowal. Audiobook, listened to it mostly in my car driving to and from Ottawa. There was more gay sex than I expected, but it was fine because it was all totally integrated in the plot, characters interrogating each other during, etc.  LHC #185: "Subprime Attention Crisis" by Tim Hwang. ebook. This was more history than future than I wanted, but I guess predicting is risky.  LHC #186: "Jade War" by Fonda Lee. Read book 1 almost 2 years ago. When I get the hold list down to a reasonable number*, I think I will start reading series closer together, it's more enjoyable. Anyway, I talked this one enough that the boy will probably start the series, and I've already added book 3 to my list. LHC #187: "A Necessary Evil" by Abir Mukherjee. eBook. I said to someone I was critting recently that I don't read much in the way of mysteries, and apparently that was a lie. I read

Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Kept writing on towards the ending. I was explaining to Ed why Jade City was so great and realized I needed to kill more characters, and actually that was what was wrong with my ending sequence, so I got a bit more ruthless.  Short Stories:  Needing something to post to OWW, I worked on one, stripping out some bad choices I think. Hope. I'm on the last pass before I call it done.  Critted  7  Got back  0 I caught up with everyone I've been critting lately, or they slowed down, one or the other. Oh, and one disappeared entirely. I hate when that happens.  And it's probably not a good thing that I've got more time slotted for working on other people's stuff than my own.   Submissions  0  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Still on the first sleeve. I haven't really worked on it since I started I Yam, I'd

 LHC #180: "The Red Wolf Conspiracy" by Robert V.S. Redick.  Hard copy; the library doesn't even had this in digital. The first 50 pages were really confusing, but fortunately I don't usually give up until around p. 60, by which things were going great. But it never completely gelled for me, it felt sort of like reading someone's D&D campaign.  LHC #181:  "And then they came for me (Rosewater)" Maziar Bahari.  After reading a few of these "trapped in an Iranian prison for dubious reasons" books I kind of get the idea: Iranian interrogators are idiots with no real goal of getting information. Unfortunately, my fictional character who spends time in an Iranian prison does not really get interrogated that much, he's a different kind of prisoner.  LHC #182: "Burning down the house: essays on fiction" by Charles Baxter. eBook. Seemed kind of mean-spirited at times, but I did get some ideas for my current problem, which is endings.

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Kept writing on towards the ending.  Short Stories:  Needing something to post to OWW, I worked on one, stripping out some bad choices I think. Hope.  Critted  12  Got back  1  Submissions  0  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month with four inches of the first sleeve. I did another few. This thing is dull.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month with 9 inches of the first sleeve. This sleeve is now done and attached to the body, and I've started the next sleeve.  Extra Whip socks  (Coffeehouse knits). Finished the sixth sock, started the seventh. I Yam pullover  (self). Back was already done; I'd just started a sleeve when this month started. That sleeve is done and I've started the front.  Last month I said I cut out a jumper to go with that t-shirt.  That was a lie. But now I have cu

"Lent" by Jo Walton. I love her so much. An interesting thing to read right after The Dragon Waiting that's for sure. I knew even less about Savonarola than Richard III but that didn't matter.  LHC #175: "On Translation: Translators on their work and what it means" edited by Esther Allen. Even the essays I really didn't care about, like the one about translating songs from old French, were fascinating. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that French would have zany old spellings the way English does.  LHC #176: "Wanderers" by Chuck Wendig. I was intimidated by the fatness of this, but it was a very quick read (for something so fat). I guess long doesn't equal difficult? I did find the lack of past perfect tense sort of annoying sometimes. It meant I had to pick through manually and decide what order things happened. also an unnatural number of characters with red hair for no reason. And America seems to be populated only by white supremac

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): While lying awake with Covid I had a genius idea for the ending. I'd already had a vague idea of how things end, but this was part of the mechanism that makes it happen, and it's in keeping with the characters' attitudes so I guess it was worth the wait?  Short Stories:  I carried one around for a while but did not look at it.  Critted  7  Got back  0 Submissions  0  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month with an inch of the first sleeve. My schedule for the rest of the year's knitting says I had to complete two sleeves this month. This should have been one of them. It was not.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month with 9 inches of the first sleeve. According to that above-mentioned schedule, I should have finished this sleeve too. It is also not finished.     Extra Whip socks  (C

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I did a couple of thousand words, worked on it ten days in the month.  Short Stories:   Critted  12  Got back  7 Submissions  1  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month 2" from the hem. Finished the body and started the first sleeve. Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month about a half-inch from the armholes, with both sleeve cuffs done, one inch of sleeve fair isle. Did maybe 4 inches.    Extra Whip socks  (Coffeehouse knits). Finished the fourth sock. Started the fifth. I Yam pullover (self). I needed something portable to take to St. John's, so I started this. Everything I'm working on right now seems to use 3mm needles.  I guess I should cut out a sewing project. All that fabric won't use itself (I hope, that would be creepy). 

LHC #171: "The Sol Majestic" by Ferrett Steinmetz.  Fourth book of his that I've read. For some reason the library didn't have this one as an eBook, so I took it on vacation. Ed forgot to take a book with him, so I lent him this even though it's probably not his jam, and he quite enjoyed it!  LHC #172: "Radical Suburbs" by Amanda Kolson Hurley. Another hard copy. It was really interesting, and not hating on suburbs at all. But then I suppose I live in an inner suburb, and I have nothing against Markham for example. They aren't all bad, they just take a while to find their stride.  LHC #173: "Mexican Gothic" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. eBook. Totally awesome, but I knew it was the mould as soon as it was mentioned. No house has mould without that being the problem.  LHC #1 74: "The Dragon Waiting" by John M. Ford. I feel like I read this a really long time ago, like 25 or 30 years ago. I really wish I knew more of the right history,

   Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I did a couple of thousand words, worked on it ten days in the month.  Short Stories:  Worked on one (the same one I was working on last month) a lot more, put it on the workshop.  Critted  9  Got back  6 Submissions  1  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month with nine inches below the armholes, finished with 15 inches, so I'm 2" from the hem.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month about a half-inch from the armholes, with one sleeve cuff done. Finished the second cuff, so the intarsia is done. Turned back to the first sleeve and did an inch of the fair isle.          Extra Whip socks  (Coffeehouse knits). Finished the third sock. Started the fourth.  Queen's Gambit skirt: Ironed and hemmed and it's done. It came out shockingly well, for all the trouble it caused.    

Apparently I've given up on trying to read in these pictures, let's see if I can do better next month.  LHC #167: "Missing Soluch" by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, translated by Kamran Rastegar. I ought to acknowledge the translators more often here; they're integral to the experience. Anyway, I read book 1 of this (it's divided into 4 books, about 100 pages each) and found it unrelentingly depressing. Then partway through book 2, I started to wonder if I was misunderstanding completely and it was actually supposed to be funny?  LHC #168: "Legends of the Fire Spirits" by Robert Lebling. Hard copy! I read most of this on vacation.  LHC #169: "Moon of the Crusted Snow" by Waubgeshig Rice. eBook. Pretty fun.  LHC #170: "Automatic Reload" by Ferrett Steinmetz . eBook. I quite enjoyed it. Not something I could write, I think, which makes me sort of jealous. The characters and their issues were so embedded in the story! 

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Now that it's a paranormal romance, I've written a lot of words.  Short Stories:   I worked on one quite a bit. In addition, the boy set me a homework to pick a story prompt and do that, so I worked on it, and he did it the same prompt too, which was fun. Then one evening I was trying to add to my list of markets and realized that I had a deadline of 2 days to finish something that I had been sitting on for like two months. D'oh!  Critted  11  Got back  0 But in fairness I didn't post anything.  Submissions  1  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month just before the increases towards the hem. Maybe I did 3 inches? I only work on it when we watch The Expanse.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month about a half-inch from the armholes, with one sleeve barely started. Finished the cuff

  LHC #163: "Mycroft Holmes" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother written by a basketball genius? What could go wrong? Not enough girls, but whatever.  LHC #164: "Passing Strange" by Ellen Klages. Delightful!  LHC #165: "The Angel of the Crows" by Katherine Addison. By a weird fluke, this is another Sherlock Holmes, this time where Sherlock is an angel named Crow, and Watson is a doctor who was maimed by a fallen in Afghanistan named Doyle. I was thinking there weren't enough girls in this story, but changed my mind later.  LHC #166: "A Stranger in Olondria" by Sofia Samatar.  I read the first 20% thinking nothing was ever going to happen, it was all just going to be sunshine and light. I don't know why this bothered me; it's a complaint people make about my stories all the time, that nothing happens. Anyway, plenty happened in the end. I liked its attitude towards humanity; most people came

 LHC #160: "Touba and the meaning of night" by Shahrnush Parsipur. I imagine it was listed in Reading Lolita in Tehran. I've got a few things on the list bunched together that are from that (My uncle Napoleon was too I'm sure). It was very good but took me a ridiculous amount of time to read.  Book by a friend from VP. Not published yet, but I think it will be big. It was crazy long, though.  LHC #161: "The Watchmaker of filigree street" by Natasha Pulley. No idea why it was on my list, but I loved it.  LHC #162: "Vengeful" byVE Schwab. I read Vicious the year it came out. The boy strongly recommended this. His book club is reading her latest! Maybe I should move that one up my list too.  Anyway, after a few chapters I read a synopsis of Vicious so would remember who all these people were. Then I devoured this. 

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I've spent a lot of time in denial that this is a paranormal romance, but now I'm accepting it, and looking at what beats I need, etc.  Short Stories:   Critted  12  Got back  3   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month about eight inches below the armholes on the body (knit top-down). I feel like I'm still at that point now, but it can't be true. Anyway, I'm not doing decreases anymore, it's only increases from here to the bottom.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month four inches from the armholes, knitting the body in one piece.  Now I'm about a half-inch from the armholes and have started a sleeve so I can attach them when the time comes.  Extra Whip socks  (Coffeehouse knits). Finished the first sock and the cuff, heel, and gusset of the second.  Que

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 38:  Took up comments.     Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Went back to the start to fill in rather a lot of missing scenes. Not sure what the point to them is, but some of the information is important. This section of the novel needs another layer of something going on rather than just the obvious. I'll keep working until I figure out what that is, I guess.  I also seem to have gotten to the limit of what Google Docs can do as a single file, so I broke it into 4, and it's much more searchable now.  Short Stories:   Found a market for another one, so I posted it as-is to the OWW for commentary.  Critted  8  Got back   6   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month about four inches below the armholes on the body (knit top-down). It's really boring, so I just work on it while watching TV. That netted me about 4 inc

  LHC #156: "How to Murder your Life" by Cat Marnell. eBook. It sat at 'available in approximately 4 weeks' for weeks, and then suddenly appeared. The voice was annoying to start but I liked the ending.  LHC #157: "The Perfect Assassin" by K.A. Doore. I'd been assuming this was available on overdrive, but apparently that was a different book with the same name. What's up with that? It was a fun read.  LHC #158: "Last Song Before Night" by Ilana C. Myer. Same as #156, this just showed up all of a sudden. It was okay, I guess. The ending felt a bit rushed to me, the last four chapters especially, where there was a ton of recursive "they had done this while offscreen" recapping.  "A Spindle Splintered" by Alix E. Harrow. Fun, quick read. I read it because Marissa Lingen just read the sequel, and her recommendations are pretty reliable.  LHC #159: "Michael Clayton, the shooting script" by Tony Gilroy. Of course

Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 31-37: Took up comments.     Someone (a reviewer worried about the marketability of my tone) called it "cozy horror" which I found funny because I don't think of it as horror. Folk horror maybe, though I gather that phrase is overused.    Various people have pointed out the amount of walking that happens in these chapters. Have I mentioned I'm very fond of walking? The above picture is from a morning walk. We were having a blizzard. Four TTC buses were stuck on my street. The first ones left about twelve hours later; the last was there at least forty-eight hours.  Chapters 38-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Wrote a ton more progressing from where I had realized the why that things happened that I wrote about last month. I found a process whereby one day I write a dialog spine and then the next day come back and flesh out that spine and progress forward with new dialog spine. This has

  Too bad I didn't put a book on the floor there, so I could pretend I was reading, just hanging out. Next month!  LHC #153: "All of us with wings" by Michelle Ruiz Keil. eBook. Stressful read! It took me until Chapter 21 to realize that the chapter titles were songs. The problem was, a lot of the songs were longer than the chapters, which hurt momentum. I didn't understand what kind of governess Xochi could possibly be, as she spent basically no time with Pallas.  LHC #154: "Viral Modernism: the influenza pandemic and interwar literature" by Elizabeth Outka. I put a hold on this back in April of 2020, when pandemics were still new and interesting. It answered the question I wanted to know, which was how we forgot the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. Though this book made the flu seem even more horrifying than I'd thought.  "Wizard of the pigeons" by Megan Lindholm. I need to read things that aren't LHC sometimes! I got this for Christmas (because

LHC #148: "A dance to the music of time: First movement, a question of upbringing; a buyer's market; the acceptance world" by Anthony Powell.  It was a race between hard and virtual copies, and hard won. Not really my sort of thing. I mean, it's readable and entertaining, but I didn't care that much about young British men in the 20's so it was easy to put down. The library website said it was 216 pages long, and this was a lie. It's three novels, each 200+ pages, for a total of 718. So I didn't totally know what I was getting into when I requested it.  LHC #149: "Fire Logic" by Laurie Marks. eBook. Much more my kind of thing. About a quarter of the way through, I started feeling like the author had loved "Three Winter's Tales" by Greer Gilman. LHC #150: "The House on the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. It was on my sister's Christmas list, so I bought it and read it because if it's on both our lists, it's kismet. The

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 31-51: Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I had written a couple of scenes in a setting back in August that I knew had to happen, but I didn't really know why, so they were missing the scenes preceding and following. Just before Christmas I realized why what happened in those scenes had to happen, and wrote a couple of thousand words (2600 actually) to precede, and a bunch to follow, with lots of scenes with existing characters being themselves to good purpose, progressing the plot. Exciting stuff.  Short Stories:  Worked on the AITA story but it's not quite ready to be sent it to some friends. and I got a little re-prioritized when I had an idea for Persephone, so there you go.  Critted  8  Got back   4   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Anna Maria  (Faroe Island Knits). Did the second sleeve, put it all together, wore it for Christmas.   Knitloops  (Knitty SS2021). Finished the las