Robynettely

Sunday I made a big push to the finish of volume 4 (it's all written in spiral-bound notebooks). And now I have 99,110 words. So close to 100K! Not that it's an important milestone, but it would be neat. And now I have only the final volume to type, 160 pages. It would be so neat to have this all typed.

My Word doc now stands at approximately 87,000 words. Today I got a new message: Word can no longer display spelling and grammar errors, as there are too many. Nice. I was thinking, maybe I should enter some of my characters' names into the auxiliary dictionary?

Last night I dreamed that Neil Gaiman is the reincarnation of Mark Twain.

This novel is a void, and not in a good way. In the 80K I've typed, there are about five recurring characters. There are about five locations. It seems incredibly un-populated. Everyone sits talking for pages and pages, but only with one another, and then they move to a different location and talk with other people. I need some action (other than the one exciting violent scene I have, which I love). I've started populating it. I'm creating characters. I'm adding locations. Yesterday, I created two characters for the main characters to interact with, and I've scouted locations for them. (For some reason, I need real locations to visualize.) I need to decide where to put a hell mouth, somewhere near the DVP and Lawrence ave. It can't be at Don Mills mall, I'm using that for something else.

I might have mentioned before that when I started typing this novel, I found that I had written two-and-a-half chapters, and then restarted at Chapter one, with Chapter 3's content, switching from first to third person. Today's amazing accomplishment is that I managed to get things straightened out so I have the same number of chapters as chapter numbers. This entailed merging two chapters into one, and another two into one, and deleting one entirely. I know it's incredibly unimportant, and I could just renumber things, but as I'm still typing (I've got 80K typed!) it would be a little messy. So this just feels good.

Why I read it: Recommended by my friend Nadine. Also, I read an interview with the author in Salon? where she listed off a few things that you can do now to survive in the future. Bookmark: Library receipt. Tastes like chicken: "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo. This book is packed with anecdotes about different disasters, and people who survived, and people who didn't. Kind of a compare-and-contrast. What I liked: This book used references in what I think of as the Rolling Stone style. That's where the author refers to an expert, and then repeatedly re-refers to them using some clever note, like "Robyn, the tech writer" so I could remember quickly and easily who they were, and what they were experts on. A lot of the newspapers and magazines I read don't do that, and in long-form journalism, I often find myself searching back for who the heck this person was. That drives me nuts. By the way, I think of it as Rolling Stone style because that...

Saturday night, I stayed up editing chapter 3 until just before 2am, which turns into 3am when you factor in the time change. I've managed to consolidate three bad chapters into one that actually progressess the plot. Sunday night I noticed I was about 12 pages from copy-typing the end of second notebook (of five, but the first was very short), so I stayed up until past 1am typing that (and on a school night, too!). The justification, in my own mind, was I wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, what with the night before messing up my circadian rhythm, and the time change meaning it felt like "just" midnight. I'm well past the 50K mark, which is great. While I was pulling out the next notebook from the filing cabinet, I came across the original plan for this book (not the sheets, one per chapter, that describe what's going to happen, but the folder that contains my original character sketches and an outline). I had intended this book to be 60-69,000 words long. ...

Why I read it: This book was recommended on various blogs I read ( this one and this one come to mind, but maybe others as well). It was up for a cybil. I was trapped at the mall for an hour last Sunday, and so I went to the bookstore and kind of accidentally read the first 40 pages. And after that it just sort of came home with me. I showed it to the boy in the car on the way home. He finished it on Wednesday. Tastes like chicken: Ys by Joanna Newsom . I know it's a CD, but it makes sense to me. Bookmark: Store receipt What I liked: Wow. This book totally hooked me. I read a bunch of pages last night while sitting around in public, and I laughed out loud. I totally cared about Katniss. The scene about Rue's bread made me cry. The story takes place in a future society that has risen up out of the ruins of the USA. There's a capitol, somewhere in the rockies, and 12 districts (used to be 13, until there was a rebellion and the 13th was destroyed). Katniss lives in distr...

The Big Read ( http://www.neabigread.org/ ) said that, on average, adults have only read six books on this list. So ... copy this list, remove my yeses, add your comments, and put in a total. 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - YES 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – YES 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - YES 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – YES 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - YES 6 The Bible – Parts 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - YES 8 1984 - George Orwell - YES 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - YES 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - YES 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - YES 12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – YES 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – we have it… 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – we have it… 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier – started it… 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - YES 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger – Started it… 19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - 20 Middlemarch - Geo...

Last night I typed up a rather nice flying scene. Of course, the destination was rather pointless.

Oh, my god. Sometimes when I'm typing this stuff up, I come across something so unbelievably horrible I'm speechless. I seem to have created the most new-age Satan ever. I quote: "Too bad the humans got the story of what happened so wrong,” Lucifer said. He moved on to another picture. It was the standard hellish torture scene – humans writhing, demons whipping, blood and pain and shit. “I figured that was your doing,” Vivianne said. The story of Eden, not this painting. Though it was well-done, too. “I won’t argue. It could have been one of my minions,” Lucifer said. “You don’t have a lot of fans down here.” He led her past another painting, of a Hell on Earth. It might have been Hawaii, paradise being destroyed by the fires of the deep. Humans usually caught the majesty of nature in this type of scene. Here, it was about Hell’s dominion over Earth. It was somewhat offensive, perhaps. “All your work?” Vivianne asked. “Oh, no,” Lucifer said. “I’m gifted with them all the t...

The opening scene of Essence of Angel takes place in the local roadhouse, present day. Vivianne is sitting at the bar. Let me show you what she is wearing: She wore an extremely full gown of gunmetal grey silk. It looked so out-of-place at the bar. Probably ten meters of silk went into that skirt. But the bodice was low-cut, and the sleeves were long. Some of the hair was tied back out of her face, and the rest hung in long golden waves down her back. Oh dear. And this is a person who, according to about ten chapters later, doesn't want to stand out? She wore a grey sweatshirt and jeans. Her sandals seemed a bit light and casual for April in Toronto, without even thick soles to insulate her feet from the pavement, but at least they looked like the sort of thing she could walk around in. Much more believable.

I might have mentioned I've been typing out Essence of Angel. I’m trying to do 10K per week. Typing it serves two purposes: I can fit it on a CD or a USB key and stick it in my fire safe, and eventually in 10 years when everything is typed, I will no longer need the giant filing cabinet (yeah, right) I can edit it if it’s typed; I can't really edit longhand I’ve got about 41K. Last night I was typing chapter 18, and I realized, if I broke the chapter in half and moved part of Chapter 13 (which is exceptionally long -- maybe 5K) into the middle, then a lot of character actions would make more sense. Except it would entail rewriting the first part of Chapter 13, and then I'd have to give Chapter 14 a completely different reason to be there... You'd think that would be disheartening. All I thought was "Yay, I'm moving things around again!"It makes me feel like I'm really editing.

Why I read it: Nadine recommended it. (She also had lent me "About a Boy" the movie, which is based on a Nick Hornby book, and "Slings and Arrows" which is a TV show with nothing to do with Nick Hornby which I watched Season 1, Disk 1 of on the weekend, and really liked). Tastes like chicken: It's not fiction, it's not non-fiction. It's a collection of essays from Believer magazine where every month he wrote a list of what books he bought, and what he read. It's very funny. Bookmark: Store receipt from when I traded in something I got two of, and got this for 5-cents difference. What I liked: His approach to literature is refreshing because it's not snobby at all. Either he liked a book, or he didn't. And there were plenty he abandoned. Not so much: Too short. Lessons learned: He spent an entire month on David Copperfield, and he read some books that are less literary, but also a good mix of bio and memoir and the like. I would be more...

I have a note at the bottom of my computer that says "Despair is an integral part of the rewriting process." I think I got it from somewhere via Justine Larbalestier . Anyway, I'm pretty sure other people don't suffer this much despair. What was I thinking? How is this story ever going to work? I can see now why I don't try editing things, like, ever. On first glance it looked good, but WTF? So many scenes missing. So many unnecessary scenes written. Yesterday we went to the zoo (the boy sulked his way through the outing, carrying his coat even though it was -1, because teenagers are impervious to cold). One of the animals we saw was the golden lion tamarin . And I thought to myself, Vivianne could have hair that color. Then she would be a Mary Sue.

Vivianne is one of the main characters of Essence of Angel. Today I am wondering if she is a Mary Sue. I just watched a travel program about northern Iran on BBC. Apparently Zoroastrians don't believe in burying their dead, because it pollutes the earth, or in cremating them, because it pollutes the air. So instead, they used to take their dead to this tower outside the city and leave them for the vultures. That's awesome. Every six months they would switch to "the other tower" and sweep all the bones into a pit, and then dump acid on them or something. Not so environmentally friendly, I'm thinking. Unfortunately, due to a decline in the Zoroastrian population, a lot of the vultures have moved on. Now they bury their dead in graves lined with concrete. If Vivianne had a pet vulture, then she would be a Mary Sue.

Why I read it: One of Ed's coworkers lent it to him. He was raving about the neatness of the magic, so I picked it up when he was done. Ed has subsequently read the sequel and bought book 3 in the series, though he lent it to that previously mentioned coworker, and I don't think he's got it back to read yet. BS is apparently currently working on the final installment in The Wheel of Time, so it was interesting to see what he's done before. Tastes like chicken: Some Raymond E. Feist books I read years ago. Bookmark: Chapters receipt for gift cards. What I liked: Ed was right, the magic was really cool. The world has some sort of ongoing environmental problem where ash falls from the sky and all plants are brown. The social system is feudal -- serfs called skaa and nobles who claim genetic superiority. The skaa are supposed to not have magic (allomancy), but some have noble blood, and have one of the eight talents. These talents involve the ability to process (burn) m...

The above quote is a headline in my local newspaper. When I read it, the first thing I thought was, why is my local newspaper now writing articles aimed at gerbils? And the second thought was, I didn't know gerbils could do that. Ahem. The typewritten Essence of Angel was up to 20,000 words on Sunday night, but Monday I devoted to converting the first chapter to third-person, and taking out the bits that are inconsistent with the mythology I'm building into the story now. That took my wordcount down to less than 18,500. Still, I wonder if the first draft might have been over 200,000 words. Must learn to be more efficient with my first drafts. Yesterday we went out walking in the golf course and the grassy areas underneath the highways and major roads near our house, and wow. Toronto is just full of culverts. I think interesting things would happen in those. I need to get a headlamp. Culverts are dangerous. Watch out for thunderstorms, and lycanthropes.

That's the title I'm going with now. Maybe it gives away too much of the first few chapters. I typed what I chose to call "Chapter 3.5" last night. Maybe tomorrow I will re-integrate it with Chapter 3. For some reason, when I re-started in 3rd person, I started numbering chapters again at 1. There are so many things I did that I did not think to explain to my future self. Also, the chapters seem very short.

So I said to my colleague, who was reading a book at lunch, "What'cha reading?" and I found him remarkably reluctant to show me the cover. It was this Robin Wasserman book. He was about 15 pages in. It was something his daugher was into. But what he said got me (other than the comment on the length, and the size of the text): "I could pump out 20 of these a week." Um-hum. I rewrote the first page of QotU last night. Third person it is.