Robynettely

Why I read it : Another book by my instructors. It's not something I would have picked up myself, the civil war not being something I... well, I care about it, but I don't read about it, and I didn't watch that documentary series. Though the thing about "United State of Jones" on the Daily Show last week sure sounded interesting. Bookmark : Library receipt Tastes like chicken : "The Liveship Traders Trilogy" by Robin Hobb, except with more boat-tech. When I explained to people what it was, I called it "Master and Commander and Magic", though I've never read any Patrick O'Brien so I don't really know. Had something of the "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell" in it, too, with the two dueling wizards, and the history. What I liked : Pages 120-121 were magic. So was page (I think it was ) 249, where one of the minor characters says "Oh, belike," and you can hear the sarcasm dripping, and it's like the way we say ...

Why I read it: Short stories -- seemed like a good carry-around book. I bought this at a flea market a while back because I'd heard RD's adult-targeted fiction was disturbing and haunting. Bookmark: Tag from a "two-journal set" someone must have given me. I love gifts of paper products. Tastes like Chicken: After a while these stories began to be predictable in their unexpectedness. I started to read them the way one reads an Encyclopedia Brown collection -- trying to guess what their twist ending was going to be. There was no magic, no supernatural, only humans being asses to one another. What I liked: Interesting to read short stories. They were structurally sound. They all had endings, which is nice. Also, Roald Dahl seems to have had a lot of knowledge about a lot of different stuff, because the details seemed believable to me -- about art, wine, music, etc. Not so much: As a kid, I loved Roald Dahl. These stories, though, seemed more Charlie and the Great Gl...

Why I read it: The boy had bought the movie tie-in cover, so it's been around the house for more than a year. He's read it twice. Ed has also read it twice. When I was explaining to the boy about Viable Paradise, he was quite jealous that I was going to get to meet SG, and asked if he could come too. I told him he had to go to school. So anyway, since I got into VP, it seemed logical to read some books by some of the instructors. My sister asked if this book was by the famed (dead) naturalist. Um, no. Bookmark: marketing for Uhuru Street by MG Vassanji Tastes like chicken: On Wednesday, the boy was casting about for something to read, so I pulled out a few things. One of them was "On a Pale Horse" by Piers Anthony. On Friday he asked me to pull out the other six, which fortunately we have. I know lots of people malign Piers Anthony for being a hack and writing weak, lame, sexist female characters and writing four books a year, and especially for those ridiculously ...

Why I read it: The boy asked for it for his birthday, and then he asked for the other two books in the series in quick succession. So we own them all. And he told me they're way better than Twilight, so I went for it. Bookmark: Receipt for sunglasses from the drugstore. Tastes like chicken: When I started reading it, it seemed a lot like "Tithe" by Holly Black. I don't know how much I was influenced by the blurb (from Holly Black) on the cover. So when the boy was casting about for something to read, naturally I forced Tithe on him. I'm not sure if he finished it, but he did mention that the Seelie (or maybe Unseelie) court comes up in book 2 (City of Ashes) so clearly he got pretty far in it. What I liked: This was an entertaining read that had some good twists. I always wonder about books where youth and teenagers seem quite unsupervised, but this one made that believable. I really liked the way Clary didn't know what she was. That seemed well done. Not ...

Why I read it: My brain needed some information to process in order to work on "Water Leopard". It's a library book. Bookmark: Chapters Love of Reading Fund Tastes like chicken: I don't think I've ever read a natural history of anything before. Reading it seemed a lot like that history of Finland I read a couple of years ago, where towards the middle it started to feel like work. Though this book picked up again at the end. The book started off with a description of the plate tectonics and other actions that have led to where this particular chunk of land is now, and how that makes this chunk of land interesting and unique, in terms of climate, landforms, flora, and fauna. Then the authors explained the various types of forests that exist in Vietnam, and an overview of the various animals. After that, there were three chapters, one each for northern, central, and southern Vietnam. The north is dominated by the Red river delta (does every country have a red riv...

Apparently I'm accepted. I'm weirdly giddy.

Why I read it: I was in need of some polishing tips, last minute, for "Apocryphal". I tore the house apart looking for it. I pilfered it from my dad 18 months ago. Now I've read it, I should give it back. I distilled it down to a single checklist for myself first. Tastes like chicken: All the editing courses I've taken. None of the story structure. This book is about the scene and paragraph level. Bookmark: Checklist I made. What I liked: There were some pretty simple things I could do to brush up my prose. That was nice. I searched for "said", and for "ly", "as" and "ing", just to quickly polish things. Other tasks took a lot of time. Not so much: After a while I got bored and started skipping the samples. Lesson: Well, make that checklist for myself. I read all the "Apocryphal" stuff out loud, and wow, that was interesting. I use too many commas.

But Sunday we were out walking in a park in Scarborough (not the blight that people say it is -- Meadowvale park is really cool -- and the river was totally in flood. I'd love to go back and see what it's normallly like, on a dry day) and saw raspberry bushes with unripe (a week or two out) berries. That's probably why I was craving them. Unfortunately, they're just not something I keep in my fridge. Friday I sent in my application/submission package for Viable Paradise. Now, I wait. And work on the other 63 chapters. I hope I can keep some of the drive going. It would be nice to be able to let someone read the whole thing, maybe in August, with a reasonable sensation that all the scenes are there, and in the right order.

Why I read it: The title had Leopard in it, and as my brain was working on "Water Leopard", and "Sea Leopard" is sort of similar, when Ed left it on the floor in the living room, I picked it up. It's a library book. Bookmark: Chapters Love of Reading Foundation Tastes like chicken: I guess that Hugh Laurie book I read a couple of years ago was a send-up of this genre, though I didn't really realize it at the time, as I haven't read much of this genre. It's a submarine thriller. I think Hunt for Red October (the only other submarine thriller I've read, even though they're lying everywhere in our house) is a better book. What I liked: Written in the early 80's, so it didn't know what we (think we) know now about the USSR at the time, and their resources, and stuff. Plot: British invent a cloaking device and put it in a submarine. They fail to take it out when they send the sub out on manoeuvers, and then the Russians enact a plan to...

Why I read them: A few weeks ago I was on a long-ish drive, and I was thinking the way I do. There's this billboard near my house that had a Spanner ad on it for a while, and in the ad the model was wearing a leopard-spotted skirt. The background was white, with black rosettes with blue in the middle. I was thinking of stealing the colourway for "Leopard print cardi" from Knit.1 Fall 2007. So then I was thinking, it needed a better name. I chose "water leopard". And a story idea was born. At around the same time, one of my coworkers told a couple of stories about his life when he was a little kid in Vietnam. It blew me away that someone who had been a boat person was now leading a normal middle-class life... I guess I had a failure of imagination and somehow thought that once a boat person, always a boat person. My bad. So the water leopard story had to take place in that sort of place. To get a feel, I got some library books. Bookmark: Library receipts (...

I really hope I'm spelling that right. Elizabeth Bear , when she's working on a project, sometimes has a daily list she fills out... how many words, mean things, etc. One of the items is "Words Word don't know". Asthenosphere is one for me. Whee!

Why I read it: Because I'd read the previous one ("Melusine") and wanted to find out what happened next. Bookmark: Library receipt. Tastes like chicken: "Melusine", obviously. What I liked: Started right where teh other one left off. Didn't make me wade through pages and pages of recap, but explained the necessary bits, in character, very quickly. I suppose it didn't hurt that Felix had little memory of what had gone before, which meant that he couldn't explain it, and that Mildmay is quite a reticent dude, so will only tell what you really need to know. The voices still really worked. I liked the new characters, and the ones that improbably popped up again. I liked the timbre of the world. The storyline had a sort of inevitable progression, which made none of it seem contrived. Not so much: Tough one. I didn't have that much time for reading in the last month, so this took a while to get through. But I read the last 150 pages in a binge la...

Last night while driving around, the boy asked me why he couldn't read my novel (I changed the name again, by the way. Now it's called "Apocryphal"). I said "because I'm afraid my writing comes off like Stephanie Meyer's." So he said "Then just add in a secret fantasy boyfriend, and everyone will love it." I hemmed and hawed about that, and he said "Add in an Angel secret fantasy boyfriend. Maybe two." And I said "All the angels hate my main character." So he suggested "Add in some demons, then." And I said "There's already about fifty." To which he replied "Cool." There you go, success awaits.

When I finished typing the first draft, I printed a copy out, and did a mark-up where I deleted all the sections that were completely not relevant, and tagged ones that needed to be rewritten to a different end, and did some of the more simple rewrites. Friday I finished the data entry of those changes. My new word-count: 106,656. That's down just shy of 19K words. Now, I get to go through the vast pile of notes I've written on scrap paper, and see what needs adding, and then print it out again. Last print-out was 531 pages. Ouch! I wonder what the next one will be?

... as a tech writer, one time someone in QA suggested to me that I write a manual with a plot, where the user has various problems putting the product together and getting to work (it was a hardware manual). I got out of doing the revision by saying that it would probably increase the word count. I could have quoted Tina the Tech Writer, and said that "unfortunately it was not to be, because User A was not attracted to User B, because he was a bald engineer." Alas, I did not. The person who suggested this to me used to accost people on Friday afternoons and draw pictures on his whiteboard that involved the cliff-shaped kingdom of man, and the opposing cliff-shaped kingdom of God, and the cross-shaped thing that joined them. HR had warned him about doing that, but unfortunately he was a good QA guy. We all learned to stay out of the lab on Friday afternoons. Today I got to the end of the mark-ups on Draft 2. Now I have a whole bunch of scenes to write, and I can print it out ...

Though if getting blurbs is the biggest problem I have with my novel... ahem. Considering the problems I'm having with its structure, that would be a pretty big problem indeed. Last night I moved four chapters. Yay, I'm moving chapters again! As I said before, ahem. I'm going through my first mark-up. At p. 408, I'm down to 108,000 words. I think that's a good thing, as I have to add at least three sections in the beginning (I've written fragments of them) and three at the end. Oh, and three in the middle. I haven't written any of the middle ones, and I only have a vague idea of the end ones, though they are incredibly important, as they have to do with de-deus ex machina-ing my ending. If deus ex machina is a verb. Which it's not.

So far, just about a perfect day. I was awakened at 9:15 this morning by a raging thunderstorm that was depositing bouncy-ball sized hail on the lawn. The rain stopped (eventually) and didn't start again until I was almost done with my morning run. I made a pizza rustica for lunch, and it was awesome, even though I screwed up filling the breadmaker (I find dough is pretty forgiving), and I have about three more servings for later. Now I get to go to karate. I wrote a Fragment of a Missing Scene (I have a little pile of these). And later, I'll put some of those handwritten edits to the wretched novel.

Yesterday was Paddle the Don, an annual event where people get to put canoes and kayaks in the West Don River just below the Ontario Science Centre and paddle down to Lake Ontario. Of course, I found out about it when the registration was already full, and I don't have a canoe or kayak anyway. We stayed up far too late the night before watching Season 2 Disk 2 of Slings and Arrows, so we weren't even awake until two hours after the event began. But, after coffee and a quick surf-o-the-web, we drove down to Portage 1. I'd never heard of it before this year, though I've been living in the neighbourhood for nine years, and one of the volunteers we talked to told us he'd been doing his post (putting in at Portage 1) for seven years. He told us he'd never seen anyone go over the falls at Portage 1, though he had seen an empty canoe go over .To me, that suggests a safe, well-run event. Also at Portage 1, I overheard that they had released water at the resevroir/dam fi...

Last night I read 80 pages of the novel. I'd meant to read 100, so I would only have 100 left, but it didn't work out. I wanted to only have 100 left, so I could read the last pages and be done by the end of April, but the end of April doesn't include a weekend, so I guess that's not going to happen. This is my first pass through, where I'm marking scenes to be moved, and taking out things that are blatantly repetitive or inconsistent with the characters or the plot or the world. One of the scenes I read was one (I call it the Nevis scene) that I knew I was going to have to take out, because it was a thread I had started and then abandoned. And then a neat thing happened. I was reading the preceding scene, and I realized that scene needed to connect to something, and that was why I had written the following (Nevis) scene. But as I was scratching things out and crafting it so the Nevis scene was no longer there, the scene suddenly had a point, and a completely differ...

Why I read it: We have an extremely small library in the R&D kitchenette in my office. Every day that I heat up lunch (when I don't go out, or have something that's better cold) I would pick this book up and, if no one felt like talking to me, read a page or two while I waited for the microwave. I'm sure it was better than the alternatives -- Law for Engineers, Better Designs in Half the Time, etc. This book took me two or three years to read. Bookmark: My memory. I read the same page over and over for weeks, I'm sure. Tastes like chicken: "Dreaming in Code" would be the closest fit. This book traces the development of a computer codenamed Eagle at a company called Data General. It's non-fiction, and published circa 1980. I was at around page 80 when I realized that these people were making something much bigger than the computers I think of today -- not a mainframe so much, but they were really happy when it fit in a freight elevator. What I like...