Robynettely

First Draft Chickpea. In April I had written three pages. I’m trying to move to a different level here, where maybe my first drafts aren’t all completely crap. So I started by knowing how it was going to end, and having a story in my head. It went kind of to hell towards the end, but I can fix it in post, right? My draft wound up probably 3000 words long. One Degree. At some point in April, I lost my notes for this, which I guess was a good excuse not to work on it. After Chickpea fizzled to a lame ending, I found my notes while doing some filing, and it became my page-a-day, which wasn’t what I had intended for it, but whatever. Medusa. Another Chuck Wendig challenge, 1500 words max. Wrote a first draft Monday (May 17). “Take Down the Lot of You”. Chuck Wendig challenge, 1000 words max. Wrote first draft May 30, wound up with 1700 words. Editing "The Rabbits". Could this only be the fourth draft I just did? Removed about 2500 more words, and it was easy, down to 6600 wor...

“A Book of Tongues” by Gemma Files. I bought this one at Ad Astra after hearing her read (I got it signed! I can’t read what it says!), and I started reading it, and OMG I could totally hear her reading voice in every word. And it was laugh-out-loud funny. Though perhaps my idea of funny is not everyone’s. One of my coworkers asked if I’d read “Not wanted on the Voyage” by Timothy Findlay a few days ago (actually, he sort of assumed I’d read it, which was true) because his son is reading it for school and having a rough time getting through it, because it’s so grim. And I said, sure, there are some dark bits, but it’s so funny! Anyway, like for example in this book one character is describing a horrific stoning of a presumed witch, and another character says “Only way, sometimes,” and I thought that was so funny! But I can see where other people might think it’s sick. “Ha’penny” by Jo Walton. After I read this in January, I said I wanted to buy about ten Farthings and give them away....

The challenge was here . I watched Tangled last weekend, and thought, someone should do a mashup, since both were about magic hair and eyes, but so different. If I'd done another draft, I would have made Medusa angrier. She doesn't come off enraged enough yet. But for now I'll just call it done. She had been born bald. When it grew in, her hair started blonde and curly at the back, dark and straight at the front. The curls worked their way forward, and the darkness worked towards the back, and by the time she was of age, Medusa had a magnificent head of hair. That had been a problem. Her beautiful long coils of hair had hung to the middle of her back, setting off her stunning eyes, high cheekbones and ripe, red mouth. Because of those looks, she thought she could get away with anything. Anything in this case was stealing lettuce. The punishment was that her hair was turned to snakes, anyone who looked in her eyes was turned to stone, and living on a desert island. The Templ...

This week's challenge was to write a story with some cussing in the title. I seem to be a bit doomed with this challenge, as I didn't find out about it until Monday (my fault) and then Blogger was down last night. I pulled out a first draft I'd had lying around since maybe December 2009, and cleaned it up through three drafts. So without further ado: Edited September 29, 2011: I took it down because I edited it and actually submitted it somewhere!

I think I upped a level in story last night. I was really close yesterday, when I was walking to work after writing my morning page, and realized that a choice I was making with my setting was going to make my story work completely. Then I had decided to do a “final” pass on Bezoar, because the weekly challenge didn’t really speak to me. I was reading along, and I realized that a scene I was working on was “a character asks another character to do something, and then he does it.” No tension there. I needed some reason for the one character to make the other character do something, and the other to resist, but then do it anyway. And I had a throwaway line that I’d tagged about the setting, that I was really going to throw away, because there was no good place for it, and I realized that if I made that line into the tension of the story rather than deleting it, and moved it to the front, then my characters had a reason to do things, and a time frame. Stories need tension. Characters can’...

“My mother she killed me, My father he ate me” edited by Kate Bernheimer. Yet another library book, this one a request. A collection of modern fairy tales. I’ll admit I don’t know every fairy tale on the planet, and in fact I might only know a couple of dozen of the more obvious ones, probably from Disney books and movies. I thought the Gregory McGuire intro was annoying, but then I read the first story, and I had to google John James Audubon, because I had no idea what he was really like. What I totally enjoyed was that I could chat about the story as being about Baba Yaga, and people knew what I was talking about, because these are all archetypes. That’s what (in my opinion) copyright has removed from Canadian literature – we can refer to the same places, but we can’t build archetypes the same way, because that’s “stealing”. The Karen Joy Fowler and Stacey Richter stories were standouts. A couple of the stories were just punishment. And I see it’s been nominated for a Shirley Jackso...

First Draft Pause. I had a really hard time with this one keeping it on track. I knew where I wanted the story to go, but I just couldn’t get it to go there. It’s going to take a lot of editing to make it into the story I want it to be. Ian’s Dad’s Ashes. Start-to-finish April 18, 2011, 1900 words. Geese. First draft was 261 words and 16 sentences and took about 20 minutes to write on April 26. Since the target was 3 sentences, I had some work to do. However, my strategy was to write the whole story and “fix it in post”. Chickpea. Short story, just started. It’s a post-zombie-apocalypse retelling of The Princess and the Pea. At three pages long, it’s still in the stage where I like it, before I wreck it by trying to write it down. Editing “Bezoar”. Mostly I carried this around. Since I restructured the ending, I needed to read the ending again to make sure it made sense what I’d done, and smooth it out. Ian’s Dad’s Ashes. Typed April 19, 2011. Second draft April 20, 2011 (1400 wo...

Two people at work made comments about the fairy tale nature of this latest royal wedding, to which I responded, “Fairy tale? Well, I guess you’ve got Camilla, the evil stepmother, but where’s the death, where’s the dismemberment? Where are the people trapped in animal bodies? What you really mean is this royal wedding is totally Disney.” I really don’t feel the need to expand on that.

The challenge was a story in three sentences. I'm not entirely satisfied with this yet, but it's due now. For someone who professes to hate the wretched geese that live at my office, I sure get a lot of stories out of them. The gander's attention was almost fully on the powerpoint through the boardroom window, and it was only in his background circuitry that he heard Dan the maintenance guy (was power-washing the leavings of the other geese from the parking lot ) say “There’s something weird about that goose.” Even Dan, who knew nothing about whatever widgets the company made, could tell what the gander was seeing was confidential and extremely proprietary, so he entered the specially marked-off protected goose breeding zone to try to shoo the gander away. Fortunately, one of the goslings chose that moment to tug on the gander's primary feathers and led him away, making him look like a normal goose after all, as he transmitted the corporate espionage he'd gleaned to...

The challenge was this . I’d written the name Circe on a scrap of paper, wanting to use it in the story ever since I saw a commercial for the movie “Hanna” (my brain went on a long digression of trying to guess how the lead actress’s name is pronounced). And one of my karate buddies mentioned in passing something about carrying his dad around in a box, so someone else said “you should write a novel about that.” Well, there wasn’t really a novel in the story. But whatever. Circe couldn't have been her real name. Probably the staff at the grocery store made their own name tags. She showed up around dusk. He hadn't told her he was going to do it tonight. He didn't remember telling anyone else either. She came to his home; he didn't really know she'd known where it was. She was all gothed up, dark nail polish and lipstick, a black wig, and a long black shift that hid her figure. "Where are they?" she asked she pushed her way in. He didn't know what she was...

Last weekend was Ad Astra , what I think of as my “home CON” since it’s the first one I ever went to, and I can ride my bike to it. Though to get there Saturday morning I rode through Charles Sauriol Park , and the hill at the south end coming out to Winford Drive is killer, and I wouldn’t want to do it in the rain. It’s paved like a real road, but not maintained, and extremely steep. I was worried about losing traction the whole way up, a feeling not improved by the pine needles strewn about in patches. I didn’t ride back the same way, because I’m chicken and didn’t want to go down that hill. Anyway, I went to three panels on Friday (weapons check guy, Where do ideas come from, and How will you survive the apocalypse). I was surprised how unprotective the ideas people were -- they talked about ideas they were still working on that they hadn’t managed to get to work yet, that they still wanted to use. But I guess ideas really are a dime a dozen, and it’s what you do with them that coun...

First Draft Limering. Page-a-day, 4000 words, finished 29 Mar. One Degree. I mentioned last month someone’s process on OWW, where they had blocks of exposition and action and dialog splines, and I wanted to try that. But first I needed an outline and some character descriptions. So this is maybe 100 words of notes. Pause. Page-a-day, just started. Seems to be about geese, to some extent. Editing "The Rabbits". Tried to read it, couldn’t. “Bezoar”. I thought I was almost done, and was just being lame and sitting on the story. I’d read the feedback (again) that I got on OWW last year, and then when I sat down for a “final read-through, clean up and send out,” things did not go as planned. I wound up rewriting the beginning and the ending, leaving the middle pretty much intact. I need at least one more draft again, mostly to look at the ending, which I think I’ve cut too since I moved two pages against each other. Apophis. Fourth draft done. Watched a documentary about a...

Considering what I'm reading now has 453 pages to go, it's unlikely I'll finish anything else in March, so I'll just post this now. Mid-month saw me go to the library one evening and take out two books, having already started Leviathan, and then discovering that I had two more waiting for me in the holds system. And then another one appeared after I'd read two of them. So I finished more books than usual. “World War Z” by Max Brooks. Library book. The Z stands for zombie, of course. This was a good resource for me for thinking about the science of my zombie novel. Also, good for looking at alternative ways of organizing a narrative. This is a series of interviews with people who were involved in different ways with the zombie war, so really it’s a collection of linked short stories. “Mockingjay” by Suzanne Collins. I had to take the boy to an appointment and didn’t want to carry around the big, heavy geology book, so I grabbed this from the pile. Everyone else in t...

Last night while I was supposed to be editing Apophis for I don't know, the sixth or seventh time (I'm not sure it works, but I'm down to messing with the formatting now, so it's time to put it on OWW and hide under my desk), I wrote a post on the bottom of the last page. And then I packed the wrong story in my lunchbag! I guess I'm just meant to work on Bezoar today, that's all. Anyway, this leaves me writing my post from my head, which never goes well, or waiting and doing it later, which never gets done. So here goes. Last night I received the March Locus in the mail (which was a good thing, because it encouraged me to finish reading the February Locus, which had been sitting on the kitchen table for about 28 days, and so I read the Sharyn November piece, which made me want to work on the Karate Zombies, which will make Fran happy, if nothing else). Flipping through (first pass I look at the pictures...) and made some mean comment about Robert J. Sawyer or ...

Yesterday all day I had a plan. When I got home, I would make a pizza (the breadmaker was all set up). Then, I was going to read through The Bezoar and make any last minute changes before sending it out to its first market. Then I would make a pass through Apophis and send it to OWW. And then I would sit down and read 100 pages of Leviathan , and maybe work on that shawl , and then bed. Well, the pizza went fine. I remembered yeast this time (yay!) and I had already made the olive salad for Muffuletta pizza. I made a playlist , and then at around 8:30 I tweeted something like “Pizza made and eaten, blah, blah, time to read through this story and send it out.” I was at the kitchen table working on paper. Ed was watching his stories (Ice Pilots I think). I was on page two when that ended and he went up to run himself a bath. I was on page three when he’d finished his bath. I’d written a couple of hundred new words. I skipped to the ending and I think made it stronger. My characters had u...

First Draft “In a Nutshell”. 35 pages -- first draft finished. Next up will be Limering , And maybe One Degree. Editing "The Rabbits". I tagged all the Thea’s Brain sections to make them make sense, and I need to fix the pacing now. It takes way too long to get to the brain stuff. I’d like to pump the atmosphere maybe, too. "Apophis." Working on fourth draft. Ignoring “Succubus”. Zombies. Troll. Pampelmouse. “Bezoar”. One more draft, I think, and it might be done. “Dowsing”. I need to change the POV (taking what I learned from reading those Caitlin Kiernan stories, actually – she does a neat thing where the main character is not the “special” character, but is the one looking at them. I will try that and see how it works for me.) so that there’s an actual plot, conflict, etc. I think there’s a good story in there. Imp face. Being reviewed Nothing. Again. Knitting Morrigan. Ignoring, actually. Anhinga. Finished. Worn 4x. Very happy with this sweater. Doublekni...

“Tooth and Claw” by Jo Walton . Library book. I believe I read on a blurb somewhere: “Is there anything Jo Walton can’t write?” And it is so true. This is a regency romance populated entirely by dragons. Dragons get bigger by eating one another, and yet the story isn’t really about cannibalism, more cannibalism is just something dragons do. It’s not taboo the way it would be with humans, because the dragons don’t see it that way. The father dragon dies in the first chapter, leaving the understanding that his estate (including his gold and his corpse) is to be divided up amongst his three younger children, with the two established children to take but a token apiece. The eldest son-in-law takes way more than his share and the others sue him. So the message is: be explicit in your will. And stand up for yourself. “Sandman Slim” by Richard Kadrey . Library book, requested several months ago. I missed it over Christmas and had to request it again. I have a notebook where I write down thing...

Over at Ilona Andrews' blog , they've got a lively though closed discussion in the comments about the boy who wouldn't wrestle the girl in Iowa. I'd just like to say, hitting a girl is not the same as having a wrestling match with a girl, and it's pretty messed up when someone confuses them. I am here to learn, and if someone won't punch me because I'm a girl, then they've just taken that learning opportunity away from me. That's all.

Not really a word, more of a phrase or a clause. But all of a sudden, I keep seeing it used all over the place. Maybe it started when one of my colleagues asked me to "reach out" to another colleague for information on a project I'd been supposed to be working on, but in fact knew nothing about. And the other person replied "It's too late to be reaching out," which I thought was a totally appropriate response. Now I'm seeing it everywhere, and I wonder, what does it mean? I don't want any colleague I've never actually met "reaching out" to me. Just send me an email. Please.

Back when I was in high school, I practiced my musical instruments. One of the ones I played, hammered dulcimer, sounded good even when I was just banging on the strings. Sometimes when I would play a piece (and I remember myself being pretty good) weird, accidental, awesomely cool things would happen. And I was concerned that when I got really good, those amazing accidents, the ones where I made a change in a piece by accident that made it "my own" wouldn't happen anymore. I needn't have worried. Also, today on Salon there's an article about Apophis (not sure how long that link will last...) so I guess I should work on that story. (ETA: you must watch the video there. The wailing shrieking music is awesome.)