Robynettely

This week's challenge was here . I just noticed that I was at exactly 1000 words (MSWord says), so I guess I'll stop. In Which LittleWatchGirl Plans her Obsolescence so She Can Retire TrainMaster (catch phrase: "Keeps the trains running on time!") couldn't have sent FutureMan over to me to explain how the campaign was supposed to work because I was the best person to explain it. In fact I felt like I was the weak link. When your superpower is about office meetings, you can't be expected to be good with weapons. They had chosen mine for me thinking I'd be good with springs and winding. Perhaps TrainMaster had heard that I'd asked SteamBoss who would be going on this campaign. SteamBoss (catch phrase: "Black belches bad; white belches good!") had said "What do you mean?" I'd said, "Is anyone I hate going?" SteamBoss couldn't see my eyes. Wearing goggles all the time protects your secret identity. My superhero name is...

Apparently you can read all about me here: http://cathschaffstump.com/archives/2011/06/24/vp-profile-16-robyn-hamilton/

The challenge was here . My sister had read the “dollheads” challenge and asked what happened next, so when I was thinking about robots (and I hate robots) I wanted to find a way to make one in Bucklepunk world. A familiar would have warned her before the man was in sight of the house. He'd come up the streambed, hopping one stone to the next, balancing in an imaginary duel. She didn't recognize him, but his fancy dress said he was official. Abigail and her daughter Susannah had hidden in the burnt-out shell of their house, made not a sound as he wandered through the yard, poked at the garden, the foundation, the pottery shed, the wires she'd run to the mill to siphon power from the waterwheel. After a tense hour he left, back the way he'd come, towards the mill. "We need a familiar," said Abigail. "It would give us away," said Susannah. "Not if no one recognizes what it is," said Abigail. Always the familiar gave witches away. It followed ...

Crow is a yoga move wherein you crouch down and put your hands on the floor, shoulder-width apart. Then you put your knees on your elbows and launch forward to balance on your hands. I was first introduced to crow when I was doing the Monday night yoga class at the Y. I, and most everyone else, would roll from our toes to our hands and back, never really committing ourselves. Then one class I fully committed, and did it for about six seconds, before falling off onto my knees, getting some of my most spectacular bruises EVER. I was able to show them off for a couple of weeks. They were awesome, because everyone seems to think yoga is so gentle . Anyway, after that bad experience, I was back to pathetically rolling from feet to hands and back, no commitment, no risk, week after week. Then a couple of weeks ago I was screwing around at my Acro class, and the boy asked what I was trying to do, and I showed him, and he crouched down, hands shoulder-width apart, and launched into the pose, w...

The challenge was here . I found most of the stuff at the prompt’s link pretty horrible, like really women-hating even. And I only got to the end of the As before I found my title. This story may be offensive to some--triggering, maybe. But it’s the story I wrote. It was Greer’s idea. He phoned me up. "Dude, we're going to have a rape gang down in La Salle Park." Rape gangs hadn't really come up in grade 8 sex ed. Maybe Greer knew, because it came up in the grade 10 version. "You going to come by and pick me up?" I said. "Nah, it's getting late," said Greer. "It's getting late. Meet us there at 2." I threw a bottle of water, three apples, and three granola bars into my backpack, along with my cell. Greer never eats the apples I bring, but I packed one for him anyway, just to be polite. I figured Johnny would be coming with us too. We met at the edge of La Salle park. If Buffalo is the armpit of America, then it’s not a very sweaty...

The challenge was here . I had the world BucklePunk in my head (someone had tweeted it in an offhand manner) and in my interpretation, it’s Steampunk populated by Puritans, who didn’t have steam power... so not steampunk at all. “You should check the run down to the waterwheel,” said Cotton Brown. Technically, that was Cotton's job. They had portrayed the situation as a win for everyone -- the mill got an assistant, and Cotton was out of the village, so everyone's daughter was safe. In reality, it was just a win for the town, with a spy at the mill. Nathaniel Proctor had never asked for an assistant, anyway. He sighed and went outside. The morning air smelled like honey, and hummed with the sound of bees. Of course, bees led to screaming, followed by accusations of being afflicted by a witch. Everything was a potential plague in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The run above the sawmill was pulled over so it wouldn't turn the waterwheel; he'd disengaged it before the storms ha...

The challenge came out on the Friday before karate camp. My first thought was “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” but that’s kind of been done. I was in the dojo, marching in line, and I started catching sight of my toenail polish, and the floor was terrible. And this year we didn’t have to cook for ourselves, but in previous years we did, and often people would discuss what food item it might have been that made them sick. The first thing you do when karate camp starts is to deal with the floor. Savannah set pairs of junior belts to running back and forth across the room with whippy straw brooms. "There's a better broom in our cabin," said Tonio. "You could come with me and get it." This to Savannah, of course. When they did pairworks this weekend, she wouldn't be partnering him. There's a real broom in the dining hall," said Susan. "Wide, with felt." "It's probably sticky with fallen foodstuffs?" asked Tonio. They swe...

"Dolphin". Still at market #1. I need to stop being so disfunctional and figure out what's up with that. “Bezoar”. At market #1.

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...