Robynettely

First Draft “Lucky Kate”. Finished a draft again. “Succubus (Younger Men)”. Wrote a short story. Just got tired of it towards the end, though. “Evening Glory”. Started, afraid it will get too long to be a short story. Editing “Wind/Water/Salt ”. I’m up in the Chapter 12 range now. On the second draft I’d written in one of my action scenes, “needs more tension!” This was fun. I deleted huge chunks of exposition and added actual action. Win! To some extent I think all this editing is improving my first drafts, because I find myself avoiding writing down those “maybe he was…” sections in the first place, rather than deleting them later. There was this article: http://www.kameronhurley.com/life-on-10000-words-a-day-how-im-hacking-my-writing-process/ which I found fascinating as a process. Not sure it would work for me, but I wonder if I need to rethink the page-a-day, since so many of those pages are crap. Connecting -- Circulating 2 It...

“The Raven Boys” by Maggie Stiefvater. I was totally taken in by this one. So, the boys at the core of the story are like the boy-band thing that Scott Westerfeld talked about. One of the boys was kind of being given short shrift, I thought. I was even kind of wondering why he was there. And then…! “The Dream Thieves” by Maggie Stiefvater. I was about 120 pages from the end of The Raven Boys and it was Friday evening. I knew it wasn’t going to wrap things up properly so I left the house in a panic to get to the library whose website said it was “in”. I couldn’t find it on the shelves. I asked the librarian. The outing ended with the security guard escorting us both out of the building at closing. D’oh. So I went to the bookstore and bought it. It was a learning experience, though. Now I know who’s in charge of the library (security). And also, the library has way better customer service than the bookstore. This book took me a bit longer to read than the first one, bu...

“Clariel” by Garth Nix . I bought this at Scott Westerfeld’s signing. We all argued about who should get to read it first, and whether one should start over with Sabriel. Fortunately the boy had school stuff, and Ed was reading the Brust I read in October (as he put it, “how did I not know about this author before?”) so I got to go first. Which is only fair, since I paid. I enjoyed this book more than I’ve enjoyed anything in a while. Having just read the other three, there was a spot where I realized this was not going to end well. The most annoying thing was that I read it first, and none of my family were reading fast enough to keep up, and when I finished I wanted to talk to someone about it. “From the Earth to the Moon” by Jules Verne. The boy is taking a SF survey course this term, and this was the second book on it (the first was Frankenstein, which I’ve already read). He told me this one was cute, so of course I asked to read it. He also told me that his prof sa...

First Draft “ Limering ”. Around 111,000 words, and draft. I had made a note for something completely different and was struggling along and realized that note was exactly what I needed to wrap all this up. Stupid subconscious and its erratic filing system! “The Tale of the Tail”. Something light and short for a nice change. Done! “Lucky Kate”. This one appears as a page-a-day every year or so, doesn’t it? I think this time I have the right plot so the middle of the story will match the beginning and the end.  Editing “Wind/Water/Salt”. I had finished November struggling to make sense of Chapter 4, NaNoEditMo having been pretty much a bust. In December I started moving all sorts of sections around in chapters 5-10, and made it so I couldn’t figure out where I was, so I spent a couple of weeks just staring at the binder and opening the word file. Then I hit on the idea of fixing one character’s POV, and that was the wedge. I’m now rewriting chapter 6. There’s a lot...