Robynettely

“Tam Lin” by Pamela Dean. Got it for Christmas. Apparently she is a terribly under-read author. I found this book delightful. It was way more subtle than I expected. I was reading along, wondering when the fairies were going to show up, and, well… This reminded me quite a lot of Jo Walton’s “Among Others”, really more about the sexual revolution on college campuses in the 70’s than anything else. “Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature – 1888” by Charles W. Bardsley . This one took years to read. I’d started back when I was revising Fairfax the first time, and now I’m revising it again and boy do I need to flesh out my world with some characters with personalities of their own and, you know, names. Gemma Files had tweeted about this book, something about Tiffany being a puritan name, who knew! Since Fairfax has many puritans in it who need names (and Cotton and Abigail aren’t really clever) and the whole thing is available online! I read it. It’s funny to tell people about a...

1st draft I started the month with maybe 2000 words of the haunted house novel, which is more for sketching and experiments right now. Not sure if it’s really first drafts (I’m calling this the third actually), but I also spent a good deal of time writing in-fill content for WWS. Editing “Top of the Stairs”. Implemented OWW commentary. I learned something here about marking my POV, which I did very badly in the first-subbed draft. “Wind/Water/Salt”. Posted chapter 3 to OWW. Implemented some (but not all) Chapter 1 OWW commentary. Working on Chapter 4, I realized something important about chapter 1. I’m now thinking, leaving old chapters on OWW in the Library Shelves section, well, Ch1 will be so different by the time my draft is finished, it’s not like anyone could read it through and get the full effect anyway. Connecting Critted 7 Got back 5 Circulating 1 Knitting Ann Boleyn (1998).  Started the month with the second sleeve maybe 25% done...

“The Farmer’s Daughter” by Jim Harrison. Even though I have tons of books around the house that I want to read, my library card was expiring, and I needed a reason to go in so I took one of my books off “inactive” status. So, here we are with a book I put on my list like 10 months ago. The problem with my massive hold list at the library is, there’s no way for me to remember why I chose a certain book. It must have been for the werewolf story. I started with no expectations, and it’s written or maybe edited in more “literary” style I guess. At least in the first story (it’s a collection of three novellas) here are a lot less commas than I’m used to, for example. That first story had a rape in it, and I sort of feel like from all the criticism I read (in general not of this story) that we’re supposed to be mad about rape in stories. Here it felt completely inevitable and didn’t bother me at all. “Wolfhound Century” by Peter Higgins. Got it for my birthday. It was on my lis...