Robynettely

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I did a couple of thousand words, worked on it ten days in the month.  Short Stories:   Critted  12  Got back  7 Submissions  1  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month 2" from the hem. Finished the body and started the first sleeve. Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month about a half-inch from the armholes, with both sleeve cuffs done, one inch of sleeve fair isle. Did maybe 4 inches.    Extra Whip socks  (Coffeehouse knits). Finished the fourth sock. Started the fifth. I Yam pullover (self). I needed something portable to take to St. John's, so I started this. Everything I'm working on right now seems to use 3mm needles.  I guess I should cut out a sewing project. All that fabric won't use itsel...

LHC #171: "The Sol Majestic" by Ferrett Steinmetz.  Fourth book of his that I've read. For some reason the library didn't have this one as an eBook, so I took it on vacation. Ed forgot to take a book with him, so I lent him this even though it's probably not his jam, and he quite enjoyed it!  LHC #172: "Radical Suburbs" by Amanda Kolson Hurley. Another hard copy. It was really interesting, and not hating on suburbs at all. But then I suppose I live in an inner suburb, and I have nothing against Markham for example. They aren't all bad, they just take a while to find their stride.  LHC #173: "Mexican Gothic" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. eBook. Totally awesome, but I knew it was the mould as soon as it was mentioned. No house has mould without that being the problem.  LHC #1 74: "The Dragon Waiting" by John M. Ford. I feel like I read this a really long time ago, like 25 or 30 years ago. I really wish I knew more of the right history,...

   Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I did a couple of thousand words, worked on it ten days in the month.  Short Stories:  Worked on one (the same one I was working on last month) a lot more, put it on the workshop.  Critted  9  Got back  6 Submissions  1  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month with nine inches below the armholes, finished with 15 inches, so I'm 2" from the hem.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month about a half-inch from the armholes, with one sleeve cuff done. Finished the second cuff, so the intarsia is done. Turned back to the first sleeve and did an inch of the fair isle.          Extra Whip socks  (Coffeehouse knits). Finished the third sock. Started the fourth.  Queen's Gambi...

Apparently I've given up on trying to read in these pictures, let's see if I can do better next month.  LHC #167: "Missing Soluch" by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, translated by Kamran Rastegar. I ought to acknowledge the translators more often here; they're integral to the experience. Anyway, I read book 1 of this (it's divided into 4 books, about 100 pages each) and found it unrelentingly depressing. Then partway through book 2, I started to wonder if I was misunderstanding completely and it was actually supposed to be funny?  LHC #168: "Legends of the Fire Spirits" by Robert Lebling. Hard copy! I read most of this on vacation.  LHC #169: "Moon of the Crusted Snow" by Waubgeshig Rice. eBook. Pretty fun.  LHC #170: "Automatic Reload" by Ferrett Steinmetz . eBook. I quite enjoyed it. Not something I could write, I think, which makes me sort of jealous. The characters and their issues were so embedded in the story! 

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Now that it's a paranormal romance, I've written a lot of words.  Short Stories:   I worked on one quite a bit. In addition, the boy set me a homework to pick a story prompt and do that, so I worked on it, and he did it the same prompt too, which was fun. Then one evening I was trying to add to my list of markets and realized that I had a deadline of 2 days to finish something that I had been sitting on for like two months. D'oh!  Critted  11  Got back  0 But in fairness I didn't post anything.  Submissions  1  Out there  1  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month just before the increases towards the hem. Maybe I did 3 inches? I only work on it when we watch The Expanse.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month abou...

  LHC #163: "Mycroft Holmes" by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother written by a basketball genius? What could go wrong? Not enough girls, but whatever.  LHC #164: "Passing Strange" by Ellen Klages. Delightful!  LHC #165: "The Angel of the Crows" by Katherine Addison. By a weird fluke, this is another Sherlock Holmes, this time where Sherlock is an angel named Crow, and Watson is a doctor who was maimed by a fallen in Afghanistan named Doyle. I was thinking there weren't enough girls in this story, but changed my mind later.  LHC #166: "A Stranger in Olondria" by Sofia Samatar.  I read the first 20% thinking nothing was ever going to happen, it was all just going to be sunshine and light. I don't know why this bothered me; it's a complaint people make about my stories all the time, that nothing happens. Anyway, plenty happened in the end. I liked its attitude towards humanity; most people came...

 LHC #160: "Touba and the meaning of night" by Shahrnush Parsipur. I imagine it was listed in Reading Lolita in Tehran. I've got a few things on the list bunched together that are from that (My uncle Napoleon was too I'm sure). It was very good but took me a ridiculous amount of time to read.  Book by a friend from VP. Not published yet, but I think it will be big. It was crazy long, though.  LHC #161: "The Watchmaker of filigree street" by Natasha Pulley. No idea why it was on my list, but I loved it.  LHC #162: "Vengeful" byVE Schwab. I read Vicious the year it came out. The boy strongly recommended this. His book club is reading her latest! Maybe I should move that one up my list too.  Anyway, after a few chapters I read a synopsis of Vicious so would remember who all these people were. Then I devoured this. 

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I've spent a lot of time in denial that this is a paranormal romance, but now I'm accepting it, and looking at what beats I need, etc.  Short Stories:   Critted  12  Got back  3   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month about eight inches below the armholes on the body (knit top-down). I feel like I'm still at that point now, but it can't be true. Anyway, I'm not doing decreases anymore, it's only increases from here to the bottom.  Tay Tartan cardigan  (Martin Storey). Started the month four inches from the armholes, knitting the body in one piece.  Now I'm about a half-inch from the armholes and have started a sleeve so I can attach them when the time comes.  Extra Whip socks  (Coffeehouse k...

  Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 38:  Took up comments.     Chapters 39-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Went back to the start to fill in rather a lot of missing scenes. Not sure what the point to them is, but some of the information is important. This section of the novel needs another layer of something going on rather than just the obvious. I'll keep working until I figure out what that is, I guess.  I also seem to have gotten to the limit of what Google Docs can do as a single file, so I broke it into 4, and it's much more searchable now.  Short Stories:   Found a market for another one, so I posted it as-is to the OWW for commentary.  Critted  8  Got back   6   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).  Started the month about four inches below the armholes on the body (knit ...

  LHC #156: "How to Murder your Life" by Cat Marnell. eBook. It sat at 'available in approximately 4 weeks' for weeks, and then suddenly appeared. The voice was annoying to start but I liked the ending.  LHC #157: "The Perfect Assassin" by K.A. Doore. I'd been assuming this was available on overdrive, but apparently that was a different book with the same name. What's up with that? It was a fun read.  LHC #158: "Last Song Before Night" by Ilana C. Myer. Same as #156, this just showed up all of a sudden. It was okay, I guess. The ending felt a bit rushed to me, the last four chapters especially, where there was a ton of recursive "they had done this while offscreen" recapping.  "A Spindle Splintered" by Alix E. Harrow. Fun, quick read. I read it because Marissa Lingen just read the sequel, and her recommendations are pretty reliable.  LHC #159: "Michael Clayton, the shooting script" by Tony Gilroy. Of course...

Wind/Water/Salt Chapters 31-37: Took up comments.     Someone (a reviewer worried about the marketability of my tone) called it "cozy horror" which I found funny because I don't think of it as horror. Folk horror maybe, though I gather that phrase is overused.    Various people have pointed out the amount of walking that happens in these chapters. Have I mentioned I'm very fond of walking? The above picture is from a morning walk. We were having a blizzard. Four TTC buses were stuck on my street. The first ones left about twelve hours later; the last was there at least forty-eight hours.  Chapters 38-51:  Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): Wrote a ton more progressing from where I had realized the why that things happened that I wrote about last month. I found a process whereby one day I write a dialog spine and then the next day come back and flesh out that spine and progress forward with new di...

  Too bad I didn't put a book on the floor there, so I could pretend I was reading, just hanging out. Next month!  LHC #153: "All of us with wings" by Michelle Ruiz Keil. eBook. Stressful read! It took me until Chapter 21 to realize that the chapter titles were songs. The problem was, a lot of the songs were longer than the chapters, which hurt momentum. I didn't understand what kind of governess Xochi could possibly be, as she spent basically no time with Pallas.  LHC #154: "Viral Modernism: the influenza pandemic and interwar literature" by Elizabeth Outka. I put a hold on this back in April of 2020, when pandemics were still new and interesting. It answered the question I wanted to know, which was how we forgot the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. Though this book made the flu seem even more horrifying than I'd thought.  "Wizard of the pigeons" by Megan Lindholm. I need to read things that aren't LHC sometimes! I got this for Christmas (because...

LHC #148: "A dance to the music of time: First movement, a question of upbringing; a buyer's market; the acceptance world" by Anthony Powell.  It was a race between hard and virtual copies, and hard won. Not really my sort of thing. I mean, it's readable and entertaining, but I didn't care that much about young British men in the 20's so it was easy to put down. The library website said it was 216 pages long, and this was a lie. It's three novels, each 200+ pages, for a total of 718. So I didn't totally know what I was getting into when I requested it.  LHC #149: "Fire Logic" by Laurie Marks. eBook. Much more my kind of thing. About a quarter of the way through, I started feeling like the author had loved "Three Winter's Tales" by Greer Gilman. LHC #150: "The House on the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. It was on my sister's Christmas list, so I bought it and read it because if it's on both our lists, it's kismet. The...

Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 31-51: Still n eed to take up comments and revise.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I had written a couple of scenes in a setting back in August that I knew had to happen, but I didn't really know why, so they were missing the scenes preceding and following. Just before Christmas I realized why what happened in those scenes had to happen, and wrote a couple of thousand words (2600 actually) to precede, and a bunch to follow, with lots of scenes with existing characters being themselves to good purpose, progressing the plot. Exciting stuff.  Short Stories:  Worked on the AITA story but it's not quite ready to be sent it to some friends. and I got a little re-prioritized when I had an idea for Persephone, so there you go.  Critted  8  Got back   4   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Anna Maria  (Faroe Island Knits). Did the second sleeve, put it all together...

  Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 31-51:  Need to take up comments and revise.  Synopsis:  Maybe I should post it for comments.  Had a glimmering of what to do with Fairfax next.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): If, as I wrote about last month, it's got the beats of a romance novel, I need those other two sex scenes.    Short Stories:  Finished and posted that story I wanted to get on the 'shop. I'd read an article about fairytales and AITAs, and wrote an AITA of the MC of another story. Then I told a writer friend about it, and she suggested I make the story a series of dueling AITAs. I blew the idea off at the time, but then I thought about it, and I liked it, so I did it.  Critted  9  Got back   4   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Anna Maria  (Faroe Island Knits). Second sleeve: started the colorwork.  Knitloops  (Knitty SS2021). Finished the f...

LHC #143: "Gamechanger" by LX Beckett. I found it hard to connect to any of the characters, but it moved right along so that wasn't a problem.  LHC #144: "Company Town" by Madeline Ashby. I read one of her sentient robot books before, and quite enjoyed it. I also met her a couple of times at cons and the like, she seems fine.  LHC #145: "Magic in Islam" by Michael Muhammad Knight.  Really interesting. I would have gotten more out of it probably if I knew anything of history or Islam. The introduction was my favorite part, but then it got interesting again towards the end.   LHC #146: "True Grit" by Charles Portis. I love westerns. This is an amazing read. I keep talking about it to people.  LHC #147: "A portrait of the addict as a young man" by Bill Clegg. Memoirs about addiction seem easier somehow to get through than books where it's a character flaw in a larger fiction. I wonder why. One of the MCs in Persephone has a histor...

  Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 31-51:  Need to take up comments and revise.  Synopsis:  Maybe I should post it for comments.  Had a glimmering of what to do with Fairfax next.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I was thinking about my friend's romance novel, where there were some flaws but some things she totally nailed, like the structural expectation of three sex scenes, each with a different emotion going in/out. Then I realized that if this story is a romance novel, then I'd just written the first of those three sex scenes. One of my MCs is ace, so there's not actually sex though.    Short Stories:  In order to have something for other people to crit, I pulled something out of the trunk. Everything always takes longer than I think it will! I didn't get through it.  Critted  9  Got back  2  Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Anna Maria  (Faroe Island Knits...

LHC #138: "The Limits of Enchantment" by Graham Joyce.  I read "Some kind of Fairytale" which was amazing a few years ago. I'm not sure why the library doesn't have more copies of his books?  LHC #139: "Swordspoint" by Ellen Kushner. eBook. I am always surprised when I read books that are very highly regarded and they turn out to be about characters. I have no idea why this is so. This book was a delight, though some of the extras were less polished.  LHC #140: "The Perfect Predator" by Steffanie Strathdee PhD, Thomas Patterson PhD, and Theresa H. Barker. A memoir about antibiotic resistant bacteria and phages. I devoured it.  LHC #141: "The Dragon's Path" by Daniel Abraham (half of James S.A. Corey, I've read one of his books). I talked this up so much, Ed wants to read it too. He will love it.  LHC #142: "The Iranian Metaphysicals" by Alireza Doostdar. Hard copy. Funny story, the night before this became ...

   Wind/Water/Salt  Chapters 31-51:  Need to take up comments and revise.  Synopsis:  Maybe I should post it for comments.  Had a glimmering of what to do with Fairfax next.  Persephone  (probably not its real name): I found myself writing and layering in the same scene over and over, which I guess is how I work now.   Short Stories:   Critted  11  Got back   2   Submissions  0  Out there  0  Rejects  0 Knitting Anna Maria  (Faroe Island Knits). I'd done about half an inch of sleeve at the start of the month. Now I've got almost a foot of that and started the second sleeve as well. My yarn has dye lot issues.  Knitloops  (Knitty SS2021). Had first sock half way down heel. I finished that pair and started the next.  Striped long-sleeved t-shirt  (self).   I had shoulders and maybe 5 rows of sleeve at the start of the month, but this is good mindless ...

 LHC #135: "Days by Moonlight" by Andre Alexi. This is the most unpleasantly formatted ebook I've ever read. But on the plus side, that means I'm much more familiar with ebook settings now.  About halfway through, the POV character mentioned that he was black, and I thought to myself, well, that would have been a useful thing to know 100 pages ago, so I googled the author, and I guess most people who read this book will have a little bit more of a clue why they're reading it than I did.  Trashy romance novel by my friend Heather. That's how she described it, not the title. It was very fun.  LHC #136: "Seven Surrenders" by Ada Palmer. I read the first book in this series 22 months ago and was a little bit worried that I wouldn't be able to remember what came before. She managed this really well.  LHC #137: "Petty Treason" by Madeleine Robins. Another book with only one copy in the system. Although it says something crossed with Buffy the...