Robynettely

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

I'm on the social committee at work. Because I'm a writer, they often ask me to whip something up for some pitch somewhere. We're starting our annual corporate charity donation campaign with a raffle for sports tickets for a game tomorrow night. So I wrote: "Tired of spending Halloween cowering at home with the lights off so people won't knock on your door and demand candy? * Tired of the yearly ritual of walking your kids around the neighbourhood, because they wear all-black costumes and masks they can't see out of? Here's something better you could do on Halloween Night! * Note: the draw will be held October 29th, so if you don't win, there are still a couple of days to pick up some candy to give out, if you're so inclined. " And that became: "Looking for an alternate way to spend Halloween?" Apparently they were afraid I was going to offend somebody. This made me very sad.

It's the new meme I'm trying to spread around the office, along with "I want to be a high contributor". That's a performance management rating, by the way. Let's ignore for the moment that I'm writing this at work. Please, it's a short post.

Why I read it: Part of the "blogger's books" project. I've been reading her blog for maybe a year. As a published-writer wannabe, her blog is maybe the best one I read. That's because she goes on at great length about the life of a writer, how the money comes in, how the words go out, how her hormonal cycle affects her climbing, her writing, her motivation. I was really happy that I liked this book. Tastes like chicken: Covers a lot the same ground as GGK "The Summer Tree" - a lot the same supporting characters out of mythology -- wild hunt, Arthur, etc. But this book seemed like it added something, wasn't just the standard rehashed blend of northwestern euro myth. Bookmark: Library receipt. What I liked: To start with, I agreed with the theme that better for humanity in general to have some risk (fairies) than for humanity to become sheep... in order for us to stay human (i.e., intelligent), we need an element of danger. While there were probabl...

We just had curriculum night at the boy's school. When talking to his English teacher, she mentioned that they will be reading "The Chrysalids" by John Wyndham this year (the context was that "the boy reads too much, and don't worry, we will read a book this year, but I can't give you a grade on reading unassigned novels in class. It's great that you love to read, but...") Anyway. The Crysalids is a fabulous book. What I remember is: There's a boy and his younger sister, and their mother is very stressed out about pregancies, because no one wants to be producing mutant babies. And apparently that's pretty common in the post-apocalyptic future in which they live. Their father is some kind of religious nut. The boy has a friend with six toes. Many of the children are psychic. In order to avert whatever crisis of being found out is going to befall them, the children, led by the boy's younger sister, use their psi powers to cry for help (the...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Why I read it: The last GGK I read was such a disappointment, I wanted to see if he was really as good as I remembered. I've read this before, but it was at least 15 years ago. Bookmark: Hard cover flap Tastes like chicken: What I most strongly remember about this series from before is that it is definitely derivative. It feels like the sort of thing some well-educated person would write who wanted to write a best-selling fantasy novel (full disclosure: I have a draft around the house that is titled "Best-Selling Fantasy Novel", BSFN for short) would write. There are dwarves, elves (lios alfar), orcs or dark elves(svart alfar), an unkillable evil, interventions from gods, an old king with two sons who have quite the rivalry, a neighbouring king with a stunningly beautiful daughter (people are never plain in a BSFN, are they?), wizards but not too many, various competing systems of magic... I remember it getting even more derivative as the series progressed. I'm su...

It's another truck I see driving around town, and once again, I betcha your East Gwillimbury Tourguide would have taken a picture. But here's my beef. If you're going to spell Shop "shoppe", I really think you should go all the way, and use Ye and Olde. And then, you can't just spell Butcher the usual way. How about Butchyr? Like vampyr, only worse. "Ye Olde Butchyr Shoppe", doesn't that sound much more like a place where the staff could be dismembering people? Oh. That's not what they're going for?

I finished the story about the lobsters. It sucks. I started another short story. This one seems better. It's about the Oak Ridges Moraine. I'm sure I will offend everyone.

Why I read it: I gave it to Ed for his birthday last year. Nadine read it recently (I think she's doing a GGK festival, because she borrowed "The Summer Tree" from me a couple of weeks ago and gave it back last week). She's asked me two or three times since if I've read Ysabel yet, I guess so we can discuss it. Still no "Darkmans". It's still "in transit." I don't think that word means what TPL thinks it means. Tastes like chicken: Tim Wynne-Jones, maybe crossed with "Da Vinci Code" but without the lame-assed puzzles. I'm wondering if he was intending to write a YA book here. I saw this book on a display for the library at the boy's school, but I don't feel like it was marketed to teens. Maybe that's because GGK doesn't have a teen audience really (though I think the Fionavar Tapestry would be great for teens). Somehow I missed that Kim and Dave were from the Fionavar Tapestry until Nadine pointed it out,...

Why I read it: Well, I didn't really, not this time through. I read parts of it to the boy, but then he moved on and read the rest of it and the sequel himself. It was about a month ago. I'm only mentioning it now because it's banned books week and I didn't really realize that it was a "most challenged" book. Bookmark: Probably a Yugioh card or something. Tastes like Chicken: This one for me is like Shakespeare or the bible. I've read it so many times, it doesn't compare to anything else. Other things compare to it (I almost wrote IT there, and that wouldn't have been good). What I liked: Familiarity. I also liked that the boy finally read the thing. What I hated: As an adult, and having probably read this book five or six times before, the religious content seemed heavy-handed. I never noticed that before. It seems just absurd to me that anyone would think that references to witches (Mrs Which) and crystal balls would be offensive. And also a...

Why I read it: I'd just finished something else and had another book listed as "in transit" at the library, so I didn't want to start anything long, because the "in transit" book was a leaden tome at something like 838 pages, so when it was mine I wanted to be able to devote my full attention to it. There are holds after me, so no renewal available. I didn't want to have to put something down half-way through, and I didn't want to read my carry-around book, because a good carry-around book is hard to find and needs to be dragged out as long as possible. Short stories seemed like the perfect choice. I could put the book down at any convenient spot and not have to recapture characters or place. I finished the book, and the library book is still "in transit"! Well done, TPL! (It's "Darkmans" by Nicola Barker , if the suspense is killing you). Tastes like chicken: I've read pretty much every published book by Garth Nix excep...

Why I read it: I liked the previous book I'd read by this author, so when I was at the library checking to see if what I'd requested was in (it wasn't) I got this instead. Bookmark: Library receipt. Tastes like chicken: Probably the only thing comparable for me would be his other book. What I liked: The characters were very amusing. I was quite curious how an author could make a book work, when the main character was a pedophile priest. And it did work. I would say it helped that we rather drew away from the priest towards the end and took more interest in the other characters, and it didn't hurt that the priest... well, let's say that things didn't go too well for him. What I hated: Two things. I hated the author's need to wrap everything up with a tidy explanation at the end. He did this in "the MD" as well. Just be in the ridiculous, go with it, let the characters revel in the hell of their own making. Though I did rather like the resoluti...

Today when I got to work I opened the internet to discover that David Foster Wallace had died. This made me very sad. While I only read one of his books, I enjoyed it very much. See this post. I'd meant to read Infinite Jest, but never gotten around to it. I guess I'm going to have to make a tag for writers who were seemingly suicides (I'm reading another Tom Disch book now). Anyway, in one of the obits, I came across this article, which I found very amusing. And so, the next short story I write will be about lobsters. Okay, I admit it, it was going to be anyway, when I'm finished this one I'm working on now, which will be probably tomorrow. That one is about funerals. I'm so cheery.

Your result for The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test... The Cardinal You scored 58% Cardinal, 38% Monk, 29% Lady, and 30% Knight! You are the real power behind the throne. No one dares dispute or refuse you. Which is good because that's how you get things done. You are also, however, completely corrupt and highly immoral. This doesn't bother you in the least as you lounge around your rich comfortable surroundings, reveling in wealth and authority. Take The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test at H ello Q uizzy

If only I ever carried my camera around everywhere I went, like your EG tourguide does, I would show a picture of the truck. On the side it said something like "We have preserved 17,000 hectares of habitat for wildlife". I'm sure it's not what they were going for, but the image that immediately popped into my mind was of bears, raccoons, seagulls, and maybe even crows traipsing over a garbage dump.

Why I read it: One of my coworkers, Nadine, lent it to me, and then several weeks later she gave notice, so I thought I'd better read it now, so I could give it back before she left. I would have gotten to it eventually, since I live here ( the book is sort of a cultural history of Toronto), so it's the only city I can write about (set my stories in) with any real sense of authority, and it would be good to "understand" it from another perspective (historical in this case). Also, after rather a long string of novels, I thought it was time to read some non-fiction. There was a documentary I saw a little while ago, "Let's all hate Toronto". When I told Nadine that ultimately Torontonians hate this city the most, because we hate it every day, whereas people from, say, Vancouver, really only hate Toronto on special occasions, she said that was typically Toronto-centric thing to say. She commutes every day from K-W. What I liked: I got a little self-righte...

Why I read it: I finished the first two of the three books I took on vacation in two days, so when I found myself in a bookstore in North Conway NH (due to the boy's need for more Twilight books -- he'll be embarrassed that I mentioned that), I thought I'd pick something up. They had a shelf of ARCs they were selling for charity, and I'd never read an ARC before, so I thought that would be neat. I'd heard the name of the author before, though I don't think it ever appeared in the list. Tastes like chicken: A cross between Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" and Emma Bull's " Finder", with a chunk of that short story by Kelly Link I read in a magazine a while ago thrown in (the one about the girl with a boy shadow, and the pocket universes). Bookmark: White Birch Books complementary bookmark. What I liked: For one thing, it made me want to take out my fiddle and, I don't know, try to tune it or something (I am a very crap fiddle pla...

Why I read it: I bought it a couple of years ago because the cover looked interesting. I started it a couple of months ago in the tub, but put it down again 14 pages in, and didn't pick it up again. (In this case, the long prologue seemed like a mistake -- this one seemed nearly unintelligible.)When I was packing to go on vacation, I selected it knowing I was unlikely to get through it when I had to go to work every day. Tastes like chicken: The Black Rose/Shadows Linger? What I liked: For fantasy, the characters were non-standard. The wizard, for example, was described as portly. What I hated: The author didn't seem to have much use for women in his world. There were three of note -- a prostitute with a heart of gold, the 61-year-old dowager empress (I forget her title) who is particularly despicable because she's always dressed as a vampire serpent queen geriatric skank, and a concubine who, though mentioned on the back cover, turns up about 80% through the book seemi...

Last Friday I finished the latest page-a-day project, a wretched novel that I will now put in a cupboard to ferment for a few months or years, in hopes that when I take it out again, it will somehow magically become, you know, good . In the meantime, I am working on a couple of short stories until I decide what to do next.