Robynettely

Today while I was having my (adult) karate class, over in the kids' class, I heard a black belt tell the 10 to 14-year-olds, "Yesterday I went to a really interesting kinesiology convention." And I thought to myself, they probably don't think that's a really interesting convention. Also today, my karate friend who is reading my karate zombie novel told me he's on page 205 (of 285). I'm amazed by that. He said he was trying to guess which characters were based on which members of our dojo. I guess that could keep you going. And I just spent the last hour rolling grape leaves for a potluck tomorrow. The problem: we're having a snowstorm right now. The potluck might not have anyone at it, if no one can get to work. At least stuffed grape leaves are a meal, if I'm the only one there. What if it's only me, and someone who made a cake?

One of my karate buddies volunteered to read the karate zombie novel from November, but then never gave me his email address. Maybe he's waiting to give me his business card or something. Maybe I shouldn't have told him so many times that the novel is unreadable. I need to practice in a mirror saying "just skip the boring parts" perhaps.

Boston Cupcakes: according to the cookbook, mace gives them a special New England twist. Um, yeah. But everyone liked them. I am happy to say I don't hate the dolphin story so much anymore. Sick to death of it, yes, but not hatred. This is an improvement. A couple of days ago on 43folders.com there was a suggestion about taking things from conception to completion (shut up, despite having posted a link, I'm writing this from memory rather) in the shortest time possible. With the dolphin story, I have not done this. For some reason a few weeks ago in editing, I dumped like four pages of exposition into the first act of the story. It's a short story. It can't take that sort of weighing down. In the last couple of evenings, I've taken most of that back out. What I think I can improve: 1. Write a better first draft (probably less with the endless exposition). 2. Edit more efficiently. Maybe if I practice editing things I've written recently, I will start to write ...

So it's like the third or fourth day in a row that I've been looking at the Dolphin story, and the beginning is SO boring, and nothing happens until about page eight (of 26), and there's tons of exposition. And the writing is crap, and there's no point even fixing it, until I know which paragraphs should actually stay. And I've moved so many things around now that there is no flow. Every place where two paragraphs used to flow one to the next, now there's invariably some chunk of nonsense dropped in the middle. I will never finish anything, not even this 5000-word story. But at least I got it back down to 5000 words. That's something, I guess. Oh, and the ending is pretty good, I think. At least, it's good compared to the rest of the story, which is crap.

Manners. First draft novel. 80% complete. "Dolphin". Short Story. Editing -- just finished the 3rd draft. Got the POV right now. "Bezoar". Short Story. Third draft. Made some really good progress with this one this month. Last night in my big mission was to make it clear in the first five pages what this story is about, because I seem to have a problem with that. And rather than write first, then knit, I edited and knitted at the same time. When I try to make the changes in the soft copy today, I guess I'll see how that worked. Printed some of the karate zombie thing, never really worked on it. Felt like going back to Toothbrush maybe. Extremely poor focus this month. My interior life has gone all haywire. I need beta blockers or adderal or both.

"Unicorn" - Just came back again. That's twice. On today's list I have to get it out to #3. This is the first time in my life, I think, that I've ever sent something out twice. Always in the past, and remember this was in the dark ages of juvinilia, I would send something out, and no matter how pleasant the rejection letter (and I did get a few personal ones) I would always decide that the story sucked and file it away. I probably still have those files. I should pull the stories out and find out how badly they really did suck. Writing avoidance project: Instead of actually working on the novel, I bought several books to read for research. So I guess at some point I'll have to actually read Dante and Milton, and some actual apocrypha. This time next month, it would be sweet to have another story circulating. God, I wish I didn't edit so slowly. Though last night I did manage to do the "write first, then knit" thing that I mentioned before, and ...

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" by Mark Haddon . I saw this book on many "best of year" lists maybe four or five years ago, but I'm not sure I ever put it on a list. The boy was reading it for school, so I picked it up and read 106 pages the first day, and then finished it two days later when the boy brought it home special so I could finish it (he'd already finished it). He thought Christopher was arrogant. I thought Christopher did some amazing things, especially considering his challenges, and his parents were a pretty disfunctional lot, and it was a good thing he had Siobhan, a sane, rational adult. I gather from the intro that the author spent a lot of time with autistic people, which made the characterization good. The details -- lists of items, etc. -- were hysterical and totally appropriate for the character to notice. Some of them I sort of skipped over, like the descriptions of the signs in the train station, but the box of meusl...

Yesterday, 23 days after I sent Unicorn out, I got my first rejection in about 15 years. I guess that's what I get for not sending anything out for that long. Task for today: send it to the next place on the list. Yesterday I also tried something new: Instead of starting the evening by knitting, and then abandoning that at like midnight to try to work on the story-of-the-moment, I worked on the story first. And I actually got through the draft! One more pass, and maybe I can let people read it. And I still managed to do the 10 rows of Morrigan. It would be so sweet if I finished the sleeve by the end of January. There are only 1.5 inches to go until the armhole decreases, which is, best guess... 16 rows, or about 2.5 hours of knitting. My other goal for January (aside from writing goals) is to finish reading "The Magicians". This book just will not end.

Read this Jo Walton article, and then come back. When I was in college, my boyfriend and I took Science Fiction as Lit as an elective. I thought the course readings were awesome, but he had a terrible time with Ringworld (L.Niven). I told him, when you get to one of those really long exposition paragraphs, skip it, and it won't really harm your enjoyment of the story. He didn't love it, but he did finish the book. Same person, I let him read a short story I'd written, and he said it wasn't as good as Mark Twain. Well, duh.

Today's topic was the goldrush in Colorado. It's for a short story, so I didn't have to go into too much depth. Yet. We'll see when I read draft 3 what I need, but I'm still working through draft two. A few days ago I tweeted that even my second drafts suck. This was in response (well, more in comment to, because I didn't reply to the actual person) to someone who said they had gotten to the point where they could reliably produce a decent first draft. But my second drafts aren't all bad. By the time I get towards the ending, there's much less red on the page. It's just the first half of both first and second drafts that is really, really awful. Posible causes: I start writing before the story has jelled in my mind My endings are really bad, but I've run out of steam on the editing towards the end, so I don't mark up as much I feel the need to explain my world at the beginning of the story, and then I need to take that out and spread it aroun...

But can't take praise either. Last night at a band concert, I played a solo-with-accompaniment. Afterward, it was all I could do to keep myself from pointing out where I'd almost gone off the rails whenever anyone said "Nice playing, Robyn." Why can't I just say "Thank you" and move along? "Gabriel's Oboe", from The Mission, by the way. Nice piece. My conductor arranged it for me.

Rule #1 was to rethink all scenes where my characters have food. So what do I do in Bezoar? I start with a really long scene with my characters sitting in a saloon drinking. Ugh. I just realized this while I was messing with fonts. Yeah, the font Mesquite made me realize.

I've decided that's my learning style. Or maybe my teaching style. I finished the draft of Bezoar. Now I can cut out the bad bits. It came in just under 5K. I wonder if I can get it under 4K for draft 2.

Got another 700 words on Bezoar. There's got to be a better way to do this. But I have 3297 words now, which I guess is good.

Incredibly, I managed to write 337 words last night on Bezoar. And while they aren't perfect words, I started writing, and then found a way to explain the world with respect to the characters and their relationships, and that made me happy.

One of my colleagues was helping a relative fill out an application to pharmacy school. The question: What is the one question that should never be asked? My guess: "Do you want fries with that?" You?

I would have totally enjoyed a collection of cartoons about taxidermy.

What I worked on in December: Manners. First draft novel. 75% complete. "Dolphin". Short Story. Editing -- 3rd draft. "Bezoar". Short Story. Still working on first draft. I have about 2000 words. Barely touched it last month. "Mary Alice". Short Story. Still writing first draft. This one is based on a dashed-off comment from Catherine Schtamp-somethingorother at VP. I know what it's about. I have around 1300 words and a couple of sheets of notes. "Limering". Short story. Still writing first draft. I have mostly notes. Cat/tinfoil. Flash fiction. Draft done (hand-written while I was at my dad's). Needs a soul. Cory told her cats they were going to be famous, so I guess I have to try to revise it now. I read a piece by I think Roberto Bolano that said that if you're going to work on short stories, you should be working on more than one at a time, five or six if you can hack it. I seem to have that down. And since I now have a sto...

I didn't really send it in December, because the post office was closed too early on the 31st, but I'll count it as an accomplishment for then anyway, since I have nothing. I sent the Unicorn story out on Saturday morning to an actual paying market . That wasn't so bad, really. Now the waiting.

Yeah, couldn't do it. Phone would not recognize the body textbox so I could enter text. Oh well. Maybe I'll try again later. We were having dinner on New Year's Eve, and I had one of those stupid epiphanies. You know why we're all in debt so much? Because financial debt doesn't work like biological debt. When you don't sleep for a day, you don't sleep double the next day to make up for it; you sleep like 25% more for a couple of days, and then you're back to normal. When you forget to eat for a day, you don't eat 5000 calories the next day; you eat a little more, and you're back to normal. So sleep debt and food debt require you to pay less when you miss a payment. But if you forget to pay your credit card bill, you have to pay twice as much to make up for it, plus a penalty. I wonder what it all means.