Robynettely

"Unicorn". At market #5, but it's a slow market so it could be there for 3 months... I really wanted to have Dolphin out there by the end of May, but that's today, and I don't see it happening. Maybe tomorrow. Definitely it will be appearing on the June list.

" Uglies" by Scott Westerfield. Belongs to the boy, but I probably bought it for him. He compared it to "Hunger Games" because they're both future-dystopias. This was a very quick read. One evening I sat down and read 150 pages, which annoyed the boy. (He read "Bitten" after me, by the way, and told me to buy the other books in the series, so I guess he liked it. This is shaping up to be a month of sequels, because I bet I start "Pretties" when I'm done the library book I just got...) The ending was highly unsatisfying, though I do have books two and three lying around, fortunately. " Maelstrom" by Peter Watts. Sequel to "Starfish", which I read last month. It's kind of weird to come across something that I enjoy so much due to such sucking circumstances on the part of the author, but whatever. The future where the internet has become almost useless in its corruptedness seemed true to me. "A Paradise Built i...

Manners. First draft novel. 95% complete. "Dolphin". Got reviewed 3 times on OWW. I really meant to have this finished and sent out to its first market by the end of the month, but that just doesn't seem realistic today. I'm just doing a last pass to tighten it up, and then it's so out of here. "TheBogWitch". Typed May 6 (9900 words), second draft structural -- made a beginning and an ending May 10 (7300 words), third draft pacing -- cut each backstory reference in about half May 18 (5500 words), fourth draft character/dialog -- decharacter'd someone, gave everyone motivations May 25 (5416 words). Karate Zombies. Karate camp weekend seemed like the time to target reading this, so I printed it out, but I read "Pretties" by Scott Westerfield instead. Sigh. Knit Morrigan. I have about four inches of the body. VK Gloves. Finished. Noro Henley. Back complete, front... nowhere near.

Today's recommendations (chosen just for me!) were: "From Dead to Worse" by Charlaine Harris. I did buy the 7-volume box set last year from Heather, but she seems to think it's the only thing I've ever bought. "Hunted" by PC Cast & Kristin Cast. I know nothing about this book. "The Summoning" by Kelley Armstrong. Heather really wants me to have this book, obviously. What had I been searching for on the chapters.indigo.ca website before this email came in? That German Zen Archery book. Hmph.

I'd been editing BogWitch and come across a missing scene, and when I was lying down, it kept popping into my consciousness. Obviously I wasn't going to sleep until I wrote it down, so I got up and, well, I wrote a dialog spine. Just the words the characters said, no attributions, nothing. 161 words. Awesome.

This week I have received two missives from Heather. On Monday she suggested six "fresh new faces in fiction", one of which sounded interesting: Angelology by Danielle Trussoni. The amazon reviews were patchy, though. And today she suggested The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, which was funny, because I'd put it on my list last week, even though the amazon reviews said the writing (or maybe the translation) was cliche-ridden.

I would hate to name the sequel to Apocryphal this, because I don't think I can say it. Also, that would imply I would have to write a sequel to Apocryphal, and I think I need to re-draft Apocryphal first. (If redraft is the right word -- I may need to start again and rewrite the whole damn thing from scratch.)

At work, we were trying to think of a new name for a product we make that shows lots of little images (because we were being sued because of our old name). Thumbnails seem similar to the complex or compound eyes that bugs have, and we started looking for technical terms for that. Comparing our products to a fly eye turned out to be a bad idea, because flies are kind of short-sighted, and blurry vision didn't seem like the kind of thing we'd want to imply about our product. Dragonfly eyesight, on the other hand, is excellent. This name never got used on the product, not because it's not absolutely genius, but because we never suggested it to marketing. We're tech writers, you know. Last I heard, the product was going to be named something about Airwolf. It would be an awesome name for a collection of short stories.

Today Heather suggested, again, that I pick up "the Reckoning" by Kelley Armstrong, which is not an unreasonable pick for me, though I don't know how she arrived at it. But Justin Bieber? Clearly, Heather thinks I am 12 years old. I just downloaded some Andrew Bird to improve my cool-cred.

About four pages from the end of the short story I just typed, suddenly things went all meta and my characters started ranting about how the story had no ending. The strange thing is, it sort of worked, and (if I rewrite the beginning) it might sort of work work, and I might leave it in.

Today I got an email from "my good friend Heather" suggesting some books I'd like to read. They were: "Pretties" "Marked" by Kristin Cast "The Summoning" by Kelley Armstrong How did Heather know I'd just finished "Uglies" on Saturday? I bought it probably a year ago (and I already have "Pretties", so she's out of luck on selling me that). I finished "Bitten" by Kelley Armstrong what, two weeks ago? How did she know? I didn't even buy it from Heather, I got it as a gift. And the last crop of books I bought from Heather were "Creating Language Crimes", "The Book of Jubilees" and ... oh hell, I forget what. Not YA. Neither of which I read.

Typing up a short story I wrote longhand a while back, I can only hope that this character is named Jiles, because I don't think even I would have named two characters in the same short story Julia and Jules. Well, not unless they were related, and they are not.

It only seems like I'm posting a lot today, really I'm just cleaning out my draft folder. Apparently the Merril Collection is not the enemy, contrary to what I wrote somewhere around here before. I had a one-on-one meeting with the TPL writer-in-residence at the Merril Collection, and it was a surprisingly positive experience. I was left with the feeling that I could actually publish this stuff. We discussed my editing issues extensively. Like how I don't like it and that makes it kind of hard to even get started, and that maybe I don't like it because I don't know when to stop, and it's out of control and I need a strategy for when to quit it and let the market be the judge of the crapness of my work, rather than being that judge myself. Though I have some lovely form rejections to argue that point. And I learned the term "fish head" which is where I've got that boring infodump at the start of the story (in the case of this story, the page-and-a-h...

"Unicorn". Rejected by market #4. Need to get this sucker out again. Read two stories on OWW in April, also, which is good but not good enough. I think I've got a system now.

Manners. First draft novel. 95% complete. While I was at Ad Astra watching a panel on Time Management for Writers, I realized that I just have to finish this thing, so I can move on to something else. It's around 90,000 words, and time to wrap up. "Dolphin". Short Story. Editing. I decided that it was trying too hard, and took out any sentence that seemed overworked. This got rid of 300+ words. Then I sent it to the TPL writer-in-residence. I also let Ed read it, and he said he didn't understand what was going on with the experiment with the dolphin, and what George's goal was with the surgery on Honorine, so I guess I took out too much. Oh well, back to the drawingboard. I rewrote the intro and realized that I was just moving things around, and each draft is not better than the last because of that. So I stopped. This story is now up on OWW. "Bezoar". Short Story. I find myself putting back things I've taken out. I think I'll try one more dra...

"Pirate Latitudes" by Michael Crichton. It wasn't "The Pyrates" by any means. I think I tend to read more challenging books than this. It connectss interestingly (to me anyway) to the discussion Justine Larbalestier started about "crap" books. I don't think "Twilight" is any worse than "The Davinci Code" or this. I don't think it's a YA problem. It's that easy-to-digest books might sell better than harder ones sometimes. The flap said that this completed manuscript was found in Crichton's files after he died. I think it had been in there a long time, and needed a good copy-edit. Though the section about navigation into an island surrounded by a reef, directly into the sun, was really interesting and cool. "Starfish" by Peter Watts. The boy says it should be called "Sea Star", because starfish aren't fish. And then he calls "Bill 157" because fish swim in schools, and therefore b...

Last night I made Rachael Ray's Steak Nicoise for dinner. As the boy was sitting down, he asked if this was "the one he likes", which would either be Brutus Salad or Italian Cobb Salad. I said no, this one was a cross between those two. And if he likes those, then he'll like this, also. The boy said "Not necessarily, mom. I mean, you like ponies, and you like monkeys, right?" And I replied " Maybe you used too many monkeys." Yep, that was an odd moment of Jonathan Coulton bonding.

When I'm editing a story, I have this horrible tendency to move things around rather than fix them. Maybe I write a paragraph on scrap paper during a meeting at work, or I decide some piece of text belongs at the beginning of the story to explain the world (I often move all the boring exposition to the start of the story, for example, in a second or third draft, making the intro nigh unto unreadable). I drop this text into a spot as I move through the document to the end, and then I make another draft, rinse and repeat. And as I progress, each draft doesn't get better. Well, maybe the ending does, but the beginning gets heavier and heavier and that's what people read first so I'm kind of screwing myself. I'm not sure; I have this thing in my head that generally each story starts out not that bad after the first draft, and then through subsequent edits got worse and worse. But that's wishful thinking and the first draft was probably crap and all subsequent drafts...

This was my first con ever. On Friday I went and Ed came with me, and that might not have been a good idea, because what he wants out of something like this and what I want are completely different. I went back on Saturday morning and attended two panels: "Editing your own work". Concluded here that I might be doing too many drafts. When I make a second draft, I don't think I'm working with the expectation that the next draft should be better and more readable than the first, and this is why subsequent drafts get worse and worse until the story is completely unreadable. Starting today, I am revising my process with Bezoar and Dolphin, which I would like to have "done to me" (send to OWW or somewhere) by the end of the month. Then I can move on to Zombie, which I would really like to not ruin. "Young adult novels". Heard the concept "new adult novel" to refer to books about 18-21s, the black hole of fiction. This was the most packed room...

Every time I write first, and then knit, the writing goes better. And the knitting always goes fine, regardless. Why do I repeatedly forget this lesson? Today I reached the end of "The Bezoar" again. This one may be progressing past the "too embarrassing to share" stage, which is nice.