Robynettely

The challenge is here . This is not the story I thought I was writing; I thought I was writing about an eating disorder. Gerard was taking a shortcut home from school when the unicorn found him. When he saw it off in the distance, he thought it was a white rock, and threw a stone at it. He missed, and the white thing kept moving towards him. He thought then that it was an awfully clean albino deer. As the creature got closer, Gerard could see it was mighty small for a deer. Instead of antlers it had a horn. Its tail was long and skinny, with a brush on the end. Gerard picked up another stone and bounced it in his hand, but the unicorn looked at him with its outsized black eyes. "Go away," he said, and raised his arm. It blinked at him, eyelashes as long as fingers. "No, get," Gerard said. It lowered its horn as if to run him through, or maybe pay homage. Gerard threw the rock, and the little unicorn, not even billy goat size, jumped in the air like a startled cartoo...

The challenge is here . The title comes from a heading in a book that's open at the top of my staircase. Sorry about the appalling science. It was a beautiful June day. The walk up from Pinkham notch was easier than it should have been. Chuck kept looking up. If India or China had found a way to stop the end times ahead, he wouldn't know; news wasn't getting through. "Big change coming," said the man he'd caught up to on the hill. The man's pack looked nearly empty. Might as well eat beef jerky sticks and Mars bars when the end is a few hours away. "Going up for a better view?" said Chuck. He'd abandoned not just pots and pans, but the concept of eating. He'd fasted before for longer than humanity had left. He'd trained at the same time, even. He wore everything he had: swords, knives, armour. "Just thought I'd climb up." The man was far too old to be hiking. But if his knees gave out, he wouldn't be going down the m...

The challenge is here (it's to write a 1000-word story about the picture you can see -- do click). The title is from the socks I'm knitting -- pattern is Naiad, colourway is Slayer. I was leaving the theatre by the back door after the show when a man loomed out of the shadows. It was late, it was dark, and no one else was around. Any normal person would have been startled. But this man didn't expect any of that. "There's a breach in the sewer that used to be Taddle Creek." He was huge and yet hunched, with a voice like walking on gravel. "Where?" I said, grabbing the door so it wouldn't lock shut behind me. My weapons were still inside. "Annex," said the man. He smelled like road salt, even though it was July. "Bathurst, near Dupont." "Right," I said. Those streams want to be free. "I'll find it." I don't know who these people are, or how they know where to find me. My theory is they're bridge t...

Sunday evening we were sitting on our patio having a beer because we’d been rollerblading and it was brutally hot. I was seaming a sock when a robin came hopping across the lawn. “Cheep, cheep, cheep,” he said. I figured he was a teenaged male, because he still had some speckles on his chest. I said hello. “Cheep, cheep, cheep,” he said, and hopped closer – close enough that I could have reached out and touched him. “You’re too close,” I said. “You should be afraid of me.” He hopped under my chair to the other side, where my beer was. He pecked at my beer bottle. He hopped over in front of my feet and looked at me. “Cheep, cheep, cheep.” “Maybe he’s hungry,” Ed said. I don’t approve of feeding the wildlife. Perhaps a concession to that, when Ed went inside, he got a slice of 12-grain bread, rather than the wonder bread we feed the boy. He broke a few pieces off and dropped them on the ground. The robin ate one and lost interest. He cheeped at me. Across the lawn came another robin, als...

I had to wait a few days until I managed to get my sh*t together, but: “Bezoar”. Rejected (pleasantly) from market #1, is now in the queue at market #2. I can see why Uncle Jim at VP had the "no sleepovers" rule. All the spreadsheeting in the world can't help me if I just let things languish when they come back.

The challenge is here : 1000 word limit, has to take place on the 4th of July. Chuck said it was probably not suited to FSF, so of course I had to prove him wrong. Dina had plugged X-15 in overnight, so he wasn't there to help her get out of bed. She had to rely on her replacement hips and knees, for a change. As she washed up, she asked herself how she would ever get her full mobility back if she didn't have to use it occasionally. You'd think a physiotherapy program would be applied to the X-15 so he'd gradually hold back the help until she asked. Or something. Maybe that's what the Anti-Robot League were talking about, when they had their radical meetings and went on the radio and the like, talking about humanity's over-reliance on robots. "We're not against help," they would say. "We just want to keep our ability to think and act for ourselves." Dina wouldn't have minded doing that some other day. It had been mildly liberating to ...

If my dreams are any indication, the thing I'm most afraid of in the world is losing my purse. And I've survived that, once.

OWW: 3 “Brown Girl in the Ring” by Nalo Hopkinson. For some reason I discovered she’d done the MFA program at Seton Hill, so I got this out of the library. She certainly presents a grim view of the future of Toronto, but it was an entertaining read, and not just because I could visualize so many of the locations. The style, especially the dialog, was challenging at the start, but it was really well plotted. “Behemoth” by Scott Westerfield. The boy got this from my mom for his birthday, and he read like 75 pages while still at her house. Win! Ed read it next (having finally been shamed into reading Leviathan). Finally I got my hands on it. Really good. Totally want the sequel. (September...) “Aerotropolis: the way we’ll live next” by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay. Recommended on Nicola Griffith’s blog. Got it out of the library. I found the introduction quite a slog, but by Chapter 2 I wasn’t having any trouble getting through it. I guess I’d gotten used to the style – I haven’t bee...

First Draft “Quinn”. Page-a-day, started June 1. On the 13th, I woke up and realized how the story was actually supposed to go, so I had 12 pages of rambling fishhead. I finished with 19 pages. “Doll Heads”. One of them there flash fiction challenges, wrote 1700 words June 5 (Sunday). “Axilism”. 1300 words, another flash fiction challenge. I wanted to write about 800 words this time, first draft, because I always wind up with 70% extra on these challenges. I didn’t meet my target, though the challenge didn’t actually have a word limit this time. I wrote it Wednesday morning at work. “Familiar”. Weekly flash fiction challenge. Wrote about 2600 words on Monday. Why is it these 1000-word things always come out so long? Steampunk Superhero. Weekly flash fiction challenge based on a true story, came in at 950 words! Wrote it on Saturday, typed it on Sunday. “Fairfax”. Page-a-day, I might have just accidentally started a novel. I have at least 10,000 words plotted out, anyway. I’ll pro...

This week's challenge was here . I just noticed that I was at exactly 1000 words (MSWord says), so I guess I'll stop. In Which LittleWatchGirl Plans her Obsolescence so She Can Retire TrainMaster (catch phrase: "Keeps the trains running on time!") couldn't have sent FutureMan over to me to explain how the campaign was supposed to work because I was the best person to explain it. In fact I felt like I was the weak link. When your superpower is about office meetings, you can't be expected to be good with weapons. They had chosen mine for me thinking I'd be good with springs and winding. Perhaps TrainMaster had heard that I'd asked SteamBoss who would be going on this campaign. SteamBoss (catch phrase: "Black belches bad; white belches good!") had said "What do you mean?" I'd said, "Is anyone I hate going?" SteamBoss couldn't see my eyes. Wearing goggles all the time protects your secret identity. My superhero name is...

Apparently you can read all about me here: http://cathschaffstump.com/archives/2011/06/24/vp-profile-16-robyn-hamilton/

The challenge was here . My sister had read the “dollheads” challenge and asked what happened next, so when I was thinking about robots (and I hate robots) I wanted to find a way to make one in Bucklepunk world. A familiar would have warned her before the man was in sight of the house. He'd come up the streambed, hopping one stone to the next, balancing in an imaginary duel. She didn't recognize him, but his fancy dress said he was official. Abigail and her daughter Susannah had hidden in the burnt-out shell of their house, made not a sound as he wandered through the yard, poked at the garden, the foundation, the pottery shed, the wires she'd run to the mill to siphon power from the waterwheel. After a tense hour he left, back the way he'd come, towards the mill. "We need a familiar," said Abigail. "It would give us away," said Susannah. "Not if no one recognizes what it is," said Abigail. Always the familiar gave witches away. It followed ...

Crow is a yoga move wherein you crouch down and put your hands on the floor, shoulder-width apart. Then you put your knees on your elbows and launch forward to balance on your hands. I was first introduced to crow when I was doing the Monday night yoga class at the Y. I, and most everyone else, would roll from our toes to our hands and back, never really committing ourselves. Then one class I fully committed, and did it for about six seconds, before falling off onto my knees, getting some of my most spectacular bruises EVER. I was able to show them off for a couple of weeks. They were awesome, because everyone seems to think yoga is so gentle . Anyway, after that bad experience, I was back to pathetically rolling from feet to hands and back, no commitment, no risk, week after week. Then a couple of weeks ago I was screwing around at my Acro class, and the boy asked what I was trying to do, and I showed him, and he crouched down, hands shoulder-width apart, and launched into the pose, w...

The challenge was here . I found most of the stuff at the prompt’s link pretty horrible, like really women-hating even. And I only got to the end of the As before I found my title. This story may be offensive to some--triggering, maybe. But it’s the story I wrote. It was Greer’s idea. He phoned me up. "Dude, we're going to have a rape gang down in La Salle Park." Rape gangs hadn't really come up in grade 8 sex ed. Maybe Greer knew, because it came up in the grade 10 version. "You going to come by and pick me up?" I said. "Nah, it's getting late," said Greer. "It's getting late. Meet us there at 2." I threw a bottle of water, three apples, and three granola bars into my backpack, along with my cell. Greer never eats the apples I bring, but I packed one for him anyway, just to be polite. I figured Johnny would be coming with us too. We met at the edge of La Salle park. If Buffalo is the armpit of America, then it’s not a very sweaty...

The challenge was here . I had the world BucklePunk in my head (someone had tweeted it in an offhand manner) and in my interpretation, it’s Steampunk populated by Puritans, who didn’t have steam power... so not steampunk at all. “You should check the run down to the waterwheel,” said Cotton Brown. Technically, that was Cotton's job. They had portrayed the situation as a win for everyone -- the mill got an assistant, and Cotton was out of the village, so everyone's daughter was safe. In reality, it was just a win for the town, with a spy at the mill. Nathaniel Proctor had never asked for an assistant, anyway. He sighed and went outside. The morning air smelled like honey, and hummed with the sound of bees. Of course, bees led to screaming, followed by accusations of being afflicted by a witch. Everything was a potential plague in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The run above the sawmill was pulled over so it wouldn't turn the waterwheel; he'd disengaged it before the storms ha...

The challenge came out on the Friday before karate camp. My first thought was “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” but that’s kind of been done. I was in the dojo, marching in line, and I started catching sight of my toenail polish, and the floor was terrible. And this year we didn’t have to cook for ourselves, but in previous years we did, and often people would discuss what food item it might have been that made them sick. The first thing you do when karate camp starts is to deal with the floor. Savannah set pairs of junior belts to running back and forth across the room with whippy straw brooms. "There's a better broom in our cabin," said Tonio. "You could come with me and get it." This to Savannah, of course. When they did pairworks this weekend, she wouldn't be partnering him. There's a real broom in the dining hall," said Susan. "Wide, with felt." "It's probably sticky with fallen foodstuffs?" asked Tonio. They swe...

"Dolphin". Still at market #1. I need to stop being so disfunctional and figure out what's up with that. “Bezoar”. At market #1.

First Draft Chickpea. In April I had written three pages. I’m trying to move to a different level here, where maybe my first drafts aren’t all completely crap. So I started by knowing how it was going to end, and having a story in my head. It went kind of to hell towards the end, but I can fix it in post, right? My draft wound up probably 3000 words long. One Degree. At some point in April, I lost my notes for this, which I guess was a good excuse not to work on it. After Chickpea fizzled to a lame ending, I found my notes while doing some filing, and it became my page-a-day, which wasn’t what I had intended for it, but whatever. Medusa. Another Chuck Wendig challenge, 1500 words max. Wrote a first draft Monday (May 17). “Take Down the Lot of You”. Chuck Wendig challenge, 1000 words max. Wrote first draft May 30, wound up with 1700 words. Editing "The Rabbits". Could this only be the fourth draft I just did? Removed about 2500 more words, and it was easy, down to 6600 wor...

“A Book of Tongues” by Gemma Files. I bought this one at Ad Astra after hearing her read (I got it signed! I can’t read what it says!), and I started reading it, and OMG I could totally hear her reading voice in every word. And it was laugh-out-loud funny. Though perhaps my idea of funny is not everyone’s. One of my coworkers asked if I’d read “Not wanted on the Voyage” by Timothy Findlay a few days ago (actually, he sort of assumed I’d read it, which was true) because his son is reading it for school and having a rough time getting through it, because it’s so grim. And I said, sure, there are some dark bits, but it’s so funny! Anyway, like for example in this book one character is describing a horrific stoning of a presumed witch, and another character says “Only way, sometimes,” and I thought that was so funny! But I can see where other people might think it’s sick. “Ha’penny” by Jo Walton. After I read this in January, I said I wanted to buy about ten Farthings and give them away....

The challenge was here . I watched Tangled last weekend, and thought, someone should do a mashup, since both were about magic hair and eyes, but so different. If I'd done another draft, I would have made Medusa angrier. She doesn't come off enraged enough yet. But for now I'll just call it done. She had been born bald. When it grew in, her hair started blonde and curly at the back, dark and straight at the front. The curls worked their way forward, and the darkness worked towards the back, and by the time she was of age, Medusa had a magnificent head of hair. That had been a problem. Her beautiful long coils of hair had hung to the middle of her back, setting off her stunning eyes, high cheekbones and ripe, red mouth. Because of those looks, she thought she could get away with anything. Anything in this case was stealing lettuce. The punishment was that her hair was turned to snakes, anyone who looked in her eyes was turned to stone, and living on a desert island. The Templ...