Robynettely

Yay, another challenge! You can find it here . Considering one of my known writing issues is all those scenes where my characters sit around eating, this is right up my alley. The bread was obviously poisoned. Kendra was the only one who ate the 12-grain. The child ate wonderbread, or the local grocery store's equivalent brand, because she was ten. The old woman ate that cheap white stuff too, because her gums couldn't tolerate the lumpy bits. So they had to buy two kinds of bread every time they went to the store, and often the bread went stale before it was gone, because who wants a sandwich every day. So the old woman knew Kendra was the only one who ate the 12-grain bread, and she infested it with whatever mould made the medieval people go mad, that infested their grain silos and made them hallucinate religious experiences and eventually sicken and die. The old woman knew Kendra would pick off the green bits, leaving tendrils of poison still deep in the bread to be eaten, g...

I have an essay due on Saturday. It's insane how attractive other projects are, when I have to work on that one. Tonight, if I get through a draft, I get to type up that first draft story from last week. Okay, maybe what's insane is that somehow copy typing has become a reward.

Subs in 2012: 1/52 “Bezoar”. Sent to market #4 Jan 9. “Cats”. Sent to market #1 Sept 30. This year's writing goal is to submit once a week. I have one more thing I need to get out to a market. And clearly I need to take all those first drafts I've written and maybe bash one into shape per month. That sounds so fun right now.

First Draft “Fairfax”. Started month with 54,000 words, near the end of Chapter 20. Now it’s around 61K, in Chapter 23. Lots of stuff has happened, which is good. I’ve moved some of the characters finally out of their comfort zones, and created lots of problems for them. I think I will be going over my initial draft target of 90K. “The X Tree” (where X is whatever the tree is; When I started I hadn’t quite figured that out yet). This short story came out of a chat with another TW. And also I wanted to try e-prime. When I was at VP, Jim MacDonald went through a few pages of my manuscript and pointed out every instance of “There was” etc. I remember despairing. We’ll see if, long term, this experiment improves the quality of my first drafts. I carried this around to work and stuff with the intention of writing on it when my computer was rebooting and things like that, but it didn’t quite work out. On the weekend I just sat down and wrote until the draft was finished (total: 7000 words ...

OWW: 0. Bad member. “Anansi Boys” by Neil Gaiman. I actually finished this a bit after midnight on Dec 31, so it should have appeared on last month’s list, but whatever. It’s been lying around the house for years, and I finally picked it up and read it. I don’t know why I put it off for so long. It was very funny and charming. NG has such a comfortable voice to read. “The Freedom Maze” by Delia Sherman. Another novel shot through with references to other books, which is neat. This was a quick read that I didn’t expect to tie up as nicely as it did. I think what I liked was that the changes that happened to Sophie were real, she really did have a growth spurt in the six months (20 minutes) that she was gone. That’s something that’s always bothered me about Narnia and its ilk, and also about more adult (is there a better word for this subgenre?) portal fantasy, like “the Mirror of her Dreams”, “Fionavar”, etc. is that the characters don’t seem to be temporally affected by their secondar...

Updated to add: Actual content! Apparently I can’t type text in the content field, only in the title and tags fields, from my phone. The Toronto Standard has (or had) an entertaining feature, “Ideas, free to a good home”. I’m full of this sort of idea. Christy Matheson is one of them. You know how Pat Robertson said a few months back that if your spouse has Alzheimer’s disease it’s okay to divorce them , because they’re dead to you anyway? And Newt Gingrich kind of had affairs on his sickly wives (at least one of them) instead? Well, I was thinking: how does someone who needs to have an affair on their sickly spouse go about meeting the right person to do that with. One thing I learned from “ The Other Boleyn Girl” was that it’s more appropriate for a king to have an affair with a married girl than a single one. So clearly, my hypothetical person married to an Alzheimer’s patient would need to meet another like-minded individual in similar circumstances (of the opposite sex of cours...

Do you ever have a thought, and then it disappears because someone distracted you, and you spend a whole lot of time wanting that idea back, and then you remember what you think it might have been and it’s actually something quite stupid, like “I should google my coworker’s name” or "I wonder what John Scalzi is up to today?" I wonder if I’ve ever really forgotten a brilliant story idea, or if they were all that crap.

It's been weeks and weeks (at least four weeks) since last I did one of these challenges . I'm fighting the idiot self-imposed conviction that everything I write has to have a supernatural or fantastic or SF element. That's just stupid. “The name of this place is pretty offensive,” the woman said as I set her beer on the bar. "Not my fault," I said. "It was named that when I got here." "Still, you're making light of people's suffering." She might have been 43 (just a guess), with long hair in a ponytail, still mostly blonde. She wore paint-spattered jeans and a tee-shirt. "They're all dead. And I think it's more a statement about our cleaning staff. Lanes should be clean." The man who came in and made a bee-line to her would have been two or three years older, fit like a runner and suited like a lawyer. His hairline was receding. He wore a wedding ring. A bowling alley must have seemed like a good place to meet; neithe...

First Draft “Fairfax”. Started month with 43,000 words, near the beginning of Chapter 17, having written portions of my second outline. Now I’m past 54,000 nearing the end of Chapter 20. I should be more than half done! We’ll see about that, in about six months. . . Editing Toothbrushing Club. (Middle Years novel). Last time I posted, a week into December, I had gone through the first half, with the goal to have draft 3 by Christmas break. In this, I was successful. There was a lot less moving scenes around, and a lot more writing entire scenes, towards the end. I knew the ending was awful, and had written a note after reading the whole thing to basically delete the last five pages, and I wrote something else entirely. The whole thing is printed out and ready to read again, but I think I should give it a week or two. This is the first time I’ve ever really properly done a “middle” draft of anything this long from start to finish. The document is 53,000 words long which seems sort of ...

OWW: 4 “The Courts of Chaos” by RZ. You know, Corwin is one of the most awesomest characters ever. He’s like basically a god, and yet he doesn’t win all the time (wrestling with his brother, sword fighting with his other brother), doesn’t get what he wants, doesn’t ultimately save the world all by himself. . . Roger Zelazny is awesome. “Fool Moon” by Jim Butcher. Library book, #2 of the Dresden Files. I found it easier in this one easier to keep track of the characters than the first volume. “Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. The information was really interesting, and that kept me reading, but I found this book obnoxious. If it was a little dated in sections, that can be forgiven because it was written in 1990. However, if you’re going to take a tone that says “wow, everyone else is so stupid!” which is how the ‘humor’ seemed sometimes, your research and editing really has to be absolutely impeccable. Torontoans? Who calls us that? “Motel of the Mysteries” by David MacAulay. This wa...

“Fairfax”. Started month with about about 36,000 words, in the midst of Chapter 14. Ended with about 43,000 and having started Chapter 17. Have I mentioned my process? When I start a novel, I always feel like everything is going to be great this time. I have a brilliant idea, and I just can’t wait to start RIGHT NOW!!!!!!! I write about 15,000 words, and then I realize that I don’t know what happens next. I have a general idea of how things need to end (giant robots!) but I don’t know how I’m going to get from here (burned house in the woods and water wheel and witch hunter) to making the giant robots and having the battle. So I write an outline of the next 75 things that are going to happen between here and the ending (that’s one thing for every thousand words I have left to write). I do not write the outline from now to the end, I start with the end, and then fill in backwards, and then frontwards, and then I fill in the middle. And then I largely ignore the outline and write anothe...

Editing “Dowsing”. (short story, 5K). Finished typing the rewrite, wound up with 6500 words. Edited the first 3000, and then printed again and edited the whole thing on the premise that the beginning is always the worst part. Posted on OWW and got four quick crits, suggesting that the ending was too sudden. That was kind of what I thought before posting it. I let Ed read it too. Toothbrushing Club. (Middle Years novel). So, this year I forewent (if that’s a word) NaNoWriMo on the premise that I don’t need another unedited manuscript lying around, and instead I need to edit one of those down, making November in fact NaNoEdMo. But then I did not apply my usual NaNoWriMo discipline, and instead worked on that short story (not a waste of time by any means) and then screwed around for several days. So, I found myself on November 16 thinking, Oh dear, I guess I’d better read this sucker. I wrote TbC several years ago, and then apparently tried to edit it without actually reading it. In ret...

“The Guns of Avalon” by Roger Zelazny. Book 2 of the Chronicles of Amber. I didn’t notice so much in book 1, but Zelazny really paints nice pictures and makes incredible economy of words in these. “Persuasion” by Jane Austen. When I go to the library, I like to take something out to be supportive, so when they didn’t have whatever the next Jim Butcher book is in the Desden Files, I took out this. Also, I have a DVD of it, and I prefer to read the book first. Anyway, this was a Penguin edition, and it had an over-explaining introduction and footnotes that didn’t seem necessary to me. A lot of the footnoted words were comprehensible in context, and I mean, who really cares that the particular coach they’re talking about is better than a convertible because the top can go either way? I love Jane Austen, and this book was charming. “Sign of the Unicorn” by RZ. These are so short I almost feel guilty counting them each, rather than reading the whole five-book series as a single book. But...

The challenge is here . This is something I had lying around that I wrote originally in March 2009. Maybe I'll post the whole 650-word version tomorrow. The bouncy ball was bisphenol-b. When the princess accidentally tossed it into a well, it sank to the bottom. A frog croaked, "I'll fetch it for you, for a kiss." "Okay," the princess said. "Kiss, then ball," the frog said. Their lips touched. The frog grew and the green localized to tights and a jacket; obviously a prince. The princess forgot about the ball. They didn't live happily ever after. As a frog, the prince had absorbed a lot of pseudo-estrogens. His vestigial third leg gave the princess the willies, and his sperm count was insufficient to provide heirs, anyway.

First Draft “Fairfax”. Started month with about about 28,000 words, in the midst of Chapter 11. Now I’m in Chapter 14, with about 36,000 words. That’s a third of a book! And now I will espouse for a moment on why I write a page a day. A couple of nights ago, I’d done like 4000 words of the Dowsing rewrite and I wasn’t totally into writing a page (roughly 280 words) of Fairfax. But I had to, so I sat down and started writing. I wrote a couple of paragraphs of description, and then the POV character said something that totally surprised me: he said (without giving anything away) he missed the clothes. He didn’t miss the lifestyle of what he was looking at, but he did miss the clothing. I was totally shocked and surprised, because right there, with those four words, he gave me all of his backstory. I knew who he was right now, but I had no backstory for that character, and because I was dragging my way through that block of text, he gave me a gift, “this is who I used to be.” Editing “Ra...

OWW: 3 “We Never talk about my Brother” by Peter S. Beagle. Short stories. The title story will stay with me. So elegant! Some of the stories were meh, like all short story collections, but this one was worth reading. “Storm Front” by Jim Butcher. So, when I was at the library taking back the previous books, I was poking around. I often look at the Jim Butcher Dresden Files books because I’ve heard so many good things about them, but I want to start with book 1, so I’ve never taken one out. I looked in the paperback FSF section, then the hard cover FSF, then the general stacks... and they always have some random middle books, but never the first. So, I’d given up. I was over in the general paperback section looking for Jane Austen (they only had Mansfield Park, but I wanted Persuasion or Sense and Sensibility) and I found this! It reminded me of Sandman Slim, though of course this came first. It came out in 2000, and it’s weird how strange that feels – the characters don’t have cell...

The challenge : a hundred-word story about bullies, and only the weekend to write it. They're all posted over on terribleminds.com, but to be complete about things, I've put it here too. “You should make something for the bake sale,” Janelle said. “It’s a good cause.” Their daughters were on the soon to be torn down playscape. It looked safe enough to Clarissa. “I’m not much of a baker,” she said. Money was a little tight this week. “Heather looks grubby today,” Janelle said. “Didn’t Children’s Aid visit you once?” “When her father was still around,” Clarissa said. Things were better now. “Maybe I can make some squares.” There might be brownie ingredients in the cupboard? Underneath the playscape Heather threw a handful of sand. Caitlin ran, bawling, to her mother.

This challenge was different -- Chuck Wendig is doing a worldbuilding exercise. The entries are all in the comments, but I thought for completism, I'd post mine here, too. The world was once terraformed. Aliens had seeded it With algae spores. These spores grew on all the wet things, killed some of them, and converted others. It was a very painful process. Creatures walked around, bodies half-covered in algae, going mad from pain. The algae spores are a modified version of filamentous green algae, which does conjugal reproduction (trading DNA with other species). The algae takes the sulfur out of the SO2 atmosphere, leaving the free oxygen that the original lifeforms are allergic to. The algae is still out there. Occasionally there’s an outbreak. Non-natives are particularly vulnerable.

Another Chuck Wendig challenge; the rules are here . I'd written this story to see if I could do something small in the world of my urban fantasy, without it having all that annoying stuff I see in some short story collections that contain those. I had to cut it considerably to fit it in the space. It would be neat to put this aside and then try editing it "straight", and see how it comes out. I had not realized my vampires were so racist. Mary Alice went out to give Sephora a hug. “Thank god you’re here. Avril is the dumbest thing ever.” “I know, honey,” said Sephora. Without a mirror she freshened her black eyeliner and cranberry lip gloss. Sephora would have flown commercial from Iceland now that Candelmas was past. She dragged a huge trunk behind her through PATH, Toronto's 10 KM of underground walkway and mall. “I can’t believe she’s going to be second,” Unlike the other vampires, Mary Alice was small and had a tiny voice to go with her pixie-sized body. “If Goat...

The challenge is here . Go there! Read the other stories! Mine is about a plant my mother is growing. Kitchens in the Cookie Factory Lofts were small, so Kimberley didn't have to walk far to show Mitch the ginger they had left in the cupboard. "Look at it," Kimberley said. "I wonder if you can eat the shoots." Four branches, hard like bamboo, grew off the corners of the wizened 3-inch root. "It's not a burger," Mitch said. He was working from home on the dining room table. The loft didn't really have an office. "Maybe I'll plant it," said Kimberley. She used ground ginger instead, and dinner was sub-standard that evening. Mitch knew enough not to say anything. After dinner, Kimberley took a flowerpot off the windowsill, and threw out the dead poinsettia it had held. She dug a hole and nestled the ginger root in with coffee grounds and potato peels. She watered the whole mess and set it beside the spindly avocados and garlic scapes...