Robynettely

“The Lies of Locke Lamora” by Scott Lynch . I’d heard so many good things, I was curious. I read it on my kindle, which was kind of an amusing experience because it doesn’t for some reason tell the page count or page number correctly. When I was about 60% done (it does update that stat, but seems to think the book is 8000 pages long) I looked on Amazon to find out how long it really was. Hmmm... 736 pages? It didn’t feel like that. I liked the way it switched between childhood and adulthood in sections, though sometimes the worldbuilding seemed excessive. One thing that annoyed me was I felt like I was being strung along with the love interest character, who never appears in any scene, even the flashbacks. “Percy Jackson 1: The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan. The voice got on my nerves. We were chatting about it in the restaurant, and the trainee server heard us and said, “Oh, I read the whole series. Way better than the movies.” I asked why she’d read them, and she said sh...

Last night I wrote a little story from a pile of notes I’d accumulated over a couple of weeks. It took about two hours, which is actually pretty slow, considering that it’s 949 words long. The weird thing is, I feel guilty for liking the little thing. Oh, it’s not perfect. I have to fix the bit in the middle where I omitted to say what was going on, and there’s a lot of stuff at the top that could be trimmed down because while it sets the tone, it doesn’t necessarily progress the story or draw people in. I started copying and pasting the frame so I have to update that now. And I rewrote the ending on scrap paper in bed at 2am so I could fall asleep. Also, the structure has a conceit that might make the story only entertaining to me. I wonder if that’s why I like it – because I suspect I’m the only one that will get the joke. UPDATED 22/10/2012:  Until I read the thing. And then I hate it like everything else. My voice annoys me. 

So I was at my Chinese Poles class yesterday, and there's this girl who can do all the moves. Our instructor asks her, what else do you do? How do you work out? Because you're really strong. And she says oh, you know, sweep, sweep, mop, mop, shine on, shine off.  Maybe being a house cleaner is a better job for a would-be novelist than this tech writing thing.  Sigh.

First Draft “Fairfax”. Around 120K, this had better end soon.  One of my colleagues was somewhat worked up because it was performance review season and she’d read an article about how Steve Jobs pushed employees to take it to the next level and get out of their comfort zone. In the day job, no one does that for us. Our boss is part-time and big on “exception management” where if no one is complaining about us then everything must be fine. I’m of the mind that it’s not exactly our boss’s job to push us to write better manuals, and anyway, we all three have different ideas of how that should be. One of us (not me!) wants more time to copy edit things. The other wants... I don’t know what, if I could provide it I would, I think someone to point out structure problems and missing content. I think I want a better immersion in the products that we write about. A lot of my manuals describe what to do, but not why. No one is really going to do that, and we don’t have time t...

“Matadora”by Steve Perry. Not the Journey one. Found this at a flea market; it’s the Steve Perry book Ed’s always looking for, so for $2 I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Ed had suggested Steve Perry because of the way I talked about Seventh Sigma last month – the way martial arts were described to a non-fighting audience. “AThousand Words for Stranger” by Julie Czerneda. She led a workshop at Ad Astra in April, and it was good. It’s the reason I sent out the zombie thing, which was an important thing for me. So when I found this at the (same) flea market, of course I picked it up. I was strangely reluctant to read it. Perhaps I don’t read as much science fiction as I like to think I do, and sometimes the effort required (you have to suspend a different kind of disbelief reading SF and fantasy than, say, Urban Fantasy, which is probably the easiest. Or YA of any sort. Eventually it moved to the top of the pile. I found the first parts disorienting, but then I suppose tha...