Robynettely

Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure by Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith . This was a gift. So, mine is: “Still trying to monetize my daydreams.” What’s yours? “PercyJackson 5: The Last Olympian” by Rick Riordan. Now I can stop. Phew. The server at our Saturday restaurant had been bugging me to finish. “Conrad’sFate” by Diana Wynne Jones. She is just such a good writer. “TheLast Ringbearer” by Kirill Eskov. I don’t know why I started this, since I had two things going already. This is basically a fanfic, not worth reading unless you know the Lord of the Rings pretty well. In true fanfic tradition, the   dialog was occasionally painful. Every time Faramir called Eowen “baby” I just cringed, and I just can’t imagine Gandalf calling Saruman an asshole.   It was originally written in Russian, and there are some problems with the verb tenses – past perfect seems to have turned to present tense. This made some of the t...

At the climbing gym yesterday, I climbed a short 5.8 for a warmup, then went over to a short 5.10- I had failed on the last time we were there, thinking it would be good to try while I was fresh (I might have been fresh the last time I tried it, too, actually). It took a lot of flailing and fighting and tugging, but I did it! My first 5.10-! And then Ed climbed something, and then I tried a longer 5.9 (while I was still fresh) that was rather easy in comparison. There were hand and footholds everywhere! then Ed climbed the 5.9, which was really awesome because he hurt his elbow a few weeks ago and he's been trying to build himself back up to climbing things that require arms. And then I tried a 5.9 on the stalactite, which is the highest part of the gym. There was a staff guy belaying kids the next spot over, and when I finished that 5.9, he said yeah, he thought that was actually harder than the 5.10- on the other side of the stalactite. So I tried that too. And he was right, ...

One of last month's short stories had some tense and POV problems. I might have intended to do it as first-person, but I started in third for some inexplicable reason, so there are spots in the first draft where I'd write something on scrap paper and integrate it later, and it wouldn't match. Anyway, that was an obvious place to start the second draft, cleaning up the tense and POV. So I picked one. Changing the verb in every sentence and a noun in about half gets boring really fast, so I resorted to search-and-replace. "Jeremy said" and "said Jeremy" became "I say", which is reasonable. Then every other instance of "said". Then every instance of "was" became "is", but this was a problem because I apparently overused the word "wash" in this story, about 50 times or so it seems. I should have chosen "was " (with a space after it) to "is " I think. "They" became "we...

“Fragile Things” by Neil Gaiman. I’d read some of these before, so the entire thing didn’t take long to read. I realized about 2/3 of the way through that as much as I love NG books, I would never have written any of these stories. The things I obsess about are so different! I read this while also editing a too-long short story, and got an infusion of how to write cleaner, I think. “Changeless” by Gail Carriger. TNH had tweeted a link to a Jane Eyre/Firefly fanfic mash-up as part of (I guess) a discussion about how much exposition readers really require (less than you think). And I had gotten this book out of the library because I had to get out something, since I had to renew my library card. It’s book 2 of a series, and I haven’t read book 1 (and it wasn’t in at the branch, though 3&4 also were). So it was neat to read and rely, for a change, on that exposition that you have to wade through when you start a second book and you already know what’s going on. Either it wa...

First Draft “Don’t Choose Astronaut”. Short story. My IM status was the title of this story for a few days, and one of my TW peers asked me what it meant, so I explained, and he told me he chose demolition expert, which was good because he immediately understood what I meant when I explained the story. So I’m on the right track! This story came out of a conversation with the boy at the restaurant in maybe October.  “Useful Things to Know”. So I didn’t have anything planned but I was thinking about memory, so I started this with a character from St. Praxis. And then on about page 3 it tied in with a theme from “The Water Leopard” and started being its own story, and quite neat, I think.  Editing   “XTree”. (short story) This is the story I realized I hadn’t opened since March of last year and felt bad about (see a previous post). Other than being too long and flabby, it seemed good on a re-read, so I tightened it up over two drafts and sent it away. Probab...

When I searched, there were six instances in the same story. And that was after I'd already taken a couple out.

(No one else on the planet, probably, remembers that song by the Hothouse Flowers) One of my favorite blogs right now is Debra Doyle's . The posts are short and to the point. So last night I was working on the story I work on every night, and I read the post at midnight, and searched my document for Very, and Somewhat, and Rather. Nothing! And Seems... x12, in 5000 words.The other ones, also nothing. And then I was looking for something else, and I searched for "In the morning" in order to put myself on the right page. That phrase appeared four times. Clearly I need to learn how to manage the passage of time. But at least I'm good at knitting.

Here’s something I’m appalled by. As you don’t know because I haven’t mentioned it, my New Year’s resolution is to get 50 rejections on worthy stories honorably sent out. So last night I pulled out a short story that I had a note on that said “tighten the language and send away.” I went through the printout especially looking for some of my tics, like “maybe” and “there were”, looked at the beginning a bit, thought about how to connect it better to the end. And then I went to the computer and pulled up the folder for this story.  The most recent draft was dated March 2, 2012.  I checked all my USB drives. I compared the files. Indeed, that was the last time I worked on this story, ten months ago to the day.  I know I’ve been busy. I did NaNoWriMo. I did two drafts of the zombie novel. I finished the bucklepunk thing. But still! It’s an almost-finished story that I just left in a pile, meaning to get back to it in a day or two, for ten months!  Thi...