Robynettely

“Flex” by Ferrett Steinmetz. He was in my Viable Paradise class, so how could I not read this? The boy saw it and said the cover looked cool. I read the scene where Valentine and Aliyah made up while I was sitting in the coffee store, and tears ran down my face, so way to go Ferrett. So proud to know him!  “The Darkest Part of the Forest” by Holly Black . The boy has an unexpected hatred for the Spiderwick Chronicles that he’s never explained. So this book didn’t attract him at all. Me, on the other hand… I couldn’t put it down. I especially loved how Hazel and Ben had the shadow of their parents’ neglect hanging over them, which got fixed about when they didn’t need their parents anymore. I also loved Ben and Hazel’s relationship so much.  “The Maltese Falcon” by Dashiell Hammett. Last week I read a quote from William Gibson that referred to DH and plot, and it seemed worth reading something. This book was published in 1929! It held up just fine, seemed like rea...

First Draft   “A surprising Number of Crows”. Short story. “Food Insecurity”. So, I had finished this kinda crap short story last month, and then the boy told me a strange tale out of his own life, and I realized that was the plot of this story, so when the previous-mentioned was done, I went back and restarted this. It’s a fun exercise because I have the character and setting development largely done separately, so I sat down trying to just write the plot, which I can merge with the other stuff later in a fantastic edit-straganza. Editing “Wind/Water/Salt ”. Finished that spreadsheet with all the chapter data.   “Food Insecurity”. Started typing but never got around to taking apart the crap part. “Lucky Kate”. I came across a market with a deadline that looked good for this, and I thought it wasn’t in that bad a shape, so I pulled out the folder. And I must say, my process is not nearly as awesome as I thought it was. The last time I looked at ...

We stayed at the Icelandair Natura, which was apparently the best possible choice. Like any normal people do, we flew into Keflavik airport and got a bus to the hotel. Unbeknownst to me, the Natura is right next to Reykjavik airport. Like right beside it. Every time Ed went out for a smoke he got to look at whatever had flown in. Reykjavik airport is a smaller airport that nevertheless had smaller corporate jets and the like coming in all the time. Over the course of the week we saw a MU2, a Beechcraft Starship (he told me he thought they were all recalled), and a turboprop DC3. This plane was parked there the whole time, harassing me: (you can't actually see the scantily-clad woman painted on near the front there, can you?)  There was a shrine to Bobby Fisher, and the boy was really into playing chess at the time (that seems to have died off this week, but will probably ramp up again next week, my theory is), so that was a hit, though he wasn’t really impres...

One of my (former) colleagues was being forced to come to Toronto, and she said whenever she goes to a place, she likes to do a couple of things: Go to a yoga class Visit an art museum There was an article in 99U about a woman who goes to the public pool everywhere she goes.  (Actually that was a link to this, I just discovered.) Oh, we did that, too, I just realized:   This was an outdoor geothermal heated pool (like a bathtub that didn't get cold) at the beach, a short walk from our hotel. Here's another angle of it.    You could sit in the pool and get all cozy warm (the day we went in it was 12 degrees celcius and drizzling) and then run down to the actual ocean, which was crazy cold. It was Iceland. How could we miss that? But I think my thing I do on every trip might be a visit to the graveyard. Is that too goth? It was so crazy green. There were a bunch of commonwealth graves from WWII.  This was just past the...

They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and I generally have my phone, though anyone who knows me generally knows I’m not that great about taking it out. Usually it’s packed two layers deep in my messenger bag. Which explains maybe why I don’t have pictures from the start of any activity. Though once I’ve started taking photos, I’m pretty good. We went to Iceland. On my calendar, which I use for planning and budgeting and tracking bill payments and pretty much everything else, I had written a short list of the things I wanted to do: Volcano elevator Ponies Hot springs Glacier Elves Mid-Atlantic rift And then I was talking up my pending vacation, and one of my colleagues turned out to have gone to Iceland numerous times, partly for work but also because his grandmother was from there. He told me he was chatting about this to an Icelandic colleague, who said “who?” My coworker listed off a name or two, and the local said “wait a m...

Editing “Wind/Water/Salt ”. Typed up all that extra stuff I wrote. Did some tidying of word choices (I have a list of words to look for, like “started” and “Just” and “very” that I need to rethink every time I use them) and went through notes to find things that I could clean up before printing another draft. For example, I did the changes to the first page from the workshop back in April. And then I started the spreadsheet. The Spreadsheet doesn’t seem like writing or editing, and writing and editing are what progress my novel, right? So maybe that’s why I avoided doing it properly for so long. But at some point, you have to stop using the back of an envelope to list all 44 chapters, their POV, and a brief description, right? So I made an excel doc. The headings so far: ·          Chapter # ·          Description ·          POV (there are three to ch...