Robynettely

1st draft Continued Season 11 Writing Excuses exercises. This month included writing the same story twice, which was interesting, and an outline that I really like.   Editing “Labyrinth Moon”. Oh my god the “he said” “you said” !!! I can’t believe I almost thought this was done back in June. “Volcano”. Gender-swapped the main characters, which gave me a chance to totally refresh my interest in the story, if nothing else.   OWW seems to be interfering with my editing time. I suspected this would happen... Connecting Critted 7 Got back 4 Circulating 1 Knitting Ann Boleyn (1998).  Still on that sleeve, last month I had one pattern rep done. This month I did nothing. I think one of the rules I need to make is I have to finish both sleeves of this before I buy more yarn.   Mont St. Martin gift socks. I’d done the cuffs in September. Finished. Due to the current yarn diet, these are made from yarn I had around the house, so I’m a l...

“The King of Attolia” by Megan Whalen Turner. Since I was on a bit of a roll, I might as well continue, right? I almost stayed up all night to read the second half, and then the next morning caught myself accidentally reading ten pages the next morning before work. These books do so much right – characters, plot (so much plot!), all the scenes pulling their weight. There are scenes full of banter, but it all serves character and plot! “A Conspiracy of Kings” by Megan Whalen Turner. This was the whole point of the previous three, so here we are. There wasn’t enough Eugenides, in my opinion. “Mother London” by Michael Moorcock. I don’t think I’d ever read a book by him before, so I picked one at random. This might not have been the best place to start. The story travels back and forth in time following three people who share a peculiar psychic ability that they don’t really control. It’s about how London was affected by the aftermath of WWII, with the displacement that hap...

1st draft Continued Season 11 Writing Excuses exercises. “The ex-magician’s apprentice”. 4000-word short story, finally done. Then I got to turn to editing Volcano again, and then a couple more short things. It’s neat to be trying to write really short things as exercises. I wish I’d started doing this a while ago.   Editing “Labyrinth Moon”. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to commit to this as done, but it must be close. “The Cicatrix Diary”. Ignored. “Volcano”. Started the month with 800 words to remove to get it under 5000 (which was my goal). Used it in some of the month’s exercises.  “Imp Face”. Trimmed the middle and improved the ending. “Top of the Stairs”. Typed and did one editing pass, then put on the shop… I’m trying a different thing here where rather than editing it to death myself I let other people (hopefully) provide suggestions on that. Connecting Went to a friend’s reading (actually missed my friend reading due to b...

Sometimes I’m reading an article about Cultural Appropriation or something (e.g., http://www.salon.com/2016/09/26/writers-imagination-vs-cultural-appropriation-in-search-of-common-ground/ ) and I think about Canada and Canadian culture. I know people who won’t read Canadian books just on principle (I tried to force a Guy Gavriel Kay book on someone once, and after about a year he conceded, and told me afterward he wished I hadn’t told him GGK was Canadian because he would have read it sooner). We consider Canadian movies to be low-budget crap. Orphan Black is so good, we don’t even consider it Canadian. I once saw George Stromboulopolis say “Americans see someone famous and say someday I’m going to be that guy. Canadians see someone famous, and they say Someday I’m going to   bring him down.” Paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. And now we have a serial killer going around Hollywood killing people in Canadian ex-pats’ houses. Well, in my imagination, anyway. Two is a tre...

1st draft Continued Season 11 Writing Excuses exercises. This month I got to write a couple of short stories for these. “The Stairs Going Up”. 2500-word short story, done. “The ex-magician’s apprentice”. 4000-word short story, not quite done.   Editing “Labyrinth Moon”. My crazy plan with the Online Writing Workshop is to finish stories, send them out and get them their rejections (if that’s what they garner…) and then put them on OWW in order to get critical feedback because I get rather a lot of the form rejections. There are only two stories in my backlog that meet the requirements, so this month my goal was to finish a couple of things and get them circulating so they can accrue those rejections. And here we are, sigh. I got to the point where I couldn’t look at it anymore and set it aside. Maybe next month? “The Cicatrix Diary”. Ignored. “Volcano”. The problem was the first scene was 3x as long as it needed to be. It’s shorter and better now. The...