Rachel Hartman's Blog, page 41

Hello, darlings!

The sequel to "Wrestling the Knee Jerk" is turning out to be kind of long, as the wise among us probably predicted. It looks like I won't get it up until tomorrow or Wednesday, since I got behind on NaNo over the weekend and need to catch up.

It's funny: over at the NaNo site they were all like, "It's the weekend! Time to really start chugging ahead!" Except that no, the weekend is harder for me. I have this family, see, and I like to spend time with them.

I have a small amount of news. I've...

Wrestling the knee jerk

The phrase "knee-jerk reaction" refers to your patellar reflex, the one where a doctor smacks you on the knee with a hammer and your leg jumps. You can't control it; it's hard-wired right into your body. An electrical impulse travels to your spinal cord, bypasses your brain entirely, and comes back to your leg with a command: jump!

Let me just reiterate part of that: it bypasses your brain entirely. It doesn't matter how badly you don't want your leg to jerk, it's gonna jerk.

Sometimes we...

Today's reading

Have you ever found yourself suddenly noticing articles on a topic you were thinking about anyway, as though the internet had noticed your preoccupation and started coughing them up into your lap? Er, nice image there – you can see why I'm a writer. Anyway, it just so happened that yesterday I stumbled upon an article about racism, sexism, and imperialism in Jay Lake's novel, Green (apropos of nothing: I keep wanting to say "Greg Lake", because apparently prog rock pervades my entire being).

T...

First thoughts on NaNoWriMo

1) 1,666 words is actually not that bad, in terms of how much time it takes. For some reason, I thought it was going to take me five hours or something. I guess I've become a fairly speedy typist in my old age which, considering how much I do it, is probably a super obvious thing to observe. But I had 1000 words done before breakfast, and I squeezed the rest in here and there as I could (my son has no school today; this will only get easier… until the weekend).

2) This is definitely going to h...

Closer to the Heart

(I was going to spend this afternoon working hard, but my puppy hurt herself and it kinda shook me up! I hope writing this will settle me and help me concentrate again. At least I had a good early morning session, before Ms. Pup decided to get too rambunctious!)

"Closer to the Heart" is arguably Rush's most famous song. It's short, it's melodic, it doesn't feature an excess of shrieking or synthesizer or time signature changes or science fiction references. I think it's the first song of...

Woo-hoo!

30K words of sequel written!

I actually passed this milestone already, before I scrapped 25 pages last Thursday, but I just want to put this down in writing for my own reference, to remind myself when I get bummed out: I scrapped 25, and I've already written back 20.

It goes so much faster when I'm going the right direction.

In related news: I've put my name in the NaNoWriMo ring! If you're doing NaNo this year, and want to be my buddy, I'm "amyunbounded" (I know, sad Amy fans, but the name is n...

Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[Thar be spoilers here, matey! And I hate those fiddly spoiler tags, so I'm just wantonly spoiling everything left and right. This is your only warning.]

I need to start this review with a caveat: I am a weirdo.

Okay! Whew! Good to have that off my chest! But seriously, I want to acknowledge fully and honestly that most of my issues with this book are probably MY idiosyncratic issues, and may not apply to anyone else...

More ways writing is like fighting. Also: like igniting.

So today I flushed about 25 pages.

It's not like I didn't see this coming (see previous post), but I had some merry notion it was just the one scene and that I could leave it and Captain Editorpants would make me cut it later. But no, I realized last night that I was hating the whole book pretty hard and I needed to sort out why because I could no longer push forward.

I generally find that when I've been heading the wrong direction, it's like wading deeper and deeper into quicksand, or a...

Scaffolding

Good writing today, although I feel virtually certain this scene will not make the final cut. There's not much action besides drinking lemonade and taking a bath; there's a certain amount of playing with themes, but I suspect even this will turn out to be an understudy for better handling of the same themes later.

Why write it, then, if I already know that? Well, it's because I need to understand what happens in this scene – in an irritating amount of detail – before I can write other, better ...

You make the call

Dwarf, or Klingon?.

I glimpsed the photo elsewhere out of context first, and I honestly thought it was Gowron.

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