author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

It started out in Nebraska, for one thing. I was riding the California Zephyr from Chicago to Denver, and it crossed the state line sometime around 5:00 AM or so. I'm not sure if I was awake for that. I know I woke up several times through the night to see the moon, just past full, shining in on me. Then the sun was rising and my seatmate said, "It was 6:15 a moment ago; now it's 5:30." "Oh," I said, rubbing my eyes, "we must have crossed into Colorado."

I put on my shoes, went downstairs to replace my morning breath with minty toothpaste breath, and went back one car in search of means to replace that with coffee breath. The lounge car had just opened for service and the line stretched up the stairs and halfway through the sightseer deck, so I put off coffee 'til later. Open up laptop and write story now.

I was on tap for story critique for my twice-monthly Wednesday group. It would have met tomorrow, but since not enough RSVPs were received it got canceled. But I didn't know that would happen, so I was slightly panicking. I wanted to email that story the moment I got home. I didn't have much time.

That's the thing with new stories. I can work them over in my head as much as I'd like, but they don't really come out until they come out. Of course, the sooner I start writing the first scene, the sooner I'll know how the second scene goes, and so forth, but I swear I wrote and rewrote the first scene several times and had no clue. Really, the story wasn't actually there to be written the way it ought to be written until I realized that the beginning catalyst and the climax mechanism, if related, would make each other less contrived and the story more efficient. And that didn't happen until sometime Thursday.

Would it have happened sooner if I'd spent more time thinking about it sooner? I don't know. The person I was Thursday is not identical to the person I was Wednesday, or the week before. Maybe the person I was the week before couldn't have figured out what the person I was Friday afternoon on the train needed to know to start churning out scene after scene at last.

Because that's mainly what I did Friday on the train. I also knitted a good deal of sock, read the first chapter of Orphans of Chaos (a free Tor.com download for the site's registered beta users from a couple years ago), and wrote up an article for Demand Studios using web pages I'd Scrapbooked earlier for research. But mainly I wrote the story's first real draft.

Writing a story draft when I only have some 24 hours to do it in is panic-inducing. Every scene I get done, I can't help but think how many more scenes I have to go; and every scene I've written seems to require that the story be at least one scene longer than I'd originally planned. I kept checking my word count and despairing at the realization that it was already 2500 words, already 4000 words.

This, unfortunately, makes for a first draft whose pace gets more and more rushed as the story goes on. But I'm not allowed to fix it just yet. I already mailed it out for critique. It really bugs me when someone responds to comments on his or her story with "Oh, don't worry about that, I've fixed that since, it's totally different now." Might as well just add "Those hours you spent in good faith critiquing my story? Totally wasted. Sorry 'bout that!" I don't know if that bugs other people as much as it bugs me, but I'm not going to do that to anyone else. So I'm not allowed to reread or edit this story until after June 8, which is when my critique was rescheduled for.

So the train arrived and I got home thanks to my terribly sick husband, who peeled himself out of bed long enough to drive down to the Table Mesa Park 'n Ride where the regional bus dropped me off. He went back to bed with my profuse thanks. And I hit the desk to finish writing this dang story.

And I emailed it off.

And promptly regretted it.

It's really pathetic how all it takes to make me insecure about my writing is for me to put it in front of other peoples' eyes. I just have to remind myself that this is how I felt after emailing an early draft of "First Breath," too -- and you know how well that went. (Really well. The anthology it's in will be on bookstore shelves come September 13. I have the PDF of the proof copy right here on my personal hard drive. With a table of contents with my name in them. And Ellen Datlow reports that the galleys are going to Book Expo with her for autograph events scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday. I didn't know galleys went to autographing events. People will see them! People in public! Can I stop hyperventilating now?) Which is not to say this new story is going to be all that and a bag of chips, of course, but it does help remind me that my insecurity isn't an accurate reflection of reality.

So. Story draft done and emailed out. After which, I and five friends drove down to NoNo's Cafe and ate rather a lot of crawfish. Then there were cats to feed, ice cream to purchase, and several episodes of Doctor Who to watch. Also the new My Little Pony cartoons, which, in the capable hands of Lauren Faust (Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Powerpuff Girls), are rather more fun than Hasbro's first go-round.

Conveniently, the world did not go all to pieces at 6:00 PM, so there was nothing stopping us watching cartoons until we were falling-down sleepy.

And that's what I did Sunday.

But oh hey wait not done yet! So. I have this really good friend from high school, right, he actually reads my blog and stuff, he says to me over lunch in Metairie last week, "So when do we get to see more chapters?" And he's right -- I should be posting excerpts more often. So here's the first few paragraphs of my brand new short story draft, which is provisionally titled "The Interfaith Intercessional Fellowship Meets Saturdays at Seven," and is very likely still full of The Suck but hey, it's down in writing now. Ya gotta start somewhere.

Janice Claire joined the cult because, having nothing else to do with her Saturday night, she had no good way to tell Madeline no.

Not that she hadn't tried. "But I don't really believe in prayer," she'd said. "I mean, I hope like anything for the best, but -- I'm not very religious," she finished uncomfortably.

"Oh, that's OK. A lot of people in the group don't pray." Not that Madeline had said please come join our cult. What she'd actually suggested was that Janice Claire accompany her to her prayer group. "It's OK to just hope. Just knowing you're there -- you've given me so much support already, I don't know what I'd do without you."

Not for the first time Janice Claire regretted having opened her mouth. "So much support" had in fact consisted of her mumbling something sympathetic early last week when Madeline had checked her daughter into room 301, bed B. It seemed to be the thing to do. The twelve-year-old had been in and out of consciousness since then, mostly out. No diagnosis had yet surfaced. Janice Claire hadn't been the only one in the records department to express sympathies, but Madeline responded with such an urgently grateful look that she knew it was Uncle Morris's barbecue ribs all over again. Really, she'd known better. Talking to people only got her in trouble. That was precisely why Janice Claire preferred to spend her Saturday evenings in bed with a book.

Ta-da! And that excerpt includes the correction of a major typo that made it out to everyone in the group on Saturday. Dammit. Well. HEY GROUP! Just sort of mentally insert Madeline's name in the sentence that doesn't parse. Where it goes "but responded with," like that. (Sheesh.) Also, it occurs to me that I meant to rename the uncle at some point because naming antagonists after actual real family members sort of sends the wrong message. (I'm sorry! It was automatic! I was in Don't Think Just Write mode! I was visualizing the usual Weilbaecher Family Thanksgiving Dinner, and the name of the annual host of the festivities just dropped in there along with the floor plan of his kitchen! I didn't mean nothing by it! I also didn't mean anything by it!)

And I'm going to stop thinking about this now, OK?

The earth shifted upon its axis that day.
I did not know. I could not tell.
The news was slow to reach my ears that day.

You could say, "four inches," measure it in the way
That is custom in my country, or "ten centimetres" if not.
The earth shifted upon its axis that day.

Measurements are meaningless and soon forgot.
What can the mere motion of tectonic plates accomplish
That the loosing of so many souls cannot?

And not just in the conventional 50K sense. But I have finally gotten to a point of completion with this draft.

Wellll... OK. I haven't yet written the denoument. But I'm forgiving myself that for now, mainly because I'm still unsure of its shape. Its rough shape is clear, but not the details. I need to think on it a bit more.

That aside, I've written each of the three major layers of conflict in which the book culminates. There's the Earth conflict, involving what the Earth antagonists were after and how they are finally stopped; I'm not entirely satisfied with it. I didn't really give it the development it needs. But it's there enough for now, hinted at and then resolving in a very large house fire. Then there's the Uberreality conflict, in which Chender's scheming comes to light and must be stopped, and is stopped. Even that rings a little shallow, but this too I'm going to throw at the rewrite. If a first draft is an act of discovery, a first revision is about implementing all the things I discovered on my way to the end of the first draft.

Then, finally, there's the... spiritual conflict, I guess. To use the classic literary terms I learned in high school, if the first two layers of conflict are Man versus Man, the final is Man versus Self. Well, Woman versus self, really; Jet may in fact be genderless, but I've been writing her as a woman this whole book long.

(Huh. How appropos. Tangent! I'd only today been reading about the distressing tendency in Hollywood to take genderless characters, for instance most of the cast of Monsters Inc., and give them male names and voice casting; the "default person" is male. I took a genderless character and gave it a female presentation instead. I was mainly rejecting male-as-default-action-adventure-character, and het-as-default-romance; I ended up subverting male-as-default-person while I was at it. Tangent ends!)

Anyway, I'm really not sure of the outcome of Jet's Woman versus Self conflict. Except roughly. I can see it as I used to see things when I was near-sighted and I wasn't wearing my glasses: the shape is discernible but the details are blurry.

And that's pretty much all I'm going to say. I want to publish this thing in the near future; someday, this will be a book you can purchase (or download) and read. I wouldn't like to spoil the ending.

At least, no more than excerpts to this point already have.

With a harsh, involuntary laugh, I salute Chender with my left fist, a motion that pretends to punch a hole in the ceiling. Then I sit up, toss the five stones into my mouth like so many aspirin tablets, and I simply swallow them. As I suspected, no sudden transfiguration happens, no mystical effect. They drop heavily into my stomach and sit there, undigestible. I hope they receive a damage from their new location. Whatever power Chender expected the gems held, he was wrong.

Then I lay back down, eyes still open, and allow my human body to be human once more. Human sensation returns, animal need. The lungs breathe because they must, and thick black smoke rushes in. The skin sweats and reddens and finally chars as human skin does when engulfed in flame. It's like nothing I've ever felt before. Strange, that in all my assignments I've never exited the dream by fire. It's worth doing. Everything is worth doing, once. Living, loving, dying-- some things are worth doing more than once.

The pain is briefer than I had feared. It sharpens and contracts into a singularity of pure agony wherein nothing exists but itself. I am engulfed and snuffed by its utter self-absorbed existence. Then, abruptly, it drops to nothing. Maybe my nerve endings have all been destroyed, and I am incapable of feeling more pain. Or maybe I'm simply succumbing to smoke inhalation and leaving the body behind. For whatever reason, the pain vanishes and leaves a blank behind it, inner darkness foglike swallowing the smoke. There I find a point of clarity that I mistake for waking. I allow myself to rush toward it, a being without a body going home at last.

But something interrupts me on my way there. The darkness flashes to lapis blue and the motion of my being halts in the center of that sky. The stones relinquish their power, or their message. A familiar presence wraps me round and shares with me an intimate space of awareness.

So familiar-- so much like the being I wove my being with while my human disguise sat grieving on a motel floor. But something about her is different, strange. Unearthly. What a strange word to think; am I not un-Earthly myself? Unexpected in a way that creeps over me in shades of awe and growing wonder. I venture a thought forth: Lia?

Meantime, through December, I mean to hit the queue of stories awaiting revision. And I hope to keep up this daily pace of fiction and blogging. At the very least, I'd like to maintain a five-day work week, just as I've intended all year. The beautiful thing about NaNoWriMo is, it normalizes dailiness. Let's see how long I can continue at a comparable pace through December and into 2011.

Lastly, I should mention that these musings are coming to you live from the lobby of Boulder's St. Julien Hotel. I'm here with seven other local Wrimos, a couple of them already sporting happy purple WINNER! bars on their profiles when they arrived. The rest of us sort of cascaded at a rate of one per half hour or so. It's really neat, attending the Final Push Write-in and hearing "Fifty thousand and one! Yes!" and "OK, word count verified! I'm a winner!" followed by eruptions of applause. It's also really neat to cross that finish line in such circumstances oneself. And yes, I did cross 50k yesterday-- but I didn't get my word count verified, didn't get my word count bar to turn purple, didn't get to watch the congratulatory video from NaNoWriMo Headquarters or download my web badges and certificate, until I was here with fellow Wrimos working hard into the evening. It's a good place to be.

I did indeed reach 50K.

Now, NaNoWriMo.org does not believe me, and indicates that I have used roughly 300 em-dashes in my manuscript thus far which have fooled its word count validator into believing two words to be one. But this does not worry me. I have one day left, that day having 2 write-ins in it, and I have two or perhaps three scenes yet to write before I can consider this draft ended. I expect it'll be another 1500 words or so. That should take care of the NaNoWriMo.org/yWriter discrepancy.

Yesterday's plot hole? I meant to fix it going forward. Not go back and edit; just, whenever referring back to the previously written scenes, pretend like they had gotten the appropriate amounts of Plot Plaster smeared on. Then what did I do? I took the plot hole and ran with it. I suppose the Muse did not approve of the quality of the Plot Plaster I had on hand, and sent me shopping for a superior brand. It's not evident from this excerpt. You'll just have to take my word for it that not only are the men Jet raised from the dead still walking around, but apparently she also can cause other profound changes that make the next conflict after this one seem increasingly artificial.

I think I'm onto something though. I'm hoping it'll solidify in my head while I sleep tonight.

You're disarranged. Deranged. You're mad. You think you can swallow a pill in the dream and wake up as a Commander of Adjustments? It's not I who am in danger of mistaking dreams for reality; it's you. My thoughts only make him chuckle. In humans, laughter is an effect of interrupted breath. In Chender it comes of his being, the thoughts that are his body; they are skipping like one of Lia's scratched CDs. What I am hearing is the sound of Chender making love with his own obsessions. The realization horrifies me. It's not possible. And even if it were, it would not be allowed. Regardless, I swear you will not be allowed the attempt.

But my words are mere helpless babble for all the effect they have on Chender, who continues chuckling at me. The skipping, looping, hiccuping thought shifts to new words: who could who could poss possibly possibly stop me?

Without thought, without a plan, I attack him. It is not so much in answer to his question as to make his insane giggling stop. I have the notion that, were I to listen to his madness long enough, I would be sucked into it, wrapped up and bound up and wound into this weird psychosis. So I attack.

This is all really geeky and possibly esoteric. It's very, very cool, however.

I managed to use up almost the entirety of today's write-in time doing administrative stuff. It's a bit of a danger of being a municipal liaison: there are events to organize, emails to send, forum posts to submit, and on busy days the only time to get it done is at a write-in. I had about 20 minutes left when all that was done... and discovered I didn't know what to write in the next scene.

I know what happens: a series of scenes in which Jet shows up to foil every action Chender attempts to take on Earth. But I don't know what actions those are. What kinds of Adjustments does a nonphysical being attempting to force his way up the hierarchy make on Earth?

So I spent those 20 minutes babbling to myself in the scene description box.

And then today continued the way it did, all in a happy nonstop of activity, until finally 11:20 PM came around. I know it was 11:20, because that's when I checked the time, regretfully realized I must tear myself away from a fascinating conversation, retreated to my room, and opened up the laptop.

I still didn't know what Chender was up to. But yesterday I had Jet waking up in Lia's apartment. I suppose he was looking for the macguffin lapis lazuli stones.

When you don't have a lot of time, you use the time you've got. I used about 20 minutes to jot down 400 words. What follows are most of them.

I hear a sound in the kitchen, and my heart beats faster even though I know it can't be Lia. Habitually, I reach under the mattress. The pistol is there, already loaded and waiting. I move silently from bed to floor to open the door, to slip out the hallway.

Chender is rummaging through kitchen drawers, pawing through kitchen cabinets. He hits his preposterously blond head once on a cabinet door he'd left open a moment before. He does not utter a word, only ducks sharply from the impact and straightens again more carefully. So intent is he on what he's doing, he does not even turn around, not until I cock the gun.

When he sees me, his eyes go wide.

My aim is perfect.

For a moment I worry about getting blood all over Lia's kitchen counter. It's a horrid mess. But in moments he vanishes, awakens from the dream, takes his bodily bits with him when he goes. I am alone again in Lia's apartment.

Alone, and feeling very human. The apartment is just as we left it the morning that I shot Hackforth. Her favorite coffee cup, the white one with Wile E. Coyote on one side and the Roadrunner on the other, still sits in the sink. The residue inside is a kind of calendar, telling by its decay how long it's been in Earth time since I last left the dream. If I could calculate its age precisely, then subtract the days of Lia's captivity, then subtract further the days on the road since Lia's rescue, then what remained would be the hours since I watched her blood soak into the motel carpet. Her blood would still be there, a rusty stain that would not disappear the way Chender's did from her kitchen counter. My vision blurs. My eyes itch. Both sensations ceases, briefly, and I watch the tear detatch and falls away from me into the cup. With an involuntary release of saline I help to erase Lia's presence from this world. After the first, the tears all fall together, each indistinguishable from the next as raindrops blur into raindrops in a summer storm.

I've been participating in NaNoWriMo since 2002. How many times have I written a new novel draft? You do the math. Then add a conservative one or two for the trunk novels that I peck at from time to time on no particular schedule. This "don't bother getting it right; just get it down" thing, I have done it a lot.

So you'd think that by now I'd have learned all there was to know about "don't bother getting it right" and "just get it down." You'd think.

Apparently you'd be wrong.

This past week has involved a lot of uncertainty. Lia and Jet light out on the run after escaping Montrose Manor--then what happens? Then, apparently, we spend a lot of time changing motel rooms and arguing... until we finally stumble upon the next possible plot point. Both Jet and Lia spend time with no-good guys they've gotten involved with for dubious reasons, and this goes on for several nights... until something finally kicks loose and I know how the "everybody dies" scene comes together. After that, Jet spends a lot of time in Uberreality (only it's not "time," because time and space aren't real) keeping herself to herself and avoiding all contact with her colleagues and employers... until I finally realize exactly what Chender is up to and what their Employer's reaction to this is and how Jet's next assignment will lead to her own personal There Is No Spoon moment and...

And here's the thing. Sometimes you just have to send your characters out into the formless primordial stuff of story, not to live the plot they ought, but rather as your avatars in the fiction mines, trying to find the next piece of plot. Sometimes you just have to spend 5,000 words writing three nights of arguing and fighting in a motel room, knowing that not a single word of it will make it to the final draft but writing it anyway, because there is no other way to find out what happens next.

And I knew this. But I didn't really know it, not until today. This past week I've been coming back to the book with great reluctance, unwilling to write another non-plot-moving 2,000 words of "And then Lia went for another walk in the desert, and looked at the pretty cacti and the red sandstone rock formations, and nearly got bit by a snake, and 'Michael' met up with her again and they exchanged some witty banter and unresolved sexual tension, and then Lia went back to the motel room and had an argument with Jet, and then Jet went out and had another date with Mr. Totally Wrong Who Might Be Useful, and..." This sort of reluctance is new to me this year, because this year I am determined to finish not just 50,000 words but also the book by November 30. I don't reach "The End" in a timely manner if I'm constantly writing time-waster scenes on my way to the next brainstorm. But I've gotta.

Today it paid off. I opened a brand new blank scene, and, unwilling to start flailing around at Jet Grieving In Uberreality And Being Very Antisocial For, Lacking A Better Phrase, Several Days... I started jotting down the lines that Jet's Employer would say when Jet finally consented to listen. And then I started filling in Jet's thoughts between them. And before them. And suddenly I was writing an actual scene with pacing and movement and revelation and reaction.

And now I know what happens next.

See? It works! But I really need to spend the entire three hours of tomorrow's write-in writing down What Happens Next, because it feels like my characters sure spent a lot of November fishing in the primordial ooze.

But they didn't waste that time. It really was time well-spent. And now, I hope, I really understand that. In my 9th year of NaNoWriMo, it's really about time.

If this were Earth, I would say that days passed. But time is only fiction, and what passes is only me. The eternal now contracts around me to a point shaped like Lia's bedroom. I wrap myself in my human shape, so that I can bury my head beneath the crimson-gold-paisley quilt and breathe her scent where in lingers in the ivory sheets. A copper hair lies upon one of the pillows; I don't touch it, but lay beside it so that its breadth magnifies in my blurred vision. Each moment that passes is the same moment, and each breath I take is the same breath. And yet with each breath the scent fades, and my ability to furnish it from memory fades as well.

As I curl around the pillow, clutching it to my tightly, the voice of my Employer echoes about the room, bouncing off the fictitious walls that are my awareness and my being. Jetta. Speak to me, Jetta.

I hug the imaginary pillow tighter and say nothing.

Jetta. Please come back. You are needed.

In the U.S. we celebrate a day called Thanksgiving on the 4th Thursday in November. It's a national holiday for being mindfully grateful for "our blessings," a term which may be understood religiously or secularly thanks to semantic drift: the ways in which we are fortunate. The apocryphal origins of the holiday involve early explorers being grateful for not starving to death. In modern times, the day has accrued into its rituals the conjoined twin phenomena of religiopatriotism and sports. All of this together means we eat a lot, we watch some football games, and the sportscasters visit with soldiers stationed abroad and tell them and their families thank you on behalf of the nation.

In the spirit of Thanskgiving, here are the things I am most conscious of being grateful for today:

I and my husband are well off enough never to wonder where our next meal is coming from, or where we'll shelter for the night. We stayed home, slept late, and had a casual lunch in front of the TV--leftover pizza for him, crock pot field roast with veggies for me. For ease and comfort and leisure time, I am grateful.

My husband and in fact all my family, both original and chosen, support me and believe in me as a writer. I can stay home and be a full-time writer rather than clocking time in corporate office because of my husband's support. For the freedom to pursue my chosen career, and the unwavering encouragement I receive in that pursuit, I am grateful.

Today, I went to the local IHOP to meet with other NaNoWriMo participants, those who had no other Thanksgiving evening plans, to work on my novel. I clocked over 2200 words today, having inched my way over the past week up to a point where I felt I could finally skip straight to a scene of drama and energy, and that scene came out almost effortlessly. For times when the work flows like play and I remember on a gut level why I chose to do this with my life, I am grateful.

Also, today, the Saints beat the Dallas Cowboys in their (the Saints') first Thanksgiving Day appearance. For Garret Hartley's 50-yard field goal; Drew Brees's incredible accuracy; awesome catches made by Colston, Henderson, Moore, Meachem, and Bush; and for a kick-ass take-away by Malcolm Jenkins that put the Saints on the path to their winning touchdown, I am grateful. Who dat!

In all seriousness: For me, the concept of "count your blessings" functions not just as a reminder to be consciously grateful for the help I've received along the way, but also as a reminder that many people need that help. While I'm picking up groceries, others are going hungry. While my family have always stood behind my life choices and helped me pursue them, others have painful memories of being told "Writing? Waste of time. What do you really want to be when you grow up?" More and more each year as I return to the volunteer position of NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison for the Boulder Region, I realize I take the job on in the same spirit that I'd donate to the local food bank. I feel like it's my responsibility to pass along, in some form or another, all the encouragement I received to the aspiring writers I meet today. The impact of that is by no means on a scale with what Actual Published Authors can do, of course; they have a lot more capital than I do, both monetarily speaking and not. I mean, Stephen King can personally fund scholarships for high school graduates in Maine, and when he writes that scholarship winner a letter of encouragement, it means a hell of a lot. Imagine! Stephen frickin' King telling you "I believe in you. Go forth, and write!" Wow. My name doesn't have that kind of impact. My funds certainly don't have that kind of plasticity. But I can give a small amount of money and a large amount of time to NaNoWriMo. And I can hope that somewhere along the way, some starry-eyed pep talk I babbled into a regional email will help someone receiving that email feel that much better--that much more justified--about giving writing an honored place in their life. If only for November.

So there we go. Happy Thanksgiving.

...Oh yeah. Novel excerpt. Like I said, I got enough of the point-A-to-point-B crap figured out that I was able to skip ahead. The bit I skipped ahead to is the bit where everybody dies. Whee! After that, this happens.

Usually when I wake I remain in human form for some little while, lying in a human bed inside a human habitation. The persistence of the illusion helps to ease the transition from form to formlessness. But after this dream, I rise fully myself, fully incorporeal, fully furious. And the object of my fury is present already, providing a space of mutual awareness into which he murmurs There you are, took you long enough. I am to have no privacy, no space to grieve. He watched my every moment in the dream, and he haunts my existence now that I am awake. The semblance of his presence is like unto a human's shit-eating grin.

I launch myself at him, ripping at his thoughts with thoughts of fire and wings and claws and teeth, a formlessness formed of pure wrath. I am seraphim-at-war, I am the glory that devours, I have five hundred throats each of which scream Chender's full name like a demon chorus pronouncing a curse. This and more I assault him with, a cacophany to bruise his consciousness.

He doesn't resist, doesn't contract his awareness to exclude me. Instead he allows me fully into it. He seems to take a sensual pleasure in allowing me to vent like this. Not that I could hurt him anyway; reality is not so fragile. Nevertheless, as my rage subsides, his lewd enjoyment leaves me feeling oddly violated.

Jetta, he thinks at me, you were going Nephil. It had to stop.

OK, so not a 2K day. Today sort of got away from me. It was full of Wednesday stuff, and also distractions. So just about 1K, and that in the last hour and a half.

Again, this being a 4th Wednesday, one my Wednesday stuff things was going to my writing class. In addition to critiquing a couple more chapters from a classmate's novel, we got to talking about NaNoWriMo. Two of us in the class are participating, so everyone else wanted to know how we were doing.

Is that how we got on the subject of...? No, wait. Let me go out and come in again.

We got to talking about critiquing novels, and about people who can't quite bring themselves to finish their novels. About the tendency to go back to the beginning and edit rather than writing the last chapter of the first draft. Or, worse yet, to throw the whole thing out and start over.

Melanie put forth the idea of having one's sense of identity bound up in the process of writing a novel, such that the author can no longer imagine themselves not writing that novel. If it were ever finished, who would they be? Someone else, inspired by the idea of having your novel be your identity, suggested that there's sometimes a fear of letting the novel have its own identity. Fear of letting the novel stop being an extension of yourself and just be itself.

Which is where I volunteered the information that I have indeed been putting bits of my novel's first draft onto my blog, "you know, just to tell the world I showed up on the page today." The connecting thought was this: Finishing a work of fiction means the author can no longer enjoy the exclusive privilege of saying what that fiction is. Once you put it out there, you open it up to the act of communication, co-creation, redefinition maybe, that takes place between the reader and the text. The author, having had her say during the writing of the piece, is now cut out of that conversation. One might understandably have a fear of ending one's role in the creation of a novel, of turning it over to the readers act of creation which is totally out of the author's immediate control. And that fear is something I do in fact confront when I put up another snippet of Jet and Lia's story.

"And you're comfortable with this?"

"Not really, no," I said. "But that's kind of why I'm doing it."

"To encounter that discomfort?"

"...yeah. To push my boundaries, step outside my comfort zone. Something like that."

Which was, for all that I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, something I hadn't really thought about before. I mean, yes, I was absolutely aware of pushing myself beyond my comfort zone, but only in that I was presenting something imperfect to the world. What I'm challenging myself to do is to allow unpolished, imperfect me out into public. (Yes, I do a quick polish before I post. But it's not finished novel. It's still pretty rank rough draft.) That, and, yes, the whole showing up on the page thing. The whole "blog every day or the world will know you didn't write today" stick, in terms of carrot-and-stick motivation. (The carrot is going back and reading my blog entry, and knowing I wrote something new today, something that didn't exist when the sun rose this morning. "Put something silly in the world / That ain't been there before," as Shel Silverstein wrote. It's a good feeling, knowing I have.)

But I hadn't thought before about how everything I put up here immediately leaves my hands and goes out into the world and has conversations of its own, conversations in which I can have no further input, with anyone who claps eyeballs to this page.

Quite frankly, it's scary. I'm not entirely sure how I keep doing it.

He wore blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and, against the chill of a desert winter, a plaid flannel overshirt. His feet were bare. And he did indeed resemble an angel, at least one of those in a racially myopic children's picture book: tall and muscular, his skin the colorless color of the moon straddling the highway to the east, his hair one shade too blond to seem real. At any moment he would begin to glow, she thought, exuding a soft golden-pale light that, though invisible under the moon, would be detectable like napped velvet to the touch of her hand on his flesh. Her fingers would come away coated in fine dust as from a moth's wing.

When Lia said, "What are you doing here?" she could have slapped herself for the naked suspicion in her voice. But why shouldn't she be suspicious? Just because he'd startled her so excitingly, just because she inexplicably wanted to get him into a dark bedroom to see if she could read by his light, that was no reason to forget he had startled her. She folded her arms, a gesture intended more to remind herself to stay on her guard than to advertise her distrust to him.

"I might ask you the same." He stepped closer, but not so close as to engage Lia's instinct to back away. The choice appeared to be deliberate, but whether respectful or manipulative she couldn't say. His bare feet coming down onto the sand made the grains roll away in small avalanches. "It's late, and you're inconveniently far from town. If you shouted for help, I don't think anyone would hear you."

The distance between them kept the implied threat in his words from slamming into her at full force. Her alertness sharpened: flight or fight decision coming. Be ready. The sensation was more spine-tingling than spine-chilling. Lia took a step closer and shivered.

Mondays are often hard. (This has come up before.) I get home from my morning shift at the farm, I take a shower and a nap, and then if I get anything else done in the day I'm lucky. Usually I take care of whatever I feel strongly obligated to do, like a load of laundry, but the things I want to have done for my own sake often don't get done at all.

Add to the general Mondayness that the novel is at an "I don't know what comes next" place, and the motivation to write decreases further.

One of today's obligations was to write up a regional email--an email that goes out to everyone in the Boulder region--on the occasion of NaNoWriMo Week 4 starting. These weekly emails usually contain a round-up list of events for the week, reminders about extra special events or about the ongoing book drive, and some little rah-rah pep talk about writing novels.

Since it's Week 4, I wrote about what to do when "The End" feels far too far away: Skip right to The End and write it first.

After sending the email, I let more time pass until writing today at all felt futile. It was already 11:00 PM - what could I possibly get done before the end of the day? Besides, I had no idea what to write...

"Hello, Niki. This is Your Own Advice calling. Yes, yes, I am off to visit your friends like you suggested, but it seems I've forgotten my keys and my wallet, so I had to come back for them. And while I'm here, I thought maybe I'd offer you a little help with your daily noveling task."

So I set a timer and wrote one of the end-of-book scenes while it was ticking.

As it turns out, it really is good advice. It can come home to visit any time.

And this is where I give up.

I have tried. I have tried as hard as anyone from any world can try. Since the beginning of memory, I have fulfilled every one of my assignments faithfully and to the letter. I have not questioned them. I have set my conscience aside, making every Adjustment required of me regardless of my personal feelings. If I have not obeyed every tradition to the letter, I have followed it to the utmost according to its spirit. But it is not enough. It will never be enough.

Yes, I got involved. I began to care. When reality ceased to hold my interest, I found love in a dream. And why not? Am I not assigned to the dream often and often? Don't get attached, Chender said--damn him, damn him forever--or it will impact your assignment. But it didn't--I did what I was sent to do, every time. Except now, when I can't figure out what it is. Even when I am awake, my Employer tells me nothing. And in the dream it seems all guidance is gone. This, after every attachment has been broken, every tie loosed. Look at me! Every day I practice forgetting her. Every night I ignore the loneliness. I have given myself entirely to the assignment--and still there is no guidance. You give me nothing.

So I give up. I take the lapis stones in my hand, letting them fall on my palm into different arrangements, trying out of habit to see clues in demonstrations of random chance. I clench them in my fist until the pressure against the flesh of my palm is painful.

Then, one by one, I swallow them.

The all-nighter write-in at Bighorn Mountain Lodge in Estes Park ended very well. The morning dawned sunny with a dramatically pink snow cloud looming behind a nearby peak. By 9:15 or so that snow cloud had reached us. It dumped its contents on us for about two hours, during some of which time it nevertheless persisted in being sunny. As the snow cleared up and I was about to drive away, I realized that the couple of elk I'd scene towards the bottom of the hill was now a huge herd of elk grazing their way right up to the parking lot. Huge, like thirty elk or more, of all ages.

They're very big, elk. But since you can't get that close, you don't always realize how big they are. Not until they pose for your camera right by a picnic table do you get a sense of scale.

About the writing--look, I really don't like what I wrote today. After meandering from idea to idea yesterday, I have Jet wandering around town trying to figure out what she's supposed to be doing, in about the same way I'm wandering around with words trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be writing. She'd like to examine the MacGuffins mysterious gems more closely, so she wants a microscope to look at them with, so I had her meet a guy in a pub, a guy who'se in pharmaceutical chemistry. And because random convenient guy is too convenient, I decided he was Lia's no good brother. What followed was a bog-stupid drunken seduction scene that will not survive to the second draft, thank you.

This is from the bit where he drives her from the bar to his lab, which she finagled by giving him to understand that she was totally hot for chemists in situ. Like I said: bog-stupid. And, hey! note the angst. Gah.

I'm nervous the whole way there; he's too drunk to drive, he's speeding, and he runs a few red lights. Usually I wouldn't worry. Death just means waking up, after all. But waking up prematurely isn't useful to the assignment, and who knows how I'd get the stones back if I dropped them here. I try to calm myself with the thought that the dream led me to him and I'm only doing what I'm told.

But I can't get rid of the doubts. Doubts are like stray animals; once you begin to feed them, that's it--you've got a new pet. It's remarkably the same on every world I've been assigned to. There are planets with methane atmospheres where the young of the dominant sentient species are told, "Don't give that crixxith your leftover stwthyl or you'll never get rid of it." And so with doubts. I began entertaining them back at the hotel, asking myself: did the dream really send me to Lia for a purpose beyond recovering the gems? Or am I just too attached to her? (You are, my thoughts think in Chender's voice. You are too attached. They die, you know. They die and they're gone as if they never were. Don't fall in love with fictions. It is indeed a remarkable imitation of Chender's voice. I can almost hear it. With my fictional ears.) The doubts cause me now to be unsure I'd recognize the dream's cues even if a ten-foot sacred clown materialized in front of Jack's car at the next red light and beckoned me to get out, go that way, do this.

The dream wants something. And I am here. That's all the certainty I can manage.