author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So I wasn't much looking forward to today's writing. It's mostly both characters being emo and angsty after parting ways. So, what the hell. I queued up the most emo and angsty song on Hunting High and Low, "The Sun Always Shines On TV" ("I fear the crazed and lonely looks the mirror's sending me these days"), I put it on infinite single-track replay, and I gave in to the mopey introspection. And I got a scene in which Lia is absolutely questioning her sanity, what with having all but convinced herself that Jet was a hallucination or a waking dream or something. Except she doesn't want to believe herself capable of hallucinating that convincingly. Except how else to explain the bit where Jet went from alive, to messily dead, to vanished? Lia has not been having a good five weeks.

("What with one thing and another, five weeks passed.")

I might never have gotten that far if it wasn't for some healthy competition at tonight's write-in. Have I mentioned, by the way, what madly enthusiastic Wrimos we have in Boulder? It's not that huge or far-flung of a region. Denver is bigger. Hell, there's only one region in the entire country of Brazil; it's called "Elsewhere :: Brazil". And yet, in our one-and-a-half-county region, we have write-ins to accommodate every schedule, every neighborhood in every suburb (practically), most of them initiated not by us Municipal Liaisons but by people who just liked the idea of, say, having a write-in at Flatirons Crossing, or who wanted to do Healing Tea Saturdays again. We have a scheduled write-in per day, average.

Today, we had two. One in Boulder, and one in Longmont. Since the two write-ins overlapped, we decided to engage in a bit of Word Warring. Word Wars are a bit like Word Sprints. You set a timer, and you try to get as many words written as you can in the allotted time. That's a sprint. Add competition, and it's a "war." From 7:10 to 7:30, the Boulder-at-Red-Rock-Coffeehouse crew vied with the Longmont-at-Ziggy's crew for the highest average of words per Wrimo.

But I'd been at Red Rock since 5:30--some had been there since 5:00--and I'd already hit 6667 total words, the normal Day 4 goal. Getting there took me through Jet's being emo and angsty over whether maybe she was a bit too attached to playing human and whether it was a problem that making out with her best bud back in her home world just didn't do it for her anymore what with there being no challenge or surprise to it. (Her home world is outside of space and time. "World" isn't the right word for it. Words aren't right for it. You see the problem I'm setting myself here.) And then maybe two paragraphs into Lia Five Weeks Later, and then I was done.

But it was only 6:15. I couldn't let the side down! I had to do more writing come Word War time!

Natalie Goldberg has an anecdote about a student who would write to the end of the ten minutes, to the end of the page, and then stop. This is in Writing Down The Bones, in the chapter called "Go Further." Goldberg writes, "Write to the eleventh minute if you need to. I know it can be frightening and a real loss of control, but I promise you, you can go through to the other side and actually come out singing."

It would have been no big deal if I hadn't. I had reached my goal for the day (get to 6667 words total). I could always right the rest of Lia Five Weeks Later tomorrow. But would I have written the same scene tomorrow as I wrote today? Would it have been the same Lia, the same family she can't cut herself free of, the same foggy mirror sending her frightening looks?

I don't know. This is some of what I got.

Abruptly Lia stood, shouldered her purse, and left the bus stop. Half a block along the way she heard what sounded suspiciously like a city bus's air brakes, but she didn't turn. It was a 10 minute walk back to her house, and the whole way she tried damn hard not to think of anything at all. The first flakes of a November flurry were beginning to fall by the time she got home; her dyed copper hair was salted with snow. She brushed it off as she let her front door slam closed behind her.

She collapsed in the armchair in front of a dead TV and sat there for five minutes or so, her mind as empty as she could make it. A sort of static buzz seemed to snap around her head like a fly. She didn't think about it at first. It stabilized, turning into a generic high-pitched ringing in her left ear, an almost electronic tone being played on a MIDI keyboard that didn't exist outside her own mind. Great, now my hallucinations are auditory. I'm one messed-up cookie. With that thought, she got up and marched herself over to the phone.

"Yeah. Sorry, Di--just can't seem to get out of bed this morning. I think I'm coming down with the latest 'flu that's going round the office. What, Jackie too? Send her my regards. Well, we'll see how it goes. I hope I can make it in tomorrrow--no, don't worry, I have no plans on being the next Typhoid Mary. Thanks, Di. 'Bye."

She hung up the handset, letting it clatter back into its old-fashioned wall-hanging base. The sound seemed to echo from the bedroom, as though something in there had fallen over at the precise moment she'd ended her call. Still hearing things, she supposed. But the ringing in her left ear was gone, that was something.

In the bathroom, she splashed water on her face and blinked, owl-like, at her reflection. Her narrow mouth, once so familiar and comfortable in the mirror, now seemed twisted, as though someone had snuck into her room while she slept to add weights to the ends of her lips. Just a milligram here, a flake of iron there, adding up over the weeks or years. She forced a smile, just to see what it looked like. It looked fake. She relaxed and watched her mouth sag into that warped scowl. Her lips were pale, with little pink in them. They were almost the same faint tan as her skin was at the end of the summer, visible at a distance only because her summer tan was lightening to her usual Celtic pastiness.

It sounds Welsh, said Jet.

Lia sputtered a cursed at the mirror, then began to shout. "Yes, dammit, I guess it does, I guess I can't cut myself off from my family even when I try to rename myself. Thank you oh so fucking much for pointing that out, imaginary person!"

What's that supposed to mean?

"Shut up. Shut up." Lia covered her ears and let her forehead fall against the mirror with a thunk whose echoes bounced around in her skull, less real than the voice of her memories. "It's been five weeks, what the hell are you doing in my head now? You never existed!" Her own voice seemed less real too.

Less real than the voice of a nonexistent woman repeating its query in her head. What's that supposed to mean?

"It means I'm done, I'm done being sick and scared and traumatized! You're just a figment of my--my trauma, OK? Go away. Please."

So, who's the fucking jerk now?

Lia squeezed her eyes shut as tight as they would go, then opened them, then turned on the water in the sink and the tub. Hot as it would go and with as much force as the building pump could muster up to her top floor apartment. She concentrated in the steam and the white noise on the face staring back out from the glass at her. Its expression scared her. The fog from the steaming water below covered it up, but she knew it was still there: a stranger wearing her face and twisting it into crazed permutations of depression, psychosis, loneliness.

I love write-ins. I love ten-minute word wars, and the occasional sounds of fellow writers snickering or groaning over what their characters just did, and the exhortations when one writer gets stuck to "have ninjas attack!" I love the industrious sound of several laptop keyboards clacking away. It keeps me focused on my own work, keeps me away from the temptation to just call it a day and go play something mindless.

But write-ins are not the most conducive setting for writing sex scenes. If I'm going to alternate between going red-faced with embarrassment and getting short of breath while trying to find non-ridiculous words for the pornographic pictures in my head, I'd really prefer the privacy of my own home. Also, the fear of someone reading over my shoulder gets intense.

Alas, I got to this scene while in the library with three other writers. So I turned up my headphones, turned down my laptop's monitor brightness, and took nice deep calm soothing breaths.

Then I came home and edited the sucker in private. Yes, I know, editing during NaNoWriMo is heresy. Heresy! But I'd already passed Day 3's target word count of 5001. Where's the harm, right?

"No," Jet whispered, "not enough time. They're right on top of us. No, Lia, stop." She pushed against Lia's shoulders and scooted back along the seat.

Lia cursed softly. She struggled upright. "All right, your loss. I guess I'd better make myself presentable."

Jet ran her hand idly along a bent and torn piece of the car's chassis that came to a wicked backwards-aiming point just above the dash. "You should go flag them down."

She was right, but Lia argued anyway. You can't just give in, not at the start of a relationship, or you'll be giving in the rest of your life. "Why me?"

"One, it's your car. Two, you're not covered in someone else's arterial blood." She indicated her rust-drenched clothes. "Also your shirt isn't ripped wide open."

"Fair enough." She got the passenger side door open--it took some pounding to make it budge--and slithered out over Jet's hips. Jet gave a sharp hiss as she passed, pulling Lia up short. "You OK?"

"Jerk. Shouldn't have let you start what you can't finish. I'm fine."

"OK, well--you wanna take care of business, better make it quick. I'll be right back with the cavalry." Lia walked around the car as Jet worked her way to a sitting position, using the twisted spike of metal for leverage. A miracle that didn't skewer one of us on impact, Lia thought. What Jet had done, did that count as a miracle? She couldn't help glancing back as she made her way toward the sound of sirens--she hoped Jet didn't end up cutting herself.

Later she wondered whether it was a premonition or just paranoia, whether the thought had prepped her to hallucinate or whether something even stranger was going on. In any case, leading the emergency responders back to the car, walking some ten feet ahead of them, she caught a glimpse that tore a scream out of her, the first since the crash. A brief descent in the terrain put the car temporarily skyward, and she could see clearly into the cabin where blood ran over the seats and pooled in the buckets. Jet's face stared without comprehension over the dash, wearing the ghost of a grin that seemed wholly detatched from the deep gash in her throat. Lia screamed again and ran toward the car.

The ground rose once more so that the car's crumpled top lay between her and any view of the interior. Lia collided recklessly with the driver side door, yanked it open. The paramedics, hearing her scream, picked up their pace behind her. She knelt beside the steering wheel, staring at nothing. No one was there. Not a drop of blood, not a shred of clothing. No one was there at all.

Maybe something will come to me in my sleep.

"So what are you writing about this year?" Common question. Probably the most-asked question between Boulder Wrimos last night. My answer? "It's an urban fantasy involving an interdimensional assassin and a woman who's unhealthily turned on by danger." And I haven't been very pleased with that answer, because it makes the assassin, Jet, sound like the only real character in the book. It turns Lia into a sort of mentally deranged caricature who is of course going to be attracted the first James Bond clone who comes along.

Today I wrote the scene where Lia has just picked a hitchhiking Jet on her way south out of town. Jet is bruised and bloody and has just stepped out in front of Lia's car. Now she's Lia's passenger, and she's getting interrogated about what she was up to just now.

Now, before I wrote this scene, while Lia was still an uncomfortably two-dimensional danger-addict, I imagined her losing control of the car as Jet described her most recent assignment. For no better reason than she found the story all exciting and arousing and stuff.

Stupid. Very stupid. But it was all I had.

Then I actually wrote the scene and realized Lia had a connection to Jet's victim, and what turned Lia on was knowing that the bastard was dead.

Miles roll by while I try to decide how far is far enough. They never say. Lia breaks the silence, all abrupt and suspicious: "Were you really trying to kill yourself?"

How much do I tell her? What harm can it do? But not much good, either. "Maybe for a moment there."

"Well, then, for a moment there, you were a fucking jerk." I watch her hands grip the wheel tighter. "You want to kill yourself, you can do it without dragging someone else into your drama. Fucking jerk." Silence again, for just a moment. Then she yanks at the volume knob. Old school punk music soars and batters my dream ears. For the briefest of moments I consider throwing myself out of the car. But no, this might not be far enough away from the scene of my assignment yet. I can't really be sure.

Ten miles I'm still not sure, but Lia turns down the volume again. "Why?"

I'm lost in thought by now, replaying my actions of the last two hours. My right shoulder feels wrenched: Ritchie, grabbing my wrist as I headed for the door. My mind's ear is faintly occupide with the noises Tresco made behind me as I escaped. A job well done is a joy to remember.

"Jet." The sound of my name brings me back to the here and now. I don't hear it often. "Why would you want to kill yourself?" Lia sounds oddly curious this time around, like one artist comparing techniques and preferences with another.

So I think about the question. I think about acceptable ways to answer it. It's never a good idea to get involved with non-involved characters in a dream, not even to the point of conversation. But it's not forbidden, either. What harm can it do? "I just killed a man," I tell her.

She jerks the wheel a little--surprise? Panic?--and punches the accellerator momentarily. When she eases off the pedal, her eyes stay wide. "It finally happened. Five years of picking up any hitchhiker I run across, I finally pick up a criminal." She sounds incongruously delighted. "Shit. An honest to God killer."

"Assassin." The correction is automatic, a reflex borne of long, intense training. "It's different. Well, to me anyway. It's all down to the reasoning."

She's silent awhile, smiling at the road. Outside, the desert is featureless, a far cry from Mapleton Ridge's depressing skyline. Yucca dot the ditch beyond the highway shoulder, and rock formations dominate the distance like the portfolio of an indifferent dilletante sculptor. "Who was he? The man you killed."

That's easy. Talking about other people is a lot easier than talking about myself. I don't have to be guarded. "Called himself Tresco. Leader of a gang calling themselves the Swifts."

Lia's putting on speed again. Just a little, but she's keeping it on this time. "Tresco."

"Sound familiar?"

She doesn't answer. Her knuckles whiten again. Then she laughs, hard and merciless, and I begin to wonder if I'll survive this ride. But that's OK. I'm far enough away now, I'm sure of it. "Tell me about it," Lia demands, sudden and decisive.

"I don't know much. He wasn't a very good gangster. I expected him to be more competent, but apparently he's--"

"Tell me how he died."

I glance at her, sidelong, and I see the set of her jaw. "What do you want to know?"

She grits her teeth--I hear them click and grind. "Make me see it. I want to be there."

Tomorrow: the car crash! A scene I'm pretty sure I know inside out, through and through. Which means I will probably get surprised again.

I spent a large part of Halloween weekend doing two things: making kimchi, and stressing about the NaNoWriMo Day 1 activities. Often simultaneously. It is trivial to stress while stirring a rice-flour porridge, running the blender, waiting for salted cabbage to wilt, or chopping up raw oysters. These activities don't occupy the brain. It doesn't take much effort to fill the brain with stress while doing them. Indeed, more effort is required to not stress.

But as it turns out, today rather rocked. So the stress was either A) unnecessary, or B) for a good cause.

I'm going to choose B) here. The stress was like, for instance, the stress over a possible Y2K disaster. In both cases, the stress wasn't just biting-the-nails insecurity; it was the emotional prompt for thoroughness of preparation. And preparedness averts unfortunateness. The result is everyone thinking you stressed for no good reason because obviously nothing went wrong, thus nothing could have gone wrong.

Well, that last bit is true about Y2K (which made a lot of programmers sad). Not so much true about my organizing NaNoWriMo kick-off activities. More "Wrimos" than I can easily count have thanked me for doing so; I do not feel unappreciated. In fact, I think they think I did more work than I actually did. As it turns out, a lot of the work involved asking people "Can we use your space?" and them saying, "Sure!" and me saying, "What, really? Really?" Then I packed a bag full of Stuff and showed up. The rest of the work was Boulder-area Wrimos being awesome.

So. Activity the first: We had an Inaugural Midnight Write-in in the lobby of the St. Julien Hotel. And the staff there were fantastic. Nobody cared whether anyone in our group was actually staying at the hotel; in fact, one couple had taken a room (ooh, luxury! *jealous*), but at no time did I feel compelled to point at them and say, "We're with them!" No. The bar manager and the night manager were both hugely solicitous, helpful beyond our wildest dreams, and exceedingly permissive considering that we taped up posters, took over half the lobby, moved furniture around, unplugged their lamps in order to plug in our extension cords, laptops, and my electric kettle. (In fact, the night manager seemed surprised that we would bother to reverse all the changes we perpetrated.) Aside from patronizing the bar a bit, we weren't paying the hotel any money for use of the space. And they didn't mind. They treated us like honored guests. They were amazing, y'all.

Wrimos began arriving as early as 10:30 PM. They ordered coffee, wine, and beer from the bar. They began moving furniture around, like I said, that we could all sit in rough circles around extension cords. Someone brought cake. Someone else brought cookies. I brought a bag of apples and a bucket of candy and some tea-and-coffee fixin's (the bar provided us coffee mugs galore). We ordered pizza from a nearby Papa John's (yet another thing I was amazed the hotel staff didn't mind us doing). Every once in a while someone would check the clock and announce how long we had until midnight.

Then, at midnight, we all started writing. Silence settled over what had been a merrily chatty party. Silence, that is, except for the clacking of keyboards.

I thought I did pretty damn well getting to 1674 by 12:45 AM. I still do think that's pretty damn good, but I am humbled at having been told that another Wrimo reached 5,000 by 2:00 AM.

Far as I can tell, everyone had fun. More than 20 people attended--that, on a Sunday night! And words got written. Thus: Success!

After the clean-up and the various carpools home, after John and I got home, after I sleepwalked my way through changing Null's diaper (I shall tell the story of How My Cat Got Into Diapers another time), I crashed and crashed hard. Aside from sleepwalking my way through feeding the cats at 10:00 AM, I pretty much slept until noon.

And at 7:00 PM we did it all over again, only with more partying and conversation and less actual writing, and the venue was Atlas Purveyors. And it was crowded--I mean, ker-OW!-ded. I lost count of the attendees attempting to find seats among the Monday night regulars (and there were a heck-a-lotta those as well). One couple did sort of give up and go home shortly after arriving, but most everyone else was able to endure the bustle and the lack of chairs long enough to enjoy meeting their fellow Wrimos and enjoying great conversation about how Day 1 had treated them so far, what word processors or novel-organizing software they preferred, and what genres they were writing in. Some of the non-involved Atlas customers got interested and started asking us about NaNoWriMo. We may have effected one or two conversions.

And now I am home. And I have edited a little of what I wrote this morning, in order to have a paragraph or two worth exhibiting on my NaNoWrimo profile. I hope to keep updating the excerpt on display under my Novel Info there on a daily basis. That's been a goal of mine in years previous, but I've never managed to do it.

So here's my Day 1 excerpt:

Lia's iPod had been repeating her Ramones playlist since pulling out of her mother's driveway four hours ago. At that time, she'd adjusted the car stereo's volume to a level known as I'm So Fucking Pissed I Could Scream (But If I Did I'd Never Stop Screaming, So I Won't). It was a very specific setting. You turned up the volume until the precise point at which the bass line started rattling the dashboard, then you turned the knob another 90 degrees. Some two hundred and fifty miles later, Lia was no longer So Fucking Pissed Etc., but she'd left the volume untouched because, hey, Ramones. And because it warded off the specter of falling asleep at the wheel, which was more likely than falling asleep in her childhood bed. The night was dying; the road was long. Thank God the road was long. Sometimes she suspected that only the distance between her family's home and her own was what kept her from killing herself.

Well. Alternating one day off and one day on isn't ideal, but it's improvement. At two articles each "on" day, it comes to a week averaging one per day. Which I haven't had for months. So. Improvement.

Via researching articles at my Day Job, I now know far more than I ever wanted to know about nitric oxide boosters, saunas, marine phytoplankton supplements, and Colorado authors whose words may or may not have been embroidered and used without permission by promoters of marine phytoplankton supplements.

Also, via certain "improvements" to the Day Job's author interface... OK, the scare-quotes weren't really appropriate their. They really are improvements, I have to admit. But the "Recently Submitted Work" section I've discovered has more than one possible status per article. There's "Pending," which I'd expect. But then there's "With Editor," so that neurotic writers like me can get the heebie-jeebies. "OMG! An editor is looking at it RIGHT NOW! They're still looking at it! Why are they taking so long looking at it? I did a bad job, didn't I? It requires stupid amounts of editing, doesn't it? It's going to get rejected, isn't it? I FAIL AT LIIIIIIIFE!"

This is how many writers' minds work. This, despite the logical voice in my head that quietly points out that "With Editor" probably means the editor selected my article out of the ready-for-edits queue and will eventually get to it.

What "eventually" means I do not know, because the new-and-improved interface is missing an editor's deadline on my pending articles. Oh well.

I'm beginning to really miss working on fiction. Which I hadn't done except in fits and starts for... well, months, I think. Fiction is work, too, but it's enjoyable work.

Now, there are times when I begin to think fiction isn't enjoyable. I'm told all authors have times like those. For me, those times are mostly when

1. I've begun to think the story I'm working on sucks great big sandstone boulders,
2. I think the story is fantastic but my ability to get it down on the page is nonexistent, so I'm not even trying.

Not that I'm complaining, mind. I am transmuting words into money. But it doesn't hurt to use these moments as teaching moments: there are other words you can transmute into money. The process is much less certain and depends on a hell of a lot of other external factors, but it's so much more enjoyable.

Roll on November, eh?

As those of you already know who follow my husband, John, on Facebook or on Twitter, he's between jobs at the moment. Since 2004, John's been the only one of us who's been employed full time outside the home for actual real money, so when he's not in anyone's employ we both get a little antsy. Not that we're really worried--he has a couple interviews scheduled next week and recruiters lighting up the phone like a Christmas tree. Turns out, they hear "senior-level java programmer" and they want a piece. Excellent. And we're covered for basic expenses for a reasonable period of job-hunting. But, still, antsy. Perhaps more me than him with the antsiness; I'm a pro worrier, and I'm the household accountant.

Also, the reason we've been a one-income household for more than 5 years now, the very specific reason, is my writing career. I left a well-paid web development job in order to write full time. So what's my excuse for not having written much recently, hmm? Non-productivity causes guilt. Lots of guilt.

So, feeling guilty about being the household bum, I asked him last week what he thought about my going back into the workforce. He told me not to sweat it yet. I nodded and felt simultaneously relieved and unconvinced.

And then it occurred to me this weekend: Duh. I already have a job. And I don't mean "I write like it's my job." I mean, "I have a job. A writing job."

I write short articles for Demand Media Studios. That right there is as much of a job as I want to make it. The gig goes like this: They have a list of titles. I get to choose titles from the list and write the corresponding article. Once a copy editor approves the article for publication--which they generally do, giver or take a rewrite request--I get a flat fee of $15 to $25. My accumulated earnings show up in PayPal twice weekly.

It is absolutely within my power to conjure up money by the power of my pen. Well, my typing. And some mad l33t Google-fu.

But I'd been holding onto this one article title since researching it from Chicago Union Station, and had done nothing with it whatsoever. I hadn't earned much in September or August, either. I could hide behind the excuse of recent travel getting me out of my rhythm, but the fact remains: I hadn't really been using this power of mine for awhile now. And, really, that's inexcusable.

That quiet muttering noise you hear is me calling myself all sorts of foul names.

So this weekend I reserved as many titles as it took to fill my queue, and I wrote and submitted two of them today--including the one I'd been hanging onto since Chicago.

And it was a pretty darn full day already, what with grocery shopping, assembling a two-week supply of cat food, doing laundry, tending a compost pile, and other household chores. Not to mention lunch at Harpo's and watching the Saints rip the asses off pretty much everyone on Tampa Bay's defense and handing each back to the corresponding player in the end zone. (After last week's embarrassment, that felt good.)

So after doing two articles on a Sunday full of Stuff, I am imagining how much I could get done on a weekday when I'm supposed to be "at the office" (usually Atlas Purveyors, sometimes Red Rock Coffeehouse) for a full working day.

Of course, part of that working day should involve fiction. I have several short-shorts that really, really, really want to go out and meet the nice people if only I'd take the time to redesign their wardrobe and give them driving directions. But I think I might put some of that on (further) hold while I concentrate on making up for lost time at the day job. At least until we see how John's interviews this coming week go.

Besides, NaNoWriMo is on its way. Fiction will absolutely happen then, never fear.

Because I am that much of a nerd. Or something.

So, earlier this month, I became aware that NaNoWriMo was approaching. And fast. But was I worried? Well...

I figured, what with riding the rails again in late September, I'd have plenty of time to brainstorm my way toward A Plan. Possible plans included a series of interconnected stories among the people who appear in "First Breath," a real concerted effort to rewrite Melissa's Ghost or maybe Like a Bad Penny, or... I dunno. Those were the only Plans coming to mind.

OK, yes, I was worried. But I was just about succeeding at convincing myself otherwise.

And then I was driving home from the airport, having dropped off a visiting friend, and a plot went and hijacked me. A potential plot. A sort of treasure map leading toward a plot, maybe, with plot elements dribbled all over the landscape.

Long drives in traffic require music. To this end, I had my laptop headphone jack connected up to my car stereo via the cassette-tape-with-a-wire doohickey, and my laptop was dutifully playing through four a-ha albums. The first three, plus East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Playing through them all. Repeatedly. (One of these days, my laptop will send a hidden transmission out to some vigilante corner of the net, and I shall be hauled off for sound card abuse. Until that day, my guilty pleasures are MINE ALL MINE and NO ONE WILL TAKE THEM FROM ME.)

And I had that thought I often have when listening to this particular collection of tunes: "Dang, these lyrics have some surreal & evocative corners to them."

And then somewhere in the crossroads between "Early Morning" and "I Dream Myself Alive" I ended up with two characters in my head having an on-again, off-again relationship. One of them happens to be a dimension-hopping assassin. Who may or may not, in actuality, be an angel. It was totally obvious. And each song that came on after that made me go, "Oh, OK, and they meet when one of them picks up the other hitching on a desert highway." Or, "I get it! She's a shape-shifter." Or, "Someone gets killed here. I'm not sure who, but it's not good."

Later, very excited, I told John about this Plan. He gave me a bit of a skeptical look. "Where are you getting this assassin stuff from? Where does that ever come up?" But it does. It's all there. There is an amazing amount of implied violence in a-ha's discography. Also dimension-hopping, if you take literally lines like "I knew this world would break my heart."

All of which eventually gets me pondering the line between "inspired by" and "fan-fiction about." I suppose it's hard to call it fan-fiction when the canon material is so nebulous. You sort of need a defined, consistent worldbuild in the original to have fan-fiction about it. Put another way: I can imagine fan-fiction based on the title track to Rush's 2112. (Imagine, hell. I've written some.) But I have a hard time imagining fanfic about Rush's Presto, because I just can't see an intentional story being told across the course of that album. Writing a story that incorporates themes from each of the songs in order might possibly count as extreme fanwank, but I think it would be more accurate to say that the author used those eleven songs as a very complex writing prompt.

And so with this. So I spent a great deal of my writing time on the train just listening to those four a-ha albums while writing descriptions for possible scenes in yWriter. The working title is Death in a Dream, because the assassin travels to other worlds by going to sleep in her own and dreaming, and after completing her assignment she ends the dream and causes herself to wake up by killing herself. Maybe it should be Deaths in a Dream, plural, like that.

I'm really, really impatient to get to the actual writing. And that's good. Obsession gets the ideas flowing. But it's also unfortunate, because I intended to have two or three short-shorts out the door by the end of October. It's not too late, but with my mind thoroughly distracted like this, it's going to be difficult to concentrate on revisions.

Poor me. My life, so hard. Heh.

It occurs to me that I forgot to blog for the entire latter three-fourths of November. You may have been under the impression that NaNoWriMo kicked me under a bus and left me for dead. If so, you would be wrong. Not far wrong, but wrong nonetheless. The bus analogy is just a bit too much. If you want accuracy, we could say that NaNoWriMo sort of prodded my backside while I was looking at something else, with the result that I sort of stumbled out in front of a moped puttering along at about 3 miles an hour, with the result that, to prevent my picking up moped tracks on the back of my favorite jacket, I had to keep running at a slow, steady, but unwavering pace for the entirety of November.

Which didn't leave me a lot of time for blogging, this year. That'll teach me not to watch my back.

In any case, the story's about the same as last year: Crossed the 50K line (see attached 2009 Winner Badge), failed to reach The End. Also, only managed to do about 9 of the hoped-for 30 Demand Studios articles; nevertheless, this total surpassed the totals of each previous month. So. Progress!

Going forward...

I have pledged to the other inhabitants of the "Life After NaNoWriMo" forum that I will finish this novel! I will finish this first draft in time to use my "free proof copy" code from CreateSpace (expires July 1). And, personally, I hope to finish it much sooner than that. Like, in time to give my wonderful, supportive husband a birthday present. "Limited edition," I told him. "Very limited. Like, just one copy. Signed and numbered and everything." This amused him.

As for my "day job," Demand Studios is doing something very special this month: Write For a Cause with Demand Studios. (Link goes to Facebook, where you can "become a fan" or just follow the cause's progress through the month.) For every eight articles their writers complete and their editors approve, they will donate a book to a child in need, via First Book. If you've been considering writing for Demand Studios, now's a darn good time. And this month's also a darn good time for me to finally reach a more respectable "day job" level of output with them.

And that's the news for now. Summary: Not dead, not under a bus, have won NaNoWriMo, will continue on.

So. First, you gotta make stir fry. Stir fry requires sauce. Sauce requires soy, hoisin, mushroom sauces. Also hot sauce and a spoonful of dill relish (because it's easier than chopping chilis and acquiring sezchuan pickles). Also veggie broth. And you gotta totally overestimate how much veggie broth the stir fry sauce needs. Those dried mushrooms don't really soak up all that much juice, reconstitutin', after all. So you end up making a really soupy stir fry.

Oh well. You serve it with a slotted spoon and use some of the extra to moisten the rice. It's damn good. Mmm, mushroom stir fry with selection of Asian greens from Abbondanza's last veggie share.

Meanwhile, you have all this stir fry sauce left over and, incidentally, the leaves of all that young celery you chopped up. The celery was really more leaf than stem, to be honest. You hate wasting it. So. You toss those leaves and that sauce into your crock pot. You put an extra cup of water in. You crush up one of your home-grown tomatoes that's starting to reach the use-it-or-lose-it stage. You set the crock pot to "low" and you go to bed.

Good morning! Now. You've been defrosting that lovely 1/2-lb Celebration Roast since a couple days ago, because you wanted to roast it up with some vegetables. Now is the time. Pull out your pyrex casserole dish with the clear lid. Set the roast in the middle. Surround it with the results of chopping up one onion, two potatoes, and two big carrots.

Ladle over it a little of that broth that's been simmering all night. Did you strain out the solid bits first? I recommend this.

Put the covered casserole dish into the oven on 425 degrees F for half an hour. When the buzzer goes off, baste with more broth. Give it another half hour and another basting. Then give it another 10 minutes but this time uncovered.

During that last 10 minutes, make a roux of about a tablespoon each olive oil and whole wheat flour. It's not going to be a gumbo roux. It's just going to be a basic thickener. When the roux is well mixed and bubbling creamily, pour in the last of the broth. The roux will go all shreddy; don't worry. Stir it casually and let it simmer until the mixture gets homogenous again. This is your gravy. It will need salt.

Serve the field roast with veggies and cover all with gravy. Do not be afraid to invite your vegan friends to the table, or indeed to create this dish if you are yourself vegan, 'cause it is.

Eat leftovers cold for maximum delight.

Go forth and try this come thanksgiving.

(This post coming to you live from BeauJo's Pizza in south Boulder. We started tonight's write-in at the Baseline Brewing Market, but they unexpectedly closed early "for cleaning." So we hopped across the parking lot and had pizza and garlic-cheese bread and fountain drinks in mini mason jars. Today, Melissa finished up her first visit with the Ghost Prince, and I discovered that the first lesson she learns from him is, "You think you've got it bad? You think you're lonely? You, missy, are eight years old. Come back and whine when you've endured loneliness for ten centuries." Except the Prince was a lot nicer than that, breaking this to her.)

So Melissa did meet the Ghost Prince in today's writing. And the conversation was terribly stilted. And every line felt really, really unnatural and hard to eke out. And some days are just like that. I just keep telling myself, someday I'll know more about the story than I do now, and that will be a better day to think in terms of perfection. Today I know very little, and so I must content myself with exploration. Sometimes exploration is done by eking out stilted dialogue and out-of-character narration. Sometimes it's the only way to get from here to there.

My additional challenge this NaNoWriMo is to do one article a day for Demand Studios,, a work-for-hire content provider that publishes in respectable places (eHow, GardenGuides.com, etc.) and pays reliably on schedule. That's my endorsement. Go ahead and apply; I won't try to stop you. Some people who write for them make a full-time living wage from them, all working from home. Me, well, I've been patting myself on the back for four articles a week. I'm not satisfied with that, neither as an accomplishment nor as a paycheck. (Also, Demand Studios will soon be offering an optional health plan but only to writers who average 30 articles a month. I should like to qualify, if only to know I have that option.) So I'm trying to do one article a day in addition to 1667 words on the novel.

How've I been doing so far? Well, divide my current word count by 5 and then multiply by 30; I think you'll find the result to be slightly in excess of 50,000. However, I've only done two articles. Gotta be behind in something, I guess. But there's time yet to catch up. I've done two articles in a day before. I'm not worried. Tomorrow is a new day with lots of writing time scheduled in.

(Schedule, you say? Why yes! There's a calendar at the top of the Boulder Regional Forum home page. Go take a gander.)

That's enough for today. Food blogging tomorrow. Maybe. (But I still feel clever!)