author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today I finally secured resort accommodations for Sirens 2012 . I purchased early registration while attending World Fantasy last year, then said to myself, "I have oodles of time before I need to do anything else!" That statement ceased to be true some time ago. The Skamania Lodge (in the majestic Columbia River Gorge, in Stevenson, Washington) showed no availability via their online reservations. I called the 1-800 number in hopes of receiving better news. A charming and pleasantly chatty reservations operator found me the very last room available and slotted me in.

Meantime, we also talked about French last names ("LeBoeuf" may have to be spelled a lot for people outside New Orleans, but it could be far, far worse), urban fantasy (she recommended Laura K. Hamilton; I recommended Carrie Vaughn's Kitty and the Midnight Hour), and various inspirations for writing fiction. As phone calls to hotel reservations go, it really was an unusually pleasant example of its type.

Now I just need to get my train tickets to Portland. I'm pretty sure I'm going by train. It's a straight connection from the California Zephyr to the Coastal Starlight. I've never been on the Coastal Starlight before. It's got wifi! The entire journey takes two overnights, not materially worse than Denver to New Orleans, though the Denver-to-Sacramento leg is 31 hours compared to Denver to Chicago's 18. But, you know, meh. More time with me and my laptop and/or knitting and/or sock-darning or jeans-patching. And less time trusting my belongings or my person to commercial airlines and airline!TSA, which trusting I'm slightly allergic to. (Amtrak!TSA exists, as far as I can tell, exclusively on video loops on infinite play in the Chicago terminals. I'm OK with that.) I can only rejoice in my spouse-given freedom from the 9-to-5 world that allows me to extend a weekend excursion by 48 hours on either side. Thank you, John! Now, to get this "writing" thing up to the "possibly making a living off it" speed...

Speaking of which, got my doubly-signed copy of the contract for the publication of "Lambing Season" back in the mail this week. Hooray!

...And of a woolen texture. First publication rights to "Lambing Season" have been sold, and for pro rates, please the Gods that things proceed as expected and hoped-for between now and the first half of 2013. Also as contracted; I mailed back two signed copies of the significant document to the editor in question this morning.

More details will be revealed when prudent and neighborly.

Two pro sales! This may actually not be a fluke! Oh my.

First off: A new review of Blood and Other Cravings has hit the internet this week. Reviewer Deirdre Murphy at Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys made me grin like a loon three paragraphs into the review. (Do loons, in fact, grin? They're birds. They have beaks. How do you grin with a beak?) LIKE A LOON, I SAID! DOWN WITH LOGIC! UP WITH GRINNING!

(There are many loons at this website. They are damn well grinning.)

Secondly: New story. Not the phone story. The other new story, the one I intend to submit to The First Line tomorrow. The due date is tomorrow, so I have to submit it tomorrow.

Is it done yet? Is even a single draft of it done yet? Well... no. Not unless you count the freewriting babble draft I did, using the appropriate first line as a prompt, at the laundromat back in mid-June.

But I have been assembling it. In my head.

So one of those beginning writer rules -- that is, the rules you're told to follow when you begin to write, which you continue to follow until you discover what your own personal rules are -- is "Thinking About Writing Isn't Writing." But staring at the word processor screen, moving a block of text from one place in the partial draft to another, editing the segue sentence yet again, then staring at the screen some more... that isn't writing either.

So I took a walk. Walks always help.

Walking the three miles home from downtown Boulder, I reexamined the pieces of scenes -- scenelets, if you will -- that make up this story. The story follows a structure that's sort of like this:

1. Right now
2. Teaser flashback
3. Continue from right now
4. More from the flashback
5. Either back to present time, or else the rest of the flashback, I'm not sure
6. Lather, rinse, repeat
7. Finish up story in present time

You can probably figure out where I keep getting bogged down. And when I get bogged down in the structure, I start to wallow in details that don't really belong in the story. So the pacing gets bogged down too.

So during my walk I imagined writing each scenelet onto index cards. Not all of the text; just the first couple sentences and the last, in order to give myself an idea of where the segues are. This story is going to be all about the segues. Like, "This bit ends with the first mention of the umbrella. So the next bit begins with a flashback to the outerspace salesmen giving him the umbrella."

Yes, I said outerspace salesmen. Also, the umbrella is pink with silver letters that can only be read from very high up, and the silver letters say "KICK ME." The snow isn't really snow. It's outerspace gluey tar stuff that causes the end of the world as we know it. WHAT IS MY BRAIN.

(I suspect The First Line does not get a heck of a lot of science fantasy apocalyptic humor. But they do welcome all genres. Who knows? Maybe everyone is writing stories about space glue snow apocalypses.)

So now I'm home, and my feet hurt. In addition to new skating blisters from Sunday, I have sandal blisters. Blisters on top of blisters. Ow. (Next time I think "Oh, I'll only be walking a few blocks. I'll be busing home. Sandals are fine," it will trigger an autohypnotic safety mechanism that will not allow me out the house until I've wised up and put my running shoes on.) But I also have a story written on index cards in my head. The structure now makes sense. And in mulling over the structure on my walk home, I discovered that the protagonist is an entirely different character than I'd thought. The things I now know about him are the key to getting both structure and pacing deboggified. Hooray for deboggification!

And tomorrow morning early, I shall wake up and transfer the story from mental index cards to WP51 file to paper. And there shall be a proofreading and a "final" revision. And lo, it shall be good.

Or at least it shall be submitted.

Then I'll be free to revise the phone story.

Hullo all. So, I owe you a big fat blog post about last week's fantastic writing retreat, a status update on where things are writing-wise since then, and also a general State of the Derby. But since you're not going to get all that tonight, have another review of Blood and Other Cravings.

Wag the Fox: Rabid Reads

Incidentally, I should note that although Shia and I pronounce our last names the same, my family spells it right. (You may commence to imagine my nose in the air to deliver this speech in a haughty *sniff*. But also imagine me grinning like an idiot, 'cause those were some very nice things that reviewer had to say.)

Well, that was easy. Apparently I just had the entire Manuscript class set not to pull certain data from the database unless I was in my staging directory. In other words, at some point in the past I clearly didn't want to deal with things, so I applied brute force.

The criteria for having an excerpt page and for showing notes about a given manuscript are now more intelligent. If I'm in staging, I get to see 'em. If I'm not, they only show up if the database entry includes a TRUE value for the brand-spankin-new "shownotes" field. Woot.

The upshot is, if you click on the title of the story in the little blue box here, you'll get the usual list of blog entries to do with that story. But you should also see a small description of the story and a link to read more. Click that link, and you'll get to read maybe the full story, or maybe an excerpt, maybe some just notes about writing it and where it got published.

In the case of "Last Week's Rhododendron," it'll be all of the above (or everything but the publication credit, until I fill in the publication credit. Which I'll do later on tonight. My brain hurts now). Enjoy!

So. Um. Bram Stoker Award Reading List. ...Eeek?

Back up back up back. The story starts here:

New Year's Eve, blogger Diane Dooley starts a thread on the Absolute Write Water Cooler forums soliciting AW authors to interview about their recent or very-soon-now publications. (The first interview is already up. Go read it! Then, go read Lavender Ironside's The Sekhmet Bed.) So I sidle in and I'm all, "Just novelists, or would you be interested in hearing from authors with sorta-recent short story releases?" You know, blinking innocently and giving my most winning grin. Or the internet equivalent thereof.

She very kindly shoots me a private message to talk about that. In the course of which, she asks me, "Weren't you just long-listed for the Stoker?"

*Blink blink blink* I -- what? No no no no. Surely not. Surely we must be thinking of someone else here. I thank her for the kind spot of confusion, but I concede that Blood and Other Cravings has indeed received some nice reviews, some of them making flattering mention of my story. (Also, one of those stories -- Margo Lanagan's "Mulberry Boys" -- is going into The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Four. Ellen just announced the table of contents today.)

Oh, by the way, since we're talking about reviews, and since I was reading a lively discussion about Amazon.com reviews and the tragic tendency to commit the ABM: This evening I decided, what the heck. I toddled on over to Amazon.com, looked up Blood and Other Cravings, and I read the reviews. Then I nodded to myself. "All right," says I, "I've got that out of my system and need never do it again." It's not like I've been avoiding reading the reviews of the anthology. It's not even like any reviews, including those at Amazon, have been less than mildly favorable. It's just that Amazon.com makes it so easy to give into temptation and snap off a quick reply that it's best for an author to just never go there. I hope that when I have a novel of my own out, I remember this decision and stick to it.

Anyway, Dooley wrote me back, saying as how she did make a slight oopsie. In fact it was the Bram Stoker Award Reading List she saw me on. (The list was just released Monday.)

My response was basically to drop my jaw and fall over on the floor, temporarily dead. When I picked myself back up, I communicated this to Dooley, along with my appreciation for letting me know.

So, this reading list is not, N O T not, a long list for the awards. Nor is it the guaranteed source of all of the 2011 Stoker nominees. What it is, is a way for the Horror Writers Association to draw attention to what they feel is some of the best horror fiction of the year. Yes, this is partially for the benefit of those who do select Stoker nominees ("You might find these worthy of your consideration"), but it's also for the benefit of the general public ("Go read this stuff! It's good stuff!").

Out of the 85 titles listed in the short fiction catgory, seven of them are from Blood and Other Cravings. And one of those seven titles is "First Breath."

It's an honor.

...And now it would appear I've a lot of horror reading to do.

Woo. NaNoWrimo 2011, done and won. Hooray!

Catch is, I'm still not sure what I've written. But that's OK. That's something I can figure out later.

Certain the different short stories that made up each chapter started to come together. Tonight, I was no longer sure what to do with that convergence point... so I went back and continued each of the four individual stories I'd begun before.

Like, where did Hank go when he put the tea cozy on his head and vanished from Earth -- and why wasn't he too worried about this?

Nevertheless, he was a lot less worried than he might have been under the circumstances. For one thing, this wasn't his first time traveling unconventionally. Well, unconventionally from the point of view of someone like Linda and her neighbors. For another, he did have a good idea of what it was he'd put on his head. He remembered visiting the world where it had originated. Or, rather, where the design had originated. The beings that made them weren't big on crochet. They preferred a cloth-making craft that a human would find mostly reminiscent of weaving, and they used a sticky, self-spun fiber that humans would consider akin to spider silk.

Which told him that someone on Earth, or at the very least someone Human, had copied Harbinger technology. This was not comforting to Hank at all. His current position in a gray-red limbo was less disturbing to him than the idea of someone who crocheted having the know-how to make a Harbinger Transport Device. And to decorate it with the constellations familiar to the Harbinger sector -- well, that just screamed smugness, didn't it? (Smugness doesn't "scream," silly. Forget it.) That betokened an engineer who was smugly sure no one would ever catch on to what they were doing.

And Linda just bought it? In some antique store somewhere?

That's the odd thing, Francis -- it's not there anymore.

Oh. One of those. Great. As if there weren't enough troublemakers bouncing around the galaxy.

I suspect Hank is a Time Lord. Dang it. Next time I write Doctor Who fanfic, could I at least know that's what I'm doing before I do it? Stupid bait-and-switch Muse.

Anyway. There's also Maggie and her computer. I still haven't decided what her computer does. It functions impossibly and it does something rather horrible. I just don't know what yet.

Still, I managed at least to follow her away from the shop for a few miles.

Maggie didn't take her new purchase home immediately. She felt terribly possessive of it. It was her secret! So instead of heading back to her house where her little brother would barge into her room -- wasn't that supposed to stop happening once you got out of high school? Only if you also got out of your parents' home, it would appear -- where her parents would want to exchange tales of the day, where she'd get questions about this machine that was hers, all hers! Or, worse, where she'd get waylaid on her way to trying out her new computer. The moment would be lost in a fog of "How was your day" and "have you got homework" and "will you be joining us for dinner tonight."

Besides, she also felt vaguely embarrassed. The shop keeper had charged her a dollar. One hundred pennies. That was all. Maggie had a strange sick clawing feeling in her gut about it. On the surface, it was dread that someone would confront her with having all but stolen the little miraculous computer.

Underneath, where she didn't want to look but still couldn't help but know it was there, she dreaded that the monetary price was only a tiny fraction of what she'd paid.

I'm not sure I want to talk about what happened next with Cathy after the joint started jumping. Or what happened to her boyfriend after Martha-possessed-by-the-Vampire-Dress got her claws in him. FIRST DRAFT FIRST DRAFT SHUT UP oh, well. Here's a fairly harmless excerpt.

More memory flowed back. The shop. That old consignment shop -- but that was a dream, too, right? There hadn't been a shop in that location for years. So where did this memory come from?

"Meet me @ Mimi's."

"What u doin there? Drag queen."

"Get u a prezzie. Or not. Up 2 U."

"Shut up. BRT."

He'd hit SEND. He'd walked into the shop. He knew he'd walked into the shop that didn't exist. Also, he was lying fully clothed on the ground in what appeared to be a filthy alley in one of those big inner cities you see in movies. Gotham. God help him, he was passed out in an alley in Gotham City. He hoped Batman was on his way.

Which just leaves Lucille and her cousin Bitsy. I didn't do anything with them tonight, though. I finished Bitsy's part of the story Monday. It looks sort of final for her, right now.

The whole thing is starkly unfinished, but it's at a point where I can take a step back and think about it as a whole. Which I suppose I'll do very soon now.

But not tonight. Tonight I get to relax. I get to take a break from life for the rest of the night, 'cause I done did it, so I did. Hooray for another successful National Novel Writing Month!

And wait oh hey! I also have a better title for the novel now! Which -- yep -- does in fact change the URL of my novel info page at NaNoWriMo.org. Awkward! Guess I'd better go back a few entries and fix the previous link where the title was still "Selling Dreams and Stealing Hearts." (Dumb title. Why'd I ever call it that? Sheesh.)

While I've been nattering on about NaNoWriMo, I've failed to blog another development: Another short story of mine will soon see print.

This isn't a pro-sale, or in fact a sale at all. But I'm pleased with it. Anything that hauls a piece of fiction out of the rewrite queue and delivers it into the slush is a slice of the positive, in my opinion. And it was a happy thing to dive into this particular slush pile.

I graduated from the University of Washington back in... well. My final quarter was Fall 1996, but I officially took the walk in Spring 1997. I did my time in a somewhat unorthodox fashion, starting with an impressive handful of AP credits and attending classes straight through the summers. So I graduated "Class of I Haven't Got A Clue, Random Mid-90s, How's That?" with a BA in English, concentration in Creative Writing, with honors. This required that I present an Honors Thesis to my Advisor (the most awesome Shawn Wong, who had just published American Knees at the time). My Honors Thesis consisted of pretty much every piece of fiction or poetry I'd created during my time at the University of Washington, presented for critique, revised and rewritten and polished until sparkly.

As you might guess, it was full of weird stuff. "And on the Seventh Day," a story inspired by misreading "an angel waking up a man" as "an angel waking up as a man." "Out from Under," a bit of wanna-be magic realism inspired 90% by resentment at my ex-boyfriend and 10% by grudging acknowledgment that I wasn't exactly perfect myself. "The Goddess Factor," a bit of science fiction inspired by the then-new idea of DNA computing. And so forth. The whole compendium I called Songs About Fallen Angels.

I have been reliably informed, by a recent UW graduate whom I met at Sirens 2011, that I would never have been able to graduate on that today. The UW English Department, I'm told, will not even consider an application whose writing sample has a whiff of the spec-fic.

This floors me. In my time, I encountered absolutely no genre-unfriendliness, neither from classmates nor from teaching assistants nor from professors. The closest I experienced to genre-unfriendliness was a TA critiquing the narrative style of "The Children of Ghosts," which was admittedly written from fresh fannish squee for Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel trilogy. He didn't mind that I was using an anacronistic high fantasy style; he minded that I was doing it badly.

But today, I'm told, times have changed. The UW English Department no longer stands as an exception to the dearth of welcome SF/F/H finds in academia. And a recent handful of English graduates -- my Sirens informer included -- decided to do something about it. They started a new literary journal, one dedicated to speculative fiction in all its glory. It's called AU, and its next issue will include my Viable Paradise "Hats of War!" story, "The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out."

Or so I'm told. In any case, I just emailed my revised draft to the editors this morning. Hopefully this new rewrite didn't change it from something they liked into something they liked less. We shall see.

In any case, I'm ecstatic to hear that something like AU exists, and I want it to go on existing for a long, long time. I submitted a story to it because 1) the theme was "Invasion," a perfect match for "Worms," and 2) because, hearing about AU at Sirens, I immediately wanted to support it, and submitting a story seemed a logical way to do that. I only wish something like AU had been around when I was still an undergrad.

Hooray for acedemic support for speculative fiction! More like that, please!

Oh, hey there, social media. You have corrupted me into putting Twitter hashtags in my blog post titles. Because the blog post title will show up on Twitter. Logical, isn't it?

Anyway. I'm in San Diego. It's Friday, Day 2 of the World Fantasy Convention. Today at 3:00 PM there will be a group reading from the vampirism anthology Blood and Other Cravings; it will take place in the Tor Suite. The Tor Suite will be somewhere in the Royal Palm Towers, the big tall U-shaped building at the end of the property nearest the mall. We don't have a room number yet. But whichever room it'll be in, I'll be there, reading my story "First Breath" and attempting not to stutter from nervousness. Steve Rasnic Tem will also be reading, as will I think three other anthology contributors. And of course Ellen Datlow will be there. Big thanks to her for organizing the reading!

I'll leave it at that for now, and blog more about the convention later on today. At least, that's the intention. I am so very full of good intentions.

Hello, Internet!

I always miss you when I am on trains. And I am fabulously jealous of everyone who takes the Coast Starlight up and down the Pacific coastline as often as I take the California Zephyr or City of New Orleans, because they get to be in on Amtrak's onboard wi-fi pilot program and I don't.

I am currently between trains, sitting back and relaxing in Chicago Union Station's Metropolitan Lounge. I'll be boarding my next train in about 2 hours -- this, dear Chicago-based friends (hi Raj! hi Chip!), is why I am not currently pestering your cell phones with last-minute get-together proposals. (It is possible you find this more of a relief than a disappointment. I can be a very pesty person.) Two hours isn't really enough time to race around, rendezvous, and attempt to do all the beween-trains stuff I wanted to do.

All of which, of course, got upstaged because today is September 13th. It's the official release date for Blood and Other Cravings. Which means I went straight to Twitter and into an orgy of retweeting any mention of the book I could find. This is what passes for "promotion" in my world. I am stunningly not good at promotion. (I am also failtastic at "networking." When I finally write about Renovation -- and I still plan to! despite that I'm about to wind up at another convention! -- you will see what I mean.) But hey, look! Another review!

Anyway, I haven't much to say beyond "It's out! Go buy it! Go request that your library stock it!" And possibly also "Sorry for cluttering up your Twitter feed." So I'll say that and sign off.

Hugs!
--
Niki

P.S. Talked to Mom from the train about an hour ago. Turns out that she thinks this book is the best birthday present evar. "But, Mom, I feel like I ought to get you something that's... well... less me-centric. It's your birthday." "Yes, but you're my daughter. And I love good news!" Well. It is good news.