author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today, John and I cut open and ate half the seeds of a pomegranate that grew on the tree I planted from a seed when I was in high school, and that Mom took over caring for when I left for college. It spent most of the intervening years in a big red pot either inside the pool enclosure or just outside it in the back, where you can look out over the grass of the levee to the big concrete hulk of the Bonnabel Pumping Station. (See also: Bonnabel Boat Launch, whose nifty new website mispells levee as though it were a tax.) Mom would move it between the two locations whenever the little tree, root-bound at about three feet high and half that diameter, lost its leaves and looked dead. Soon after being moved in from out, or out from in, it would re-leaf itself. It did this with no particular regard for weather or season. Mom took to calling it "The Resurrection Plant." At one point it began flowering, but the flowers would fall again without issue. And then so would the leaves. And Mom would move the pot, and it would stage another dramatic renewal.

Pomegranate bushes have narrow oval leaves veined with the red that the fruit bleeds when you cut it, and irregular spines an inch long that take you by surprise, since it's easy to forget they're there. This particular bush had a habit of subletting its pot to local ant colonies, which occasionally Mom or Dad would poison with a scattering of teeny golden grains that come in a green and white box whose labeling implies it means business. At some point someone looked up pomegranates on the internet and determined that they don't actually like humidity much, which might explain some things.

A year or two ago, I forget precisely, Mom and Dad brought home some satsuma trees to plant out back, and while they were at it, they transplanted the pomegranate too. It promptly grew to a height at least three times my own and filled out until it could have easily hidden five of me up against its trunk (if there were in fact five of me, all with thorn-proof skin). And when it next blossomed, it blossomed all over. Hummingbirds visited it, and I'd never seen a hummingbird in that neighborhood before.

And finally the darn thing bore fruit.

I was just there -- I now have two conventions, not one, which I'd like to blog about and haven't yet -- and on my last morning in town Mom and I went out back and tried to decide which of the five or six fruit hanging from its boughs was ripest. September's awfully early for pomegranates, I'd have thought; I never see them in the stores much before Halloween. Three were medium big, and two were half-sized and paired like cherries. None had that wine-red pebbly skin I remembered from the grocery. I chose the one that was the reddest, which is to say, it had the least flushes of yellow and the most overall salmon coloring. Its hide was stiff like cracked old leather.

I brought it back to Boulder with me and showed it to John. I brought it to Sunday brunch and showed our friends. (Sunday brunch was temporarily moved, at my request, to a venue showing the Sunday NFL line-up, so I could watch the Saints win their hard-fought, mathematically calculated, teeter-totter Week 3 victory over the Texans.)

Then John and I got home, and, half-fearing what we'd find -- was it ripe? was it rotten? -- sliced the pomegranate in half. Juice flowed from the cut. The seeds were oblong rubies pressed into facets by their close-packed quarters, the perfect little Lite Brite pegs we hadn't quite dared hoped for. There were less of them than in a store-bought pomegranate, and there was more pith between them and the skin, but they were beautiful. And delicious.

The big question now is, am I now obliged to spend half of every year in the greater New Orleans area?

That... wouldn't be so bad, actually. Bilocating between Boulder and New Orleans is pretty much my best-case eventual scenario, seeing as how it's unlikely we're going to just move outright. So, yeah, let's call this piece of fruit my happy infinite homecoming spell, a piece of sympathetic magic to keep me coming back.

Oddly, this whole experiment in home-grown fruit culminates at a time when I'm working on a story that draws heavily on the Demeter/Persephone myth. Also oddly, there is no pomegranate in that story. (There is, however, a crocus. Also several hundred bottles of mead, and elk backstrap medallions smothered in bearnaise sauce. Between that and Janice Claire's potato salad, I may wind up writing foodie horror/fantasy.) I suppose the story takes place millennia after the fruit was eaten and the compromise drawn up. It's about fulfilling the bargain, not about the striking of it in the first place.

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.

...roughly in order of actual writing-related relevance.

Firstly. Had the pleasure of seeing myself referred to, for the first time, in a Real Review of Actually Published Stuff, as a "newcomer." Like one's first lumpy handspun yarn, this is to be cherished. Only about 100 times more so. Again, I can't think of better company in which "First Breath" could see the light of print. This is amazing.

Relevant to this: Blood and Other Cravings is slated for release on September 13 of this year. It's available now for pre-order at all your favorite online and brick-and-mortar localities. I've presented here a link to do so at IndieBound.org, who help you place orders at your neighborhood independent bookstore if you're fortunate enough to have one.

Secondly, I've finally put "Blackbird" back into the slush. I'm slightly unnerved by Apex Magazine's insistence that submissions be done through HeyPublisher.com, referred to hereafter as "HP". (This should be unambiguous since I am not going to discuss boy wizards nor printer manufacturers in this post.) I can't submit a cover letter unless it's part of the manuscript; alas that I didn't think to prepend one. I can, however, enter a bio that will be attached to every darn thing I submit via HP -- which just feels weird. Also, in order to submit, I had to upload my manuscript to HP, which is worrisome even considering HP's reassuring privacy clause. Still, Apex specifically want dark fantasy, which this is, and Apex pay pro rates, which option I should like to exhaust before moving down the publishing hierarchy.

I'd have tried Strange Horizons first, but they have a list of horror tropes they really would not like to see again, at least not unless the manuscript is effin' fantastic, and I see "Blackbird" in at least three of those listed items. Which, despite SH wanting to see "stories that have some literary depth but aren't boring; styles that are unusual yet readable; structures that balance inventiveness with traditional narrative," is daunting. So... well, maybe later. Maybe a few rejection letters down the road.

Thirdly and similarly, I'm looking for other places that might like to reprint "Right Door, Wrong Time." Brain Harvest seems like a good fit. When I took a look Saturday, the most recent story was Helena Bell's "Please Return My Son Who Is In Your Custody," which, wow. Chills and shivers and a few uneasy giggles. I still need to read the latest since then, Simon Kewin's "Terahertz." The first few paragraphs tantalize me with their efficient worldbuilding.

Nextly, I've begun play-testing Glitch. Glitch is a very strange, and strangely compelling, MMO. You play the part of a figment of the Gods' (called "Giants") imagination. You learn skills, you do stuff. You interact with other people. You help build the world. Play-test opens again tomorrow, so I hear. What does this have to do with writing? Well, it's a reason why I might not be getting a lot of writing done. (Stupid online game addictions. I can has them. In multiples.) If you also are playing, I'm "vortexae".

And lastly (for this post at least), I am baking pound cake. I had this quart jar of whipping cream that self-soured, and pound cake calls for sour cream. So there.

And what does that have to do with writing? You ask a writer who's ready for dessert.

Actually, I can loop that back into writing. When I get done baking it, if the timing works out I shall take it over to our neighbors' place to share. John's over there with Kit and Austin of Transneptune Games, play-testing Becoming Heroes with some friends. Becoming Heroes is available for ordering right now this minute! Nothing "pre" about that. And if you go to Gen Con Indy this year, you can visit Transneptune Games at their vendor booth and buy it there from the team that made it happen.

I'm really proud of these guys and of the book they've produced, and not just because one of them's my husband. And not just because one of the copy-editors was me. (Gods help me, I'm a copy-editor.) And not just because Alison McCarthy's illustrations are stunning. And not just because the game draws on such a multifarious palette of literary influences. I'm proud of them and this book for all these things, plus because creating a new game and putting it out there for public consumption is an amazing feat to take from concept to fulfillment. And it's something John has always wanted to do, for as long as I've known him, so I'm especially pleased for him on that account.

And it's a dang good game, too. The team has put a lot of thought into it -- heck, they put a lot of thought into games as a category. You should read their blog. You won't take RPG mechanics or RPG terminology for granted ever again, that's for sure.

So Transneptune Games sold their first copies of Becoming Heroes about the same time I saw that Publisher's Weekly review of Blood and Other Cravings, which parallelism really amuses me. Hooray!

And that's the list of Things What I Wanted To Tell You What With Not Blogging Reliably Of Late. Which hopefully will improve in the near future.

Which is about it. Neither the story nor the scarf are finished. However, significant progress was made on both.

Most of the progress on the story happened at the Moonlight Diner, a sort of 50s/retro-themed greasy spoon on Tower Road near Denver International Airport. Their food is... OK. Well, it's either acceptable or abysmal depending on what you order. Steak and eggs ordered "eggs over easy and steak as rare as you're allowed" became eggs over medium/hard and a steak that had only hints of pink in the center and was dry and tough like leather. On the other hand, the taco potato skins are absolutely loaded and yummy. And they play a mix of oldies and 80s on their stereo, which is fun, but--what's up with 80s music being the new oldies? I'm only 34, I'm too young to feel old, stop trying to make me feel old!

Anyway, the quality of the food was of no import yesterday. I had already treated myself to Popeye's Fried Chicken for lunch. (New Orleans homesickness ahoy!) All I wanted never-ending coffee and a place to work on my story for three hours. Also wi-fi to check on the status of Southwest Airlines flight 502. I was there to pick up the marvelous Cate Hirshbiel, of course. Have you met Cate? Blog, re-meet Cate. She continues to be awesome.

So by the time her plane was due, I'd written the first five scenes. Of 13, of course. And by the time she called to say she'd got her luggage and was ready for pick-up, I'd spent the last fifteen minutes just gabbing with the waiter about, oh, stuff. Y'know. Driving in the snow, how video games can prepare you for real life situations, how people get very confused about tipping etiquette because it's so hush-hush in polite conversation, how airport security constantly strives to surprise us with more stupid where you'd have thought they couldn't possibly fit more stupid, how trains can be nice if you like trains.

As for the scarf, I knit on that at the Spin-In until my hands were done with knitting and I was ready for bed. Then I went home and crashed, hard.

Today I have until about 3:30 to work on the story some more. We'll see how far we get. The scarf has a new deadline of next Spin-In, when we'll leave our projects at the store to make a big show-off presentation for customers to ooh and aah at.

And tonight it's All You Can Eat Sushi at Japango with John and Cate and Avedan! Yayyyy!

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.

It's not quite U.S. Thanksgiving yet, but I'll count my blessings.

John started his new job this week. The company he works for is starting up a brand-new Denver-based group to work on a brand-new project, so they need a brand-new office. They do not yet have this office. They spent the first three days of the week meeting in a conference room at a hotel in Louisville where the folks flying in from L.A. were staying.

Last night apparently the team all got told, "Sorry, still no office. Take your company-issued laptops and work from home for the rest of the week."

So I got to spend pretty much all day sharing "office space" with my husband. And by "office space" I mean the Parkway Cafe this morning over a long breakfast and Red Rock Coffeehouse over a very long afternoon. He spent it on IM with co-workers, working on building their brand-new code base. I spent it blogging and noveling and programing personal PHP/MySQL projects. Eventually other Wrimos joined me at Red Rock. We did three 15-minute word-sprints, over the course of which I got some 1670 more words of rough draft into the word processor, and we talked about how our novels were going. I posted to the forum that "the Red Rock group is here, ready for word wars! There are three of us and a support spouse." After a moment I looked over at John, hard at work in about five different application windows, and amended that aloud: "I couldn't tell you which of us is the support spouse, actually. We're sort of reciprocal like that."

It's been a really nice day. Tomorrow looks to be equally nice.

Really nice days like today ought to happen more often.

"Wait. Montrose. Is he--"

"Oh, he's alive. So's the thug. Won't be too long before they come around, so let's get out of here."

I start walking, but she doesn't move, so I accidentally wrench my hand free of hers as she stands there staring at her erstwhile captors. "Kill him," Lia says. Her teeth make that grinding noise I remember from our first afternoon together. "I want that bastard dead."

I study her face; what I see there makes me slightly ill. "That's not why I came," I tell her.

"If you don't kill him, I will."

"No." But she turns, takes a step toward the unconscious bodies. The state she's in, I truly believe she might kick Pa Montrose to death with those ridiculously spray-painted sneakers. I grab her arm, yank her toward me hard enough to make her cry out. "I said no."

She gives a long shriek like I've never heard come out of her before--and if that doesn't bring the rest of this hornet's nest down on top of us, I don't know what will--but the vengeful obsession seems to leave her with the sound. The next thing out of her mouth is a petulant whine: "Well, why not?" I'll take petulant over obsessed any day. "Why that poor security guard, then? He wasn't your target either. Why kill him but spare this piece of shit?"

"Because I had no choice. I had to be in that building for an hour or more. He'd have woken up and called the whole police station down on me." It bothers me still. There'd been a photo next to the parking lot cam monitor: a small boy laughing in a spray of rain. "I don't kill where I don't have to. And I don't have to kill him. He's an asshole, but he's not why I came."

"Then why--" She turns a pleading look on me. "Why did you come?"

I tell her the truth. "I came for you, Lia." Well, I think, and the words are lapis blue, but not the whole truth.

Right now this very moment, I am at Atlas Purveyors. I'm slightly typo-drunk on a red plastic cup of Boulder Beer's Flashback Anniversary Ale, poured for me lovingly by the familiar face behind the counter whose name I never quite caught. The cafe is crowded with people here to celebrate Atlas's 1st birthday--a year ago this month they opened where The Tea Box used to be--and I'm being a little antisocial. The only people here that I know are the proprietors and staff, and they're fairly busy (see above). I've escaped the crush by hiding with my beer and my laptop back in the hallway, which is inexplicably empty.

Occasionally someone picks up a bit of chalk and adds a thought to the freshly cleared wall-long blackboard. "We ♥ Atlas." (That was supposed to be a heart. I don't know why it doesn't want to be a heart. ♥, dammit, ♥!)

I've been up since 7:30 this morning, and I've driven up to Estes Park and back. Between the small amount of sleep last night and the trek up to 7,522 feet (I thought it was 8,300 but I was wrong), you'd think I'd be more tired. But I was looking forward to the party, and I kind of feel obliged to be here. A bunch of NaNoWriMo buddies and I, we've been meeting here since Atlas's beginning. It's a favorite office-away-from-office, and I want to help celebrate them, even if it means slipping out of a crowd of strangers to hole up in the hallway under a photo called "Blue Crossing."

Atlas is inextricable from recent memories, and current experience, of NaNoWriMo. So here I am.

But most of today I was in Estes Park, at an all-day write-in that the Municipal Liaison of "Colorado :: Elsewhere" set up. We met at the Stanley Hotel, famous filming location for Kubrick's adaptation of King's The Shining. Appropriately, one of the Wrimos present used a typewriter, an Underwood with features remarkably like my off-brand Sears knock-off. The dining room manager asked her to knock it off, as it was noisy. Shame that.

(Incidentally, I've heard enough "red rum" jokes today to last me until Halloween 2011. You are not allowed to recommence the jokes until then.)

We had word war after word war, and when I surpassed 10,000 words early in the afternoon I gave myself permission to put it away and make a start on my Demand Studios queue. Which is a little backwards. You're supposed to do the Soul-Numbing Professional Hackery first, then give yourself the reward of Working On The Novel. But, oh well, my schedule put them backwards. It all worked.

--oh hey! Speech! Applause! Good things! (Owner Chris Rosen, quoting his dad: "When someone walks through your door, remember: that might just be the best part of their day.") And the raffle prizes are being announced! It took them some 5 tries to find someone present to win the Illegal Pete's gift certificate...

So where was I? Ah. Well. I haven't done any editing since I got back into Boulder--I mostly started cooking. Like a fiend. "Bake the eggplant before it rots! These okra are about to go--quick! Cook them down for frozen gumbo starter! A fly landed on the butternut squash; is it going bad? Quick, roast it! And if I'm going to defrost the pork bellies for lard for the gumbo, I should make kimchichigae with it..." Then I remembered the party at Atlas, and I looked at the time, and I hastily put everything in the fridge. (The eggplant got baked and the squash got roasted and the okra went into the crock pot.)

Anyway, today's excerpt is short, because it's entirely Zero Draft. No light polish this evening. Enjoy... I guess?

What she absolutely did not expect was a short, dark woman in a button-down blouse and jeans of indeterminate color--it was dark in there, the curtains drawn tight, the only light what ventured in from the hallway fluorescents past Lia--a woman fallen from the bed to the floor, legs tangled in the blankets, her arms still outstretched from having reached for the nearest support, which had happened to be Lia's nightstand, temporary rest place for cast-off coins and life accoutrements still on her person at bedtime. The woman lay under the strewn shards of last night's water glass, two pairs of glasses, uncountable loose change, and random silverwhere. Her clothes were no longer bloodstained, but you'd expect a woman to change clothes sometime in five weeks. You might not expect her alive and unwounded if the last time you saw her she'd been dead of a slit throat, though.

Lia stared, her right hand slowly lowering the kitchen knife.

"Oh, like that was going to work," said Jet. "Trained assassin, remember? Well--come on, can I get a little help here?" Lia backed up a step, shaking her head. "Sorry about your glass--I hope it wasn't terribly irreplaceable? Hey--Lia--don't be like that--"

She was slamming the door before she even knew she was moving. Slamming the door, dropping the knife, bolting down the hall and out the door. She knew you couldn't run away from hallucinations, but she didn't know anything else to do but try.

(Meanwhile - yum, birthday cake! And possibly more beer...)

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.

Since I've been blogging this week, I've been having doubts. This stuff I say I remember: did it really happen that way? It's more than just "Was the poem on display in first or third grade?" or "Was it tenth grade or twelfth grade when Mr. Day and Ms. Petersen showed me how you submit a story for publication?" Since I've name-checked actual people, I'm half-expecting any of them to show up on Facebook or in my email to tell me, "I don't know what you're talking about. Did you make this up?" I'm very much afraid that I may have done just that.

At some point during the last decade, I was engaging in some of that mild daughter-to-mother-about-husband griping that you hear about in sit-coms and romances. Nothing important, nothing damning, just a half-laughing exasperated kvetch about a silly argument John and I had had that week. At some point, Mom laughed and said, "Niki, hasn't he learned yet that you remember everything?"

Woo uncomfortable. Because, growing up, that wasn't a compliment. It was synonymous with "You sure can hold a grudge, can't you?" When the fact was, I did remember things, hurtful things among them, with a high level of emotional detail and a word-for-word recall. And it would be like living the episode all over again. The only advantage was, the intervening time had allowed me to match words to experience. So I'd describe the memory, explain the way it had hurt, try to get someone who didn't live inside my head to understand.

But was I then, am I now, remembering things correctly? It seems that it's less likely that I have an astonishing memory than that I have a normal, vague, wishy-washy memory alongside a writer's instinct to convert everything into narratives. I tell myself stories about what happened, and the stories take the place of the memory. I'm not sure how much of what I remember is the event, and how much is the cleaned-up, narratively sound story I made up around the event.

I wonder if other writers have this doubt?

The upshot of all this maundering is, I'm not sure exactly when the previous or following events happened, or even quite whether they happened in exactly this way. But this is the story I'm going to tell about them.

Sometime between my sophomore and senior years, Ms. Petersen encouraged me to submit a story I'd written to a local contest. My family will remember this, because I think Mom did a lot of reading it to aunts and uncles over the phone: "Dancers of Land and Sea," a quiet little conversational story that took place in a mental institution between an insufficiently subordinate woman, a psychologically cut-off drowning survivor, and a cynical and skeptical doctor. I didn't know anything about mental institutions outside our high school's recent production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I had a tendency to get preachy with The Moral Of The Story, but the results seemed to work. The story was apparently pretty decent for my age and lack of experience. It placed second in the contest.

Have I blogged about this before? It feels familiar. Maybe because I've told this story a lot to friends, face to face, fossilizing the memory in layers of tidy narrative. This time around I want to emphasize something specific: I would never have entered the contest without my teacher making me aware of it--and without her telling me, "This story you wrote? You should enter it. It's good." I was a headstrong, independent, stubborn bull of a girl with an ego that could have floated a hot air balloon--but its amazing how far that wouldn't have gotten me just on its own. I needed someone in my corner pushing me out into the center of the ring.

The contest awards were to be given out at the New Orleans Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival. Does anyone remember the NOSF3? Google reassures me that about two people mention it. I wouldn't know; I didn't know the first thing about conventions, didn't go to one until 2002. If I'd had my way that night, I wouldn't have gone at all. I hated getting dressed up, I mean in dresses, and I hated the goddamned pretentious ritual of formal occasions. And I was going to have to put up with all that and keep my elbows off the table and not drink out my soup bowl or use my fingers to pinch the last unwieldy bits on my plate against my fork. But Mom wouldn't let me get out of it. (For which, my sincere thanks.) Off we went to the French Quarter and the convention hotel.

The award banquet was as uncomfortable as I'd expected, of course. The table was cluttered, there was no good place for my legs to go, my feet didn't touch the floor so I couldn't support myself in a relaxed posture, and I was afraid of breaking one of the million incomprehensible rules that made the difference between "good manners" and "I can't believe how badly you embarrassed me tonight!" Nothing really changes; the last bit is no longer a factor, but the rest? Why must there be so many things at every place setting?

But then came the various awards. And then came the award for my contest: something like the NOSF3 Young Writers Award, something like that. And then it was time for me to walk toward the front of the room and accept my certificate from the smiling lady holding out her hand to shake mine.

I was learning a lot about the mechanics of the writing and publishing industry. But I knew nothing yet about the people in it. I knew which authors I liked to read, of course, but of publishers and editors and the sorts of people who go to professional conventions I was very very ignorant. I was shaking hands with Ellen Datlow, then editor of Omni Magazine. I don't think I'd heard either name before in my life.

"You should submit something to Omni," she told me. "Thank you," I said. I went back to my table.

And dang if I didn't take her at her word. A real editor, someone who puts stories in magazines that people actually read, had told me to submit! Hot damn! I wasted no time. I acquired a copy of Omni's submission guidelines. I followed them to the letter. I agonized over a cover letter mentioning our brief meeting at NOSF3 and her kind invitation to submit. I mailed off my contest-winning story!

And, very soon after that, I had my very first rejection letter--and my very first real-life lesson in the importance of researching your market. As you know (Bob), Omni published science fiction. "Dancers" was very much urban fantasy.

Oops. But "Oops" notwithstanding, I had a goal now. And not just a goal, but a set-your-heart-on-it, pursue-it-through-the-years goal. I had failed this time, but just wait. One day... one day... But then Omni Magazine folded, and I still hadn't been published in it. But that was OK, because a few years after that there was SciFiction. And one day... one day... And SciFiction closed its doors too, but still I had this goal. And the intervening years had convinced me it was an important goal: One day, I would sell a story to Ellen Datlow.

Which is the punchline that this series of blog posts has been leading up to: One day is today.

That professional sale of my story "First Breath" I mentioned a few months ago? I get to blab about the details now, because the table of contents (TOC) has been announced and everything. My story will appear in Ellen Datlow's forthcoming anthology Blood and Other Cravings, to be published by Tor in, so the estimate goes, the fall of 2011.

*blink* *blink* Wow. That means that, in addition to being in a Datlow anthology, I'm going to be published by Tor. Wow. *blink*

Maybe if I say it enough times it'll seem ordinary.

But a really important thing here is--I would never have submitted the story if I didn't, again, have a writer in my corner pushing me forward. I've been attending a bimonthly writing class in Denver for about 6 years. Local writer Melanie Tem--I'd say "horror writer," but that would be woefully incomplete; The Deceiver is far too complex a family drama to be simply called horror; and have you read her and Steve's The Man on the Ceiling?--anyway, Melanie hosts a writing group that I've been going to since running into one of her students at World Horror 2004. It's a pretty basic class. Sometimes we critique a manuscript, sometimes we bring in shorter pieces to read aloud, and sometimes we read aloud very short pieces written right there in class. Sometimes we just talk shop.

I volunteered "First Breath" for the group to review, and, as you may remember, my heart was in my teeth about it. I mean, it has sexy stuffs in it! But another student had brought in a piece the time before that had an actual complete sex scene in it, so screw fear, let's do this. And as it turned out the comments around the table were overwhelmingly positive, and the negatives were overwhelmingly helpful, and everything was overwhelmingly awesome. Peer critique went like peer critique should.

Then, about a week later, Melanie emailed me. Ellen Datlow was putting out the call for submissions to a closed anthology, she said, and Melanie, who'd been invited to submit, had also been given the go-ahead to pass the invite along to me. (Apparently she'd said something like, "So I have this student, I have no idea why she isn't published yet, who just turned in this amazing story..." This is me, blushing and stammering: *blush*) The anthology would have to do with vampires, but not your ordinary vampires, and Melanie thought my story would be a perfect fit. "But they're not vampires, not really..." Yeah, but they kinda sorta were, right? Just not blood-suckers. Which the submission guideline specifically wanted them not to be. So. Perfect, right?

Right. Apparently so. I received an acceptance-conditional-upon-revision on May 2, and within a few days I was signing and mailing back a contract. How weird to think that last time I mailed an envelope to this address, I was out by the outgoing mailbox with my purple fountain pen waiting for the post officer to show up so I could beg him to give me the envelope back momentarily so I could scribble VAMPIRISM on the outside like I'd totally forgotten to the day before. Insecurity then, totally incredulity now. Wow.

I cannot begin to tell you--well, I can begin, but "begin" is about all I can do--what Melanie's support means to me. This wasn't the first invite-only anthology she got me permission to submit to. When she emailed me about this one, I thanked her profusely: "I feel honored that you keep sending opportunities like this my way." To which she replied, matter-of-factly, "I'm on a mission to get you published." Support like that, you can't count on getting it. You can only thank the powers that be for the blessing of having it.

I feel sort of like I've written those two pages of writer's acknowledgments you get at the beginning of novels, which is a little silly when the piece I've sold is under 3,000 words long. But this sale feels like a huge landmark in my personal path as a writer. It isn't the goal, certainly not a final destination, but it's a goal I've had close to my heart since that night at a downtown New Orleans hotel. I think goals are like playing connect-the-dots, really. Or climbing a rock face. You only ever aim for the next dot, the next hold, because until you get to the next one, you can't really work on the one after that. But then you do, and so you can. So you go on.

But before going on, this set of holds is a good place to pause, rest my arms, and think about some of the people (and there are ever so many more!) without whose support I'd have never gotten this far up the mountain.

I love you all.

In addition to being given absolute permission to follow that star, a budding writer needs support that maybe their parents, if they're not writers themselves, can't give: concrete knowledge about the path leading to that star. Also knowledge about avoiding things unhelpful to the journey. Knowledge that enables, and knowledge that inoculates.

These days, though I've never submitted a book for publication but once (unsuccessfully) nor attempted to attract the interest of an agent, I feel fairly confident I can avoid the scammy pitfalls that many writers fall prey to when they first begin seeking publication. And if you get me on my soapbox I can talk about the hallmarks of publishing scams and bad agents until the cows have not only come home but have also been tucked into bed. I devoutly hope some of my soapbox time has helped prevent a friend from falling into the 7-year clutches of Publish America or the black hole that is the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency.

I learned a lot of what I know in that regard from the good writers and editors in the AbsoluteWrite.com Forum community. That's where I heard "Yog's Law: Money flows toward the writer," i.e. don't pay to be published; the proper relationship of writer to publisher is as a vendor, not as a customer. That's where I learned that reputable publishers consider readers their customers, that reputable agents only get paid when you do, that fee-bearing contests are generally less useful than the for-free, year-round "contest" you enter every time you submit a story to a paying market, that an advance against royalties is the publisher's estimate of how much your book will sell. That a reputable publisher or agent generally doesn't surf the internet in search of more manuscripts, since they get plenty mailed to them without asking. That if a publisher or agent tells you they'll give you "the chance you deserve," that their competition is "afraid of them" because they're going to single-handedly "revolutionize the industry," you should turn your back and run--not walk--as far away from them as quickly as you can.

The more a writer knows about how the industry works, the better choices they can make and the less likely they are to be wooed by incompetents and frauds. But that knowledge needs a home prepared for it in the writer's mind.

For that, I have a couple more teachers to thank.

I continued on at Metairie Park Country Day (with the exception of 5th grade, about which long story), and eventually I got to my sophomore year in high school. That year I had the opportunity to give up a free period (free periods! oooh!) and instead take a one-on-one writing elective in the brand-spanking-new computer lab.

(This is also when I started using WordPerfect 5.1. The computer lab was full of Macs, and my parents had a PC running Windows 3.1. MS Works was no more compatible with, well, anything then than it is now. My brother's after-school tutor lent me the 5.25" floppies to illicitly install WP51, and the rest is history.)

Our English department boasted not one but two published authors: Betsy Petersen and Chet Day. Under them (making it more of a two-to-one class than a one-on-one), I had a designated daily class period in which nothing was expected of me but the sound of typing. If I finished a piece, I could of course turn the draft in for them to read and comment on.

What a boon that was for a young writer! I believe I've gushed about this before: Designated writing time doesn't only give a writer time to ply her craft; it also gives her explicit permission to take time to write. You see the difference? That elective didn't just say, "It's important enough to spend an hour every day doing it." It said, "You are allowed to consider writing this important." This is exceedingly vital permission to give a beginning writer. Oftentimes we don't get it at all. It's much more the case that we hear, "Are you busy? Oh, just writing, huh? In that case, you can spare some time to watch my kids/chop some vegetables/run an errand for me..."

But I got told, "Writing is important. If you want to make it your life, then give it space in your life every day." And having learned that, I've strived to surrounded myself with people who respect that. It's a good thing.

So that was awesome. Then, in senior year, we did it again, but this time with a fellow classmate. (Hi, Chip!). Throughout the year the two of us read each other's work and critiqued it under Mr. Day's and Ms. Petersen's guidance. And that was even more awesome.

And at some point during that year (or the sophomore one, I'm not sure), I asked our teachers, "So... how does one go about getting a story published?"

I remember Mr. Day's answer like it was this morning. "Well, first, do you think you're ready for your story to get rejected?"

"If I'm not," said I, "I had better be."

And so I learned about preparing a manuscript for professional submission, about researching a market's content and guidelines, about form rejections and personal rejections. I learned how to navigate the library's copy of The Writer's Market. But, more importantly, I learned how to think about rejection letters. I learned that submitting a manuscript may feel like baring your soul to an uncaring world which will spit in your face, but that in reality it's just attempting to sell a product. And I made my very first professional submission and I got my very first rejection letter. (About this, more later.)

I'm not going to claim that I magically bypassed that whole "taking it personally" thing that we writers do when we get rejected. I'm still there. No matter how much I go, "Ah, another rejection letter. Time to submit elsewhere!" I've still got that voice in my head going "But... but... but don't they love me?" Like acrophobia while rock climbing, I doubt that voice will ever go away.

But I learned from the beginning that I would feel that way, and that the goal was to keep submitting anyway. And to be a professional about it. And also to not make a jackass of myself by letting that awful rejected feeling dictate how I react.

Instinctual fear of heights? Climb anyway; you're safe. Instinctual fear of rejection? Keep writing and keep submitting. The fear never gets smaller. But the task of moving forward despite the fear gets easier, and that makes the fear seem smaller.

Another thing I learned: Reasonable expectations. A rejection letter means either the story hasn't found the right editor or the story simply isn't ready. It doesn't mean the publishing industry is broken or unprepared for the shining spectacle of my golden words. Knowing that is key to being a professional, to improving the writer's craft, to avoiding the scammers who prey on rejection disillusionment, and to allowing an editor to help improve the story even more after your story gets... *gulp* ...accepted.

This is getting long, and the punchline I'm trying to get to is still a ways off. So here's one of those "To be continued" endings Mrs. Waters would remember from way back when, and we'll finish up tomorrow.