author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I'm in Montreal today, and will be until Tuesday morning. Montreal is where WorldCon is this year. It is full of lovely architecture, found art, great food, and cab drivers that speak only French. This weekend it is also full of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fans enjoying the heck out of each other's company.

Today I took some pictures. That's kinda news. I carry a camera with me but I'm sort of missing the shutterbug instinct, so the machine stays useless in the bookbag most of the time. It stayed there during this morning's "Stroll With The Stars" (a morning walk about town in company with several Industry Names, sort of a moving kaffeeklatsch without the sign-up sheet). That was silly. But I took it out for a couple of things today.

First, there's Leah Bobet doing her half-hour of autograph duty. Leah writes fiction, critiques manuscripts at this year's writing workshops, and edits the online speculative fiction magazine Ideomancer. Which is where I submitted "Sidewalks" at the end of June. Leah's response to this was not a rejection letter, but a rewrite request back on July 20th. This is a first for me, for a fiction submission. And it blows my mind. I always thought short fiction, especially short-short fiction, pretty much got accepted or rejected as is; how could a 500-word story be worth the time an editor takes going back and forth with the writer over revisions? Short fiction magazines are on tight budgets as it is! And yet here we are.

Rewriting "Sidewalks," as I've said here before, scares the crap out of me. Such a short story is like a tightrope walk; it balances on such a fragile line between the twin pitfalls of overwriting and underwriting. And I've already taken some falls on the overwriting side, making me really nervous when I'm asked to make something clearer or more explicit. When the response to my first rewrite came back asking for a second, I swear my mental reaction was "O Gods, what now? Don't make me do this! I'll break it for sure!" But then I printed out Leah's email, poured myself a shot of Glenmorangie and a bathtub of piping hot water, and contemplated the task in as relaxed a manner as my high-strung little self could manage.

I'm extremely glad for this process, and not just because it's not a rejection letter. Without the rewrite request, I might have been content with the story as it was. Sometimes it takes another reader to point out that the story isn't all it could be, and what it could be is worth striving for. Now, even if everything falls through and this process doesn't end in publication, I will still have a vastly improved story. That's pure gold.

I sent off the second rewrite shortly before WorldCon. I'd refrained from blogging about it while the process was still ongoing, up to now, but it's become too hard to resist. I mean, I've got pictures of Leah and me proudly displaying our knitting at WorldCon! (Leah is knitting her first pair of socks. They have a lovely ribbing that's a sort of barberpole lace. It's a pattern from Ravelry whose name I forget.) So not only am I all a-squee over having a fiction editor take this kind of interest in my story, but on top of that I got to geek out about knitting with said editor! How cool is that?

The third picture is Paul Cornell. Paul won a Hugo last year for a two-part Doctor Who episode that he wrote. It was based on a tie-in novel from several Doctors ago which he also wrote. And some readers may have noticed that a chapter in that novel bears a title ripped straight from a Kate Bush lyric. This sort of thing rarely turns out to be coincidence. Paul is a huge Kate Bush fan, and today I got to hear him give a presentation on her music as great fantasy writing. Do you know how seriously cool it is to hear someone whose work you admire totally geek out--in an educated, serious, literature-analysis way--about someone else whose work you admire? It's way cool. In fact, Paul has the coolest theory I have ever heard about the plot of The Ninth Wave (essentially Side 2 of Hounds of Love). (It involves alien abduction.)

This is what makes WorldCon the beautiful wonderful miraculous magical event that it is. Finding out who your heroes consider their heroes. Hearing them enthuse hard in full fan mode about their heroes. Also, finding out that you have more in common with those in the industry than just the industry itself. And I haven't even gotten into the other panels I attended today, or the great conversations at the Making Light party, or or or or or...

It's 3:30 AM. I should wrap this up and go to sleep. Good night!

This morning, whilst scribbling today's date in my Morning Pages notebook, I suddenly realized that June in fact only has 30 days in it and not, say, the 42 or so I must have assumed. Plenty of time to get a story ready for its first submission! Or, y'know, not.

But if it's under 500 words long, we're looking at possible, right? And if it's 400 words of a story that's been waiting two years to be submitted, when I originally meant it to go from creation to submission in the space of a week--well, it's about time, right?

Thus ends the editing paralysis surrounding "The Day the Sidewalks Melted".

I went back to the original draft, the one I sent around to friends on the day I first wrote it. Then I read my rewrite, the one John told me died on the page. And he was right. I thought it corrected for clunk? It was the clunk. Comparing the two drafts was like a concise lesson in how less is more: two or three sharp details can do a much better job of painting a picture than can twenty. And when the story is about an event that none of the characters (nor even, quite, the author--shh!) understand, but can only describe by its effects, then two or three sharp details about those effects is what the story needs.

Which isn't even getting into the concision required by the flash format (400 words; each one has to be right), or the different implications of different narrative frames (this is not a scholarly treatise! this is a break-up story).

So I sent it off and soon received Ideomancer's auto-response. I did not seek anyone's comments on the draft, because what I really don't need are another two years of paralysis. John will read it tonight. (I hope he likes it!)

And now I am no longer thinking, every single morning, "I really need to repair and submit 'Sidewalks'". Yay. On to the next thing!

So, yes, as of about 9:30 PM last night I completed the eking out of my 7th NaNoWriMo win. (7th? Good Gods--quickly assembles mental list of NaNoWriMo novel drafts of yore--Yes, that's right, I've done this every year since 2002!) "Eking out" because, once yWriter told me I had more than 50K words, I used its handy "Export obfuscated NaNoWriMo text" command, opened the resulting text file, Selected All (CTRL-A), Copied (CTRL-C), and Pasted (CTRL-V) this into the NaNoWriMo Word Count Validator, and was rewarded with a word count downsizing to about 49380. I think it's the usual deal where the em-dash formation I'm in the habit of using (word!--'nother word!) causes two words to count as one in more conservative word count algorithms. Whatever. So I went back to the scene I was working on, did another few paragraphs, tried again, and so forth until the word count you see here. And the purple "Winner!" bar and the proud happy Viking Longship image and the web page icons and all that.

So I took today off. Well, not off off; I had to tackle the household finances, which had sort of languished for a month and a half. Dug out all the bills from the pile of Stuff To Be Dealt With, some of them past due; paid them; pulled up the checking and saving accounts online and made sure my balances matched theirs; y'know. The stuff you ignore when you're frantically trying to meet a deadline. I got that done. But otherwise, today was a play day. I went to the gym and rocked out in the bouldering cave, and I went to IHOP with friends and played Puzzle Pirates until I was completing carpentry puzzles in my brain on the bike ride home.

Tomorrow, however, I write again. For one thing, the novel still isn't really done. I haven't really gotten my characters from point A to point B, where point A is "at each other's throats" and B is "angrily declaring love for each other". I still haven't entirely disentangled my idea of how the bad guy functions and how the main character plans to fight him/her/it, although I do understand how the main character actually ends up defeating it. And, as usual, I haven't figured out a useful denouement. A novel-length story will often exist in my head with a total Hannah-Barbera laugh-track ending ("Quick, someone say something goofy so we can all laugh and go home!") for months before I finally figure out how to tie the bow on that package.

Also, there are other stories than the Demonic Sweater Story that could be finished and sent out to meet the nice people.

So. Today was playtime. Tomorrow is back-to-work time. To be precise, tomorrow at 11:30 when some NaNoWriMo buddies and I will meet up for coffee and writing time. Just because the calendar's ticked over from November to December doesn't mean the write-ins have to stop.

Me at 6:30 (ish): *Thunk.*

The United States of America at 9:00 (ish): *THUNK!*

Congratulations, President Elect Barack Obama.

(One day, people will ask, "Where were you when they called the election for the first black President of the United States of America?" And I will say, "Watching Indecision 2008 on Comedy Central." That's right. Colbert was blathering, and Stewart made the announcement, and what's-his-bucket came out from backstage bawling and wearing no pants.")

(What? Look, it'll be on YouTube. You look it up.)

I do believe this is my first professional submission in mumble mumble ahem months. Also my first professional fiction submission in somewhat longer. Man, where's my head been? It's been up... something. Obviously.

Anyway, I've now written, rewritten, and submitted a story to the aforementioned Haunted Legends anthology. I used the ghost story that I demonstrate pulling my hair out over here. Briefly, the memory of it popped into my head while I was, I think, half asleep on the bus home after working my weekly 5-hour volunteer shift at the local Community Supported Agriculture-style farm--never underestimate the power of exhaustion to bring back-burner content quite suddenly to the fore apropos of nothing. I spent the next week trying to find that story and/or remember where I'd read it. Once I found it, I started writing.

...Sorta. Actually, I kept procrastinating. "Hey, I've still got 5... no, 4... no, 3 days left until deadline. I'm a genius under deadline. I have time."

Then a fellow Viable Paradise X alumnus got a-hold of me via IM and cackled madly. "Ahahahaha! I have finished my story for Haunted Legends!" He also complained of the loss of objectivity and sanity that come of spending many consecutive hours thrashing about on the printed page.

Oh, it was so on. I admitted to not being... ahem ...quite done yet, and suggested that he email me his story for beta reading; I would email him my story along with comments on his. By the next morning.

Yay! In one fell swoop I got a beta reader and insane pressure to finish the story, like, NAO!

So I did (although only for values of "next morning" that equal noon). And he did. And I rewrote today (after another 5 hours at the farm and a little bit of running around town interviewing people for the currently assigned StyleCareer.com eGuide). And I submitted it.

Yay!

I really, honestly, at least for right now this moment, am totally unconcerned as to whether the story gets rejected or accepted. Ask me again tomorrow and that will probably have changed.

But right now, today, I am a writer.

YAY!

You know what that means. Only, minus the "much-extended" part and plus 10,000 words. I was a good girl this month.

If anyone needs me, I'll be on the Viridian Ocean terrorizing the natives. (Yarrr.)

Tomorrow, John and I are going to go to the gym and try to test positive for lead belay. (Tuesday morning we were deferred--the proctor wanted to see us improve at cutting each other slack. Er, giving each other slack. Y'know.) After that, I intend, as promised, to do some rewriting stuffs. Only I've got chores too. Grr. WHY DO THINGS NEVER STOP???

Did I forget to post here and say that I won NaNoWriMo 2007? And reached the end of the book too? Sorry. I did this. I even posted the last few paragraphs as an excerpt at my NaNoWriMo profile. Posting that is sort of a way of saying it out loud: I did it, I got to the end, and I'm not going to delete it all in a fit of insecurity, or whatever. And of course once November ends, you can't change what you put up there, so posting an excerpt is kind of like making a declaration you can't take back.

Things are fairly quiet on the writing front since. I'm easing back into it slowly. I have another couple freelance work-for-hire projects ahead of me, a short-short I want to have ready to submit by the new year (the one about the sidewalks melting) which shouldn't take me that long really but we can't get too crazy y'know. Also another short story (the one about the plant virus) that's long overdue its overhaul.

I'm also just back from an excellent fun trip to Boston, and soon to go on a trip to Seattle. John's using up those vacation hours that would otherwise go poof at the end of the year, and airfare has been unaccountably reasonable, so we've been Visiting.

That's all the update I can usefully think to make at present. More later, hopefully not too much later.

Yes, I did break 40,000 at the Write-A-Thon yesterday! And my total of some 7500 words produced at that location won me the third prize, a bag full of Neat Stuff! (I now, for instance, own a small Moleskine notepad, so I can maybe figure out why everyone loves these things so much.) I also went home with a lot of the extra stickers from the Denver region, so maybe I can get those to the high schoolers and the Longmont contingent.

The Organizer is actually one of the founding doners for NaNoWriMo, and she'd in fact been to the San Francisco Write-A-Thon. She hopes that next year we can have another Colorado Write-A-Thon with planning further in advance and smaller, localized Write-A-Thons that similarly function as fundraisers for the Office of Letters & Light. I'm looking forward to it.

I would, of course, have blogged this yesterday, but I was already half falling asleep at the keyboard during the Write-A-Thon. John and I pretty much collapsed when we got home. Actually, we collapsed on the sofas out by the Wii, where we downloaded the original NES "Metroid" game and had a very relaxed nostalgia session.

Right now I'm at the Lazy Dog in downtown Boulder, attempting to watch the Saints v. Panthers game at a sort of oblique angle and working on today's 1667. Join me if you're in the area and don't mind football crowds.

Update: We won, by the way. We kicked their butts, and then we kicked their puppies. And now we're biting our nails over next week's game against Tampa Bay.

That is all.

More later when my brain returns.

I have Good News. The article about the hand-knit bikini experiment? It really really will be published. At any rate, I was recently asked to turn in a slight (very slight) revision to it along with a bio and a nice headshot of me. And money arrived in my PayPal account. So it all looks like getting published. Hurrah!

However, the publisher has started sending me emails with strangely spam-like rhetoric. "Nicole Do you know the TRUTH about knitting?" "The insider secrets that you should know before you even THINK of starting a knitting piece!" Fear! Feeear the knitting! Without our help the knitting will surely defeat you! It's like the headlines from a cover of Reader's Digest. Should I be worried?

Meanwhile, I'm under a deadline that is two days gone, and two more deadlines have sprung up looking scary in the distance, and I haven't touched any fiction in almost a month. This makes me cranky.

However! There is extracurricular good news. I am this close to being able to legally act as Pilot in Command again--it's likely that after tomorrow's lesson the instructor will sign off on my flight review (he did! Yay! I can has endorsement!)--and John and I have been taking beginner rock-climbing classes at the neighborhood gym. Both of these do wonders for one's sense of competence. Yesterday I walked into the gym in a tank top and ill-fitting shorts, horribly self-conscious about being short and pudgy and hairy and a total n00b. (Shut up. I know.) Then I started climbing, and then I got to the top of the route, and then all I could think was "Ha! Who cares how I look? I don't care how I look. Ain't nobody gonna talk to me about how I look. I look bad ass." Bad ass for a n00b, sure, the route was only labeled 5.8, but still. A highly recommended experience.

No, really. Getting back to work now. Laters.