author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Behold! Sock. Sock on foot of newly graduated and duly celebrated Tree. It fits! And it is both rainbow and sparkly, as requested by its recipient. I call it "The Margaritaville Parrot". It is made with two different skeins of Sockotta to achieve the rainbow color sequence, red and blue reinforcement thread, and Trendsetter Yarn's "Spruce" added in every fifth row or so in the cuff.

In this picture the sock is only crew length. I've got it off the needles on a bit of string for the sake of letting Tree try it on. I am now extended it to knee length. There will be more pictures when the sock is done.

So, I am a good knitter.

But I am a bad, bad writer-wife.

Back in 2002, I dug up an old science fiction cum horror story called, at the time, "Quiet In The Night" (after a line from Yeats's "The Two Trees", stuck in my head thanks to Loreena McKennitt), and gave it a thorough revision in preparation for the Weird Tales Short Story Contest--winners to be announced at that year's World Horror Convention in Chicago. It was my first year attending, and it only occurred to me to go because Neil Gaiman was a guest of honor that year.

At the time, my husband was living temporarily in Las Vegas for reasons to do with work. I sent him a copy, now entitled "Putting Down Roots", after I submitted the story to the contest. And for months and months, he didn't read it, also for reasons to do with work. He was working from home when he wasn't in the office, and falling asleep at the keyboard was a daily occurrence. He did not have a lot of time to read fiction, not even his wife's fiction, and this was a story he'd already expressed some dislike for.

A brief pause for synchronicity: In Chicago, across from the Airport Radisson, there was a Mediterranean restaurant that served gyros and falafel and the like. They also served fried perch. I had not hitherto associated fried perch with Mediterranean cuisine. I associated it with summer weekends at my Dad's friend's fishing camp on Lac Des Allemands, upon which memories I had based the setting of "Putting Down Roots". There's a scene in there in which perch are caught and fried and eaten. Although I didn't even place in the contest, and Weird Tales decided not to publish the story, I couldn't help but interpret the odd menu item as one of the ways the Universe has of patting me on the back. "Good job, Niki. You wrote it, you finished it, you submitted it. You went to a convention and met people in the industry, too. You, my dear, are on the right path."

And then months went by, and John didn't find time to read the story. Finally I morphed into my Mr. Hyde phase and began badgering, pestering, and guilt-tripping him until he finally agreed to read it and call me back with comments. I am not proud of myself as Mr. Hyde. It isn't the best side of me, and it makes me wonder why this man continues to stay married to me. I can be a real bitch.

Well, in spite of or because of my bitchiness, he read it. And he called me back. And he gave me a lot of good critique. I mean, a lot. Better than I deserved. I took notes all over the back couple of pages of my current writing notebook, and I resolved to do a new rewrite on the strength of my husband's comments.

Flash forward to today. This is the story I want to bring to the Borderlands Press Writer's Boot Camp to workshop. But since I haven't touched it in four years, I want to do the rewrite I promised myself and my husband that I would do.

And I can't find those notes.

I've flipped through every notebook I've filled since WHC02. And they just aren't there--or else I'm too blind to see them.

I'm deeply ashamed. John was exceedingly patient with me in spite of my Mr. Hyde phase; he took the time out of an exceedingly busy working life to read the story; his critique was exceedingly thorough. And I can't find the notes. I wasted all that generosity. All I remember of his comments is a vague sense of the expository bits being long and boring.

So... I guess I'll just be rewriting the story from my own current reread, with only my own 4-year-detached eyes and instincts to go on. And although he's heard this several times already, in person, I'm just going to continue apologizing to my long-suffering husband for having lost the notes.

And when I have time I'm going to read every effin' page of those notebooks until I find those notes. Dammit.

Still slogging along with the mother-son phone call. Stupid phone call. Amtrak's City of New Orleans is just getting into Chicago. It's running an hour late because we have a freight train crawling along ahead of us. Stupid freight train. The two girls behind me are having a conversation that alternates between teenage-style boy gossip and five-year-old-style whining about what a waste of time this trip is and how they'll never take the train again and they want their money back. Stupid whiny boy-crazy girls.

Will have about a four-hour layover at Union Station before catching the California Zephyr for Denver at 1:50 PM. Will probably find some wi-fi there to post this, after finding links to spruce things up with. Meanwhile I'm meeting an old friend for lunch at the Corner Bakery. That means I probably won't be hoofing it to the public library, since that's about a mile and a half in the opposite direction. It's to the southwest of Union Station, I think; the Corner Bakery is to the northeast. That's OK. I like seeing a different bit of Chicago each time I come through.

Once on the westbound train, I shall continue the slog. Wish me luck.

P.S. The attached picture is the part of Chicago's Union Station that actually looks like a train station ought. You have to come in from the correct entrance to see it, though. Either end of the Canal Street side of the building will do; the central entrance, though, will send you right down into the bit that resembles a modern airport and is therefore boring.

P.P.S. Did not manage to find myself wi-fi in Chicago. Just lots of pay-per-use wi-fi: tmobile courtesy of Starbucks, and SurfAndSip courtesy of Cosi. Stupid pay-per-use wi-fi. This post will have to wait until Denver and get backdated accordingly.

Lookie me! I'm a Metroblogger!

I've also been convinced, for the sake of reading others' friends-only blog entries, to join LiveJournal. Don't look for a hell of a lot of blogging from me there, though. I mean, I'm here instead. And at Denver Metblogs, for when I have nothing to say about writing but plenty to say about my locale.

(I also have a Blogger account, for the sake of mouthing off in the comments sections of others' blogs, but I haven't set up a blog there. I may do, just for the sake of putting up that same "Redirection" post as I've got at LJ.)

So. To everyone coming here from those two places (I'm being optimistic about that), Hi there!

Today: Another hour of birds-eye read-through on what I like to call "the unicorn novel." I had forgotten how hella cool the scene in which Diane burns Danny's note rather than give it to her teacher is. "You want it, huh? Well, take it!" And how heartachey is the scene in which she finally comes to him as the unicorn. But there are oh-so-many theme-ish threads to tie through them and into them. My Gods I've got a job ahead of me. I keep taking notes on the page and in WordPerfect, and I have no idea how I'll make use of them when I'm done the read-through. I mean, it'll be just a mess of "Oh, yeah, and another thing..." Maybe I'll have to take notes on the notes first, organize them into scenes on index cards, shuffle them about. Something like that.

I am convinced that this is going to be a good book, though. Depending on how I count (Completed drafts only, or completed drafts plus the ongoing whenever-I-come-up-with-a-scene Stormsinger Saga), it's either my third or my fourth, so theoretically that means it's quite possibly potentially publishable, right? It's not the manuscript that Hemingway recommended tossing into the ocean, right? I'm determined that this is going to be a good book, because, dammit, I care.

Um. So there!

It probably says something unflattering about me that one of my passtimes is reading ancient USENET flame wars. I can say that thus far I have not actually given in to temptation and posted responses to five-year-old posts. But it's been a near thing.

[Begin anecdote] ##Trust me, this is going somewhere.

There was this post at the AbsoluteWrite.com forums which I can't seem to find anymore, sorry, but it linked to this thread here. (Don't click the link! It will eat your soul!) The "discussion" has an all star cast and one very clueless, rude would-be author suffering from Golden Word syndrome. (Don't be tempted!) It probably wouldn't have been nearly as long a thread as it became were it not for a spectacularly stunning exchange between the would-be author and one of the shining stars in that all-star cast. She gave his awful novel excerpt a detailed critique, lovely in its thoroughness and more generous than he deserved. He dismissed it as petty. She said she was therefore puzzled as to what he expected in a critique. His response? "If you've ever written a real book... you'd know. :)"

(Yes, that was a smiley on the end there. As in, "I've just been breathtakingly rude but don't take offense because I tacked a smiley onto the end of it!")

They say that on the Internet no one can hear you scream, but even over that distance of five years I could hear the distinct sound of a convention full of authors' and editors' jaws dropping.

(But really, don't read it! There but for your forebearance will go weeks of your productive life!)

So shortly after that happened, another star in that cast picked up the gauntlet and began a new thread in which he gave this would-be author's excerpt an even more detailed page-by-page critique. For which everyone else in the thread was grateful, except of course for the one person who had been specifically asked to killfile it. He didn't, so there was more juicy flamage, With The Result That...

[End anecdote]

[Do getToThePoint]

##Told you this was going somewhere!

...he found himself used as the example in a fascinating discussion about the banality of evil.

While reading Gene's latest excesses, with increasing horror, I also noted quietly that this is an interesting way to introduce a villain into a trusting community. The back of my head considered that, as there aren't many vicious pathological liars around in most people's lives, thanks be, I may be reading other people's versions of Gene Steinberg as Dark Lord for years to come.

The discussion that followed held examples of real live evil, which is rarely as flashy as Darth Vador or flamboyant as The Joker. Real pathological evil is hard to recognize, because most of us tell ourselves it doesn't exist, certainly not in our circle of friends. Pathologically evil people take advantage of our tendency to assume motives of goodwill in all. How many times have I myself quoted the Author's Creed For Creating Three-Dimensional Antagonists: "No one is the villain in their autobiography"?

It's true. I cling to my faith that the Creed is true. However, do not underestimate an antagonist's ability to reframe their villainy in their internal narrative. In real life, it isn't always helpful to tell yourself that they just want the best for everyone and are misguided as to what the best is. They may actually want the worst for you--but are convinced that desiring the worst for you is reasonable.

Not going to go into details about it, not going to name names, but... my husband and I are recently on the rebound from someone who fits the description. And the sad thing is, that someone probably has legitimate historical reasons for being broken in her particular ways. But she absolutely did not want the best for anyone; she merely was convinced that some of us were evil and out to get her and needed to be destroyed. Once you finally realize--and it can take a long time to realize--that this person expects her friends to make her the center of their lives, prioritized higher than preexisting friendships, than family, than marriage; and that her more obnoxious behavior, far from being unconscious, comprises active attempts to break up those preexisting relationships by which she feels threatened; that wrecks every pattern you have for interaction. You can no longer assume goodwill as a motive. You can no longer take for granted a beneficient common ground.

The point here is not "poor pitiful me, I have seen Evil." The point here is, realistic evil--or a damn good facsimile thereof--comes in all different flavors. A villain needn't be a misguided philanthropist or a self-described benevolent dictator to be three-dimensional. Sometimes the villain has an unjustified persecution complex, or an overdeveloped sense of vigilante-ism. And whatever the flavor, it's valuable to recognize a villain when it shows up in your life. Not just because you're better off wasting less time and energy on people like that (really; the self-defense mechanisms by which we manage them in our lives can be actively bad for the soul), but also because once you recognize it, you, for certain writerly values of the word "you," can use it.

'Cause when you're a writer, and you find yourself losing at the games of life, that's your consolation prize.

So I've got bad guys in The Golden Bridle. I've got a high school clique leader who's downright nasty. I've got the protagonist's boyfriend who uses the protagonist in all the worst ways. I've even got the protagonist herself, who starts off the novel in her guise as Bad-Ass Cool Chick, a guise she's build out of self-defense over the years. None of these people are motivated by wanting the best for everyone. They want the best for themselves, and they treat others poorly, and they rationalize their poor treatment of others as being the only way to give themselves the best, which of course they're convinced they deserve.

And when I stopped to think about it, I realize that many of the examples raised in the USENET thread I'm linking you to here, as well as the example I mention from my own life, they've got threads of behavior and rationalization that make sense in the context of my bad guys. And I thought, damn. These people are so right.

So I'm passing on the link as a public service to writers everywhere. Enjoy.

But don't, for the love of the Gods, read that first thread. Or, if you do, limit yourself to the "Cooking for Writers Who Forget To Eat" subthread. Recipes are very cool. And the posts where people invent whole fictional accountings for the rude would-be writer's mental state, that's kind of interesting and heart-warming. And--

[do slapSelfSilly]

Look, it's not worth it!

Quick shout-out going to Keith and Deric in Chicago, Illinois, who rang me up this afternoon on my cell phone and said not much more than, "Can we speak to Nicole? Hi, this is Keith. Deric is on the line, too," before hanging up on me. Hi y'all! Call back anytime y'all have more to say.

At last count, I have two contacts in the Chicago area. One's a gal I met there at World Horror Con '02, and I owe her email. Or she owes me email. I forget. The other's one of my bestest oldest childhood friends; she and her husband moved there after Katrina wrecked their brand-new New Orleans area home. Neither of these good people are named Keith or Deric. But I have known folks by those names, and for all I know, they could be in Chicago now. So, hey, you guys? If I should have recognized you, sorry I didn't!

(In the interest of accuracy, the call came from a 312 area code, which is Chicago, but the callers might have been elsewhere. That's the magic of cell phones.)

Meanwhile, I note that the NaNoPubYe.org goal for Month Three is 30 hours of editing, or one hour per day. As you've probably guessed, that's not going to happen before January is over. However, what with my plans to submit The Golden Bridle to Delacorte, there isn't a lot of other editor/agent researching necessary at this stage, so Month Four can be mainly a Month Three extension. Well, OK, it wouldn't hurt to research up a Plan B list, sure, just so I know where I'll be going afterwards on the off-chance that Delacorte doesn't heap glowing accolades upon my head, but it's not as urgent as it would be if I hadn't any idea of what Plan A was, I think.

OK, OK, I'm just justifying my being behind schedule. Fine. I admit it. Happy?!

The essay has been sent. Nevermind that it's three-quarters-past-midnight on the 16th; I have at last finished and submitted my "geek" essay. With any luck the editors will let the extra 45 minutes slide and they'll read it anyway.

I'm not as happy with it as I might be, but the ending made my nose prickle and my eyes water, so I guess the right chords get hit by the end. I'm not entirely sure my Mom would be as happy with it as I'd want her to, either; hopefully she'll take it in the spirit with which it's intendend.

And yes, yes I know, I had misspelled Jane Austen's name in my previous entry. All better now, see?

There. Now. On to other things with deadlines.

So, what, I figure a Jane Austen riff in an anthology about female geeks makes for a delightful, how-shall-we-say, frisson, a lovely little anachronistic twinge of humorous irony. Or just humor. Or maybe it just makes me sound like a pompous ass but, y'know, I'm willing to take that chance.

I'm having fun.

The problem with autobiographical essays is figuring out what the hell's so special about me of all people that anyone should bother publishing a polished up piece of my life in their pages. For money, even. Once I get past that problem--once I convince myself I actually have lived a story worth telling--the next pitfall for me is the tendency towards self-aggrandizement. A tendency which you just might have noticed in these very pages, in fact.

With this piece, though, I think I might just manage to come over both of those hurdles unscathed. The subject is something that needs saying, can't be said enough, and places all the praise on someone not the author.

This piece is going to be a 3,500 word "thank you" to my mother.

(Hi mom!)

The nutshell is, where some daughters have been told--where some, amazingly enough in this day and age, continue to get told--that if they don't play dumb they'll risk dying unwed and unloved, oh heck, oh horrors, my Mom gave me some remarkably sane advice: Better not to marry at all, than to marry a guy who's insecure around your brain. (I think it's safe to say that I took her advice). But this isn't just about marriage. Looking back over my growing-up years, I can see a long line of encouragements and priorities that stem from the same values of which Mom's advice was an apt expression: Don't suffer fools who won't suffer you to be who you are. Don't let anyone drag you down.

As parental values go, those are some good ones. And I think they may just be responsible for the weird variety of interests and pursuits I've ended up pursuing. Knitting and aviation and spinning wheels and MySQL/PHP widgets--what the hell, why not describe it in a she-geek essay wrapped up in a Jane Austen-style frame. Damn appropriate, I think.

This puppy should see submission tomorrow, one day ahead of the deadline. Thank goodness for email. But, since acceptance is never a guarantee, I'm going to just pause here and say, without need for prior editorial review:

Mom, ya done raised a geek, and for that she's eternally grateful. Love always.

I like to say that I symbolically fill my Midwinter's Night with those things that I want filling the coming year. If that is the case, then apparently I want a year full of cooking, cleaning, rum & bourbon, too much to eat, and not a heck of a lot of productivity. But Oh Well.

Every year, on the night before Solstice Day, I stay up all night burning a Yule log and keeping the door unlocked so that friends can drop by. I bake a fruitcake and start it marinating in time to offer some to Midwinter guests. I try to follow Bridget's egg nog recipe despite my not really knowing what it means to whip egg whites and heavy cream "until fluffy"; the results tend to be scrumptious despite my ignorance. I put holly over the door and encourage Pagan friends, fellow NaNoWriMo participants, John's gaming groups, and random neighbors to drop by. And then at about 5:30 or 5:45 I take off with a car full of whoever stayed all through and we go to Red Rocks for Drumming Up The Sun.

This year is a little different, mainly because I didn't do a good job of making sure people knew what was going on and when, but also because it's a weekday. And it's mid-December, just like it is every year. Bridget helped me pick out the Yule log (heck, she totally spotted it, and then helped me lug it home), but preparations for an out-of-town stint are keeping her too busy to come over. John brought Dave over for chess, but he's gone home now. Sarah (co_butterfly) dropped by, what with already being in Boulder, but she had to get home for, y'know, sleep, what with having a full day tomorrow. Thus it's looking like there won't be a DUtS carpool, and I really don't want to drive all that way all by myself after a night of no sleep. I may just tend the fire until sunrise and then hit the sack.

It's a huge damn Yule log, by the way. I'll be surprised if it takes less than a week to burn that sucker. I've been propping up grocery store firewood against it and burning them in hopes that it will catch on and follow suit.

As for what I want to fill the year with... Well, I didn't see as much of my husband as I'd like, but it's a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are notoriously busy. We sat about five minutes in front of the fire together to show the new year willing. I also don't have a working laptop yet. My Averatec 5100 series laptop turned out to need a new motherboard, so now I'm waiting on Warranty America Corp. or whatever they're called to decide whether they'll buy me one or buy back my machine. (The latter would not be so bad. I am currently drooling over the Averatec 3225 on display today at Computer Renaissance.)

But as always I have my Ancient Decrepit Compaq. Also pens and paper. Writing is a low tech activity. Working motherboards come and go, but writing never forsakes. And I hear that WOTC's calls for full manuscripts won't go out until the first week of the new year, giving me a little more time to get out of chapter 11 and through the rest of the book. So it's off again to the races for me.

More after sunrise (and possibly some coffee). Stay tuned.

The Averatec is not yet returned from the grave, but its resurrection looms ever nearer. And before I go any further, I would like to make another shout-out, this time to Ryan, the tech at Boulder's Computer Renaissance outlet who helped me out so much today.

He called me around 1:00 this afternoon, said that after overnight testing my computer's hardware all checked out but that its WinXP system was beyond repair. He'd backed up the contents of my hard drive to the server, and everything was ready for me to pick up my computer and run the factory-provided recovery media on it.

So I did this. I walked it across the street to Cafe Bravo, ordered up some fine-tasting coffee, and began feeding CDs to the beast. Three CDs and one "Recovery Successful!" screen later, I was growling. That computer just wasn't booting up. It was doing stuff that looked remarkably like Monday afternoon's original breakdown. So back to CompRen I went.

Turns out that they'd tested the hard drive, but not the RAM. The RAM got tested forthwith. Even more forthwither, the RAM failed. Ah-ha. So out comes one stick. The remaining one tested good. The sticks got swapped. The other stick tested good. Both sticks back in. Again, test good. Ah-ha? Ryan ran through the recovery media, and this time met with success. Sometimes, apparently, connector pins can get oxidized, and all we have to do is wiggle the sticks, take them out and put them back in again maybe, and things will be fine. An hour later, my backed-up data had been copied onto the newly formatted machine, and I was on my way home. And either because it was a physical problem which means my extended warranty covers the labor, or because Ryan and CompRen are just that nice, I wasn't charged a cent.

Well, I got home. And I started up the computer. I did some preliminary customizing--downloading and installing Firefox, connecting to the home network and its workgroup, swapping the keyboard input default over to Dvorak. Then I started a blog entry.

Then I was staring into the Blue Screen Of Death. Of Physical Memory Dump, anyway.

Er.

I have not yet tried wiggling the RAM sticks, but I have tried rebooting. It went very soon into the deadly spiral of aborted startup attempts. I stopped it before it could start deleting sectors again. As far as I'm concerned, it's still dead.

But! My time today was fruitful in other ways. I got to watch Ryan take my hard drive and my RAM out of my laptop, which meant I learned for the first time just how easy it is to do. I mean, you just unscrew these panels and out they come! Which means any schmoe can do it! Even me! And they sell these $40 devices which turn your laptop hard drive into a USB jump drive in, like, seconds. So I think I can at least go buy one of those (or a suitable cable, $10-ish, for daisy-chaining the drive onto another computer) so I can move my data onto one of the home desktops. Then I could have access to my saved emails and address book and all (not to mention the latest changes to Becoming Sara Peltier), by tomorrow afternoon, even though Ryan won't be back in the shop to look at my flailing laptop beastie until Tuesday.

So life isn't so bad after all.

Meanwhile, I logged another half-hour on The Drowning Boy during my second stint at Cafe Bravo's, the one during which data was being copied back onto my laptop. I managed a few more paragraphs on chapter 11. I feel like I'm sneaking up this story, sort of sidling up to it by describing this or that character's feelings, bodily posture, snippets of dialogue. Sometimes that's the only way to find out what the story's doing.

So, life quite suddenly sucks. My computer has died.

Well, that's putting it a little overly strong. Life doesn't exactly suck, per se. I mean, John and I are in Bloomington, Indiana; we're staying with Cate; we're comfy and well-fed and in loving company. True, the Saints did not win last night, but you can't expect too much from your weekend. Life is actually pretty good.

But somewhere between hibernating my laptop yesterday morning and attempting to wake it back up again yesterday afternoon, Something Went Horribly Wrong. After I halted its unsuccesful Resume From Hibernate prrocess, it entered a cycle of disk checks during which it deleted many purportedly corrupted sectors, and then after gnawing on itself in this fashion for several minutes it utterly failed to recognize a bootable drive. I get the Averatec splash screen and then nothing but a blinking cursor.

Curses!

So today I pulled out my spiral notebook, wrote down the previous novel-editing session's final sentence from memory, and then tried mightly to keep going. Boy, what a comedown. I've used computers for so long that my handwriting is illegible, and my longhand writing mentality is all, like, "This is just freewriting and Morning Pages and stuff, why should I care about quality?"

Clearly I need to compose manuscript copy in longhand more often. It's no good to rely so completely on electricity and microprocessors.

So today I mostly spent trying to convince myself to write as though it mattered. Then I got a little into Sasha's seemingly unplanned meeting with her classmate crush in the Wilcox Plaza bookstore. And when I get back to Boulder I need to dig up my Windows XP Home Edition install disk, which I am assured exists and ought to be in my possession. I am skeptical of this, having no memory of bringing one home at the time of my laptop's purchase....

As for other things: In my opinion, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe was very, very, very, very good. Faithful fans of the Narnia books, whether their interest is in the fantasy story or in the Christian allegory, all ought to be well pleased. I am, however, a little troubled by an acquaintance's concern over the "appropriateness" of Lucy's friendship with the faun Tumnus. "I mean, he's, like, ten years older than her and he goes around shirtless! Is it right that they're going around holding hands all the time?" Is this an issue that ought even to occur? For heaven's sake, it's like watching Finding Neverland and begin convinced, despite James Barrie's protestations otherwise (which, by the way, the audience is supposed to believe), that the adult author is sexually involved with his children playmates. My goodness, we live in a corrupt age.

Other than that--other than having my mind now forever tainted by the previously unheard-of concept of little Lucy being preyed on by her best friend in Narnia--I have no complaints. Well, I was unimpressed by Liam Neeson's voicing of Aslan. But maybe that's unfair. Probably for me to be satisfied you'd have to get freakin' God in on that role. Well, God or James Earl Jones. Either one will do.

And in yet other news, the NaNoWriMo article in dirt has come out. Whee! Go read it right now!