author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

First off, I promise not to go all anal with this Celtic Knot thing. I'm just having fun doodling, is all.

So. Meet Tess Helen Holland. Tess is the spiral in red. Tess is a middle school girl who likes books (especially those by Gwen Halpburn) and doesn't like boys (much) or sports (at all). Tess is the one who shows up at The Bookwyrm's Hoard and notices the quill is missing. She helps Gwen look for it. They don't find it, but during that time it becomes obvious that the bookstore is a good place for this little mousy misfit. Tess blossoms, sheds her self-consciousness, and even mouths off a little as she and her idol take apart old Mrs. Nimbel's desk in search of the writing implement. Gwen is inspired to keep the bookstore open for the girl's sake if not for her own.

Next, meet Tim Smith. He's the loop in green. When Gwen calls around looking for a security company who can spare guard personnel, like, now, he's the one who shows up. Thing is, after he sees Gwen safe home from the bookstore, he goes directly onto the graveyard shift at the office of a certain corporation which wants the bookstore property and doesn't think twice about using dirty tricks to get it. That's why Tim's loop crosses itself. He's crossing his own interests to take this job. Only he doesn't know it yet.

I might play further with the doodle if I get stuck, see what kind of neat repeating patterns these new lines might cause; they'll make interesting new intersections that might suggest future scenes. But right now I have plenty to work with for several days to come, just with these new characters and all their hangers-on. So for now I'll put away the colored pens and instead open up a paintbox full of words....

She said "Get closer." She said, "What are you looking at?" She said, "Keep the pen moving." Presumably she's still saying all of that, and well should she, because it's true.

If the name is unfamiliar to you, get yourself a copy of Writing Down the Bones to start with. Read it. Do the "Try this" exercises. It won't take you long. At worst, you may simply decide it's all new age hokeyness designed to keep amateur writers eternally amateurs, and you'll kick the dust off your heels and move on. Or you may decide that it's a valuable addition to your personal arsenal of inspirational tricks and that you will go forth and do likewise forever more.

I'm in the latter camp. Today's NaNoWriMo session is an example of why.

Gwen is sitting at the big check-out desk in the bookstore, trying to figure out how to save both the store and her life. Doing the one seems mutually exclusive with the other. As she sits there thumbing through the phone book (SELF-DEFENSE, she thinks, and then thinks, but how much can I learn in a week? He said if I didn't clear out of here in a week I'm dead), she does like I do: her brain slides off the difficult thing and onto a thought more pleasant. To wit, herself as the owner of the bookstore she's loved since childhood, doing the things she idolized the previous owner for doing.

"Get closer," says Natalie. "What are you looking at?"

She runs her hand over the wood of the desk (sturdy oak, dark, glossy and smooth with age and use) and notes the many little cubbies, pigeon-holes, and drawers. One for every possible object. There is a cut-glass inkwell permanently affixed to the desk; the ink has dried to a crust in the months since the previous owner's death. Gwen will have to clean it out before she refills it. Metallic purple, she thinks, and remembers how the previous owner would take a quill pen from its place in that inkwell and write a fabulously curly-cued X at the "sign here" part of credit card slips and IOUs. Gwen imagines doing likewise. And because she is a young adult novelist, she imagines signing her name with that quill for teenage fans of her books.

The room takes on all three dimensions. I'm in there with Gwen. I'm reading the titles on the magazine rack, I'm lounging in the faux-leather chair by the window to the left of the door, and I'm opening the door to make the bells tied to the return bar jangle.

It occurs to me that what distracts Gwen from her reverie is a customer. Her first ever. A young girl here against the express wishes of her mother, who knows that the children who went missing over the past year were last seen at the bookstore. And, after much introductory conversation, the girl says, "Where is the quill?"

And Gwen looks around and says, "Crap! Where is the quill?" Neither of them can find it. Finding it will be vitally significant to the plot, especially as regards Gwen's relationship with the Bookwyrm and the Space Between The Stories.

The plot thickens. And all because Natalie Goldberg said "Get closer."

Of course, the guy I'm thinking of who can't stand Natalie Goldberg also doesn't much like NaNoWriMo, so this won't convince him. But for folks like him we can just pretend I didn't say NaNoWriMo, and that this is merely the first draft of a novel like any other novel. It is, actually. I simply happen to be writing it in November at the rate of 1,000-2,000 words per day.

Confession time: I didn't think this up. Not only didn't I think this up, but I only got into it because it's shiny. Its suggested benefit in story building only took effect later. Tonight, actually.

The "this" in question is the idea of using Celtic knots and braids as a plotting mechanism. James D. Macdonald tells us about this in his famous and long-lived "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" thread over at the AbsoluteWrite.com forums. (Go read it. From the beginning. Yes, it will take you awhile. Take your time and do the homework assignments as you get to them.)

Like I said, my first thought was "Ooh! Shiny!" My first action was not to try plotting a brand new story, but instead to run off and learn how to draw these things, which I mainly got the hang of, and to show off my new hobby in a Comicollage contribution.

Now, I'm not sure I can do what Uncle Jim does anyway. I don't think I can use a knot to come up with a plot from scratch, not the way he describes doing it. What's intuitive for one writer isn't intuitive for another. But I thought maybe I could design a knot or braid based on the way things were already shaping up, and use the resulting pattern to figure out where the Nano-novel was going next.

Three threads were about all I could keep in my head at once. So I named those threads "Gwen and the bookstore" (blue/gray), "The talemouse" (blue), and "The corporate thug" (maroon). (The colors come courtesy of the particular selection of le pens I had on me at the time.) Each thread represented not just that character but also his-or-her goals, interests, and actions.

Then I tried braiding those threads. I quickly found out that in a simple braid, you end up with a rock-scissors-paper conundrum: each thread has only one relationship, "win" (over) or "lose" (under), with each of the other two threads. That makes it exceedingly symmetrical, but it doesn't suggest an interesting progression of scenes. So I messed with it some more, hoping to get a bit more variation--and I got the image you see here.

I think this may well be the perfect basic three-character pattern ever. OK, well, maybe not, but it's pretty cool. See, you have the gray-blue thread for the protagonist, who stays in that tight twist representing the central plot. Then you have the supporting character in blue and the antagonist in maroon who alternately help/hinder the protagonist and oppose each other. The braid runs chronologically along a timeline, and each intersection is a scene that can be described as "[thread on top] [does something] to [thread on bottom]." For a bonus, the braid emphasizes that the secondary and the antagonist have plots of their own which intersect "off-stage." I need to flesh them out.

After I drew this out and labeled the threads, I started labeling the intersections. It mapped surprisingly well to those scenes I already have written or planned, and suggested new scenes I would need to invent. (Note: letters in list correspond to letters labeling intersections in the .GIF, and text in brackets indicates scenes that weren't already planned but were instead suggested by the braid.)

1. The talemouse first rescues an abused child by disappearing him from Gwen's world and putting him into one of the books Gwen wrote. This affects Gwen because neighborhood suspicion falls on the bookstore when kids start disappearing, and because her books have been changed.
2. [I guess here the talemouse witnesses something the corporation plans to do, and that spurs the talemouse into action he would not otherwise have taken.]
3. Gwen accepts, takes possession of, and makes plans to reopen the bequeathed bookstore. This affects the corporation, who wanted to buy the place. Gwen's action threatens the corporation.
4. The corporation sends a thug to threaten Gwen and scare her off.
5. [Here the talemouse must take some action to try to protect Gwen from the thug. Maybe he'll influence the neighborhood beat cop, who is currently not well disposed towards Gwen.]
6. [Here something Gwen does will change the talemouse's course of action, causing him to trust her more maybe, resulting in...]
7. [...the talemouse indirectly reuniting Gwen with the Bookwyrm, whom she last saw when she was a child.]

Unlike a self-contained knot that might lend itself to the abstract concerns of theme and relationship, this braid is a literal storyboard. That has its limitations. It'll need a shake-up somewhere just to keep the dynamics from getting too predictable. I think that the pattern will have to change drastically after one full repeat, which is to say, after the talemouse causes Gwen to meet the Bookwyrm once more (which is to say, grown-up Peter Pan remembers how to fly, with a little help from Tinkerbell). Also, I should probably put in a couple new threads for Gwen's agent and, once I decide how he gets into the story, Gwen's love interest. (I may have mentioned that she's married in Right Off The Page? Hubby-to-be needs to play a part in this story. Maybe he'll be the security cop Gwen hires when the beat cop makes it clear he can't care less.) Both those characters are going to play real parts, not just be "prop characters" like the Bookwyrm and the missing children. And then there's the beat cop and maybe a representative parent-of-missing child. And then, and then, and then....

And then a lot of stuff. But for now, that's the first part of the book mapped out. Plus I get to make shiny pretties in Adobe Illustrator! What's not to like?

I only got my notebook out once yesterday at the polling place, and that was to jot down the URL associated with the cute fuzzy hat that the Machine Judge was knitting. What was I thinking, finish the short story rewrite at the polls? I didn't even hit the NaNo-novel that day. After my working day ended at 9:30 PM (that's a fifteen-anna-half hour working day, I'll have you know), I was just about up for a bike ride to The Dark Horse for their Tuesday night Burger Madness special, and then sleep.

Today was a different story. Today I broke 10,000 on the NaNo-novel. Most of it was Gwen reminiscing about her "imaginary friend" and her unorthodox book-finding procedure at the bookstore throughout her childhood. The surprise for me today was when I realized that the bookstore was no longer magic for Gwen. Gwen is Peter Pan grown up. Part of the plot development will be her re-learning, so to speak, how to fly.

The other surprise was the totally cliche occurrence of the main character receiving a warning at knife point to pack it in and leave town. This will be the adult version of a Scooby Doo plot, I'm afraid: the villain's motivation is to scare those meddling kids away from his base of operations. In other words, he grabs her, tells her that everyone knows she's involved in the recent child disappearances, and that she'd better leave town before she finds herself on the wrong end of vigilante justice; when in actuality he's connected with corporate interests that want to turn the bookstore property into something new and tall and shiny and profit bearing.

I am both impressed with myself over the Peter Pan angle and depressed with myself over the Scooby Doo angle. But don't worry. I'm not writing in a talking Great Dane for Gwen. I'll be writing in her husband-to-be at some point, but not a big talking dog.

Which is not to say that you should not visit the polls tomorrow. Not at all. You should totally go to the polls and VOTE. Really, few things are as depressing in this so-called democratic republic than the concept that a 20% turnout is considered high. Go vote! However, I will continue to whine about how much life will suck for me as I work the 14-hour day involved in running my home precinct's polling place. During a general election. With poll watchers telling me how to do my job.

And no laptop.

I am not allowed to bring my laptop! It is electronic. It has ports. It could potentially be used to hack into the electronic voting booth that I'll be running. So it's not allowed on the premises.

And for once I have nothing ready to knit.

*cry*

So given that work on the Nano-novel tomorrow will be a no-go, I prioritized it today. I brainstormed about how to throw pointier rocks at Gwen, who is up the tree of Being In Charge Of A Bookstore No One Will Shop At Because Of Suspicions Of Past Criminal Activity. She thinks she knows how to handle this. She is wrong! So wrong! Give me an hour, and I'll figure out why she's wrong. Something to do with digging up copies of her own books and discovering one of the missing children in it, I think. Also, I decided that the scene with 7-yr-old Gwen meeting the Bookwyrm, which I've written before, will be rewritten from the point of view of the talemouse, who will be amazed at seeing a story character travel to the place between stories.

Meanwhile, I plan to bring the short story along with me in hard copy tomorrow: critiqued copies, print-out of current work, and spiral notebook. Perhaps by the end of the day I'll have something ready to type up. I am so very sick of dragging this revision out.

I should not feel guilty about today. I should not feel under-accomplished. I wrote some 2300 words towards November's 50,000-word goal, and all of it was new material--nothing I'd already imagined in the years I've been kicking this novel idea around in my head. Well, yes, I sort of riffed off the phenomenon of Gwen and Vai holding a crisis conference lunch at their favorite Chinese restaurant, sure, I'd already done that in Right Off The Page, but I'm allowed to give these characters a routine. I did it with brand new words. I was careful not to just repetitively cover ground sufficiently covered last year. I was a writing machine. 2300 sparkly words! All of them new!

That's good, right? That's totally awesome, right?

Don't be fooled. It was 2300 words of procrastination. While I was working on The Bookwyrm's Hoard, I was very deliberately not working on the short story. Dammit.

I'll go do that now, shall I?

I hate writing science fiction! It has to make sense! I am sitting here with pen and paper trying to decide what the timeline is for the plant virus to take effect, and how exactly Daphne catches it, and how--if she only contracts it once she gets to Lac Des Allemands--she and Aaron don't hear about it on TV what with people contracting it directly from the source before they even leave Kenner. Gahhh!

On second thought, that sort of logical mechanics isn't just a province of science fiction... I hate writing fiction! Fiction has to make sense! Why can't it all just be striking turns of phrase and smooth dialogue and stunning imagery? I hate having to make it make sense!

*sigh*

As for the other on-going project, I'm still behind schedule. About 20 words per day behind schedule. Which, multiplied by 26 remaining days, isn't so bad. But I have this sense of dread following me around, because I haven't done very much more than rewrite from memory things I've already written here and there in past years. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do when I use up that material and have to figure out exactly how the rest of the novel goes.

Maybe this weekend I can spend some time plotting and outlining. I still haven't played with yWriter's nifty Outliner machinery yet. Maybe I'll do that.

Simplifying what I said yesterday: The difference between Procrastination and Soup-making is the difference between thinking about the project and not thinking about the project. And the "must" moment is never totally lost, although the contents of the soup may need to be reheated.

I say this now because I did a lot of soup-making last night and today. Falling asleep, I saw in my head the near-invisible Ambassadors holding their tentacle-like limbs into the air in front of the Saint Louis Cathedral for the small birds to perch on. I re-worded the very ending of the story. Aaron's two moments of realization came clear to me.

And then, instead of writing the scenes down, I played video games. I read blogs. I looked at the clock and said, "Oh, crap! Only an hour left to Novemeber 3! Must log some words so that my bar chart doesn't lose a bar!"

And so I opened up The Bookwyrm's Hoard instead and wrote about how Gwen became a writer.

There is probably a special procrastination hell for writers who pretend to be writing by writing stories whose protagonists are writers. I promise, once again, that Gwen will not become a Mary Sue! I promise!

In any case, the piece of scene I wrote is something I've written before, but rewriting it from memory allowed it to be influenced by my more recent understanding of the character since writing the first draft of Right Off The Page.

OK. Now, I really shall work on the short story. I think part of my problem is, I'm not totally clear on how to rewrite Daphne's banana reverie. I think instead tonight I shall rewrite the ending scene. Actual words bubbled up in the soup this afternoon; I should get them down before the soup cools off.

Well, it gets me 900 words in half an hour. Dunno what it does for you.

I finally couldn't stand it any more. Typing stuff like [##gwenslastname##] and [##agentsname##] all the time--I drew the line at [##talemousesnameskittlessomethingwasn'tit?##] and finally copied last year's NaNoWriMo draft over from master zip disk to hard drive. So those would be "Halpburn," "Vai" (did I ever give him a last name?), and "Rakash Sketterkin." I figured that out while rereading chapters 1 through 3, which are surprisingly good for NaNoWriMo output even if I do say so myself at this late date. Only I'd totally forgotten what Gwen's voice was like, and that I'd written her POV bits last year in present tense. Yesterday morning's output looks really, really stilted. I guess I'll go back sometime and fix that. Gwen's proper voice is talkative enough that the revision will only help my word count.

(And by yesterday morning of course I mean November 1. Right now it is November 3, but only just.)

I'm still behind. I'm using SpaceJock Software's yWriter2, and it has a handy tool for calculating daily word counts--you can give it any start and end dates and grant word count total, but it was specifically created for NaNoWriMo. It tells me I have... to write 1768 words per day starting tomorrow if I'm gonna win this.

That's not so bad.

No, wait! That's 1768 starting Saturday! If I push my computer clock back to Thursday, it says "28 days left; 1705 words to write per day." That's even better!

(OK, now I am thoroughly waxing the cat, or vacuuming it, or taping bacon to it, or doing something else that neither the cat nor my writing deadlines like much at all.)

Now I can go back to the short story with a clean conscience. But first! Sleep.

Revision Status: "Putting Down Roots" will probably not hit the mail today. (And why is that, Niki?) Because the darn thing has almost completely rewritten itself in my head on a plot level. Like, where the virus comes from, and why the aliens are on Earth, and all that. The plot is twisting itself back into its original shape, but it's taking a lot of its recent developments with it, with the result that I'm not working on the... [counts on fingers] ...6th draft of this story so much as writing a new one with the same characters, climax, and ending. So I haven't gotten anywhere near completion since last blog post. Dammit. Working on that will take priority; I don't mind being a little behind on NaNoWriMo in the meantime.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo: Have reset the word count on "The Bookwyrm's Hoard"--those 7.5K or so came from summing together all the words from all the snippets I've drafted through the years, any of which I'll end up rewriting from memory this month if the novel still wants them in it. This morning, after the clock hit midnight and the calendar hit November, I broke the first thousand, but it was all very clumsy. I'm not entirely sure where the novel's going beyond the plot premises of Gwen taking over the bookstore and children vanishing into her books.

Last night's This morning's NaNoWriMo kick-off was very well attended, and the people who showed up all had a productive session. One of 'em even crossed the 2K mark. Then things devolved into mere socialization and cat stories until about 4 AM. It was fun. And I am paying the price today. But, having slept until about 3:00 PM, I think I'm recovered enough to get on with things. Like, rewriting short stories. And cleaning up in the kitchen.