author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Why not. It looks nice, after all. I think we'll say that Uncle Matt bought it here.

Chapter outline is mostly done. Between that and my markups on the previous draft, I'm really ready for a type-in. I spent part of tonight dashing back into the three and a half rewritten chapters and seeding them with foreshadowy things and subplot arc beginnings. Hopefully things will sew up as nicely as I go.

Tomorrow morning John and I leave for Bloomington, Indiana, to see Cate. Yay, Cate! I am going to spend much of the plane ride darning socks. To that end, I am testing the waters of airport security by bringing my little wooden container of darning needles and my Christmas present from Sarah, a yarn-cutting pendant. It's awesome. It's not only a useful craft implement; it's totally goth. Well, aside from the cute little Clover logo.

The blade is totally protected so that this thing is dangerous only to yarn, but maybe the good folks at the metal detector arches will mistake it for a ninja throwing star and freak out. We'll have to see. Hopefully, by the time we land in Indianapolis, I'll have put three more of my handknit wool socks back into service. And that'll be a good thing, because it's freakin' cold in that part of the country. Even more so than here.

Hi there. I'm at the Tea Spot. I'm here with SlyCrow and his Big Blue Pencil of Doom (pictures to follow). I just finished writing my 2K+ for the day, putting me at just over 2K due on every day through the last in order to win. I also just realized I haven't posted for several days, so it's about time I did.

I'm closing in on the final scene of the book. I'm not entirely sure that the story as it stands has 8,300 words left in it, but I think I have a subplot or two in my back pocket, so it should be all right.

In other news, the wedding present is done and in the mail; I am told it will arrive by Monday. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that. I didn't take any pictures, so I have none to show, sadly, but you can take my word for it that the results of all that knitting are very warm and cozy and soft indeed. Now I get to knit bears and mouse-slippers for Community Knitting. And then get to work knitting several second socks to make pairs out of my collection of singletons.

Tonight is "techno party night" on the ice. John and I are planning on dinner and skating accordingly. Tee-hee. We're gonna have a date. We never got to date, growing up, what with living some 600 miles apart, so these days we try to make up for that.

So. Back to considering subplots, and exactly how the ending of the book is going to pan out. And where we're going to have our Thank God/dess It's Over party. Yeah.

No, not me. I ain't quitting. No sir. I didn't do a full 2K today, but I did this much:

A daily word count of 1,667 would have put you at 36674 words.
You have averaged 1600.227 words per day thus far.
A daily average of 1859.375 will make you a winner!
Good luck!

But not everyone "wins" NaNoWriMo. And that's OK. From talking to at least two people today who started the challenge and then stopped, here are two reasons to give up on the idea of a single 50K work written in 30 days:

• When you're no longer interested in the story. One person I know started an entirely new novel during Week 2, and now has given up on that story too. But she still comes to write-ins and does stuff like freewriting and brainstorming. Sometimes a given story just dies, or needs to be put on the shelf for awhile. Pushing past the point of authorial interest will only guarantee an uninterested reader.
• When you're no longer interested in writing. Some people take on NaNoWriMo, having never written much before, with the intent to discover whether they have a book in them. Sometimes they discover that no, they don't. At that point, it's probably best to stop writing and move on to something one would prefer to spend time on. Because, heck, life's too short to spend on something you don't fundamentally enjoy. Granted, writing isn't always playtime, even for the most inspired writer in the world. It'll be work from time to time too. But if the work isn't fulfulling, move on to something else. Don't turn your daily word quotas into a penance undertaken for the sin of not coming out of NaNoWriMo a lifelong career writer.

Moving back into my own NaNoWriMo 2005 experience: I did a bit of kvetching today about how Right Off The Page is the second book in a series whose first book isn't written. Kandybar's response was a sort of "Oh, I hate it when that happens, I've totally done that." My husband, on the other hand, said, "You're an idiot!" He's very sweet and wants to see me get published, and he knows that if I'm banking on this series then I'll have to publish The Bookwyrm's Hoard first.

He also knows that means one more book for me to write before I'll finally get back to work on "the ghost story." This refers to an as-yet unnamed novel which began as a short story roughly inspired by thinking too much about Tori Amos's song "Toast." That alleged short story refused to show signs of ending after 2,000 words. (At this point I had Stern Words with my Muse about false advertising. "Oops," she said, "did I say short story? Maybe I, er, underestimated." She means lied.) John would like very much to read it, but only those 2,000 words exist as of yet. He would like more of it to exist, please, and as soon as possible.

It's times like this when I thank the Gods for supportive husbands. Some writers have spouses that say, "That's nice, dear, but when are you getting a real job?" or "What do you mean, you're busy? You're only writing." I have a spouse that says, "Is it finished yet? Can I read it? What do you mean, no?"

(He would also like me to be the next J. K. Rowling so he can retire on my book advances. Well, so would I.)

It's nearly Thanksgiving. I have thanks to give. This is not the only reason, but it's a big one.

The manifesto obliges me to post every day, and to keep my post relatively centered around writing. Sunday's goth club outing¹ is not a valid subject for blogging, nor is the delightful Celtic Tatting book² Sarah got me. Ditto the wedding present³ I am frantically knitting for my friend and his bride-to-be.

So here's a very boring post to say, "Hey, look! I got a whole bunch of words written since last post!" In case you care, we're up to Chapter Thirteen, in which the talemouse meets the Bookwyrm. In my own opinion, which isn't very humble because in first draft stage my opinion is all that matters, it was pretty darn cool. I got to describe how Rakash Sketterkin finds his way into the Bookwyrm's lair, and to define the true nature of the Bookwyrm's horde (the actual horde, not the bookstore named after it). To describe and define those things, I had to decide and discover them. Yay NaNoWriMo! Daily word count quotas are good for me.

Now, I need to figure out why fictional characters don't want to go anywhere near the Bookwyrm. At least, not in their parent plotlines. The Wyrm probably wouldn't threaten their existence in their own plotlines.

In other news, the battery in my Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero appears to have joined the ranks of the undead. Or the resurrected, I'm not sure which. The computer has been running on battery power for 30 minutes without showing a drop in the battery charge meter, which is a huge improvement over last week's "pull out the plug and the computer immediately dies" routine. Yay zombie battery! Maybe next time I lend Willow my Averetec, I'll actually be able to use the Compaq on battery power.

And that's all.

(1. I'm sorry, I have no pictures to share of me gothed up and dancing to a slightly sped-up spin of VNVNation's "Neverending Light". Nor have I pictures of John, Sarah, or Jaerin, at least not such that I'm at liberty to share. Nor have I sustained actual bruises from the collision occasioned by two stoned dimwits who started rolling around on the floor and using us as pinball bumpers.)

(2. Dude! I had been trying to figure out how to do celtic knotworks all weekend! Apparently the answer is to tat chains, not loops, and use a paperclip to thread the chains into knots. Very cool.)

(3. The wedding is on December 3rd. If I knit really fast, there's hope. If I knit really fast and stop swapping threads or either notice more quickly when I've swapped threads or just give up on this whole "knit two socks at once" idea.)

Yes it does. November and all the insanity thereby entailed.

We've got a large, enthusiastic crew in the Colorado::Boulder NaNoWriMo forum. (If you're looking for me, I'm vortexae.) We met up at the Tea Spot this past Saturday for a novel-planning meet-and-greet, and attendence was about triple what I was expecting. And everyone actually talked about their novels, too! *Glow* What more could a Municipal Liaison and Forum Moderator want? It's going to be a fantastic November.

Now if only I didn't have two novels to edit and a non-fiction book to finish. Ah, well, nothing wrong with being busy, right?

Speaking of novels, Chapter 11 of Drowning Boy is about where I left it the other day, but cleaner. Editing as I go, and all that. I know where it's going, and where Chapter 12 is going, too, so it's just a matter of allotting time. That may or may not happen tonight; apparently my husband and I have a date with some friends and a game of Axis & Allies. I'll be more doing the heckling thing than the actual playing thing, so we'll see how far into the evening we get before things get thrown at me.

Finally. Chapter 10 is over. Brian and Mike have Had Words, none of them particulary pleasing to Brian, all of them fairly amusing to Mike. A couple of things have been revealed between the lines, and hopefully it's clear that Brian's missing them all because he is desperately trying to sail down a river in Egypt, and not because he rolled triple ones for his intelligence stat.

Great. Now, according to the revised outline, next comes the chapter in which Brian meets the shark, and I try very hard not to sound like I'm ripping off Diane Duane's Deep Wizardry.

Meanwhile, New Orleans. I purchased tickets yesterday to fly down to New Orleans, help Mom and Dad with the clean-up, and see with my own eyes how my hometown is holding up. Of course, now more than ever I feel kind of a fraud talking about New Orleans as my hometown. Orleans parish responses to the post-Katrina situation differ from those in Jefferson parish, to the point where it's almost like my parents in Metairie are living in a different country from folks in New Orleans. But, really, it's all home.

My parents have been struggling against the chaos beseiging their insurance company. Every other day, Mom would call with new indignities: her assigned adjustor was in Dallas, what good would that do? She didn't even know if they'd reassigned her claim to her home owner's insurance policy rather than her flood insurance policy. Could she even get started on fixing the roof, and with what money? Helpless me, all I could do was agree that life totally sucks and I wish thing could be better.

"Is there anything I can bring you from Colorado when I come visit? Celestial Seasonings herbals, anything?"

"No, no--well, actually," Mom said, "could you bring me an adjustor? Just go by your insurance agent's office, grab one, and put him in your luggage?"

"Er, well, I think they're out of stock..."

Just bullshitting, of course, but the thought that came out of it was, why didn't I go talk to my insurance agent? My parents and I use the same agency, and a Boulder office wouldn't be swamped like one in south Louisiana. (Ha! Swamp. Pun!) Maybe there was something could be done from here?

So I biked on over to the State Farm office on Mapleton. And I felt really stupid asking; I kept saying things like, "Of course I'm just clutching at straws here--but just in case, on the off-chance there's anything you can do..."

And the agent smiled sympathetically, and asked me for Mom's policy number. She made a phone call. She found out some stuff. She took notes. Then she called my Mom.

They talked on the phone for at least twenty minutes. She got all the details on the house, reassured Mom that in this unique, unprecedented situation she didn't need to worry about preserving evidence of damage or itemizing it all, mentioned what kind of unheard of things her office, all the offices, had been given authorization to do, and promised she'd do what she could today to get the ball rolling. I left the office feeling that at last I had done something, I'd finally been able to help. At least, I hoped so.

That night, Mom called me up to say Thank you. "You mean she really was able to help you?" Yes, yes she was.

So anyone reading this, if you have relations in the New Orleans area whose insurance claims are just stuck, see if you can get an agent in your part of the country to take a look. If you're in New Orleans, see if you can get ahold of a relative elsewhere who can stop by their local insurance office. Apparently it's not just clutching at straws.

But we'll know for sure how helpful things have been in seven to ten days--that's when they've promised Mom and Dad will finally get a visit from the adjustor. Then, if all goes well, they'll be able at last to start rebuilding their roof.

Hello. I'm attempting to eat a ham and cheese sandwich without using my front teeth. It's loads of fun. You should try it sometime. No, really.

Ahem. That was me attempting to distract you. You're not supposed to notice how long it's been since my last update. Didn't work, did it? Drat. Oh well. It's been something like six days since my last update. But I have Reasons! They're over there, on the right. Lookit! Lookittapicture!

I'm the short one. John's the male one. That leaves Cate to be the one in the middle. We're at the Dushanbe Tea House on a Friday afternoon, having just had pots of tea and three plates full of dainties and suchlike. (Which I attempted to eat without using my front teeth.) We're about to head next door to the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. And we started the day at 8,000 feet above sea level. And that was just Friday.

You can click on the picture to find out how John met Cate. They were at Gen Con. And see, there's the thing. You just never know, right, when your husband meets a new friend while he's out of town, whether you'll actually get along with said husband's said friend. You hope you will, but differences have happened before, and if you don't get along, that'll suck, because he's really good friends with her and she'll be in town for half a week and if you don't actually end up liking each other that'll make it a really long and uncomfortable half-week, right?

Yes, I worry. Can you tell? I'm a neurotic little bundle of nerves. But the bright side to that is, when things don't turn out for the worst, I get all pleasantly surprised and delighted. And "delight" is the word for when someone arrives on Wednesday generous enough to accept you for the sake of your marriage to her friend, and leaves on Saturday having become your friend too. See? No suckage!

And "melancholy," of course, is the word for the drive back from the airport after saying goodbye. But John and I are scheming. Oh yes. We scheme and plot and move our eyebrows up and down in shifty, scheming ways. By the end of the year, there will be another visit. Oh yes. And we three shall terrorize Bloomington! Mwahahahahaaaaa!

(And by then, I'll be able to use my front teeth when I eat ham-and-cheese sandwiches and tea-time dainties. Yay!)

So what with one thing and another, today was my first day getting back to the Novel. Nothing new today, unfortunately. Just cleaning up the page-and-a-half leading up to where I left off last time. But hey! Now that page-and-a-half is sparkling clean.

Well, periodontist, actually. But it was at my dentist's office.

Yes yes yes long time no blog what a slacker what a bum talk about procrastination. Indeed. House painting, house cleaning, community knitting, Cessna flying, guest preparations, Saints watching, and all that jazz. Excuses, excuses.

Back to the dentist's. By the way, you would think that one could get some writing done while lying abed in post-op mode. You would think, wouldn't you? Uh-huh. Anyway, Friday my mouth got hacked into, in the service of keeping my teeth for my old age. Apparently it's a bad thing for tooth longevity when there's no thick, pink "attached tissue" in front of your tooth, but only the thin, darker, capillery-filled "movable tissue." And they have ways of making your mouth conform. It involves lots of local anasthetic, scapels, and stitches, and no eating of chewy things for days and days after.

This makes road trip novels like Neil Gaiman's American Gods a bad choice of post-op reading material. I mean, the characters keep stopping for hamburgers. Oh my sweet everloving Deities I want a hamburger.

Anyway, sitting in the dentist's chair and trying to ignore the sharp things. The periodontist says, "You can totally just close your eyes and go elsewhere, you know. I won't be offended. No. Seriously. Go paint your house or something." So I closed my eyes and tried once more to listen in on my characters' conversation again. I don't know what's been taking me so long about that--I guess not enough long, sustained time staring in panic at my computer. So apparently oral surgery is good for invoking the same sort of panic, I guess.

Brian: "Oh my God, Mike! You're alive!"

Mike: "Well, yeah. But you knew that."

Brian: "But that was a dream... wasn't it?"

Brian: [chuckles] "Little bro, you always were in denial."

That plus a few tips from Mike on how he actually would act in this scene, and I think we're rolling again.

(After that, the hovering-over-the-Puget-Sound visualization sort of morphed into standing on the red pedestrian bridge at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal and watching the pelicans preen themselves, and I got a little teary. Which is not wise when someone is sticking sharp things in your mouth. And now I have to add "Nostalgia" to the growing list of categories invoked by this entry. These entries really need to get a bit more focused.)

Meanwhile, Cate's coming to visit tomorrow. Excitement! More house cleaning! A trip to the airport! A trip to the other airport! Goths Having Tea! And early morning writing sessions while everyone else is still sleeping, if dailiness is to be cultivated. W00t!

More later, possibly with pictures.

At right: Uno argues his usefulness in helping John re-assemble our bachelor-pad-style entertainment center, which we'd disassembled in order to paint the last living room wall. Meanwhile, I discover twenty-year-old addictions hiding underneath all that dust.

Sometimes, to break out of a rut or rediscover your passions, you just have to rearrange the furniture. We've been spending a lot of time on the couch since moving its L shape to face west and south. It's just so comfortable now. With the entertainment center against the west wall, we can watch TV or manipulate the CD-player aspect of the PS2 by remote from the kitchen table, and wires no longer lie in walkways. The desktop computer has its own little nitch, the up-lamp is out of the way, the modem and router are easier to get to--the living room is just more livable.

At least, for now. Give us a few months, and we'll be sick of it again, ready to rearrange the furniture once more.

We're in heavy-duty clean-up mode not just because of wanting to get at and paint walls, not just because of wanting to rearrange our living space, but also because of an impending visit. Someone John met at GenCon, a lovely gal by the name of Cate, will be staying with us during the third week of September. If she's able to find the futon in the second bedroom and even sleep on it without risking a broken limb getting to it, that would be considered a bonus.

Of course we want to show Cate the sights of Boulder. Afternoon tea at the Dushanbe Teahouse, for instance, is obligatory. And since the best sights of any mountain town are seen from above, we've got a flight in a Cessna 172 planned for Thursday morning the 22nd. Which means I need to get back up to speed in a hurry. My log book shows exactly two flights in the past year. Two hours with an instructor back in February, and an overnight cross country to Rock Springs, Wyoming, in September of last year.

As of now we can add to that an hour with an instructor today. Whee! I can still fly! Good morning, November 64548. Pleased to meet you. How's your engine feeling today? Full throttle for cruise, huh? Tch. Oooh, nice taxi steering...

I'll be doing some solo practice on Monday, since we only had time for two of my three takeoffs/landings needed for me to legally take passengers. And then we've got three hours on the 22nd to play, or go to Greeley for lunch, or whatever. And then in October, I've signed up for the mountain course one of the instructors offers. Some ground school, some basics, and then a cross-country from Boulder to Leadville and Glenwood Springs and other scenic points. October is going to be expensive. But it's going to be gorgeous.

So. Flying, cleaning house, moving furniture... Writing! Yes. Well, no rejection letter from WOTC yet, so Drowning Boy is still a priority. Still haven't convinced the brothers Windlow to let me listen in on their reunion conversation. I'm starting to get peeved at them. And October is coming up super-quick, but my read-through of Becoming Sara is still stuck in the middle of Chapter 2, which isn't even to mention that the rewrite stopped at around Chapter 5 and hasn't progressed. Retooled part of some key dialogue last night, though.

I'm. So. Damn. Slow. But hey! I can fly!

This is the bit where I bore you with a page out of my dream journal. After that, you get some links, so if you want to skip the boredom, just page down a bit or click here.

So before I woke up this morning, I was in this huge, I mean gi-normous university library. Bigger than a convention hotel. I mean whoppin' large. And I was there after hours; I had some friend who was smuggling me in. Our reasons were both personal and political. Political, in the sense that I was working for some underground movement, the details of which escape my waking mind. Personal, because I had my novel to work on, and I needed to work on it all night every night until it was done.

See, in the dream, I'd gotten the call from Wizards of the Coast telling me to go ahead and send them the full manuscript of Drowning Boy. I'd said, "Oh boy! Will do!" and then I'd hung up and said, "Crap! OK, I'll do two and a half chapters a day, that'll finish in enough time to mail them the beast before ten days is out..."

But of course there were these people patrolling the library to make sure no one like me was stowing away. The fluorescent overheads would light up, boom boom boom, one after the other down the hall, and official-looking people would march through, and I'd have to do my best "Huh? Closing time? I slept through closing time?" face. Then I'd let them march me out of the library, and I'd be thinking OK, I can still do this if I do five chapters tomorrow...

A useful dream to get me back on schedule. Too bad the novel I've been working on most recently is Becoming Sara.

Pace to be picked up forthwith.

Meanwhile, here're your links. Hurricane Katrina links. Stuff y'all can do, that you might not have thought of doing, what with other stuff like The Red Cross and The Salvation Army coming to mind so readily.

• Habitat For Humanity: A nonprofit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry seeking to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world. They build homes, literally as well as monetarily. Donate money, or sign up to lend a hand in the disaster-affected areas.
• Officers of Avalon, a nonprofit organization representing, networking, and benefiting Pagans in law enforcement and other emergency response fields, has created The Avalon Cares fund. In its current incarnation, the fund raises money for The Red Cross's post-hurricane efforts, and sends volunteers to feed supplies into the affected areas.
• Veterans for Peace have set up camp in Covington, LA. That's in Saint Tammany Parish, right on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where the Causeway Bridge touches down (and, incidentally, where a majority of my aunts and uncles on my Mom's side live). The Vets have brought a whole bunch of supplies for the relief effort, but they need more. Click the link to see what they need and where to send it or, if you're in the area, drop it off. They could do with volunteers, too. Seems they're picking up a lot of FEMA's slack in the area. Gods know someone's got to.

And finally, there's Stories of Strength, an upcoming anthology edited and produced by Jenna Glatzer of AbsoluteWrite.com. The anthology will be published and sold via LuLu.com and all proceeds will be donated to the Red Cross. If you're a writer and you've little cash to donate outright, perhaps you can donate a thousand words of your professional skills. Submission deadline is September 16. That's this Friday, so get a move on!

Coming Up Next: Progress on the right novel! Pics! And addictive substances from the mid-'80s! Stay tuned.