author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So the read-through is practically over. And the last quarter of the book is, like, totally fragmented. Reads like an outline. I know exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote it: "Oh crap! It's week 4 and I only have 35,000 words! And I don't know how to get to the scene I want to write! Crap! I'll just splotch it down on the page without any run-up..." It reads like something between an outline and a "scenes from" abridgement.

There's also the scenes that by their very existence imply something that ought to have gone before but failed to, what with me not having thought of them until week 4. I keep making notes like, "Good description of Mitch & co. on p 190. Need more throughout." "Too far in to be the first time we see this mannerism." "Did she really? Figure this out."

Yeah. I am not looking forward to finishing with the read-through. I'm going to have to fix all this mess.

And the sad thing is, it looks about ten times less painful to fix than either of the two NaNoWriMo novels that went before.

We really do get better at this. But what "better" means is never quite as much as we'd like it to.

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?!

...if words like "somehow", "something," and "vague" show up at regular intervals: "Diane woke up on the doorstep at 4:30 AM with a vague recollection of her father having stepped over her to let himself in."

Look, I know I should actually write a scene or make a decision here, but I have no idea what kind of relationship these two characters have yet. I'll come back to it. Onward!

...if characters occasionally set off into town with no other intention than "to see what the day will bring." Bonus points if those characters then start describing what they see in town in great, wordy detail.

I'm stuck. I haven't a clue what happens next. Maybe if I send my main character on a mapping expedition, they'll bump into some plot before they're through.

...if, immediately upon introducing a new secondary character, the narration pauses while the main character reminisces about how the two of them met and what has been going on in both their lives between then and now.

Gods. Infodump. Not that this info doesn't belong in the book, but.... Look, I'll weave it into the story more gracefully on the rewrite, OK?

Which is, of course, the point. All the infelicities introduced by a 50K-in-30-days regimen will be smoothed away when it comes time to revise the novel. O ye of little faith! A publishable book will emerge! Just you wait.

(Besides, if I hadn't been under pressure to hit 50K by November 30th, you know what would be there instead of the infodump on page 49 where Diane Lenner tells us all about her mutual history with Danny Wodemeier? That's right. Nothing. I'd probably still be working on the first draft, one perfect sentence at a time. And that ain't no pace at which to begin a novelist's career.)

Woke up quite late today, toddled down to the mailbox, and found my official form rejection letter from Wizards Of The Coast regarding The Drowning Boy. Reactions?

1. Darn! I could have sworn my three-chapter excerpt was irresistable!
2. Figures. My synopsis and chapter outline were teh suxx0r.
3. Whew! Now I don't have to worry about racing the phone call with my rewrite!
4. Whoo-hoo! Another number located! Mine is 166! ...I have no idea what that means.

Like I said in the AW thread, I'm going to keep working on this one through December, hoping to have the rewrite close to finished. Then in January I'm going to primarily do whatever the NaNoPubYe Plan says to do with The Golden Bridle, making sure to schedule time for other projects as well. Like short stories. And work-for-hire projects. Etc.

So. Time to hit chapter 13. More later tonight. Probably.

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!

So "tomorrow" rolled around without an update. Sorry about that. Thus, today's installation takes the form of not a writing progress report but a recap checklist. It goes something like this:

• TGIO Party: Well attended. We didn't get the 20-25 headcount estimate I gave to Conor's, but then Conor's didn't reserve us enough space for 20-25 people, so it worked out perfectly. You can see a slide-show of the profiles of all the people that attended, and one or two who didn't, here. At least two people who showed up were making their first appearance all month at a regional gathering; it was super-cool to see them come out of the woodwork and meet everybody. In other news, the couch monster ate my winner certificate, but what the hell, I can always print out and hand-laminate another.
• Becoming Sara: The real rewrite effort will begin today. I'm afraid I was in TGIO-mode all weekend long, and the most I did was to reread all my handwritten revision notes just to remind myself what I ought to be thinking. But I'll start the rewrite, for real, tonight. Promise!
• Fruitcake: Baked Thursday and is now marinating in brandy. This year the tropical theme is heightened by the presence of dried mangos, chosen mainly to keep the candied papaya spears company. I considered dried canteloupes, but they were just too sweet. Also debuting this year: dried strawberries.
• Aeon Flux: Saw that Friday. It was about as good as you could possibly expect for a PG-13 Paramount production. I mean, I'm sure that Peter Chung has an NC-17 indie film version of it running around in his head, and it is beautiful. But this wasn't that movie. Thus, you don't end up going "WTF just happened?" like you do at the end of an Aeon Flux cartoon. And the kinky Trevor/Aeon foreplay is much toned down and, horrors, explained. But. I expected as much. For what it was, the movie was just about as good as it could be and captured just about as much of the spirit of the original as a Paramount production could be expected to. It made me absurdly happy. Plus! The eye thing! That was there! I did not expect that.
• NaNoPubYe: Another website for discussion under the category "NaNo Uh-Oh." A forum-based community organized under the idea of taking the fruit of your NaNoWriMo effort and turning it into something publishable. The goal: Professional submission to commercial publishing markets (I refuse to say "traditional publishing" considering where that term came from) in twelve months. The plan is a fairly reasonable one. I shall probably submit my 2004 draft, The Golden Bridle, to the process. Not Right Off The Page, of course; as mentioned before, that one won't be publishable until the book that precedes it is written and submitted for publication.

Yes indeed. I had to turn all--of--these into this - kind - of - thing to get the NaNoWriMo Word Count Validator to agree, sort of, with WordPerfect 5.1, because the former apparently doesn't count double-dashes as word separators, but, you know, whatever. I've hit "THE END" and I've hit 50K+ and life is good.

The last IHOP All-Nighter of the Month is breaking up. Two of us validated our word counts and got our purple winner bars right here (and winner icons and winner certificats and happy little banners on our profiles) along with a lot of applause, and one more of us is bound to manage it in the next half hour. A photographer from Boulder's free paper dirt got a lot of pictures (look for them on December 12). The blue pencil got to be showed off. Much fun was, in fact, got.

And that's all for tonight. Tomorrow: The TGIO Party at Conor's! The Baking Of The Fruitcake! The Beginning Of The Lightning Edit Round On Becoming Sara! Stay tuned.

That's how many are in this novel. That's the chapter heading I typed last night before going to sleep.

Either Chapter Twenty-Seven will be about 2,500 words long, or I'd better pull a sub-plot out of my back pocket.

In about four hours, you should be seeing bright blue bars on my wordcount bar graph. Stay tuned.

Hi-ho. Yes, writing continues. It continues to be a bit behind schedule, but not such that success cannot occur. I'm really closing in on the final scene now. I'm hoping to bag about 3,000 words today and another 3,000 tomorrow--that should put me at "The End" as well as over the 50K mark.

Here's a bit of word count trivia. Word Perfect 5.1 counts the words on either end of a double-dash (like this--see?) as two words. NaNoWriMo.org's text file validator counts them as one. When I uploaded a text file of my manuscript and saw a 300 word drop between my count and its count, that turned out to be why. So, aspiring NaNoers who use this puctuation mark: either shoot for 50,500 just to be safe, or replace all "--" with " -- " in your manuscript just to be safe.

And another bit of trivia: I would have started on my novelling for the day by now if it wasn't for those damned spammers. After an hour on the phone today with my ISP (DrakNet is good) I finally figured out how they've been exploiting my email forms over at Littlebull.com--a trick that resulted in that web site getting suspended over the weekend. I had to stop everything I was doing to roll through all my pop-up contact webforms and seal any header injection holes I could find. Grrr. This is me going "grrrr." Me ain't happy.

But! Me is now writing. And any potential spammers what get between me and writing, oooh their ears are gonna be burning.

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.