author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Or as ready as they can look on the day the task is done. I should read them over again later, though, after I write up the synopsis. In any case, I got to the end of Chapter Three.

By the time he got back to Seattle (in the passenger seat of a green Saturn coupe whose driver held contradictory opinions about hitchhiking), a crimson sea was once more washing over the world. But this time it was the healthy, rose-touched red of sunset. It had nothing to do with lack of air. Brian was breathing just fine. Air moved into him comfortably and out again with each breath, just like air should. He was exhausted, true, but there was nothing wrong with him really, nothing at all.

He was alive and well. He wasn't on his way to Colorado.

And he never would be again.

I'm not entirely sure what happens in the book. I haven't entirely decided. I suppose I'd better just make the best guess I can and trust that it'll be good enough to get me in the door.

The exceedingly friendly lounge car steward on the train from Chicago to New Orleans asked me something relevant here. "Do you think you need it?" He meant the workshop. He meant, can writing be taught? Are workshops worth it? And yes, enough of the craft of writing is teachable that there's no question workshops can be worth it. But it remains a good question: Why do I want to go? What do I hope to learn? When I think about Big Name Authors (or even medium-name authors) reading my sorry attempts at telling this story and pointing out all the ways in which I've gotten it wrong, I cringe, I really do. But I still want to go. Why?

I really hope I have a better reason than the fan-girl one. "Ohmygawd like I totally want to meet Big Name Authors and have them read my Stuff *swoon* it'll be so rad!"

Maybe I'm hoping that the very knowledge that I've spent a lot of money to go, and put a lot of face on the line, will push me into high performance mode. I always have worked well under pressure. I hate it, but it works. Maybe that's why I procrastinate. Maybe I'm doomed to procrastinate all my life.

Victoria Nelson has some very kind things to say about procrastination. She says that we should stop punishing ourselves with the word and start looking at it as a statement of fact: I have put off my task until tomorrow. Why have I done this? What is preventing my unconscious creator mind from working with my conscious ego? What can my ego do to improve relations with my unconscious? Only I don't know how to answer that question. Creation happens in a state of grace, she says. You can't make it happen by force of will; you can only relax and allow the miracle to happen. And let yourself write as an act of play instead of a chore. Have fun.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of all this advice, but kind words and having fun seem like a good place to start. Better than hating myself for taking all day to get started, anyway.

In other news, I've been messing around a bit with the blog code. I'm quite pleased with having converted the blog entries table from being indexed by timestamp to being indexed by an auto_increment ID number instead, and revising all the display and entry management code to reflect that, all in under twelve hours. Unfortunately, you can't see that. What you can see is I've put the Random Writing-Related Quote back onto the page. Yay! Bask in its radiance! It is a thing of beauty!

(Yes, I know. I need to get out more. Hush.)

...is darn difficult.

Remember all that crap about the banality of evil? Human villains that aren't actually evil, per se, but aren't acting out of any sort of good intent for anyone but themselves? Useful stuff. Damn useful stuff. But still... I'm having trouble.

Rewriting the conversation between Brian Windlow and his mother. *shudder*

The previous version, which I thought was pretty good at the time, is a ham-handed mess. On the one hand, Brian's half of the convo isn't so bad. He reacts the way you'd probably expect, given the crap she's throwing at him. But the crap she's throwing at him isn't consistent with the philosophy that "No one wakes up in the morning, cracks their knuckles, rubs their hands together, and says, 'What eeeeevil shall I perpetrate today? Mwa-ha-ha-haaaaa!'" Well, it isn't.

So. Reevaluating how the evil got perpetrated now. Reevaluating, y'know, motives. Why is she such an unmitigated bitch to this poor boy? Is she convinced that everything he does is with her disadvantage in mind? Does she therefore view everything he does with suspicion, as a possible plot against her? Does she resent that he lived while her favorite son died? (Yes, yes, and yes.) And how the hell did she get this way? Most people don't start out with such a default distrust of their fellow humans. How bad, exactly, was that divorce, and why did her relationship with Brian get so saddled with it?

(And exactly how much remembered abuse is she actually guilty of, that Brian is now ambiguously traumatized by?)

I keep suspecting I've bitten off more than I can chew. There's a sort of highwire tension line between these two characters, and if I teeter off it even a little bit I plunge this portion of the novel into irredeemable hokeyness. Which is bad. Which is also a terribly strained metaphor, but, y'know. It's a blog. I'm allowed.

Anyway, that's about where I am at the moment. Now I'd better clear out of here--I can tell you with certainty that the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company on Vets in Metairie (er. there are two. I'm at the one by the end of the parade route, near Oaklawn) has very decent wi-fi (unlike Puccino's, where I couldn't even connect, not once, and where there are signs telling students on no uncertain terms that they may not study there), but on a parade night they're pretty darn busy, and I bet they'll appreciate my freeing up a table.

I'm all clever. I have turned my laptop into an alarm clock. In fact, it is a writing alarm clock (an actually writing alarm clock) because in addition to "Time to wake up!", it says, "Time to write! Show up at the page, you lazy bum!"

Premise The First: Once I associate a given handful of environmental elements with writing--a lit candle, the Blue Man Group: Audio CD--those elements will cause me to get into a writing mood.

My computer does this every morning at 6:00 AM so long as I have left the computer in "Standby" mode.

Premise The Second: If I write at the same time every day, the practice will form a habit. Also, designating that hour as writing time protects a place for writing in my day.

So here's how this works: First, create a playlist in Windows Media Player. Next, create a scheduled task in Windows. The Scheduled Tasks Wizard will prompt you for program to run (Windows Media Player) and a time (Daily, 6:00 AM). When you finish with the Wizard, check the box that says something like "take me to this task's advanced properties" and tweak it. Under the "Task" tab, append the name of your playlist to the end of the command in the "Run" field. (Mine looks like this: C:\PROGRA~1\WINDOW~2\wmplayer.exe /prefetch:1 "c:\documents and settings\niki\my documents\my music\Instrumentals To Write By.wpl".) Check "Enabled" and uncheck "Run only if logged on." Under the "Settings" tab, check "wake computer to run this task." There you go. Put the computer on Standby last thing before bed, make sure the volume is up, and rest easy. If you're using a desktop, you might even be able to leave the computer on Hibernate, and it'll magically wake up anyway. Something to do with the BIOS. Most laptops don't have this capability, unfortunately.

(Note that in Windows XP, scheduled tasks only run if you provide a username and password. If you don't want a password on your login, then create a new profile, give it a password, and run the scheduled tasks under its aegis. If you don't want to do that, I mean if you really want only one profile on the computer which logs itself on automatically, here's what you do. Create a password for that proile. Then, Start->Run->"control userpasswords2". Uncheck "Users must enter a name and password to use this computer." Select your profile from the list. Hit "OK". You will be prompted to enter your new password. From this point on, your computer will log on automatically even though there's a password on the profile.)

This is how I got an hour done on the novel even before leaving the house for my 8:00 AM volunteer reading session. Ta-da!

Premise the Third: If I do some writing first thing in the morning, I won't resent all the rest of the things I have to do with my day. You know, for taking up time I could of used writing. 'Cause, see, I already wrote some for the day.

You have no idea how good that felt. Best damn sunrise I'd seen all winter.

Note to self: Really, let's make a habit of this.

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!

Hello. I'm pulling an all-nighter. Trust me when I say it's writing-related, just not a WIP I am at liberty to database and blue-box. (In case of style sheet change, read that as "[whatevercolor]-box," depending.) I'm on dinner break, or midnight snack break, or whatever, and wanted to report in.

Firstly, I have now in my possession the Averatec 3360 I was drooling over. Warranty Corp finally responded last week to the second round of buy-out approval, and Computer Renaissance finally received a new, salable machine to sell me Saturday. (They were in fact waiting on the restore disks that apparently don't come with these computers anymore, because the machine currently in their possession had been empty of OS. A brand new unit came in faster than the disks. (Well, brand new to them, anyway. These are refurbished machines.) They're still waiting on the disks. I hear that Averatec themselves are not very fun to deal with. Good thing for them that they sell such nice computers. Good thing for me I have someone else to deal with when I need service.)

Thus far, my impressions are positive. It's teeny tiny! I like teeny tiny! I have teeny tiny fingers, and I could do with less weight hanging off my shoulders. So. Four and a half pounds, 12.1" screen. The hard drive's an 80 gigger, as I said, although some 17 of those gigs are a recovery partition, which annoys me a little, but maybe when I get ahold of some recovery disks I can do a rebuild. If the recovery disks allow a rebuild that doesn't break off a 17 gig recovery partition. What else? OK. Centrino 1.6 thingie. I hear the Athlon in the 2250 would have been more powerful, but for my purposes, I can't tell the difference, and the Centrino's efficiency is good. I wanted to try it out at SkillJam, but for some stupid reason my account has been temporarily suspended and I can't. But preliminary tests with Bejewelled 2 at PopCap and Jewel Quest at Yahoo! demonstrate competitive refresh rates. Yay!

Centrino notwithstanding, I saw that many people online were unimpressed with this machine's battery life; I concur, and as soon as I finish with the thing I'm currently working on I'll devote some energy towards dealing with that. I hear that there are battery calibration techniques you can proceed through and power management applications you can install. Meanwhile, meh. No big deal. The world is full of electrical outlets. Some of them are even on Amtrak trains.

So my only real complaints have to do with the layout. First, there's the way they fit all the keyboard buttons on the smaller footprint. They opted not to shrink the keys, making this doubtless a more popular computer than the Compaq Aero Contura was among those with bigger hands. However, this meant they had to be clever about fitting the keys together. And what they did was, they moved the arrow keys inwards, and put the shift key and the backslash/pipe key outside of them. Sounds minor until you start typing with it. I keep putting my pinkie on the right-arrow when I'm going for the down-arrow.

Um. Probably a picture would help. I don't have time to deal with pictures at the moment. Later, then.

Second, the volume dial is on the front edge of the laptop. This means that when I lay on my back and prop the computer up on my knees, anytime I shift my butt a little I'm likely to move the dial with my belly and end up muting the music. Or blasting it.

It's kind of nice the way that there are no outlets and connectors on the back edge, though. Convenient. Still, having the USB ports all on the near end of the right edge means things can be a little awkward in right-handed mouse land.

Oh. Back on the positive end, this sucker's wireless capabilities are very impressive. I wrote my husband an instant message from the bus stop across 30th street from our home this afternoon. I was able to do this, because there was wireless signal at that bus stop. Wireless signal whose SSID looked very familiar. Wireless signal from our router, in fact. That's--what?--about 50 yards away? At least another twenty yards past our parking space, where I sometimes, sometimes not, got signal on the 5110H upon getting home from a long drive during which I was using my laptop for tunes. Yeah. Wow.

So, that much for the computer. Now for the mushrooms.

Take you a couple portabellas that are threatening to go bad unless you eat them, like, now. Wash 'em. Slice 'em up however you like.

Heat up a pan with a couple t'bls walnut oil, olive oil, whatever, something that can take a medium high heat. Throw in some minced garlic. After about a minute, take the garlic out. You want your oil garlic-flavored, not burnt-garlic-flavored.

Toss in the shrooms. Pile 'em in. Toss the garlic bits on top, so they'll steam instead of burn. Drizzle a little more oil on top.

Cover. Go away for about ten minutes.

Come back and splash some sherry on top. Cover again and go away. Five minutes or so.

Now for some fun. Sprinkle on a little flour, a little thyme, a little salt and white pepper. Stir 'em about until the flour's dissolved and you can smell the thyme nicely. Now, splash in a little heavy cream. Stir about some more and then let 'em simmer (low heat) for a few.

Voila! It's like cream of mushroom soup, without the soup!

Garnish with parmesan and serve alongside some veggies.

Eat up.

Now. Get back to work!

This is not an Actually Writing Blog Entry. This is merely an Announcement. The Announcement goes something like this:

"Hey you! Yeah, you. You know who you are. I gotcher RSS right here."

That is all. Check back tonight for your regularly scheduled Actually Writing Blog Entry. Well, your several-days-late Actually Writing Blog Entry. Theoretically, that passtime known as "Writing" will have happened by then. It bloody well ought to have, anyway.

Oh my Gods it's a book it has a lot of words in it and like a million things to keep straight like subplots and character development I mean look at the sheer freakin' mass of notes I'm taking and--

*wheeze*

Yeah. And that's just the first few scenes. Er. Yikes?

In other news, "Trilobite" has a word count. With actual words in it. Go me.

Also, I am inches closer to having a new laptop. WAC called Comp Ren back and OK'd the buy-out. Only, they OK'd it based on the price of the Averatec 3250 I was eying the other day, not at the price of the actual laptop I'm replacing. That's a $300 difference, and rather obnoxious given that I've actually decided on the 3360 model which is, while still less expensive than the broken 5110H, $200 more expensive than the 3250. So Comp Ren has called WAC back, and I hope to hear from them by, oh..... spring.

Sorry for the cliche, but it's not. It's an announcement that I'm working on a new short story--yeah, I do that sometimes--but that it doesn't have a title yet or has even been added to my manuscript-and-submissions-logging database, because I've been all hell-bent to get the web interface for said database up and running so I can finally use something easier than phpMyAdmin across several tables to enter new records.

Ah, HTML. HTML, PHP, MySQL. Those lovely procrastination tools that keep on justifying themselves.

Just to keep this entry from being a total waste, behold! I give you an open call for submissions to an anthology: She Is Such A Geek. Gals only. Personal essays requested. All forms of Geekdom welcome. I think. Don't ask me, I'm just passing on the link. Same with the person whose web page I've linked to. So, make sure you note the email address of the actual editors of the actual anthology; don't bug Jed Hartman about it.

Another quick writing session at Cafe Bravo today after visiting Computer Renaissance. I swear, what with the ongoing saga of the dead Averatec 5100, we're all on a first name instant recognition basis at those places now. I walk into Comp Ren, and it's all like, "Good morning everybody!" from me, and "Hey Niki, you're here to see Ryan, right? Go on back," from Brian. And then I cross the street over to Bravo's, and it's all, "Hey Josh, Merry Christmas," and "Hi, another tea today for you? How's the computer doing?" Totally scary, I'm telling you.

Comp Ren: So, last week I reinstated my Thunderbird profile on the desktop in the backroom (which we playfully refer to as "ROXXOR" because of having acquired it specifically to play Guild Wars simultaneously with John--what a cruel, cruel move it is to get someone addicted to real-time gaming when all they have is a laptop). Only, all I reinstated was my Mail folder. Then I deleted the rest of it to save space. Thursday I discovered what I'd forgotten: my address book. So today I came in with the Toshiba Satellite's hard drive in the USB adapter so I could have those files copied to me again. Ryan was holding onto my backup for just this eventuality. He'd been sitting on it for a week, all 37 GBs of it. When I told him this was all, he encouraged me to take the files home and make double sure before he hit the delete key. When I did, and I imported the address book, and I called back, he was all like, "Are you sure?" Total sweetheart. Totally.

So now across the street for tea and a sausage Breggo (like a breakfast burrito, only more Italian than Mexican--more like a floury foccacia than a tortilla) and two hours of writing. I didn't quite hit Chapter 12; instead, I went back through all of Part Two up until now with a grocery list of What Changes Happen (Or Get Noticed) When. The grocery list looked something like this:

• Moon--Brian notices he can sense phase/movement of moon (tides)--
  • upon leaving Amy Friday night, moon is setting, will be down by the time we leave the shipping canal
  • it's up again when Brian runs into Alexis on the fishing boat Sunday dawn
• gradual adjustment to "seeing" mostly via ear
  • "watching" salmon swim away outside shipping canal (hearing water motion)
  • thinks mermaid's song is making an illusion of crowds, then discovers there really is a crowd of other mermaids in the big cave (hearing echoes of voices, adjusting to what the echoes mean)
• When does Brian become aware of sea's voice? (sort of a bass pulse, like what you hear underwater in a swimming pool only much much deeper)--
  • leaves shipping canal; hears relative quiet (reinforces how noisy human civilization sounds underwater), but--
  • still plenty white noise in the inhabited depths; doesn't hear sea's voice until the silence of the Shark's domain

It was the "sea's voice" stuff that got me back-tracking. I was rereading the first version of the book in order to start writing about Brian's meeting with the Shark. There always has to be a Damn Big God-Like Shark in books like these, hasn't there? I promise I am not trying to rip off Duane's Deep Wizardry, despite what it may sound like! Trying not to, anyway. Damn, but there are an awful lot of similarities. I suck. Mustn't concentrate on the suckage. Must just finish book--

Rejection letters, supposedly, went out yesterday. Or thereabouts. If I don't see anything in the mail by Tuesday, it might be a sign of That Blessed Dilemma--a request-for-full when the novel isn't finished--in which case no one will be hearing from me for about a week. As a sign that I am allowing myself to hope, no one will hear much from me tomorrow, either. Well, aside from the inevitable mass family phone call session, it being Christmas and all. Hi Mom!

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.