author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

"First Breath" has sold. To a professional market, even. Which is a first for me. (Come to think of it, Ideomancer was my first semi-pro sale of fiction this decade. Damn, 2010 rocks!)

On the one hand, this means that the ongoing worldbuilding discussion with my friend is unlikely to result in a significant revision. On the other hand, that's totally OK and I know she'll understand.

This weekend: Floating on euphoria, squeeing to my nearest and dearest, having an extremely short attention span because squee!

Tonight: Angsting over writing the requested bio. What the hell does anyone put in those things? I mean, when they can't say "is the best-selling author of this, that and the other novel."

Tomorrow: Working on the next thing, because there is always a next thing.

And I'm not sure the Ant thing will be the next thing, because if there's something I've learned from this experience, it's this: Write at the intersection of passion and fear. That story that won't get out of your head, that you're kind of ashamed to let anyone else see? That's the one. Get to it.

Bonus points if it came to you in a dream.

I am thinking of another story that matches that description. And, while there's something to be said for the comic relief of something like that Ant thing, that other story does match the description. Which means now it won't get out of my head.

But tomorrow I get to see a bunch of writer-type friends downtown for my usual Tuesday Lunchtime At Atlas thing, and I will probably squee at them a bit more before settling down to writing the next thing. Also! I have a new laptop! It isn't falling apart, and its CD/DVD-ROM works, and it doesn't crash when I unplug it! Tomorrow is totally going to be show-and-tell day.

Writing metaphors! They're not just for breakfast anymore! In fact, they're what's for dinner. Also lunch for the next three days, because we cook in quantity.

So on Wednesday John and I had our first Cooking Date of the year. We made French onion soup and insalata caprese. It was all a spectacular success, and, as implied above, I've had leftovers to eat every day since then.

Today at lunch I sat down with a freshly broiled toast-and-cheese top on a rewarmed crock of our awesome soup, and, apropos of nothing extraordinary, I finally figured out how to eat the dang stuff.

Pause. Rewind. Replay a Wednesday night in Metairie, Louisiana circa 1988. Maybe it was a Sunday, I don't know. Once a week, or maybe just once a month--memory is hazy here--a group of neighborhood ladies got together to sing barbershop harmony. They had hopes of founding a brand-new Sweet Adelines chapter. Mom met with them and brought me along, and this was when I first got pegged as a baritone. (Yes: I was a Type A at the age of 12.) But where I'm going with this trip down memory lane is down the road from the neighborhood home in which we rehearsed to the local Ruby Tuesdays for late night appetizers. Where I always, always, always ordered the French onion soup.

And I always made a mess trying to get through that toast-and-cheese lid. And Mom and all the other grown-ups enjoyed great and gentle amusement at my exasperated expense.

It's not simple! A spoon isn't sharp enough to get through that thick swiss cheese. And even if it was, the toast is floating; you can't very well slice it with a knife and fork. There's no leverage. Best I managed to do was poke at the edges of the cheese until I had a hole through which to sip the broth down to a less perilous surface level, such that mangling the toast and cheese no longer caused catastrophic overflow.

Even John asked the question when we sat down to dinner: "Now how do I eat this?" "I have no idea," I told him. "You just muddle through and make a mess. It's why I put the soup crocks on plates."

But today at lunch, I got it. If you just let the soup crock sit, all patient-like, until all components are cool enough to eat without burning your mouth, the soup will have soaked into the toast and softened it up. Then you can push... not too hard... very very gently... at the cheese-topped toast with the edge of your spoon, until it gives way. The cheese will try to glue it together, but once the bread breaks, the cheese will stretch thin and you can bite through it when you eat the broken-off bite of bread.

After that, everything's much easier.

So this was my discovery. And I thought, "That's another metaphor for writing, isn't it?" (Yes. I know. Everything's a metaphor for writing. Shut up, I'm making a point, it's an effin' marvelous point, it's bloody brilliant. Because I say so. Hush.) Of course I thought that. I was in the middle of my writing day, and I was trying to figure out how to get my mental spoon through the thick cheese topping that was keeping me from going deeper than babble draft into anything.

The plan was to spend a good hour moving an unfinished short story closer to submission-ready. Only I didn't know which one. "First Breath" was done and out the door (though it may yet see further revisions pending an ongoing conversation a colleague and I are having about its worldbuilding details). "Lambing Season" also hit the slush again yesterday. A number of stories are in the post-critique "almost perfect, but not quite" stage, but none felt... permeable, if you know what I mean. None felt accessible. I spent half an hour going through my files, looking for some half-baked idea from a freewriting exercise that might spark itself into a full-blown story. Nothing went ping.

Finally I latched onto a "scene" from the Daily Story Idea yWriter file. It had to do with sentient, human-sized Ants coexisting with humans. One of them goes into a coffee shop and orders a cappuccino. As story ideas go, this one was light and fluffy and funny and nothing at all like "First Breath," and it amused me to read it. I had no idea what to do with it, though. I didn't even know what to call it. ("The Ants Go Marching Latte-ward, Hurrah" is very much not a working title. It's an "I have to call this something and I mustn't take it too seriously this early in the game" sort of for-now title.) I set the timer for another half hour and attempted to figure it out where this thing was going.

I pasted that ridiculous excuse for a working title at the top and printed out the not-yet-a-story. Then I read it again, letting its broth soak in and soften things up. Then I got out a pen and began making notes as tentative as the spoon's assault on the toast-and-cheese. "Barista shouldn't be too enlightened; anti-Ant prejudice shouldn't all be big bad boss's." "Would Ant use mandibles for speech? How would Ants speak?" "What barista thinks but doesn't say parallels what Ant doesn't say but telegraphs with her antennae." Several of those notes put together became a solid story development idea, like a nice big bite of toast that lets you finally get your spoon into the soup. And after that, everything becomes much simpler.

Really, everything about writing that looks scary and impossible tends to seem less so once you take that first nibble. But then, isn't that the case for most scary and impossible tasks?

Big news: "The Day the Sidewalks Melted" is now live for you to read in Ideomancer volume 9, issue 1. Read it here. And since it won't take you all that much time to read, go read the rest of the free, online magazine while you're at it. The other stories are breathtaking, the poetry likewise, and the reviews illuminating.

And consider donating, since that's how the staff of Ideomancer keep the magazine going and the contributors paid year after year.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a new story, which is news and really oughtn't to be. That is, I ought to be doing it often enough--writing new stories--that it's not newsworthy. But I finally realized, considering the woefully slow progress I've been making on finishing the NaNoWriMo 2009 draft of Melissa's Ghost (I'm afraid John's getting the proof copy for an anniversary present; it wasn't done in time for his birthday), that putting off everything else until I'm done with that job is a recipe for unhappiness.

Recipe for happiness:

• One story idea that won't let you go.
• A portable Smith-Corona that's gathering dust.
• Five minutes reviewing the typewriter's instruction manual.
• About two and a half hours.

It's not actually a new story, but it's such a revision over the first time it showed up that it might as well be. What's it about? Well, in one sense, it's about succubi and how they reproduce. In another, it's about lives of ennui, lives of substance, and profound transformation. It's probably only going to be about 1500 words by the end of the day.

The end of the day will not be later than this weekend. I have promised it to the twice-monthly critique group. No, not the original typewritten draft. It'll get retyped into WordPerfect and revised first. Then emailed.

See, I'm not entirely a luddite here. (I mean, look! Blog post! On the internet!) It's just that sometimes, to recover from a stall, I have to switch from my daily laptop to something a little more "me plus words minus everything else". Sometimes I need to dust off the Ancient Decrepit DOS 6.2 Compaq, hide away from the wifi and from all my fancy editing tools. And sometimes I need to escape the bureaucracy of file names and directory trees and run away to where the paper shows up before the words rather than after, to where each letter has weight and the price of going too fast is a key-jam or the whiteout ribbon.

And sometimes I just need that immediate reward of a bell going "ding!" every time I invent a new ten-word sequence or so. "Go you! Now come up with another ten. Good job! Again!"

Seriously. You should try it. It's refreshing.

It was actually only four rewrites; I estimated and slightly exaggerated on Twitter. Four requested rewrites, and now an acceptance. "The Day The Sidewalks Melted" will be published in Ideomancer Speculative Fiction. Possibly in March.

I don't really have much to say beyond that, except that I'm really happy, and, despite how weary I may sound of rewrites, really grateful to editor Leah Bobet for seeing the potential in this story and pushing me to make that potential reality. Her attention, patience, and persistence were vital.

Now I must write a bio. Hooray, a new assignment to affix my dread upon! I'm off to procrastinate now, which we shall call "reading back-issues of Ideomancer to get an idea of what kind of bios the authors therein do write."

This morning, whilst scribbling today's date in my Morning Pages notebook, I suddenly realized that June in fact only has 30 days in it and not, say, the 42 or so I must have assumed. Plenty of time to get a story ready for its first submission! Or, y'know, not.

But if it's under 500 words long, we're looking at possible, right? And if it's 400 words of a story that's been waiting two years to be submitted, when I originally meant it to go from creation to submission in the space of a week--well, it's about time, right?

Thus ends the editing paralysis surrounding "The Day the Sidewalks Melted".

I went back to the original draft, the one I sent around to friends on the day I first wrote it. Then I read my rewrite, the one John told me died on the page. And he was right. I thought it corrected for clunk? It was the clunk. Comparing the two drafts was like a concise lesson in how less is more: two or three sharp details can do a much better job of painting a picture than can twenty. And when the story is about an event that none of the characters (nor even, quite, the author--shh!) understand, but can only describe by its effects, then two or three sharp details about those effects is what the story needs.

Which isn't even getting into the concision required by the flash format (400 words; each one has to be right), or the different implications of different narrative frames (this is not a scholarly treatise! this is a break-up story).

So I sent it off and soon received Ideomancer's auto-response. I did not seek anyone's comments on the draft, because what I really don't need are another two years of paralysis. John will read it tonight. (I hope he likes it!)

And now I am no longer thinking, every single morning, "I really need to repair and submit 'Sidewalks'". Yay. On to the next thing!

So there's this One-Minute Weird Tales thing, which I may have mentioned before. At this time, there's just one on the site. Weird Tales would like there to be more, so, they're encouraging submissions. So I wrote a little something... oh, Tuesday. I think. Yeah. Tuesday.

I just submitted it today.

Why so long? Because I couldn't decide on a freaking title, that's why! Gah. But then, in a story 120 words long, the title comprises a non-trivial percentage of the text, right? Deserves a bit of thought, right? Possible not six days of thought, though. In any case, I stopped whiffling, and it's on it's way now. Go me.

In other news, I've started pulling another story idea out of the Demonbox and potentially into the light of other people's eyeballs. Kicking and screaming. See, I'm in Chicago. It's Monday night. Monday night in Chicago means Twilight Tales Open Mic! Or, as it turned out, Twilight Tales Mini-Workshop. I wanted to bring something short to share and get critiqued, just in case there was room on the schedule. So I spent much of today trying to decide which half-baked idea might profitably go back into the oven. And then, once I decided, I spent half the afternoon getting around to the blackbirds-leaving-the-wire moment of "OK, all right, time to get to work! Really!"

So I ended up leaving myself only 30 minutes to get a real draft done--as opposed to the "babble draft" that was sitting on my hard drive, containing characters with no excuse for being in the story beyond the fact that they were in front of my eyes when I wrote it. I mean, this two-year-old draft had "I Am A Writing Exercise!" written all over it. You read it, you can almost hear Natalie Goldberg's voice saying "What are you looking at? Fifteen minutes. Go." And this was not getting turned into something presentable in 30 minutes.

Which was fine. On the one hand, the event was well attended, and the last person due a turn in the hot seat ended up postponing until next time. No one was hurting for me not offering up more that my opinions on others' writing. (As to that: Gods, I'm a mouth. Sorry.) And on the other hand, the simple act of getting started on the draft was beneficial in and of itself. Now I have something else to work on during my multi-city writing retreat.

A bit about the "getting started." This came up on the Absolute Write forums: Someone started a thread called "How do you motivate yourself to write?" Someone who, much like me (more frequently than I like to admit), has a work in progress but has a hard time making themselves sit down and work on progressing it. And the thread turned into a real treasure house of strategies for beating writer's block. Writers being a varied bunch, the suggestions offered were wildly divergent. So... read it. If one trick doesn't work for you, another will. Some depend on guilt and duty, others on excitement and play. Others depend on psychology, hypnosis, mood-altering of the non-drug-related kind. Some mix and match!

My main contribution was about the "getting started" thing that I keep mentioning but not really going into. My issue is, once I get the right momentum going, it sustains itself. The trick is generating that momentum in the first place. I've got, like, rubber in my butt and springs in my ALT-TAB fingers--I sit down, I get up again; I open up my word processor of choice, I ALT-TAB away to some blog or other. What finally works is to identify the first bite of any given task: Reading the critiques. Fixing the teeny-tiny nit-picky stuff in the draft. Describing the one scene. Printing out the babble draft and scribbling notes on it. Something, some small nibble like that--it "tricks" me into entering the room where the story is, and being in that room at all will result in story happening. For five hours, if need be.

(I have to admit that being away from constant Internet access does help.)

So I'm all started now. With any luck (and discipline), I'll manage to continue the momentum tomorrow evening on the train. We Shall See.

(Boy, this entry fits under a lot of categories. Also, I'm sure we can dig out 9 other ways of looking at procrastination and make a nifty pastiche reeeeal easy. "A writer and a story / Are one. / A writer and a story and an hour of Puzzle Pirates / Are one." You can probably fill in the rest.)

Hello from Chicago, a surprisingly bike-friendly city! And hello from Wrigleyville--as bike rides go, not as far from Union Station as I feared. Seriously, other than the last 5 blocks of my ride, which were residential so meh, there wasn't an inch of route that wasn't marked with bike lanes or with "Shared Lane / Yield to Bikes" signs. How did Google know? I told it "Union Station to Sheffield House Hotel," it showed me a route including the interstate, I told it "No, walking" because I am neither a car nor a bus, and it gave me this. You might note that the second appearance of Milwaukee Road involves going the wrong way on a one-way street; well, on that one-way street, there are bike lanes going in both directions. That's how good it is.

As for Sheffield House Hotel... Put it this way; it's no Hilton. But it's reasonably clean, tolerably functional, cheap, and in the target neighborhood.

And as for biking, go me. I checked my bike on the train for the first time. I feel like I spent the entire week before my trip getting ready for that: buying tools, practicing removing or rearranging pieces of my bike, getting surprised by the need for new tires or the suddenly broken seat adjustment nut, & etc. But it was time well spent. When I got to Denver Union Station, it took me under 15 minutes to have the basket off, handebars lowered and turned, pedals removed, and the bike into the $15 box. They even let me stow my tool bag in the box, which Amtrak's web page says absolutely is not to be done.

Picking the bike up in Chicago was slightly more cryptic; you sort of just have to know that bikes won't come up to the baggage carousel, but that you have to go down to the basement in the hard hat area to claim 'em and put 'em together. And given that you're not going to ride away carrying that box, at least not as is, maybe you're resigned to buying a new one each time you check; maybe you talk to someone working in baggage retrieval and they agree to hold onto it for you. Maybe you stomp it into a flat 3" x 2" square and hope it'll reconstitute. Be creative.

But all of this is by-the-by. What I really wanted to blog about was how Amtrak is totally my favorite mobile writing retreat like ever. Which you knew, if you know me. But this trip totally rocked for writing.

It didn't look like it at first. The train ride started out... crowded. I mean, even for Memorial Day weekend. Crowded. Which is good; more people riding the rails means more likelihood of service expansion. But it also meant that they had trouble seating us all. Seriously, the train was rolling for a good 5 minutes before a crew member found me a home for the night. But that's OK; I never doubted they would. Amtrak wasn't my problem. No, we reserve that honor for Gripey McBickerson, father traveling with small son, who wasn't gonna let some Amtrak crew member tell him to wait in line like the other customers. Noooo.

Really, this is classic. Indulge me for a bit. You know that destructive nonsense about "the customer is always right"? Ever notice how customers who really believe it, bless their pointed little shoes, seem to think that they, themselves, are always more right than the other customers? In Whiny McSidlesneeze's case, he and his son were oh so much more important than the other, oh, 20 families including small children also waiting to board. He must be seated right now! Screw waiting in line like everyone else, seat him and his kid first! Before all the paired seats are taken! Such that he and his son end up at opposite ends of the train! Because Amtrak crew members can't possibly be adept at gently shuffling passengers around to ensure children remain safely with their parents!

I'm not going to go into the whole saga of Kvetching McSullenpants and his four year old son. Not here. It's not the point. Besides, the poor kid is clearly going to be embarrassed enough by his father as the years roll by; I shouldn't add to it. No no no no. The point is, when one of the coach passengers is obnoxious, suddenly no matter where you're sitting, it seems like you're bumping into them. And Mr. Whingiewoe Carp-n-Moan continued to be obnoxious after this point. He seemed quite sure that the rest of us would find his constant barrage of cynical, sarcastic commentary entertaining. And retold the saga of how some crew member tried to bully him around to one and all. And practically encouraged his kid to repeat the crew member's name with him, that they may remember it forever, that he might someday soon, any minute now, sic five lawyers on him for, y'know, not treating him like the special snowflake shooting star that he so clearly was.

And so on, and so forth, and this is my writing environment? But but but I must finish my rewrite before Chicago!

And yet things were wonderful.

So eventually, after the train's gotten as far as Commerce City, us last two end-of-the-line single stragglers are led to seats two cars down. And we settle in. And I take me, myself, and my computer, along with recently critiqued copies of "The Impact of Snowflakes," into the Cafe Car... where I discover, to my delight, that it's the sort with two outlets at every cafe table and two more at ever cluster of sightseer-style chairs. This is not to be taken for granted! On the California Zephyr, one never knows what the outlet situation will be in coach or in the lounge. By Summer 2011, all Superliners should have outlets at every seat (offical word from Amtrak rep), but until then, I tend to squee a bit when I see outlets. So I happily ensconce myself and read through my friends' comments. Then I sort of just sit there, composting it all in my head, and playing with the Mardi Gras silk that Avedan gave me for my birthday (depicted here with Birdseye Maple "Lily Spindle" purchased at the new downtown Boulder shop Gypsy Wool). It spins up pretty.

So that was last night. This morning I woke up as we pulled into Omaha, about 6:20 AM or so (a bit behind schedule), and went into the wake-up routine: teeth brushing and coffee drinking and Morning Pages scribbling. And then a little more spinning. And then--"OK, no more procrastination! Must have this done by 3:00!"--sitting at another Cafe Car table to revise "Snowflakes" over the next... five hours, I think. Great leaping Gods and Goddess. Five freakin' hours.

(Mr. Sweetiepie and son showed up a lot, but they were Not Allowed to spoil the happy writerly buzz. Headphones are good. So is Determinedly Enjoying The View or Doggedly Staring Into The Computer Screen. Still, allowed myself a small amount of schadenfreude when overhearing dad admonishing tantruming son, "Hey now, no drama." Because goodness knows Kvetchy McMutterscoff never caused any drama.)

So as it turned out, I had not brought my Canon BJ-10sx with me in vain. I plugged in the printer upstairs in the lounge car and finished printing out that story about 45 minutes before arriving in Chicago. Then into the Priority International envelope it went, ready to be toted up to the nearest U.S. P.S. customer service lobby!

First thing I did in Chicago, other than retrieve and reconstitute my bike, was stick that story in the mail Priority International. Because I have a March 31 deadline I'd like to beat, thanks! I'll let you know how it goes.

So it's later and I'm hanging around the Sheffield House Hotel lobby, posting this. And on the one hand, I'm feeling like, way to go me! Today, I Was A Writer! Good job! You have Accomplished and now you may go play. Which I did. I biked over to Blue Bayou and said hi to my brother--who was not, in my opinion, nearly surprised enough to see me riding my bike in Chicago. He just said, "Hey, you're a little late, aren't you?" Meh. I'll do the crawfish thing tomorrow. Today I was just saying hi. And then I went over to North Clark to a Japanese restaurant I'd noticed on my way up from the station: All You Can Eat Sushi. That appears to be the actual name of the place. I ate there. Now, I hurt.

But on the other hand - and this is weird, I think - I'm feeling both addicted to stress and addicted to the happy. The stress is, "Oh my Gods I have to get this stuff DONE today," and the gut level of it isn't necessarily affected by having actually got the stuff done. I have to keep reminding myself that I did my assignment, really, I can relax now!

And then there's the happy. I like Feeling Like A Writer! I should do it again! I should spend another four hours revising something so I can pop it in the mail so I can get that feeling again!

Seeing as how it's eleven o'clock at night, I've been up since six, and I didn't sleep very soundly last night, those 'nother four hours are at the very least not going to happen right now. But watch this space for developments; a much shorter version of it may happen tomorrow or Monday.

P.S. I'm on Twitter now, Gods help me. Click the link if hearing me jabber interests you; I'm doing a good bit of it since I'm traveling. Meanwhile, my uber-rss should start feeding to Twitter via TwitterFeed. Let's see what happens when I post this...

Oh, hey, it's past March 31 now! Weird Tales should be open to submissions again, right?

Well... no.

It's always a good idea to check the guidelines again instead of going, "Oh, hey, it's past March 31 now!" and blindly shooting off a submission.

Weird Tales’s traditional story submissions remain closed until Memorial Day — but we ARE opening up submissions for a new flash-narrative format: ONE-MINUTE WEIRD TALES!...

These are sharp little micro-stories of 20 to 150 words, presented in a quick sequence of brief one-screen chunks — sort of a funky hybrid of a movie trailer, a Zen koan, and an Adult Swim between-show bumper.

I guess I have another writing assignment. A short one. (I like those.)

Meanwhile, rather than wait to resubmit "Lambing Season" in late May, I'm thinking I might give it a shot at F&SF. If that's not meant to be, I'll know in way less than two months. The Slush God is hella quick that way.

...then you will probably find the following information helpful.

When I last checked the Submission Guidelines (around the end of December), the Weird Tales website directed authors to look for them at Ralan.com. (If you write fiction of the fantastic, you ought to have Ralan bookmarked.) These listed the editor as being Ann VanderMeer, and the address for e-submissions as weirdtales at gmail dot com. On my inquiring for further details as regards attachment format and the like, Ms. VanderMeer emailed me the following:

I prefer the first 3-4 paragraphs pasted into the body of the email and the entire document attached, either as a PC MS-Word document or an RTF file. Currently closed to submissions until March 31.

Poking around today for links, I find that both Ralan and Weird Tales have updated their websites. Weird Tales once more hosts their own submission guidelines (although with the same lack of technical details as prompted me to email in late December), and both websites announce the temporary closure to submissions.

HTH. :-)

To my fellow United States citizens and residents, and to my fellow citizens of the global community: Happy Inauguration Day! The U.S. has a new President as of yesterday, and his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and I can't stop grinning.

I will put my exuberance here, for the record. Should I have occasion to regret it, as supporters of the previous President eventually did, I'll own up to it. But right now I can't imagine being disappointed because I don't expect miracles--I expect a continuation of the hard work and competence I saw during his campaign.

What the heck does this have to with a writing blog? Just this: I pledge to work as hard, in my own life, in my own career aspirations, in my craft and art, as I see our new President working for his own ideals. I admit that sounds cheesy. But watching him during his candidacy, watching his constant activity since the election (really, since when have we seriously paid attention to the Office of the President-Elect?), and watching him get to work on Day 1 (I am actually tuning in to CNN to find out what's up to--I've never done that before, and I actually avoided coverage of the previous President because he made me angry and nauseated), is nothing short of an inspiration. And it makes me feel like a bum. And I don't want to feel like a bum.

We find our role models where we can. I pledge to work as hard as I can see my role models have and do--because that's what "role model" means. We model our behavior--hopefully--after the inspirational examples set before us. So. Add another name to my list of role models.

It's kind of like a New Year's Resolution, except made on Inauguration Day rather than New Year's Day. I think that's fairly appropriate.

In other news, "Lambing Season" is in the slush again; I wish it well. And on the freelance non-fiction side, I'm working on some articles for upload to Constant Content. I was mildly excited to learn that one of my existing CC articles was recently purchased, and to find that this customer, unlike some previous ones, honored the Usage License requirement of including my by-line. (Read it here.) Apparently CC has also lowered their payment threshold from $50 to $5, which effectively removes the disconnect between selling an article and getting paid. All of which makes seeding that particular cloud look more worthwhile. So I will.