author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

In the tradition of Silly Names Authors Have For Their Works, this blog entry is brought to you by the Demonic Sweater story. It is "finished" (scare quotes in acknowledgment of the eternally tenuous nature of that label) and in the mail. Huzzah!

As I may have mentioned, it was horrendous with typos, copy-paste errors, irrelevant infodumps, and stage-blocking stupidity when it first saw other eyes than mine. Among the logical errors were a man getting out of a car twice but only getting back in once, a woman working with a rigid-heddle loom on the ground (owie back!), and a full-grown sheep getting grievously injured by nothing more than an average-sized woman falling on it. Also, one of my friends actually googled the fictional address I gave Maud's farmhouse, and Google told him it was outside Colorado Springs. Fine. Fine! You don't get a fictional address, K? How d'ya like them apples? You just get told "east of Brighton and north of Weld County Road 2," and you're going to accept it!

The version I sent to my writing teacher Monday was better, but still embarrassingly full of typos. I spent a good chunk of the write-in reserved for actual NaNoWriMo'ing churning through and creating the new draft, and I am not so smooth that I can hide a rush-job. Probably one of the most mortifying "brain typos" in there--y'know, where at the last minute your brain inserts the wrong word for the one you want based on sharing an initial letter or basic sound?--was having someone set up her portable loom on the "big woman table". (Should be "wooden," obviously.) The visual is evocative and lovely, but not particularly appropriate.

Anyway, two days later and several detailed reviews later, the story is in the mail. Guaranteed 99% more typo-free! (That last 1% is properly left up to the powers that be, in about the same spirit as apocryphal Quaker quilting mistakes.)

I won't bore you with another glowing description of how much like a real writer putting a submission in the mail makes me feel. I do that song and dance every time. But I'm also on fire a bit because the last three days have been spent finishing a story. Not fartin' away time on the internet. Actually working on actually finishing an actual story for actual submission. My Gods, it's like I have a job or something!

Time to get back on shift - NaNoWriMo is a-callin' and I've fallen behind again!

Saturday morning I finally finished a complete draft of this story and emailed it to my writing group. Well, not so much Saturday morning as Saturday afternoon. It was 12:30. It was laaaaaate. I had promised to distribute it Wednesday, October 15th. I'd thought, "Tuesday's my nothing-but-writing day! Tuesday I'll finish it for sure!"

Yyyyeah right. Since when have I managed to do anything more productive with a Tuesday than sleep until noon (unless I went to the rock-climbing gym with John for 8:30 or so, and went back to sleep when I got home), crawl out of bed to do maybe half-an-hour of work of some sort, then crawl back into bed all disproportionately pleased with myself and feeling due a break? Yeah. Tuesday the 14th went much like that, only, no half-hour of work. And then, y'know, Wednesday through Friday were Wednesday through Friday. Full of stuff and things.

For what it's work, very soon the rest of the week will look like Tuesday. October 31st will be my last day on the clock at my part-time job. I'm gonna be an honest-to-garsh full-time writer finally. I mean, being a full-time writer was my plan back when I quit my full-time corporate web design job back in April 2004, but soon after I did that, the director of the non-profit I volunteer for asked me if I could spare ten to twenty hours a week to come in and fix their web page and do other miscellaneous tasks. And here I am four and a half years later. You'd think I wouldn't have any trouble staying productive on my own terms when I only work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday--and volunteer Thursdays at a local farm--and continue volunteering some four hours a week for the non-profit that is now also my employer--but by the time I bike home from the office I'm feeling like I ought to be allowed some play-time. And by the time I finish playing, it's bedtime. Apparently my self-discipline and time management skills are a bit more, say, non-existent than I like to admit.

So, starting November 1st, I'm a free agent again. Which is good news for for me on the NaNoWriMo front; I will have more time to go to write-ins and to organize stuff. However, Nov. 1 comes too late to help me out with current projects, so I need to dig up some self-discipline from somewhere or other and get things done. (About that, more later.)

Anyway. I finished this story Saturday. It has this is common with its origins: there's still a magically manipulative sweater involved. However, it's no longer set in and around a New Age store in north-west Denver. Its antagonist is no longer an individually acting eccentric employee. Instead, it's set in a fictitious community it unincorporated Adams County, east of Brighton. The antagonist is the central figure and namesake of the not-quite-town, and the whole town is in on her schemes. Which is to say, the magic involved in the sweater happens to be part and parcel of the community's way of life. And the protagonist walks right in thinking nothing's out of the ordinary. Think Wicker Man, only without the outsider's investigative motive. Think, if I've done this right, Shadows Over Insmouth.

Only I probably haven't done it right yet, which is why I volunteered it for Wednesday's critique session. Aside from one email bounce due to the recipient's mailbox being full, email did what email should and now several people whom I see twice a month and respect quite a lot will be reading it. Cringe! Nervousness and fright! I mean, given the last-minute nature of this story's composition, it's rather rough. It's probably a bit rushed at the end, even though the end came about a lot more organically and easily than I feared it would back when laying down scenes felt like a fractally infinite task. It's probably got copy-paste errors you could blow up a fictional neighborhood with.

And then there's knowing that I haven't exactly been the most gentle contributor to my writing group. I have been prone to Thinking Myself Right when commenting, rather than humbly offering "if it were my story I would" suggestions and "this might be just me, but" observations. And, being the prickly and temper-prone creature that I am, I've been guilty of causing a bit of... well, social tension. Which is the nice way of saying I've been kind of a bitch lately. I'm not proud of it. And I'm not under any illusion that people are going to be any kinder to me than I've been to them--not that I think anyone would be deliberately unkind out of some impulse towards vigilante justice; just that my effect on the tone of this group's discussions has not been for the better. I have to live in the environment I've helped create. So. Having given others a hard time, I don't expect to be given a particularly easy time myself. So I'm living on a steady diet of stomach lining and belated good intentions at the moment.

Um. Hi, y'all! I love y'all bunches! I promise to be good! (Please don't kill me.)

However frank and even merciless Wednesday's critique turns out to be, I think I'm going to need it. My head is an echo chamber, and when I last turned in a story (cf. "Turnips"), I was careless. The manuscript still had the blank template page header, for goodness's sake! It said "LeBoeuf / TITLE" in every upper-left-hand corner. And I mean, literally, "TITLE". Dammit. When Ellen Datlow lamented that so many manuscript submissions she had received revealed a lack of concern for manuscript submission format, she may well have been talking about me (if, that is, Nick Mamatas actually did think my story worth passing on to her, which I doubt). Beyond that, the story had stupidity in it, structural stupidity as well as line-by-line dumbness. Which is not to diminish the awesome assistance of my friend from VPX who did read it and gave me some great feedback on it, and then took the time to read the rewrite and confirm whether I'd fixed what he'd pointed out before as broken. Without his time and effort, the story would have sucked harder. It would have sucked great big granite boulders until the feldspar was striated. However, there's still a great deal of work to do. I printed out that story a couple weeks ago and began marking it up, and by the time I got to page five I understood that revisions wouldn't be a matter of a quick hour's gloss. Oh no. They'd begun to look like a good couple of afternoons' worth of work.

Which I would have taken care of by now. Really! Except, well, this story. Which I am sure will also get marked up thickly before the week is out. Or at least before the end of the month. Maybe. I hope. In any case, this story I have no illusions that is ready for prime time.

DID YOU KNOW?!

The majority of Spell Check accidents happen in the home,* and of those, the bathroom is statistically the most likely place for them. Take special care when using Spell Check in the bathroom!

*No, not in the offices of Publish America. Those would be Spell Check deliberates.

In honor of the thing I am currently stuck on (but hoping to come unstuck on, like, now), a link.

And in case you're like me and don't click links unless you're given a very good reason, here's the introductory excerpt:

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do....

Read it. Read it even if you think it sounds like old hat. Read it especially if you think it's gonna be old hat.

(Bonus! Contains inside insight into the creation of The Graveyard Book! You know you wanna.)

Because writing new stories is always easier than editing rough drafts, isn't it? Yeah, I know. I know. But--hey! New story!

First off, this story is not a Jumper rip-off. Promise.

While I was at the World Horror Convention the other weekend, I had a momentary conversation in the elevator with a man who had just arrived that afternoon. His morning had been spent teaching math at a local high-school. He could only come to the Con after he got off work. He found it amusing, how different the two environments were: a Salt Lake City high school, the World Horror Convention. Indeed.

So I got out the elevator on Floor 3 and moseyed over to the suite in which the film series was showing. The movie scheduled for that two-hour block was Poltergeist, which I'd last seen on HBO in, like, 1983. I hadn't watched it since, mainly because it scared the pants off me (I was six) but partly also because on the third night after watching it Mom told me, "If you really feel the need to sleep in here with us again, you just can't watch that movie anymore." So I didn't. In many ways I was a mindlessly obedient child. (Hey, I still feel like I'm doing something forbidden when I go looking for something in my parents' walk-in attic. I wasn't allowed in there as a kid.)

All of which is beside the point, which is that the casual elevator conversation sort of transmogrified itself in my head during the movie until it became something around which the short story began to take shape. The conversation instead took place at an office party somewhere in the U.S., and the main character was listening with half an ear to a man from London talk about how he used to teach in high school. "Teach what?" she asks, making conversation. "Maths," he says. And she sort of drifts off, thinking about how plurals are even more plural in London, except that Sports sort of become singular, and there are a lot more "U"s to go around, and then as she continues daydreaming about what it must be like across the Atlantic she literally drifts off--vanishes out of the boring office party and finds herself in a classroom in London. She has a rather hard time getting home.

At first I thought she'd be stuck there permanently for some reason, like maybe she was meant to be in London and had to find out why, but I couldn't really get interested in taking the story in that direction. All the fantastic would sort of stop at that point. Besides, it was too much like playing a tabletop role-playing game in which an inept gamemaster clumsily assembles the party by authorial fiat. "OK, so, you're in the middle of whatever you're doing when this mysterious guy appears and says 'You are needed elsewhere.' Then suddenly, like, whoa! You're standing in the woods and there's four people there looking at you--OK, everyone describe your characters to each other."

So instead of making her unable to teleport again, I thought about the other extreme. What would happen if the ability to teleport came so easily to her that she started doing it accidentally? If it was as easy as imagining a place, any place, real or fictional? If it was as easy as thinking--and as hard not to do?

Ever had someone distract you from your hiccups by telling you not to think of purple foxes?

So that's my excuse for not having worked on anything in my editing queue today. I got clobbered by a new story instead. Not that I've left my editing queue entirely untouched, understand - the other day I rewrote "The Witness" from scratch and from memory. That's the story I read for the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest at World Horror 2007. (You can read the winning stories from that year at the Twilight Tales website. Start here with the 1st place story and follow the links back to 2nd and 3rd.) I think I know how to make it better now. I think some of what will make it better is in the new version I wrote the other day. Maybe tomorrow I'll take both versions out, side by side, and - I dunno - synthesize them or something.

Oh, and Poltergeist still scares the pants off me. SRSLY.

Chez LeBoeuf-Little has acquired a pet snail. Have I told you this story yet? Briefly, we were washing two pounds of fresh spinach and a snail floated to the top. Now we have a pet snail.

It's thriving like nobody's business. Its shell has grown by half a whorl since we first found the wee beastie, and if it doesn't get a nice thumb-sized bit of vegetation to munch on every evening, it gets uppity. And whatever you feed it, it will eat it all up. Not a trace remains the next morning. It's a ravenous eating machine!

Here's the thing, though: its mouth is small. Way small. And it doesn't have teeth. All it can do is put its mouth around the next three millimeters of veg and rasp at it with its little sandpapery tongue. Give a snail enough time, though, and this process will suffice to consume leafs of lettuce three times its size and carrot slices five inches long--the latter remarkably like slucking up a spaghetto in slow motion.

Nibble nibble, bit by bit, "she ate that whale, because she said she would!"

Which puts me uneasily in mind of any writing project that's ever seemed so huge that the only reasonable course of action was to procrastinate the hell of out of it.

Nibble by nibble. Bit by bit. 500 words by 800 words. Scene by sentence by word.

Patient and persistent as a snail.

Which is the quasipoetic way of saying that I haven't finished or even really started my short story rewrite yet--and John and I are getting on that train tomorrow. So you know what I'll be nibbling away at today, in between laundry and housecleaning and all the other things that fill the day before travel. The first nibble in the queue will be a new scene wherein Daphne meets one of the extraterrestrial "Ambassadors" face-to-face and shakes its (for want of a better word) hand. Which starts two separate event-wheels in motion, both deadly in the extreme.

I copped out of describing the aliens before; Daphne merely observed that they didn't respond well to cameras, that something about the way light hit them, or missed them, gave the viewer an impression of a vague gray blob with too many limbs. One of the Borderlands instructors read that sentence out loud and then gave me a look. And I said, "Yeah, I admit it. Cop out." It's coming clearer now. The "too many limbs" are thread-like pseudopodia, root-like even, some carrying the being across the ground like centipede legs, some raised up to manipulate matter like hands at the end of arms, and some giving the impression of a wild shock of hair like dandelion down. The light seems to pass between these threads rather than hit them straight on, so that if they're moving they're hard to catch sight of. If you're very observant and don't blink, you can see the sparkle and shimmer of them passing by.

Nibble nibble nibble.

As usual, I fell behind on my intended work schedule. Thus, 9,000 words to go between now and Deadline. That's OK; there's a lot of today left in today.

I'm going to go ahead and announce for all to hear that the current project will go THUNK in my editor's inbox by 5:00 AM MDT on March 15. (Hey, it's daylight savings time already! Is this actually helping us save on oil and electricity?) This is because I firmly intend to start some Serious Goofing Off right about then. My crewbies on the Viridian Ocean are planning to hunt the sea monsters of Atlantis at noon GMT, and I want to be there! Yarr!

Wait! It's daylight savings time! That means 6:00 AM MDT. Well then!

Don't worry, I won't go into a month of downtime over this. Sunday's writing time is earmarked for rewriting "Seeds of Our Future" or whatever I may end up renaming the short story currently known as "Putting Down Roots." Hopefully it won't take me more than a few hard-working days. If I run into the person I want to submit it to at the World Horror Convention at the end of this month, I want there to be a chance that she's actually already received it.

Also? Next week, the bathroom and kitchen get cleaned within an inch of their life. I really hate the way we can tell how long I've been working to a deadline by the depth of the grime layer on the fixtures.

So I showed the story to one more person. She liked it, too, but mentioned two things that could be changed. So I thought, "OK, quick revision and send it off!"

Which I did today (having been felled to uselessness by the heat yesterday).

Only, aside from those two things, I kept running into *klunk* and *ick* and *oh give me a break.* So I did a lot of revising on the sentence by sentence level. And I read it to myself and thought, "Hot damn. That's great!"

Then I gave to my husband for a final read through.

He wasn't happy with the changes. That's an understatement; what he actually said was, "It died."

ArrrggghhhhH!!!!!!!!

So we went back and forth as to what killed it and how to revive it. The big things I agreed with: too much detail nails down the ineffable and makes it sound like a police report. The little things, though... "Doesn't this sentence just sound better?" "Well, no." "Why not?!" "Not sure. It just doesn't work."

So I have not submitted this story anywhere yet. I've sent copies out for second opinions. And I'm going to sleep on it.

Thing about my husband is, he may not be able to articulate exactly why something doesn't work, but he can definitely tell me when something doesn't work. If a piece sings, or fails to sing, he hears that. So I trust his diagnosis. I just can't get over how the old draft clunks here and there and apparently sings for everyone but me.

And that's the problem. Sometimes feedback leaves me feeling like there's absolutely nothing I can do. Like I can't trust my own judgment. Like I suck at revising, so why try? Which is not to blame anyone giving me feedback, of course. Absolutely not. Anyone who's willing to give me feedback, I treasure that. If only I could figure out how to use that feedback rather than get paralyzed by it.

Like I said: Sleep. Tomorrow for working miracles. Miracles are over for tonight.

This weekend "Captain Hook" got an expositionectomy. Then it hit the email. On Wednesday I'll get to hear what my bimonthly writing group thinks about it. Since the last thing I submitted there for critique was "Right Door, Wrong Time" (and boy it's been awhile), they're probably going to get Ideas about me and my seeming penchant for Putting Children In Harm's Way. OK, well, Guillermo del Toro I'm not, but I admit that the dangerous side of faerie tales and magic is a concept worth exploring, even when--especially when--the main characters are legally minors. It's sort of a side-effect of my wanting to treat fantasy as reality. If magic is real, it plays by real rules. If magic is risky, there's no lower age limit on when you start to run the risk. Sometimes when the Goblin King steals your baby brother, he doesn't give him back.

(It's probably worth noting that I don't have children. One or two people reading this story may decide I oughtn't ever to. Which is fine. John and I have no plans in that direction. You may proceed to feel relieved.)

In other news, today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day! Jo Walton announced it last week in response to the entertaining kerfluffle caused by current SFWA VP Howard Hendrix (Ph.D.) screeding off about how writers who put their work on the Internet for free are no better than strike-breaking scabs, "pixel-stained technopeasant wretches" who're "undercutting the efforts of [their] fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all."

Bwa-ha-ha.

Anyway, I'm not certified professional quality as of yet (though I'm trying!), but in honor of the day I'm finally gonna turn this Obligatory Vanity Domain into a real Author's Official Web Site. Which is to say, I'm going to build the "Recently Published" RSS for the front page (although "recently" is sort of a relative term by now) and also put some excerpts, reprints, and freebies up where y'all can read 'em.

Check back throughout the day. Changes will be on-going and stuff will be showing up. After I'm done I'll put a more general update at BurnzPost pointing out choice places one might spend one's time drinking all that free milk from the cow y'all ain't having to buy. So to speak.

21:56 MDT: Recent Publication list is now up. Sorry it took so long. Will post excerpts, reprints, and other freebies over the week.

In other other news, I am just now today turned 31. Woot. Given that 31 is not a number that brims with frothy excitement--"Yay! It's my tenth anniversary of being legal to drink in the U.S.! Let's go out for a beer!"--it was a pleasant surprise to hear that Jo had declared it a special day for all minimally techno-savvy writers. (It also being Shakespeare's birthday doesn't hurt.)

OK, enough of that. Let's go out for a beer.

So I have now completed a full, actual draft of this story. And I do in fact intend to email it to Shimmer within the next couple hours. Yes, I'm nuts. But I said I'd submit, and gosh-darn-it, I'm going to submit.

Who knows? I may surprise myself.

I have a good deal of tightening up to do. It's too long for Shimmer's 5,000 word maximum. I also need to go back and make sure everything I want in it has actually gotten out of my head and onto the page, like what's the deal with Louise and Jimbo's Mom, and what Louise's Dad is up to, and all the parallels between Louise and Wendy, and of course making sure that it doesn't look too cheesy that Jimbo's got the same first name as Captain Hook. Y'know.

So. Back to the grind. More in a couple of hours.