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.

Well, and I did go spin yarn. For several hours. I now have all three singles of my Cloud City "Primrose" (some dyed merino I picked up at the wool market) all spun and ready to ply. (If you're on Ravelry, I'm NicoleJLeBoeuf and it's in my Stash. Link will probably only work if you're logged in.)

These several hours at the spinning wheel did wonders for unwinding my naturally high-strung temperment, but did not work any weird supernatural charm on certain anthology editors. I mean, not that I expected it to--I'm superstitious, sure, but not that superstitious--but it didn't. "A Surfeit of Turnips" will not grace the pages of the Haunted Legends collection. Ah well.

So I'll give the story a gentle once-over (I can't believe I turned it in with "momento" where "memento" should have been! also, some lumps remain) and then send it Right Back Out Again.

You know the adage: "Never let a manuscript sleep over!" Because, I swear, you let 'em sleep over, they take over the couch, throw trash in the floor, and, before you work up the guts to evict them, they've burned cigarette holes in the carpet and uphostery. And you never know when and where you'll find their discarded underclothes a year later. So. Best not to go there.

After that, I think I have a date with some knitting. I mean, fictional knitting. With demons or something. No, of course I didn't mean real-life knitting--the singles aren't even plied yet. Duh. And, unlike the characters in this story I'm thinking of, I always bind off before summoning.

(I know, I know. But I only put that joke here to prevent myself giving in to the temptation to put it in my story.)

I do believe this is my first professional submission in mumble mumble ahem months. Also my first professional fiction submission in somewhat longer. Man, where's my head been? It's been up... something. Obviously.

Anyway, I've now written, rewritten, and submitted a story to the aforementioned Haunted Legends anthology. I used the ghost story that I demonstrate pulling my hair out over here. Briefly, the memory of it popped into my head while I was, I think, half asleep on the bus home after working my weekly 5-hour volunteer shift at the local Community Supported Agriculture-style farm--never underestimate the power of exhaustion to bring back-burner content quite suddenly to the fore apropos of nothing. I spent the next week trying to find that story and/or remember where I'd read it. Once I found it, I started writing.

...Sorta. Actually, I kept procrastinating. "Hey, I've still got 5... no, 4... no, 3 days left until deadline. I'm a genius under deadline. I have time."

Then a fellow Viable Paradise X alumnus got a-hold of me via IM and cackled madly. "Ahahahaha! I have finished my story for Haunted Legends!" He also complained of the loss of objectivity and sanity that come of spending many consecutive hours thrashing about on the printed page.

Oh, it was so on. I admitted to not being... ahem ...quite done yet, and suggested that he email me his story for beta reading; I would email him my story along with comments on his. By the next morning.

Yay! In one fell swoop I got a beta reader and insane pressure to finish the story, like, NAO!

So I did (although only for values of "next morning" that equal noon). And he did. And I rewrote today (after another 5 hours at the farm and a little bit of running around town interviewing people for the currently assigned StyleCareer.com eGuide). And I submitted it.

Yay!

I really, honestly, at least for right now this moment, am totally unconcerned as to whether the story gets rejected or accepted. Ask me again tomorrow and that will probably have changed.

But right now, today, I am a writer.

YAY!

I sent the bastard. Yes. It is on its way.

I'm not displeased with how it turned out, actually. I look forward to a good excuse to revise it good, of course, but for the rush job I gave it I'm not entirely dissatisfied.

I like the way it ends.

I spent the bulk of the past couple hours working on the opening, to make it more likely that it will be read all the way through to the end. As anyone in this business knows, that's never guaranteed. The wishing business is more understated and the exposition is, I hope, a little better woven into the action. And there's a smidge more tension between Louise and her Dad, which I like.

Hey, just as a reminder? This story is not autobiographical. I stole a bunch of autobiographical details from it, but Louise's Dad is not my Dad, for all that they're both pediatricians in Metairie after Katrina hit. Louise isn't me, for all that we both like(d) to spend time hanging out despite parental prohibitions on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Louise's house is not my house, for all that I gave it our big bookshelf at the top of the stairs that got soaked when Katrina blew a hole in the roof. And Louise's brother is not my brother in any way shape or form, even though I stole the two-year-old pronouncement of "cars going splash into the water" from him. Similarities notwithstanding, this is fiction.

Sometimes I just feel like I need to reiterate that.

It's probably getting boring to hear it, but I've sent "Turbulence" and "Heroes" back out again into the slush. Hurrah! I am being a Writer, yes I am.

Although I don't usually like to say which markets I'm trying until I get an answer back, yea or nay, I will mention that my first choice for "Turbulence" turned out to be a non-starter. DNA Publications's Fantastic Stories of the Imagination has apparently not been heard from in some time. Andrew Burt's The Black Hole has no data on them later than 2004. (Absolute Magnitude, on the other hand, has quite a rew recent rejections logged, but I suspect that market likes its science fiction somewhat "harder" than this story delivers. So I have sent it elsewhere.)

So there that is. In other me-write-fiction news, tomorrow is the beginning of a couple of critique periods for me. I've got the first two chapters of The Golden Bridle to be released to Critters.org, and the short story "The Impact of Snowflakes" entering the Newbie Queue at Critique Circle. If you're a member of either, I sure wouldn't mind the feedback. If you're not, but you want to read and comment on these pieces, it takes no time at all to sign up at these sites and dive into the queues.

And then on the work-for-hire side of my life, I have a June 19 deadline, so if I seem to get a little freaky between now and then, don't worry, that's just my standard operating procedure.

And for those who haven't noticed, the AbsoluteWrite.com Water Cooler (i.e. big huge honkin' 7000+ member forum) is up and functional again without a jot of lost data. All hard feelings against those involved in its time down should be sublimated into posting the 20 Worst Agents list far and wide, with the proper preamble attached and donating generously to AbsoluteWrite.com to help pay its bills and fund the legal proceedings. (The post at Jenna's blog is dated, but the PayPal button still works.) No mention of the persons involved in the ISP Which Cannot Be Named, we are told, will be tolerated at the Cooler. It's called "taking the high road," and it grates harshly upon still stinging nerves, and it's the best thing to do. So do.

The story workshopped Saturday has been committed to email as of nine hours ago. As for myself, I am in the Emeryville train station, ready to be committed to rail in about an hour.

Before leaving San Francisco, before finishing and emailing my story, before sitting around half the night in the Hospitality Suite at the Dead Dog Party knitting and watching Adult Swim, I actually got out of the hotel for a bit. I started out by asking the hotel staff, "How do I get to an Amtrak bus stop tomorrow morning?" Oddly enough, the staff member seemed aware only of the Ferry Building stop, and the only way he seemed to know how to get me there was allll the way down Van Ness on a southbound #47 to Market Street, and then alll the way back over on the Market Street cable car, forming a nice big "V" shape over the map of downtown San Francisco in doing so.

"What about Pier 39?" I asked, because Amtrak's pamphlet showed it would pick up passengers there too, and the northbound #47 bus would go right there. Believe me, with my luggage, I didn't want any more transfer points than were strictly necessary.

"Look, all you need to do is get to the Ferry Building, see?" He redrew the "V" shape. "Like that."

"And there's no route to just get me there straight?" I drew a line across the top of the "V" from the circle he'd drawn at the Holiday Inn to the circle he'd drawn at the Ferry Building. The line that capped the "V" went along a street I'd become familiar with, California, as I'd taken the #1 bus along it to the hotel on Thursday morning after checking out of the Green Tortoise Adventure Hostel. It was one of the cross streets that demarcated the block containing the Holiday Inn. "Nothing runs directly along California between here and there?"

"Not that I know of!" he said cheerfully.

I was doubtful. I decided to scout things out for myself. I took the northbound #47 up to Pier 39 / Fisherman's Wharf, found the Amtrak bus stop there, and said to myself, "A-ha!" Then I commenced to putter. I was at Pier 39, after all. There were supposedly all sorts of fun things here. Restaurants, and candy, and an arcade, and a merry-go-round, and seals! Well, actually, sea lions, you can tell the difference because they're smarter and have visible ear flaps and so forth, but--seals!!!! Like fifty or sixty of 'em, laying out on the platforms between the piers and barking at each other and scritching themselves behind the ears with their foot-like flippers and lounging with their furry bellies in the air and--wow! Sea lions. Dude.

Then I figured I'd just walk along the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building. It was good exercise and pretty too. I located the Amtrak stop there as well, ate an Ahi sandwich and worked on the workshopped story at a restaurant in the Ferry Building, and finally turned inland to get on the Market Street cable car.

And then I found out that there is a public transit route that caps the damn "V" that the hotel staff member drew. I found the damn rout that runs right along California. It's the California cable car, duh, and it runs practically from the Ferry Building right out to Van Ness and then stops.

Rather a convenient line of public transportation for the hotel staff to be completely unaware of, don't you think?

At this point in the narration, the author pauses to regale you with a nightmare. I don't have many nightmares. When I do, they tend to fall into one of a handful of categories. There's the airplane or car trouble dream, in which I can't brake or steer or land worth a damn--I had one of those Sunday morning, finding myself awakening at the controls of a Boeing 757 which I had absolutely no training to handle or certification to pilot and which my husband was steering within mere feet of the water. I had to grab the yoke to force us into a wings-a-tilt position so we'd fit underneath a bridge coming straight up. "Why are you flying so close to the water?" I screeched; "Because I'm more comfortable there," he said. I corrected this as soon as I could, but we were not in VFR conditions and I didn't know what to do other than land and wait for help. I later told the jet pilot who came to take the plane home, "Really, I swear, I just sort of woke up in the cockpit. I don't know how I got there."

So that's the vehicle trouble dream. It used to take place in cars, but now it almost exclusively takes place in airplanes because, well, piloting stresses me out more.

Then there's the nightmare of pursuit in which some monstrous person or thing chases me at a walking speed, knowing I can run but I can't hide. That one has happened only very, very rarely since I got into my 20s.

And the nightmare of being unprepared for school happens fairly frequently. It almost always puts me back in high school, not college. I've heard others say the same. We form more of a stressy connection with the school our parents chose, maybe, than with the school we chose to escape to. Or maybe high school is more grounded in the subconscious, being usually in our home neighborhoods and associated with rites of passage like the sweet sixteen, learning to drive, and so forth.

Well, you probably recognize all those dreams. Especially the school one. And you'll probably recognize this one, too: the nightmare of falling. Only when I have it, it's special. It's quite precise. It very rarely involves a straight freefall; instead, it begins on an inclined plane. And I'm in a vehicle of some sort: a roller coaster, a car, a bus, maybe even a waterslide. And I am going down or up a very steep incline, so very steep and increasingly so that inevitably my vehicle's wheels (or, in the case of the waterslide, my butt cheeks) lose contact with the road (or track or slide) and begins to fall as though the plane had become perpendicular to the ground.

The entire way up Nob Hill while riding the California Street Cable Car, I kept thinking, "Greeeeat. Fresh fodder for my falling-off-an-inclined-plane nightmares. Just what I needed."

Because California Street is pretty damn steep. I'd wager 10%, some of those blocks. And the cable car is two-thirds open to the sides. My entire stay in the Holiday Inn, I'd fallen asleep and woken up staring at a Photoshop-filtered picture of people riding a San Francisco trolly (ding! ding! think Rice-a-Roni!), and I'd marvelled at the way they some of them stood on the running board and held onto the side pole as they rode. Was that allowed? Was the driver aware? Yes the driver is aware, and it is in fact expected, and it is not the norm for someone sitting on the bench in the open bit to clutch the side pole and the back of the bench with white knuckles and shaking arms as the car rides up past Chinatown.

Yes I'm a wimp. What's your point?

On my way back to the Ferry Building with luggage this morning, I sat in the enclosed section in the middle. I still did my share of white-knuckling, especially when a young lady stepped right out onto the running board in preparation for her stop about two blocks above the heart of Chinatown. I suppose people get used to the darndest things.

Hell, I suppose if I can get used to steering an airplane, or to chatting with Big Name Authors at conventions without going all "hrrrr dahhhh thhbbbb uh You Rock, Sir! i er ummm....", or with reading my own fiction aloud in front of a group of strangers (which group includes said Big Name Author(s)), other people can get used to seemingly death-defying feats such as hanging out the side of a cable car going 10 miles an hour down a 10% grade incline. Each to their own.

Yes! I have entered this contest right here. In order to make the story acceptable for that contest, it not only had to be totally rewritten from its beginnings as a high school writing assignment (it burns! it burns! the awful bad teenage writing burnsss us!), but then the result of rewriting it had to be slashed down from 4,500 words to 2,500. Oh ouch. Oh, owie wowie. I, er, didn't actually need that left arm, did I?

In other news, I am sitting in the lobby of the Green Tortoise Hostel in San Francisco. Tomorrow sometime before 10 I have to get to the hotel that's hosting the World Horror Convention. I am hoping that the transit hurts less than the walk from the Ferry Building to the hostel. "Oh, it's just a couple blocks up to Broadway and then like another block to the left. You can't miss it." If those were two blocks to Broadway, they were looooong blocks. And then it was at least six blocks up Broadway to the hostel. Up as in uphill. Uphill as in San Francisco Bay Area uphill. With luggage. Owwwwww.

So I'm going to sleep now. Tomorrow starts bright and early, and I'm beat.

...oh wait. I have.

I'll say it again anyway: Synopsis writing suuuuuucks.

On the good side, I did get through the three pages of narrative summary without ever quite giving in to the little voice in my head that is quick to tell me what an awful, awful book this is, how pervected and gratuitous and wrong. I wrote through the paragraphs describing each of the scenes that woke that voice up, nodded peacefully at said voice until it went away, and pretended not to care every time that voice came back.

Thus I reached the end. It's 1,682 words long, just under three pages single-spaced, and it will need a thorough revision later on this evening. With any luck I will put the darn thing in the mail tomorrow morning on my way to work.

More later.

Aaaaaand another one goes back out into the world.

Have I ever linked to The Black Hole? Black Hole good. It's a database of paying F/SH/H markets and their minimum/maximum/average submission response times. It also contains relatively up-to-date guideline and masthead information. It's toothsome, low-fat, and high in fiber. Go nibble on it yourself.

Now. Now I have so badly got to write a synopsis for Drowning Boy. More later. Probably after sunrise.