author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

A suspiciously post-free weekend is easily explained by my having been in Santa Clara, California. I rather thought I'd actually write and blog all weekend long, but this was a jam-packed stuffed-with-fun weekend involving people that haven't been in my daily life for far too long to neglect on those so rare occasions when I actually get to see them. People like this person and that person, neither of whom I notice have updated their blogs in a while. Get with it, people! Bwah-ha-ha. Anyway, August 4th found me doing the day-before-flying Decapitated Chicken Dance, and for August 5th through the 8th I was on vacation. So there's my excuse.

For examples of the Fun with which the weekend was stuffed, see attached photos. (That will be "photos," plural, upon moving this blog entry to the new website. I restructured the database over there to allow multiple images to be associated with a given blog entry. Go me.) I, personally, was also stuffed with Fun, in the personage of candy Lego blocks. Bulk candy stores are teh bomb. They're like trick-or-treating and coming home with nothing but the good stuff. (They are unlike trick-or-treating in that the candy isn't free. The quarter-pounds add up pretty fast.)

I did try to hit the novel, but it seemed every time I had some time set aside, I managed only to get as far as my Morning Pages ritual. Found a wifi spot pretty close to the hotel, a lovely little joint called House of Bagels that sold three types of lox and piled it on a bagel for me with cream cheese and cucumbers, and ended up taking care of bits and pieces of email (mostly concerned with remote access to databases for efficient migration of blog posts from one domain to another) and running out the laptop's battery. There was only one free outlet in the cafe, and it had a blank plate screwed over it. I didn't think the management would think much of my whipping out a flat-head screwdriver and HAXX0Ring their electric bill.

Came home to some goody-goody-gumdrops in the mail. The contract from BBI Media had arrived. It's official--"Faith-Based Charity, Pagan Style" will be in Issue #42 of PanGaia. It will also be on the website, if the extra compensation for electronic rights is any indication. I did the happy dance, signed that puppy, and dropped it back into the mail before heading out into my day.

And yes, writing happened. Got Amy and Brian through their almost-encounter at Gasworks. Will probably finish Chapter 7 tomorrow. Chapter 7 is really, really long.

I just got done creating the Blog Creation/Edit page over at the new site. I hate making fill-in form entries. Next I'm going to have to do the login functions so I can put Edit buttons y'all can't see everywhere. I hate mucking about with login functions.

And today, the novel progressed by another 100 words of conversation between Todd and Amy meant to somehow eventually get them talking about Brian again, while neither of them actually wants to talk about him, and get them both down to the sundial so that Amy can see what Brian's been up to these days, while I have forgotten exactly what that walk looks like.

I hate this sort of fiddly stage direction nonsense!

Everyone talks about the middle book. The middle of the book--the Week Two Wall--that's where the plot's gotten started but run out of steam and the ending crisis is too far ahead to reasonably hope to reach. No one over talks about the middle chapter. The chapter's gotten started, the chapter end crisis is still ahead, and here we are in the middle, the characters twiddling their thumbs like I'm supposed to be a good servant and bring the rest of the plot to them.

I hate lazy characters!

Yesterday: 300 words on the novel and no web design.

Day Before Yesterday: No novel work. Lots of web design.

Conclusion: My weekend was, on average, only one day long. Can I have a refund?

I have forgotten more about Seattle than I'm comfortable admitting. For instance, the walk down 7th Avenue to the bike path that leads to Gasworks Park. Does the bike path actually T-bar 7th, or is there some street negotiating between the two? How long does it take the bike path to get right down to the docks? How much concrete distance between the Wall Of Death and the water? Aaaargh!

And the sad thing is, I had a chance to refresh my memory back when John and I visited his sister. They went to a gaming session at a friend's house in Wallingford; I walked into the U District from there. I walked around the house on 7th Avenue. But did I go to Gasworks? No. I decided to visit campus instead. I puttered up and down Suzallo-Allen Library. Curse my studious streak! Curses!

(At some point, meanwhile, I'm going to start talking about the novel I plan to write come next National Novel Writing Month, and how it is not going to be a Jasper Fforde rip-off, I swear. But about that, more later.)

Hey, wow, this entry spans the gamut of Abstract Categories, don't it? Maybe I should stop pickin' em.

Still crawling along through Chapter 7. Spent half the time tweaking the already-written bits (bad habit! quit it! get the new version written!) and the rest eking out five paragraphs of internal monologue.

Got some stunning good news today. My article, "Faith Based Charity, Pagan Style," will see print in the next issue of PanGaia Magazine. The piece has been pushed back for several issues now, up in the air between PanGaia and newWitch as part of the usual uncertainty that surrounds any busy family of publications, so you can imagine how very pleased and surprised I was to get the phone call today. Watch this space for me crowing about it when the issue hits the stores.

Oh, and the new blog? Coming along nicely. I foresee the Big Move happening over the weekend or shortly thereafter.

So I guess you should actually watch that space for all the crowing.

Five thousand words. Ho ho ho. More like 800. But that's more than I tackled both yesterday and the day before combined, so, moving in the right direction, right?

Fact is, I got all distracted with web design. I created the web page that'll pull up blog entries over at the new site, fiddled with the structure and the style sheet, and made categories and manuscripts linkable. It's still butt ugly, OK, but then I haven't finished fiddling. And look! Linkable categories! Manuscripts that aren't all NaNoWriMo novels (because I write other stuff too)! Blog sorting that doesn't set weird cookies on your machine! Duuuuude!

Not, of course, that the screen shot above quite does the page itself justice (or quite does anything else besides take up a crapload of space in this blog entry), but then you can't see the real thing just yet. It's all hidden in a password protected directory, accessible only as follows...

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Niki's Weblog: Staging Area"
AuthUserFile "/yadda/yadda/yadda/passwordfile"
AuthGroupFile /yadda/yadda/yadda/groupfile
Require group Me

Back to the novel. OK. Maybe I've blogged about this bit before, but--this novel is set in a very specific locale, one that actually exists, for the most part. My characters all live in the boarding house I lived in for all but my first two quarter-years of college. They go to the same college I went to. They're living in the same city. Zoom back in: same cafeteria I worked at, same Gasworks Park I took walks to, same boarding house on 7th Ave.

They do say, write what you know. Often, I do. They say, write your memories. If you lived through childhood you have plenty material for all the fiction you can write in a lifetime. And I did, and I do.

They do not say, expect said memories to bite you in the ass when you begin to write about them.

I'm moving my characters around the memories of that house--Brian here, Todd there, Amy at the kitchen table--and then who comes down the stairs but that gal whose stoneware I broke in the oven (sorry) or that guy whose radio got stolen by that other guy who proceeded to expire in his bed while I was out of town, or maybe the two guys who moved in from the dorms and played White Wolf roleplaying games with me and two other friends all night long every other weekend. And because not all memories are pleasant, here comes L----o slinking around the corner with that smirk on his face, and there's the new landlord and his smarmy son who I swear was just pissing us all off deliberately in order to encourage us to move out so he could move his friends in, and that guy who kept coming back to dig through our mailbox after he stayed only two months rent-free and got kicked out for the rent-free part. And of course Russ in the novel, that needling twerp who recognizes no form of "that's enough" as long as he's still amused, he never wore any face but that of that guy he was conciously based on.

And because friendships don't always stay sweet, there's the role-playing game gang again only this time no one's talking to anyone anymore, and laughter that used to warm the heart now cuts to the bone without changing one audible note.

And because forgiveness happens, there's some of that gang again on the phone or at the IHOP when John and I drove up from Oregon on a visit. And there's the guy Russ is based on, who really wasn't all that bad all the time, blasting Enya out the window to compete with the noise of the party across the street, and him and I sitting on the awning over the front door and laughing at them all.

Damn. Nostalgia strikes again. Soundbytes aren't really representative samples, no more so here than on Fox News. The people briefly and non-identifyingly described above, they all really exist (except the dead guy, anymore), and none of them are as bad as some of those sadder or angrier paragraphs make them out to be (except L----o, whom John met once and dubbed "The Creep" because, well, he was). With just those parenthetical exceptions, I miss them all.

Well, not the landlord's kid. And not the digging through the mail guy. He was just... wrong. But mostly the rest of them... yeah.

I was going to end by naming one of them and begging him to email me, because, Gods bless his parents, his name is So Damn Common that Google avails me nothing, and the constant failure to find even the smallest lead is painful. But now I'm shy of it; naming even one name of that crew might make the rest identifiable, and who knows but that they wouldn't thank me for it. So. I'll end with some keywords, instead. Dude, you know who you are. Talk to me. It's been too long.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Also known as "garou." Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon. Algernon, from The Importance of Being Earnest. NiN and that comic about the cat-girl. Bangor, Maine. The Talking Heads: Remain In Light. Tori Amos on the Dew Drop Inn tour (happy birthday). And, of course, there's always "Well, I've been to France..." (And for anyone who still needs to be told Seattle and the University of Washington, y'all really haven't been paying attention, have you?)

I feel like I'm writing my high-school senior yearbook "dot-dots" all over again. Look what comes of mining college memories to write a novel about college students. They oughtta post warnings.

Still haven't written Chapter 7. But that's OK. I finished editing Chapter 6 today, discovered Chapter 6 hadn't really been finished yet, and added material that set up Chapter 7 quite well.

Problem: Brian has his "OMG I'm Out Of Control" meltdown far too soon after Amy arrives--to wit, the very night she shows up. Seemed to me that I needed his instinctual reaction to being near her to gradually become more and more intense over several encounters. But when it came time to write out the chapter outline, that made for a lot of repetition, a la "Brian and Amy sit on the couch, engage in a little necking, and The Monster Within Wakes UP! Only, worse this time than last time. (Two more of these until Brian goes nuclear.)" So instead the realization and breakdown had to all happen in their initial reunion.

Apparently, the solution to "isn't that too sudden?" is "Damn straight it's sudden, it's hella sudden!" The trick is to up the stakes at the end of Chapter 6, making Brian's out-of-controlness, as well as his horror at meeting the beast within, more intense. Intense enough to make him immediately decide there and then that Amy won't be safe around him, setting him up to pull his disappearing act in Chapter 7. Intense enough that Todd notices all the running around and doors slamming, setting him up to pow-wow with Amy throughout her debut as narrator.

So Chapter 7 is looking a lot more plausible. Now I just have to decide what scenes, out of the several possible ones in my head, will happen during the beginning and middle of that chapter.

Meanwhile, this blog is going to be moving shortly. Awhile back, I took advantage of one of Drak.net's periodic Lifetime Account sales, and purchased NicoleJLeBoeuf.com--hey, all the big kids got 'em, why not me? Anyway, I'm finally starting to do something with the new domain. There will be links between the two websites until I finally port over all the blog archives and functionality, at which point this directory will helpfully redirect visitors. All three of 'em. Stay tuned.

Did I mention that I mailed the book proposal off Wednesday? I mailed the book proposal off Wednesday. I imagine it's in a towering stack of book proposals, manilla envelopes weighing a pound and a half each, early birds with first class stamps lording it over late-comers with their electronic priority mail postage stickers. I imagine a room filled with the smell of coffee, the slowly hystericizing giggles of overworked slush readers punctuated by the rip of envelopes and the flip of pages.

Well, no, it's probably a little early for slush readers to get slush drunk. At 8:00 AM Pacific Time, it might even be too early for slush at all. I have no idea what a WOTC slush reader's schedule is like.

And how's the book coming, you ask? You just keep right on asking that. You go right ahead. While you're at it, ask me how much sleep I'm going to get tonight. Uh-huh. That's right.

In better news, NaNoEdMo 2005 is coming along nicely.

And let's close this morning's entry with product placement: Have you looked through your share of keyholes today? Well, why not? Look at the kind of stuff you get to see! For instance, this blog entry features a lovely composite satellite image of Gasworks Park, in Seattle, where several important scenes in this story take place. Look! You can see the sundial!

(It should be noted that Google--who bought the software, incorporated it into their Maps Beta, and renamed it "Google Earth"--did not pay me to say that. But I wouldn't turn down payment for having said it. Should Google feel moved to grant me a free subscription for plugging this delightful piece of software, I won't complain.)

Yes I do. I'm-a gonna edit this novel into submission. I plan to clock two hours per day, with rare 1-hour exception days, until the 50-hour goal is reached and then keep it up until I like the shape the novel is in enough to give it to a beta reader.

We'll see how well that sticks. Considering that I'm still trying to get the 2003 novel ready to go out the door should someone ask for it, and that I've also got a short story that needs to hit the mail by mid-March, it'll be a crunch. Either it'll be quick-start tough-love lesson in Treating Writing Like A Real Nine-To-Five Job, or I'll end up sleeping a lot. We Shall See.

Meanwhile, after an initial attempt at applying Holly Lisle's One-Pass Manuscript Revision Technique to a NaNoWriMo draft, I have a better idea how to proceed. It goes something like this:

1. Print out and reread the manuscript in its entirety. Flinch if you must, but read. Don't write on the manuscript at this time.
2. Do what Holly says in the "Discovery" bit. Define what the story is about, who the characters are, how they develop. Get a rock-solid grok on the desired finished product.
3. Restructure as needed. Write a chapter-by-chapter outline. Go through your hard copy making marks as needed to bring the manuscript into line with the new structure. Figure out how stuff is foreshadowed. Plant the trees that need to grow; grow the trees that got planted. Lay on a patina of literary allusion and symbolism according to your preference. Think "macro."
4. Now, make a copy of the document file and get to work rearranging the manuscript to reflict this revised structure. Write new scenes where needed. Cut old ones. Be vicious. When you're done with this, you are done with this and you will not be allowed to revisit it except by editorial fiat (that is, if the book is accepted and the editor wants changes; or if the rejection letter says "do this stuff and then resubmit.").
5. Print out a new hard-copy and do some fine-tuning. Find oft-repeated words or phrases and apply thesaurus. Fix the sentences that clunk. Smooth out paragraph segues. Think "micro" and make that prose sing.
6. Print out a new copy and hand it to a trusted beta-reader. Forget all about this novel and work on something else until your beta reader gets back to you. Incorporate beta reader's suggestions, as appropriate. Repeat as necessary.
7. You're done. Now go out there and find someone to publish the beast.

In other news, I got my 10-year-old Canon BJ-10sx talking to my brand new, parallel-port-free Averatec laptop, by way of a USB-to-Parallel-Port adapter. They said it would be iffy! They said it would be expensive! They were right! But I got lucky. And the thing works beautifully. Installed the printer to port USB003, shared the printer on the network, did a NET USE alias using LPT3 to refer to the share drive, and told WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) to print to LPT3. Whoo-hoo! Direct printing from my word processor of choice!

I can now say this: For an effective ego-boost, try printing to an ancient, slooooow bubble-jet. The hours it'll take to print a 237-page manuscript will impress on you that, Almighty Gods in Alphabetical Order, dude, you wrote a huge honkin' book! And isn't that a nice feeling?

To all two or three of you who actually read this and might be wondering: No, I'm not dead, and the novel's not dead.

As to the blog, I'm trying to do a bit of rebuilding on it such that it accomodates other writing subjects besides those novels I've drafted as part of NaNoWriMo. I've been doing a bunch of work on short fiction these last few months, and I've also been hanging out in the AbsoluteWrite forums where the demise or the cleaning-up of PublishAmerica is being ardently hoped for. So many writing subjects to talk about! So many ways to organize blog entries! Plus I wanna try writing my own RSS feed, too.

And as to the novel, I confess to dragging my heels. But! I've written a Whole New Short Story! To submit here! Go me.

So. More later, as available. Kisses.

Sent out two copies of my picture book manuscript today. This means I have fulfilled my "one submission a month" requirement for January. Nyah.

I'm very pleased with the latest rewrite--the story's a lot tighter now, all extraneous elements removed, each remaining Thing tying setup and ending together in a neat little bow. OK, well, it's probably not that perfect. I can think of one Thing still in it that serves no purpose except 1) to establish the main character's physical setting in a "Damn That Television" sort of way, and 2) to establish a Saturday morning routine for the family. But I do think a certain amount of extraneous detail of this sort is necessary; otherwise, your characters might as well be floating in front of a blue screen.

What do I mean by "Damn That Television"? Well, it happens to be the first line of a Talking Heads song, and it got stuck in my brain after reading a forum post by James D. McDonald. Who's he? He's the "Uncle Jim" of "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" fame. The forum post I'm thinking of addresses the issue of Point of View, and quotes an instructive article by Rob Killheffer. (Notice that the link in the AbsoluteWrite.com forum post no longer works; the article had moved sometime since December 2003. My link does work. Please click on it.)

Here's the relevant excerpt:

Interlude: The Voyeur Camera

It’s television’s fault. Television and movies. Visual media. In so many of these indie publications the narrative point of view slides around like a hot rock on ice, and observations intrude without any clear viewpoint at all. Consider this, from Thoughtmaster: "a skeletal face…whose shifting features left the viewer confused." What viewer? Or this: "The voice was surprisingly strong from such a diaphanous figure." Surprising to whom? Surely not to the only other person in the scene, who knows the speaker well.

These writers’ imaginations have been shaped by visual storytelling, in which there’s always an implied viewpoint — that of the audience, the camera, the peeping lens. They conceive their scenes as if they’re presented on a screen, and when they commit their prose, the camera remains, lurking outside the frame.

There’s no other explanation for scene shifts like those in Exile. As Jeff Friedrick and his pal Carl leave the bar where they’ve met, we’re told: "At the bar, a man turned his head and watched them go. He was tall, and a brief flare of light revealed reddish hair. Before the spotlight moved on, odd points of light deep in green eyes gave the impression of motion.…" Gave the impression to whom? The viewing protocols of film and television help us make sense of it: The two men who have been the focus of the scene get up and head for the door, and the camera pans aside to settle on this watcher. His reddish hair is "revealed" to us, the audience. We’re the ones who receive the "impression of motion." It’s as if, in these moments, the authors are not crafting prose but working out a screenplay. I recall the oldest and most basic advice offered to the aspiring writer: Read! Read! And read some more! If you want to write a novel, don’t draw your skills from the big — or the small — screen.