author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Wearing my Metroblogging hat and back-filling my New Orleans visit, I've gotten as far as... Day 1 of the Habitat work week. But in my defense, it's a long damn post. So there. I think the rest of them will be somewhat shorter, having gotten some of the "how ESTHFH works" stuff out of the way.

[back of hand to forehead, eyes rolled heavenward] On I slog.

Meanwhile, rather than getting stuck in the past, I have put up a post at Denver Metblogs celebrating the annual corn harvest in Longmont. The recipe is tried and true as of early this afternoon, so if you are not averse to dairy products or foods with a high glycemic index (SugarBusters need not apply), have at it and enjoy.

Meanmeanwhile (is that a word?), thoughts are straying towards the inevitable revision of the soon-to-be-retitled "Putting Down Roots". As usual, I'm squeamish about reading all those comments everyone wrote in the margins. I don't think that ever gets any easier; pushing the fear aside and reading the critiques anyway, it only becomes habitual, not easy. But I can't put it off. A golden opportunity for an editorial audience opened up for me at the writing workshop, and I can neither run the risk of letting it go stale or submitting anything less than the best this story can be.

Some thoughts to incorporate in the revision, culled at random from my memory of the past weekend:

• People don't talk to bananas, at least not in a serious horror/SF story; and
• People don't go from worrying that their spouse might be deathly ill to pressuring said spouse for sex in the space of a paragraph; and
• If a character is going to be more ignorant than the reader, he needs a good excuse; and finally
• If you're going to have aliens in a story, you'd better damn well mean it.

Today has been interesting. It has certainly not been an unqualified win for Ego, so, y'know, that's good. It's been a little inconsistent, sure. The first instructor told me I was writing the wrong story entirely, and that the things in the background should be in the foreground, and that there wasn't any drama. The second praised the story to the high heavens and told me I should send it to Editor X and tell 'er that he sent me. I suspect that the story's rewrite needs are somewhere in between.

Note to self: All characters have favorite music, favorite food, and things they do with their days. It's probably worthwhile to let these things show, at least a little.

Tonight: reading aloud! Like karaoke but more literary! w00t!

Well, I'm here. I'm sitting at a desk in an apartment in a family dormatory building on Towson University campus in the state of Maryland. If that isn't enough prepositional phrases for you, you can add "after the big Borderlands Press Writers' Boot Camp kick-off." And now I am about to drop.

I mean, it's not that they've begun to work our asses off yet. It's that I got very little sleep last night, which has been a theme all through my second week in New Orleans, when all of a sudden I had the time, energy, and unmitigated panic with which to address my fast approaching deadlines...

and I'm flying American Airlines, who have to make every freakin' flight go through the huge pain in my ass that is the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, regardless of actual geography...

and the Baltimore airport is strewn with detours so that I gotta walk half a mile in one direction to get my luggage and half a mile in the other direction to get on the Super Shuttle...

and every Sheraton desk clerk within phoning distance has to put me on hold for five minutes before they can take the fifteen seconds to give me the next phone number...

and I have with me a collection of very high quality full-leaf, muslin-bagged tea and no implement suitable for boiling water in. Not ideal!

Tomorrow, presumably after I get a good night's sleep, my ass will be entirely worked off. Instructors/authors Doug Clegg, F. Paul Wilson, Tom Tessier, and Tom Monteleone spent much of tonight's kick-off meeting telling us, in the general, why all our stories pretty much sucked. I expect tomorrow in our small-group 1-instructor 2-hour sessions they will tell each of us about the suckage in the excrutiating specific. Fellow workshop members have been telling me that they liked my story very much, which makes me glow and gives me warm fuzzies, but in no way tempts me to think that I'll be exempt from having my story get ripped to utter shreds by the professionals.

It's a good thing. Whatever's left after the shredding will be the kernel of what "Putting Down Roots" really wants to be. And that's why I'm here.

Things take time. If nothing else, that's what I'm learning from all this daily goal setting. Submitting critiques takes time, because I can't freakin' shut up. Finding and emailing interview subjects takes time, because I don't know many names off-hand in the fields I'm researching and I'm anal about getting my emails worded just right. Revising fiction takes time because I'm a freakin' perfectionist with maybe shades of ye olde obsessive compulsive disorder.

And four-hour training sessions on how to facilitate use of evil yet compellingly shiny electronic voting devices from Hart Intercivic take a really long time, especially if you hang around the county clerk's office for an hour afterwards to discover whether your out-of-town plans have turned out to interfere with your availability as supply judge. (They do. I won't be around on Saturday, August 5 to pick up the supplies, see. But I will be retained as a machine judge, so the training hasn't gone to waste.) And then if the bike ride to and from the county clerk's office exposes you to more sun than you prepared yourself for, afternoon naps take a really really long time.

So. After a night of not sleeping, where are we at?

• Not a word written today on the freelance gig, but lots of progress made Monday morning in seeking interviews.
• Revised chapter 3 of The Golden Bridle and will email it as soon as this poor old WinME-running laptop stops giving me hell via its context menus. Chapter 3 took so long that we'll just talk about chapter 4 next week.
• Turned in a very long and wordy critique at the Critters site. One more by Wednesday and my ratio will be happy.
• Poked my head in a friend's private novel critique forum, as promised, at Critique Circle. Although if my day's obligation is merely to poke my head in the forum, it's probably not worth a bullet point here.

I'm afraid the rewrite of "Snowflakes" isn't ready to be submitted today. Haven't even finished the new draft type-in, so I can't even update the word count. Just as well; I really ought to order the latest issue of Farthing before I try to submit. Best practice and all.

Still, slight disappointment. The story was so clear while I was just thinking about it. Once I got into the rewrite, it sorta... muddled. I'd try to address a problem one of the critiques pointed out, and I'd find myself adding like three paragraphs of highly suspect first draft. Then I'd try rewriting something no one else had a problem with, because I didn't know whether I liked it better with the adverbial phrase up front or at the back of the sentence.

And I expect to be able to do this with novels?

Well. I shall be out of town this weekend--going to Seattle mainly for my sister-in-law's housewarming party and additionally to catch up with friends old and new. I'll be heading to the airport in about an hour. For once, I'm not bringing my laptop with me--or my husband's laptop, whatever--so there will be no weekend bloggity. There will be story revision, but it'll be the old fashioned way: pen, ink, paper, print-outs. Hopefully there will be something to submit, somewhere, come Monday.

Ta-ta fer now.

Which seems obvious on the face of it, granted, but I just actually realized it tonight. I just read through the critiques for "Snowflakes" and as a result I can practically see the finished, publishable draft hanging in front of my face like a shiny bright jewel. This is not a revision session that gives me Doubts. This is a revision session that gives me Great Glee.

I think it has to do with the way the shape of 1900-ish words fits in my head all at one time a lot more nicely than the shape of 50,000 words do.

Anyway, I'll print everything out and sleep on it tonight, and then I just might get this sucker revised and in the slush. Farthing just happens to have a reading period open until end of June, which means if nothing else a quick-ish response. (Also, it being a UK market, it means I have extra cause to be grateful that one of the critiques came from a non-USian who was unfamiliar with Memorial Day. It's good to for me to be reminded that some concepts are unique to particular countries. Duh, Niki!)

Oh. And. By the way. 1100 words written today on one of the work-for-hire manuscripts. Oh yeah. I's a good girl.

I am, in fact, still in both laptop and deadline crisis mode. However, laptop crisis is bandaged by the availability of my husband's old Compaq Presario, and deadline crisis is mitigated by setting myself a daily word-count quota and actually meeting it.

Thus I was able, this evening, finally, to make time to read the critiques that came in from the Critters crew.

My novel is no longer a virgin. It has for the first time been seen by eyes that do not belong to me. And it has deep and abiding flaws that were not visible to my eyes, because my eyes were my eyes and they sat inside a head that was my head. You know how it goes: I knew too well what I meant to see what I had in fact said.

Now, I have Doubts.

I am aware that Doubts are a natural side-effect, sometimes, especially when most of the comments are pointing out flaws rather than sparklies, but it is fruitless to speak logic to a writer who is in the middle of Doubting.

Just, y'know, give me a day or so. I'll get over it. Doubts do give way to Decisions and Plans, but it takes a bit.

(Meanwhile: if you critted chapters 1 and 2 this past week and have not yet received the fulsome thanks I owe you, it is because your email bounced. Now to hunt you down in the newsgroup. Mwahahahahaaa.)

On Friday, June 16th, I'll have fiction published again. Yes! Having undergone yet another title change (from "The Right Time" to "Right Door, Wrong Time"), my Award Winning Flash Fiction Story[TM] will see the light at Twilight Tales. The title change was the idea of the fiction editor, Ed deGeorge--and may I just say that an editor whose name is Ed is just set, you know? He can use "ed" as his email handle at the twilighttales.com domain, and it can mean "editor at Twilight Tales" or it can mean "Ed at Twilight Tales." That's totally cool. You just can't do neat wordplay like that with "Niki". I mean, you can, but I've heard all the possibilities sung at me on the kindergarten playground, and they're all goofy and unuseful.

Anyway, it works for me. The title, I mean. It's a title that tells us what's known up-front, rather than giving away what is revealed at the end. Then again, "The Right Time" was ambiguous enough to apply to both before the revelation and after--but I think wittering about which of several very similar titles is best is right up next to inserting a comma in the morning and taking it out in the evening. It's a sign that it's time to let the editor make the changes.

Besides, what sense does it make to talk about "the revelation" in a 700-word short-short? I mean, yes, suspense can be done in flash fiction, it ought to be there, but it only lasts about a minute or two, since that's all the time it takes to read the whole thing.

In any case, there's a date attached to the promise of publication. When the story goes up on Friday, I'll post a link.

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.

Yo. OK, so, the story is now down to with 50 words of 5000 words. Which means I'm allowed to say "about 5000 words" and send it in. Which I did Thursday evening. Ms. Last minute, that's me. The first 1200 words were really easy to cut, what with pointless mental meanderings and obnoxious repetitions and the plot holes that were more verbose than the sealant used to plug them. The last 300, now, those were damn hard.

Last weekend was pretty action-packed, between movies and concerts and 10K races. OK, well, one of each. But still. One of each is plenty. Saw X-Men 3 and the Cars/Blondie Road Rage tour, my opinions of both of which you can read over at my latest blogging gig. Did my fourth Bolder BOULDER in 1:30:30, my best time yet by about 4 minutes (yes, I suck), and my bodily reaction is somewhere between "ankles and knees no longer sore" and "toenails not quite fallen off yet."

On for this weekend: Pretty much everything I've been yammering on about for the last few weeks. Working my way through The Golden Bridle and maybe getting "Snowflakes" closer to ready to submit somewhere. Kicking finished stories off the couch and back out into the world. Logging some five thousand words or so on the current work-for-hire assignment. Y'know. Writing and stuff.

In other news, I hear the AbsoluteWrite forums are this close to resurrected. (This link goes, not to AW itself, but to a post at the temporary forums telling us to please not try to visit AW because all the server's resources are needed just to install and heal up the database that the greatly dishonorable web-host-of-a-million-contradicting-stories, JC Hosting, gave the gang a 24-hour window* of access to (after sitting on it without sufficient explanation for nine freakin' days). Rejoice and hold your breath.

*24 hours was what the gang were told yesterday in the wee hours of the morning; today the story has already changed to say that the May 22 shut-down was an automatic bandwidth overage suspension, which counter is reset automatically on June 1, so that there is no shutter on their access window. Like I said, a million contradictory stories. It's like these people have never heard of screen capture.