author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Wow, the 2002 skin still looks like utter crap. Anyway, it'll be this novel that gets the March 2005 NaNoEdMo treatment. Maybe by then the stylesheet will also get a treatment. Surgical treatment. That would be nice.

I have managed to take an inadvertent couple of days off. I am not sure at all of the feasiblity of getting 25 more hours in by the Greeley meetup Jan 5, or even - stopping to think about all that's wrong with this draft of the novel - finishing a full cycle of revision by that date.

Gonna keep trying, of course, which will make the next four days rather demanding. Part of my problem is how easy it is to just procrastinate starting. Starting at all. Stopping whatever else I'm doing and just putting in one more hour...

Oh, just one more game of Atomica. Just one more try at Katamari Damacy "Make Star 6." Oh, just another few pages of this forum thread that's making my eyes glaze over.

There are even productive procrastination tasks, like working on the FAQ for the Neverending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story Engine, which has reopened for general use this morning. Or putting in a few more hours' work on my latest Little Bull Creations assignment, which is much easier to push myself on given that the deadline has teeth and the pay is guaranteed (neither of which can be said about writing one's first saleable novel).

Anything other than writing!

So, I've got a new strategy in my constant war against apathy. The thing causing me the most angst - in this case writing - will be the thing I do last thing at night and first thing in the morning. And I shall be ruthless. "Last thing" means no reading myself to sleep, however the omission pains me. "First thing" means not even getting out of bed. Just roll over, grab the laptop and open the document.

I've been rereading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Black And Blue Magic, which I'd been threatening to do ever since NaNoWriMo 2004 began, and it's been really a useful reminder that my YA unicorn novel really isn't as much like Snyder's lovely book as I'd thought. For one thing, Harry Houdini Marcos is twelve, and my main character is sixteen, and that difference isn't just a number. It explains a lot about why my plot got a bit more sexual than I realized it was going to, for one thing. But. I am not allowed to finish rereading it until I've finished rewriting the mermaid novel. Sorry, me. Consider the resulting discomfort mere withdrawel pangs. Take the lumps and move on.

At times like this, I sometimes find this thought helpful: "What will you regret more in 10 years - not having slept more/reread that book one more time/caught up on reading newsgroups, or not having finished writing your novel?" And then sometimes I find it as useful as a clinically depressed patient finds the advice, "Just think happy thoughts!"

At those times, I find it's best to pretend that it's actually one of the other times.

Either stay up until two in the morning programming, or wake up at 6:30 to meet a writer friend at the coffee shop. Not both. These two options are mutually exclusive.

Wow. Not a heck of a lot of novel gets edited in an hour and a half. I got through about... three pages. Three well-marked pages, and lots of accompanying mustn't forgets in my notebook.

I have realized that A) the first scene in my novel sucks, but B) it has to stay, so C) I may end up utterly rewriting it.

This must be why the fate of so many 1950s-era story drafts was to end as a crumpled-up ball on the floor. Not unlike the fate of several clinically depressed writers, sadly enough.

Well, more tomorrow. I'll be getting on a plane and heading off to Seattle. Which is fortunate, because the first scene in this novel involves a plane taking off at Seatac. I mustn't forget to notice exactly how the preflight briefing speech goes, exactly what Seatac's geographical relationship to Seattle is (with reference to I-5), and exactly how (and whether) the name of that aiport town is supposed to be punctuated. ("Sea-Tac"? "Seatac"? "SeaTac"? Er...)

In a way, that means my vacation is a paid vacation. I would be more jolly about that fact if I knew I actually would get paid, of course. But, as noted in the previous entry, you don't get contracted pre-novel until after you've novelled pre-contract. Whee!

In other news, I've started working on the definitive PDF template for archiving Neverending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Stories. And I finally got a working cron job in place on that site and scheduled to prune the deleted items list every morning at five past midnight. Yes, it's procrastination, but it's productive procrastination, so shut up.

What? Cat food? Screw that. That's boring. Fruitcake is where it's at. Fruitcake in the oven for the next 3 hours, slowly making my house smell niiiiice.

Today, SlyCrow and Kandybar and I all went to Caffe Luna, in Longmont, and held miniature writing races where we'd set a timer for five or ten minutes and see who got the most words written in that time. I started the day at 29,131 (how the hell do I remember that?) and you can see where I'm at now. I highly recommend this activity. Especially if you type fast. Kandybar kept track of the math, and I'd watch to see if she punched the air triumphantly or gave me a squinty glare to see which of us had beaten the other by five words or so.

Caffe Luna claims to have free wiFi available. Actually, what it has is wiFi available. Boingo Wireless, to be exact - the kind where you need a login, and you either have a monthly subscription or else you "pay as you go," and that's not free, not in the littlest bit. Good thing we weren't there to web surf.

Not much else to report. It's Teen Titans tonight on Cartoon Network, followed by Justice League Unlimited and Megas XLR. And somewhere in there I want to do another 45 minute writing session or so, just to try to get me up to the 33K mark. And that's all I got for now.

(Oh, all right. Homemade cat food. Bake 1 lb chicken livers and 2lb ground turkey breast. When cooked, chop the liver fine and crumble the turkey. Take 1.75 cups uncooked brown rice and cook it. Open a can of pumpkin - not pumpkin pie mix, OK, just regular pumpkin - and set it aside. Open up a bag of Wellness brand dry cat food. Now, make up five batches of cat food by mixing 2/3 C turkey, 1/3 C chicken liver, 1 C rice, 1 C dry cat food, and 1/4 C pumpkin per batch. Stick all the batches but one in the freezer. That last batch goes in a closeable container in the fridge. Feed 1/3 C twice a day to overweight tabby cats with finicky digestion. In Uno and Null's case, said cats will lose weight and their digestion will improve.)

(Take leftover pumpkin and mix with falafel and a little olive oil. Form patties. Fry 'em and eat 'em like hamburgers.)

(Take leftover turkey and mix it into mac and cheese. Or saute up some celery, onions, scallions, and garlic to mix with leftover turkey; add a cup of water, a half cup uncooked jasmine rice, a couple boullion cubes, some chili powder and cayenne pepper, and a couple bay leaves. Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. Voila - Cajun dirty rice!)

(There oughtn't to be leftover brown rice. If there is, add it to the Cajun dirty rice during the last five minutes of cooking the jasmine rice.)

His name is Uno. In this picture, he looks like he takes after Mommy. But in fact he is a lazy ass.

The pot-luck write-in at my place mentioned yesterday, did in fact happen today. In attendance were myself, SlyCrow, and épinards. Those of us who were writing did in fact actually reach our writing goals (/me glances at 2007 word diff between this blog entry and yesterday's), and we stuffed our faces full of - lessee, how'd I put it on the forums? "Kick-ass chili and mouthwatering homemade bread." Yummmmmmmm.

I did a whole bunch of house-cleaning before everyone showed up. Don't thank me. It was a selfish and calculating act. I cleaned up before I started writing, so that when I started writing, I couldn't procrastinate by cleaning the bathroom. Because - get this - it was already clean. And, unlike some, I don't reclean clean things. I find other ways to procrastinate. Ways that actually serve a purpose.

Like, getting up and spooning myself another helping of chili with sour cream and green onions and cheese on top.

Diane has made it home and gone to bed and woken up and gone to school and started to come home from school. All of which came out, really, no more interestingly than that. (Except for the near encounter with the cougar. Dun-dun-dunnnnnnh.) Now she's gone and run into Mitch, the Older And Disreputable Boyfriend Type. Mitch exists in my head as a sort of mobile grunt that has the potential to explode into violence. I guess all characters have to start somewhere. He started as a plot necessity, so I'm not exactly surprised at his current flatness.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, and I have no actual events planned except going into the office and slotting more data into a database. (I have this part-time job that, among other things, involves fixing a very broken MS Access database. This means I have to relearn Access. And cuss out its various "I'm helping! Bizzaro! I'm helping!" wizards.) Lots of time to witter over trying to write the next 2000 words.

Wish me luck!

P.S. Oh hey. It turned out that there was a copy of No Plot? No Problem! on the shelf at the Boulder Bookstore. What luck! Now, there is no copy there at all, because I bought it and brought it home. As for Pen On Fire, that one I had to order.

I'm still at the hotel in Tempe, but I won't be for long. The car is all packed up. All that's left is for me to get my own happy ass in there along with my bookbag, laptop, printer, humorous back-support pillow ("The Witch Is In") and print-out of a new short story to mail to SciFiction.

I'll be driving on no sleep and a heck of a lot of coffee. As I type this, the hotel staff are making their way down the halls dropping off copies of the USA Today—just to give you an idea of what time it is. (Heck, those of you who pay a little attention have already read the datestamp on the blog entry. Duh.) WFC2004 is some ten hours over and done. And you know what I just found out? I can get internet in my room. My window faces ASU campus, and if I'm sitting over here at the desk, I can sometimes connect to SSID "asu_tempe". And sometimes I can even stay connected for a significant amount of time.

It seems to be more reliable with the window open.

My last act before leaving this hotel room for good is to start my novel, remembering the wise words of one of the WFC panelists (whose name I have shamefully forgotten): If you can't put in your four hours a day, put in a few sentences at a time, several times during the day. Do what you can if you can't do more. And so I have put down a little over 300 words of the opening scene which begins the outer story that frames the inner one.

I'll be hitting the road soon. Next stop: Flagstaff. I'll try to pull up in range of a wireless signal there, type a few more hundred words on this novel, and blog about it. In any case, the goal is to get home in enough time to get a good night's sleep before—eek!—opening the polls tomorrow morning. That is - in 27 hours. 27 hours until election day! You had just better show up, is all I'm sayin'.

So we're about seventy-five percent less crappy now. Cool beans.

I suppose I'd better start blogging about the novel now or something. Not sure I want to tonight. I think first I want to get my admin interface back up and running, so I can blog from the web page instead of from the PHPMyAdmin "Insert" form.

If none of that made a whit of sense, don't worry about it. Presumably you're here because you're also into that NaNoWriMo thing. If you do PHP and MySQL too, that's a plus, but certainly not necessary.

No, I can't adequately explain why I don't use an out-of-the-box blog manager like Blogger.com or Moveable Type. I could say, "I'm a control freak," or, "That would be cheating," but if you had to ask, those answers probably wouldn't cut it. In which case, I suppose, it would be best not to ask.

Again, stay tuned.

If you aren't using LYNX or another text-only browser, you will have noticed that my journal for NaNoWriMo 2004 looks like crap. That's because I have not yet created a set of stylesheets for it.

Those of you who are using LYNX probably haven't noticed the crappiness and I applaud you for your foresight.

More later. How much later? Who knows. Stay tuned.

...and charging on. No time to say much more than that, because if I stop for tonight I'll be left with more than 8K per day - and I won't have time to do that on Sunday! So, on I go.

The characters are about to reach the midpoint crisis. The main character's girlfriend is suggesting a trip to the beach. It spelled trouble for Ranulf and Undine, and it sure as heck ain't a good idea for these kids either.

Addendum: I really should add a "current word count" field to the Nanoblog database table. That and a "which year's novel" indication so that I can reuse it from year to year. And I should actually use the "image" field I put in there...

[Ed. Note: Done. 2003-03-12]

[Ed. Note: Improved. 2005-08-21]

Back to the current word count thing:

I'm currently at 25,072 words. My next reward comes at 27,000 words, when I will allow myself more coffee. Then at 30,000 words I'll let myself have a forum break and then go to sleep. Maybe tonight I'll be able to fight off the sleepies.