author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Finished the manuscript mark-up today. Reread all the separate notes I've taken along the way. Total completely illegible notes about which I have absolutely no idea: One. Total notes indicating problems I still haven't decided how to resolve: Fifteen or so. Total notes indicating problems for which I have solutions, but whose solutions I don't feel I can implement until after I figure out those fifteen or so mentioned last sentence: Pretty much all the rest of them.

Sometimes, stories just happen. I watch them unfold in my head and I write them down. Those kinds of stories are very little trouble to write. But sometimes I have to decide which way a story goes. I have to consider the consequences of each idea and figure out which idea results in the better story. Those kinds of stories are hard.

Guess which kind this is. Go on. Guess.

So the second half of today's session was taken up by me talking to myself on paper. "Rethink ending: what is proper effect of the 'exorcism' spell?" "Split up Sasha's first two spells into different scenes, or no?" "How exactly is Uncle Matt necessary to the resolution?" I don't think I'm going to get any of those answered without a long walk and a nap first. Luckily, I'm about a mile and a half's walk from home, and I'm very good at napping.

On that note: If you're in the Boulder area, do stop in at Cafe Bravo's for caffeinated beverages (some with little tapioca pearls at the bottom) and lunch things. Tell 'em the gal who hogged the leather couches all Tuesday morning long sent you.

You know, after reading this section of manuscript--pages 190 through 217, if you must know--I feel like I should make it absolutely clear, before anyone else reads it, that this novel is not autobiographical in any way that counts. It has a few details supplied from my high school memories, but the actual character dynamics are all imaginary. Sasha's big sister is not my Mary Sue. Well, in some ways she's everyone's Mary Sue--she's the model from which Sasha's notebook begins taking shape--but she's got her flaws.

And, just to be absolutely clear, her Mom is not my Mom.

In the course of marking up the manuscript, I've been thinking about a sub-plot that stayed fairly unexplored during the thirty hectic days of NaNoWriMo 2002. A story arc that never got a chance to arc. Sasha's big sister was the victim of an extremely traumatic experience some three years ago, and her mother's role in the aftermath was not a supportive one. At the time that Sasha's story starts, her mother continues to consider the older girl guilty. Both women, for their own reasons, are concerned that Sasha might stumble into a similar ordeal.

That their concern colors the story, I already knew. But I had neglected to explore, until now, the possibilities of the mother and the older sister coming toward some sort of reconciliation. There won't be any big epiphany, but I want to at least sow some quiet seeds that might indicate future growth in that direction after Sasha's story ends.

The reason I'm protesting about my own Mom here should be pretty obvious. Seems the older I get and the more of the world I see, the more I appreciate my parents; I hadn't realized that imagining dysfunctional families for my novels would have the same effect.

Mom, I love you bunches. I really do. You're probably not reading this, and you'd probably have no idea what I was talking about if you were, but I gotta say it: Thanks for being absolutely nothing like Diane Edgar-Greyson.

(Oh. And in other news, I'm out of the woods as far as plot tangles are concerned. Nothing like getting right up to the climax of the book to make things easy again! I guess plot tangles mostly occur when the author doesn't really know how to get from the premise to the climax and, consequently, babbles a lot.)

Wow, nothing like a deadline shouted out to the four corners of the Internet to make me completely come to a standstill.

Well, either that, or it was attempting to get by on five hours of sleep a night. Wednesday morning I felt great; Thursday morning I felt great but I needed a nap in the afternoorn; and Friday morning I woke up with a sore throat. The problem with sick is, it may keep you home, but it keeps you from doing all the things you'd like to stay home from work to do. Dammit.

So I'm just wrapping up Chapter 6 Mk II, which contains nowhere near as much original NaNoDraft material as I thought it would, but whose almost-but-not-quite sex scene is a whole lot less clumsy than it was first time around. Plus there's more assholey Russ goodness. You may send me mocking emails if you wish, but I'll have you know that Russ can mock your lights out. (I have this secret but unlikely hope that the real-life person upon whom Russ is modeled will someday read this book, recognize himself, and send me nasty letters about it. But then I have lots of little vengeance fantasies running around in my sick little head. Oh yes. Locked up in my head where it's safe.)

There shall be more over the course of the morning, and then in the afternoon I'll have to hit the other projects for a few hours. I took all weekend off from the official manuscript of NaNoEdMo 2005, the better to work on this puppy right here (for all the good that did me), which means I'm no longer ahead of schedule. And then there's this short story I want to put in the mail by the tenth. Excuses, excuses. Yes indeed.

Western society lives in a most incredible state of denial. The more I hear about schools wanting to ban books like The Giver and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, the more I'm amazed at the sheer duplicity of it all. "We can't let teenagers read about sex like it was normal!" When of course not only is sex normal to humanity, it's exceedingly normal to adolescence. I mean, think about the hormonal storm that puberty unleashes in a teenager. If YA literature conspires to pretend sex doesn't exist--or to only acknowledge sex as That From Which Godly Folk Refrain--why are we surprised when kids don't know how to handle their urges and start hating themselves for having those urges?

It's just freakin' stupid, OK? That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

None of which helps me figure out how best to handle the main story arc of my novel, in which a love spell comes to fruition with frightening effectiveness. The "climax" of that problem occurs when the two main characters Very Nearly Do It, and if you can't put that in YA literature, where the heck do you put it, given that the characters are high-school students? How do you write about real live fourteen-year-olds with hormones and emotions and believable complexity and still escape the censure of your community?

You get one lie for free, because it's fiction. I've already used up my lie quota on the magic notebook. I'm not going to push my luck by pretending that teenagers Never, Ever Think About That.

I remember a phone conversation with my grandmother recently; she had just finished complaining about all the sex and violence in today's TV, all the nudes in today's artwork, all the sex in today's pop songs... and then she wants to know when she gets to read my book. "I don't think you'll like it much," I said.

Neil Gaiman: "I once said in an interview that I'd just about got used to the idea that my parents would probably be reading anything I wrote when I realised that my kids were now reading anything I wrote."

Whoo-boy, type-in's gonna be fun.

So this manuscript's trend of getting all Sasha's changes mixed up is only getting worse. I'm getting to the point where I'll be reluctant to mark up a page at all, simply because I'm still agnostic as to whether that page will still exist after I get all the threads sorted out.

What helps is thinking of the main story arc in three phases:

1. Sasha changes her attitude and the world responds
2. Sasha begins to notice physical and more blatant changes in herself and others
3. Sasha is actively causing supernatural change and things are getting out of control.

The end of tonight's mark-up session, page 109, had a scene that will be the main indicator that we have moved from Stage 2 to Stage 3: Sasha takes a strand of her crush's hair and magically entangles him into her notebook so she can affect him directly with the hot-and-heavy fantasies she's written in there.

Which brings me back to the problem of Sex and the Young Adult Novel. In my 2004 novel, things just got really adult, I'm afraid. There was no way around it; unicorn stories all hint at ideas of sexual innocence and experience, and the story arc wasn't coy. This time around, I think discretion is the better part of valor, and I'll do a lot of "between the asterisks" stuff.

And that's all I've got for now.

Hit the first big need for a scene restructure tonight. Apparently, back in November 2002, three ideas hit me all at once, and I tried to make them all happen almost simultaneously. I'm thinking they need to be put in sequence. That'll draw out the main story arc a little longer, giving me more time to show gradual character change.

In less abstract terms: This book is about the price of getting what you wish for. It's about a high school freshman named Sasha--unattractive, un-admired, unaccepted--who wants to be pretty and brave and loved. It's about what happens when she gets her hands on a magic notebook, one that makes everything she writes come true.

She writes three changes in the chapters I marked up tonight. She writes herself a meeting with the boy she has a crush on; she writes herself a minor victory over her most feared bullies; and she writes herself a kiss. I'd managed to smoosh the first two up into one cycle of write-and-come-true, and the third sort of clumsily evolved from there. They'll turn into three separate cycles, each showing her confidence growing and the pace of change accelerating, magic spells having effects more and more blatant as the story progresses.

I also found a minor story arc hiding in a conversation between Sasha and her older sister. Not quite sure how to pull it off, but I can sort of see the shape of it from here. See, this is why the re-type doesn't happen until after one complete read-through.

Incidentally, I highly recommend doing the markup in the bath. Carolyn See recommends a glass of wine, to combat the writer's natural tendency to tense up when confronted with her own writing; I recommend a long hot soak. It may be time to invest in a bathtub desk.

OK, so that bit about reading through once without a pen in hand? That went right out the window. Pages 1 through 47 are now rather ink-stained. I'll be surprised if I can read the scribbles later, knowing my handwriting; I'll probably be remembering more than reading, as the appearance of each note on each page reminds me what my brain was doing at the time I made the note. I don't have photographic memory, drat the luck, but I do seem to have a good head for associative recall.

Here's a true thing, for certain values of true: The first read-through, after a long wait, is the truest. The manuscript has sat on a Zip disk (a high-tech version of The Back of the Bottom Desk Drawer), unread, for more than a year now. Tonight I am reading it again with the freshest eye I can hope to bring to the work. If I weren't marking it up now, the things I'm noticing on this read-through might have never make it into my notes, because I might not have noticed them on a re-read.

I'm marking quick-fixes in the margins of the manuscript--typos and line-level errors that stand alone. Larger structural issues, such as the need to better develop a character's motivation or to convert a one-hit wonder detail into a recurring theme, go in a separate notebook. I'm also using the notebook to keep a running tally of what scenes I've written and what they contain. Hopefully the structural issues will inform a revision of the scene-by-scene outline, and then while I'm doing the type-in I'll be able to take care of the quickies on the fly. That's the plan, anyway.

Two hours down, 48 to go. Well, who knows how many left to go. 48 is enough to appease the NaNoEdMo Gods, but I'm betting it won't be enough to see this sucker publishable.

As a side note, Ms. Lisle says she can revise a 125K rough draft in one or two weeks. I expect that's at a higher rate than two hours per day. Gods know my attention span can't handle eight-hour devotion to a single project. When I worked a nine-to-fiver, I was forever switching back and forth between projects (ha! so it was a good thing that I always had three deadlines hanging over me at any one time?) and getting up for walks around the office, sometimes figuratively (visiting co-workers for a minute or two of gab) and sometimes literally (heading outside to circumambulate the building). I guess it's a good thing that I have two other projects to work on. But anyway, it occurs to me that before deciding to follow Holly's revision methods, I ought to read at least one of her novels and make sure her style and my tastes actually concur.

Reading, sadly, will have to wait until at least one of my three projects is done. I'm going to go away and whine now, thanks.

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?

Oft-heard advice to writers new to the novel-writing scene: "Do not send in your 3+synop to an agent or publisher until the entire novel is finished!" I agree. Until you've written a few of these beasts and determined for yourself how long it takes you to finish—hell, until you've determined that you can finish—it's sheer madness to send out the first three chapters of an unfinished novel. Not only do you risk getting a request for the full manuscript before the full manuscript is actually ready; you risk those first three chapters developing changes as you finish the rest of the novel, causing your original submission to become inconsistent with the full manuscript. Both of these problems are bound to cause you to lose reputation points.

Well, hey. Madness. Fine place to visit. I'm headed there Monday.

The WOTC deadline is March 1. That leaves only, erm, 9 days between now and then. And here's where I'm at: I've got three chapters done and edited, all except for the final fine-tuning. What the hey. Let's ship 'em off on Monday and then write like a fiend, right?

Reason 1: If I don't submit until after I've edited the whole manuscript, I'm going to miss the deadline. So it's go mad, or just stay out of the pool.

Reason 2: I've mostly been stuck on the edit because I know the novel needs a lot more structure and interim crises than it has at the moment. If I prepare a submission for mailing on Monday, that means I'll have written up a synopsis and a well-organized, exciting chapter-by-chapter outline. Ta-da! Structure and crises. After that, the rest of the edit should go swimmingly.

Reason 3: Submitting on Monday puts me in the position of either hoping they don't pick my submission as one of the ten finalists, or working like a dog to get the manuscript ready in case they ask for it on March 2. I don't enter contests that I hope not to win, which leaves me only plan B. Tricking the external world into enforcing my internal deadlines is a nice way to make deadlines stick.

Reason 4: This is not the novel I want to work on for National Novel Editing Month. Nope. This is. Accordingly, I need to get the current novel the hell out of my way by the time March 1 rolls around.

So, there you go. Four reasons for the absolute madness of a first-time novelist submitting the first three chapters without having the rest of the manuscript in hand. If I manage to get caught with my literary pants down, you'll be the first to know. But I ain't planning on that happening. Just You Watch.

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.