author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Heck with it.

The Averatec laptop is in the shop. Its Windows XP install proved too far gone to repair. An attempt to load a new XP installation over the top (which, if successful, would have allowed me to boot up and actually get to my files) failed to the tune of "Cannot install. C:\ is corrupted." So here I wait, twiddling my thumbs, hoping that the files I was able to see on the disk during a CD boot to DOS operation are indeed recoverable.

And the novel? Apparently I hadn't backed it up once since beginning to work on it this month. Didn't back up a copy of the new chapter outline last week after the IHOP session. Didn't upload to the web server a copy of the novel after working on it in Indiana. I'm a ditz. A total ditz.

So I could continue working on it now, just leave a blank line with a ### in it to mark where the temporarily (knock on wood) unavailable version of the manuscript had progressed, but...

Heck with it.

There is no way that Becoming Sara Peltier would be ready for submission in the next week even if my laptop hadn't taken a nose dive. No, that's OK--Delacorte's Press Contest for a First Young Adult Novel is just going to go another year without my manuscript among its contestants.

Meanwhile, word on the street is that I'll hear one way or another about The Drowning Boy by the end of the month. And that novel was backed up along with everything else shortly after November ended. Copied to ZIP drive, burned to CD, the works. So. Today I dove back into it. When we last left Brian, he had finally met the mermaids. Things were very tense. I'd been uncertain how to get the tension to shift so that the story could continue--I sort of had him all curled up in a floating ball of used-to-be-human misery amidst personal demons and suchlike. But tonight, hanging out at the downtown Borders while my husband browsed the aisles, I finally had a spark that just might lead to the end of chapter 11. So that's all better.

So there's the novelling side of things. Back over on the technical difficulties side, I wanna give a shout out to Ken. He used to be a tech for Computer Renaissance back when I bought this Averatec and had the data recovered off the fatally flawed Toshiba Satellite. Now he's working down the street from me at PC Express. He took time out of a morning full of 'xtreme custom computer building to totally hold my hand through the Windows XP repair attempts. He knew I'd have to take it away to Comp Ren because of them holding my 3-year extended warranty--heck, he encouraged me to take it over there--but he took the time to help me out and provide moral support anyway. Damn cool guy, that Ken. You should totally haul your boxes over to PC Express for upgrades and give him some business.

(And super-duper thanks to Willow for pointing me in Ken's direction!)

So "tomorrow" rolled around without an update. Sorry about that. Thus, today's installation takes the form of not a writing progress report but a recap checklist. It goes something like this:

• TGIO Party: Well attended. We didn't get the 20-25 headcount estimate I gave to Conor's, but then Conor's didn't reserve us enough space for 20-25 people, so it worked out perfectly. You can see a slide-show of the profiles of all the people that attended, and one or two who didn't, here. At least two people who showed up were making their first appearance all month at a regional gathering; it was super-cool to see them come out of the woodwork and meet everybody. In other news, the couch monster ate my winner certificate, but what the hell, I can always print out and hand-laminate another.
• Becoming Sara: The real rewrite effort will begin today. I'm afraid I was in TGIO-mode all weekend long, and the most I did was to reread all my handwritten revision notes just to remind myself what I ought to be thinking. But I'll start the rewrite, for real, tonight. Promise!
• Fruitcake: Baked Thursday and is now marinating in brandy. This year the tropical theme is heightened by the presence of dried mangos, chosen mainly to keep the candied papaya spears company. I considered dried canteloupes, but they were just too sweet. Also debuting this year: dried strawberries.
• Aeon Flux: Saw that Friday. It was about as good as you could possibly expect for a PG-13 Paramount production. I mean, I'm sure that Peter Chung has an NC-17 indie film version of it running around in his head, and it is beautiful. But this wasn't that movie. Thus, you don't end up going "WTF just happened?" like you do at the end of an Aeon Flux cartoon. And the kinky Trevor/Aeon foreplay is much toned down and, horrors, explained. But. I expected as much. For what it was, the movie was just about as good as it could be and captured just about as much of the spirit of the original as a Paramount production could be expected to. It made me absurdly happy. Plus! The eye thing! That was there! I did not expect that.
• NaNoPubYe: Another website for discussion under the category "NaNo Uh-Oh." A forum-based community organized under the idea of taking the fruit of your NaNoWriMo effort and turning it into something publishable. The goal: Professional submission to commercial publishing markets (I refuse to say "traditional publishing" considering where that term came from) in twelve months. The plan is a fairly reasonable one. I shall probably submit my 2004 draft, The Golden Bridle, to the process. Not Right Off The Page, of course; as mentioned before, that one won't be publishable until the book that precedes it is written and submitted for publication.

It is now officially November, and now I have a word count. We had a Countdown To Word One House Party. CO_Butterfly came over, and my husband, AKA Worldnamer, pulled out his ancient decrepit Compaq (yes, we both have ancient decrepit Compaqs--mine's more ancient but less decrepit, haha), and we got to work. Well, we sort of worked. We also did a lot of chatting and goofing off. Sarah and Bridget were over for Halloween/Samhain goodness, moral support, and, well, just to be NaNoWriMo groupies.

Dude. Boulder is so hoppin', we have NaNoWriMo groupies.

(And no, that short story did not get written in time to submit. But, oh well. It'll still get written. I'm sure I'll find somewhere else that will publish an Adam & Eve spec fic story.)

As for that other novel, I had a dream last night. I had this weird dream wherein I was in the New Orleans area, at my parents' house, and going swimming at the neighbor's house every morning while the neighbor rode a bicycle around the bottom of the swimming pool... none of which is actually the point, because the point is that in the dream I got a call from Wizards of the Coast, which happened to be headquartered right there in Metairie. And they said, "We totally want to publish your book. How soon can you bring the full manuscript by?" And I said, "Dude! Right now!" And I brought it. And it was on this sort of old tape backup drive, and they were having trouble getting the file off the drive, and so I finally said, "Well, y'know, that isn't actually the real manuscript anyway... I'll bring you the real one in a day or two." I didn't want to admit that I hadn't actually finished the publishable draft. But the editor totally caught on and gave me this sort of pity hug like she was about to break the news to me that she wasn't going to buy my book anyway...

So. Yeah. I'll be doing both novels this November. And did I mention that I still haven't finished and submitted that other other novel? *Sigh*

Not that having too much writing to do is the worst of fates, or anything...

So, that work-for-hire thingie? Yeah. That's done. Time for me to remember where I left off in the various novels and short stories I'd put on hold in order to hit the deadline.

While writing up a brief bio for the editor to use or not as appropriate, I discovered something. PanGaia issue #42 is now online. And my article is indeed among those you can read in PDF format: here.

In other news, it's looking like my yen to blog about my surroundings will be fulfilled once the Denver Metroblogging website gets up and running. Yay! Metroblogger is a fine old respectable venue, for online values of "old" anyway, and I'll be proud to be on the team.

Meanwhile, down here in the New Orleans area, we are feeling the effects of Hurricane Wilma. Stupendous northerly winds are rushing across the city--not wings of the storm, precisely, but a current caused by the hurricane's low pressure system in the Gulf yanking the air out of the high pressure system that is our incoming cold front. The ghost town of the 9th Ward got two feet of water last night. The blue tarp on the roof with the long slats on top was flapping, bumping, and squeaking all night long. And you can actually hear the wind howling in my parents' sink. 35 years in this house, and they've never heard that happen before. I leaned over, put my hand to my ear, and said, "Mom! I can hear the sea!" We didn't stop laughing for something like five minutes.

So y'all know about Mr. Scalzi's call for submissions? The one where you're supposed to take a big fat science fiction cliche and reinvent it in 5,000 words or less?

I got me an an idea. Maybe I'll even be able to finish it in time.

That work-for-hire thing? Yeah. The signed agreement is in the mail, and the editorial outline is open on my computer. Along with an interview release form to be given to interview subjects. 15,000 words. Hoo-boy. By the third week in October.

It's times like this when a writer sits back, glances at the calendar, looks up at the ceiling, and says, "Great Gods in alphabetical order. What have I gotten myself into now?"

Meh. No worries. It's just the usual pre-project panic. I get this way on November 1st, too. It's no biggie. Dude, I can do 15,000 words in three days. The rest of my allotted time I can use for research and editing and fact-checking and interviews and the inevitable additional panic attacks. It's cool.

Speaking of which, the NaNoWriMo forums are open and un-kerbluggled. By which I mean, the sign-in link works (John tried it out), the log-in link works (I tried that out), and posts are appearing at the speed of light. Boulder has its own regional forum this year for the first time; if you check it out, you'll see what we'll be up to this weekend. Come join us!

Now, about that novel. No, this one, not that one. About it, this:

Less is more.

Well and good. Only question is, which "less" is it that will serve best as "more"? That's what's taking me so fricken' long, dammit!

This is just to report that the short story manuscript whose title features prominently in this blog entry is in the slush again. Wish it luck and prepare it a comforting homecoming should it come back on its shield rather than with it.

Also, today has been another freelance-happy day. Produced about 400 words of sample article for one prospective client, about 615 words of possibly saleable nonsense for Constant-Content.com, and about 350 words of writing excercise for happy forum fun. So that's, like, almost 1500 words. That's almost a full NaNoWriMo day, or something.

(Speaking of NaNoWriMo, if you're in the Boulder area, maybe you should come by The Tea Spot on October 8.)

I will also apparently start blogging about Boulder and thereabouts in the newly opened Denver chapter of CitySceneBlog.com. If they like my posts, they might actually start paying me. Not, I should stress, a possibility I'm banking on here. Why am I taking on such a gig for only a very slim chance of payment some unknown time in the future? Because it looks like fun. Because I think I'd like a blogging outlet where non-writing-relevant posts aren't verboten, are in fact encouraged. And that ain't happening here in my Actually Writing Blog, not if I'm behaving myself like I should.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have a couple boys out in the Puget Sound to eavesdrop on.

It's Thursday. I wrote. It wasn't Novelling, but it was a lot less worthless than some of the other things I do that aren't Novelling.

It went something like this...

• Put together a writing resume; submitted said resume towards a write-for-hire gig.
• Whipped up a saucy little short-short in response to a request posted over at Constant-Content.com.

Bonus link! If anyone reading this is interested in quick daily lists of freelance leads, I gotcher smack righteer.

Hey, check this out. The Sheraton Mountain Vista has wi-fi in the lobby. Why the hell'd it take me so long to figure that out? Not that I minded going to Loaded Joe's for my internet fix, but when all I want to do is check email, Google a bit of info, or upload a blog entry, it's nice to have that two minutes from my door rather than ten.

Of course, internet in our room would be even better, but Starwood has not sprung for wireless repeaters. If I go out on the balcony I can sometimes get onto some unsecured private network in the area--its SSID is neither an out-of-the-box default, nor is it obviously related to a neighboring resort--but the flies out there are something awful. And computer monitors? Are ten-star fly attractors.

We'll be driving back to Boulder in a few hours. John wants to be at work for 8:00 AM, and he wants to stop at home and shave first. It's going to be a night of very little sleep and a morning of much earliness.

Chapter 10 is almost done. Brian has been reunited with Mike for the second time, and this time he knows he's not dreaming. I left off with them coming up to the surface to babble happy greetings to each other. No real information has yet been exchanged. The continuation of this conversation will need some careful engineering: Mike will tell Brian how he came to be where he is, a tale that will include admission of unsavory deeds which the elder brother utterly fails to regret; Brian will be shocked, horrified, and as disbelieving as I can paint him without making him look like I rolled him a 5 in Intelligence. That's because his ability to continue relating to his brother after this conversation will depend on how much he can convince himself that he had misheard, or misinterpreted, Mike's tale, and his journey from "he didn't really kill anyone, did he?" to "that bastard has to die" is supposed to take most of the first three quarters of the book. Once again, I've got a lot of delicate psychological tweaking to do here. It's a problem I'd like to sleep on, so I'm stopping here for the night.

And you know what? It's September. You know how far away October 1 is? Not very. You know what that means? Time to haul out Sara Peltier and get that manuscript ready for Delacorte. When we last left off, Sasha was walking into town to return Anubia's video rental and, unbeknownst to her, to run into her crush and find out whether he notices her magical self-image makeover. At this moment, I forget exactly what I'd intended to do with that. I expect tomorrow will involve a lot of rereading.

See you in Boulder.

Work on the novel today consisted mainly of reworking the bit right before the big sex scene. Said sex scene is still languishing at the halfway point. If you want to put it in terms of bases, we've hit home base but the crowd hasn't started cheering yet. There are some plot points to visit yet, some physical and some emotional, and I'm still pondering how to go about it. So I'm doing a lot of imagining, rewinding, re-imagining, blushing and humming with embarrassment, leg-crossing, and then more imagining, all the while getting distracted by later events in the book and how they might go.

Look, this would be easier if I were writing porn and only wanted to make the reader sweat. But what I'm doing here is mentally positioning characters for later events. The scripting has to be more precise. At the same time, of course, it needs to read naturally.

So what I did today was work with the bit of dialogue and its stage directions ramping up to the sexy stuff. It had been moving way too fast, resulting in the impression that the author got bored with the talking and slipped the characters aphrodesiacs so they'd just get on with it. After today's work, the symbolic marriage conversation seems to flow better. It's a lot more poignant, more desperate, more nicely full of fearful pauses, giving what follows the weight of a last chance.

Then again, it could still be utter crap. I've only got my own word for it, and--ha ha--I'm an unreliable narrator. Ha ha. Still, my hope is that I've got it to a point where tomorrow when I reread from the beginning of Chapter 9 I'll know where to go next.

In other news, I skeined up a length of the silk/mylar goodness discussed recently. (Photos of spinning projects will probably be uploaded Saturday, Circuit City willing.) Also, I biked around Boulder with John's T-Mobile Sidekick II, snapping photos of favorite eateries and writing up quickie reviews of them for NearLocal to earn the current promotional restaurant gift certificate. That's right, folks. "Will Work For Food." Or, at least, for $25 off the next time John and I and friends go stuff ourselves silly at Conor's.