author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So, there's seven of us here now, and things are getting a little bit noisy. Sgmoo is exhorting me to go register NaNoProMo.org, for National Novel Procrastination Month - "I mean, you're online. Get on top of it!" I demurred, preferring to put it off until next month.

The topic has since moved on to the logistics of writing an entire novel of maniacal laughter, and how many words it would come to, and how you would spell them.

I had intended to get some writing done here, but I've hit a difficult part, and the Boulder Meet-up is distracting. It's certainly easier to think about spelling maniacal laughter and analyzing the cocoa content of chocolate chips from Whole Foods than it is to figure out how my main character plausibly discovers the nature of his highly unlikely problem.

Meanwhile, I Am Clever. Again. When I update my word count here, it also updates my word count on nanowrimo.org, along with my novel's title and the excerpt I'm displaying. Cool, huh? I may even make my novel excerpt visible from here. Stay Tuned.

If there's one effect switching to Dvorak has had more than any other (besides slowing my typing down from 90 wpm to about 20, and besides tempting me to choose my words based on how easy they are to type), it's that of making me aware of what letter combinations are particular repeat offenders in my writing.

I've noticed, for example, that I use the word "again" a lot. Without, I might add, improving my "again"-typing skills by any significant amount. Also, I'm seeing a bunch of words that start with "us"--"usually", "usefully", "used". And far, far too many adjectives!

What this seems to do to my writing is, I'll get to a word like "useful" and, recognizing the feel of typing it, I'll attempt to think of another word in order not to be repetitive, when in fact it's not that word I've been overusing so much as it's been bits of that word.

What overall effect this will have on my rough draft has yet to be seen.

Anyway... more tomorrow.

Look! Pretties!

OK. I am a clever little Vortex. See, there's this slick word-count bar at the top of the page, it's made of two itty-bitty divs all dressed up in CSS to go out and meet the nice people, and there's an unimposing Log In link at the bottom of the page that I can click so I can enter humungo long-ass run-on sentences like this one right on the web page, there are links I can use to edit existing blog entries or just delete them entirely...

All right, genius. What's missing?

Yeah. That nicely decorated word count hasn't moved all day, has it?

Guess I'd better save developing the random quote administrative tool for later...and write now.

For going to sleep at 4:30 am, I sure managed to wake up at 7:00 am. How disappointing. I was hoping for long, vivid dreams until early afternoon.

My housemate is brewing coffee. You can smell it in every room. My husband, who was awake longer than I playing Neverwinter Nights, is still snoring. The cats, now fed, are conspiring to keep me from getting up again. Today can afford to be a leisurely day; I'll write another couple hundred words and then try to get this blog finished up in ways you can see and in other ways that only I will notice.

Did I say dawn? Silly me.

Yeah. I did. I said, "I'll start writing at midnight and keep going straight until dawn!" Uh-uh. No way. At least, not likely.

The first scene of the novel is coming along very slowly; this is for a number of reasons. One has to do with the usual difficulty I find in pulling an all-nighter. Another has to do with my madly optimistic plan to type it all in Dvorak. I keep remembering the title to Holly Lisle's article about switching from QWERTY to Dvorak: "With Fingers Struck Dumb" or something like that. I've been practicing a little over the past few weeks, but still it takes enough concentration that I get sleepier even quicker.

And then there's my usual block where after having thought and thought and thought about a story for weeks, actually writing-it-down is a daunting task. It's like there's no way the words I put on the page will ever convey the movie going on in my head. (Maybe I should be a screenwriter instead of a novelist.)

On top of all this, I'm raging hungry. This from staying up as late as I have. I'd cheer for it - nothing like uncomfortable sensations to keep you awake, right? - but generally when starving-hungry and dead-tired get into a fight in my body, dead-tired wins.

It's lovely outside. I took a walk to keep myself awake around 2:00 MT, and the frost all over Boulder is 1/4-inch thick in places. Leaves, grass, and pine needles feel like plastic doll furniture. We'll see how much of the ice has escaped melting when I wake up again...

Good morning everyone.

OK, so it's not quite morning yet. It's five minutes to midnight. At midnight, I'm going to brew myself some coffee and open up a new document, lovely in its infinite blankness, on the ancient-decrepit Compaq Aero... and begin to write this novel.

I haven't even quite finished developing the blog software here - I'm writing this journal entry directly into a mysql> prompt - but I'm going to start the damn novel at midnight.

Two minutes to go.

I'd tell you about my novel idea (ha, novel idea, geddit? whaddever), but then I might, like, squander it or something. Rich novel-juice dripping wasted into the dirt like some kind of libation to a demanding and thirsty God. Can't have that, can we? I'll come back in a few hours and be a bit more forthcoming at that time.

Oh yeah. Thanks for visiting!