author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Once again, I have overestimated my relative productivity while travelling.

Number of socks returned to functionality from the darning sack: One. The blue Encore DK Colorspun cable knits only had one hole to darn. I did that at the IHOP Wednesday evening while waiting for my computer to deal with the wi-fi situation. The dusty-rose Encore DK Colorspun lace socks both had holes, one of which I darned Thursday morning in the C Terminal of the Denver International Airport; the other is still waiting. (Encore DK is not a sock yarn. Guess which of my socks are frequent visitors to the darning sack? Go on. Guess.) I also knitted two inches last night on the mate to the double-knit gray Kroy sock with the white diamonds on top, but did not finish it. Damn. It's all cold here and I want to wear double-knit socks.

Number of hours spent working on the novel: Zero point Five. Result: One conversation in flashback rewritten. The hour count doesn't include all the staring at the work so far, all the cups of tea, and all the "just one more" games of Alchemy played after a few more minutes of staring.

Not a heck of a lot of progress in either court, I'm afraid.

But! Number of yarn-cutter pendants confiscated by DIA security: Zero. Not even a comment from the guard or a beep out of the metal-detector arch. So that's OK.

And. Number of Narnia-related movies to be watched by the end of today: One. I'll probably have a few words to say about that later. But only if I also get a bit more work done on the novel. Stay tuned.

Why not. It looks nice, after all. I think we'll say that Uncle Matt bought it here.

Chapter outline is mostly done. Between that and my markups on the previous draft, I'm really ready for a type-in. I spent part of tonight dashing back into the three and a half rewritten chapters and seeding them with foreshadowy things and subplot arc beginnings. Hopefully things will sew up as nicely as I go.

Tomorrow morning John and I leave for Bloomington, Indiana, to see Cate. Yay, Cate! I am going to spend much of the plane ride darning socks. To that end, I am testing the waters of airport security by bringing my little wooden container of darning needles and my Christmas present from Sarah, a yarn-cutting pendant. It's awesome. It's not only a useful craft implement; it's totally goth. Well, aside from the cute little Clover logo.

The blade is totally protected so that this thing is dangerous only to yarn, but maybe the good folks at the metal detector arches will mistake it for a ninja throwing star and freak out. We'll have to see. Hopefully, by the time we land in Indianapolis, I'll have put three more of my handknit wool socks back into service. And that'll be a good thing, because it's freakin' cold in that part of the country. Even more so than here.

Hi there. I'm at the Tea Spot. I'm here with SlyCrow and his Big Blue Pencil of Doom (pictures to follow). I just finished writing my 2K+ for the day, putting me at just over 2K due on every day through the last in order to win. I also just realized I haven't posted for several days, so it's about time I did.

I'm closing in on the final scene of the book. I'm not entirely sure that the story as it stands has 8,300 words left in it, but I think I have a subplot or two in my back pocket, so it should be all right.

In other news, the wedding present is done and in the mail; I am told it will arrive by Monday. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that. I didn't take any pictures, so I have none to show, sadly, but you can take my word for it that the results of all that knitting are very warm and cozy and soft indeed. Now I get to knit bears and mouse-slippers for Community Knitting. And then get to work knitting several second socks to make pairs out of my collection of singletons.

Tonight is "techno party night" on the ice. John and I are planning on dinner and skating accordingly. Tee-hee. We're gonna have a date. We never got to date, growing up, what with living some 600 miles apart, so these days we try to make up for that.

So. Back to considering subplots, and exactly how the ending of the book is going to pan out. And where we're going to have our Thank God/dess It's Over party. Yeah.

Quoth my handy-dandy NaNoWriMo Calculator on Saturday, November 19:

For Reference:
A 1667-word daily average would result in a total of 31673 by the end of day 19.

Your Stats:
Your daily average thus far is 1469 per day over 19 days.
At this rate, you'll wind up with 44070 words.

In order to win...
You need to average 2008 words per day over the remaining 11 days.

Good luck!

(It used to say I needed to average 2,089 words, going forward. So I figured I had to write more than 2,089 words to make things better. In case there's any confusion, 27,913 minus 24,585 is rather more than 2,089.)

Plus Gwen got to meet the talemouse. That was cool. Apparently, a talemouse's natural voice is like a dog whistle that humans can hear, and it's kind of like fingernails on a blackboard, and Gwen now has a super colossal headache.

I got to visit with quite a few fellow Boulder-area NaNoers at the Tea Spot today. Tea was duly sipped. Dim sum was summarily consumed. And words got written in great quantity. In my case, I'm fairly confident of the quality as well. Rewriting this bad boy, I think, won't be nearly as painful as rewriting other novels has been.

Tomorrow's 2000+ words will involve... well, I'm not entirely sure what they'll involve. I'll have to give it some thought while I double-knit 11" of ribbing and 11" of ribbing-with-stockinette-panel. By this time tomorrow, I'll know more than I know now, and will hopefully be ready to mail off a wedding present to the New Orleans area too. Or at least I'll be a lot closer to ready.

The manifesto obliges me to post every day, and to keep my post relatively centered around writing. Sunday's goth club outing¹ is not a valid subject for blogging, nor is the delightful Celtic Tatting book² Sarah got me. Ditto the wedding present³ I am frantically knitting for my friend and his bride-to-be.

So here's a very boring post to say, "Hey, look! I got a whole bunch of words written since last post!" In case you care, we're up to Chapter Thirteen, in which the talemouse meets the Bookwyrm. In my own opinion, which isn't very humble because in first draft stage my opinion is all that matters, it was pretty darn cool. I got to describe how Rakash Sketterkin finds his way into the Bookwyrm's lair, and to define the true nature of the Bookwyrm's horde (the actual horde, not the bookstore named after it). To describe and define those things, I had to decide and discover them. Yay NaNoWriMo! Daily word count quotas are good for me.

Now, I need to figure out why fictional characters don't want to go anywhere near the Bookwyrm. At least, not in their parent plotlines. The Wyrm probably wouldn't threaten their existence in their own plotlines.

In other news, the battery in my Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero appears to have joined the ranks of the undead. Or the resurrected, I'm not sure which. The computer has been running on battery power for 30 minutes without showing a drop in the battery charge meter, which is a huge improvement over last week's "pull out the plug and the computer immediately dies" routine. Yay zombie battery! Maybe next time I lend Willow my Averetec, I'll actually be able to use the Compaq on battery power.

And that's all.

(1. I'm sorry, I have no pictures to share of me gothed up and dancing to a slightly sped-up spin of VNVNation's "Neverending Light". Nor have I pictures of John, Sarah, or Jaerin, at least not such that I'm at liberty to share. Nor have I sustained actual bruises from the collision occasioned by two stoned dimwits who started rolling around on the floor and using us as pinball bumpers.)

(2. Dude! I had been trying to figure out how to do celtic knotworks all weekend! Apparently the answer is to tat chains, not loops, and use a paperclip to thread the chains into knots. Very cool.)

(3. The wedding is on December 3rd. If I knit really fast, there's hope. If I knit really fast and stop swapping threads or either notice more quickly when I've swapped threads or just give up on this whole "knit two socks at once" idea.)

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.

Some time ago, I made a one-item-long wish list. Since then, although the letter of my wish (that the Tea Spot were open 24 hours) has not been granted, the Powers That Be have apparently heard the spirit of my lament. They moved heaven and earth, or at least that part of heaven and earth concerned with national diner chains, and transformed the Boulder IHOP into a free wifi hotspot.

I may never go home again.

Actually, I'm headed home pretty soon. Tomorrow's a long day, so I'd better get some sleep. I'm also thinking that this wasn't the smartest point in my novel to tackle in public. There are several reasons why sex scenes are best written in private, and one of them is the window right behind my head and the way it feeds my natural reading-over-my-shoulder paranoia. (I'd list other reasons, but most of them are TMI.) In any case, tonight's hour was slow going.

Just an hour. Just one frickin' hour. Look, today was loooooong. Today was very long and it involved plumbing. No, not that kind of plumbing. Dude, just because the novel's reached a plot-obligatory sex scene doesn't mean you have to take everything I say as a double entendre. I'm talking about replacing both the kitchen faucet and the bathroom faucet, which involved biking out to the hardware shop for new water supply hoses since the new valves installed this morning were 3/8" quarter-turner ball-joints in place of the old 1/2" screw-types. (Huh-huh. She said "screw". For cryin' out loud...). And then I had to deal with two obstinately leaking P-traps, which involved a lot of swearing and moaning and griping and sore thumbs. (From tightening the nuts, of course. Gutter-brain.) They're still leaking now.

I had expected this adventure in consumer installation to take a few hours. Maybe half a day. Definitely to be over by lunch. But oh no. I had just barely gotten around to feeding the cats and slipping into a well deserved hot bath when John got home from work. It was 5:15.

Got a bit more spinning done before I headed out to the IHOP. The blue-and-white is safely plied, skeined, washed, and dried, so today and yesterday (yesterday was a day off, by the way) belonged to a different project. That one time I went to the Estes Park Wool Market a couple of years ago, I picked up a fair bit of silk and a ziplock bag full of sparkly mylar. These are both rather tricky fibers to spin. Well, try mixing them up and spinning them. That's really tricky. But the result is fun. Ply together one strand pure silk and one strand silk/mylar, and you get this fingering-weight glitzy stuff suitable for creating whatever fashion accessory you'd like to turn heads with. I'm thinking, maybe a purse. I don't really own a purse, so it might be nice to make one. Maybe make one with beads on, just for added glitter.

(I'll upload some pictures as soon as I get ahold of a digital camera. John's got lost at GenCon, and the only other digital picture-taking implement in the house is his T-Mobile Sidekick II, which, being his cell phone, doesn't get loaned out often. Keeping in tune with the family tradition of low-end photo hardware, I've special-ordered the $99 Kodak C300 from Circuit City; I'd have it in my hands right now, only, I'm not the first to think that a hundred bucks for 3.2 megapixels is a good deal, and they're out of stock.)

Anyway, time to head home. Hard to pull myself away, but I've been nursing this pot of coffee way too long, and tomorrow's looking uncomfortably near. G'night, all.

First, boot up your word processor and open the novel in progress. Find where you left of yesterday. Now open up some music-playing software and load up Enya's Watermark album.

Close your eyes and breathe.

Breathe in; focus on your third eye/brow chakra (a spot between and above your eyes, just do it, OK?) as you do. It glows brighter and brighter as your belly expands with air. Pretend you're actually inhaling through your brow chakra rather than through your nose. Now hold onto that breath. Feel your brow chakra pulsing with warmth and light.

Just before you begin to feel tense from holding your breath, begin to let it out slowly. Shift your focus to your heart chakra (a spot in the center of your chest). Pretend you are exhaling out of your heart chakra, and feel it glow brighter and brighter. When you are empty of air, hold onto that emptiness for a little while before inhaling again.

Continue to do this, eyes closed and thinking only of the breath, until the title track of "Watermark" comes to an end.

Now, as the next track, "Cursum Perficio," begins to play, pick up some wool and start carding it. The motion of the combs goes well with the pulse of the song. Stay conscious of your breath. By the end of the song, you'll have a whole bunch of wool ready to spin, so go ahead and spin it. Take your time and enjoy the calm motion of the spinning wheel. Don't rush yourself to feed out the fiber. How slowly can you work the treadles?

Don't try to think about anything. Just trust that as the spinning wheel imposes order on the wool, so will the process impose clarity on the thoughts you are not yet thinking.

Continue spinning until the album is done. Now return to your laptop. You left off yesterday at the beginning of the Chapter 8 rewrite. Go back through what you have written already, cleaning up the narration and smoothing out the dialogue. Now write the rest of the chapter. Wind the tension tighter and tighter until it at last, at the end, it breaks--

and the main character has learned to breathe.

So John's all GenConning right now, which means it's just me and the cats in the house. Boring. Quiet. A little lonely. But, you know, keeping busy. For instance, right after I got home from bringing him to the airport, I went back to the spinning wheel.

I got the wheel a few years ago when I finally succumbed to the temptation of Shuttles's store-wide 10% while-in-class discount. I was taking the Beginning Wheel-Spinning class at the time, which was super cool in that every student got to actually borrow a wheel for the whole week between classes. This gave me a chance to fall head over heels in love with the Schact double treadle. (My Gods, I'd forgotten how expensive it was. Damn good thing we were a two-income household at the time.) So I succumbed, and the wheel came home with me for good, along with a bottle of oil, a threading hook, and a Lazy Kate.

What also came home with me was a whole big mess of white wool, which it had been my homework to wash and card, and a smaller mess of variegated blue wool, which we'd all dyed together on the last day of class. And I am here to tell you that I still haven't spun it all. I started, and I also started in on some two-ply fingering weight yarn made from "The Beast" (that gray-brown-white wool of no particular lineage which Shuttles sells for something like $.49/lb) which I am proud to say has made it into two thirds of a lacy sock. But after a few months I kinda slacked off.

So now I'm trying to finish off these unfinished projects. Today I carded and spun a whole bunch of the blue stuff, and once it's all spun up I'll ply it together with the white stuff, which will look super goofy and'll probably make a nice pom-pom hat someday. After that, I'll have to figure out how to deal with the whole heel/toe reinforcement thread issue so I can finish the sock. Maybe I'll just skip it. Anyway, I have to finish knitting the darn thing so I can finally get The Beast off my fourth bobbin.

Right. So, lots of time spinning. And spinning is a mindless activity. Keep the treadles moving in a nice, even rhythm; keep the fiber coming in nice, consistent draws. Stop now and again to move the thread onto the next hook of the flyer. Mindless. You would think, with all that mind freed up, a writer could totally use that time to brainstorm her novel.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I don't know, maybe it's like meditation. You have to practice that kind of thing. As it is, when I knit or crochet I think math, and when I spin, I think not at all. Well, maybe I think, "Ugh, this blue dye is getting all over my fingers," or, "Yuck, all this lanolin is starting to gross me out." Or, "Damn, this yarn is over-spun. Good thing I'm going to ply it."

But that's all. I try to start myself thinking things like, "OK, here it is--Amy and Todd having a bit of a heart-to-heart, and Russ comes in and starts being an ass. How's that dialogue going to go?" And then I stop thinking. It's like I'm trying to turn the ignition and get the car to go, but all I'm hearing is whirr-whirr-whirr and no vroom. I'm gonna have to push this sucker uphill, 'cause that engine just ain't starting.

And yet, I put off writing and hit the spinning wheel, or the knitting needles, telling myself I'll think about the story while I'm fibercrafting. I'm priming the engine, I'm brainstorming, I'm getting ready to write.

Really!

Maybe it just has to be learned.

Heycheckitoutgadgets!

The screenshot you are now looking at comes to you courtesy of Sinner Computing. The programs name sounds a lot like an intentional double entendre, considering the name of the company and all, but a glance at the other programs in their line-up seems to indicate that it's just a happy coincidence which does not represent their normal naming conventions. Too bad, really. But that's not the point!

The point is, it counts seconds. Then it stops counting seconds, if you've told it when to do so. Then, it makes noises.

Which, of course, is very, very useful. It means I can press "Start," ALT-TAB over to WordPerfect 5.1 (in its itty-bitty DOS window, cho kawaii), then write and write and write resisting the urge to look at the clock until an hour or two later when a pop-up window pops up saying "Finished!" and Gaelic Storm's version of "Nancy Whiskey" starts playing out of my laptop speakers.

Which is what I did today. And I only ALT-TABbed over to check where the count-down was at once.

OK, maybe twice.

(Oh. Yeah. About Sunday and Monday. I took Sunday off. That was on purpose. And Monday, I came home from the office with a headache but nevertheless got all interested in my spinning wheel, which I hadn't really touched for something like a year. Decided it was about time I finally plied together those two bobbins of dyed angora that had been languishing neglected all this time. Then went on to make a grossly overspun single ply out of our anime night host's puppy-doggy's combed-out undercoat (the collecting of which Saturday night we can blame for the sudden reawakening of interest in home-spun yarn). It knitted up a lot like mohair, oddly enough. I'd tell you what breed of doggy it is, if only I could remember. It's one of them husky-wolfie-looking things. Anyway, by the time I was done, my headache had gotten all worse-like and I went to bed early. Which only proves, once again, that writing has to come before other pursuits, just in case of migraine.)