author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I finished the exploratory draft of the new story today. It's still got no title, but that's OK. That'll come during revision. More troubling is that it clocks in at 3,380 words. That's more than double the cut-off called for in the submission guidelines. It's even more than double what the draft was at yesterday, when I figured I was about halfway through.

Such an occasion calls for introspection, or at least evaluation. Which is to say: Can this really be cut down to 1,400 words?

The part of my brain arguing for YES points out that there is, as I observed yesterday, a lot of cruft to be culled. Several things get said over and over again and also redundantly, and many things get said that need not be said at all. For instance: It is less important to remark on Rosalind's Sunday exception to her morning routine of reading the entire newspaper, back to front, than it is to mention that she no longer bothers reading the obituaries. It is less important (for the sake of the story, anyway) to voice Elaine's disapproval of the labels "homeless" or "transient," given her permanent residence under a particular tree in the park, than it is to capture the voice of her tree asking her to be its new dryad.

The theory that YES-brain espouses is this: Now that I've met all the characters in this story and gotten to know their backgrounds, I'm well equipped to trim their surrounding exposition down to those few phrases that best crystallize who they are and what's at stake for them.

NO-brain is more pessimistic, as you might expect. There's too much going on here, says NO-brain. This story needs at least 2,500 words for the reader to have any clue what's going on. Don't sell your characters short!

On the other hand, NO-brain is also bringing some optimism to the table. It points out that as easily as this story idea arose from my freewriting sessions, just as easily might another that's more apt for the submissions call. YES-brain concedes the point, but counters that, this being the case, there's no harm in making the revision attempt here. I've made such good progress while still nearly two weeks to deadline remain, that there will be time to pan for more gold in my Daily Idea .scrivx should this story remain stubbornly above the maximum word count. And then I'll have two brand new stories to shop around!

What strikes me here is how very natural it was to go from "The deadline's imminent and I've absolutely nothing to send!" to "Well, what came out of my timed writing sessions lately?" That didn't used to happen as readily. But now that I've begun the Friday Fictionettes offerings, it's happening every week at the very least. Every Friday, I'm looking at the past week's scribblings and deciding which of them I'll polish up, stick some cover art on, and upload to my creation stream during the corresponding week of the following month. It only makes sense that this mental process would fire up in response to the need for new story material in additional contexts.

This was one of my sneaky self-improvement goals with Friday Fictionettes. The headliner goals were, firstly, to get more of my stuff out where y'all could read it, and more frequently; and, secondly, to potentially earn a little spare change doing so. But behind the scenes I was also hoping to see some improvement in my larger Story Production Process. I wanted to get in some regular practice making that transition from "just a wisp of an idea that I'm noodling on" to "fully fledged and publishable story." I wanted to see that process go more smoothly and happen more often.

With the current story, I'm seeing evidence that this is happening. And I'm delighted.

Not to leave you hanging, but there isn't a whole lot more information than there was yesterday, because I am indecisive and stuff. But here's what I've got so far--

Wait. Drat. I keep getting interrupted mid-blog by the sound of what is undoubtedly yet another instance of Bat In The Belfry. Er, mansard. Soffit? It's pattering about up there, so it's only a matter of time before it comes swooping out into the still-attic-like office. That's what happened last night, anyway, and also several weeks ago. We basically waited for it to get tired, then we waited for it to come out from its hiding place in the baseboard heater, then we trapped it against the wall in a big plastic soup bin with which we tipped it out the window.

Well, I've got the soup bin ready.

Don't worry. It won't be forever. In a little more than a week, the house is getting all its interior repairs. We will have whole ceilings again. After that, we'll be able to ignore the sounds of bats in the soffit because at least then we'll know they won't be able to get into the living spaces of the house. They'll just keep us up nights pattering around amidst the joists, that's all.

Right. Where was I? Information. I have very little of that. What I've got are thoughts.

The first thought was, "I'd like to do something like this." This being Bruce Holland Rogers's subscription service, Short-Short Stories. For $10 per year, subscribers get three short stories a month emailed to them. They're very short, most of them between 500 and 1500 words long, unpredictable in genre, sometimes oddly unclassifiable. Apparently he has about 1,000 subscribers and most of them do renew each year. That's a nice deal for everyone: 36 new stories for each subscriber every year, and, if that subscriber number holds steady, a respectable side income of $10,000 (ish) for the author.

Obviously I like money. I'd like to make more of it by writing. I joke about being a full-time writer on the spousal subsidy grant, but I'd like to rely on the spousal subsidy somewhat less than I do. But there's also a handful of intangible benefits going on here that I'm interested in. The author is writing and completing way more stories than I do in a year. This is no doubt helped along by 1) knowing he's got an audience waiting to read them, and 2) knowing that the audience has already paid for the product. That mutually beneficial relationship between expectant audience and productive writer is something I'd like to explore.

I also recently was introduced to Patreon, "bringing patronage back to the 21st century." It's a way for creators to find funding, and audiences to support creators in a more ongoing way than via one-time Kickstarter/IndieGoGo campaigns. Its interface looks perfect for doing something like what Rogers is doing, but with potential for different levels of support receiving different levels of product. Except not exactly product. Patreon's emphasis is not monetizing products, but rather on enabling a mutually beneficial relationship between audience and creator. See above.

I was bouncing some ideas about this off of John--that was the extent of my researching the project today--and he suggested that I produce a certain amount of short fiction to post for free, and that supporters via Patreon could get them ahead of schedule. Other ideas I've been noodling on include taking those same stories and recording an audio version of them, or a decent ebook that exposes more of my daily process, or...

"But who wants to see my daily process? I mean, me. Not Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin, but little old me. How is that worth money to anyone?"

"You'd be surprised."

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do quite yet. But I do know this: What with all my daily freewriting, I've got oodles more raw material on my hard-drive than I could turn into salable fiction at my current rate of production, and certainly more than anyone but me will ever read at my current rate of commercial publication. This idea I have that every ounce of my writing, no matter how rough and incomplete, needs to be protected jealously from "wasting" its first rights just in case I'll come back to it and develop it into a story that will see print in Asimov's or F&SF or something... well, it's based in truth but I think I take it too far. And so I do less with my writing than I could.

Instead, I could be developing some of those daily vignettes and thought-experiments into short fiction, prose-poems, odd unclassifiables, things that, while not viable in most professional slush piles due to their form or format, might still be worth putting in front of other people's eyeballs. It would be a good practice, releasing these small things on a schedule, and, hey, y'all might enjoy reading 'em.

So that's where my head is at, right at this moment.

Meanwhile, I'm one day into the Conquer the Craft in 29 Days challenge (it's apparently not too late to join!), which will require me to do my daily freewriting on an actually daily schedule. Y'know, as opposed to just Tuesdays through Fridays. Which means more raw material to throw at this subscription-style relationship-with-audience-building project I'm noodling on. Hooray!

I expect I'll spend most of August figuring out what I want to do and what kind of schedule I can keep to. As I have more thoughts, I may end up floating 'em by you. If you have thoughts, well, I don't have comments enabled on this blog (I don't in fact have any mechanism for comments programmed on this blog, if you want to be precise), but I do read Twitter at-replies and Facebook comments. And there's always good old email.

And I think I will go ahead and set up that Patreon page, just so I can explore the interface, and see what other authors are doing with it.

(That bat never did come down out of the soffit. Hopefully it went back outside via whatever hole it used to come in.)

Yesterday's successful last-minute completion of "Caroline's Wake" and submission of same to its very first market (which has now sent me an receipt acknowledgement email of the "We look forward to reading it" variety, which I believe means I no longer need fear that it will be deleted unread due to various infractions of the... idiosyncratic guidelines) has led to the usual feeling of "now what?"

The pressure's off. The deadline's past. The battle's been fought and won. So... "Now what am I supposed to do?"

This should not be a hard question. There's always the next story in the revision queue. There's always content writing for fun and small amounts of profit. And there's always the novel I'm supposed to be working on every day but, well, haven't.

"The" novel. Honestly, that's more like the twelve or fourteen or so novel drafts that have been accumulating since I first discovered the existence of National Novel Writing Month. But my serious efforts this year have been on behalf of Iron Wheels (working title, naturally), the YA urban fantasy teen romance roller derby novel that I tried to write last November.

I've started poking at it again, picking up where I left off re-envisioning its eagle's-eye-view outline with Randy Ingermanson's "Snowflake Method" for novel-writing. One of the steps in this Snowflake Method is to write a synopsis of the story from the point of view of each character. It's actually a lot of fun, and a useful reminder that every character is the protagonist in their own autobiography. When the "real" protagonist is being heroic out in the forest approaching the castle, the evil overlord isn't just sitting up in the high tower playing solitaire and twiddling his or her thumbs. The evil overlord is living that story, too, and from his or her point of view, they're the main character and the hero.

What I'm mostly uncovering is the fact that I don't actually know what the evil overlord--which is to say, the Faerie Queen--I don't actually know what her story looks like. I know its general arc, from wanting to having to losing to desperately trying to regain to finally resigning herself to loss in the end--the story arc of an antagonist is often tragic--but not its details. So I keep poking away at it, hoping details will fall out of it like candy.

By the way, did you know Shakespeare never actually named the flower that Oberon and Puck use to restore everyone to normal at the end of "A Midsummer's Night Dream"? The love spell flower, the one that causes all the ruckus in the first place, that one he names. Heck, he even gives that flower an origin myth (apparently Cupid is a bad shot with that bow of his). But despite what my big book of illustrated retold Shakespeare stories for young readers led me to believe, the flower that cures everyone has no name or reference other than "Dian's bud," which has greater power than "Cupid's flower" and thus can nullify love spells.

("Dian" of course is "Diana," also known as Artemis, the chaste Goddess of the Hunt and of the Wild. I have opinions about this whole "pristine wilderness = celibate woman" thing. My own personal theory is, it got thought up by men who considered women's only roles in sex to be "witholder of" or "endurer of." If you consider that there's another role, "enthusiastic participant," then you start wondering why Diana/Artemis wasn't allowed to enjoy any of what Her forest critters were getting plenty of.)

(Oddly, there is a plant called Artemisia that sounds like, via Artemis, it ought have something to do with this "Dian's bud" business, but no, it's thought to be the bitter "wormwood" Hamlet namedrops.)

Anyway, I'm kind of relieved. I wanted to reference the Shakespearan herbs by name when that very same type of love spell gets cast and later broken in my novel (and I'm still having thoughts about that), but damned if I was going to refer to any herb as "Sweet Normality" with a straight face.

Not, mind you, that "Love-in-idleness" is any easier to take seriously.

Well, that was easy. All I had to do was have Andy wash some dishes.

That's a little glib, admittedly. There's a bit more to it than that. What it really came down to was remembering that he's a character, not a stereotype. And, despite my best intentions, I was alternately writing him as a stereotypically sloppy drunk or a stereotypically sleazy pick-up artist. But the initial detail I changed that turned him from a stereotype back into a character, was having Demi come back upstairs and find him not lounging around suggestively on the couch but instead cleaning up the mess left from the party. Hey, he genuinely wants to help. He's got entitlement complexes out the wazoo which have led him to do something very horrible indeed, but his conscience won't let him leave Demi to clean up dirty dishes and broken glass alone. Characters are complex, y'all.

This required rewriting all the stage directions in the beginning of that scene. In doing so, I realized another mistake I'd been making. In the second scene, Bobbie Mae gets drunk and climbs up on the kitchen counter, which results in a lot of broken glass and punch on the ground. In this scene, all that debris... has just disappeared? I certainly never mentioned it again, despite Demi surely having to walk through it to prepare their late-night dinner. Whoops. So now they're cleaning up that stuff together like a comfortable, domestic couple. Awww.

A comfortable, domestic couple who are, separately and simultaneously, playing very deeply in the Land of Creepy and Problematic Consent Issues, but still. Just for those five minutes of story time, before things get morally icky again, we can say "awww."

Once again, two problems in search of the same solution. Nothing there "just because." Previously unrelated things becoming related. Story getting tighter. My short story theory is invincible!

So this time through the draft I hit the steam-powered locomotive tipping point where it becomes effortless to type through to the end of the scene because now I know how to get there. It'll need some tightening up, but that's OK. I can do that tomorrow, after I write the final scene, which will be easy a hell of a lot easier than this scene was. Yayyyy.

Exit author, in the direction of beer and popcorn and that pint of mango chili margarita sorbet from Glacier.

This scene. This story. Ye Gods. Did I say I was generally good at writing dialog? Did I say it's usually easy and enjoyable? Bwa-ha. The universe is laughing at me and my dialog hubris. Because the dialog I'm writing for this scene, or at least this part of the scene, sounds like it belongs in a cheesy porno. You know what I'm talking about? When the only point of the contrived "plot" and stilted conversation is to get the leading actors to the bit with the sex in it? This is kind of like that, only without the sex.

I mean, yes, it's a seduction scene, but no, sex isn't going to actually happen. At least, not like the characters expect it to. Or maybe not at all. I haven't decided. That makes it so, so much worse. It's like someone took the actual sex out of a bad porno and left in the cheesy seduction talk. I think I'm going to go hide in a hole now.

The problem is, I have a checklist of Things That Must Happen, and I simply haven't figured out a natural way to get those Things to Happen. So every piece of blocking and every line of dialog pushes the characters around like a cattle prod and makes a dull, heavy thud when it lands.

Progress has been made this week, don't get me wrong. The problem of the scene feeling rushed came unstuck when Demi decided she had time to whip up a quick bearnaise sauce to go with the seared venison. And the idiot plot problem got a plausible solution when Andy broke his glass tumbler and sent shards all over the carpet. So maybe I can hope the problem of the seduction scene being all bad-porno-awkward will fix itself tomorrow.

It really is amazing what fixes itself when I just sit down and start typing--just trust the things that I already know to lead me to the solutions I need. I already knew that Andy was being morose and pissed off by turns, "pity me" with one sentence and "dammit" with the next; I also knew he needed to be the reason that Demi would lose track of a thing she really ought not to lose track of. So I let him unload. And in the course of his unloading, he rage-smashed his glass. Picking up after that mess--"No, no, it's OK, you sit tight and I'll clean this up"--turns out to be a really effective distraction.

I have this theory about short stories: Most logical problems in them come from needlessly multiplying entities. Short stories work best when they're tightly constructed, every element in them doing two or three jobs at once. It's amazing how many problems I end up solving by collapsing two characters into one, condensing two scenes into a single scene, or drawing extra connections between seemingly unrelated details. It's a good theory. The evidence seems to support it. The problem is, I usually don't remember it until after it's happened.

But, see, I remember it now. So maybe I can use it. Ask myself, "What details wound up in this scene arbitrarily, purely because I had to think something up and that's what I thought up? Can I make those details work harder at justifying their existence?"

Nothing comes to mind immediately. It may have to wait until I next sit down to write.

For the second time I've missed a Sword and Sorceress submissions deadline. It's already 11:30 as I begin writing this blog post. There is no way I'm finishing the story and preparing it for submission in under half an hour.

I just left it too late, is all.

For one thing, I left almost the entirety of the second scene and the rest of the story after for today. That was pretty dubious from the start. Then I woke up with a headache, and that headache refused to shift itself all day. I didn't really feel able to work on it until the headache finally faded around 7:30 or 8:00 tonight. That was what sealed my defeat.

Nevertheless, I sat down to work on it, thinking, "Hey, it's still possible! And even if it isn't, it'll be time well spent." And it was time well spent. I just wish I'd spent the time last Tuesday.

I can get really pathological about deadlines. The closer they get, the less time I have to finish, the more resistance builds up around the project, making it even harder to use what time remains. It's not that illogical, really--it's just that the project gets scarier the closer the deadline gets, so I panic, and in my panic I avoid the project really hard.

The good news is, I've finished the second scene, the one with all the moving pieces and bit-part characters. I probably need to go over it again and smear a light glaze of "other people in the room" over the top of it, just to more convincingly texture it as a crowded party setting. And I probably need to massage the pacing a little, give more of an impression of the hours passing until the scene culminates at drunk-o-clock. (These are more reasons why a story shouldn't still be in incomplete rough draft form on deadline day.) But the basic building blocks of the scene are all there, and it reads fairly smoothly.

Getting it even this far is an accomplishment that did not at all look feasible last night or this morning. It's amazing how suddenly the writing looks possible when you just sit down and make yourself start writing, isn't it? *shakes head, sighs, feels stupid*

The next scene is easy. There are only two people in it, and despite it representing the emotional climax of the piece, the actual action is minimal. The real challenge is in making the dialogue natural and not clunky, given the job it's going to have to do, the things that have to get said and reacted to. But since dialogue is typically something I find easy and fun, it'll probably be OK.

I should not find myself avoiding it, is what I'm saying.

So I can't submit it to Sword and Sorceress 29. But I can think of several places it might be a good fit for, and I'm looking forward to sending it to one of them.

Meanwhile, I get a weekend.

It's this weird balance. In order to establish credibility and to really put your reader in the scene, you need details. Aspen, not tree. Prius or Civic, not car. You don't say "Somehow she managed to figure it out." You show how she figures it out. ("Somehow" means "The author doesn't know, either.") And when your character slips beneath a box-spring to hide inside the hotel-style frame it rests upon, you can't just say "she panicked when she realized she'd never get out again by herself." You have to describe the onset of nausea and the feeling of a scream trying to get out. You have to make the reader smell the dust under that box-spring, taste the air going stale in that airless space, hear how sounds in the rest of the room are muffled by the smothering mattress.

But then if you're too detailed about other things, you invite disbelief. It's like the way writing too-detailed rules invites people to game the system. I continue to have a problem figuring out or even simply imagining the detective game Jet plays to figure out the connection between Councilman Hackforth and the Swifts, for instance. I can't say "and then she got it!" with no supporting detail. But I also can't describe her getting into Lia's workplace incognito and tracing various financial records until she finds the dirty money, because A) I don't quite know my way around plausible details for that, and B) if I attempt to make them up, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. And I can't rely on "Because she's dreaming, the dream magically provides things like key cards and passwords" too much or it becomes the sonic screwdriver of my novel.

I think I need to rewatch some Leverage episodes. I always feel like everything about the computer hacking and info-stealing is plausible while I watch the show, only to realize later that I really didn't quite follow. There was enough detail to keep me nodding along, but (usually) not enough to get me picking it apart. (The big exception is whenever they do something with airlines. The writers for Leverage really need to sit down with the latest FAR/AIM before trying to write another "bluffing the pilot with a surprise inspection" scene.)

I haven't quite figured out that balance yet, which is why I skipped right over all that stuff and wrote the assassination scene. I'll figure it out on the rewrite, I guess. Or in December.

But the problem rears its head once more as I try to figure out how Lia outsmarts the gang leader in his own home, despite a room with no hiding places, no windows, no weapons, and constant monitoring via regular and infrared cameras. Here I am with a stack of cards again and instructions to make a house out of them...

Oh, screw it. How about we have Jet come back at a time convenient for engineering a power outage? Which Lia takes advantage of admirably, so she's not just a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued?

Nevertheless, I'm sure that even this more simple scheme involves plot holes which one might drive a truck Chevy Tahoe through. But screw it anyway. This is rough draft. This is NaNoWriMo. I'll figure it all out eventually.

"Oh, and about those cameras," he said. "They're infrared. You have no secrets here." He turned out the light as he left, locking her into complete darkness.

Lia once more lay in a defeated state of aching disarray. Degraded was not a strong enough word. Nor was violated. Just--defeated. But the feeling passed sooner than before. Maybe that was because she was less exhausted now, having slept a night through. Maybe it was putting a night's sleep between herself and Jet's--departure. That's all it was, she told herself: a departure, a temporary goodbye. She tried hard not to remember what Jet looked like dead. But having slept and eaten since then, and having the more immediate problem of her captivity to worry about, it was easier to hold that memory at bay. Departure. And she'd made a decision when she awoke this morning, if it were indeed morning. She'd made a decision not to just wait to die.

So she found herself on her feet once more, turning the lights back on, running another bath to clear her body and her mind. She washed off the blood and other fluids, inventoried her body for new bruises, studiously ignored the hidden cameras she couldn't do anything about. She also inventoried the room--mentally, since she couldn't investigate physically without alerting her monitors to her actions. But she walked tens, hundreds of laps around the room, considering possible hiding places (though the room was devoid of hiding places). She calculated possible escape routes (though escape routes were notoriously absent). And she thought about possible weapons. Jet had made a deadly weapon out of a champagne glass. Pa Montrose's exposed throat lingered in her memory: an opportunity. If she could only find a single sharp object easily hidden in the hand, if only she could secret it away without the cameras catching her, she might actually look forward to the next time he screwed her. She'd screw him right back, fatally. Let his thugs kill her for it; she'd die happy. She walked around the room again, evaluating her resources.

If only she were Jet. Jet wouldn't even need a weapon. She'd simply strangle him with her bare hands.

If only Jet were here.

The next day--she had to assume these were days, measured as they were in three meals per and ending with a bedtime visit from Pa Montrose--a strange static snapped somewhere in her consciousness, and a ringing began in her left ear. She thought very little of it, other than that the auditory hallucinations were especially loud in this silent prison of a room.

Then, about ten minutes later, the lights went out.

So. One possibly interesting insight from writing class, coming right up. It's sort of a third-hand anecdote, so the details of exactly how it transpired may be off. Bear with me; the insight comes at the end.

One of the group members who wasn't actually there yesterday had been trying to work on a short story that had been commissioned from an anthology and was now significantly past deadline. He told us about this last month. He was just having a terrible time trying to figure out how to make the story work when its action comprised a single conversation.

One of the group members who was there yesterday had gotten to talking with him after class that night, and suggested that the conversation in the story be crafted to do double-duty. While it was ostensibly about one thing, its real meaning should be something else. Say one character is ostensibly talking about his emotional state; in describing it he's actually obliquely relating a crime he committed and how he feels about that.

Apparently this piece of advice sent the first group member home in a hurry, inspired to get to work on the story. It also enchanted those of us present last night, and Melanie suggested we use it as our "homework" prompt for next class.

So I'm thinking of three basic ways a conversation can do that kind of double-duty. Actually, they're more like points on a spectrum of character awareness, where at one end the character is aware of their words' double-meaning and intends it to be so, and at the other end only the author and the readers are aware of the double meaning. There are in-between possibilities as well.

Example: It's Thanksgiving dinner, and one character is telling the family about a movie she just saw. But the way she recaps the plot and her emotional reaction to it actually relates to a traumatic memory of how she got bullied by one of the people here now at a Thanksgiving dinner 20 years ago. Moving from the one extreme to the other, here are ways that might come about...

Aware & Deliberate: She is being intentionally passive aggressive, attempting to jog the culprit's memory of bullying incident with the way she talks about the movie.

Aware & Accidental: As she recaps the movie, she realizes the words coming out of her mouth could just as well apply to the bullying incident. She wonders if the culprit picked up on it too.

Unconscious: She doesn't realize consciously how the movie plot relates to her childhood trauma, but the connection influences how she talks about the movie. Maybe the rest of the family pick up on it, maybe they don't, but the connection is definitely present in the text.

Literary Metaphor: Here the connection is only present in the subtext. The character is simply recapping the movie, but the words the author puts in her mouth are meant to make the reader aware of the character's painful past.

And how does this relate to my own novel? Ooh, glad you asked! Well, today's scene was mostly taken up with Lia and Jet arguing. Because I didn't really know what they were supposed to do next. I hate that crap. The only thing I can do is follow the boring, talking-headsy argument until one of the characters spits out something revealing.

The character doesn't know they're being revealing. And my eventual readers (should this get published) won't know it, either, because most of the argument will be edited out of existence. But I'll know, and I'll go, "Whew! Finally! We can get on with it now," and I'll write the next scene.

I suppose that's even further toward the "unconscious" extreme. "Literary Metaphor" is where the author and the reader are aware of the double meaning, but the characters cannot be. We should call this fifth critter "Author's Note To Self," because it serves no purpose beyond giving the author a gosh-darned clue.

Anyway. I'm not sure I got to the clue yet. But I would like, once I know more about this story, to come back and revise the argument so that it performs a double-duty that the reader can appreciate. Perhaps by the time class meets next I'll be able to do that, so I can bring this scene in and share it with my classmates.

Lia stared at Jet, trying to force a brain abruptly awakened to early in the morning to accept this information. "They what? But why would they--" She couldn't seem to form a coherent response. "And how would you know?"

"Because I dreamt about it and received some information that made that clear."

"Oh, come on." This bit of nonsense on top of all of last night's nonsense, pleasant though the circumstances had been, was just too much nonsense to take. Lia wished that, instead of telling Jet to tell her everything, she'd restricted herself to asking very specific questions. That way maybe Jet wouldn't be throwing the incomprehensible at her every time she opened her mouth. It felt like being told that the sky was velvet, breakfast was desperately igneous, and, by the way, godzilla is on the agenda at yesterday's pumpkin secession. "No, no, no, this is ridiculous--"

"We don't have time for this, Lia, not if the Swifts are coming for you."

"How can you know that just from a dream?"

"Look, I dreamt that you were the assassin who killed Tresco! Then you were insisting that I take a closer look at the stone. OK? Clear? Satisfied?"

"No!" Lia covered her face, scrubbed at her eyes, and let loose a mock-scream of exasperation. A baby began to wail from the apartment on the other side of her bedroom wall. Lia sighed. "Look. Listen. I just dreamt that my mother and I were riding a horse, and I fell off, and she kept going without me. I am capable of waking up and going about my day without an urge to call her up and doublecheck that she hasn't just, I dunno, drawn up a new version of her will and left me out of it or something like that--"

"Why not?" Jet seemed genuinely surprised. Or else she was determined to be contrary. "It seems like a real possibility."

"Because I'm already out of her goddamned will, and besides, dreams are stupid! They're not psychic, they psychological, and half the time they aren't even that!"

The infuriating tolerance of Jet's smile made Lia want to dream agian. "That, while probably true for you, isn't the case with me. When I dream, I--bilocate, I guess you could say. Part of my awareness returns to reality, making more information about my assignment available to me. Usually I remember it in the form of a dream, with all its symbolism and metaphor. My colleagues and I get very good at dream interpretation." Jet's smile went from condescending to simply wry, a change that changed Jet from someone Lia wanted to punch into someone Lia wanted to kiss. And then punch, just to make clear she wasn't forgiven.

Lia began, "Look, assuming that I--" then cut herself off. She'd been going to say, assuming that I believe your stupid story about being from another world, which I don't, because I don't accept that my life is just your dream-- But that seemed to violate some sort of agreement they'd come to between the lines last night. And while she was trying to figure out how to rescue that sentence, her morning alarm went off.

Now we'll see whether anyone reads my blog I don't know about. Because I'm rather guilty of telling nobody in the area--including, with one exception, family--that my next stop after Chicago would be New Orleans.

Yes. Sneaky stealth French Quarter stay. John and I had a week with Interval International to use up, and John was out of vacation days, so it was up to me. I plugged a likely looking week into The Quarter House and called it an extended writing retreat. (It just happened to line up well with the annual Chicago crawfish outing.) Also a preview homecoming, given that I'm hell-bent on moving back to New Orleans someday, at least part-time. I mean, it's home, dangit. I ought to spend more time actually living there.

So why haven't I told anyone about it? Because... well, a week and a half can go by really quick if it fills up with visiting obligations and other unforeseen restrictions. And I just want this week and a half to myself, right? I'm allowed, right? Right?

So. If I get a phone call tomorrow afternoon with disappointed family members scolding me for this (or even saying "hey, it's all right, enjoy your vacation, just promise to visit next time"), that will be an interesting and possibly scary way to find out that Mom and Dad (or friends of theirs, or other family members) are reading my blog. If they are, I must beg them not to get mad at my brother, who mixed me this lovely, lovely Bloody Mary I am drinking. I swore him to secrecy on pain of pain. Blame me, not him! I'm the older one, right? I'm a bad influence, clearly!

OK, well, you can blame him for any typos. He mixes a non-trivially strong Bloody Mary. Vodka makes me insanely uncoordinated as far as fine motor control goes. I'm fixing the fat-finger fuxxups as I go, but I may miss a few.

Don't worry, gross motor control should remain trouble-free. This is important. I'm on my bike. Woo, Riverbend to French Quarter. Woo, past midnight.

This update is not turning out to be so quick. On with it.

1) Got here. Pleasant train ride. Interesting scenery, among which I will count the guy who was shouting at everyone who would listen that "They Blew The [17th Street Canal] Levee!!!" because "They" wanted to shut down the Lower Ninth Ward and needed a Cat. 5 Hurricane for cover. I think this particular theory has been around since before Camille, actually. Most of the times I hear it, it's attached to, I dunno, a canal with less proximity to multi-million-dollar neighborhoods like Lakeview. But whatever. He says he heard a BOOM, and Gods know there's nothing but dynamite can cause a boom, right? Like I said - interesting scenery on my train.

1)b. No free wi-fi in the W, and I refuse to pay when any number of fine establishments like Z'otz and Bruno's will give me what I want. Also the Royal Cafe, if I'm not feeling all that "woo" about biking to the Riverbend and I'd rather just walk about 4 blocks instead.

2) Nibbled at the short story WIP. Really, only nibbled. And not until I got into town and was having dinner at this little Vietnamese place two doors down from Camillia Grill. My nibbling gave me an ending, and it gave me an unforeseen backstory complication. I'm so proud of my little 650-word story! It's developing a back-story!

3) Will probably do more nibbling tomorrow, as well as a visit to the Williams Research Center for microfiche reading to buttress the verisimilitude of "A Surfeit of Turnips" (which will probably get a new title before it goes out again). Hey, when Gumbo Ya-Ya tantalizingly mentions a 1930 story in the New Orleans Item Tribune referencing the most bizarre ghost story I have ever heard, who am I to resist?

4) Will probably have lunch here (via both Neilhimself and docbrite).

And that's it for now. Laters!

I think this novel, unlike last year's, will actually wrap up in 50K or shortly thereafter. I know this because today, in between 24K and 28K, I reached the midbook climax.

This scene is definitely not one of the boring bits. Not to me. It's one of the scenes that I go over and over again in my head when thinking about writing the novel. This, in terms of Joseph Campbell's oft-quoted thesis, is the "refusal of the call" scene. This is where the not-so-imaginary friend gets far too real, and the MC has to repudiate it/him/her. It/him/her is effectively banished now, but it/etc./etc. has already managed to impart a portion of the deadly gift it needs to bestow. The supernatural powers which the MC has inherited from her mother are now available to her; the knowledge of them, alas, not yet. Which is an accident waiting to happen. Which is the next not-boring-bit in the plot. Which, unfortunately, can't happen for at least 10K and 3 months of story time, or else the pacing goes all to hell.

Appropriately enough, today's Real Author Pep-Talk was exactly about this.

Explanation: This year, Chris Baty asked a handful of published authors to write pep-talks for all us NaNoWriMo participants. These pep-talks are being emailed out at strategic intervals, their topics coinciding with the time of the month. We received a pep-talk from Tom Robbins on Nov 1, and it was all about the excitement of starting the novel. On Nov 6, we got one from Naomi Novik, and it was full of strategies for keeping up the daily writing routine even after the Day 1 excitement fades. Sue Grafton's pep-talk was about beating back those creeping insecurities that appear in the vacuum left when that excitement does fade.

Today, we got Sara Gruen's pep-talk about how to get that excitement back: by writing the fun bits first.

It's a strategy that's really made me appreciate novel outlining in general and Spacejock Software's yWriter in particular. Not that you can't skip to the fun bits without an outline or a software application that encourages creating each scene before writing it, of course. But if you do take the time to outline or to create chapter and scene files in yWriter, you'll end up knowing where all the fun bits are--as well as all the "and then something unspecified happens and takes up a month of plot time" bits. (Knowing where those are is also good. It enables you to figure out what that unspecified something actually is.)

The other nice thing about Writing The Fun Bits is, those bits are fun. Duh. Sorry. What I mean is, them being fun to write has another nice effect besides getting the writer unstuck. They also tend to result in the writer writing a lot. I meant just to get to 25K and stop today. As you can see, I went about 3K longer. Whoo! All caught up and stock-piled for the future!

Of course, the bits that are fun to write accrue extra words because we linger over them. About 1,500 words are probably going to get edited out of that scene. It needs to not go on so long or be so very repetitively explicit. But editing doesn't happen in November. I wrote those words. That's all that matters.