author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

A suspiciously post-free weekend is easily explained by my having been in Santa Clara, California. I rather thought I'd actually write and blog all weekend long, but this was a jam-packed stuffed-with-fun weekend involving people that haven't been in my daily life for far too long to neglect on those so rare occasions when I actually get to see them. People like this person and that person, neither of whom I notice have updated their blogs in a while. Get with it, people! Bwah-ha-ha. Anyway, August 4th found me doing the day-before-flying Decapitated Chicken Dance, and for August 5th through the 8th I was on vacation. So there's my excuse.

For examples of the Fun with which the weekend was stuffed, see attached photos. (That will be "photos," plural, upon moving this blog entry to the new website. I restructured the database over there to allow multiple images to be associated with a given blog entry. Go me.) I, personally, was also stuffed with Fun, in the personage of candy Lego blocks. Bulk candy stores are teh bomb. They're like trick-or-treating and coming home with nothing but the good stuff. (They are unlike trick-or-treating in that the candy isn't free. The quarter-pounds add up pretty fast.)

I did try to hit the novel, but it seemed every time I had some time set aside, I managed only to get as far as my Morning Pages ritual. Found a wifi spot pretty close to the hotel, a lovely little joint called House of Bagels that sold three types of lox and piled it on a bagel for me with cream cheese and cucumbers, and ended up taking care of bits and pieces of email (mostly concerned with remote access to databases for efficient migration of blog posts from one domain to another) and running out the laptop's battery. There was only one free outlet in the cafe, and it had a blank plate screwed over it. I didn't think the management would think much of my whipping out a flat-head screwdriver and HAXX0Ring their electric bill.

Came home to some goody-goody-gumdrops in the mail. The contract from BBI Media had arrived. It's official--"Faith-Based Charity, Pagan Style" will be in Issue #42 of PanGaia. It will also be on the website, if the extra compensation for electronic rights is any indication. I did the happy dance, signed that puppy, and dropped it back into the mail before heading out into my day.

And yes, writing happened. Got Amy and Brian through their almost-encounter at Gasworks. Will probably finish Chapter 7 tomorrow. Chapter 7 is really, really long.

Still crawling along through Chapter 7. Spent half the time tweaking the already-written bits (bad habit! quit it! get the new version written!) and the rest eking out five paragraphs of internal monologue.

Got some stunning good news today. My article, "Faith Based Charity, Pagan Style," will see print in the next issue of PanGaia Magazine. The piece has been pushed back for several issues now, up in the air between PanGaia and newWitch as part of the usual uncertainty that surrounds any busy family of publications, so you can imagine how very pleased and surprised I was to get the phone call today. Watch this space for me crowing about it when the issue hits the stores.

Oh, and the new blog? Coming along nicely. I foresee the Big Move happening over the weekend or shortly thereafter.

So I guess you should actually watch that space for all the crowing.

Not dead. Novel's not dead. But I put my first couple hours in on the beast today since, well, last blog entry. In rereading what I had in Chapters 1 through 6 (just to refresh my memory) I managed to spend some time trying to line-level perfect bits of Chapters 5 and 6. Not as much as I'd like to do, considering the brand new Chapter 7 really needs to get written. But more will come. Oh yes. More will come. And soon.

For the record, WOTC haven't responded one way or another. They say responses probably won't be forthcoming until August. Hope yet remains!

Pardon the late blog on this subject, but life's been a lot like that lately. Late to everything. Taxes, paying the bills, blogging about stuff. You know.

Sunday night I decided to grab an excerpt from this novel and enter it into the Absolute Write Idol contest. What's that, you ask? Why, it's a combination of Absolute Write and American Idol, of course! If you are unfamiliar with the former, then for goodness sake, click the link. If you are unfamiliar with the latter, I can't help you; my TV stays pretty much locked on Cartoon Network.

Anyway, I entered. I also put the same excerpt on my Novel Excerpt page, but, that being subject to change without notice, I've linked to the relevant post at the AW Forum.

So I got a whole 4.25 hours logged on Sunday, at least two of them because of my efforts for the contest. And in those two hours I didn't progress through the novel at all, but I can at least say that 1000 almost-perfect words got polished into a gleaming 700 word gem of perfection. So, nyah.

(Some say, "If you keep on at this rate, it'll be months until you're done with the novel! Being done is better than being perfect, right?" But, hey, Delacorte isn't accepting submissions until October. I have time. And I believe in avoiding repetition. The result of one time through the manuscript should be a near-perfect, submission-ready manuscript (submission-ready after one last read-through for typos, anyway), not a manuscript that needs yet another full revision cycle.)

The excerpt I used came from Chapter Two, which was a beast of a chapter to revise. It's full of dialogue. Dialogue is one of my strong points, but each bit of it needs to work triple-time. This is true of short stories, too: dialogue advances plot, reveals character, and can be used to slip the reader bits of back-story. The thing about dialogue in the early chapters of a novel, though, is there's a lot of back-story that's relevant, and there's a lot of plot coming up, and there's a lot more character complexity on display. (Did I say "a lot"? I mean A LOT!) So each sentence that each character spouts, however casual and natural I may end up making it sound, has to be carefully scripted. This is why, after 39.75 hours of editing, I'm barely half-way through Chapter Three. (Chapter Three is also full of story-advancing, character-developing dialogue.)

It's OK, though. I mean to keep at this 2-hour-a-day schedule for the foreseeable future. Or at least continue trying to adhere to said schedule, with hopefully more success as time proceeds. The novel doesn't have to be done by March. It just has to be 50 hours closer to done.

That said, I have 10-and-a-quarter hours yet to log by tomorrow night. So we can safely assume that today and tomorrow will rate somewhat more than two hours each.

(If I keep this up, I'll have blogs with titles taken from the entire songlist off My Favorite Headache.)

Didn't get anything done on the novel yesterday, and only an hour today. But! I managed to finish and submit that short story I've been working on. It will reach the slush pile for which it is destined with a postmark of today or tomorrow, putting it well under the March 21st deadline.

Note to self: March deadlines are hell on NaNoEdMo goals.

So, today being the 15th, I ought to be halfway through my 50 hours. To wit, 25. /me glances up at current hour count--hey, that reminds me, there's supposed to be an IRC channel for NaNoEdMo participants... Anyway, I need to start clocking some 3-hour days until I'm back on track.

I'm trying to figure out why I didn't get more done today. Chalk it up to the seduction of accomplishment, I guess. I handed my precisely postaged envelope to the mail carrier (who was kind enough to get my building's mailbox cluster, which was jammed, unstuck), and went back inside feeling mighty fine. "I've done it!" I said. "I sent my story out to meet the world! I have done what a writer should! ...I get to slack off now!"

Well, yes, true, but for the rest of the damn day? That was noon, and I didn't touch my novel until 8:15 PM.

Some people manage to do this for a good 6-8 hours a day. Hell, I used to go to work and sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day. Why can't I seem to do that with writing? Is it just the lack of a supervisor to reinforce my ALT-TAB instincts? I know it's not, as certain cynics would answer, that I'm not cut out to be a writer. When having completed an ambitious story that, upon rereading it, makes me say, "Damn, that's good," I get a euphoria like little else in the world. That's the universe, via my bones, telling me, "Yeah, that's what you're here for. You're right. That's what I want you to do with yourself." I only wish I didn't seem to have this hate/fear/reluctance reaction to the process.

Tomorrow I'll probably do my usual Wednesday thing: head down to Joe's Espresso (nee The Painted Bean) when the cafe opens at 6, clock a good 2 hours, and then goof off until it's time to go to my part-time job, where I will bang my head against the brick wall that is Microsoft Access until by sheer brute force I create the find-listeners-by-radio-serial-number search function that we need so badly. Then I'll come home and hopefully clock another 2 hours, rather than slack off with guilt breathing down my neck all evening. See, I don't really believe that guilt-ridden slacking off is somehow more enjoyable than guilt-free slacking off. Self-loathing is overrated.

I hereby give myself permission, once I have clocked a total of 4 hours on this novel tomorrow, to slack off with a squeaky clean conscience.

Ta-da! Magic!

Did I mention that I mailed the book proposal off Wednesday? I mailed the book proposal off Wednesday. I imagine it's in a towering stack of book proposals, manilla envelopes weighing a pound and a half each, early birds with first class stamps lording it over late-comers with their electronic priority mail postage stickers. I imagine a room filled with the smell of coffee, the slowly hystericizing giggles of overworked slush readers punctuated by the rip of envelopes and the flip of pages.

Well, no, it's probably a little early for slush readers to get slush drunk. At 8:00 AM Pacific Time, it might even be too early for slush at all. I have no idea what a WOTC slush reader's schedule is like.

And how's the book coming, you ask? You just keep right on asking that. You go right ahead. While you're at it, ask me how much sleep I'm going to get tonight. Uh-huh. That's right.

In better news, NaNoEdMo 2005 is coming along nicely.

And let's close this morning's entry with product placement: Have you looked through your share of keyholes today? Well, why not? Look at the kind of stuff you get to see! For instance, this blog entry features a lovely composite satellite image of Gasworks Park, in Seattle, where several important scenes in this story take place. Look! You can see the sundial!

(It should be noted that Google--who bought the software, incorporated it into their Maps Beta, and renamed it "Google Earth"--did not pay me to say that. But I wouldn't turn down payment for having said it. Should Google feel moved to grant me a free subscription for plugging this delightful piece of software, I won't complain.)

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?

This will not be news to you, for the subset of "you" that's defined as "folks what've already been through the novel-submitting process." But I thought I'd just mention it, for the benefit of y'all what haven't.

Synopsis-writing sucks.

Thank you.

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.

To all two or three of you who actually read this and might be wondering: No, I'm not dead, and the novel's not dead.

As to the blog, I'm trying to do a bit of rebuilding on it such that it accomodates other writing subjects besides those novels I've drafted as part of NaNoWriMo. I've been doing a bunch of work on short fiction these last few months, and I've also been hanging out in the AbsoluteWrite forums where the demise or the cleaning-up of PublishAmerica is being ardently hoped for. So many writing subjects to talk about! So many ways to organize blog entries! Plus I wanna try writing my own RSS feed, too.

And as to the novel, I confess to dragging my heels. But! I've written a Whole New Short Story! To submit here! Go me.

So. More later, as available. Kisses.