author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

That's all I have to say, really.

Oh, yes, and my contribution to the pot luck was Mom's Fabulous Spinach & Artichoke Dip, only with hearts o' palm instead of artichoke.

ML stands for Municipal Liaison. I got volunteered for this position when our previous ML, sgmoo, let us know that she'd be out of town for most of November (and indeed has not been heard from yet). She said, "I'm so glad vortexae has volunteered for the position; she'll do an excellent job." And I said, "I did what?" And she said, "That's the spirit!"

So I'm the Boulder ML this year. I get to try to organize write-ins and meet-ups, let folks know when said write-in and meet-ups are happening, and use my magical ML powers to do stuff like put these events on the calendar.

I also get to be the contact point for Fatty, the Goddess Of All NaNoWriMo Goodies. That means that when she is able to get those goodies together, I'm the one she's mailing 'em to and I get to distribute them to my Boulder-area NaNo buddies.

So today I got to start with that. I got to put on one of these classy little NaNoWriMo buttons, and I got to give one to Kandybar.

And then I left the Tea Spot for to catch a 205 back to my end of town, headphones trailing out of my bookbag and book in hand... and I left the Goodies Envelope behind.

It's OK! It's all right! I spoke to Mr. John Little, barista extraordinaire (and no relation to my husband - there are a lot of John Littles in this world), and it seems the envelope has already been discovered and turned in to the lost and found box.

(I think the conversation must have gone something like this: "Hey, I found this envelope here addressed to a Niki LeBoeuf-Little... do you know this person?" "Yeah... that's the very confused young lady that called me thinking she left her wallet here last week.")

So my husband has gone with a friend to Acqua Pazza, the Italian restaurant next door to the Tea Spot, for dinner, and has pledged to pick up the envelope and bring it home to me so I can continue distributing the NaNoWriMo Goodies. And tomorrow I should have better luck with holding onto them, 'cause the meet-up and write-in tomorrow evening is at my house. Nice and simple.

Now I just have to figure out what to cook us for dinner.

Wow.

OK. I've just written the penultimate scene in the book. I've decided at last exactly what leads up to the shooting scene, and how that comes about; and I've fleshed out a bit of what happens just after. (Best line of dialogue so far: One police officer says to another, "You asshole, put that away. You wanna tell your kids you shot a unicorn?") And I've finally figured out how to resolve Diane's relationship with the one-horned critter such that she loses the ability to change shape in a way actually required by the story.

Hint: no, she doesn't just lose the magic item. It's something better.

I'm not sure whether what I just wrote was awful purple yuck or transcendent glorious poetry. But I'm feeling like I just read something transcendent and glorious, anyway, so I'm just going to ride that wave for now and congratulate myself.

Now I really ought to pull out my short-short story draft and start revising it into something submittable. Except I'm kinda scattered at the moment...

Maybe it's the coffee. Many cups of coffee, on top of a glass of tea from Penny Lane, on top of a pot of tea from the Tea Spot. My brain went and drowned in caffeine. So... I guess I'll hit the keyboard again when I've managed to resuscitate it and dry it off.

Happy Thanksgiving!

What the hell happened?

Well, it was more complicated than I thought.

The logistics of the scene I want to write are still evading me. How does Mr. Right end up getting into the position of witnessing Mr. Wrong's abuses, let alone defending Diane from them? Did he somehow get invited along in a car ride that was intended to end in a sex scene? That seems unlikely. Did Mr. Wrong just happen to park the car somewhere along the Diagonal Highway on a night when Mr. Right was going for a late night bike ride from Niwot to Boulder? Even more dumb. If Mr. Wrong is in the middle of doing nasty things to the main character when Mr. Right shows up, does he still manage to whip out a gun while still, er, engaged, and then does he just ditch Diane on the side of the road and drive off?

And then the thought occurred to me that all three of my NaNo novels so far will have sexual assaults in them either onstage, offstage, or in flashback. I'm not sure I like the trend.

So, I'm just not sure exactly what's going to happen or how high the stakes will be. Does the story really need an attempted rape right before a gunshot murder? Isn't the shooting enough? Do we need another unicorn story in which a unicorn visits a rape victim, thus proving that it's not virginity but pureness of heart that unicorns actually care about? Does this story need to be one?

All of which is a) more than you want to know, and b) a lame excuse why after last night's enthusiasm I somehow haven't written another word.

But, hey. Last night, I typed until I bled. "Dude," said my husband, "that's hard core!" Yeah. People walk into your apartment and find you dabbing blood off the keyboard with a bit of moistened toilet paper. That should count for something... even if the bleeding wasn't really caused by the typing. Or maybe it was. I mean, I don't know exactly how that cut on my knuckle from the other week's bicycle wipe-out reopened. I just realized that my finger was wet, and looked down, and there seemed to be a lot of red. Maybe it was the typing. Serious, hard-core typing. Yeah.

Hey, look! That websnark guy is doing Nano too! Go look at his excerpts and leave me alone while I frantically make up 2,000 words of, oh, I don't know, background material or something.

Pardon that last entry. Part of the reason I'm keeping a NaNoWriMo blog at all is to have a record of my pace - when I was at what word count - so if I miss a day, I lose a point on the graph, so to speak.

Anyway, today I had this plot flash. About 15,000 words and 11 days ago, I had just jumped ahead and written the climactic scene in which the Disreputable Older Boyfriend (we'll call him "Mr. Wrong") shoots the Nice Classmate And Bourgeoning Love Interest (we'll call him "Mr. Right") and then drives away, and Diane has to try to flag down help to save her friend's life. I had no real idea what action led up to this scene, though. All I knew was it had to happen. Well, now I know - but it's not very pretty. Mr. Right is going to show up in time to witness Mr. Wrong mistreating Diane rather viciously, and, being a virtuous lad, will try to come to her rescue, with the above results.

So, good. Another piece of the puzzle falls into place and I'm looking forward to continuing tomorrow. But the exact nature of Mr. Wrong's abuse of the main character brings up a logical problem I really can't keep ignoring. (Although I will keep ignoring it until I either spontaneously solve it or finish this first draft.) The problem is, this is a teenage novel with all the sex and hormonal uncertainty associated with that age... more, it's a teenage unicorn novel, which invites the author to explore issues of innocence both emotional and physical... but the story is being told by Diane sixty years or so later to her grandchildren. Grandchildren who are mostly too young to hear, for instance, about Diane and Mr. Wrong having a heavy petting session under the bridge behind the school.

And, no, grandma-Diane is not too old and senile to realize that the story of teenage-Diane is R rated.

I think the solution lies in differentiating the version the reader gets from the version the grandchildren get. But I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to pull it off.

And, er, that's all I've really got to say, for now. "I'm not sure how I'm going to pull it off." It lacks a certain snappy something for ending a blog entry, I know, but now that I've met my word quota for the day, I need to get to work on another writing project - a short-short to submit somewhere before the end of November. Just because it's NaNoWriMo doesn't mean I'm off the hook for doing one professional submission a month! Last year maybe I could have pulled the "but I'm already doing my novel, what more do you want?" whinge, but last year I was employed full-item. This year, my full-time job is... writing. So 2,000 words later, my job ain't quite done.

I had met
my quota
of words
due yesterday

which accomplishment
I probably
should have blogged
at the time

Forgive me
I was tired last night
and my head was hurting
and I had nothing left to say

What? Cat food? Screw that. That's boring. Fruitcake is where it's at. Fruitcake in the oven for the next 3 hours, slowly making my house smell niiiiice.

Today, SlyCrow and Kandybar and I all went to Caffe Luna, in Longmont, and held miniature writing races where we'd set a timer for five or ten minutes and see who got the most words written in that time. I started the day at 29,131 (how the hell do I remember that?) and you can see where I'm at now. I highly recommend this activity. Especially if you type fast. Kandybar kept track of the math, and I'd watch to see if she punched the air triumphantly or gave me a squinty glare to see which of us had beaten the other by five words or so.

Caffe Luna claims to have free wiFi available. Actually, what it has is wiFi available. Boingo Wireless, to be exact - the kind where you need a login, and you either have a monthly subscription or else you "pay as you go," and that's not free, not in the littlest bit. Good thing we weren't there to web surf.

Not much else to report. It's Teen Titans tonight on Cartoon Network, followed by Justice League Unlimited and Megas XLR. And somewhere in there I want to do another 45 minute writing session or so, just to try to get me up to the 33K mark. And that's all I got for now.

(Oh, all right. Homemade cat food. Bake 1 lb chicken livers and 2lb ground turkey breast. When cooked, chop the liver fine and crumble the turkey. Take 1.75 cups uncooked brown rice and cook it. Open a can of pumpkin - not pumpkin pie mix, OK, just regular pumpkin - and set it aside. Open up a bag of Wellness brand dry cat food. Now, make up five batches of cat food by mixing 2/3 C turkey, 1/3 C chicken liver, 1 C rice, 1 C dry cat food, and 1/4 C pumpkin per batch. Stick all the batches but one in the freezer. That last batch goes in a closeable container in the fridge. Feed 1/3 C twice a day to overweight tabby cats with finicky digestion. In Uno and Null's case, said cats will lose weight and their digestion will improve.)

(Take leftover pumpkin and mix with falafel and a little olive oil. Form patties. Fry 'em and eat 'em like hamburgers.)

(Take leftover turkey and mix it into mac and cheese. Or saute up some celery, onions, scallions, and garlic to mix with leftover turkey; add a cup of water, a half cup uncooked jasmine rice, a couple boullion cubes, some chili powder and cayenne pepper, and a couple bay leaves. Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. Voila - Cajun dirty rice!)

(There oughtn't to be leftover brown rice. If there is, add it to the Cajun dirty rice during the last five minutes of cooking the jasmine rice.)

It's time for my thousand word blogging break. Readers - all two of you - rejoice!

So I have this fruitcake recipe. Someone sweet sent it to me a few years back on the condition that after I followed it I send her a slice. Which I did. And then I never did it again. Make the fruitcake, I mean.

But now the Tea Spot (I never get tired of linking them!) is selling little slices of the stuff, heavy in cherries and walnut, and you know what? I gotta do it again.

So yesterday when I went to Whole Foods to pick up the ingredients for cat food (about this, more later) I also started in on fruitcake preparations. This is both the fun and the obnoxious part: bopping up and down the bulk goods aisle, deciding which dried and/or candied fruits to include, scooping them into little baggies with PLU numbered twist-ties, and weighing them to see if I'm adding up to 3.75 lbs yet. I got...

• pecans
• walnuts
• almonds
• currants
• bing cherries
• sour cherries
• black mission figs
• dates
• cranberries
• candied ginger
• and sweetened papaya spears.

Now. About chopping up dried fruits. Dried fruits are sticky. I don't care how much your friendly Pampered Chef Dealer hyped the Food Chopper, it is useless for chopping dried fruit. Dried fruit sticks to the blades at the very first slice and then rides them clear of ever getting sliced again. Besides, you don't want randomly minced fruit; you want cubed cherries and quartered dates. So stick with the knife. It's old fashioned but it works.

By the way - here's a little bit of trivia for you. True or false: "It is safe to leave bags of dried fruit out on the kitchen counter in a cat-infested household." False! I came back from retrieving the second load of groceries to find Uno and Null regarding a scattering of black mission figs, occasionally batting them to watch how they rolled. Bad kitty-owner!

So now I have a bowl of chopped-up dried fruit sitting in a covered bowl and happily getting drunk on half a cup of cognac. Tomorrow there will be the mixing of the batter, the baking of the cake, and the beginning of the process of curing the cake in more cognac in my big round Tupperware™. I plan to let that sucker pickle right up until Solstice. Yes, yes, I know. "Waste of good cognac." Well, you know what? It's just as much a waste to leave the stuff sitting on the kitchen counter until it spontaneously quadruple-distills itself. Which is what would happen. Believe me, the last third of a cup of brandy from the bottle I used on my last fruitcake was still hanging around as of yesterday. So, deal.

Next entry: A musical interlude, with homemade cat food. You (all two of you) may want to skip it, as it involves baked chicken liver.

Tuesday, Kandybar uttered a cry of lamentation:

Man, Niki's caught up with me while I was cavorting around the country side.... And I won't get to write until tonight! *sob*

Looks like you're still leading me by about 2K - guess I'd better put in another 3K day just to cut that lead a bit! *maniacal laughter*

Thursday was supposed to be an all-writing, all-the-time day... but it started with a trip with Uno and Null to the vet for their semi-annual kitty check-up, after which I came home and just about died. By the time I recovered it was time to go grocery shopping for cat food fixin's and fruitcake ingredients, and the onerous tasks of mixing up homemade cat food and processing various types of dried fruit (about which, more later) left me with just about enough energy to declare a moratorium on actual work for the night.

Now I'm behind - well, not really, not if I get to 28K tonight and stick to my 2K/day pace - but I'm no longer ahead of schedule - and Kandybar's past 33K!

*Whiiiiine*

Why, look! I appear to have acquired a NaNoWriMo Enemy! And I wasn't even looking for one! Well. Time to kick some butt, that's what I say.

(Meanwhile, I need a new vet. One that isn't afraid of my cat. Any takers?)

Yeah, so I devoured Abarat Book Two: Days of Magic, Nights of War pretty much over the 24 hours following its purchase. That stuff about how books don't get read during NaNoWriMo? Apparently, there's an exception.

Now I am in agony because now I have to wait for Book three. That's gonna be, like, a whole 'nother year. At least! Wow. I think now I know how a Harry Potter fanatic must have felt after eating up Goblet of Fire the day after it came out.