author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Finished a draft yesterday. Still don't know quite what this story is, other than bloated; don't really know what its title wants to be, other than "not that." To fix the one, I'm doing a "quick" (ha!) revision pass this afternoon before emailing it to, or reading it to, friends and colleagues. To fix the latter, I plan on throwing this piece on the mercy of said friends and colleagues.

In case anyone's interested, Open Office Writer will open WordPerfect 5.1 documents remarkably well. However, the conversion is not without its flaws. All table structures in my WP51 document get visible borders that then have to be removed...

1. Right-click inside table
2. Select "Table..."
3. Under "Borders" tab, in the Line/Style section, choose "None"

...and all tabs need to be reinserted, which is most easily done using RegEx Find & Replace. Which isn't simple. Open Office Writer's implementation of Regular Expressions is... non-standard. The expression "\n" means "paragraph mark" in the Replace With field, but "newline" in the Search Field. Or something. So apparently the thing to do is search for the first character of each line and prepend a tab:

Search For: ^(.)
Replace With: \t$1

And you should definitely not click "Replace All." This ends in tears. Have patience and perform the replacement one at a time; when it finds a new line that should not begin with a tab, press the "Find" button to skip this instance and move on to the next.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a novel-length document. Probably refrain from using WP51 for my draft revisions, I guess. Just export RTF from yWriter and open the RTF with Open Office. Which is fine for novels written in yWriter; not so fine for novels written in WP51.

This is one of those "bridges" you only "cross" upon arrival, so I hear.

Which is about it. Neither the story nor the scarf are finished. However, significant progress was made on both.

Most of the progress on the story happened at the Moonlight Diner, a sort of 50s/retro-themed greasy spoon on Tower Road near Denver International Airport. Their food is... OK. Well, it's either acceptable or abysmal depending on what you order. Steak and eggs ordered "eggs over easy and steak as rare as you're allowed" became eggs over medium/hard and a steak that had only hints of pink in the center and was dry and tough like leather. On the other hand, the taco potato skins are absolutely loaded and yummy. And they play a mix of oldies and 80s on their stereo, which is fun, but--what's up with 80s music being the new oldies? I'm only 34, I'm too young to feel old, stop trying to make me feel old!

Anyway, the quality of the food was of no import yesterday. I had already treated myself to Popeye's Fried Chicken for lunch. (New Orleans homesickness ahoy!) All I wanted never-ending coffee and a place to work on my story for three hours. Also wi-fi to check on the status of Southwest Airlines flight 502. I was there to pick up the marvelous Cate Hirshbiel, of course. Have you met Cate? Blog, re-meet Cate. She continues to be awesome.

So by the time her plane was due, I'd written the first five scenes. Of 13, of course. And by the time she called to say she'd got her luggage and was ready for pick-up, I'd spent the last fifteen minutes just gabbing with the waiter about, oh, stuff. Y'know. Driving in the snow, how video games can prepare you for real life situations, how people get very confused about tipping etiquette because it's so hush-hush in polite conversation, how airport security constantly strives to surprise us with more stupid where you'd have thought they couldn't possibly fit more stupid, how trains can be nice if you like trains.

As for the scarf, I knit on that at the Spin-In until my hands were done with knitting and I was ready for bed. Then I went home and crashed, hard.

Today I have until about 3:30 to work on the story some more. We'll see how far we get. The scarf has a new deadline of next Spin-In, when we'll leave our projects at the store to make a big show-off presentation for customers to ooh and aah at.

And tonight it's All You Can Eat Sushi at Japango with John and Cate and Avedan! Yayyyy!

Sometimes a day just kinda gets away from me, and I just get nothing useful done. The typewriter doesn't come out. The short story scenes don't get written. And then it's 11:30 PM and I'm sleepy and it's so very easy to think, "You know, screw it. I'm going to bed. Writing can happen tomorrow."

But there's always another 15 minutes.

My laptop is coming to bed with me, and I'm going to poke at the half-formed scenes in my head before I lose consciousness.

I made some. One of them was, "Devise a writing schedule with great specificity, and stick to it." This post is to announce my having done the first half of that.

It goes something like this:

1. Four days a week (Tue.-Fri.),
2. write a 6-hour work day,
3. which includes
   • blogging gigs,
   • fiction,
   • and paid content writing.

The time spent on blogging and content writing can shift. The people paying me to blog and write articles can shift. But the fiction has to happen. It absolutely does, and for no less than 2 hours a day. It's what it's all about, after all. So I'm trying to put it closer to the beginning of the day, to make sure it happens. Or at least to change the order of tasks around every day so that no one thing becomes The Thing That Never Happens. (About this, more later. Like, later this week. Probably.)

As to the second half of that resolution... well. Tomorrow is Monday. A whole new week. A whole new week plus an extra day because Abbondanza has not yet called its volunteers back to the farm for the spring. Every week is a chance to start fresh! And so I shall.

That blogging once every work day? Blogging here? I'd like to get back into that too. Consider this a new start.

So recently I've been trying to create and adhere to a useful daily schedule, as per New Year's Resolution the First. And one of the things I want to get done during a typical work-day, rather than, say, once per week, is a spot of web content writing or other project guaranteed to result in money. In trying to improve my output there, I have figured out something really important about researched content writing, such as a writer for Demand Media Studios ends up doing. About how I do said writing, anyway; your mileage may vary.

You ready? Here it is:

Too much data kills.

So I'm researching an article about fruit trees and how they metabolize stuff. This naturally leads to college course study guides describing photosynthesis and cell respiration. And the photosynthesis equation, which I dimly remember from high school. And the krebs cycle, to which I attribute most of the physical pain and nausea that resulted from my taking the AP Biology test (which I passed, but which the University of Washington had absolutely no use for, so there went uncounted hours of my life I will never get back). And molecules of ATP and ADP and NADP, some with ionic plus signs on the end signifying something or other and--

And this is a $15 article I'm writing, here. I should not feel like I have to write a chemistry thesis. But I'm staring at these course study guides and my brain is spinning and my tummy is churning and writing is not happening.

Then I find a PDF describing the process in a chatty, breezy tone and from a broad top-down view rather than from under a microscope. It's all "Light hits leaves, therefore chemical energy, therefore water breaks down and carbon dioxide breaks down and viola, oxygen and glucose! Yaaaaay!" And suddenly things are very simple in my head, and I'm mentally composing the first two sections of the paper. Yaaaaay.

It really comes down to finding the right reference articles that have the right balance of info detail. Also to knowing what kind of info needs to go into the article, so I can distill the right amount of detail from a microscope-level description of photosynthesis if I need to. Also remembering that I'm only getting $15 to $20 for the article, let's keep the time spent per article short, OK?

Besides, I've got a novel to edit. I can't do that if I'm spending all day attempting to relearn the krebs cycle.

And not just in the conventional 50K sense. But I have finally gotten to a point of completion with this draft.

Wellll... OK. I haven't yet written the denoument. But I'm forgiving myself that for now, mainly because I'm still unsure of its shape. Its rough shape is clear, but not the details. I need to think on it a bit more.

That aside, I've written each of the three major layers of conflict in which the book culminates. There's the Earth conflict, involving what the Earth antagonists were after and how they are finally stopped; I'm not entirely satisfied with it. I didn't really give it the development it needs. But it's there enough for now, hinted at and then resolving in a very large house fire. Then there's the Uberreality conflict, in which Chender's scheming comes to light and must be stopped, and is stopped. Even that rings a little shallow, but this too I'm going to throw at the rewrite. If a first draft is an act of discovery, a first revision is about implementing all the things I discovered on my way to the end of the first draft.

Then, finally, there's the... spiritual conflict, I guess. To use the classic literary terms I learned in high school, if the first two layers of conflict are Man versus Man, the final is Man versus Self. Well, Woman versus self, really; Jet may in fact be genderless, but I've been writing her as a woman this whole book long.

(Huh. How appropos. Tangent! I'd only today been reading about the distressing tendency in Hollywood to take genderless characters, for instance most of the cast of Monsters Inc., and give them male names and voice casting; the "default person" is male. I took a genderless character and gave it a female presentation instead. I was mainly rejecting male-as-default-action-adventure-character, and het-as-default-romance; I ended up subverting male-as-default-person while I was at it. Tangent ends!)

Anyway, I'm really not sure of the outcome of Jet's Woman versus Self conflict. Except roughly. I can see it as I used to see things when I was near-sighted and I wasn't wearing my glasses: the shape is discernible but the details are blurry.

And that's pretty much all I'm going to say. I want to publish this thing in the near future; someday, this will be a book you can purchase (or download) and read. I wouldn't like to spoil the ending.

At least, no more than excerpts to this point already have.

With a harsh, involuntary laugh, I salute Chender with my left fist, a motion that pretends to punch a hole in the ceiling. Then I sit up, toss the five stones into my mouth like so many aspirin tablets, and I simply swallow them. As I suspected, no sudden transfiguration happens, no mystical effect. They drop heavily into my stomach and sit there, undigestible. I hope they receive a damage from their new location. Whatever power Chender expected the gems held, he was wrong.

Then I lay back down, eyes still open, and allow my human body to be human once more. Human sensation returns, animal need. The lungs breathe because they must, and thick black smoke rushes in. The skin sweats and reddens and finally chars as human skin does when engulfed in flame. It's like nothing I've ever felt before. Strange, that in all my assignments I've never exited the dream by fire. It's worth doing. Everything is worth doing, once. Living, loving, dying-- some things are worth doing more than once.

The pain is briefer than I had feared. It sharpens and contracts into a singularity of pure agony wherein nothing exists but itself. I am engulfed and snuffed by its utter self-absorbed existence. Then, abruptly, it drops to nothing. Maybe my nerve endings have all been destroyed, and I am incapable of feeling more pain. Or maybe I'm simply succumbing to smoke inhalation and leaving the body behind. For whatever reason, the pain vanishes and leaves a blank behind it, inner darkness foglike swallowing the smoke. There I find a point of clarity that I mistake for waking. I allow myself to rush toward it, a being without a body going home at last.

But something interrupts me on my way there. The darkness flashes to lapis blue and the motion of my being halts in the center of that sky. The stones relinquish their power, or their message. A familiar presence wraps me round and shares with me an intimate space of awareness.

So familiar-- so much like the being I wove my being with while my human disguise sat grieving on a motel floor. But something about her is different, strange. Unearthly. What a strange word to think; am I not un-Earthly myself? Unexpected in a way that creeps over me in shades of awe and growing wonder. I venture a thought forth: Lia?

Meantime, through December, I mean to hit the queue of stories awaiting revision. And I hope to keep up this daily pace of fiction and blogging. At the very least, I'd like to maintain a five-day work week, just as I've intended all year. The beautiful thing about NaNoWriMo is, it normalizes dailiness. Let's see how long I can continue at a comparable pace through December and into 2011.

Lastly, I should mention that these musings are coming to you live from the lobby of Boulder's St. Julien Hotel. I'm here with seven other local Wrimos, a couple of them already sporting happy purple WINNER! bars on their profiles when they arrived. The rest of us sort of cascaded at a rate of one per half hour or so. It's really neat, attending the Final Push Write-in and hearing "Fifty thousand and one! Yes!" and "OK, word count verified! I'm a winner!" followed by eruptions of applause. It's also really neat to cross that finish line in such circumstances oneself. And yes, I did cross 50k yesterday-- but I didn't get my word count verified, didn't get my word count bar to turn purple, didn't get to watch the congratulatory video from NaNoWriMo Headquarters or download my web badges and certificate, until I was here with fellow Wrimos working hard into the evening. It's a good place to be.

Well, today didn't start all that auspiciously. Snow was coming down in buckets around the time I should have been getting ready to go to the farm. Since I could neither see myself busing and biking in that weather nor expect John to bus in it, I texted the folks at the farm to regretfully bow out of my usual Monday morning shift. John drove off for his first day at the new job. Then, of course, the snow stopped, late enough to keep me from retracting the no-go decision (besides, what if it started dumping again and I got stuck?) but early enough for me to feel terribly guilty about it.

And then I didn't manage to do anything besides answer a few emails all morning.

I blame guilt, personally. Guilt is no good. It was like, since I had no right to having this morning free, I couldn't let myself do anything else with the time. Or maybe it was just the gray, overcast morning spitting snow on and off that made the morning so blah. Maybe it was just my usual failure to get moving without externally enforced schedules to oblige motion.

In any case, that whole "action first, then motivation" thing. Action did not happen until pretty much dinner time.

However, at dinner time, I wrote. I worked on that novel. I ate my stir fry (bokchoi, brussels sprouts, tofu, mushroom) and I wrote that next scene. Because I am not allowed even one day off.

Between a joke that one of the Boulder NaNoWriMo participants made early in the month and a blog thread I spent a lot of this afternoon reading, I find myself tempted to put the whole "no days off" thing into AA terms. "Hello, my name is Niki. I've been writing every day for 15 days now. I know now that even one day without writing is too many. Some days are harder than others, but I'm just taking it one day at a time." It's remarkably apt.

Lia had not even realized Jet was on the roof yet. She had thought she'd have more warning, hear something more tell-tale than the sound of cars driving down the street. She had only just realized that they were driving way too slowly when the first gun shot, zzzzip!, yanked her eyes upward as though her head were on a string. Oh no, not yet, said her involuntary thoughts as she found the lone figure standing up on top the building. Please, not yet. But it was too late for that. Lia was thrust all unprepared onto the set of a TV firefight. She heard the eruption of bullets from street level, ugly explosions nothing like the single shot Jet had fired. And there was Jet, motionless amidst the deadly hail, arms spread like Christ for the cross. Lia's angle allowed her to see Jet clearly, if on the slant; the sun would have made her a featureless silohuette to her assailants, but to Lia she was real and fragile and suddenly blooming with blood. Lia whimpered softly with each impact, feeling the sound hiccup up her throat but hearing nothing but the gunshots.

When Jet took the dive, Lia screamed. She couldn't help it. She knew better, Jet had warned her, but the sound ripped its way out of her without stopping to consult silly things like knowledge. She stood screaming as Jet fell, frozen in place until she heard the too-quiet thump of a body hitting the ground. Then she was running, bursting out of the grass, sprinting across the corner of the parking lot, skidding to a halt on the lawn in front of the office building--

Where Jet was dying but not yet dead. After a fall of nearly a hundred feet, she still breathed. She must have deliberately managed that fall to give her time after impact--for what? To get checked into a hospital? To say something dramatic to Pa Montrose?

"Knew it." Jet's voice was low and hard to hear, but to Lia it was the only sound the world was capable of making. "Told you, 'go home.' Knew you--wouldn't--" Her eyes, too bright, got lost for a moment in a fit of coughing. Afterwards her voice was even fainter. "Predictable"

Lia put a tentative hand on her shoulder, then drew back, then touched her again. She wanted to hold her; she was afraid of hurting her. "Jet--"

Jet's hand closed around her wrist. Where she found the strength, Lia could not guess. "No time. Listen--coat pocket. Here." She drew Lia's hand to her own chest. "Quickly. Hide them. I'm coming back for them." When Lia hesitated, not so much unsure as simply uncomprehending, the dying woman squeezed her wrist painfully enough to make her gasp. "Do it, damn you! This hurts--this--so I could tell you--" Her fingers went slack, falling off Lia's arm. Her next words were barely an exhalation. "Take them and get out of here."

Lia fished inside the pocket and found the four blue pebbles, each a twin to the one in her stolen earring. She stared at them them in disbelief, then looked back to Jet for answers.

Jet had no more answers.

The novel-organizing software I've been using for several years now, yWriter, accompanies each scene with several spaces for you to comment on the scene. During October, when I was freshly excited about this plot but not yet allowed to start writing it--not if I wanted to play by the conventional NaNoWriMo rules, that is--I created droves of new, empty scene files and babbled all over the "Description" fields. I roughly organized these scenes into chapters named after various a-ha songs, as seemed appropriate, and popped the lyrics to each song in its chapter's description field. And I gave each scene a roughly descriptive name, like "In which Lia is driving along when she sees a figure step out into the road," or "So how's Lia adjusting to life since then? NOT WELL."

The scene I wrote today is in a chapter named for the song "Early Morning," and the scene, all 2182 words of it, is called, "Jet shoots a dude."

I just felt like sharing that.

I wait until each car spits out its additional passengers. Each man has brought along a couple toughs to ensure top standing in the posturing contest that ensues. I wait a moment more, making sure every single one of them will be able to see me.

Then I pull the trigger, and Hackforth goes down in a spray of red.

I rise to my feet, standing clear against the dawn. I toss the rifle down the nine stories to the ground. It clatters loudly in the near-empty streets. I blow a kiss to Pa Montrose, then, smiling, I spread my arms to the sky.

Disappointingly, the first bullet to hit me is the fifth one I hear. It thuds painfully but not lethally into my left shoulder. Montrose's toughs have terrible aim. I guess it's hard to find good help these days.

I raise myself onto my toes, take a deep breath, and follow the rifle down to the sidewalk below.

Today was one of the not-so-great days you sometimes hear tell about. I got more than 2000 words down, but most of those words were just saying "I don't know what happens next" in wordy kinds of ways.

That's not precisely true. I do know what happens next: Jet eventually has to get onto that rooftop and snipe some important dude, and then exit the dream with a very showy swan dive. That scene's pretty clear in my head. The problem is, who's the dude, how does she find out, and what all does it have to do with Lia precisely?

So I'm still blathering my way through the Getting There From Here bit. I'm going through a day in the life of Lia, who turns out to be a programmer for a financial institution. Sounds... slightly familiar doesn't it? When nothing else comes to mind, grab a piece of biography. Then I'm writing about Jet who's shadowing Lia through the same damn day. By the end of the 2000+ words, I think I finally know what really was supposed to happen in those scenes and how it fits into the bigger picture--but why must it take several hours of "I don't know what to write" to get there?

This is the point where, were I an established author with a long list of published titles to my name, I'd toss a bit of unedited rough draft up on the screen and call it a backstage look at The Process. And y'all would read it and go, "Wow, even awesome successful writers like Nicole J. LeBoeuf have crappy first drafts, isn't that encouraging?" However, as Nicole J. LeBoeuf is not yet an awesome successful writer but rather a writer aspiring to awesome success, the effect would be more like "HEY U GUYZ LOOK I WROTE SOME STUFF IT STINKS LOLZ."

So instead I present those few paragraphs from today's output that, brushed off and given a bit of a polish, turn out to sort of suck the least. I'm putting it here for the same reason you raise your hand and say "Here" when the teacher calls your name. I was present. I showed up. Even though I felt totally uninspired, I showed up on the page. Because that's what you have to do.

For starting as unusually as it had, Lia's day was not unusual. It was yet another a poster child, in a long line of poster children, for Lia's Boring Life. Lia had never liked boring--who does? Well. Some people seemed to. Safe behind their cubicles, pushing code or financial figures across a lighted screen, getting all the excitement they needed out of World of Warcraft or Monday Night Football. She didn't understand those people. She didn't understand why she was living one of their lives. Maybe some Java programmer cum MMORG nerd had misplaced his life, or her life, and Lia had stumbled across it on her escape from Mapleton Ridge, just when she needed to pick up a new life of her own.

Obviously she wasn't displeased with her boring present life as compared to her exciting days with the Swifts. And anything, even the Swifts, was better than the family and the house that she couldn't stop thinking of as home. Not that she'd thought so during her time in Mapleton Ridge. Crushed beneath Tresco's idiot weight in the bedroom of an Upton Street mansion, her thoughts had reached with desperate fondness toward her older brother, who'd done terrible things to her in the years when she'd been too young to comprehend how terrible things were. But just this past September, sitting across the table from her brother, listening to her mother sniff and sneer about how fucking grateful Lia should be that her parents still allowed her to cross their threshold--ah, then she fixed her mind firmly on the glamorous nights spent leaning on Tresco's arm or dancing with Ritchie under a thousand refractions of ballroom spotlights. It kept her from screaming awful bridge-burning things at her family, memories like that.

And now? Sitting in front of her computer screen, pushing code meant to enable rich investors to risk their funds for more riches, what did she think of now? She thought of the night she'd fled the Swifts at last, hitching north with nothing more than the clothes she stood up in, hiding in the bushes outside her parents' house so she could sneak into her old bedroom after both her parents were out of the way--her father in the arms of yet another too-youthful mistress, her mother in the arms of drugged sleep--then taking what she needed, then driving away, driving south, driving, driving... She wished she could be driving anywhere, now. The lack of a car still pinched.

Some days I don't really have any Interesting Insights About Writing to share. Some days, I just write.

Some days I barely get to the writing at all. As predicted, today was totally a Wednesday. It had unusual Wednesday things in it, like This Is The Wednesday John Flies To Boston. So I did the sorts of things one does when one's spouse is about to go away for 4 days, like staying in bed late for cuddles and mutual enjoyment and stuff, and joining him in the kitchen for lunch and laptop video games, and following him about the house with a nagging checklist of And Did You Remember To Pack This And Also That, and driving him to the airport. When you're talking Boulder to DIA, that's a big old round trip.

And it was full of the normal Wednesday things: an hours' volunteer reading for the Audio Information Network of Colorado, specifically an hour of reading employment ads; and the long drive down to North Denver for my 2nd and 4th Wednesday writing group.

Which meant that today was also full of other people's writing: reading other people's writing and critiquing it, or listening to other people's writing and reacting to it. You can learn a heck of a lot about the craft writing by analyzing your reaction to other people's works in progress. (Maybe tomorrow I will have processed some of tonight's meeting into Interesting Insights About Writing to share. Right now I'm kind of fuzzy about it all. But it's a good fuzzy.)

So what with the Stuff and the Things and my one-day lead on my NaNoWriMo word count, I had the temptation again to take a day off from the novel. But on the drive home, I got to thinking about--and talking to myself about--the next scene. (The talking part is necessary. Thoughts in my head aren't real, you see; I have to say the thoughts out loud so that my ears can hear them. Then they're real.) It's about a 45-minute drive home from the bookstore where my writing group meets. That's a long time to talk to myself about my work in progress without reaching any conclusions.

And so I did reach some conclusions. Only some, of course--one must leave oneself a few mysteries for the morrow, no?

Lia and I fall asleep at last sometime during the desperate last hours of the dark, and I dream. I dream of Lia's earring, the piece of the Swifts she appropriated during her escape. I dream, oddly, that she is me. I watch her stand for the birthday toast, her face revealing nothing of her intentions as Pa Montrose gives a long, long speech. In the dream, the speech takes years to complete because Pa Montrose is talking more slowly than the conversations of trees. But no, the entire scene is in slow motion; obligatory laughter rumbles through the crowd like earthquake warnings, and champagne takes full minutes to slosh from one side of the glass to the other.

Lia tilts her head to listen better, or to appear to listen better. Her copper hair, long in this dream, reaching to the middle of her back in a straight metallic fall, slides like silk toward her right shoulder. Her left ear shows plainly, and its high up spot of blue is like a laser light pointer, getting my attention.

Then all the glasses raise for the toast, and time resumes its regular rate--no, it's faster, we're in fast-forward now. Lia's movement, bringing her glass down sharply against the table's edge, proceeds faster than the eye can follow. Her next motion is a blur. Then time stops altogether, Tresco's head flung back and the blood just beginning to free itself around the broken glass in his throat. I appreciate that, the pause in the flow of time. I appreciate Lia taking a turn being me tonight. Because of these things I am free to observe the reactions of all the witnesses. I see the hate and shock on every man's face in the ballroom. Some of the women wear expressions of undisguised admiration: Tresco's whores, yes, I know they have cause to hate the man, but also wives of real powers among the Swifts, or women who are powers in and of themselves. That seems important. I note the identities of the women glad to see Tresco dead. I file them away for future use.

Then my gaze returns to the lapis lazuli stone in Lia's ear. It comes close to me, without either of us moving, and now I kneel in the grass beside Lia and she says, "You want a closer look? I can take it out." I close my eyes, hold out my hand to the stone, feel its presence fill my world. My world turns lapis blue. But Lia is still saying, "Do you want a closer look? Take a closer look."