author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Aaauuugh! I think I strained my fiction! In the the writing place! Ow! Ow! With the hurting and the ouchies!

[Please excuse the noise. Our Author has suffered from atrophy of the storytelling muscles and is consequently undergoing physiwritteral therapy. Some discomfort is to be expected during the adjustment period. Thank you. -The Mgmt.]

Ow ow ow ow stoppit ow YEEEERGH!

[Actually this is all quite normal. -Ibid.]

*whimper*

Rewriting has felt impossible lately. I've got a rough draft queue a mile long and I can't seem to get myself to finish anything. I've been whining about this to everyone who knows me. Today, I'm gonna crow a bit instead.

Here's the theory I've been working from: The Revision Block comes from fear--from being intimidated by the task of Making Something Publishable Out Of This Piece of Crap Rough Draft. (Hush. To the intimidated writer, every non-final draft is a piece of crap.) To get over the Revision Block, I've got to find something I can manage to revise, finish, and submit. So, back away from the thing with all the avoidance juju and try revising something that feels less important, less intimidating. Something with stakes that aren't so high.

So I've been meaning to work on "A Handshake Deal," as it's the newest rough draft with a beginning, middle, and end. But guess what? "Been meaning to" is a huge source of avoidance juju! Just like every email that's sitting in my Inbox marked unread since, oh, last June (sorry y'all), any manuscript mentally marked "to be revised" will acquire the ability to intimidate.

So today I decided to retreat a bit further and write a brand-new story from a brand-new idea, an idea so brand-new that I wouldn't have a clue what it was until I started typing. Then I'd revise it, immediately, before it could accumulate the first hint of avoidance juju.

I used to do something similar every morning in college. The exercise I set myself was to write something which filled exactly one page in WordPerfect and had a beginning, middle, and an end. Then I'd revise it just enough to meet the arbitrary length requirement. Most of these vignettes came to about 700 words long. They took about a half-hour to finish (for these standards of "finish"). At the end of the year I'd print them all out and bind them into a chapbook. I'm really proud of those chapbooks.

And I'm rather proud of today's work, too: A 400-word spec-fic piece about how an apocalyptic occurrence impacts a tiny circle of humanity. The idea sprang out of that most banal of complaints, "It's hot." (Have you seen the forecast for Boulder? The NOAA used the lava-colored sky icon for this coming Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. That never bodes well.)

Both beta readers who've thus far read the story say they like it a lot. Of course, they're A) my husband, and B) one of my best friends, so it's possible there may be some bias going on. But they're both people who A) write occasionally themselves, and B) I can trust to be truthful. So that's enough positive feedback to make my poor little easily-intimidated ego sit up with pride. Tomorrow I'll read the story aloud to some writer friends I haven't seen in awhile. (They don't know this yet.) After that, I'll give it a final revision. I'll probably change the title ("The Day The Sidewalks Melted" has a hint of "gotta" in it, but I fear it's a cheap "gotta" as it adds nothing new; it merely pre-echoes the first sentence of the story). Then I'll email it to a paying market Sunday morning.

On Monday, the process starts over.

Lather, rinse, repeat enough--reassure myself with enough proof that I can finish things, and do so reliably--and I might actually be able to sit down with one of the stories in the revision queue. Cross your fingers for me.

Meanwhile: Let it be known to all and sundry that John and I will be attending Denvention3, aka WorldCon 2008. It'll be in Denver. What better opportunity for me to (*gulp*) attend a scarily huge convention for the first time?

Also, am flying again. Yay! Give me a few weeks and I'll be a legal pilot in command once more.

And that's the news.

Haven't quite hit the story rewrites yet. Will soon. Am meanwhile throwing stuff at the page that may or may not turn into anything worth a title. Some of it goes like this.

Observe her, there, beside the fountain downstairs in the library. Don't worry about seeming rude. She'll never notice your eyes upon her. She's not really here, you see. Not while those pages are turning.

She sits like a child, butt on the floor and legs straight out in front of her. Her right hand idly rests upon the fountain's edge, where the pool sinks below feet level, and her fingers are getting wet. It's OK, though. She's left-handed. She's not getting the pages wet. Sometimes her right hand seeks the hand of the bronze ballerina who kneels upon a bronze paving stone in the pool. Sometimes the fingers of her right hand dip deeper to pick up a penny, twist it through the liquid light, pass it from finger to finger like a carnival juggler. Sometimes she scratches her scalp and leaves chlorinated drops in her hair.

She is aware of none of this. She's not here, I tell you. She's not even in her body. The words her eyes pick up merely pass through on their way to her consciousness, which wanders around some far-off Matrix with a radio antenna in her ear. The left hand turns pages by remote control.

Unaware of our eyes, or the water, or the children running past her in a great roiling boister, she is yet keeping an ear open for some few things. Those things that cue that it is time to close the book. "The library will be closing in five minutes," is one of them. "Sadie, we're ready to go home." That's another. When these signals filter through her body's answering machine to the soul that is picking up messages far elsewhere, the left hand does a fearsome thing. It closes the book and makes the otherworld disappear.

Then Sadie rubs her wet hand dry upon her jeans, recoils her hair at the nape of her neck, and stands up on legs full of knee-popping and stiff-stretching. Wincing at the protestation of joints makes the faint lines reappear beside eyes and mouth. She no longer seems childlike. She no longer appears young. But she is not in great practice being aware of her body, so she does not count this a tragedy. She simply hobbles for a few steps until her legs limber up again and continues normally to the checkout counter. The book goes in her purse and the woman goes back to her friends (if they called her to leave) or simply to her car (if the library's closing time was the only impetus).

Once she arrives home, she will make the world disappear again. This world. The otherworld will be there, waiting for her, like a video tape left on pause.

This is Sadie's life. She spends only what time is necessary here with us, at work or eating or taking care of the children. Or socializing with friends over coffee, reassuring them that she remains among the living in both mind and body. But when she's able, when she can get away with it, she opens a book and disappears.

Our story begins, like many stories begin, on a day that begins like any other. Like any good story, that day soon diverges from routine, for what else are stories about if not the point of no return? For Sadie, the point came when she opened a book like any other book--or was it? Was it the book that differed, or something in her mind? Did something that noticed her comings and goings finally act upon it? Because, sometime later, she reached the point at which she realized she had passed the point of no return. And that was when she closed the book.

And the otherworld failed to let her go.

Well, that's what happens with me, anyway.

Like I said. If you can't get started on the one project, for the Gods' sake, write something else.

In other news, my first bloody mary experiment in Boulder has been semi-successful. Here in the land of No Effing Zing-Zang Anywhere, I went to Whole Foods and picked up a bottle of a local product called "Premium Gourmet Bloody Mary Mix." Also some V8 to cut it with, in case it packed the horseradish in a stomach-lining-corroding proprotions. Also a selection of pickled products in bottles and off the olive bar for use in garnish: marinated mini-onions, olives stuffed with garlic, hot pickled green beans (another local product, which the local grocery clerk (being local and not from New Orleans where a bloody mary doubles as your pre-dinner salad) thought was a very odd garnish for a bloody mary), capers, and those awesome little bumpy garlicky pickles.

But you know what we're missing? You know what I couldn't find at Whole Foods, neither on the baking aisle nor among the bulk spices?

You know what's not crusting the edges of my glass in this lovely picture here?

CELERY SALT.

This is why we're only talking semi-successful here. Maybe tomorrow I'll call... shudder... Safeway.

Some mornings are obviously not meant to be productive.

I unwisely saved the tidying up of my article for today during work. This isn't as unethical as it sounds; some days I'm mainly just covering the phones and making myself available for random desk clerk and computer sub-guru tasks. Given where I left off Wednesday, I thought today would be one of those days. Today was not one of those days. Today was non-stop.

Which means that I actually managed to let the June 15 deadline on the bikini top article slip by me. Granted, I had no idea "June 15" meant "June 15 at 2:00 PM MDT," but I should have just finished the dang thing and emailed it last night. My own fault, this. I emailed it in anyway to give the editor the option of slipping it in under the wire or holding onto it for next month.

The moral of this story, folks, is this: When you set your alarm clock for 6:00 AM, mean it. Sometimes those two hours before you have to be in the office are all the day you get to call your own.

So that's my wake-up call for the week. Also, I've been working my way through Becoming A Writer again (read all about it at BurnzPost!), which means "wake to write" is a debt of honor. Another debt of honor is "schedule your writing." Yesterday I was very good about both these things. I overslept, but I spent my first half hour awake typing away on the Compaq Contura Aero. Over the course of that half hour--mainly a spate of journaling--I decided that I'd schedule further writing for 2:30 PM.

Now, recently I've pledged my housewifely services unto my husband, which is to say, he said "I wish this house were cleaner," and I said, "Me too. You know what? I'm home three days a week, thanks to your excellence and generosity. How about I get back on a cleaning schedule?" It's not a hard cleaning schedule. It's two rooms a week until I run out of rooms, starting over again each first week of the month. There are six rooms. This is no hardship.

However, I'm not exactly fond of cleaning.

What "I will write at 2:30" did was give me a light at the end of the long dark tunnel of cleaning the bathroom. (And if you don't believe that's a long dark tunnel, you haven't seen the mildew and soap scum all over the bathtub.) At 2:30 PM, I would be done. I would have put the cleaning supplies away and scarpered off to Korea House for a writing date with kim chee chi gae.

It's true that us writers do things like totally sanitize the kitchen rather than write. But by making a date with myself, and not allowing myself to write until the time arrived, I managed to reverse my mental perspective on the two tasks. I was--yes!--looking forward to writing.

Bottle that up and sell it, ma'am, and that's the end to writer's block as we know it! Or at least as I know it.

So, more of the same tomorrow, only on a different project. Maybe a short story re-write. *Gasp!* Just maybe.

Why yes, I've been lolcatting around lately. How can you tell? It's gotten really bad around here, to the point that, at Water World Saturday, stuff like "Can we has go faster, plz?" and "We can has acceleration!" started coming out of my mouth whenever John 'n me 'n Taylor got stuck and came loose again in one of the tube slide rides. "We're in ur tube slide, causin bottlenecks" was another favorite. As was the observation that we must have somehow gotten onto the internet because this ride was obviously a series of tubes.

John tells me I owe him a dollar for the bad joke jar for that last one, and I don't even work at the office where the bad joke jar resides. Funny, that.

That aside, my current-most writing project, aside from keeping up with the blogzes, is to somehow usefully describe the knitting of my bikini top in 600 words or less. This may or may not work. We Shall See.

I've also finished re-reading Dorothea Brande's 1934 classic, Becoming A Writer, which is oodles more useful than I remembered. Somehow all I recalled from last read-through was the "wake to write" and "schedule writing dates with yourself" advice, and I'd forgotten all about the story incubation meditation techniques. And it's been fun speculating on whether Ms. Brande would have adored laptops or despised them, based on what she says about the importance of typing and having a travel typewriter but doing nothing other than writing at the typewriter. I think she would have recommended using the laptop only for writing and acquiring a desktop computer for things like email and video games.

But that's enough of that for now. I don't want to steal the thunder from a series of blog posts on the subject of that book which I'm planning on uploading to Burnzpost.

Of late, most of my writing has been unpublishable journal entries and, like I said, keeping up with the blogging gigs. But this is in keeping with my temporary solution for the single project form of the Block. If a have a particular project I have to work on, one short story rewrite or freelance deadline that gets top priority over everything else, and inability to get started on that project causes a total writing bottleneck--then write something else. Every day. Reliably. It's the daily act of writing and not the daily product that's important in breaking through the Block.

Of course, that in and of itself won't get deadlines met. But I find that the journaling can help me ease into the high-priority project, especially if my journal entry segues into a bout of talking to myself about that project. And if something that happened the day before keeps me from concentrating on the serious work, journaling about the event or fictionalizing it into a new story draft can sometimes satisfy whatever annoying part of my brain insists on chewing on it.

In the interest of not increasing this post's category count, I'll put off talking about the ongoing behind-the-scenes website redesign (still in progress) or my new flying lessons schedule (i r gonna b legal pilot agin lolz) for another post. And maybe I'll rethink the current category list, 'cause I don't have one for flying or for The Block or... right. Later.

More later, then.

Look! (Where?) Over there! (At what?) Writing!

Triumphal fanfare, angels descend in a chorus, small children with little paper-unrolly noisemakers go 'tweeee'

So, like I said once or twice before (or maybe a few more than that), I attend a semimonthly writer's group, writing class, thingie, over which Melanie Tem and her dog Dominique preside with wisdom and exuberance after hours at West Side Books, aka The Big Purple Bookstore In Highland Square. Very informal thing. Whoever shows, shows. Sometimes manuscripts get critiqued (like my Captain Hook story last month). Sometimes not, and we just do in-class writing, or homework show-n-tell, or craft-n-industry discussions. Homework? Yes! Homework. Which you do if you feel like it. Melanie announces the homework prompt at the end of one class, and next time we meet, people who did something along those lines read it aloud.

The homework for tonight was to write something inspired by the seven deadly sins.

So, what the hell. I spun off "lust" and finally put on paper about three-fourths of the first draft of the Qabbalistic hostile corporate takeover story that's been knocking around in my head for some years now. "So, it's erotica," I told my classmates, "or at least erotic. Which is why I'm not going to share in until it's quite done."

"Erotic? Ooooh!"

"Yeah. A sort of erotic corporate horror story. With golems."

"...Right! OK."

See the pretty picture? That's what I wrote it on. Every once in awhile I remember my aging Compaq Contura Aero (not to be confused with the modern palmtop device of similar name), and I haul it out and charge up its battery and find a floppy drive for file transfer... and I write. And the funny thing is, stuff actually gets done.

The Compaq is not internet-enabled!

It could be. It once was. Give me a while with Telix and find me a phone number to dial and I'll possibly even remember how to make it work. But today, unlike in 1994, there aren't nearly as many dial-up text-only internet access points. Plus our telephone line gets AM radio, so, not so good for data transfer.

In any case: Light, ultra-portable, bump-resistant, Dvorak enabled, and Totally Temptation Free.

Well, almost temptation-free. Maybe 97.3% temptation-free. Because there's only so long you can play QBasic games like Nibbles and Gorilla before you're bored stiff. (I'm pretty good at Nibbles, though.)

What reminded me this time around was Maud's Blog. Maud Newton blogs splendiferously, and last month she blogged about Stephen Elliot's article in Poets&Writers: "Surviving a Month Without Internet." It wasn't so much the novelty of going off the grid for 30 days that resonated with me--I'm a total online junkie, I'm a telecommuting freelance writer for goodness's sake--as it was these excerpts:

Since I'm most creative in the mornings, I've decided no Internet until after lunch.

Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity.... Dedicate at least half of your day to handling non-Internet tasks exclusively. Write a list of things you need to do when you do get online so your Internet time will be more productive.

The urge to screw around is always strongest when the work's not going well. And if you work at a computer, screwing around is only a click away. But when the work's not going well is exactly the time to turn the Internet off.

If I leave the house with the Compaq, I don't get "just one more" anything. I get Nibbles, and I get WordPerfect 5.1 staring me in the face.

And--you know what?--when I look at that computer with its tiny keyboard and its monochrome screen filled from edge to edge with WP51 exactly as it was meant to back in 1990, it's like someone turned on the Batsignal for the Muse. My poor Pavlovian association-driven brain has one last surefire writing association that I haven't totally destroyed by being lazy: The Compaq Contura Aero means Writing.

And it ain't gots no nets no more.

Bwahahahaaaa!

The lack of manuscript stats associated with this entry doesn't mean a lack of writing. It means everything's in first stages of first drafts, so that it feels a little premature to enter them into the manuscript database. But though I haven't yet managed to make the 2 hour BIC routine a constant, I have...

• Woken up, grabbed my laptop, and wrote a short Western/ghost story to share with my writing class (no title as yet)
• Revised said story on the bus to said writing class--chose to take the bus, in fact, for the sake of being able to write while in transit
• Sat at Page Two in Gunbarrel after picking up the tax returns (I am too much of a coward to do them myself) and wrote a Lovecraft-ish short-short (working title: "Ties That Bind") concerning why that man on the 208 might have that tic which requires him to list every member of his very Scottish extended family
• Upon being unable to sleep thanks to a badly timed Waste-O-Scotch Hot Toddy (2 oz. Glenmorangie, sherry finish; 6 oz. steaming hot water, 1 tbl honey), grabbed the laptop and wrote for a solid hour in bed on the other trunk novel, the one I haven't touched since 2001
• Upon waking up this morning, returning to the trunk novel for another 3 hours straight, ceasing only when I'd run out of plot

Even when the results aren't publishable yet or in fact ever, there's something magical about actually acting like a writer, dammit, y'know, by writing. It makes me a lot less of a grouch. All that pent up dissatisfaction just goes away, or doesn't have the chance to accumulate itself in the Pending queue in the first place. That's my theory, anyway: When I'm being a total grouch, it's really me I'm mad at. When I write, I'm a lot less mad at me.

This, of course, does not address the portion of my grouchiness due to being unable to sleep. And then when I finally got to sleep, being woken up by various household environment factors. That grouchiness has nothing to do with not writing and is entirely justified.

In other news, one of my best friends has been attempting to detach herself from the tentacular crappiness that is the Cricket wireless company. Apparently they have a tendency to keep billing you after you tell them to cancel your account. Then they bill you for reinstating your account long enough to cancel it for real. And then they bill you for the bill.

If you or anyone you know is stuck in this particular hell, here is the number you want: 858-882-9999

It's long distance, but unlike the toll-free customer service line, it gets you on the phone with a real person. This is obviously something Cricket doesn't want you to do, and I thoroughly expect them to change this number as soon as they realize that actually customers know it and are using it. "Argh! The customers are penetrating the bureaucracy!" Yes.

Back to basics. Back to what the folks at AbsoluteWrite.com affectionately refer to as "my daily two hours of BIC".

BIC means "Butt In Chair." Two hours means exactly that. And daily is as simple and as scary as it sounds.

I figured I'd get back into that routine Tuesday evening on the train. Got my laptop charged up in the cafe car, and then from 7 PM until 9 PM, I sat in my coach seat and wrote. Or stared at the screen and thought, what the hell comes next? But mostly wrote.

And thought, "This is what I need to be doing every day."

I ain't gonna lie. It's a daunting thought. Daunting enough that for the rest of the week, including today, I found excuses not to BIC. Excuses like, "must sleep" and "yay! Home! Spend time with my sweetie!" and "Urrr... early..." and "Must dig up financial info for tax returns" and "Paying work first" and... and... and...

...and "What the hell am I going to do with over 3,000 words of new rough draft every day? I'll never get it all revised and publishable! Not to mention publishED."

Seriously. Those 3,339 words of "Little Beanie"? Two hours. That's all it took.

The combination of being a fast typist and a verbal thinker is its own source of writer's block. I feel a little like the leading lady in the I Love Lucy episode with all the chocolate. That conveyor belt is clicking away and producing lots and lots and lots of truffles. An Aladdin's cave full of truffles. More than I'll ever be able to package. Or eat. Ever.

Kinda scary. But no excuse for not producing all those metaphorical truffles. Especially not when I'm supposedly trying to pursue a successful career as a metaphorical chocolatier. And in the end, who doesn't like truffles, right?

(Well, I could take or leave 'em. I prefer salt-water taffy. Or those flaky little vienna wafer rolls. But still.)

Sometimes it sounds like I'm making myself a lot of work. You ever read The Neverending Story? Remember Bastian's debt to Fantastica? Every story you start, you have to finish. And if you spend two hours every day writing new material, how many stories is that?

Sometimes, though, I remember it also means I'm adding to the riches in Aladdin's cave. Two hours every day creating new material? Define prolific. Sometimes I feel rich.

So. Tomorrow morning. (Yes, on a Saturday. "Being a writer means you don't get weekends and holidays.") Tomorrow morning, 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM. Finish "Beanie"? Finish "Trilobyte"? Start something entirely different? Dunno. Whatever comes of it, my butt will be in that chair for two hours.

"Daily" has got to start somewhere.

Writing a story, we are told, is like sculpting an elephant: you start with a marble block and you remove the bits that aren't elephant. Except it's more like sculpting a chimerical beastie no one has ever seen before except you, just once, in a dream after a late night consuming too much tequila and not enough orange juice. You're not exactly sure what you saw, come to think of it. But it was cool.

This makes it a little difficult to figure out which bits of the marble block to remove.

And then there's the other big difference between writing a story and sculpting an elephant. Writing a story means you have to make the marble yourself. This is a point Chris Baty drove home in a pep-talk from his No Plot? No Problem! Writing Kit. When you write your first draft of the story or novel you'll later sculpt into something beautiful, you're actually conjuring up the raw material. Out of thin air. Poof.

I began writing this short story rather like I write a NaNoWriMo novel. I sort of just splortched out a series of babbled scene wanna-bes, filtered not at all for quality or connectivity, jumped around the timeline, deleted nothing, inserted whatever crossed my mind. The result is a hodge-podge that hasn't, in fact, coelesced into draft one. Apparently I'm fairly good at making mediocre marble. All my writing of late has been like that. Splortchy. And then when I try to revise one of my other stories, long or short, I end up stuck on paragraph two.

I've been in a slump.

I've been telling people that my slump is really just that temporary valley of despair a writer ends up in after a particularly intense learning experience. It's the paralysis that results from realizing that ye Gods, I really do suck, I have so much still to learn, I have insurmountable buttloads of stupid in my story, I am ashamed of even trying to write. It's not just me. A few other VPX alumni have copped to it, too--having a hard time jumping back in, wondering whether they were actually meant to be writers at all. But if you are going to be a writer, then you have to get out of the slump again. You gotta pick yourself up and get back to writing. If you do, lo and behold, you discover you can still do this, and even better than before, because you've begun incorporating all the lessons you just learned. And then suddenly it's easy and fun or at least rewarding again.

Getting out of the slump doesn't happen by itself. A writer has to put forth that effort. I've been procrastinating instead, and I'm running out of plausible excuses.

I've had several people suggest to me that outlining might be the best way to dig myself out. All this workshopping of late has got me fixated on details but has lost me the sight of the big picture. Whatever stage a given story is at, I need to make sure I have at least a rough field guide for identifying the chimera in the marble.

That's mostly what I've done today. Outlining. Asking myself questions: What's the theme? What's the plot? Who are these characters? And which bits of the splortched excuse for a rough draft have absolutely nothing to do with any of it? Do I need to quarry more marble?

And why am I stopping to blog this when all I've done towards answering these questions is fifteen minutes of thinking on paper?

...Right. I gotta go.

Did very little today but write, for a change. Only it wasn't the short story I'm meant to be working on. It was the "trunk novel," the one that will probably never see another reader's eyes. It doesn't even have a working title or a slot in my manuscript database. What it is, is a bedtime story I've been telling myself at night and embroidering on for at least fifteen years. When I get to where I'm feeling like a total impostor, like writing is totally beyond me, like all the recent workshop experiences taught me is that I'm talentless and lazy, like I can't finish a new story and the older ones suck too much to burden yet another editor's slush pile with, I work on this one. Because it reminds me that writing is fun.

I'm convinced it's the only way to successfully beat writer's block: make writing fun again. Write something that doesn't matter to anyone but you, or practice the bits you find easiest whether that's dialogue or description or journaling or gawdawful purple prose. There's a reason you decided to do this words-on-paper thing. Go rediscover it.

Addendum: On writing from the place where writing is what you love. Via retterson, via beth-bernobich.

And maybe the trunk novel might see print someday if I manage to excise the Mary Sue factor. It's already loads better than it was in my head, when the main character was explicitly me and the leading man was whoever I had a crush on at the time. They're now both actual characters, which is nice, and makes me blush less when I reread it. But she's still a gosh-darned Mary Sue, so you're not reading it yet. So there.

Tomorrow there will be work on the short story. But after the boat gets a hole, you gotta bail the boat and patch it before you can point it in the right direction again. Today was for bailing. Tomorrow's for getting back on track.