author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So "tomorrow" rolled around without an update. Sorry about that. Thus, today's installation takes the form of not a writing progress report but a recap checklist. It goes something like this:

• TGIO Party: Well attended. We didn't get the 20-25 headcount estimate I gave to Conor's, but then Conor's didn't reserve us enough space for 20-25 people, so it worked out perfectly. You can see a slide-show of the profiles of all the people that attended, and one or two who didn't, here. At least two people who showed up were making their first appearance all month at a regional gathering; it was super-cool to see them come out of the woodwork and meet everybody. In other news, the couch monster ate my winner certificate, but what the hell, I can always print out and hand-laminate another.
• Becoming Sara: The real rewrite effort will begin today. I'm afraid I was in TGIO-mode all weekend long, and the most I did was to reread all my handwritten revision notes just to remind myself what I ought to be thinking. But I'll start the rewrite, for real, tonight. Promise!
• Fruitcake: Baked Thursday and is now marinating in brandy. This year the tropical theme is heightened by the presence of dried mangos, chosen mainly to keep the candied papaya spears company. I considered dried canteloupes, but they were just too sweet. Also debuting this year: dried strawberries.
• Aeon Flux: Saw that Friday. It was about as good as you could possibly expect for a PG-13 Paramount production. I mean, I'm sure that Peter Chung has an NC-17 indie film version of it running around in his head, and it is beautiful. But this wasn't that movie. Thus, you don't end up going "WTF just happened?" like you do at the end of an Aeon Flux cartoon. And the kinky Trevor/Aeon foreplay is much toned down and, horrors, explained. But. I expected as much. For what it was, the movie was just about as good as it could be and captured just about as much of the spirit of the original as a Paramount production could be expected to. It made me absurdly happy. Plus! The eye thing! That was there! I did not expect that.
• NaNoPubYe: Another website for discussion under the category "NaNo Uh-Oh." A forum-based community organized under the idea of taking the fruit of your NaNoWriMo effort and turning it into something publishable. The goal: Professional submission to commercial publishing markets (I refuse to say "traditional publishing" considering where that term came from) in twelve months. The plan is a fairly reasonable one. I shall probably submit my 2004 draft, The Golden Bridle, to the process. Not Right Off The Page, of course; as mentioned before, that one won't be publishable until the book that precedes it is written and submitted for publication.

So, I did about 2,000 words yesterday. I plan to do another 2,000 words today. But I'm having one of those "Who the hell cares about my petty concerns?" days, ever since hearing that they're pulling the plug on SciFiction. Damn it. Without my ever managing to sell Ellen Datlow a story for it. Double damn.

You should go there, now, and read the voluminous archives of short fiction. I think it'll be on display until the new year; after that, all bets are probably off. Today I read the latest original story on it ("Man For The Job," by Robert Reed) and over the next few weeks I'll read the archives in backwards order, one story at a time. Such a wealth of fiction should not go to waste. I hope someone (Ellen Datlow maybe?) will anthologize it.

So, yeah. Huge, huge bummer.

Talk to you in another 2,000 words, I suppose.

Short entry tonight. Very tired. Very happy. Just got back from a party. Those things that go on at cons. As parties go, this one rocked, like, literally. This was the annual WFC Folk Singing Do-hickey as MCd and performed by Patrick and Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Charles de Lint, and quite possibly others. I don't know who officially organizes this thing. I'm not sure it's exactly official. This year they'd taken over the Assembly room (the Madison Concourse labels its first floor meeting areas after ceremonial bits of the Capitol) by ten o'clock. I got back to my room at one thirty. There may have been other goings-on after Alma and Deck and I left, I don't know.

The upshot is, I've got multiple earworms playing simultaneously on the various tracks of my mental recording studio. "Angel Band" as performed by Teresa Neilsen Hayden and by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; "Free Man In Paris" ("the freelance editor's lament," I think someone called it) as performed by Patrick Neilsen Hayden; "Jersey Devil" as performed by Charles de Lint; and that's not to mention the annual comic dirging of "Teen Angel" or the various SF filks written and performed by Joe Haldeman or the very first audio-visual performance of Charles de Lint's "Cherokee Girl" (now with 100% more belly dancing). And more. Oh my Goodness yes. I'm going to be humming "Ain't Misbehaving" all the way to sleep, unless it morphs into "You Took Advantage Of Me." Or "Java Jive." "Java Jive" was not in fact performed, but it shares a chord progression with the other two.

The NaNo novel progressed today, but not by much. And you might call it cheating, as it was a copy-paste job. But! It was not a mere copy-paste job. It had Justification. You see, there's this, ahem, sex scene in Gwen's manuscript, which Gwen reviews. It reads very strangely now that all clauses pertaining to Brooke are gone. However, in a much later chapter, that scene is enacted with all its sentences intact as Brooke, regardless of being stranded in (for want of a better term) Real Life, follows the plot Gwen wrote. So I had to write the scene once in fragments in Chapter Two so Gwen could read it, then copy-paste it to Chapter Ten and write all the missing bits--swapping out the name of Brooke's original partner for that of the person with whom Brooke finds herself in (so-called) Real Life.

That sounded really twisted and kinky and grammatically confused. But it's meant to cause this really neat deja vu effect as the sentence fragments from Chapter Two resonate in your memory as you read Chapter Ten. Plus, it's a really hot scene.

This all presuming I get this right, of course.

Tomorrow: The awards banquet! The dead dog party! The Saints play the Bears! Onnnnnn Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

PS. This, apparently, is what I mean by a "short entry."

Today, after a lotta lotta panels, was the World Fantasy Convention Mass Autograph Party. This is the event that reminds me how well I do not do in big crowds. Thankfully, the WFC Gods had arranged everyone relatively logically and according to My Convenience. For instance, I went up to say hi to Alma and Deck, and they happened to be sitting next to Patricia McKillip, whose autograph I was seeking (this year I remembered to bring my old, beloved copy of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld). Steve Rasnic Tem (writer, writing teacher, and husband to Melanie Tem, ditto, whose classes I take twice monthly) was sitting next to Ellen Datlow. Charles de Lint (who faithfully emailed me the photo he took of me with the googly-eye goggles on last year), Charles Vess (with hand-drawn draft of illustrations for Neil Gaiman's "Blueberry Girl" bravely available for all comers to flip through and melt at the sight of), and Nina Hoffman (who's a good friend and fellow workshop member to Jen, whom I met on the bus and have been having write-ins with) were all in a convenient row--and their table was the one making all the jolly noises, so you know where the party is. And all the guys 'n gals with gaming fiction were kinda grouped together, too. (Hi, Lucien!)

Still, I felt like I was at Whole Foods on a particularly crowded day--you've got your grocery list organized by aisle and then you hope you don't forget anything because after fighting your way from the produce section all the way over to the bakery you do not want to do it all again.

(Oh, and don't be fooled. I am not actually on a first-name buddy-buddy basis with most of the names you'll recognize up there. But I find that after attending two WFCs and WHCs each, some of the regulars--some of them Names, but most of them just members like me--are starting to wave at me on arrival, even if they don't really know me beyond "face I see repeatedly at this con." So I wave back. Cons are cool.)

I may put up some photos later. Or not. We'll see.

One should strive to learn something new at every panel one attends, I think. I sure learned a lot. I'm hoping that the schmuck behind me in the second row at the panel on fairy tales has learned the folly of attempting to lecture Terri Windling, Jane Yolen, and other professionals about the fine art of world-building, or has at least learned that panels are for asking questions of, not arguing with. As for me, I learned that schmucks who would actually do that sort of thing exist. Another paradigm shift for me! I think that's at least 500 XP.

Ah, yes, writing. Rather slow this morning. Starting to get worried by how far behind I am! But today over dinner I got to meet the talemouse. For now, I'm calling him Rakash Sketterkin. I know a lot more about him today: how he travels, what he eats, and why he decided to interfere with Gwen Halpburn-Smith's novel. I also know more about Gwen's novel: what happens to Brooke in it, and how that informs what Brooke does when she escapes into Gwen's reality. Lastly, I actually cameo'd in the novel--I mentioned that "Gwen's author has never seen Central Park, hasn't even been to New York," and that this is why Rakash Sketterkin finds it so easy to travel "up" into Gwen's reality via Central Park. Talemice get in where details are not well thought out. (I might have mentioned that already.)

Anyway. More tomorrow, including the links I didn't bother inserting tonight. And possibly photos. For now, sleeeeeeeep.

Woo! Two concerts to report on. Feels like lots and lots more. Here we go.

Trippin Billies, Tuesday night: You know, I think I had more fun listening to this cover band at the Fox than I did at the actual Dave Matthews Band show at Jazz Fest 2005. The Fox was less crowded; I had somewhere to sit; and I was so close to the stage that I kept getting looks from the lead guitarist and from the violinist, as much as to say, "You're really into it, aren't you? Or maybe you're just insane?"

For me, there were two highlights of the evening. Most noticeably there was the violinist's solo. He sampled each riff he played into a repeating loop until by the time he was done he was playing with an entire orchestra of himself. More subtlely, there was the moment when the singer stopped pinching his voice in an attempt to sound more like Dave Matthews his-own-self, and just relaxed and sang like someone with a damn fine singing voice.

It isn't actually that hard to be a Dave Matthews cover band, as long as you can find a versatile saxophonist and a super-human violinist. And it helps if your vocalist has about a three octave range. Nothing to it, if you've got all that. Then you just play the songs, and no one cares whether you're actually the Real Thing or not, because the songs are so very happy-making. Me, I have about three or four songs I absolutely love, and all the rest of the songs I don't know all that well but I still want to just pick them up and hug them. Look, there's enough doom and gloom in the world; we need music that's life-affirming as much as we need cathartic wails and politically aware dirges. The latter has its place, but sometimes you just need to swing-dance, or smile wistfully, or jump up and down and clap your hands and sing.

Dresden Dolls et. al., Wednesday night: Which is to say, Dresden Dolls but also openers Faun Fables and Devotchka, and an unexpected burlesque-style strip tease in between the two opening acts, making the show feel like a classic variety show.

Faun Fables turned out to be a solo act, a lady in "Mediterranean pirate" garb who accompanied herself on guitar or with a complex percussive stomping dance of her high-heeled boots while she sang folk ballads, ancient Greek chants, and compositions of her own. The climax of her set was a melencholy lament during which photographs were lovingly displayed by candlelight, and at last the singer transformed herself into a framed photograph too.

Devotchka were a quartet playing music that sounded like a mix of Slavik and Latin on drum, upright bass or tuba (flugelhorn?) depending on which instrument that musician picked up, guitar, violin, and this weird old-time thing consisting of a miked up wooden speaker box with an antenna sticking up which the guitarist would jiggle to make a sound like a musical saw. Their act had a lot of energy. There'd have been more dancing if people weren't jammed in shoulder to shoulder.

As for the strip tease, what's to say? The music was "Experience Unecessary" and the stripper was wearing purple pasties with blue glitter.

Which brings us to Dresden Dolls. I had never actually heard them before, barring one song that Cate played for John and me. They did in fact play that song, "Coin-Operated Boy," complete with the "record skipping" effect halfway through, which was absolutely amazing to watch. The technical skill involved in that trick is nothing to sneeze at, and that skill was in evidence all through the show.

There was a very Tori Amos element to the lyrics, an emotional rawness unafraid to put itself in semi-shocking terms. A lot of black humor. A lot of cleverness that makes you laugh before you realize you've been handed a grenade. (Note to the audience: You know that song with the verses about sitting by the window in the morning and masturbating? If your only reaction was to fantasize lewdly about the singer, you weren't paying attention.) It was the kind of concert where I was glad to have someone I loved holding me. Some of those songs really hurt. But I'd still go see them all over again tonight and tomorrow and again if I could.

Besides the fantastic "record skipping" thing, there was the sorta-kinda duelling pianos bit (only of course it was one piano versus one set of drums) when she said to him, "It's so hard to take you seriously in that dress." There was "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" peformed by the keyboardist on the drums and the drummer on distorted acoustic guitar. There was the anecdote about how female musicians might respond when male fans yell "I want to have your baby!" (Someone yelled that at Faun Fables, too; she just said, "That would save me a lot of work, wouldn't it?")

And then there was me totally forgetting to pick up any CDs before I left, dangnabit! Guess I have some internet shopping to do.

And of course that's not even to mention the mountain flying cross-country I finally flew yesterday, or the progress on the novel, or how I might have to take a few days off from the novel in order to stay on track with the work-for-hire gig. Meh! More later, therefore.

Look, all I've had is one stinking martini. One! Stupid! Stoli's! Martini! Why the hell do I feel so damn drunk? I swear, it's like I'm getting whiplash trying to turn my head fast enough to catch up with my head turning. At which point all my thoughts but one fall out of my head. I hate being drunk. Maybe next time my martini ought to be an Absolut?

I'm at The Fox. I won me a Golden Ticket! Do you wanna win a Golden Ticket? Then you wanna get you on the mailing list. Sometimes they have these little trivia contests, and if you answer correctly, you get your name put in the hat, and then maybe they pull your name out of the hat. Apparently that's what happened, so I get to see Trippin Billies for free.

Trippin Billies is, as the name perhaps suggests, a Dave Matthews cover band. From Chicago. I can't tell you much about them except that they're currently setting up the stage. But I just had a lot of fun with the opening act, who I believe called themselves "GreenField". Their drummer was insane; their singer, however, was uninspiring. Still, somewhere in between, their lead guitarist was hitting all those riffs and harmonics that make the rock 'n roller in your soul lose its little mind. Much fun. Totally adequate. And I'm the drunk little so-n-so at the very stage-right verge of the wall-side rail bouncing around like a spaz and singing like she thinks she's some sort of back-up soprano vocalist.

(Well, I'm also the one with the computer. Duh.)

It's amazing I'm not committing more typos then I am.

Anyway. About the novel. Coral reefs? Apparently they happen in shallow, tropical waters. I'm not sure I'm allowed to have my mermaids living in a coral reef, therefore. *Sigh*

PS. Apparently, "Lighting Guys Do It On Cue." Hey, don't ask me, I didn't name the SSID.

PPS. Tomorrow, the Fox again! Dresden Dolls. Oh yeah.

No, no no no. Chapter 11 is not the chapter when Brian meets the shark. Chapter 11 is when he meets the mermaids. And there is much angst. It's a pretty angsty damn novel. I really, really hope that it does not evoke the reader reaction of "I wonder if this author had a lot of angst to exorcise?" Because that would suck. Because next-door to that is the reader reaction of, "OK, I get it, I'm supposed to feel the angst here. Jeez, you don't have to beat me over the head with an angst stick."

Kinda like Fushigi Yugi. We got to the first Very Sad Part last night. Or second, depending on how much you care about the previous Very Sad Part. The authors didn't seem much to; they rather swept it under the carpet for the sake of another plot point. But the next Very Sad Part, we got to it, and for once I was the only person in the room not crying over it. I guess it worked for everyone else, but I felt as though the authors were hitting me over the head with a cry stick. "OK, this is the part you're supposed to cry at, see? What, you didn't get it? Well, we'll have each character in turn have a total meltdown until you do get it!"

Meh. But it works for some.

You wanna know what works for me? Mirrormask. I saw that movie twice this past week, once with John and once with a friend who totally needed to be dragged off to a good movie. I liked it that much. It was beautiful and magical and 100% good for the soul. If you liked Labyrinth, but you wished Labyrinth had a bit more psychological depth and a better lead actress, Mirrormask will be good for what ails you. Or if you ever wanted to actually step inside Dave McKean's head, this comes very close. There's eyes on legs, chicken gorillas, sphinxes in all sizes from tiny bundles of very cute menace to larger bundles of befuddled incompetence, creepy goo that comes out of walls and kills you, windows that open on things that aren't physically on the other side, and lots of circus music all in the right places. And Neil Gaiman wrote the script. Dude. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean! When those two get together, miracles happen!

This is a Damn Fine Movie. Go see it now. Oh, don't give me that "but it's not showing in my state" excuse. Aren't you overdue for a road trip, anyway?

Addendum: Read this review of Mirrormask. Then follow the links and buy the soundtrack.

This'll be a long, long entry, and another one having nothing to do with work on any particular manuscript (though thoughts of them arise). As writing goes, I've been a bum these last few days. The excuses are rife, and run the gamut from office work to home improvement, from social engagements to bicycle maintenance.

Also sleep and irregular sleeping habits. The late-late-late Wednesday night at the IHOP lead to a following Thursday of sleepwalking from obligation to obligation. (I really need to get better at all-nighter recovery.) Then on Friday my husband and I took the living room apart and painted one of the walls thus revealed. Saturday involved finishing touches on the paint job, an initial stab at reassembling the living room, and watching Disc 2 of Fushigi Yugi over a pot-luck dinner with friends.

My interest in the show flagging as it progressed (I must be broken; everyone else thinks it improves with each episode), I took a stab at working on the code for this blog. Discovered some huge CSS problems in Internet Explorer (y'all might have said something!) and tried to fix them. Created the Category and Manuscript sorting menus now available in the left margin. Ended up with something that works in both browsers, except that one entry persists, for reasons unknown to me, in wonkifying itself in Internet Explorer, and only when my I-can-see-it-you-can't editing menu isn't displayed.

(But, hey! W3C says it validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional!)

And I've been working my way through a stack of library books. John and I hit the library a couple Thursdays ago, and I started in on Viable Paradise's Suggested Research Reading For Aspiring Fantasists. I have now finally read The King In Yellow, along with three science fiction novels by Jack Vance and one of Nesbit's children's fantasies that I hadn't gotten my hands on before.

Also in that stack was a last-minute impulse pick, The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper. Which leads to the reason for the title of this post, here, and indeed its existence. I finished reading that book just now, and thoughts of it, aided by too much Coca Cola during the anime viewing and too much garlic during dinner, have been impeding all attempts to get to sleep. So I figured, what the hell: I should get up and write down those thoughts, because if I'm going to have insomnia I might as well share it with the world.

Thought The First: I do think Ms. Tepper has totally given up on the human race.

No, really. Her characters are always striving for a better world, but they are without exception merely carriers of good intentions whose effectiveness depends on a nudge, or even a shove, from the angels. Or the fairies. Or various imaginations of Deity. And as her books' publication dates get later and later (if the sampling I've read is any indication) these supernatural beings have been increasingly wrathful ones. They remorselessly sweep away the chaff of humanity, using disease and catastrophe to solve the problem of overpopulation and unfailingly leaving alive those open-minded humans that are either the deities' annointed heroes or those that are amenable to being shepherded by said heroes. The epilogues invariably show these virtuous survivors making plans to build themselves a new Eden.

Which is why I say "earned utopias." The deus ex machina doesn't simply wave a wand and create paradise; it pushes a sort of reset button that cleanses the world of those who don't want/deserve paradise, preparing the way for those left to work hard at creating paradise themselves, something that is only possible after the reset enacted by, or the powers granted by, the deus.

These are not books that show readers the way back to the Garden. At most, these books preach a particular morality--one I admit I agree with: a doctrine of feminism and environmentalism and responsible reproductive choice and religious tolerance. But these values are not themselves what saves humanity. Instead, the message seems to be, "If you don't adhere to these values, the Avenging Angel will delete you. Then, the Avenging Angel will hand over the keys to the kingdom to those people who do adhere to these values." The reader comes away not with ideas for saving the world but merely with a better understanding of the author's dogma. Those of us who agree with the author's values might indulge momentarily in her fantasies of vengeful nature Goddesses eating up whole cities, or fungal symbiotes imposing worldwide harmony, but we don't come away with any sort of pragmatic direction for real world activism.

And it's not that I expect pragmatic direction from every science fiction novel, but I do expect to see some faith in humanity's ability to save itself without depending on divine intervention. Or on the godly destruction of the unrighteous, for that matter! Recent Tepper novels have a lot more in common with premillenial dispensationalistic fantasies than I think her fans (myself among them) would like to admit.

Thought the Second: Tepper's apocalypses don't follow real-life social dynamics.

I yearn to write a short story whose punchline is "On the last day was the Rapture, when in a twinkling of an eye God's chosen people were taken away to Heaven, and the environmentalists inherited the earth." But real-life catastrophes don't work that way. Catastrophes don't discriminate between the virtuous and the bigots. They do discriminate, but not in ways conducive to righteousness.

For instance, look at New Orleans. If we were living in a Tepper novel, by and large the breached levee would be a means for Deity to cleanse the city of corrupt politicians, children of undeserved privilege, and bigots of both the racial and the religious kind. Those left behind would be the poor, the black, the gays and lesbians, the voodoo practitioners, the strippers, the prostitutes, all of them working together to survive and to rebuild their home in the image of good egalitarian ideals. But look what really happened: those with means got the hell out, and many of those left behind--too poor to own a car, or too old or infirm to travel, those that could not afford to abandon what little they had, those with little more to their names than their pride and their idea of home--simply drowned. The survivors have been denied food, water, aid, and dignity by the botched plans of the well-intentioned in government and the disinterest of less-well-intentioned government figures. They've even been denied attempts to leave under their own power. In their starving desperation, the stranded survivors, having learned that it's every man for himself, have in many cases turned on each other.

But that brings us back to deus ex machina. In a Tepper novel, the flood wouldn't just be the inevitable result of a 200-mile-wide Category Four hurricane and the underfunding of the levees. It would be guided by some supernatural figure (maybe the ghost of Marie LeVeaux) who would take an active hand in saving the sheep and drowning the goats. Heroes would arise in its wake bearing gifts and miraculous powers, ready to smack down government obstructionists (who'd all get eaten by alligators) and lead the poor but honest survivors to rebuild their home in a manner condoned and encouraged by Mother Nature.

I'm not sure I'd want to live in that world, tell you the truth. I want to see humanity win out against both aversity and averice without the crutch of avenging angels, super powers, misanthropic reset buttons, or any of the other artificial oversimplifications Tepper perpetrates on her worlds.

Of course, I'll be the first to admit that the short story I'm starting to write about the rebuilding of New Orleans will probably fall afoul of all of the above. But if I do my job right, the supernatural aid will exact a price, and the ethical situations therein won't be monochrome.

Or maybe it will be just as much a wish-fulfillment fantasy as any of Tepper's god-enforced utopias. Maybe the story will evoke not hope in humanity but longing for something else. I don't know yet; it's not finished. But I can swear this much: it won't be anything I need feel ashamed of longing for.

Western society lives in a most incredible state of denial. The more I hear about schools wanting to ban books like The Giver and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, the more I'm amazed at the sheer duplicity of it all. "We can't let teenagers read about sex like it was normal!" When of course not only is sex normal to humanity, it's exceedingly normal to adolescence. I mean, think about the hormonal storm that puberty unleashes in a teenager. If YA literature conspires to pretend sex doesn't exist--or to only acknowledge sex as That From Which Godly Folk Refrain--why are we surprised when kids don't know how to handle their urges and start hating themselves for having those urges?

It's just freakin' stupid, OK? That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

None of which helps me figure out how best to handle the main story arc of my novel, in which a love spell comes to fruition with frightening effectiveness. The "climax" of that problem occurs when the two main characters Very Nearly Do It, and if you can't put that in YA literature, where the heck do you put it, given that the characters are high-school students? How do you write about real live fourteen-year-olds with hormones and emotions and believable complexity and still escape the censure of your community?

You get one lie for free, because it's fiction. I've already used up my lie quota on the magic notebook. I'm not going to push my luck by pretending that teenagers Never, Ever Think About That.

I remember a phone conversation with my grandmother recently; she had just finished complaining about all the sex and violence in today's TV, all the nudes in today's artwork, all the sex in today's pop songs... and then she wants to know when she gets to read my book. "I don't think you'll like it much," I said.

Neil Gaiman: "I once said in an interview that I'd just about got used to the idea that my parents would probably be reading anything I wrote when I realised that my kids were now reading anything I wrote."

Whoo-boy, type-in's gonna be fun.

Because then I'd really be doing the NaNoEdMo thing. I mean, I'm trying to do it right now, but as it's December I don't have the sense of participating in a huge marathon run with competitors from all around the globe. It's bad enough that I've told pretty much everyone I know that I'm trying to get through one revision cycle before Jan 1 - good darn thing I haven't told the whole world.

Because, of course, 43 hours to go divided by 13 days left is about 3 hours and 20 minutes per day. Starting today. And the thing about hours of revision is, you can't get them done any faster than at a rate of 1:1.

Holly Lisle recommends "Nerves of Steel" on her list of implements necessary to the One-Pass Manuscript Revision technique. She says she's kidding, but I think the only joke is saying that they're available for purchase at Wal*Mart. I mean, after just one hour of slogging through this manuscript, I can't sit still. I've got all sorts of contradictory stuff going on in my head...

"Ooh! Now I see what the overarching theme this scene serves is! I want to rewrite it now!" Except of course that would mean I might have to rewrite it five times by the time I got done with the red pen and the manuscript print-out. The last scene may, on reconsideration, also inform the revision of this scene.

"But there's no way I'll keep this all straight in my head for when I'm done slogging through!" That's why I'm taking notes. "Argh! But my notes are all mixed up!" Yeah. Good luck there.

"There's too much crap that needs to be done to make this thing publishable! It sucks! It sucks big granite boulders until all the quartz is gone! I can't redeem this dreck!" Which is why, I think, writing is a sort of religion; a certain amount of the process is built on faith.

Bleargh. Back to the grind, anyway. There was a time on Thursday when I was getting excited about really seeing clearly the main themes and character dynamics that drive the plot. Today, unfortunately, all I seem to be able to see is ick. It's obviously one of those days that separates the career novelist from the hobbyist writer - on a day like today, the one gets to work while the other goes back to bed.

"If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it." -Brenda Ueland

On days like today it's good to know that successful and famous authors have days like today too. Not because I enjoy seeing others in pain, understand, but because I'm encouraged to see that when others share that pain they keep writing (and publishing) anyway. It's proof that perseverance is not only possible but prudent. (Ha-ha! Alliteration.) Besides, if even Neil Gaiman has days when the writing's so hard he'd rather do anything else, then having that kind of day isn't necessarily my cue to throw in the towel.