author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I have Good News. The article about the hand-knit bikini experiment? It really really will be published. At any rate, I was recently asked to turn in a slight (very slight) revision to it along with a bio and a nice headshot of me. And money arrived in my PayPal account. So it all looks like getting published. Hurrah!

However, the publisher has started sending me emails with strangely spam-like rhetoric. "Nicole Do you know the TRUTH about knitting?" "The insider secrets that you should know before you even THINK of starting a knitting piece!" Fear! Feeear the knitting! Without our help the knitting will surely defeat you! It's like the headlines from a cover of Reader's Digest. Should I be worried?

Meanwhile, I'm under a deadline that is two days gone, and two more deadlines have sprung up looking scary in the distance, and I haven't touched any fiction in almost a month. This makes me cranky.

However! There is extracurricular good news. I am this close to being able to legally act as Pilot in Command again--it's likely that after tomorrow's lesson the instructor will sign off on my flight review (he did! Yay! I can has endorsement!)--and John and I have been taking beginner rock-climbing classes at the neighborhood gym. Both of these do wonders for one's sense of competence. Yesterday I walked into the gym in a tank top and ill-fitting shorts, horribly self-conscious about being short and pudgy and hairy and a total n00b. (Shut up. I know.) Then I started climbing, and then I got to the top of the route, and then all I could think was "Ha! Who cares how I look? I don't care how I look. Ain't nobody gonna talk to me about how I look. I look bad ass." Bad ass for a n00b, sure, the route was only labeled 5.8, but still. A highly recommended experience.

No, really. Getting back to work now. Laters.

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.

Thunk - the sound of a 15,000-word RTF attachment hitting my editor's inbox at 8:00 AM on the morning of a much-extended (for reasons mostly to do with scheduling interviews) deadline morning.

Zzzzz - the sounds emanating from the bedroom shortly thereafter and for most of the day. Week, in fact. Most of the week. When I crash, I crash hard.

Whizz - the sound of the February 28 deadline for Shimmer's "Pirate" issue approaching with great velocity, in flagrant disregard for my state of crashiness.

Vroom! - Me, shifting into high-speed productivity mode with regard to that and everything else I'd temporaily shelved during the freelance project (a prospective freelance web design assignment, a continuing novel critique, and all sorts of fictioneering in addition to the short story.

...Better late than never, right?

Bonus terminology: Damn you, wench! And I mean that in the nicest possible way... - Me, discovering exactly what my friend had done when she said, "You know what? You should totally check out PuzzlePirates.com." Do not, as you value your own real-world productivity, go and do likewise.

OK, well, but if you do, drop me and email and tell me what handle you play on which ocean. I'll invite you to be one of me hearties. Arrr!

Signed,

Ninnybird (Cobalt)
Teshka (Midnight)
Millefleur (Viridian)

Write.

I didn't. Not a single word. All week.

...Shut up! I was on vacation!

This has not been one of my most productive weeks.

Well, not novel-wise, anyway. In other ways, it's been quite fast-paced. For instance, I've got myself all signed up for the World Horror Convention, including the Editor's Workshop (topic: "Professional Help," ha ha ha *groan*). I've gotten initial hold of everyone I want to interview for my latest work-for-hire gig. I have even gotten interviewed for a possible new web development job (no! no! don't wanna! can't make me! ...well, OK) with a follow-up interview next week.

But the novel? Er. Eek?

I've decided on just the first three chapters, since that's a better place, storywise, to break off. The application guidelines say up to 10,000 words, not exactly 10,000 words, after all. And I've only just started on the chapter three line-by-line. If I had to get through Chapter 4, too, I'd never get this dang thing in on time.

Today's headache: Flashbacks.

That's all. No long, drawn-out explanation. Just: Flashbacks. Flashbacks, and the segue between past perfect and simple past. Ew, I say. Ewwwwwww.

According to this quiz over here, my protagonist is not a Mary Sue.

You have no idea what a load off my mind that is.

(Further fun reading on the subject can be found at Making Light.)

Yes, I already quoted this on Metroblogging Denver. Yes, I do tend to go on and on about things that are funny. Yes, this is another example of me reading other people's flamewars for kicks and grins. But OMG this is good.

So we have a follow-up to Miss Snark's "When To Quit" post. It's an example of the sort of doomsayer I've been railing about here. Only this guy's line is, apparently, that anyone who writes but isn't seeking publication really ought to just stop wasting their energy on such a pointless endeavor. Her Snarkiness, of course, trods him firmly beneath her famed stiletto heels.

Oh, but that wasn't enough. Intrepid Snarklings had to go read this bozo's blog. Mr. "If it Ain't Gonna Be Published Why Bother" has a self-published book of his very own, and a blog subtitled "a novel in progress." That blog, apparently, gives one little doubt as to his book's commercial viability, or, more to the point, lack thereof. Each entry consists of one sentence, perhaps two, each of which earnestly vying for the title of Longest Sentence In The World. A reader might be prompted to reflect on the other meaning of "sentence," and how appropriate it is that both meanings fall under the same word, for reading the run-ons to be found at the bozo's blog is certainly a punitive procedure.

Or, as these comments demonstrate, one might be prompted to think other things:

I'll say he's talented! In scrolling through his blog, I think I saw two periods. Those are some of the longest ass sentences I've seen since me Joyce and Faulkner readin' days. Yikes!

I read some of his stuff.

Congrats, Mark!! To judge by the singular lack of periods in your narrative you're PREGNANT!

This has absolutely nothing to do with my writing beyond the fact that in reading blog archives I was rewarding myself for a successful hour on the novel while simultaneously procrastinating the next round of attack upon the current work-for-hire project. Which goes swimmingly, by the way. I am still on the aforementioned sanity-saving schedule, and should be able to go to the goth club with everyone Sunday night guilt-free.

Lookie me! I'm a Metroblogger!

I've also been convinced, for the sake of reading others' friends-only blog entries, to join LiveJournal. Don't look for a hell of a lot of blogging from me there, though. I mean, I'm here instead. And at Denver Metblogs, for when I have nothing to say about writing but plenty to say about my locale.

(I also have a Blogger account, for the sake of mouthing off in the comments sections of others' blogs, but I haven't set up a blog there. I may do, just for the sake of putting up that same "Redirection" post as I've got at LJ.)

So. To everyone coming here from those two places (I'm being optimistic about that), Hi there!

Today: Another hour of birds-eye read-through on what I like to call "the unicorn novel." I had forgotten how hella cool the scene in which Diane burns Danny's note rather than give it to her teacher is. "You want it, huh? Well, take it!" And how heartachey is the scene in which she finally comes to him as the unicorn. But there are oh-so-many theme-ish threads to tie through them and into them. My Gods I've got a job ahead of me. I keep taking notes on the page and in WordPerfect, and I have no idea how I'll make use of them when I'm done the read-through. I mean, it'll be just a mess of "Oh, yeah, and another thing..." Maybe I'll have to take notes on the notes first, organize them into scenes on index cards, shuffle them about. Something like that.

I am convinced that this is going to be a good book, though. Depending on how I count (Completed drafts only, or completed drafts plus the ongoing whenever-I-come-up-with-a-scene Stormsinger Saga), it's either my third or my fourth, so theoretically that means it's quite possibly potentially publishable, right? It's not the manuscript that Hemingway recommended tossing into the ocean, right? I'm determined that this is going to be a good book, because, dammit, I care.

Um. So there!

Hello. I'm pulling an all-nighter. Trust me when I say it's writing-related, just not a WIP I am at liberty to database and blue-box. (In case of style sheet change, read that as "[whatevercolor]-box," depending.) I'm on dinner break, or midnight snack break, or whatever, and wanted to report in.

Firstly, I have now in my possession the Averatec 3360 I was drooling over. Warranty Corp finally responded last week to the second round of buy-out approval, and Computer Renaissance finally received a new, salable machine to sell me Saturday. (They were in fact waiting on the restore disks that apparently don't come with these computers anymore, because the machine currently in their possession had been empty of OS. A brand new unit came in faster than the disks. (Well, brand new to them, anyway. These are refurbished machines.) They're still waiting on the disks. I hear that Averatec themselves are not very fun to deal with. Good thing for them that they sell such nice computers. Good thing for me I have someone else to deal with when I need service.)

Thus far, my impressions are positive. It's teeny tiny! I like teeny tiny! I have teeny tiny fingers, and I could do with less weight hanging off my shoulders. So. Four and a half pounds, 12.1" screen. The hard drive's an 80 gigger, as I said, although some 17 of those gigs are a recovery partition, which annoys me a little, but maybe when I get ahold of some recovery disks I can do a rebuild. If the recovery disks allow a rebuild that doesn't break off a 17 gig recovery partition. What else? OK. Centrino 1.6 thingie. I hear the Athlon in the 2250 would have been more powerful, but for my purposes, I can't tell the difference, and the Centrino's efficiency is good. I wanted to try it out at SkillJam, but for some stupid reason my account has been temporarily suspended and I can't. But preliminary tests with Bejewelled 2 at PopCap and Jewel Quest at Yahoo! demonstrate competitive refresh rates. Yay!

Centrino notwithstanding, I saw that many people online were unimpressed with this machine's battery life; I concur, and as soon as I finish with the thing I'm currently working on I'll devote some energy towards dealing with that. I hear that there are battery calibration techniques you can proceed through and power management applications you can install. Meanwhile, meh. No big deal. The world is full of electrical outlets. Some of them are even on Amtrak trains.

So my only real complaints have to do with the layout. First, there's the way they fit all the keyboard buttons on the smaller footprint. They opted not to shrink the keys, making this doubtless a more popular computer than the Compaq Aero Contura was among those with bigger hands. However, this meant they had to be clever about fitting the keys together. And what they did was, they moved the arrow keys inwards, and put the shift key and the backslash/pipe key outside of them. Sounds minor until you start typing with it. I keep putting my pinkie on the right-arrow when I'm going for the down-arrow.

Um. Probably a picture would help. I don't have time to deal with pictures at the moment. Later, then.

Second, the volume dial is on the front edge of the laptop. This means that when I lay on my back and prop the computer up on my knees, anytime I shift my butt a little I'm likely to move the dial with my belly and end up muting the music. Or blasting it.

It's kind of nice the way that there are no outlets and connectors on the back edge, though. Convenient. Still, having the USB ports all on the near end of the right edge means things can be a little awkward in right-handed mouse land.

Oh. Back on the positive end, this sucker's wireless capabilities are very impressive. I wrote my husband an instant message from the bus stop across 30th street from our home this afternoon. I was able to do this, because there was wireless signal at that bus stop. Wireless signal whose SSID looked very familiar. Wireless signal from our router, in fact. That's--what?--about 50 yards away? At least another twenty yards past our parking space, where I sometimes, sometimes not, got signal on the 5110H upon getting home from a long drive during which I was using my laptop for tunes. Yeah. Wow.

So, that much for the computer. Now for the mushrooms.

Take you a couple portabellas that are threatening to go bad unless you eat them, like, now. Wash 'em. Slice 'em up however you like.

Heat up a pan with a couple t'bls walnut oil, olive oil, whatever, something that can take a medium high heat. Throw in some minced garlic. After about a minute, take the garlic out. You want your oil garlic-flavored, not burnt-garlic-flavored.

Toss in the shrooms. Pile 'em in. Toss the garlic bits on top, so they'll steam instead of burn. Drizzle a little more oil on top.

Cover. Go away for about ten minutes.

Come back and splash some sherry on top. Cover again and go away. Five minutes or so.

Now for some fun. Sprinkle on a little flour, a little thyme, a little salt and white pepper. Stir 'em about until the flour's dissolved and you can smell the thyme nicely. Now, splash in a little heavy cream. Stir about some more and then let 'em simmer (low heat) for a few.

Voila! It's like cream of mushroom soup, without the soup!

Garnish with parmesan and serve alongside some veggies.

Eat up.

Now. Get back to work!

Note to self:

A thorough critique of a 6500-word story takes a Lot Of Time. Do not, in future, save it for the last minute.

Do not, likewise, save work on one's own writing for last minute.

So there.