author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This to be said about IHOP's pumpkin pancakes: They go best with butter pecan syrup.

John and I pooped out of the IHOP All-Nighter at around midnight-thirty. I was tired, and he was getting bored. We're both hitting Week 2 with a vengence. Week 2 is when the novel stops being fun, see. I think I'm digging a few holes through that wall, though. Slowly but surely. Taking a spoon to the mortar and sccrrraaaaaaping awayyyyyyy.

The thing about all that scraping is, odd fragments of things show up amid the mortar crumbs. Paradoxically, I have to make up fresh details in order to give my talemouse an ambiguity to chew through. How does he get Brooke out of her own timeline and into Gwen's? He gnaws a hole where a little yellow flower grows in the park, just something that Gwen put there for color but didn't bother to identify or describe or even think about. And Brooke fell into the hole. How does he keep tabs on Brooke once Gwen finds her in Central Park? He rides in the skin of a bit-part character, a jogger I threw into the scene to keep Brooke and Gwen from turning into talking heads. Just something to distract Brooke for a moment, a jogger running by. Unnamed, unimagined, it gives Rakash Sketterkin a way in.

So there's a jogger that wasn't there before, and a yellow flower that I had to go back and add, just so I could say that the story was vague about the jogger or the flower.

I keep referring to the failure of "Gwen's author"--me--to imagine things properly, or to the fact that "Gwen's author" has never seen New York. Which sort of makes me a character in this book. If it's a Mary Sue thing, it's the oddest Mary Sue I ever did see.

Today's leap in word count is partially due to Greywolf--that's the New Orleans Municipal Liaison--inviting me into her daily NaNoChat, where participants participated in 15-minute word sprints. I got something like 228 and 336 words in those two races, words I think I can be proud of. Then another 800 or so at the IHOP later in the evening, followed by 300ish in bed just now. Today was a good day.

Tomorrow, well, who knows. Tomorrow will be full of laundry, house-cleaning, cat food making, and car repair. The car died on us today. I think its alternator went wherever it is that the dogs go at the end of a convention. You know. During the dead dog party.

With any luck I might still be able to, on top of everything, attend another write-in. Wish me luck!

Well, periodontist, actually. But it was at my dentist's office.

Yes yes yes long time no blog what a slacker what a bum talk about procrastination. Indeed. House painting, house cleaning, community knitting, Cessna flying, guest preparations, Saints watching, and all that jazz. Excuses, excuses.

Back to the dentist's. By the way, you would think that one could get some writing done while lying abed in post-op mode. You would think, wouldn't you? Uh-huh. Anyway, Friday my mouth got hacked into, in the service of keeping my teeth for my old age. Apparently it's a bad thing for tooth longevity when there's no thick, pink "attached tissue" in front of your tooth, but only the thin, darker, capillery-filled "movable tissue." And they have ways of making your mouth conform. It involves lots of local anasthetic, scapels, and stitches, and no eating of chewy things for days and days after.

This makes road trip novels like Neil Gaiman's American Gods a bad choice of post-op reading material. I mean, the characters keep stopping for hamburgers. Oh my sweet everloving Deities I want a hamburger.

Anyway, sitting in the dentist's chair and trying to ignore the sharp things. The periodontist says, "You can totally just close your eyes and go elsewhere, you know. I won't be offended. No. Seriously. Go paint your house or something." So I closed my eyes and tried once more to listen in on my characters' conversation again. I don't know what's been taking me so long about that--I guess not enough long, sustained time staring in panic at my computer. So apparently oral surgery is good for invoking the same sort of panic, I guess.

Brian: "Oh my God, Mike! You're alive!"

Mike: "Well, yeah. But you knew that."

Brian: "But that was a dream... wasn't it?"

Brian: [chuckles] "Little bro, you always were in denial."

That plus a few tips from Mike on how he actually would act in this scene, and I think we're rolling again.

(After that, the hovering-over-the-Puget-Sound visualization sort of morphed into standing on the red pedestrian bridge at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal and watching the pelicans preen themselves, and I got a little teary. Which is not wise when someone is sticking sharp things in your mouth. And now I have to add "Nostalgia" to the growing list of categories invoked by this entry. These entries really need to get a bit more focused.)

Meanwhile, Cate's coming to visit tomorrow. Excitement! More house cleaning! A trip to the airport! A trip to the other airport! Goths Having Tea! And early morning writing sessions while everyone else is still sleeping, if dailiness is to be cultivated. W00t!

More later, possibly with pictures.

At right: Uno argues his usefulness in helping John re-assemble our bachelor-pad-style entertainment center, which we'd disassembled in order to paint the last living room wall. Meanwhile, I discover twenty-year-old addictions hiding underneath all that dust.

Sometimes, to break out of a rut or rediscover your passions, you just have to rearrange the furniture. We've been spending a lot of time on the couch since moving its L shape to face west and south. It's just so comfortable now. With the entertainment center against the west wall, we can watch TV or manipulate the CD-player aspect of the PS2 by remote from the kitchen table, and wires no longer lie in walkways. The desktop computer has its own little nitch, the up-lamp is out of the way, the modem and router are easier to get to--the living room is just more livable.

At least, for now. Give us a few months, and we'll be sick of it again, ready to rearrange the furniture once more.

We're in heavy-duty clean-up mode not just because of wanting to get at and paint walls, not just because of wanting to rearrange our living space, but also because of an impending visit. Someone John met at GenCon, a lovely gal by the name of Cate, will be staying with us during the third week of September. If she's able to find the futon in the second bedroom and even sleep on it without risking a broken limb getting to it, that would be considered a bonus.

Of course we want to show Cate the sights of Boulder. Afternoon tea at the Dushanbe Teahouse, for instance, is obligatory. And since the best sights of any mountain town are seen from above, we've got a flight in a Cessna 172 planned for Thursday morning the 22nd. Which means I need to get back up to speed in a hurry. My log book shows exactly two flights in the past year. Two hours with an instructor back in February, and an overnight cross country to Rock Springs, Wyoming, in September of last year.

As of now we can add to that an hour with an instructor today. Whee! I can still fly! Good morning, November 64548. Pleased to meet you. How's your engine feeling today? Full throttle for cruise, huh? Tch. Oooh, nice taxi steering...

I'll be doing some solo practice on Monday, since we only had time for two of my three takeoffs/landings needed for me to legally take passengers. And then we've got three hours on the 22nd to play, or go to Greeley for lunch, or whatever. And then in October, I've signed up for the mountain course one of the instructors offers. Some ground school, some basics, and then a cross-country from Boulder to Leadville and Glenwood Springs and other scenic points. October is going to be expensive. But it's going to be gorgeous.

So. Flying, cleaning house, moving furniture... Writing! Yes. Well, no rejection letter from WOTC yet, so Drowning Boy is still a priority. Still haven't convinced the brothers Windlow to let me listen in on their reunion conversation. I'm starting to get peeved at them. And October is coming up super-quick, but my read-through of Becoming Sara is still stuck in the middle of Chapter 2, which isn't even to mention that the rewrite stopped at around Chapter 5 and hasn't progressed. Retooled part of some key dialogue last night, though.

I'm. So. Damn. Slow. But hey! I can fly!

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.

Almost didn't post this evening. It's been a long and busy day in which the only times available to work on Drowning Boy were this morning (had I woken up two hours earlier, which I didn't) and right now. And if the IHOP was too uncomfortably public for composing a sex scene, imagine trying to write Hot 'N Steamy from the cramped seat of a crowded westbound #B bus.

Work today involved not only database input, web page modifications, and attempts to script a self-updating potcast feed, but also a lot of driving and a 3,000-foot change of altitude. And then it was a mad scramble to catch the westbound #S. And on the bus I had a story to critique and homework to complete for my writing class. Not that I get graded. Homework in this class is completely optional. But so many good ideas are born from homework exercises that I hate not to do them.

So here I am on the bus with a headache (cf. altitude change) and very reluctant to start on the novel. I'm thinking, "4 hours, all right, I mean 6 hours tomorrow. No, eight! Just--not tonight, OK?"

But wait just a moment there. I did my homework. If that's not writing, what is?

Hence the new manuscript title at upper left. The Bookwyrm's Horde is a metafictonal novel--rather, a transfictional novel--concerning an author who inherits a magically labrynthine bookstore after which the novel is named and who writes stories that children just fall right into. Literally. Also, the Bookwrym? He's real. He's big and purple and wears horn-rimmed glasses and, occasionally, eats people.

Over the past few years I've babbled out bite-sized bits of that novel at random intervals. The word count you see up there sums up all those vignettes. And I've only just realized that this, this here, is the real first book of my "book detective " series (the one that I hope won't get flagged as a Jasper Fforde rip-off; I swear I've been working on it, mentally at least, since before I ever heard of The Well Of Lost Plots.) So this realization puts much of the next novel--which involves a missing main character--into perspective. It also upsets my previous ideas about how Bookwyrm was going to shape up. But that's why story-writing is so fun, right? You never know what'll happen next.

So, just to prove I wasn't a complete bum today--well, as regards writing; I have been very busy otherwise, and yesterday too, just not so much with writing--here's what resulted from my homework assignment. The prompt was this: Take the phrase "message in a bottle" and reinterpret it. No desert islands, no literal bottles. Here goes.

Every day that she could steal a few minutes, she went to the library. She went like a fugitive, on frightened feet, staring about with haunted eyes. She would wait at the juncture in the path until a moment when no one could see which direction she chose. And she'd hide her face from the librarian at the information desk.

But if you were to follow her, if you were, say, a small brown mouse with peppercorn eyes and quiet, quiet toes, you'd see her sneak over to the middle-grade shelves. You'd see her picking her terrified way past the voices of children some five years her junior, flashing that hunted look up and down each aisle before venturing into its narrow confines. You'd know when she got close to her target by the way she began to allow her eyes to rest on book titles.

It wouldn't take her long to choose. Five minutes at the outside, and she'd have a book down in her hands, flipping madly through it. If you didn't know better, you'd think she just wanted to reread her favorite scene. And you'd be confused by the fear in her hands.

And when she found just the right page, she'd reach quick-quick into her back jeans pocket, whip out a piece of paper, and in one motion slip it into the book and the book back onto the shelf.

Then she'd run.

And if you happened to have seen her do it, you might have gone back to that book and searched it for her contribution. You wouldn't find it any other way; she chose books that never got checked out much. But if you were, say, just a little sandy mouse with clever paws and claims to literacy, you might have seen which book she chose, and you might have been able to open it up to the right page, and you might have been able to read...

"Page 168-and-a-half: Then, while Alison was still practicing her BROODING face at the window, she saw a little girl come running down the street. The little girl looked so distressed that Alison opened the window wide and leaned out and said, 'Hi! What's wrong?' And the little girl said, 'Please help me, I'm stuck in the real world and I have to get out, can I be in your book please?' And Alison said, 'Of course you can be in my book.'"

If you knew where to look--but of course you wouldn't--you could find almost ninety-nine notes like this one in almost ninety-nine books, and they'd all show a little girl meeting one of the characters and asking for permission to enter the story.

But since you're not a mousey-brown mouse with well-traveled feet, you don't know a thing about it until one day the newspapers report a missing child and quote woeful parents with tears running down their cheeks, and you just shake your head over the tragedy of a world in which even little girls aren't safe from evil. And you go on to put your coffee mug in the sink and kiss the cats goodbye, and you lock the door and you head into the office for another day of depressing sales calls.

But there's a lot more to know than what you know, and the thing about this little girl is, she was the first.

Some time ago, I made a one-item-long wish list. Since then, although the letter of my wish (that the Tea Spot were open 24 hours) has not been granted, the Powers That Be have apparently heard the spirit of my lament. They moved heaven and earth, or at least that part of heaven and earth concerned with national diner chains, and transformed the Boulder IHOP into a free wifi hotspot.

I may never go home again.

Actually, I'm headed home pretty soon. Tomorrow's a long day, so I'd better get some sleep. I'm also thinking that this wasn't the smartest point in my novel to tackle in public. There are several reasons why sex scenes are best written in private, and one of them is the window right behind my head and the way it feeds my natural reading-over-my-shoulder paranoia. (I'd list other reasons, but most of them are TMI.) In any case, tonight's hour was slow going.

Just an hour. Just one frickin' hour. Look, today was loooooong. Today was very long and it involved plumbing. No, not that kind of plumbing. Dude, just because the novel's reached a plot-obligatory sex scene doesn't mean you have to take everything I say as a double entendre. I'm talking about replacing both the kitchen faucet and the bathroom faucet, which involved biking out to the hardware shop for new water supply hoses since the new valves installed this morning were 3/8" quarter-turner ball-joints in place of the old 1/2" screw-types. (Huh-huh. She said "screw". For cryin' out loud...). And then I had to deal with two obstinately leaking P-traps, which involved a lot of swearing and moaning and griping and sore thumbs. (From tightening the nuts, of course. Gutter-brain.) They're still leaking now.

I had expected this adventure in consumer installation to take a few hours. Maybe half a day. Definitely to be over by lunch. But oh no. I had just barely gotten around to feeding the cats and slipping into a well deserved hot bath when John got home from work. It was 5:15.

Got a bit more spinning done before I headed out to the IHOP. The blue-and-white is safely plied, skeined, washed, and dried, so today and yesterday (yesterday was a day off, by the way) belonged to a different project. That one time I went to the Estes Park Wool Market a couple of years ago, I picked up a fair bit of silk and a ziplock bag full of sparkly mylar. These are both rather tricky fibers to spin. Well, try mixing them up and spinning them. That's really tricky. But the result is fun. Ply together one strand pure silk and one strand silk/mylar, and you get this fingering-weight glitzy stuff suitable for creating whatever fashion accessory you'd like to turn heads with. I'm thinking, maybe a purse. I don't really own a purse, so it might be nice to make one. Maybe make one with beads on, just for added glitter.

(I'll upload some pictures as soon as I get ahold of a digital camera. John's got lost at GenCon, and the only other digital picture-taking implement in the house is his T-Mobile Sidekick II, which, being his cell phone, doesn't get loaned out often. Keeping in tune with the family tradition of low-end photo hardware, I've special-ordered the $99 Kodak C300 from Circuit City; I'd have it in my hands right now, only, I'm not the first to think that a hundred bucks for 3.2 megapixels is a good deal, and they're out of stock.)

Anyway, time to head home. Hard to pull myself away, but I've been nursing this pot of coffee way too long, and tomorrow's looking uncomfortably near. G'night, all.

Tuesday, Kandybar uttered a cry of lamentation:

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

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

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

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

*Whiiiiine*

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

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