author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Wow. I didn't think yesterday when I was writing in the cemetery that today I'd be flying over it.

I had a pilot lesson today at Boulder Municipal Airport, specifically a lesson in mountain flying. I learned how you have to slow down when you hit an updraft, so as to stay with it, and I learned how to speed up when you hit a downdraft, so as to outrun it. This because a Cessna 172 from the 1970s doesn't command a lot of horsepower; if you want to climb over an 11,000 foot mountain ridge, you're better off letting the natural wind currents do the work for you. In order to catch those updrafts, I flew a lot closer to mountain ridges than I was strictly comfortable doing, and I kept telling myself I'd get used to it. I flew over Winter Park, and I flew within sight of Granby, but I didn't actually fly to Granby, since my instructor was under a time crunch.

And I did something that's totally a no-no. I flew a long final into Boulder. Dude. "Aren't we not supposed to fly west of 30th?" "Why not?" "Because that's pattern procedure." "Why?" "Um... because of noise abatement policies?" "Well, if you're making no noise, who cares?"

Me: *boggle* "You mean we're going to pull the power and glide in? From here?"

Instructor: "Well, we're still five thousand feet above pattern altitude..."

So we pulled the power and glided in from freakin' Nederland. I got aligned with the runway before I could even see the number on the runway. The instructor told me to make my radio call when I was over the cemetery, and I thought, Cool, that's where I took my laptop off to write at last night. The storage shed tower looks even more impressive and monument-like from 2,000 feet above ground level.

(We in fact underestimated the distance, and I had to put power back in while I was still over, I dunno, 16th Street maybe. I ended up floating a good way down the runway due to still carrying 70 knots when I got over the numbers. But still! What a view. Whattavyooooo!)

Then I came home and remembered exactly how exhausted I get after going a mile up in the air and coming back down again.

On the novel front, I am very annoyed with my characters. I had to erase some 500 words of last night's dialogue because it fricken' sucked. But I think what's going in now is better, so, OK then.

Coming soon: Weather permitting, a 4.5 hour cross-country flight on Sunday. This time, I'll get out my camera and take some pretty pictures. (Today, I'm afraid, I was a little preoccupied with, y'know, flying the dang plane.) This may mean no dust bunnies. We'll have to see.

And, from the department of "Oh yeah, that": Denver CityScene? CitySceneBlog.com? Not writing for them anymore. I was holding out bunches of skeptical benefit of the doubt, but once the players in the controversy started going at it, it was clear that Tim Gilberg was not someone I'd even want to sit down to coffee with, much less write for. Note to people accused of ripping off other people's websites? The "you'll be hearing from my lawyer" response will not make you any friends at all.

Slogging. Working on the novel at the speed-of-slog. This is the sound that working on the novel makes: Ssssllllaaaaaawwwwwwgck. (That little "ck" at the end is the inevitable death rattle I'm sure is waiting for me just around the corner.) But there has been Progress. Chapter 10 has moved on from the point where Brian lays eyes on Mike, and has reached a point where they have actually exchanged words. See? Progress!

I put a post up at Denever CityScene this morning. Go me. Not three hours later, I think, I'd received an informative little email telling me about this. Hurrah, I've wandered into the middle of Controversy! What, didn't you know that was one of my super powers? Anyway, the jury's out on whether any wrong-doing is actually in the offing, or if maybe we're just dealing with a really clumsy attempt to generate web traffic. I don't plan on doing anything rash until more is known.

Tomorrow: More slogging, with dust bunnies!

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.

Novel's progressed by another 500 words or so. I'll probably get another 500 or so done before the day is out, but blogging is sporadic due to no internet in the hotel room. I'm at Loaded Joe's for my wireless and for some rockin' damn music. It's the final Battle of the Bands competition of the summer. Mojitos and Bloody Marys are tasty. John can vouch for the hot chocolate. Beer's free. Someone who's been enjoying the free beer--Darryl? Therryl?--would like me to tell y'all, whoever y'all may be, that he says hello.

So I'll hang out here a bit more, and then head back to the hotel for more novel-writing.

Not that it matters.

John and I are in Avon, Colorado. We're doing that get-away-from-town thing we sometimes do on holiday weekends.

But who cares about my freakin' vacation?

The current estimate is that WOTC will start calling authors next week to get 'em to send in their full manuscripts, those they want to see. I'm going to try to get just as far through the novel as I can while I have no cats, cleaning, work, or random visits to interrupt.

But none of this matters.

A friendly gal from the NOLA.com forums who happens to be the niece of one of my parents' close neighbors emailed me with a link to satellite photography of our neighborhood. The houses are all standing. There's no water on the street. The levee is undamaged. My parents will have something to come home to. So will I.

But it's a house. Who. Fucking. Cares?

People are dying all over New Orleans. And FEMA have bugged out. Evacuation efforts by land, air, or sea can't go fast enough. And all air traffic was halted so that our precious President Bush could take a ceremonial tour of the area without feeling threatened. People are starving. There's no food, no clean water, nothing to eat or drink but what you can scavenge from what stores haven't been cleaned out yet. And Homeland Security forbade the Red Cross--the Red Cross! Loaded with supplies, food, and life-saving water--forbade the Red Cross to enter the city.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

I wish I was making that up. The Gods' Honest Fucking Truth: This is Homeland Security's rationale.

It is getting harder and harder not to believe that there exists a concerted Federal effort to kill the poor of New Orleans. Sorry, Mom. I know you're sick of hearing it. But nothing else makes sense.

You know what I want to do? I want to head down to Jeffco Aiport, load up a Cessna 172 with bottled water, and fly the hell down there. Land on I-10 after a few flyovers to get the poor stranded folks huddled there to clear the landing strip. Stop, pitch 'em all out, fly off again for more. Maybe take three people with me because that's all that plane will carry, three passengers and the pilot.

And I can't. I can't afford the rental or the gas. Nor can I afford to get shot down by the National Guard. That wouldn't help anyone.

I can, however, afford the donation John and I have made to the Red Cross. But Homeland Security won't let into the city the life-saving food and water we helped pay for. Because, of course, everyone who's still in the city is, according to Homeland Security, there by choice and they will choose to stay, choose to return, for the sake of a Red Cross doughnut.

You know, after 9/11, many authors felt that, compared to that tragedy, everything had ceased to matter. Why write books when so many people have died? I didn't share that despair--I felt that any celebration of life is always worth it.

But I'm coming very close to it now. At least with 9/11, you knew that everything the goverment could do was being done. But today, who cares about my novel? Anything that distracts the general public from the murder that is being committed on my city--there is no other word for what Homeland Security are doing by forbidding the Red Cross entrance--any distraction costs lives.

Stop reading this. Go do something. Shout it from the rooftops. Write emails and letters. Call your representatives. Get the assholes out of the Red Cross's way, get FEMA on the damn ground already, get food and water to the dying people stranded in my city. Please. Someone. Restore my faith in humanity.

Restore his faith, too. Gods know his faith in the rest of the government, at least, is no doubt crumbling.

Another word cut; got rid of some leftover Part 1 snippits that turned out not to have a place. Spent most of today reading the first half of Part 2 from the previous draft, reminding myself what I'd decided during the first read-through, deciding which decisions could still stand, and taking notes on how the chapters needed rearranging so that one thing leads to another.

Had a bit of a revelation about the Brian-Mike-Mrs. Windlow family dynamic. Revelations are good things. They make incidental supporting characters less villianous, and antagonists much, much more. Which is probably the way these things ought to be balanced.

Today was mostly an obsessive day. I spent pretty much my entire work session keeping WWL's live coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath floating next to my MS Access window, gluing one eye on the arial footage, trying to find out just how bad things were now that the levee was broken.

It was a day of ups and downs. John and I almost didn't go to work after getting the news from Mom. He sat there, numb over his fried eggs, thinking about his sister; I sat there reading three different packagings of the same AP news story, intermittently breaking into tears. My home, my home is gone. Then got to work, watched the news, read the Nola.com Jefferson Parish Forum, and learned that Bonnabel Place might not be all that submerged after all. One person even reported dry streets at Wisner and Poplar, and having walked all the way from there to Causeway without trouble. Then I got home, and read that the sandbagging of the levee breach would be abandoned untried, the pumps left to fail, Metairie left to submerge itself as the lake poured in and sought sea level. I don't understand why. Apparently Mayor Nagin doesn't either; WWL reported him as being "unhappy" that the helicopters never dropped the sandbags. But then I called Mom to tell her (she hasn't access to Internet in her hotel room), and she said she'd heard from the St. Tammany Hospital contingent and they were all OK, they were all alive, unhurt, they were not in any way part of the four-person death toll reported from St. Tammany Parish this afternoon. And John's sister isn't in Covington after all; she's in Dallas. And my brother's in Little Rock. Everyone's safe.

Now WWL is no longer reporting that sandbagging will be abandoned; they're just repeating the stuff about Jefferson Parish residents to be allowed back in on Monday to recover their essentials before evacuating once more for a month.

It was a day of slim silver linings. I learned that The Rock Boat has no plans to cancel; they may, however, ship from Galveston or Mobile. Final decision still pending. I learned that it is too late to acquire trip insurance, as Katrina's damage is now a preexisting condition. But I also learned that American will let us change our flight reservation once without charge. So maybe we're not out a bunch of money after all.

But I was so looking forward to sailing from the Port of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. I'd never done it before. It's a petty grief, but sometimes we cheer ourselves up with petty grievances. We use them to distract ourselves from great griefs, like the mental image of one's hometown sinking forever under brackish waves.

Not forever. New Orleans is too ornery not to recover and rebuild. And I want to be there. As soon as they say they can use physical volunteers, I want to go. What use calling myself a New Orleanian if I won't go help rebuild her?

But for now, of course, we have to stay out, out of the way and out of danger. For now, we get to donate money (and only money) to the Red Cross. We get to pray--or hope--or dream--or believe--as best as our personal convictions and suspensions of disbeliefs will allow.

And curse the damn opportunistic looters. There's a picture on the front of WWLTV.com that shows a man sitting in his driveway, and on his half-opened garage door is the spray-painted slogan, "Looters Will Be Shot." I am not generally fond of guns, but the crime of victimizing a fellow victim rates really high on my "kill 'em all and burn 'em in the innermost circle of Hell" list. And, as a practically card-carrying Wiccan, I'm obliged to admit I don't even believe in Hell.

Oh! Speaking of Wicca and such! Crow! This is me crowing! PanGaia's ish #42 is out. I'm in there. Crow! I'm in there with the most inoffensive yet unusual mispelling of my last name ever. I have to admit, while there are variations--my Mom and Dad typically put a space, whereas I somehow learned to run the whole thing together (as above)--I had never before seen the "Le" hyphenated to the "Boeuf" before. That gave me a giggle.

And today's in sore need of giggles, wouldn't you say? Damn straight I would.

Still haven't finished Chapter 7. I really have to give Amy something more useful to do than twiddle her thumbs and wait for the end of the chapter. I'm one sentence away from getting her and Todd into that bit of necessary conversation--the one, in fact, that necessitates the switch in narrator, because it reveals things that Brian is not to know--during which Russ and then Brian will interrupt them, closing the chapter with a lovely piece of brutality we'll all enjoy (if guiltily) because the victim is Russ. I'll have to go back through the Novel So Far and make sure that Russ has been adequately presented as That Guy You Love To Hate, so as to best make way for the Schadenfreude. The effect I'm looking for is "Finally, that asshole is getting the beating he deserves! ...Wait. Ok, enough beating now. No, really. Stop! I don't want to see him die...."

Which all sounds very fiendish and manipulative. Probably because it is.

From time to time it occurs to me to worry that, as a writer, I'm setting myself up to be mistrusted by the community. Whatever community. Writers of fiction make their livings telling lies, after all--telling lies and pulling readers' strings. And yes, those lies stand in the service of Truth, and the string-pulling is exactly why the reader returns to a good book again and again, but still. The power to manipulate the heart and mind by use of words alone is a little alarming. Are those who have that power objects of suspicion? I don't claim to have that power in any significant degree as yet, but I'm reaching for it. I wonder if I'll regret achieving it.

Maybe the choice to use such a power to create works of unabashed fiction, as opposed to running for office or charming congregations into mass Koolaid imbibery, is enough to restore a writer's credibility. Unlike the corrupt politician or charismatic megalomaniac preacher, we're not trying to fob off our lies as fact.

Well, with the exception of folks like, I dunno, Carlos Casteneda or something.

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.

So this manuscript's trend of getting all Sasha's changes mixed up is only getting worse. I'm getting to the point where I'll be reluctant to mark up a page at all, simply because I'm still agnostic as to whether that page will still exist after I get all the threads sorted out.

What helps is thinking of the main story arc in three phases:

1. Sasha changes her attitude and the world responds
2. Sasha begins to notice physical and more blatant changes in herself and others
3. Sasha is actively causing supernatural change and things are getting out of control.

The end of tonight's mark-up session, page 109, had a scene that will be the main indicator that we have moved from Stage 2 to Stage 3: Sasha takes a strand of her crush's hair and magically entangles him into her notebook so she can affect him directly with the hot-and-heavy fantasies she's written in there.

Which brings me back to the problem of Sex and the Young Adult Novel. In my 2004 novel, things just got really adult, I'm afraid. There was no way around it; unicorn stories all hint at ideas of sexual innocence and experience, and the story arc wasn't coy. This time around, I think discretion is the better part of valor, and I'll do a lot of "between the asterisks" stuff.

And that's all I've got for now.

1. No sex, at least none onstage.

For some reason rape is an exception to the unwritten "no sex in YA novels" rule - I guess that's because rape is actually an act of violence, not of sex. Violence always seems to be more accepted for younger readers then sex is. (I say "accepted for," not "acceptable to," because younger readers will read anything you throw at them that doesn't make them feel too uncomfortable. It's when adults choose reading material for younger readers that these filters come into play.) I think it really comes down to our weirdly neurotic American puritanical heritage: you're never too young to suffer, say the Godly ones, but you must not under any circumstances be allowed to enjoy yourself until you're of statutory age of consent, married, and planning to stuff yourself with babies.

2. Adults mustn't see the supernatural thingie.

Oops.

3. The magic stuff has to go away by the end of the novel.

I always hated how the wing-juice ran out and the ponies all left forever and the Egypt game lost its appeal (Zylpha Keatley Snyder) and the girls stopped believing that they were witches (E. L. Konigsberg, Edmund Wallace Hildick). But I think in this story I've come up with a compromise between magic lasting forever without giving the girl superpowers forever, in a way that at least meets my standards for story necessity.

So are there any rules I missed?

How do we know this? We know this because it's the day after Thanksgiving, and the Tea Spot is serving up hot chocolate, and the ice-skating rink is open for business. Today was the rink's grand opening, along with the annual lighting up of Boulder. The star on Flagstaff Mountain has been turned on. That's how we know it's holiday season in Boulder.

I have a gripe, though. I've had this gripe for quite some time. I'm griping about the automatic synonymization of "Winter" with "Christmas." I'm griping that every single tune the ice-skaters in the grand opening ceremony twirled to was a Christmas tune. I'm griping that there's no Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, or Wiccan equivalent to the sentimental notion that "even the most hardened, cynical heart can believe at Christmas time!" Look, I don't care that Christmas has been secularized - that doesn't make it any less irksome to see it get exclusive favor from secular entities.

I mean, would it be all that bad to have a little mention of the Solstice? of Chanukkah? of Eid, Diwali, Kwanzaa? That would be so damn cool: an ice-dancing routine of African descent celebrating the seven virtues, with the dancers dressed in green, red, and yellow; then a reenactment of the consecrating of the temple with the miraculous eight-day duration of that tiny bit of lamp oil; and then a solemn yet divinely comic procession of divinities led by Ganesha around the rink.

Wouldn't it be cool if the onset of winter prompted a celebration of the entire community, every last heathen pagan atheist or god-fearing one of 'em? Wouldn't it be cool if the folks planning these festivities actually gave a damn about the diversity of their city... instead of brushing the non-Christians aside, putting on their church robes, and then pretending that calling it something vague like "the holiday season" somehow magically does the inclusivity work they've neglected by only celebrating one damn holiday?

Maybe one day. When I'm the boss of Boulder.