author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

...which won't exactly top the charts as a big band swing pop tune, but it sounds like it ought to be one, at least. The long story is, they're replacing the floors in the laundry rooms of my building, so in the meantime I have to take my dirty clothes to the laundromat in Diagonal Plaza. Last night I took my novel draft over there along with two loads of St. John's Bay jeans and Hanes Her Way undies and the rest of the fauna.

So, whee for me. I ended up hacking out some 1500 words from the very beginning of the book. X. Cut. Gone. Well - those pages have been set aside to be mined for redeemable material at a later date, anyway. But still.

Admittedly, they did have to go - they were fine examples of my ability to waste oodles of text in getting characters from point A to point B. Great word-padding for NaNoWriMo, but not very good substance for a novel. Which leads me to the following conclusion. You ready for this? OK, here we go: NaNoWriMo is not necessarily good for your first draft.

No no no really. Let's try that again, and more accurately: NaNoWriMo only produces workable first drafts if the author begins with the goal of a workable first draft. There. That's somewhat less extreme.

See, if you bop around the forums, you will see all manner of unhealthy suggestions offered on the assumption that those reading care only about crossing a 50K-word finish line, and not about which 50K words cross that line with them. Suggestions such as, "write a scene involving ninjas! You can fit ninjas into any story!" And, "do a find and replace on all your contractions - 'do not' is two words!" And, "Expand all your acronyms! 'International Business Machines' is three times the wordage of 'IBM'!"

Suggestions like those remind me of coffee and cigarettes and all-night writing sprees when what your body really needs are a nutritious meal and a good night's sleep. Not that the occasional all-nighter isn't a useful way of challenging yourself, understand, but what I'm talking about here is the difference between a torturous one-month marathon that leaves you unwilling to run for a whole 'nother year, and a month of solid, healthy running practice. Some NaNoWriMo participants only want to run that marathon and then go back to the couch all year, so to speak, and that's OK for them. Me, I want my November production to be part of lifelong writing career. So NaNoWriMo has to be fun, not torture, and it has to produce a draft I can be proud of.

Thus, my goals for NaNoWriMo are a little more stringent than those of many other NaNoWriMoers:

• I have to tell a story that I'm willing to live with after November.

• I have to tell that story, and not tell around that story.

• Lastly, I have to write as though I'll want to read it later.

In short, a NaNoWriMo undertaking, for me, has to resemble in some ways the first draft of a short story. From the beginning, the hope is to produce a first draft - not just a 50K-word ramble. This of course means that I'll be heartbroken if November's output turns out to be unredeemable after all. I've got more at stake than I would otherwise. But it's having stakes in the matter that gets me to the finish line. And I've survived broken hearts before.

Hell, I've had to rip five hours of knitting back into a ball of yarn. I know all about surviving heartbreak.

OK, time to unravel another 15 rows of lace... *grooooan*

1. That the Tea Spot were open all night long. 9:30 just seems so... early!

2. Actually, there is no 2. At least, not at the moment. Psyche! Sorry 'bout that.

OK, I admit it. I am not, thus far, a very good blogger. Given the panic of getting the novel finished, there was no time to blog. But I would be a singularly abyssmal blogger if I did not at least journal the final days of the month and my pulled-out-of-my-backside win. At the very least, I should show off my "Winner!" .jpg, right?

So. Saturday I stayed up all night. Remember how I was going to stay up all night on Samhain and write straight until dawn? Apparently I wasn't serious enough. It takes a real fear of failure for me to get serious and fight the sleepies. That fear didn't really hit until Saturday morning. Even on Friday night I failed to pound out my quota, even with a quota of 7K per day! And Saturday I rather sabotaged, even considering the mixed blessing of a cancelled flying lesson (winds in excess of 28 knots at JeffCo).

I sabotaged it in a really yummy way, though. I went to the Redstone Meadery and tasted pretty much everything they had. That included the 2001 Reserve, best decribed as "the Port of mead." Then I went home and had a mead-induced nap. Word count at the time: 38,000. In trouble? Oh yeah.

So I got back to work around 8:00 and I stayed up all night, averaging about 1,000 words an hour but not necessarily many hours in a row. And I don't do that well. It helped that the rest of the household was up most the night too.

By 7:00 I had the novel up to its major crisis point and the sleepies were really starting to hit, so I went across the street to Vic's for a change of scenery and a bit more caffeine. I asked the barrista, "So what would you recommend for someone who's been up all night and isn't done yet?" He suggested something called a "depth charge." This turned out to be a shot of espresso dumped into a cup of coffee, and it was nasty. A bunch of sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla powder seemed to help. That, and a glass of orange juice, because I try to accompany my drugs with actual food.

I got the climactic penultimate scene written while at the cafe. There came a point where I was crying like a baby while typing it out, and I'm sure the gal at the table next to mine thought I was a basket case. It's usually a good sign that the story, however awkwardly told, is worth telling, so I was starting to get really excited.

I went back home to write the end of the novel. I cried some more. The surviving characters cried some more, and laughed a little too. I wrote the last line, checked my word count, and really started crying.

Barely more than 46,000 words.

Shit!

The rest of the day was spent frantically pulling extra scenes out of, like I said, my backside. And for the last 2K I wasn't even writing story anymore but background material and brainstorming.

But I did finish. And in time to watch Adult Swim, too. So, Yay! Chalk me up another NaNoWriMo win. One more rough draft to go into my compost drawer until such time as I'm ready for a revision... in... I dunno, how about March?

Yeah. Phone call. Got it written - go, me!

In fact, I'm just about finished with The Prologue, or, more properly, Part I: Air. These are the ten single-spaced pages in which Our Hero finds out that He Has A Problem. I'm almost done writing him up to the realization of the exact extent of that Problem, and the scene will close with him driving back to Seattle knowing he will never be able to leave it.

Scene fades on westerly point of view, the Geo dwindles towards the Puget Sound, sun sets over the Pacific in a rather illogical way considering Our Hero had started out in the early morning and hadn't gone more than 15 miles but who cares it's symbolic.

And then what?

And then my sense of immediate structure dissolves. I know that my character needs a daily life and that supporting characters figure into it but really it's just marking time as interestingly as possible until The Problem Gets Worse.

Once upon a time, I wrote a lovely story of which I'm still very proud, about an angel who lost his wings. I wrote it for college, so naturally it came down to last-minute deadline panic during which I didn't know how I'd ever finish. What finally cut me loose and allowed me to tell that story from beginning to end was structure. I saw how the tale could happen over a week, with both the biblical allusions to Genesis (seven days) and to the Passion (death is explored on a Friday and rebirth on a Sunday). Each day would house one scene, essentially. And so the rough draft was no longer the aimless wanderings of an explorer with no sense of direction but instead an exercise in filling in blanks.

This year's novel does have a structure, but it's a pretty wide one, especially since I'm still reluctant to make any choices about the ultimate forms that the crises will take. That understood, it goes something like this:

Part I: Air In which Our Hero learns He Has A Problem, and we are tantalized with hints as to its Origin.
Part II: Earth In which Our Hero learns to live with his Problem, but is unprepared when the Problem takes a turn for the worse. A Crisis is reached.
Part III: Water In which a short-term Solution is found. Of necessity this solution causes a most inconvenient and unjust situation. The Truth is discovered, prompting Our Hero to make a difficult Choice (but not before enjoying Intimate Relations with a Mermaid; he's had a Rough Time Of It and deserves a little bit of Fun).
Part IV: Fire In which a final Resolution is reached, and our story Ends.

If that sounded a little vague, it's because I don't want to give anything away. If this ever gets published, you wouldn't want me to spoil the plot, would you? I myself have been avoiding finding out what's going to happen as much as possible!

So. Part II is going to consist of quite a lot of "day in the life" style word count padding. And Part III will contain much angst. Any more than that, I'll just have to read it to find out. And to read it, of course, I'll have to write it.

Quick! "Why does a writer write?"

Because it's not there.