author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Generally this is a good thing. The best thing, even. When a story hijacks an author's brain, it isn't an attack to be resisted or defended against, though life circumstances may require its temporary deferral -- a day job, children to care for, family emergencies, etcetera. (I am blessed in having no reason to defer other than my own procrastinatory tendencies. Except maybe because other stories have been trying to hijack me too.) No, a story with that kind of compulsive energy is rather a sign that the author should be writing that story. So. Yay!

I'm not sure to what extent I actually believe those who say "If you're going to be a writer, you need to not be able to not write." I mean, I believe it in the general and in the abstract: I am a writer, I need to be a writer, I don't know who I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm not sure there'd be anyone else for me to be if I couldn't be a writer. But speaking in the everyday activity sense, I am rarely compelled to write. Every once in a while I undergo typewriter rage, but most of the time it's really easy not to write.

This is normal. Work is work. It's beloved work, it's my life's work, but it's still work. If you don't experience it that way, good for you, I am envious, but please don't think that your experience is prescriptive for every other writer. Don't give me the line, "If you think it's work, maybe it's not really your life's calling." The only reasons to think writing isn't one's life calling is if one has identified another life calling, and/or if one does not enjoy writing.

Well, in some way or other, anyway. "Enjoy writing" has many valid interpretations beyond "constantly finds the act of writing to be sheer bliss." It can also mean "Feels tearfully fulfilled when a story is complete and wants to do it again despite finding the actual act of writing an unmitigated tormentuous ordeal."

I'm somewhere in between. I love telling stories. I love babbling out rougher-than-rough draft. I put myself to sleep at night by imagining stories as though they were movies I were watching in my head. I have wept tears of joy to reread a much-revised story and realize, "Yes. This is it." And then I find the act of revising a story to a potentially publishishable state to be work. So I avoid it.

There is more to be said about avoiding writing even though one experiences writing as one's life's calling. I think I'll say it later, because I had a point I was getting to here.

My point here is, I was procrastinating my day's work again this morning when a story showed up and hijacked my brain.

I was packing up my bookbag when I spotted the book I'd fallen asleep rereading last night, Patricia McKillip's Winter Rose, and I thought, "Oh, one more chapter". Which of course meant two hours later, having reached THE END, I looked rather guiltily at the clock.

But while I was reading, a story crept up on me and grabbed hold.

I do this, sometimes. I can't do it with books that are new to me, but even on the first reread a book can become a comfortable, well-known friend, and I can relive its story while simultaneously chewing on my own. Or getting chewed on by my own stories. This morning, it was more the latter than the former.

The story that hijacked me is a Maiden/Mother/Crone story. And it's a transformation story. (I seem to be mainly writing transformation stories. Remember I said that when Deaths in a Dream, or whatever it finally ends up being called, finally makes its way to bookshelves. In the year 2052, if I'm lucky.) It involves some fairy tale images that have stuck with me, hard, such that they are personal powerhouses of myth and emotion.

And, looking back on it, I realize it's a subversion of Wiccan... liturgy, I guess. Whatever we've got that, in a non-heirarchical, non-organized religion, counts as scripture. Traditional Wicca -- which is to say, Wicca as it was described by its founders and first promoters -- is agressively heteronormative. There's a Goddess; there's a God who is Her consort. Every year the God fathers himself upon the Goddess at Beltaine, dies at Samhain, and is reborn of the Goddess at Winter Solstice. The High Priest and a High Priestess embody the God and Goddess in the Circle, often reenacting the divine sex act symbollically by means of the Priest inserting the athame (ritual knife) in the chalice (fancy cup). THIS IS NOT SUBTLE.

Obviously this is not true of all Wicca or of all Wiccans, but it's the spin you get when you read Buckland and Gardner and even as ecclectic and non-hetero a writer as Scott Cunningham. It was certainly the only deity story I knew in my own practice for a long time. And I spent an embarrassingly long time, for a bisexual woman who wants to be a good QUILTBAG ally, being perfectly comfortable with this.

But it seems in my fiction I am unconsciously subverting this, because here I'm envisioning a Maiden/Mother/Crone triad who do their own damn eternal reconceiving and rebirthing, thank you very much. We do not require a divine penis in this mythology! Take that, evildoers! It took me awhile to realize that this is what I was doing, but now that I do realize it, I'm feeling pretty damn smug about it.

(Come to think about it, this is not my first time rejecting heterosexual reproduction in speculative fiction. As you shall see. Click link below, order book, yadda yadda promotional yadda.)

Additionally, today's brain-hijacker had its origins in a dream I had years ago. This is true of many of my most complusvie "write me NOW" stories; it was true of "First Breath" (which will see print and bookstore shelves as part of Blood and Other Cravings This Month! Squee!). In the case of this story, the one that's hijacking me today, less of the plot was in the original dream than is sometimes the case. (I don't conceive of stories whole cloth from dreams. I get really emotional kernals of story whose complete stories I have to figure out. My dreams make me do all the work. I WISH TO MAKE A COMPLAINT.) The dream goes something like this:

I am grieving the death of a close friend. And suddenly there's her ex-boyfriend revealing to me that he killed her. Apparently they had so many mutual friends that his social circle became a very uncomfortable place after they broke up. He had to remove her from the picture. I fly into a rage upon hearing this, pounding fists against his chest and screaming You killed her! She was my friend, and you killed her! He laughs bewilderedly at my ineffectual fury and cannot understand why I'm so angry.

I have no idea now where the rest of the story came from, the stuff where the murdered woman is actually a Goddess who is reborn periodically by means of the rest of Her triad of Goddesses, but it started with this dream. And, as with "First Breath," a lot of time has gone by since the dream and the original conception of the story. It will be fascinating to see what years of unconscious back-burner time has done to it.

So that's where I'm at this morning. Also, I intend to blog about my happy shiny World Con / Renovation experience. More than a week late. STAY TUNED.

Wait, I've got it! I've got it I've got it I've--

Pause. OK. At Moonlight Diner again, having dropped Cate off at the airport and waiting for John to tell me he's ready to be picked up from work. Trying to finish this dang draft like NOW. (Also eating the Smothered Fries, which are Smothered in cheese and green chili. The dish is not terrific, but it's redeemable and filling. I swear, it's like I could start a whole new blog just about working my way through their menu while spending 3-hour stints writing at their 4-top behind the bar-side register station.)

So. Struggling my way through the rewrite of Scene VI. ("Icicles filled the long window / With barbaric glass. / The shadow of the blackbird / Crossed it, to and fro.") It's no longer a psychologist telling the narrator that fear obscures our clear vision until we see demons where there are only mundane difficulties. Now it's the narrator's lover, pissed off at having their romantic evening interrupted by another fit of novel revision, saying that the narrator needs to adjust some priorities. (While the narrator gazes out the window at starlings crossing behind ice and in front of the sun.) And the narrator's like, "Oops, sorry, demon's waking up again, I gotta go; also, you left your oven on and the demon is thinking about burning you up in a house fire. Don't let that happen, kthxbai."

About halfway through writing that scene, I got good and stuck trying to make the phone conversation work. Also, a large family gathering eating at the next table had begun to emit exceedingly distressing noises. Look, people: What did I do to deserve your kid's screaming tantrum? I mean, really? Thank goodness for headphones and Kate Bush's The Dreaming. Turned up quite loud.

Anyway, got through that. Then got through the next couple scenes in which the writer/demon relationship becomes sort of writer/demonic Muse ("But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know"). The pacing of that arc seemed to slightly shift as I got through Scenes VIII and IX. I started to like what I was seeing.

Then in was time for Scene X, originally another psych session. The narrator had decided to tell the shrink about the first time the demon became apparent, expecting to finally break through that professional skeptism ("Even the bawds of euphony / Would cry out sharply") and get some real help. Naturally, I'll be replacing that with another phone call with the lover. Or ex. Their relationship is a little bit of both now.

And I realized--their roles are reversed! Now it's the narrator who is looking forward to the demon's voice, because it tells her how the write--and finish, uh-oh--the book... and it's the lover who is now convinced that there's something weird going on. "You were right--the oven was on. How did you know? Is there really something to this? Oh my God, you must not finish that book!"

You want Process? I WILL GIVE YOU PROCESS.

(Wow, it's a good thing that burbling about The Process doesn't jinx The Process. Yay.)

HAY YOU! Yeah, you know who you are. You will have email REAL SOON NOW.

Today's the day. Today's the day I get a full draft of the new story complete. Today's also the day I come up with a good title for it--"The Monster at the End of the Book" is cute, the way it nods comfortably at Grover in the Sesame Street Golden Books story of the same name, but it's not at all right for this story.

Yesterday was the day I think I figured it out. Also the day I remembered how my spinning wheel makes a great platform for Meditation For Inspiration. Remember that? I hadn't.

But I remembered I had to finish spinning my portion of the group project fleece if I wanted to have a project to show off to the group tonight. Last year, the spinners who meet monthly at Shuttles Spindles Skeins decided to do a group project. So a representative went to the Estes Park Wool Market and bought three fleeces, and at the next monthly spin-in we all paid her back for our pounds, or half pounds, of the fleece. The idea was for each of us to bring finished projects to the January spin-in and Rock Day potluck. As most people weren't finished, we get another chance at tonight's spin-in.

So yesterday I hauled the spinning wheel over beside my desk and spun the last of the singles. And, because I had the poem tacked up over my desk, I meditated on a different stanza for every rolag I spun. (Rolag: a roll of hand-carded fiber. A possible unit work in spinning.)

Read next stanza. Begin to spin. Repeat the stanza out loud. Think about its possible connections to the story, letting "blackbird" equal "demon." Think about more connections, letting "blackbird" equal "Muse." Think about the theme of the stanza and mentally sketch out a scene demonstrating it in the story.

Then, for no better reason than opportunity, recite the whole poem up to that stanza. I mean, why not memorize poetry?

I had exactly enough wool left to get through stanza 12. (I'd already memorized Stanza 13 because it so very perfectly described the weather we'd been having lately. "It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing, / And it was going to snow.") And I had exactly enough time left in the day that the newly spun singles could sit awhile before plying in the evening and washing the wool.

And now I know what I'm doing. Excellent. Presenting the Schacht Matchless as a Literary Composting Accelerator!

And now I've got to do it.

Hopefully I can blog again tonight or tomorrow morning, happily announcing a new first draft and a newly cast-off and sewn-up hooded scarf. Completing projects: good for the ego! I recommend it!

Today, Feb 2, is Imbolc, one of the eight Sabbats celebrated in the Wiccan calendar and sacred to many other Pagan traditions as well. Though today's Pagan religious systems vary as to how much actual Real True Ancient Traditions they contain, Imbolc was indeed celebrated in pre-Christian times. It was the feast day of the Goddess Brigid, beloved of the Celts. And when Christianity took hold in the region, she became Saint Brigid, and her Day became Candlemas.

Now, Brigid and Brigid's Day have connections to all things dairy, because Brigid watches over the milk-bearing livestock. Google up the two words "brigid dairy" and you'll find a bunch of them named after Her. Imbolc falls at the time of the year when the cows and the ewes first begin producing milk for the year. And so Brigid watches over dairies, those who work the dairies, and the young animals who need that milk to thrive.

But Brigid has other concerns: healing, the tending of the sick and the poor, the waxing of the light from late winter into early spring. And She is the patron Goddess of those who create. She has a particular affinity for blacksmiths. "And the poets call on Her, too...."

Now you know what poets are like – they are people who feed their souls on beauty, and a verse that won’t run to its meter is as painful to them as a wrenched knee is to the rest of us. But a poet wants more, too – a poet wants a verse to go out and do some good; for the poet shapes the verse – which is what the root of the word poetry means, after all – but then she sets the verse out to do some shaping of its own. So the poets call on Brigid, saying, Brigid, heal my words so that they run to the meter, and Brigid, light the flame of inspiration so that I can bend the words to my purpose, but most of all, they say, Brigid, let my words go out to others to be a source of wisdom, wisdom that does the service of healing, and wisdom that gives the gift that is needed, and wisdom that inspires the souls of women and men.

And so this comes right back around to yr. humble Blogger, who's a bit of a lapsed Wiccan, or at least an inobservant one, but who couldn't let the day go by with out acknowledging Imbolc, and Brigid, and Brigid's gifts of wisdom and inspiration to poets. You see I've been at Her altar today--there's a word count on the new story. There's a whole bunch of new scenes. They're not very good yet, they're only 1st draft and then some, but, as I've found, I can't write the story right the first time. It's got to be down on the page before I can figure out what the story really is.

Not that it should take a High Holy Sabbat to get me writing--but I wasn't going to not write today. Not hardly.

Maybe tomorrow I can finish that first draft and really figure myself out. And maybe I can also figure out what good this story wants to do in the world. We're in the entertainment industry, us fiction writers, we live by our ability to make readers turn pages, but there's other stuff a good story does. I'm not always sure what else my stories are doing, especially the ones down on the Horror end of the Fantasy spectrum like this one, but when I get 'em right, I know they do something. Brigid knows better than I what that something is, I suppose. I can't go after it in specific. I can only write the best story I can, and trust in that touch of Her grace.

Oh! And I also messed around in the dairy, so to speak. I mean, that jug of milk that's a bit past its expiry date? I made it into paneer. Hooray for paneer! John and me and Avedan all nibbled a bit of the trimmed edges before I put the squared slab into the freezer bag where I accumulate paneer against the next time I make saag. Which should be around spinach harvest time. Eostre, maybe?

The short story I'm currently avoiding working on occurs in a very strange conceptual overlap. Writers do that, and poets; I'm convinced it's a universal part of creativity. Totally unconnected thoughts get their wires crossed, thanks to that unruly and involuntary associative quality of imagination, and the resulting circuit does things that the electronic components manufacturers never dreamed of and would probably get superstitious about.

It starts with a recent homework prompt from Melanie Tem's writing group. (I seem to have mentioned this before.) She shared an anecdote concerning a writer she knew who'd been working on the same novel for years. He'd constantly get within sight of the end, then tear it all up and rewrite from the beginning. It's not all that uncommon; how many of us progress from incremental rewrite to incremental rewrite without ever finishing the first draft? But the prompt was, "Why can't they finish the book? What would happen if they did?"

Then a friend alerted me to an anthology I ought to be submitting to, and its theme dovetailed nicely with the prompt. Clearly, if the book ever ceases to be in a constant state of construction, something nasty will escape and do terrible things.

And of course that thought led to the famous Winchester Mystery House, which Mrs. Winchester kept in a constant state of construction for, so legend has it, a fairly similar reason. More or less. Meanwhile, flailing around for some sort of structure, I considered conversations between the writer and a psychologist, the latter cluelessly offering irrelevant professional insights on writer's block. Kind of like Richard Matheson's short story "Person to Person," in which the shrink tries to convince the narrator that the phone in his head is just an invention of a troubled subconscious mind. It isn't, of course.

So far, so good. One thought leading in an orderly and explainable fashion to the next. What I don't get is why the poem "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" popped into my head as an alternative structural frame.

Then while I was mulling all that over, the uncanny blackbird die-off in Arkansas happened.

So there you go. Lots of weird ideas and not a word written. As author Kit Whitfield put it, I've got mostly ideas about a story but not much in the way of ideas for a story. I don't have a good handle on the main character, I don't know what they write, I can't really see where they live and work, and I can't decide on the supernatural mechanics involved in trapping an infernal monster inside an unfinished novel manuscript.

But I've printed out the poem and hung it over my desk, and I've read some literary criticism about it. I've done some research on the Winchester House and the fallen blackbirds. I've got ideas toward the structure of the story, ideas like "Thirteen small scenes, each somehow connected with a poem stanza and having a blackbird in it somewhere if only in a very minor way. The last scene should involve the bird die-off and a day that dawns directly onto evening because of the snow." Structural clues like that often makes the difference between thinking in futile circles and actually writing something that goes somewhere. It's how "And On the Seventh Day" finally got written all those years ago; once I knew that there should be seven scenes, one for each of the days of the week in an oblique parallel to Genesis 1, I could write the story.

And I think tomorrow I'll be dusting off the typewriter. It worked last time, after all.

So I wasn't much looking forward to today's writing. It's mostly both characters being emo and angsty after parting ways. So, what the hell. I queued up the most emo and angsty song on Hunting High and Low, "The Sun Always Shines On TV" ("I fear the crazed and lonely looks the mirror's sending me these days"), I put it on infinite single-track replay, and I gave in to the mopey introspection. And I got a scene in which Lia is absolutely questioning her sanity, what with having all but convinced herself that Jet was a hallucination or a waking dream or something. Except she doesn't want to believe herself capable of hallucinating that convincingly. Except how else to explain the bit where Jet went from alive, to messily dead, to vanished? Lia has not been having a good five weeks.

("What with one thing and another, five weeks passed.")

I might never have gotten that far if it wasn't for some healthy competition at tonight's write-in. Have I mentioned, by the way, what madly enthusiastic Wrimos we have in Boulder? It's not that huge or far-flung of a region. Denver is bigger. Hell, there's only one region in the entire country of Brazil; it's called "Elsewhere :: Brazil". And yet, in our one-and-a-half-county region, we have write-ins to accommodate every schedule, every neighborhood in every suburb (practically), most of them initiated not by us Municipal Liaisons but by people who just liked the idea of, say, having a write-in at Flatirons Crossing, or who wanted to do Healing Tea Saturdays again. We have a scheduled write-in per day, average.

Today, we had two. One in Boulder, and one in Longmont. Since the two write-ins overlapped, we decided to engage in a bit of Word Warring. Word Wars are a bit like Word Sprints. You set a timer, and you try to get as many words written as you can in the allotted time. That's a sprint. Add competition, and it's a "war." From 7:10 to 7:30, the Boulder-at-Red-Rock-Coffeehouse crew vied with the Longmont-at-Ziggy's crew for the highest average of words per Wrimo.

But I'd been at Red Rock since 5:30--some had been there since 5:00--and I'd already hit 6667 total words, the normal Day 4 goal. Getting there took me through Jet's being emo and angsty over whether maybe she was a bit too attached to playing human and whether it was a problem that making out with her best bud back in her home world just didn't do it for her anymore what with there being no challenge or surprise to it. (Her home world is outside of space and time. "World" isn't the right word for it. Words aren't right for it. You see the problem I'm setting myself here.) And then maybe two paragraphs into Lia Five Weeks Later, and then I was done.

But it was only 6:15. I couldn't let the side down! I had to do more writing come Word War time!

Natalie Goldberg has an anecdote about a student who would write to the end of the ten minutes, to the end of the page, and then stop. This is in Writing Down The Bones, in the chapter called "Go Further." Goldberg writes, "Write to the eleventh minute if you need to. I know it can be frightening and a real loss of control, but I promise you, you can go through to the other side and actually come out singing."

It would have been no big deal if I hadn't. I had reached my goal for the day (get to 6667 words total). I could always right the rest of Lia Five Weeks Later tomorrow. But would I have written the same scene tomorrow as I wrote today? Would it have been the same Lia, the same family she can't cut herself free of, the same foggy mirror sending her frightening looks?

I don't know. This is some of what I got.

Abruptly Lia stood, shouldered her purse, and left the bus stop. Half a block along the way she heard what sounded suspiciously like a city bus's air brakes, but she didn't turn. It was a 10 minute walk back to her house, and the whole way she tried damn hard not to think of anything at all. The first flakes of a November flurry were beginning to fall by the time she got home; her dyed copper hair was salted with snow. She brushed it off as she let her front door slam closed behind her.

She collapsed in the armchair in front of a dead TV and sat there for five minutes or so, her mind as empty as she could make it. A sort of static buzz seemed to snap around her head like a fly. She didn't think about it at first. It stabilized, turning into a generic high-pitched ringing in her left ear, an almost electronic tone being played on a MIDI keyboard that didn't exist outside her own mind. Great, now my hallucinations are auditory. I'm one messed-up cookie. With that thought, she got up and marched herself over to the phone.

"Yeah. Sorry, Di--just can't seem to get out of bed this morning. I think I'm coming down with the latest 'flu that's going round the office. What, Jackie too? Send her my regards. Well, we'll see how it goes. I hope I can make it in tomorrrow--no, don't worry, I have no plans on being the next Typhoid Mary. Thanks, Di. 'Bye."

She hung up the handset, letting it clatter back into its old-fashioned wall-hanging base. The sound seemed to echo from the bedroom, as though something in there had fallen over at the precise moment she'd ended her call. Still hearing things, she supposed. But the ringing in her left ear was gone, that was something.

In the bathroom, she splashed water on her face and blinked, owl-like, at her reflection. Her narrow mouth, once so familiar and comfortable in the mirror, now seemed twisted, as though someone had snuck into her room while she slept to add weights to the ends of her lips. Just a milligram here, a flake of iron there, adding up over the weeks or years. She forced a smile, just to see what it looked like. It looked fake. She relaxed and watched her mouth sag into that warped scowl. Her lips were pale, with little pink in them. They were almost the same faint tan as her skin was at the end of the summer, visible at a distance only because her summer tan was lightening to her usual Celtic pastiness.

It sounds Welsh, said Jet.

Lia sputtered a cursed at the mirror, then began to shout. "Yes, dammit, I guess it does, I guess I can't cut myself off from my family even when I try to rename myself. Thank you oh so fucking much for pointing that out, imaginary person!"

What's that supposed to mean?

"Shut up. Shut up." Lia covered her ears and let her forehead fall against the mirror with a thunk whose echoes bounced around in her skull, less real than the voice of her memories. "It's been five weeks, what the hell are you doing in my head now? You never existed!" Her own voice seemed less real too.

Less real than the voice of a nonexistent woman repeating its query in her head. What's that supposed to mean?

"It means I'm done, I'm done being sick and scared and traumatized! You're just a figment of my--my trauma, OK? Go away. Please."

So, who's the fucking jerk now?

Lia squeezed her eyes shut as tight as they would go, then opened them, then turned on the water in the sink and the tub. Hot as it would go and with as much force as the building pump could muster up to her top floor apartment. She concentrated in the steam and the white noise on the face staring back out from the glass at her. Its expression scared her. The fog from the steaming water below covered it up, but she knew it was still there: a stranger wearing her face and twisting it into crazed permutations of depression, psychosis, loneliness.

Because I am that much of a nerd. Or something.

So, earlier this month, I became aware that NaNoWriMo was approaching. And fast. But was I worried? Well...

I figured, what with riding the rails again in late September, I'd have plenty of time to brainstorm my way toward A Plan. Possible plans included a series of interconnected stories among the people who appear in "First Breath," a real concerted effort to rewrite Melissa's Ghost or maybe Like a Bad Penny, or... I dunno. Those were the only Plans coming to mind.

OK, yes, I was worried. But I was just about succeeding at convincing myself otherwise.

And then I was driving home from the airport, having dropped off a visiting friend, and a plot went and hijacked me. A potential plot. A sort of treasure map leading toward a plot, maybe, with plot elements dribbled all over the landscape.

Long drives in traffic require music. To this end, I had my laptop headphone jack connected up to my car stereo via the cassette-tape-with-a-wire doohickey, and my laptop was dutifully playing through four a-ha albums. The first three, plus East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Playing through them all. Repeatedly. (One of these days, my laptop will send a hidden transmission out to some vigilante corner of the net, and I shall be hauled off for sound card abuse. Until that day, my guilty pleasures are MINE ALL MINE and NO ONE WILL TAKE THEM FROM ME.)

And I had that thought I often have when listening to this particular collection of tunes: "Dang, these lyrics have some surreal & evocative corners to them."

And then somewhere in the crossroads between "Early Morning" and "I Dream Myself Alive" I ended up with two characters in my head having an on-again, off-again relationship. One of them happens to be a dimension-hopping assassin. Who may or may not, in actuality, be an angel. It was totally obvious. And each song that came on after that made me go, "Oh, OK, and they meet when one of them picks up the other hitching on a desert highway." Or, "I get it! She's a shape-shifter." Or, "Someone gets killed here. I'm not sure who, but it's not good."

Later, very excited, I told John about this Plan. He gave me a bit of a skeptical look. "Where are you getting this assassin stuff from? Where does that ever come up?" But it does. It's all there. There is an amazing amount of implied violence in a-ha's discography. Also dimension-hopping, if you take literally lines like "I knew this world would break my heart."

All of which eventually gets me pondering the line between "inspired by" and "fan-fiction about." I suppose it's hard to call it fan-fiction when the canon material is so nebulous. You sort of need a defined, consistent worldbuild in the original to have fan-fiction about it. Put another way: I can imagine fan-fiction based on the title track to Rush's 2112. (Imagine, hell. I've written some.) But I have a hard time imagining fanfic about Rush's Presto, because I just can't see an intentional story being told across the course of that album. Writing a story that incorporates themes from each of the songs in order might possibly count as extreme fanwank, but I think it would be more accurate to say that the author used those eleven songs as a very complex writing prompt.

And so with this. So I spent a great deal of my writing time on the train just listening to those four a-ha albums while writing descriptions for possible scenes in yWriter. The working title is Death in a Dream, because the assassin travels to other worlds by going to sleep in her own and dreaming, and after completing her assignment she ends the dream and causes herself to wake up by killing herself. Maybe it should be Deaths in a Dream, plural, like that.

I'm really, really impatient to get to the actual writing. And that's good. Obsession gets the ideas flowing. But it's also unfortunate, because I intended to have two or three short-shorts out the door by the end of October. It's not too late, but with my mind thoroughly distracted like this, it's going to be difficult to concentrate on revisions.

Poor me. My life, so hard. Heh.

You remember the scene, right? A black cat crosses the red carpet in the hallway, hisses, then continues on its way--only to vanish two steps later and reappear five steps behind. With a brief digital blur, it reenacts its most recent past. The protagonist is startled. So are we. "A glitch in the Matrix," we are told. A memory hitch, a redraw jitter, a fault revealing the computerized nature of the fictional world.

Meanwhile, in the "real" world, the Matrix glitches again. John and I are in Chicago, visiting the Field Museum. In the Africa exhibit there stands an elephant tusk from a royal altar in Benin, a spiraling story carved into its six or seven foot length: the Oba would have commissioned this work to commemorate his father's reign. As a work of literature, it grabs our attention, because (the informative plaque tells us) there is no single translation. The iconography is properly interpreted as overlapping layers of story. Like a sedimentary rock, each narrative strata resembles the one beneath it but differs here and there in key ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt.

At the time, we understand this to mean that a single reading contains these multifaceted interpretations. That the tusk always contains in its deliberately broad-reaching icons several related stories, each considered true, each accessible in the carving, from the point of view of a member of the court in a given generation. Researching it now, I think maybe I misunderstood; articles such as Barbara W. Blackmun's "From Trader to Priest in Two Hundred Years" (Art Journal; June 1, 1988) seem to imply that the layers of varying interpretation were not designed from the beginning but rather accreted over the years. The ambiguous nature of the icons and the prioritizing of "cherished values" over "linear, factual recording of past events" allowed successive generations to seamlessly reinvent the story, changing the past to better suit the values of the present. Nevertheless, at the time, John and I were both enchanted by the idea of multiple narratives coexisting upon the same "page." Both of us wanted to tuck the paradigm under our arms, spirit it home, and infuse it into our respective relationships with storytelling.

Like most museums, the Field Museum strives to be interactive. Some of its exhibits include hands-on demonstrations. Some are labeled with pop-up books instead of plaques. "How many languages are spoken on the African continent? Lift this page to find out!" Tools from our childhood classrooms, prompting us to respond as children ready to learn. In this spirit, a three-ring binder was affixed to one of the shelves bordering the exhibit case. "Flip through the pages to see different possible stories this tusk could be telling."

So I did.

But each page was identical to the first.

Only one story was being told. Repeatedly. With word-for-word accuracy.

In fiction, I do weird. I love to read it, I strive to write it. And I'm in the habit of believing it. When I think I'm seeing oddness in the world around me, like everyone else I insert a logical explanation: "Administrative glitch. Or maybe it's supposed to be 10 copies of the same thing. Whatever." But before I get there, the weirdness gets there first.

"A glitch in the Matrix. The world is throwing duplicates, like a computer running too many processes. When I look up, I'll see a line of duplicate carved tusks in identical glass cases stretching off as far as the eye can see."

For just a moment, I know this to be true. Then the logical explanation cuts in and restores order to my world. Safe, predictable, comforting order. Boring order.

So two months later I start writing the story in which the weirdness usurps the boring. And the weirdness, as it turns out, has layers of weird lurking underneath, weird strata imperfectly mimicking even weirder strata.

This should be fun.

I'm still under orders to keep mum concerning the details regarding my recent sale of "First Breath," unless by some chance said orders have been rescinded without my knowledge. Playing it safe, I assume that not. But apparently it's never too early for a success to turn me into a stupidly immobile writer-wannabe hack. I shouldn't be surprised; it takes so very little to do that. Besides, we all know how success itself can turn around and cause writer's block. I should have seen this coming.

Now, first off, I feel pretty weird referring to the sale as "success." A success, yes. A very important success, very true. A landmark I've wanted to reach since, oh, age 14. But, nevertheless, a single short story sale cannot be considered Success With A Capital "S" Or A Definitive Article, not when the long-term goal is to be able to support myself and my family by making stuff up and writing it down.

This is why I keep saying, "Time to write the next thing!" Which is... a lot of pressure, oddly.

Because here's the thing: I keep catching myself trying to write not simply the next thing, but the next thing that this editor will buy. Instead of simply looking for another idea I can turn into a story, I've been searching for the idea. You know the one. The one that will turn itself into a story by dint of yanking the hapless author out of bed and plunking her down in front of the typewriter with an inviolable command to Write! and Write now! and Not To Stop Until It Is Finished!

If that's what I've been doing, it's no wonder I'm not getting past "I don't know what to write" these days. Because that idea? That idea is a myth. It is a fantastic creature. It is--

Well, wait. That's wrong. I know it's wrong, you know it's wrong, every writer who ever had an idea haul them to their daily work by the scruff of the neck or had fictional characters insist they take dictation knows that it's wrong to say that such an idea is mere myth. It exists, all right. Really and truly--but only insofar as, given a working writer's full attention, every idea is that idea. It's the difference between "There are no such things as unicorns" and "Of course unicorns exist, duh. Here's a picture of a narwhal."

(For the record, I absolutely believe unicorns exist. Unconditionally.)

There are a lot of wrong lessons to learn from having sold a story. Among them are "Write something else JUST LIKE IT!" and "Save your energy for writing stories that obsess you, like that one did!" It's all well and good to make your ideas compete for your attention and only work on the one that succeeds in grabbing it. But to wait, sit there with your pen or keyboard motionless, until the right idea appears? No.

Any lesson that takes the writer out of the driver's seat is the wrong one.

A better lesson is, "See what you did there? Take the next idea you have, and do it again." Do what again? "Give it your attention. Feed it to your right brain. Dream on it. Spend time typing about it." Take an active role, and turn the next idea into that idea.

Which will turn around and hijack you.

Enjoy the ride.

(...I'm not sure I'm OK with that metaphor, really. Perhaps tomorrow I'll have a better one. Sleep tight, kids.)

From the Amtrak to the BX, from the station straight to work. John and I just got back this morning on a train from Chicago, having spent a fantastically action-packed Memorial Day weekend there. A night spent in sleeping accommodations meant we were well-rested and ready to get back to our respective jobs pretty much the moment we pulled in.

For both of us, since May 17, our respective jobs are primarily in downtown Boulder. Which is to say: John took a position with a small programming start-up in a location he can bus, bike, or even walk to (in good weather and with 45 minutes to spare), and I happily rearranged my own writing routine such that I accompany him there most days. He goes to the office, and I go to some place quiet and endowed with electrical outlets and wi-fi. Maybe I do my Morning Pages on a bench by the creek, maybe pull out the laptop and do some freewriting, until the Boulder Public Library opens at 10:00. (Once I gave into temptation and spent the pre-library hour at Tee & Cakes. Hard on the wallet. Easy on the yummm.) Maybe I spend the hours until lunch working on Demand Studios articles in the upstairs quiet zone. Maybe I meet John for lunch, if he has time. Maybe we try a downtown establishment with an interesting lunch special. Maybe we make lunch. (I bought bento boxes! I want to fill them up with Stuff!) Maybe I go to Atlas Purveyors for the afternoon stretch, working on short stories and blogging gigs if there's time.

That's a lot of maybe. The definitely is, I go to work. And I work.

It helps to leave the house to go to work; I don't end up running errands or cleaning the house or chasing the cats instead of writing. It helps even more to leave in the company of someone who's heading to work himself. Self-discipline is largely a matter of mindset, and the morning go-to-work routine changes a mindset. Also, this is my first time since 2004 working roughly in the same location as my husband; I'd forgotten how much I'd missed commuting together, going to lunch together, simply being nearby rather than at opposite ends of a highway.

Today, we got off the BX, walked to his office, stowed our luggage, and then went our separate ways: he to renew his Diet Coke supply, me to order a pot of pu erh at Atlas. I had a lot to do, so it was best to spend the day all in one place. Atlas are very hospitable to all-day work sessions, even bums like me who buy one pot of tea and re-steep it all day long.

(Atlas recently got a hilariously absurd negative review on Yelp.com. The owner blew it up, printed it out, and enshrined it on the wall-to-wall chalkboard for all to enjoy.)

It felt weird how normal everything felt today, being back in Boulder, getting back to work. I mean, last night I went to sleep somewhere in Nebraska. Yesterday morning I woke up in Chicago. I guess traveling has to bring you back home sometime, but the transition was so seamless that I barely noticed it, making Boulder feel a strange place to be.

Then I thought, "You know what's really weird? That 'normal' means calling this cafe my office for the day, watching people walk by, writing stories half the day and paid article gigs the other half. And calling somewhere else my office tomorrow."

Then things got really circular. I stopped thinking and went back to writing.

Today's fiction task: write down the zombie story I've been entertaining in my head all weekend long. If you followed the links above, you'll have found one to Tee & Cakes's short story contest (here's their original announcement). The three words that were the story prompt put me in mind of nothing so much as Popcap.com's "Plants vs. Zombies" game (though I admit playing it during any downtime with John this weekend helped). So it's a bit of a pastiche on that, and a bit of a spoof on popular expectations about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It also incorporates something I learned about chickens a couple weeks ago at Abbondanza.

The result is now in Tee & Cakes's inbox. If it doesn't make the cut, I think I just might send it to Weird Tales.

And that's the news.