author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I've already lost track. When was it? Thursday? Thursday the Tenth. Right. No writing happened on Thursday, November the Tenth. It's a little misleading if you look at the Daily Word Count bar graph displayed on my NaNoWriMo profile; I suppose I must have roused myself long enough to actually update my word count. (As for the lack of bars on the Sixth and the Seventh, that had to do with being reeeally busy and then being on a train. I wrote, but I didn't get online to update my official word count.)

So what's up with that? Well, it had to do with going grocery shopping, making cat food, reducing the bedroom to its primal state of carpet and bare walls in order to clean really thoroughly, a surprise visit to Saturn of Longmont (my car didn't start the night before--surpirse!), and, so I'm told, a plume of toxic vapor over IBM. By the time I finally collapsed (from exhaustion, not from vaporized epoxy), it was in search of unconsciousness.

Which is a long way of saying that 2,000 words a day, which was at first a pleasant option to consider, is now a necessity. So it's a good damn thing I did just about that today.

Meanwhile, the story progresses. The characters keep doing things that surprise me. The chapter in which Gwen explains things to Brooke ("By the way? You're imaginary. I made you up") was not intended to have a mutual crying jag in the middle of it, but conversations between fictional characters will turn in strange ways. Also, that sex scene in chapter nine? It went and developed Serious Foreshadowing right there at the end. Yeah. Not expected.

That kind of stuff, characters doing stuff I hadn't planned on, saying things that have Themish and Metaphorical implications--it makes me fall in love with writing all over again.

*Bliss*

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.

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.

Work on the novel today consisted mainly of reworking the bit right before the big sex scene. Said sex scene is still languishing at the halfway point. If you want to put it in terms of bases, we've hit home base but the crowd hasn't started cheering yet. There are some plot points to visit yet, some physical and some emotional, and I'm still pondering how to go about it. So I'm doing a lot of imagining, rewinding, re-imagining, blushing and humming with embarrassment, leg-crossing, and then more imagining, all the while getting distracted by later events in the book and how they might go.

Look, this would be easier if I were writing porn and only wanted to make the reader sweat. But what I'm doing here is mentally positioning characters for later events. The scripting has to be more precise. At the same time, of course, it needs to read naturally.

So what I did today was work with the bit of dialogue and its stage directions ramping up to the sexy stuff. It had been moving way too fast, resulting in the impression that the author got bored with the talking and slipped the characters aphrodesiacs so they'd just get on with it. After today's work, the symbolic marriage conversation seems to flow better. It's a lot more poignant, more desperate, more nicely full of fearful pauses, giving what follows the weight of a last chance.

Then again, it could still be utter crap. I've only got my own word for it, and--ha ha--I'm an unreliable narrator. Ha ha. Still, my hope is that I've got it to a point where tomorrow when I reread from the beginning of Chapter 9 I'll know where to go next.

In other news, I skeined up a length of the silk/mylar goodness discussed recently. (Photos of spinning projects will probably be uploaded Saturday, Circuit City willing.) Also, I biked around Boulder with John's T-Mobile Sidekick II, snapping photos of favorite eateries and writing up quickie reviews of them for NearLocal to earn the current promotional restaurant gift certificate. That's right, folks. "Will Work For Food." Or, at least, for $25 off the next time John and I and friends go stuff ourselves silly at Conor's.

Not a lot to report today. It's Saturday, a day for which I had a lot of good intentions that all got shoved aside in order to reread Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix. Now, at last, I am ready to start on Half-Blood Prince. Which is good, because I'm sure John will be eager to read it as soon as I'm done hogging it.

Got a little ways into Chapter 9 today, which began not at all like I expected. See, I had this lovely, romantic vision for the segue between chapters. At the end of 8, they fall in the water and Brian discovers he can breathe down there. He smiles up at Amy through the water, and, after a moment of shock on Amy's part, they kiss at the opening of 9. This, of course, leads to happy sexy stuff happening for most of the chapter.

Only they didn't want to do it that way. Instead, Amy decided that Brian must be drowning--you know, the kind of conclusion a normal person would come to--and ended up trying to drag him back to shore. This would be more than just "a moment of shock." This would be fully sustained minute-long panic. But, hell, it's not like Amy knows she's in a fantasy novel.

She does eventually realize what's going on, and she engages in a fun little spot of dialogue with Brian, but now the momentum is wrecked. So I'm left trying to figure out how to get my bewildered but happily bantering characters to hit the next plot point.

There's some great lines, though. There's the bit where Brian says, "Put me back in," reminding me delightfully of MacDonald's The Light Princess (coincidentally also Chapter 9). And then there's the bit where Amy says, "OK, but how am I supposed to marry a fish?" Damn good question, if you ask me.

And so to bed, and, with luck, dreams that will make things clear. But first, a couple of chapters of Harry Potter 6. W00t.

I'm still at the Saturn dealership now. There's no signal here, so I will have to post this later. (As you're reading it now, it must be later.)

I've written some really self-indulgent scenes of Diane's childhood friend reading her unicorn stories just like in the old days, and of Diane having some really disturbing dreams about him, and my word count is now a not entirely unacceptable number at which to stop for the day. I like the results of dividing the remainder by 2,000. They indicate I'll get a day off.

And I had this thought: It's totally unfair for me to complain about that unsympathetic couple at the bus stop, and not give well deserved kudos to another pair of people who, in a similarly needy circumstance, exhibited exactly the opposite sort of behavior. There actually are people in this world who give a damn about strangers in distress. More of them, I think, in Boulder than in Westminster.

So I mentioned yesterday's bicycle wipe-out, right? The road was wet and I took the curve at the speed I was accustomed to, and the bike went from vertical to horizontal in 0.5 seconds flat. It was one of those situations where you watch it happening in slow motion, and you feel really stupid about not being able to stop it happening. "Here we go... yep, skinned the knee, and there's my knuckles, and, yep, the forehead goes bonk. Whoo."

There were these two guys converging on the Goose Creek Path from the path that runs along Foothills from Pearl Street, and I confess that my first thought upon seeing them was please for the love of the Gods stop and stay out of my way. 'Cause the path I was on, y'see, it goes briefly up, and they were about to cross right in front of me at the top, and it's really devastating to have someone get in your way while you're toiling up a hill, even a small one. I veered to the left of the path to avoid them, and I thought uncharitable thoughts about what I perceived as typical pedestrian oblivion.

Next thing I know, I've done a face-plant on the pavement, and I'm trying to decide if I can sit up without wetting myself. And these guys about whom I was having uncharitable thoughts, they're running up to me and, very charitably, asking if I'm all right. See there? Instant karma's gonna get ya.

First words out of my mouth: "I bet that looked real stupid, huh?" I cry at the drop of a hat - it's often more a physical thing than an emotional one - and I had just impacted the pavement with somewhat more force than a hat-drop. So my voice is cracking and I'm leaking a goodly number of tears. They don't seem to find me pathetic for it. They assured me that no, no, this was a treacherous curve in the rain, it was perfectly understandable, people wipe out here all the time.

And they didn't even tell me off for not wearing my helmet. Guess they knew I was mentally kicking myself for that already. Although really I'm not sure how much good it would have done. Maybe it would have prevented the goose-egg on my forehead, but probably not the cut on the bridge of my nose.

The guy on my left, he actually offered me a handkerchief to mop my face up with. A real one. Probably cotton, woven linen-style, pristinely white, and he's suggesting I bleed all over it. I didn't knew people even carried handkerchiefs these days. They watched me mop up my scrapes, pronounced me probably not in need of stitches, and helped me get to my feet. While I satisfied myself that I wasn't concussed, he indicated that I should keep the hanky.

So, there ya go. Not everyone is a lizard-like reject from the human race. Some people actually care about others' misfortune. Some people, I might add, at the risk of sounding all pre-feminist, are actual gentlemen.

Maybe I can write these guys into my novel, should the plot call for helpful, kind strangers. Or maybe I'll just write their exemplary behavior into an already established character, such as Diane's childhood friend, the archetypal unicorn-attracting innocent with whom she will one day be married and have three daughters.

Because writers don't just take vengeance on icky people. If they're truly observant, they do something that's much more important. They celebrate good people.

If said good people are reading this right now... well, I washed off that hanky when I got to the office, and it came surprisingly clean. I'm carrying it on me now to remind myself, as I continue along my way, to emulate your kindness. You guys rock. Blessed be.

As Mr. Baty writes in No Plot? No Problem!, plot is simply the movement of characters over time. Therefore, if the plot appears stuck, let your characters get to moving.

And if you characters don't want to move, find some new characters.

Where do you find characters? You find them in real life. Go people watching.

I did a bit of that yesterday, albeit unhappily. See, the Denver RTD (bus) system involves a necessary evil known as the Westminster Park'n'Ride. It has platforms on either side of Highway 36. Getting back to Boulder from Federal and 32nd involves taking the #31 north to the West Platform, using the pedestrian overpass to walk across the highway, and then catching a westbound #B at the East Paltform – all the while hoping and praying that the B doesn't arrive while you're halfway across.

Part of this dilemma, I admit, I should have avoided by taking an earlier 31. Instead, I took the one scheduled to get to the Park'n'Ride at 10:12 PM. The B is scheduled to depart at 10:19.

I had my bike. But it had snowed, and the pedestrian flyover was treacherous with slush. If I'd tried to ride on the corkscrew ascent and descent, I'd have risked repeating the accident I had that morning on the eastbound Goose Creek bike path where it switchbacks to go under Foothills. (I'd post pictures of my face, just to get the point across, but you'd think I was just fishing for sympathy. So leave it at this: it's not pretty. No stitches, though. Apply hanky to bleeding spots and get on with the day. I was lucky. Wear your bicycle helmets, boys and girls!)

So I'm about 2/3 the way across when, yes, the B shows up. And me, I start hollering, "Stop that bus!" at the top of my lungs as the bus disgorges its passengers. One of them I swear looks up at me. But the B pulls away as I limp the rest of the way down to the platform.

And as a couple who got off the bus cross paths with me, doubtless on their way to pick up their car, I say to them, "I wish someone had told the bus driver to wait!"

And the look they gave me can only be described as, "Forgive me, but exactly what species are you?" Kind of a cross between "And I should care... why?" and "Funny, I thought I heard something. Must have been the wind."

It was that look that just devastated me. I swear, I sat down in the bus shelter and sobbed. Maybe I was just weak from gulping cold air and running as fast as I could, but I was a wreck. I sat there and just howled, knowing I'd be waiting half and hour in the cold for the next bus and that the people I'd appealed to simply couldn't be bothered to acknowledge my existence.

By the time I finished having my little tantrum, I had made my decision. These people were going to be in my novel.

I got to the IHOP Write-In a little late, where Kandybar and her friend Dana were already hard at work, and I jumped right into a climactic ending scene in my novel. Diane has just seen her Older Disreputable Boyfriend shoot her class mate (and evolving love interest) and drive off, and she goes running out in the street to try to flag down some help. That couple, those evil uncaring unsympathetic lizards, are driving the only car passing by. And they give her that very look. Excuse me, but... why should I care?

As writerly revenge goes, it isn't nearly as satisfying as the short story I just submitted to SciFiction, which story was "inspired" by the excreble behavior of a family of children sharing a flight with me from Phoenix to Denver. In that story, well-deserved harm actually comes to those kids, whereas in my novel, that couple are merely revealed as the rejects from the human race they truly are.

But still. It was sweet. And worth about 1,000 words.

Ha-ha. Off to take the car to the shop for its check-up now. I hope to get a good 'nother 1,000 words done in the waiting room. Talk to ya later...

OK. Check this out.

Right now - I mean, right now this minute - if I wanted to finish the novel in a week, I'd have to write 7,000 words a day. Well, 7,150.

That kind of makes the daily 3,000-plus-change I actually have to accomplish, in order to chalk up a win for NaNoWriMo '03, seem fairly doable.

(Sorry - just got distracted. FlashbackRadio.com played the opening theme to Fat Albert, and my brain rubbernecked.)

It got easier to increase my word count in a hurry because I reached the bit where the Main Character indulges in a gripe session with his best friend. And for me dialogue tends to come naturally. Both characters end up sounding like me in show-off mode, but at least they're saying things real people might say, and there's an undercurrent of humor running through it.

The only problem is, the story isn't actually going anywhere. The story is, in fact, sitting in a bar griping about its mother and the tragedy of a fine stout going to waste.

At least the word count is growing, and at a rate greater than 300 words a day. And the nice thing about doing something I'm good at, like dialogue, is that it restores my confidence in my writing ability in general. And that's a boost that'll carry me through the next thousand words, easy.

I heartily recommend it, if you're a good 20K behind schedule as well. Warm up to your writing session by doing whatever kind of writing reminds you how much fun writing is. 'Cause if it ain't fun, what the blistering Hell are you doing it for?

...is when you realize that what you thought was an idea for a novel was actually just an idea for an opening scene and a snippet of Act II drama.

I'm there. I am so there. My character is now on a bus home after his initial disturbing brush with fate, alone at last with his thoughts... which means I have to figure out what these thoughts of his are.

And no, I can't just skip over to the aforementioned Act II drama. Said drama really ought to be informed by those things I learn by writing the intervening bits of story — things like what my character does with his every day life, who his friends are, what his family is like, who especially will miss him when it comes out that he can never go home to Denver again.

I don't really know this boy. I don't know what it's like to miss Denver either — I'm too busy angsting over what it means to miss New Orleans. And I haven't the first clue about being a pre-law student! I've studiously avoided anything to do with the law all my life!

As usual, there's an appropriate writers' cliche for First Scene Slump: Write it to find out. Several hundred words later, I'll know something.