author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So I'm auditioning an Idea. In my head. An Idea about how this novel is going to be structured. I think each chapter will be a different story, maybe a fairy tale retelling or maybe not, in which a purchase from the magic shop sparks adventure and disaster and heroism and tragedy. And each will also feature a conversation between the shop keeper and someone who's tracked her down (or him, or otherwise; gender is as fluid as species, and needs to be, for a shop keeper who can open shop doors on any world) and wants to know about her (or his, etc.) role in all this.

And I'm thinking that, like Dream of the Endless through the long narrative of The Sandman, the shop keeper's idea of her (we'll say "her" for convenience's sake) responsibilities toward her customers and her agency in their stories will subtly change over her millenia. But she doesn't realize it. As far as she's concerned, everything she tells each chapter's interrogator is true and has been true throughout her career.

Thing is, if I want this novel to ultimately be about her, it can't be because some THING happened to suddenly thrust her front and center into a story. She's been doing this magic shop thing for uncounted years. She's practically a deity. What aspect of the vampire dress story could possibly be special enough to spur her into sudden action? It makes more sense for me that her urge to assert her own will over story events is an urge that grows on her gradually over many, many hundreds of thousands of years.

In trying out that structural Idea, I'm free to keep noodling along the story of the vampire dress. Because I need to see that chapter through, right? And in this chapter, the shop keeper sends two people after Martha to try to stave off disaster. One is Cathy, one of the three young women Martha was simultaneously envious of and shamed by in the shop before she tried on the dress. Cathy gets the spotlight for today's excerpt. She's wearing an item of clothing that the shop keeper gave her. It's also enchanted, but I'm not sure in what way. It allows her to see through the glamour that the vampire dress casts, that's for certain, but I'm still figuring out the rest.

The second person the shop keeper sends is her interrogator -- yesterday's "you" character. That whole bit about her words not being a free gift? Well. Her words also were part of her merchandise, also a magical item. Again, I'm not sure how that all fits in, but I like the idea that anything you take with you out that shop's door has the power to direct Story.

"And that gorgeous collar you're wearing?" Rachel stabbed an enthusiastic finger at Cathy's throat, oblivious to the way her friend pulled back sharply from the weapon-like digit, tipped as it was with a long, sharp, red-hued nail. Rachel had always been fastidious about her nails. "It matches perfectly, all old-fashioned and stuff. Did your cousin really wear that, too?"

"It's so elegant," put in Jacqueline.

Cathy blushed and admitted that it had been a gift, and that she was indeed lucky that it matched the dress, but then black lace is black lace when you get right down to it. She fidgeted with the single black teardrop hanging from the choker's center.

"Oh, look--" Jacqueline interrupted Cathy's stammerings and pointed toward the entrance. "It's Mr. Willingham. Oh, that's so sad -- you heard about him right?"

"Is that him?" Cathy recalled the newspaper item covering the protests in Northside. "He's the one who's daughter went missing?"

"Yeah, that's him. Martha Willingham. She was just two years behind our class at Withervine. Classmates saw her leaving campus and heard her say to a friend she was going to Old Town. No one saw her since." Jacqueline continued with the unnecessary details, recounting the news story they'd all read in a melodramatic voice, clearly relishing the tragedy. Cathy thought her enjoyment in poor taste.

Rachel sniffed. "What's he doing here, then? He's so distraught over his daughter he's got to organize half of the Withervine neighborhood to protest, what's he doing at a party?"

"Maybe he hopes she'll turn up here," said Cathy. She wasn't sure what to think of the whole thing, really, but Rachel was always so judgmental. Cathy couldn't help jumping to the defense of anyone Rachel started ranting about. It was an unthinking reflex, and it sometimes got her into trouble, especially when Rachel actually had the right of it. But it was hard to let Rachel's condemnations go unanswered. "Or maybe he's coming to realize she's gone for good, like the police have, and he's trying to cheer himself up. If I'd lost a daughter, and some bigwig was offering me a chance to drink myself into oblivion on their dime, I'd take it."

"You wouldn't." Jacqueline laughed. "Have you ever been drunk?"

Cathy admitted she hadn't. "But I've also never lost a child under mysterious circumstances, either."

Did I mention I have no idea where this year's novel draft is going? Also I'm having acute attacks of "Why am I writing yet another new first draft? Why am I not seriously editing an existing draft? Why am I not trying to get a book published yet?"

1. Because it's November.
2. Because it's November.
3. Because ... I've wasted a lot of non-Novembers up to now.

The question of wasting no more non-Novembers will have to wait until December. For now... it's November. And I have this story to create out of pure nothingness.

So I'm trying to take the advice I am preparing to give to the whole Boulder region come Week 2: When in doubt as to which option to choose, choose them both. Write the scene both ways. Write continuations to both scenes. All the words count toward your 50K, and they also (by some mysterious alchemical process) count toward your figuring things out. Because, as I discovered last year, you don't know what you're going to write until you've written it and read it.

So since I didn't know whether to continue with the vampire dress storyline or cut out to the shop keeper telling her story, I did both. And I suppose tomorrow it'll be continuing the vampire dress plot or starting a new magic-item-leads-to-adventure/disaster plot. Depends on what's in my head at that time.

Here's the shop keeper on choices, responsibility, and free will, and at some tiresome length too:

Believe me when I tell you there is nothing I could have done. And don't you tut-tut at me like that -- I'm far too old to put up with such clucking from my own parents, let alone random people who walk into my shop. And, trust me, you've got nothing on my father. At least, I think so. It's been so long; my memories of home and hearth are foggy. I think I had a father. Once. In any case, if I did have, you weren't in his league.

But no, listen. I am under certain constraints. Anyone who can pay my price may buy what they will; I am not allowed to interfere. I cannot interfere. The thing about stories is, characters have to have agency, right? What's the use of a story in which no one has a choice and no one stands a chance? Even you, even you have a choice. You paid my price, and so you get my words. Did you think those were for sale? No. Everything has a price tag, everything is stamped with its particular UPC. Trust me, you can pay it. And you want to. Look, don't worry about it -- it will become clear to you later. You will have no regrets. Well, I wouldn't, were I you.

But that's the paradox, isn't it? In order to allow His creations free will, God, Who can do anything, cannot choose what we would have Him choose. If it makes you feel better, perhaps it is better said that He must not. And I am no God. I am less powerful. The choices I cannot make -- to refuse the sale, to hide the dress, to chase poor Martha out of the shop or simply lock the door after she disappeared into the dressing room -- I really can't make them. I owe my livelihood and my existence to -- a contract, say. Call it a contract. I, the undersigned, waive my ability to interfere in my customers' choices; in return, I get many hundreds of thousands of years of life in an infinite multitude of multiverses and an inventory that takes care of itself. And absolutely no responsibility for those things I cannot control: no moral responsibility for my customers' selections, no liability for the disasters they may incur, no obligation to accept returned merchandise.

The most I can do, as you have seen, is offer my wares without asking for money, and throw in word or two of advice. Not for free -- nothing, as I have been at pains to tell you, is for free. We bartered, did Cathy and I. I gave a thing if she accepted the duty to use it. I asked for her willingness and gave a thing in return. Oh, it was nothing said in words, but the exchange happened nonetheless.

The shop takes care of my needs and it exacts my obedience to the clauses of our contract. If that bothers you so much, go out yourself and do something about it. Martha's still out there. That poor boy may not be her last conquest. Go make yourself useful and stop scolding me.

Or go across the street and buy me a coffee. Even that will be useful. Pay you back when you return. What else am I going to do with money?

Oh, make your choice already. You have choices, isn't that enough for you? Why must you flaunt what you have that I do not by dithering? Choose, and go.

Don't look to me to make this easy.

Later on this afternoon (meaning Tuesday, November 1), I'll blog about WFC. (I mean it. Really!) (The reading went very well, by the way -- but more details on this and other weekend activities later.) Right now it's time to admit that I'm doing NaNoWriMo again and post an excerpt from today's writing to the blog.

Why, yes it's only 1:30 AM Mountain Daylight Time. The inaugural midnight write-in is a Boulder tradition! And I'm pretty pleased with myself for logging over 2000 words by 1:15 even with having got up around 12:40 to refill the electric kettle (from a water fountain, using a paper cup as intermediary transport; it takes about 3 full pours to fill the kettle). And it doesn't seem to matter that it's a Monday night; I think we've got as many people in the St. Julien lobby as we did last year when Halloween fell on a weekend.

I have very little idea where this novel is going. At some point I decided that since my dreams handed me about 95% of a complete short story the other day, I should start with that story. When I got done with it, I figured, I'd either know what happens next or I'd search my dream journals for another juicy one.

As it turns out, I'm pretty much done storyfying the content of the dream, which goes something like this...

I'm in an elegant dress and accessory shop, and I'm staring hopelessly at a slinky black dress, knowing I could never wear something like that, I'm too short and my butt's too big and my boobs are too small... and this gaggle of girls near me who each would be perfect in a sexy dress like that just make me feel really small. Then I say what the hell, I try it on. It fits me perfectly. And I am supremely confident, I know I'm beautiful and sexy, and also, as it turns out when a teenage boy walks into the shop, I'm now a vampire. I totally seduce him, and then I drink blood from the vein inside his elbow, and he's absolutely OK with th"is. The shopkeeper gives me such a disapproving stare when I go to buy the dress, though. Oh, and then there's this lacy choker collar I'm thinking of buying too.

...and I'm thinking the main character of the novel isn't the woman with low self-esteem and a non-Hollywood-compatible figure, no, it's the shopkeeper. And the shop is one of those little magic shops that just appear and disappear without warning, remaining around just long enough to sell you some object that turns your life inside-out without your consent. I imagine the shopkeeper saying, "I'm not the one in the stories. I just start the stories." But she can't have a novel about her without that becoming less and less true as the pages wear on.

Today's scene was mostly through the eyes of my dream point-of-view character. At least, until the dress vamps her. Then it goes sort of omniscent. Look, it's a rough draft, that's the point of NaNoWriMo, deal with it. The following excerpt? Not prettied up at all. Just a few paragraphs from the raw output.

The dress said, Try me on.

Of course it didn't. Dresses can't speak. So it had to have been Martha's own mind throwing out the words in technicolor and surround sound in the theater of her mind. Try it on. Nevertheless, she answered aloud: "No."

Go ahead.

"No!"

Motion from the main store. The clerk's voice -- Martha hadn't heard the clerk's voice yet, but it had to be her, the shop door hadn't jangled again -- "Is anything wrong in there, sweetie?"

"No," Martha said again, louder, relieved to have a reason to shout the word. She let the sound's natural ambiguity cover both the clerk's question and the dress's command, which was just how cowardly Martha was externalizing her own temptation so she didn't have to own it, of course. "No," she told herself and the dress, and watched her hand stroke the midnight silk.

There, and that's my Day One NaNoBlogging duty done. More after I clear out of the hotel, give people rides home, go to sleep, and wake up very late in the morning or later still.

It's March. That means, if I've got my ass in gear, that it's National Novel Editing Month and I'm doing it. I got two hours in today on the revision of Deaths in a Dream (working title, may change) which was what I wrote back in November; that's the good news. The bad news is, I've only got three hours in total and the goal is fifty. Hee hee?

(The low word count refers to the rewrite. I'm taking the rough draft side-by-side with a new outline and notes on each scene, and I'm rewriting the novel into a new yWriter project.)

Doing a bit of procrastination today, I went back to an old standby, Randy Ingermanson's "Snowflake Method" for writing a novel. His method involves starting with a single sentence, then fleshing it out to a paragraph, then writing out a page of summary for each character, and so forth until you've expanded your single ice crystal of an idea into a snowflake of a novel full of all the detailed pointy bits you'd expect. It's a sort of fill-in-the-blank that gets you to write the shape of the blanks out first. It's a neat idea, but I don't think I've ever really found an occasion to use it. I go into a rough draft with a rough outline, but nowhere near the level of planning Ingermanson suggests, mainly because I write the rough draft to find out what the hell it is I'm writing. And now that I've got a rough draft and a much better idea of what the final should look like, I'm not sure his method goes the way my brain goes. Maybe I'll try bits of it here and there. The character page summaries seem useful; I seem to have less of a grip today on the character of Lia than I did back in November.

I've also discovered I... don't really like Ingermanson's writing style. I'm sorry! But I don't. He keeps inserting jolly comedic bombast that, as a joke, gets old quick. In my opinion. It's not so bad in Snowflake, where he mostly gets it out of the way in the first couple paragraphs and then gets down to business. But I clicked over to his other free article, "Writing the Perfect Scene," and the bombast was something like 40% of the content.

This may seem obvious, but by the end of this article, I hope to convince you that it's terribly profound. If you then want to fling large quantities of cash at me in gratitude, please don't. I'd really rather have a check. With plenty of zeroes.

He's also got a little problem with sexist language:

Your reader is reading your fiction because you provide him or her with a powerful emotional experience. If you're writing a romance, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is falling in love herself. If you're writing a thriller, you must create in your reader the illusion that he is in mortal danger and has only the tiniest chance of saving his life (and all of humanity). If you're writing a fantasy, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is actually in another world where all is different and wonderful and magical. And so on for all the other genres.

It's a small thing, but it does bug me. Put it together with a tendency to overload every new section with a fresh shmear of LOOKIT ME IN UR ARTICLE BEIN FUNNY before getting around to making actual informative points, and I fall right off the page.

OK so well but anyway he recommends this book, says he's stealing all his scene-building ideas from it. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain. This is where he gets MRUs, or "motivation-reaction units" ("such an absurdly ridiculous term that I'm going to keep it, just to prove that Mr. Swain was not perfect") from. "If you don't have this book," Ingermanson says, "you are robbing yourself blind." All right, already. I go look at the Amazon page.

Would you like to know why I will not be buying this book, robbing myself blind though I might be? Would you like to know? My problem with Swain, let me show you it. Let me rip it straight from Amazon's "Look Inside The Book" feature and show you it:

And each authority is dangerous to the very degree that he's correct, because that's also the degree to which he distorts the actual picture. Put four such specialists to work as a group, designing a woman, and she might well turn out like the nightmare of a surrealistic fetishist, all hair and derrière and breasts and high French heels.

So . . . no magic key. No universal formula. No mystic secret. No Supersonic Plot Computer.

It's enough to plunge a man to the depths of despair.

This is, perhaps, not entirely unusual given the book was published in 1965. Except no, wait, here are a bunch of other books published in 1965. Some of them are on my shelf. Many of them have caused me less pain, cover to cover, than these few paragraphs did. Swain! More sexist than many of his contemporaries, and possibly proud of it!

According to reviewer T. Velasquez from Beaverton, Oregon, this is no simple unfortunate exception. He goes on like this throughout the book. Says Velasquez,

On the downside, the very dated presentation in the book can made for hard reading to the modern PC crowd. Swain writes very clearly from the POV that his readers are male. He never says that women can't write books but he mentions only one female author and she is used in a negative example. Swain uses the terms 'man/men' interchangeably for people. Of course, Swain was a product of his times but his style of writing borders on the unintentionally insulting.

He refers to a black woman as a 'negress' at one point and his examples portray all wives (and women since this is the only thing he can allow women to be in his examples) as cheating on their husbands the moment that their husband's backs are turned: The understanding being that women are weak and mindless submissive creatures that are easily influenced by other men and must be constantly supervised.

...queen of the love pulps thirty years ago.... Old and tired now, she turns out just enough confessions to support herself.

"Modern PC crowd," nothing; Swain's book is painful for me to read as a woman. As one of those female writers that don't exist in Swain's world. As one of those terrible bad-advice-giving female writers who is probably cheating on her husband if he isn't nailing her fins to the floor. And is causing surrealist fetishists nightmares or something, I dunno. Clearly, if Swain were still with us today, I would be causing him nightmares just by existing. And writing. And publishing.

I should note that out of all the reviews on Amazon, most of which are 5 star and say "The writing Bible!" and "Should be required reading for all writers!" (because, Gods know, if women find Swain's writing painful they should just suck it up in the name of Becoming A Writer), Velasquez's review is the only one that mentions Swain's problem with slightly more than half the human species.

Anyway, valuable lesson learned. If a writer with an unfortunate tendency to fall into unconscious sexist language from time to time recommends a book about writing, and recommends it very very strongly as the book he got all his best ideas from, it is not unlikely that the recommended book will be full of a lot more sexist language that's a lot less unconscious. If your mentor is mouthing nasty bigoted stuff about women, or about people of color for that matter, and you learn a lot about writing from that mentor, well, it's hard to come away without having unconsciously internalized some of the nasty stuff.

Choose your mentors carefully to the extent you have a choice, right?

That said: If someone has taken Swain's good ideas, such as still apply today (Velasquez says he has a lot of ideas that don't pertain to today's publishing industry either), and has repackaged them within a writing style that, I dunno, acknowledges women as human beings who might have something worthwhile to say, maybe? then I'm all ears. I have a list, it is currently one author long, that author is Ingermanson. I should like the list to be longer. Suggestions?

And not just in the conventional 50K sense. But I have finally gotten to a point of completion with this draft.

Wellll... OK. I haven't yet written the denoument. But I'm forgiving myself that for now, mainly because I'm still unsure of its shape. Its rough shape is clear, but not the details. I need to think on it a bit more.

That aside, I've written each of the three major layers of conflict in which the book culminates. There's the Earth conflict, involving what the Earth antagonists were after and how they are finally stopped; I'm not entirely satisfied with it. I didn't really give it the development it needs. But it's there enough for now, hinted at and then resolving in a very large house fire. Then there's the Uberreality conflict, in which Chender's scheming comes to light and must be stopped, and is stopped. Even that rings a little shallow, but this too I'm going to throw at the rewrite. If a first draft is an act of discovery, a first revision is about implementing all the things I discovered on my way to the end of the first draft.

Then, finally, there's the... spiritual conflict, I guess. To use the classic literary terms I learned in high school, if the first two layers of conflict are Man versus Man, the final is Man versus Self. Well, Woman versus self, really; Jet may in fact be genderless, but I've been writing her as a woman this whole book long.

(Huh. How appropos. Tangent! I'd only today been reading about the distressing tendency in Hollywood to take genderless characters, for instance most of the cast of Monsters Inc., and give them male names and voice casting; the "default person" is male. I took a genderless character and gave it a female presentation instead. I was mainly rejecting male-as-default-action-adventure-character, and het-as-default-romance; I ended up subverting male-as-default-person while I was at it. Tangent ends!)

Anyway, I'm really not sure of the outcome of Jet's Woman versus Self conflict. Except roughly. I can see it as I used to see things when I was near-sighted and I wasn't wearing my glasses: the shape is discernible but the details are blurry.

And that's pretty much all I'm going to say. I want to publish this thing in the near future; someday, this will be a book you can purchase (or download) and read. I wouldn't like to spoil the ending.

At least, no more than excerpts to this point already have.

With a harsh, involuntary laugh, I salute Chender with my left fist, a motion that pretends to punch a hole in the ceiling. Then I sit up, toss the five stones into my mouth like so many aspirin tablets, and I simply swallow them. As I suspected, no sudden transfiguration happens, no mystical effect. They drop heavily into my stomach and sit there, undigestible. I hope they receive a damage from their new location. Whatever power Chender expected the gems held, he was wrong.

Then I lay back down, eyes still open, and allow my human body to be human once more. Human sensation returns, animal need. The lungs breathe because they must, and thick black smoke rushes in. The skin sweats and reddens and finally chars as human skin does when engulfed in flame. It's like nothing I've ever felt before. Strange, that in all my assignments I've never exited the dream by fire. It's worth doing. Everything is worth doing, once. Living, loving, dying-- some things are worth doing more than once.

The pain is briefer than I had feared. It sharpens and contracts into a singularity of pure agony wherein nothing exists but itself. I am engulfed and snuffed by its utter self-absorbed existence. Then, abruptly, it drops to nothing. Maybe my nerve endings have all been destroyed, and I am incapable of feeling more pain. Or maybe I'm simply succumbing to smoke inhalation and leaving the body behind. For whatever reason, the pain vanishes and leaves a blank behind it, inner darkness foglike swallowing the smoke. There I find a point of clarity that I mistake for waking. I allow myself to rush toward it, a being without a body going home at last.

But something interrupts me on my way there. The darkness flashes to lapis blue and the motion of my being halts in the center of that sky. The stones relinquish their power, or their message. A familiar presence wraps me round and shares with me an intimate space of awareness.

So familiar-- so much like the being I wove my being with while my human disguise sat grieving on a motel floor. But something about her is different, strange. Unearthly. What a strange word to think; am I not un-Earthly myself? Unexpected in a way that creeps over me in shades of awe and growing wonder. I venture a thought forth: Lia?

Meantime, through December, I mean to hit the queue of stories awaiting revision. And I hope to keep up this daily pace of fiction and blogging. At the very least, I'd like to maintain a five-day work week, just as I've intended all year. The beautiful thing about NaNoWriMo is, it normalizes dailiness. Let's see how long I can continue at a comparable pace through December and into 2011.

Lastly, I should mention that these musings are coming to you live from the lobby of Boulder's St. Julien Hotel. I'm here with seven other local Wrimos, a couple of them already sporting happy purple WINNER! bars on their profiles when they arrived. The rest of us sort of cascaded at a rate of one per half hour or so. It's really neat, attending the Final Push Write-in and hearing "Fifty thousand and one! Yes!" and "OK, word count verified! I'm a winner!" followed by eruptions of applause. It's also really neat to cross that finish line in such circumstances oneself. And yes, I did cross 50k yesterday-- but I didn't get my word count verified, didn't get my word count bar to turn purple, didn't get to watch the congratulatory video from NaNoWriMo Headquarters or download my web badges and certificate, until I was here with fellow Wrimos working hard into the evening. It's a good place to be.

I did indeed reach 50K.

Now, NaNoWriMo.org does not believe me, and indicates that I have used roughly 300 em-dashes in my manuscript thus far which have fooled its word count validator into believing two words to be one. But this does not worry me. I have one day left, that day having 2 write-ins in it, and I have two or perhaps three scenes yet to write before I can consider this draft ended. I expect it'll be another 1500 words or so. That should take care of the NaNoWriMo.org/yWriter discrepancy.

Yesterday's plot hole? I meant to fix it going forward. Not go back and edit; just, whenever referring back to the previously written scenes, pretend like they had gotten the appropriate amounts of Plot Plaster smeared on. Then what did I do? I took the plot hole and ran with it. I suppose the Muse did not approve of the quality of the Plot Plaster I had on hand, and sent me shopping for a superior brand. It's not evident from this excerpt. You'll just have to take my word for it that not only are the men Jet raised from the dead still walking around, but apparently she also can cause other profound changes that make the next conflict after this one seem increasingly artificial.

I think I'm onto something though. I'm hoping it'll solidify in my head while I sleep tonight.

You're disarranged. Deranged. You're mad. You think you can swallow a pill in the dream and wake up as a Commander of Adjustments? It's not I who am in danger of mistaking dreams for reality; it's you. My thoughts only make him chuckle. In humans, laughter is an effect of interrupted breath. In Chender it comes of his being, the thoughts that are his body; they are skipping like one of Lia's scratched CDs. What I am hearing is the sound of Chender making love with his own obsessions. The realization horrifies me. It's not possible. And even if it were, it would not be allowed. Regardless, I swear you will not be allowed the attempt.

But my words are mere helpless babble for all the effect they have on Chender, who continues chuckling at me. The skipping, looping, hiccuping thought shifts to new words: who could who could poss possibly possibly stop me?

Without thought, without a plan, I attack him. It is not so much in answer to his question as to make his insane giggling stop. I have the notion that, were I to listen to his madness long enough, I would be sucked into it, wrapped up and bound up and wound into this weird psychosis. So I attack.

This is all really geeky and possibly esoteric. It's very, very cool, however.

OK, so. Jet has her "there is no spoon" moment. It involves a certain amount of hyperlucid dreaming, in that she has to arrive on Earth with her awake/reality mind and memories. But it also involves a certain amount of treating Earth as part of what is real, such that she can manipulate physicality for the illusion it is.

If this all means that she can now shapeshift, pass through walls, travel in time, and bring people back to life whom she regrets having killed, why then is she powerless to stop one particular death?

...Maybe she doesn't get to bring people back to life after all. Because people aren't illusions; they're people. People are real.

That's enough Plot Putty to keep me sane until January, I guess. Unless I end up buying a different brand of Plot Putty, the following will not survive to the next draft. This excerpt is official an endangered species! Which is just as well, because it's sort of blue and red at the same time. Which is to say, purple. With Sueish overtones. Gah.

Time, of course, is an illusion. But so is death. I remember the pictures in the monitor room, that smiling boy with the missing front tooth. In an earlier dream, I killed his father. And was it really necessary after all?

In this dream, I will bring him back.

I kneel beside the body, unzip the gym bag, pull the poor man's head onto my lap. I place my right hand over his unmoving chest. Right now, in this moment, my disguise is not precisely human. A human cannot do this: lay a kiss on a corpse's brow, then pound my fist once over his heart, then hold the man tight by his shoulders as he gasps for his first breath in hours and struggles to resume his fight with the small, fierce woman who overpowered him in the doorway.

His struggles cease in a moment. "Who's there," he rasps; "who are you?"

I lean down to whisper in his ear. "It's me," I say. "I killed you, just a moment ago--no, wait, wait--but I've brought you back now. Because I was wrong. I am sorry."

I managed to use up almost the entirety of today's write-in time doing administrative stuff. It's a bit of a danger of being a municipal liaison: there are events to organize, emails to send, forum posts to submit, and on busy days the only time to get it done is at a write-in. I had about 20 minutes left when all that was done... and discovered I didn't know what to write in the next scene.

I know what happens: a series of scenes in which Jet shows up to foil every action Chender attempts to take on Earth. But I don't know what actions those are. What kinds of Adjustments does a nonphysical being attempting to force his way up the hierarchy make on Earth?

So I spent those 20 minutes babbling to myself in the scene description box.

And then today continued the way it did, all in a happy nonstop of activity, until finally 11:20 PM came around. I know it was 11:20, because that's when I checked the time, regretfully realized I must tear myself away from a fascinating conversation, retreated to my room, and opened up the laptop.

I still didn't know what Chender was up to. But yesterday I had Jet waking up in Lia's apartment. I suppose he was looking for the macguffin lapis lazuli stones.

When you don't have a lot of time, you use the time you've got. I used about 20 minutes to jot down 400 words. What follows are most of them.

I hear a sound in the kitchen, and my heart beats faster even though I know it can't be Lia. Habitually, I reach under the mattress. The pistol is there, already loaded and waiting. I move silently from bed to floor to open the door, to slip out the hallway.

Chender is rummaging through kitchen drawers, pawing through kitchen cabinets. He hits his preposterously blond head once on a cabinet door he'd left open a moment before. He does not utter a word, only ducks sharply from the impact and straightens again more carefully. So intent is he on what he's doing, he does not even turn around, not until I cock the gun.

When he sees me, his eyes go wide.

My aim is perfect.

For a moment I worry about getting blood all over Lia's kitchen counter. It's a horrid mess. But in moments he vanishes, awakens from the dream, takes his bodily bits with him when he goes. I am alone again in Lia's apartment.

Alone, and feeling very human. The apartment is just as we left it the morning that I shot Hackforth. Her favorite coffee cup, the white one with Wile E. Coyote on one side and the Roadrunner on the other, still sits in the sink. The residue inside is a kind of calendar, telling by its decay how long it's been in Earth time since I last left the dream. If I could calculate its age precisely, then subtract the days of Lia's captivity, then subtract further the days on the road since Lia's rescue, then what remained would be the hours since I watched her blood soak into the motel carpet. Her blood would still be there, a rusty stain that would not disappear the way Chender's did from her kitchen counter. My vision blurs. My eyes itch. Both sensations ceases, briefly, and I watch the tear detatch and falls away from me into the cup. With an involuntary release of saline I help to erase Lia's presence from this world. After the first, the tears all fall together, each indistinguishable from the next as raindrops blur into raindrops in a summer storm.

I've been participating in NaNoWriMo since 2002. How many times have I written a new novel draft? You do the math. Then add a conservative one or two for the trunk novels that I peck at from time to time on no particular schedule. This "don't bother getting it right; just get it down" thing, I have done it a lot.

So you'd think that by now I'd have learned all there was to know about "don't bother getting it right" and "just get it down." You'd think.

Apparently you'd be wrong.

This past week has involved a lot of uncertainty. Lia and Jet light out on the run after escaping Montrose Manor--then what happens? Then, apparently, we spend a lot of time changing motel rooms and arguing... until we finally stumble upon the next possible plot point. Both Jet and Lia spend time with no-good guys they've gotten involved with for dubious reasons, and this goes on for several nights... until something finally kicks loose and I know how the "everybody dies" scene comes together. After that, Jet spends a lot of time in Uberreality (only it's not "time," because time and space aren't real) keeping herself to herself and avoiding all contact with her colleagues and employers... until I finally realize exactly what Chender is up to and what their Employer's reaction to this is and how Jet's next assignment will lead to her own personal There Is No Spoon moment and...

And here's the thing. Sometimes you just have to send your characters out into the formless primordial stuff of story, not to live the plot they ought, but rather as your avatars in the fiction mines, trying to find the next piece of plot. Sometimes you just have to spend 5,000 words writing three nights of arguing and fighting in a motel room, knowing that not a single word of it will make it to the final draft but writing it anyway, because there is no other way to find out what happens next.

And I knew this. But I didn't really know it, not until today. This past week I've been coming back to the book with great reluctance, unwilling to write another non-plot-moving 2,000 words of "And then Lia went for another walk in the desert, and looked at the pretty cacti and the red sandstone rock formations, and nearly got bit by a snake, and 'Michael' met up with her again and they exchanged some witty banter and unresolved sexual tension, and then Lia went back to the motel room and had an argument with Jet, and then Jet went out and had another date with Mr. Totally Wrong Who Might Be Useful, and..." This sort of reluctance is new to me this year, because this year I am determined to finish not just 50,000 words but also the book by November 30. I don't reach "The End" in a timely manner if I'm constantly writing time-waster scenes on my way to the next brainstorm. But I've gotta.

Today it paid off. I opened a brand new blank scene, and, unwilling to start flailing around at Jet Grieving In Uberreality And Being Very Antisocial For, Lacking A Better Phrase, Several Days... I started jotting down the lines that Jet's Employer would say when Jet finally consented to listen. And then I started filling in Jet's thoughts between them. And before them. And suddenly I was writing an actual scene with pacing and movement and revelation and reaction.

And now I know what happens next.

See? It works! But I really need to spend the entire three hours of tomorrow's write-in writing down What Happens Next, because it feels like my characters sure spent a lot of November fishing in the primordial ooze.

But they didn't waste that time. It really was time well-spent. And now, I hope, I really understand that. In my 9th year of NaNoWriMo, it's really about time.

If this were Earth, I would say that days passed. But time is only fiction, and what passes is only me. The eternal now contracts around me to a point shaped like Lia's bedroom. I wrap myself in my human shape, so that I can bury my head beneath the crimson-gold-paisley quilt and breathe her scent where in lingers in the ivory sheets. A copper hair lies upon one of the pillows; I don't touch it, but lay beside it so that its breadth magnifies in my blurred vision. Each moment that passes is the same moment, and each breath I take is the same breath. And yet with each breath the scent fades, and my ability to furnish it from memory fades as well.

As I curl around the pillow, clutching it to my tightly, the voice of my Employer echoes about the room, bouncing off the fictitious walls that are my awareness and my being. Jetta. Speak to me, Jetta.

I hug the imaginary pillow tighter and say nothing.

Jetta. Please come back. You are needed.

In the U.S. we celebrate a day called Thanksgiving on the 4th Thursday in November. It's a national holiday for being mindfully grateful for "our blessings," a term which may be understood religiously or secularly thanks to semantic drift: the ways in which we are fortunate. The apocryphal origins of the holiday involve early explorers being grateful for not starving to death. In modern times, the day has accrued into its rituals the conjoined twin phenomena of religiopatriotism and sports. All of this together means we eat a lot, we watch some football games, and the sportscasters visit with soldiers stationed abroad and tell them and their families thank you on behalf of the nation.

In the spirit of Thanskgiving, here are the things I am most conscious of being grateful for today:

I and my husband are well off enough never to wonder where our next meal is coming from, or where we'll shelter for the night. We stayed home, slept late, and had a casual lunch in front of the TV--leftover pizza for him, crock pot field roast with veggies for me. For ease and comfort and leisure time, I am grateful.

My husband and in fact all my family, both original and chosen, support me and believe in me as a writer. I can stay home and be a full-time writer rather than clocking time in corporate office because of my husband's support. For the freedom to pursue my chosen career, and the unwavering encouragement I receive in that pursuit, I am grateful.

Today, I went to the local IHOP to meet with other NaNoWriMo participants, those who had no other Thanksgiving evening plans, to work on my novel. I clocked over 2200 words today, having inched my way over the past week up to a point where I felt I could finally skip straight to a scene of drama and energy, and that scene came out almost effortlessly. For times when the work flows like play and I remember on a gut level why I chose to do this with my life, I am grateful.

Also, today, the Saints beat the Dallas Cowboys in their (the Saints') first Thanksgiving Day appearance. For Garret Hartley's 50-yard field goal; Drew Brees's incredible accuracy; awesome catches made by Colston, Henderson, Moore, Meachem, and Bush; and for a kick-ass take-away by Malcolm Jenkins that put the Saints on the path to their winning touchdown, I am grateful. Who dat!

In all seriousness: For me, the concept of "count your blessings" functions not just as a reminder to be consciously grateful for the help I've received along the way, but also as a reminder that many people need that help. While I'm picking up groceries, others are going hungry. While my family have always stood behind my life choices and helped me pursue them, others have painful memories of being told "Writing? Waste of time. What do you really want to be when you grow up?" More and more each year as I return to the volunteer position of NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison for the Boulder Region, I realize I take the job on in the same spirit that I'd donate to the local food bank. I feel like it's my responsibility to pass along, in some form or another, all the encouragement I received to the aspiring writers I meet today. The impact of that is by no means on a scale with what Actual Published Authors can do, of course; they have a lot more capital than I do, both monetarily speaking and not. I mean, Stephen King can personally fund scholarships for high school graduates in Maine, and when he writes that scholarship winner a letter of encouragement, it means a hell of a lot. Imagine! Stephen frickin' King telling you "I believe in you. Go forth, and write!" Wow. My name doesn't have that kind of impact. My funds certainly don't have that kind of plasticity. But I can give a small amount of money and a large amount of time to NaNoWriMo. And I can hope that somewhere along the way, some starry-eyed pep talk I babbled into a regional email will help someone receiving that email feel that much better--that much more justified--about giving writing an honored place in their life. If only for November.

So there we go. Happy Thanksgiving.

...Oh yeah. Novel excerpt. Like I said, I got enough of the point-A-to-point-B crap figured out that I was able to skip ahead. The bit I skipped ahead to is the bit where everybody dies. Whee! After that, this happens.

Usually when I wake I remain in human form for some little while, lying in a human bed inside a human habitation. The persistence of the illusion helps to ease the transition from form to formlessness. But after this dream, I rise fully myself, fully incorporeal, fully furious. And the object of my fury is present already, providing a space of mutual awareness into which he murmurs There you are, took you long enough. I am to have no privacy, no space to grieve. He watched my every moment in the dream, and he haunts my existence now that I am awake. The semblance of his presence is like unto a human's shit-eating grin.

I launch myself at him, ripping at his thoughts with thoughts of fire and wings and claws and teeth, a formlessness formed of pure wrath. I am seraphim-at-war, I am the glory that devours, I have five hundred throats each of which scream Chender's full name like a demon chorus pronouncing a curse. This and more I assault him with, a cacophany to bruise his consciousness.

He doesn't resist, doesn't contract his awareness to exclude me. Instead he allows me fully into it. He seems to take a sensual pleasure in allowing me to vent like this. Not that I could hurt him anyway; reality is not so fragile. Nevertheless, as my rage subsides, his lewd enjoyment leaves me feeling oddly violated.

Jetta, he thinks at me, you were going Nephil. It had to stop.