author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

More writing. Yes! The short story revision, which was not finished by the end of January, nevertheless continues apace. Today I got through the bit with the maudlin elementary school teacher, which takes the draft just up to the threshold of the first major structural change to the scene. Which details mean very little to you at this time, dear reader, but check this out: the word count came down by another 300 today. Bringing the word count down is a large part of what the editor requested. At almost 6,000 words it struck her as a tad bloated.

Each day I'm finding it easier to get started. This should come as no surprise. All through the fall and winter I had this nasty, negative association with the story, something like "OMG there is no way this is impossible I suck I suck I suck." But each small revision session during which "impossible" and "I suck" is disproven eats away at that association, replacing it with something else, something more like "Where did I leave off? Oh yeah, I was going to do this..."

I find that most of my "stuck" has to do with negative associations, like "it's going to be hard," and "it's going to hurt," and "it's going to suck." Getting unstuck requires creating new, positive associations, like "This is fun" and "Gee, I'm clever" and "Wait, I wrote that? Wow." Which is where such strategies as "Just read it through, that's all," and "Just do that one paragraph, OK?" come from.

This is also where new, radical strategies like playing while I work come in.

Well... It's actually not all that new and radical, except in its application to writing.

For years now, I've used knitting and Puzzle Pirates to combat the deadly boredom of reading an hour of employment ads for AINC twice a week. Don't get me wrong, it's a very necessary and useful broadcast, but producing it is sort of mind-numbing. So while I'm reading the ads, I might also be knitting a sock, memorizing league points on the Jade Ocean, or earning obscene amounts of in-game currency during the latest blockade grudge match on the Emerald Ocean. It's not as complicated as all that. It just requires careful arrangement of monitor real estate so that the browser window, recording application, and YPP client are all visible and in close proximity. Then it's just a matter of glancing back and forth between the text I'm reading and the bilging combo I'm putting together.

Over the years, this has had an effect on my attitude toward reading the employment ads. When I first picked up the shift, I approached it with dread. "The next hour and a half is going to suck," I would think. And I'd put it off, and put it off, and then finally race the clock to get it done in time.

Now, I'm all, "Yay! Sunday morning reading! Which means time legitimately blocked out for playing Puzzle Pirates!"

Well. Recently, I started doing something like this to overcome a deep reluctance to do my Morning Pages. Sometimes I just don't want to do them. They're going to be three interminable pages during which I will distress myself with the contents of my head, stress myself out over the obligations of the day looming over me, and chafe at not being able to get started on said obligations because I still have to get through these three interminable pages of freehand writing. Some days, not even the cheerful bright colors I've put in my favorite fountain pen make Morning Pages look at all attractive.

It was a day like that when I got the bright idea of logging on to Second Life and essentially running around picking up spare change while doing my Morning Pages. There are a bunch of "earn Lindens for visiting sims" mechanisms in SL, most of which involve interacting with some object or other and then waiting around for some amount of time before the object pays out. It's ...not particularly fun, actually. But somehow putting that sort of thing together with the Morning Pages fulfills my need to always be doing two things at once in a satisfying way.

When I can't find a single thing about the task at hand to look forward to, I can bundle the task up with a completely unrelated element of play, and look forward to that.

It's this silly improbable trick that I play on my brain. It's similar to Havi's "proxy" theory, and it's all about replacing avoidance with interest and attraction.

I'm not doing my Morning Pages... I'm hopping traffic cones in Second Life, and passing the wait time at each traffic cone by scribbling down my thoughts in this spiral notebook here.

Sure, I have to record an hour of employment ads... but while I'm doing that, I can make a bundle buying large cannonballs at Armstrong Island and selling them at Paihia. (Emerald, not Opal. Almost always a viable trade. Check it out.)

I don't want to do freewriting for 25 minutes. How about instead I do freewriting for the time it takes to memorize Caravanserai to Kiwara on the Jade Ocean? It's not like I have to interact with the game for more than a few seconds every other minute or so. I basically complete one duty navigation puzzle and then hit pause, and wait to reach the next league point. During which time I can write the next paragraph...

OK, so some of those details won't make sense in and of themselves unless you play Puzzle Pirates too. On the other hand, those details in and of themselves aren't the point. The point is, adding a fun passtime to the dreaded task turns the dreaded task into an eagerly anticipated excuse to enjoy the fun passtime (as long as the task still gets done).

It's radically different from butt-in-chair theory. From a butt-in-chair perspective, it's heresy. But as long as the writing is still getting done, who cares?

On the other hand... I didn't need to bundle today's story revision session with playtime. I wasn't dreading the task enough to need to.

Hooray!

Day one of the Anti-BIC experiment is going well. I have all sorts of rabbit holes to report on. And I hit my next goal for the story revision--the one I was going to do Friday but didn't because, as usual, the Friday Fictionette release ran me out of time. One of these days I'll figure out how to make Fridays work.

My goal had been to take the first "brick" in the unmortared wall of rough-revised scene--that is, the first block of text in a revision that consisted of simply moving blocks of text around--and turn it into the opening of the new version of the story. But that opening would be polished. And so it is. And so I did.

Obviously, I can't hit my self-imposed deadline if I work in such small chunks every day. But my hypothesis is that if I make working on the story less scary, then every day I'll get a larger chunk done than the day before.

Now, I don't want to get ambitious and say "I'll finish the scene tomorrow!" Tomorrow I have a lot of non-writing stuff on the agenda. I have my usual Wednesday morning AINC remote reading shift. I have my semi-regular Wednesday night trivia with a fellow BCB skater in the evening. And in the afternoon I have my first physical therapy appointment, about which I'm pretty darn excited, let me tell you. Physical therapy means I get to do something more assertive than just wait for my ACL to heal.

Anyway, tomorrow's assignment on the story revision is simply going to be the next brick in the wall, which is the bit with the guys from Caroline's hunting club telling hilarious stories about the deceased. It's a slightly larger brick than today's brick, which was Demi feeling claustrophobic and the house failing to make it better.

As for rabbit holes, here's what I've got to report.

Slept until noon. Why did I felt the need to sleep until noon? What does sleeping until noon have to tell me? Well, for starters, it's telling me "Don't be up until 4 AM, dimwit." I kid. Sort of. Actually, what it's telling me is much more cheerful and encouraging than that. "It's OK to be up until 4 AM. Just remember that you still have to get enough sleep if you do. Aren't you glad you work from home on your own schedule?" Yes. Yes, I am.

An excessive amount of time playing Two Dots on Facebook, despite having already beat all the boards available to me. I'm actually just trying to raise my Level 73 score from two stars to three. When I realized I was dawdling this way, I investigated what Two Dots had to tell me. "Just connect the dots," it said, which is a reassuring way to look at big projects. "Realize that every action you take now plays a part in the choices available to you in the future," which is a bit of a reality check.

Waydaminnit. Wait a minute. "Trying to raise my Level 73 score from two stars to three." Today's small chunk of story revision included an emphatic narrative mention of how the house was used to accommodating three women, but now there were only two. Two where there should be three. Oh my. That's kind of neat. And also scary. (What, the synchronicity, or your pathological tendency to convince yourself that there are patterns everywhere?) Um. Well. Both?

*ahem* Anyway...

Yet another long Puzzle Pirates Examiner blog post, complete with slideshow. Again. Which, again, I did before the story revision. My instinct was to yell at myself and kick myself in the ass about it. "You know better. Why are you doing this first?" But, again, I'm trying to trust the rabbit holes. So. Investigating. Maybe I'm not putting off the story revision--I'm prepping for it. Something about the experience is part of essential preparation. Something about games and playing. "Remember, what you're about to do? It's not work. It's a form of play. Play hard!"

The urge to go to IHOP instead of home at 11 PM. On Tuesday nights my house is full of people. Happy people who are having fun! Which is lovely, but it is also loud. So I've begun taking my Tuesday night work down to the Remington Post Clubhouse, where it's dark and quiet and empty. So I wrapped up the Examiner post around eleven and realized I was hungry. I could have gone home, but home was still full of people. I could have gone home, grabbed some food, and come back, but that didn't sound appealing. It's kind of a long walk on this knee. So I gave into temptation and I went to IHOP. What's at IHOP? What has IHOP to say to me, to help me with my story revision? "It's about food and drink, and warmth, and creature comforts, and heart comforts. This story is about struggling from a world that's the wrong shape towards a world that's the right shape. Also, why is there no food in the last scene? There's food in the other two scenes. There should be food in the last scene."

And now I'm wrapping up at IHOP, having met all my writing goals for the day and brought my timesheet up past five hours. Day one is a success! I am well pleased. Let's see how the experiment continues tomorrow.

(Let's see first if I can get to bed sometime before 4 AM so I don't sleep until noon again.)

I'm declaring this week to be Conscientious Anti-BIC week. It's my week for Active Emancipation from the Tyranny of Butt-In-Chair Philosophy.

It's an experiment. Hear me out.

I've stated my intent to have the short story revision done and submitted by the end of January. One week now remains to hit that self-imposed deadline. That's plenty time for the task at hand, if I use my time wisely and don't dawdle.

Which would lead one to believe that BIC would be the best strategy:

Pick two hours a day. It doesn't matter which two hours, but make them two hours that you can do every day.

For that two hours, you will sit in front of your typewriter or computer. You will have no distractions. You will write, or you will stare at the blank screen. There will be no other options.

Writing letters does not count. Reading does not count. Doing research does not count. Revising does not count. You will write new stuff, or you will stare at the screen... Fill the page or go mad.

...Your mind will rebel. You'll want to clean the toilet, change the cat box, mow the lawn. But you won't, because there are no excuses.

Isn't that logical? Doesn't it make sense? To get something done, you allot time in which to do it, and you damn well do it in that time. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well... I have this brain, you see. A brain full of avoidance monsters.

It goes like this:

The closer I get to deadline, the scarier the project gets, the harder it is to make myself sit down and do the work.

The more work remains to do, the harder it looks to do it, the more I avoid doing it.

And the more I tell myself things like this:

Your body will rebel. You'll get headaches. You'll get colds. You aren't allowed a choice. You will sit in front of that screen even if your head is throbbing.

...the more those two hours begin to look like torture. Which doesn't exactly help with the avoidance monsters, you know?

Now, I'm not saying BIC is bad advice. There is a time for BIC. BIC is about getting from "thinking about the writing" to "actually writing." My daily timesheet, where I log time spent on writing and try to make it add up to five hours every work day, is all about BIC. But neither BIC nor any other piece of writing advice is the right advice for all occasions. I'm convinced that no writing advice is wrong, but any writing advice can be a bad match given a particular writer and a particular set of circumstances.

I'm experimenting with the idea that BIC is not entirely the right match for me right now.

Fast-approaching deadlines make the work look scary... so I need to work as if I had all the time in the world. Huge, overwhelming goals make the work look impossible... so I need to work with small, bite-sized, non-overwhelming goals. And the BIC philosophy makes the work look like a painful, horrible, absolutely unenjoyable ordeal... so I need to work in ways that don't hurt.

I hereby declare this week to be the Week of Following Rabbit Holes.

Following something that appears to be a distraction is not a waste of time, if — and it’s a big all-caps IF — you can do it consciously....

You realize that you are not avoiding your project. You are investigating an aspect of it. Or learning something that will help you with it....

The outside culture says yell at yourself for following the urge to fold laundry instead of writing that proposal.

I say: find out what is waiting for you in the laundry.

Which isn't to say that the writing will magically get itself done for me while I go fold laundry, make dinner, stain a closet door, or just up and walking around the block. Rather, the thing that's got my writing stuck might go away while I do those things. This is the art of consciously following distractions, of deciding that the distraction wouldn't be there if it didn't have something to tell me. (If the writing were going well, would I be getting distracted in the first place?)

And if I give myself permission to dive down rabbit holes and see what's down there, the scary, threatening pressure of "two hours, butt in chair, doesn't matter if it hurts, just do it" ...dissolves away. The threat of pain dissolves away. The fear dissolves away. The avoidance dissolves away--why shouldn't it? There's nothing left to avoid.

And maybe instead of simply not avoiding the work, I might find myself looking forward to the work instead... because I've stopped making it look so much like work.

I'm also going to give myself permission not to keep "logging out" and "logging in" on my time sheet. Rabbit holes, followed consciously, count as part of the writing process. (Just like tea with my avoidance monsters.) If in the middle of the work I feel the urge to take a short walk and look for clues, I'll take that walk "on the clock."

I don't want to draw such bright glaring lines between "writing" and "not writing" right now. I want instead to write from a more holistic space, where all of the things surrounding the writing are part of the writing process.

Like I said, it's an experiment. One of many that I've proposed for myself, all of which address in one form or another the hypothesis, "If I am kinder to myself, I will write more and I will enjoy writing more."

Well, when you put it that way...

When it comes to Great Big Tasks What I Am Avoiding Like Whoa, less is more. Small goals are less threatening than big goals. And giving big goals a less imposing deadline doesn't make them less scary; it just makes them loom from farther off.

Having big goals like "Make a first pass at a revision this week" or "Finish the revision by the end of the month and submit the story" is great if the aim is to make my stomach churn with acid and my brain churn with self-loathing. It's not so great if the aim is to revise and resubmit that story.

A smaller goal, like "Spent 15 minutes tonight making a list of elements to be retained from the scene to be deleted," is a lot less threatening and therefore a lot more doable.

By a striking coincidence, that's what I did today. I made that list.

But I didn't just make a list. Each list item got some babble about how that element might be repositioned in the new draft. And along the way I wound up reshaping the next scene in the story, putting the key incidents into a new order that made sense as a new home for the elements salvaged from the deleted scene.

Less really is more. When I set smaller goals, I feel freer to stretch a little past those goals. It's much easier to be an overachiever when expectations are human-sized. Also, smaller goals make it easier to just start already, and starting has a way of continuing. It's sort of the same principle whereby "Oh, no big deal, I'll just read through the story real quick" turns into an hour of almost compulsive line edits.

And smaller goals are a kindness. Big goals carry the weight of ultimatum: "Get this done or you're a failure!" "Get this done or you'll miss out!" Ultimatums are not kind--they're a kind of threat. Whereas small goals have kindness built in, and encouragement, and appreciation too--somewhere between "Could you do me a favor?" and "I bet you can do it. Give it a try, OK? For me? I knew you could!"

You can think of it as being gentle with the inner child, or encouraging Creative Brain to come out and play. Or, if that sounds a little too woo to you, you can think of it is "Be nice to yourself, all right? Who else can you count on to be nice to you, if not you?"

In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut, "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

So I guess the small goal for tomorrow is... to take a copy of the second scene, reorder it according to today's idea, and then insert the elements from today's list. To be clear: I'm not expecting myself to rewrite the scene. I'm giving myself the purely mechanical task of block-cut-and-pasting paragraphs and then typing up notes in square brackets at the appropriate places.

I'm good at purely mechanical tasks. Purely mechanical tasks are not scary. Tab A into Slot B, fetch and carry, copy and paste. Moving things around. Genius isn't required. Perfection isn't the point. No need to get anything right, just get it done.

But if in the middle of that purely mechanical task I find myself moved to, oh, maybe perform a few line edits here, tidy up some dialog there, well, I'm not going to hold myself back or anything.

Sometimes, with this blog, you get woo. Sometimes you get excerpts from my dream journal, complete with possible interpretations. Sometimes you get lucid dreams, astral projection, magic, witchcraft, spirituality, religion.

And sometimes you get conversations with imaginary people.

Re-reading Havi's post on avoidance yesterday led to rereading also the post by Emma Newman that inspired it and then Havi's post about sitting down and having a friendly chat with your fears. There are other ways to deal with fear than facing them down, as it turns out, and I'm getting a lot out of them now.

Emma's post was about finding sufficient courage to be her own hero. Which put me in mind of the classic Knight in Shining Armor facing down a Dragon. So I started thinking of my story, the one whose revision I've been avoiding, as a dragon. Big. Big, scary dragon. Rugged scale and sharp claws and teeth the size of mammoth tusks. DRAGON, blocking the road.

It's the story itself that's the dragon, and the road it's blocking is THE ROAD TO WRITERLY SUCCESS. It's that important to me. If I don't pass it (revise and resubmit the story), I lose as an author.

Wait, you might say. That's all-or-nothing thinking, there. A career is bigger than one story. What if you just, well, go around the dragon? You could work on a different story, progress toward WRITERLY SUCCESS along a different road.

But the problem with that is, what if the next time I have a story on the brink of possible publication, needing only a rewrite to make an editor fall in love with it... I give up on that too? THERE ARE OTHER DRAGONS OUT THERE. It would be one thing if this were just not the story to work on right now... but right now the possibility we're courting is most definitely "I never finish anything because I get scared and run away."

It's down to habits, right? And skills. And patterns. Finishing and submitting stories is a skill I want to get better at, a habit I want to foment, and a pattern I want to establish.

Anyway. My story is a DRAGON blocking my road and I am a HEROIC KNIGHT challenging it!

But I don't want to slay my story!

But the dragon... wants me to slay it? "Finish me off," it's saying, "Finish me off!"

That's creepy.

But, no, I misheard. What the dragon is actually saying is, "Finish me up! Finish me up!"

So I look closer at the dragon. And its nose is missing. And its internal furnace lacks necessary components. And its wings are crooked! And it's so very, very afraid that it will never be a finished dragon who can soar and breathe fire.

The dragon needs a hero, y'all. That's what I found out last night when I took my ten minutes or so to sit with my avoidance. The unfinished dragon needs a hero who can make it complete. I'm going to be its hero, y'all. That's what I'm gonna do.

This morning there were more discoveries, because I had that chat with my fear I was meaning to have. It went something like this:

ME: So, hey there, fear. You're here, aren't you? I can be OK with that. What are you afraid of?

FEAR: (Huddling in a corner, the picture of misery) I'm afraid that you'll take one look at your story and find out it's a terrible story. And you'll be ashamed of yourself for writing it.

MY UNSPOKEN REACTION: Well... that's silly, isn't it? I mean, an editor looked at that story and said, "There is much to love here." Then that editor took personal, precious time to do a rough edit on it, just to show me how she imagines it could be made it better.

ME: OK, I respect that fear. It's scary stuff. Let me ask you this: What if you're right? What if looking at my story did make me ashamed of myself? What then?

FEAR: (Huddled tighter in abject terror) It... it doesn't bear thinking about.

MY UNSPOKEN REACTION: Well, dammit, that's not helpful. Think about it anyway! No, that's mean and aggressive and hostile, and the poor thing's clearly terrified....

ME: What do you need to feel safe enough to think about it it?

FEAR: (No answer, just more misery)

ME: Here's what I think will happen if I become ashamed of myself as a writer: I might stop writing. Which is indeed awful! But... how is that different from what's happening now? By paralyzing me with fear, you're creating the awful outcome that you're trying to avoid. That isn't very helpful, is it?

FEAR: (Silent. Miserable. Maybe a little shamefaced.)

ME: Honey, I appreciate that you're trying to keep me safe. I really do! But I need to be able to write, so, fair warning, I'm going to work on my story today. But here's what I will do: First, before I even think about rewriting it, I will read it through as is, beginning to end, looking for all the reasons I have to feel proud of that story. Your timely warning that SHAME might be lurking right around the corner has enabled me to dodge that hell out of that jerk and keep writing. Seriously, thank you!

FEAR: (Still silent, still huddled, but maybe there's a hint of a smile going on in there. It's nice to feel listened to. It's nice to feel like you've been of help.)

All of the above was actually kind of surprising. I didn't know the dragon was going to have no nose. I didn't know what FEAR was going to say. But I guess it's not too different from day-to-day writer-brain. I mean, when I'm freewriting or writing rough draft, half the time I don't know what I'll be writing three sentences from now. It shouldn't be so surprising that when I create a character called FEAR and I invent a conversation with her, she says things I didn't know she was going to say.

Anyway, I still need to do what I promised FEAR that I'd do. It's late, I've been out to Brighton (which is an hour away), I skated for two hours at the very edge of my endurance then two hours more just for fun--but I think I can manage to read myself a story before bedtime.

I said "solid work week," and I meant it, gosh darn it. And today has been a solid, if oddly scheduled, work day. I haven't reached my five hours yet, but I will, even if it takes me right up to 1:00 AM. Even if it means I have to ... *gulp* start working on the short story rewrite.

Remember that bit about how procrastinated tasks get heavier and heavier the longer I put them off? Well, right now that rewrite feels like it weighs some four or five tons of weaponized plutonium. The avoidance tendency is strong with this one. How strong? Strong enough that I tried really, really hard to meet my five-hour quota today by writing resumes. And the volunteer WFTDA Editor position doesn't even require a resume. I lingered lovingly over that application, though. Ditto the new DMS resume. Oh, did I linger.

It is possible that I am lingering inappropriately over this blog post, too...

Avoidance! It's what's for dinner. And also for elevensies. Which means it's time to review some avoidaince-avoidance strategies. That is, strategies for avoiding avoidance.

I come back to Havi's post about avoidance (and how to get out of it) time and time again, hoping it'll magic-bullet me into World Fantasy Award level productivity. Or any sort of productivity. Magic bullets! Why can't there be magic bullets? I was so comforted by Bruce Holland Rogers's book, Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer, where he repeatedly and unashamedly says he doesn't want to do "self-help," he has no patience for "self-help," what he wants are tricks that work. I want a trick that works. But Havi's post (from which all blockquoted bits today are drawn) is really more about ongoing self-help than it is about magic bullets, and I suspect it's because there really aren't any magic bullets.

But it does have a magic bullet for shooting a different problem: My tendency to start getting impatient with myself over the avoidance. Worse than impatient. Angry. Frustrated. Depressed, and wondering whether I've been a fraud all along. When I get like that, I need to reread the following words and hold them close to my heart:

You’re avoiding the thing that’s holding all your dreams? Good grief! Of course you are! That symbolic weight? It’s that much potential for hurt and disappointment.

If you weren’t avoiding it on some level, I’d be worried about you. If you could do the thing easily and painlessly, without having to spend years and years working on your stuff to get there… I’d probably assume that it didn’t mean everything to you.

"Doc, I have these symptoms that are really worrying me. I want to do the thing, I want to do it so bad... and then I don't do it at all, for weeks at a time. What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing's wrong with you, honey. What you're describing is a symptom of how much you want the thing."

"But that doesn't make any sense!"

"It makes perfect sense, sweetie. The more important a thing is, the scarier it is. The scarier it is, the more you want to run away. Perfectly logical when you look at it that way."

So I reread that post, and I go away with my permission-to-experience-avoidance renewed. Not that I want to experience avoidance, mind you. But I am experiencing it, and I can't exactly work through it while I'm busy denying it. So I need to stop denying it. So I need reassurance that experiencing avoidance doesn't invalidate my I Am A Writer claim. So that's the magic bullet I get out of rereading Havi's lovely post.

And then there's the ongoing self-help work part of the post: sitting with the avoidance and recognizing its legitimacy.

And every time I recognize that it’s legitimate for me to feel whatever it is I’m feeling about the way things happened to be, I get room to breathe.

But that sort of self-work takes time. And I don't want to take time about it. I want to get that rewrite done this week!

Which is where the whining and moaning and the "It's not fair!" complaining comes in. Which I guess is OK, as long as--like the famous writer said about writing itself--I indulge in it in private and wash my hands afterwards. So. This is where I run away and have my "It's not fair!" temper tantrum off-stage.

[ muzak interlude ]

OK, I'm back. With thoughts. Here's my thought: I'm going to take a little time to do the self-work. Just a little, every day, telling myself things like, "I see you there, avoidance. I recognize you as a valid expression of fear. What am I afraid of, and what do I need to feel safe enough to do the work?" And I'm going to allow myself to count it toward my total count of time spent working on the short story, just like I would time spent staring into space, mulling over plot problems, or typing up verbose character backgrounds and worldbuilding notes.

Basically, I'm legitimizing the time spent working on the avoidance. Which will go a long way toward legitimizing the avoidance itself.

I won’t say that it’s easy or anything. But it beats the hell out of drawing the conclusion that stuckification and avoidance mean that my dreams aren’t important to me.

Because they are. They must be. Because they still scare me.

I'd rather not be scared. But if I've got to be scared, I rather be scared and productive, rather than simply scared stiff.

Your Friday Fictionette for the first week of January is "Moon Island: A Traveler's Guide." For the first time in weeks I've uploaded/posted/published everything on time--the excerpt here on the actually writing blog, the excerpt at Wattpad, the accompanying public posts in my Patreon Activity Feed, everything. I'm feeling rather industrious right now. (I'm also trying not to think about how long everything took me.)

There's something of the tone of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" in this one, more obviously if you read the whole thing than if you just read the excerpt (insert blatant but brief plug for subscriptions here), but it's less to do with Le Guin's ethical thought experiment and more to do with the sense of wonder you get from the very last paragraph of her story. I was very much taken with the ethical premise and question when I first read the tale, but now what really sticks with me is the contrast between Omelas and the destination of those who walk away.

Throughout the story, the narrator coaxes you into imagining Omelas. She tries to make it easier for you wherever difficulties arise. She invites you to collaborate with her in outright inventing the place: "If an orgy would help, don't hesitate." Even the horror of the sacrificial child has a role in this task: she offers this detail as one last aid to making feasible the task of imagining happy Omelas. But what of the place toward which people who walk away from Omelas go? There the narrator simply gives up. She's in the same boat as the reader. "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist."

Of course there's an assertion on the level of the ethical thought experiment: that humans may well be incapable of imagining a true utopia, but that won't stop us from "walking ahead into the darkness" to try to find it. But as a storyteller myself I'm fascinated with this meta-treatise on the limits of the imagination, and with the strategies we use to imagine the unimaginable. If we cannot describe it, perhaps we can describe something else, and position the indescribable in relation to it.

There's also a touch of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in "Moon Island." It's been years since I read the book, but the flavor of it sticks with me: fantastical, fictional places that only begin to exist when the storyteller creates them in the listener's mind. But the city in Marco Polo's mind can't be the same as the city in Kubla Khan's mind. Even if they spoke the same language, which they do not, there would be translation issues. All current forms of speech are lossy data transmission systems. And yet a city comes into being within Kubla Khan's mind. This happens regardless of whether the city physically exists in the Khan's empire or was invented out of whole cloth by his explorer correspondent. That's the magic of storytelling. It's an act of creation. And what has been created can never be wholly lost.

So Moon Island now exists in my head, and that's a happy thing but also a sad thing, because now I want to visit it, and I know I can't. At least, not outside of imagination and dreams.

Drat.

And of course our train trip would not be complete without some unfortunate interpersonal incident to inspire a full-bore feminist rant. It has become clear, in my brain, that a single tweet has done nothing to relieve my feelings on this issue, so you get a blog post about it. You're welcome.

A distressing subset of the population seems to think that, to paraphrase Jane Austen, a woman in possession of a book must be in want of a conversation partner. And it is overwhelmingly the case that it's a woman who's trying to read on a bus, train, or airplane, and a man who's interrupting her. Whole multi-volume encyclopedias, indeed, whole libraries, could be filled with examples of this... well, I'd call it a faux pas, but most of the time it seems far too deliberate a disregard of social signals. Like the soft "no," the non-verbal "leave me alone" cue (e.g. reading a book, listening to music on headphones, working on a computer) is demonstrably detectable in other circumstances (i.e. when it's another man who's reading or wearing headphones) by men who pretend not to "get it" when the person sending out the signal is a woman to whose attention they feel entitled.

If you're tempted to argue with me about this, don't bother. I've been subjected to it too many times, and I've read too many testimonies by other women who've endured it. Invariably interspersed among such testimonies will be That Guy, protesting either honestly or disingenuously, about how men have to be allowed to interrupt women reading in public, or else potential missed connections, and yes in most cases it would be rude but there's that one personal anecdote that totally invalidates every woman's experiences, feelings, and needs. "So you're saying men aren't allowed to talk to women in public transportation ever? Is that what you're saying? Is that what you want?" In your case? Yes. You in particular should not ever approach a woman on public transportation. Or in public, actually. Ever.

But I digress. My point is, today I experienced... well, not actually the rudest example of this ever. It certainly doesn't top Captain Awkward's story of the guy who waved his hand in her face while shouting "HELLO? HELLO?", or any number of women's experiences of having their headphones/earbuds physically yanked off their heads or out of their ears by importunate men. But it was probably the rudest and most clueless incident that I've personally experienced, and I've experienced quite a few. It goes like this.

I'm slouched back in my coach seat with Steven Brust's The Book of Jhereg, which is the first three Vlad Taltos novels (in terms of publication order) in omnibus form. I've got about 20 pages to go. And suddenly this hand comes out of the sky, reaching for my book. Reaching, specifically, for those last 20 pages. I flinch away instinctively, moving the book out of the looming man's reach, or at least deeper into my Personal Space Zone on the theory that he won't actually grab something that's pressed up against my boobs-such-as-they-are.

And while this almost-but-not-quite-tug-of-war is going on, he is speaking thusly:

"Oh my goodness that is such a big book! Did you really read that whole book by yourself so that there's only this much left?!"

Those are the actual words that came out of his actual mouth. To me, a grown-ass and arguably middle-aged woman.

(I'm suddenly reminded of a distant, elderly relative at the family Christmas dinner who said to me, "When you get a little older, you'll find...." Honey, in less than 6 months I'll be 39. My gut started complaining about coffee about ten years ago, my back started complaining about long hours at the computer fifteen years ago, and my knees started complaining about being knees some twenty years ago. Do you seriously think I've had no experiences thus far of getting a little older?)

Age is beside the point. Maybe, given my posture and my short stature and his top-down view, he mistook me for a young child. I don't care. That was an inappropriate thing to say to a reader of any age. Maybe if you're the child's teacher or parent and you've watched them struggle to master chapter books, maybe then you get to say, "Congratulations! I know how hard it was for you." But if you've never seen her before in your life? I don't care how young she is, your first words to her should not communicate, "I'm astounded by your ability to read! I had of course assumed you were illiterate." Few women or girls of any age will find that charming.

Besides, "Did you really read that whole book?" is kind of a stupid thing to say to someone whose eyeballs are intently glued to the 20th-to-last page. It's like saying "Did you really eat that whole thing?" to someone who is happily sopping up the last traces of garlic butter. No, sweetie, I dumped that steak in the trash, just to fool you. No, I didn't read the whole thing (by myself); I was just sitting here, posing, holding an impressively thick book open to the last chapter, breathlessly waiting for you to come by and compliment me.

Anyway, when I looked up to deliver a scathing response ("What an incredibly condescending and rude thing to say," sez I; "Huh?" sez he), I couldn't help but notice his uniform and name-tag.

That Guy was totally an Amtrak train attendant.

One: I'm pretty sure Amtrak would not be pleased to have its staff casually insulting passengers.

Two: He can't possibly have been surprised to see a long-distance passenger reading a book. Despite the prevalence of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, this is still a relatively common pastime on the California Zephyr.

So that's my rant. Boggle, ye optimistic, and despair.

So here's the thing about smartphone-powered wi-fi hotspots: They only work if your smartphone is getting signal. For large stretches of track, it won't get signal. So if you've put off working on your Friday assignment until the City of New Orleans leaves Chicago Union Station at 8:05 PM, and you don't get it done until somewhere after Effingham (say, midnight Central time), then you're just going to have to wait until the train gets to Centralia and that's all there is to it.

In other words, this blog post and the accompanying Friday Fictionette will be coming to you a touch late. Mea culpa. It's half past midnight now; I mean to stay up until both critters are uploaded. If that means I have to be awake when we hit Carbondale, so be it.

I hate coming up with titles. "Stealing the Crown Jewels" is at least marginally clever and refers to at least two things in the story. But it doesn't quite make me go yeah, that's the ticket. And I get this weird superstitious feeling that, by coming up with a title for a Fictionette four times a month, I'm using up my title ju-ju. Really weird, right? Do something often and you'd think you'd get better at it, right? But no, lizard brain is all YOU ARE CONSUMING A NON-RENEWABLE RESOURCE, STOP NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE--

Lizard brain needs a good night's sleep, and also a hug.

I'm going to keep this one short, because I'm not at home. I'm out at a friend's house, where there has been food and beer and margaritas and cards. Now there are very random conversations going on at a loud volume, and I am enjoying my usual role in these circumstances of "smart-ass fly on the wall."

I am very good at multi-tasking. Well. Maybe not very good. I'm multi-tasking, anyway.

Anyway, it's Friday, so here's a fictionette. As the Author's Note over there says, it came out of a dream--or, at least, the urge to turn the dream into something that made a kind of narrative sense. Since you can totally click that link and read about it, I won't repeat it here.

I will say, I've been trying to make sense of the "nurse" bit ever since writing up the Author's Note. Here it is in all its morning-after-the-dream glory:

Another diner catches me and asks, "So, do you like your hobby?" They mean my writing time at my desk in the corner. I explain that actually the writing is my job, and "I'm just the relief nurse for Corey while she's out." I don't know why I said "nurse" instead of "staff" or "waitress" or "server."

(What, you didn't expect dream journal excerpts when you started reading this blog?)

Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that "substitute nurse (when you're not even medically trained)" is an intensification of "substitute server (when you're not even on staff)." The latter theme might indicate a tendency on the part of the dreamer to over-volunteer and over-commit, and a problem with setting reasonable limits on one's sense of responsibility. The former takes it up a notch: "You cannot fix (heal) everyone and everything! Stop trying!"

So, OK. Taken under advisement. Thank you, dream. Would prefer you stick more to story ideas and less to psychoanalysis, yeah? But I suppose dream's gotta dream.

Now, about that cover art... Yes, that is my coffee cup. On my desk. No, I did not steal that coffee cup from Denny's. I bought it fair and square from Cen-Tex Supply in Boulder (no longer there, alas). Bought a vinegar shaker from them, too, just like the ones they have at Metairie Park Country Day for red beans and rice Wednesdays.

I get asked that, about whether I stole that coffee cup, from time to time. Less so these days, no doubt because it's a college hijinx type of question, and I'm closer to 40 than I am to my college years now. (And even during my college years I didn't get up to much in the way of college hijinx.) But when it comes out, the question isn't exactly a question. It's more of an exclamation of recognition: "Oh, you stole a Denny's cup too! Everyone does that sometime in their lives, don't they?" And then I have to say no, no I didn't. And then things get weird and awkward, like they do when you enthusiastically mistake someone for someone else.

Hey, I've committed my own small petty thefts. I have, from time to time, liberated unloved books. I am also guilty of hoarding hotel soap during multi-night stays, because soap is useful and housekeeping brings more at the drop of a hat and why should it go to waste? I just don't typically steal supplies from the restaurants I dine in, is all.

You've got your vices, I've got mine, is what I'm saying.