author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Remember yesterday's overwrought, overstretched metaphor? "So it's like a seedling nursery, right? Only it's in suspended animation." It's exactly like that, actually.

So I do the Twitter thing. My blog posts broadcast there via RSS, and I get downright tweet-headed when I'm on a train or at a convention. And sometimes I tweet the "Story Idea du Jour"--for example, this.

The Story Idea du Jour comes directly out of this daily routine I'm working on, where I sit down with the task of writing something new, something so brand-new that I don't even know what it's going to be until it's done. It is very self-reassuring to come up with a shiny new story idea daily. It reaffirms the known but hard-to-keep-hold-of fact that story ideas don't run out. Truly they don't. Ideas are not only a dime a dozen, they're growing on trees. And the more I force myself to come up with new ones, the easier it is to come up with new ones.

"Coming up with ideas" isn't quite right. I'm coming up with ideas all the time without even trying. I'd wager tomorrow's breakfast that we all do. The trick is recognizing them as ideas and not reflexively rejecting them. Morning Pages are also good for fomenting the habit of recognition and breaking the habit of rejection: Keep the pen moving. Don't stop for three pages. Recognize each thought and transcribe it. Don't audition your thoughts against some "worth writing about" yardstick. Write them all down. So with story ideas. What's in your head right now this second? That right there, yes, that, that's a story idea. Pay it some attention. Play with it.

When I started my 25-minute timer, I was also timing some cupcakes in the oven. (We had a cupcake-designing party for April Fool's Day. We had some icing left over. How do you use up leftover icing? You make more cupcakes.) 25 minutes to freewrite on some idea or other; 25 minutes to bake cupcakes. Isn't it great how these things work out? But in any case, after beating together flour and sugar and milk and shortening and so on, after pouring out batter into little paper cups inside the six spaces on a muffin tin, my head was full of cupcake. In fact, what my head kept saying was, "The little cupcake that could."

Isn't that awesome? "The Little Cupcake That Could." That's awesome. But--what the crap is it about?

Twenty-five minutes later, it was about some esoteric ingredient masquerading as extra flour, bought at a questionable shop that happened to be convenient on the way home from a particularly hassled day at work, that got baked into cupcakes, that got served at a ten-year-old's birthday party, that changed the lives of the birthday party attendants forever. Years later, something terrible happens to one of them, and this brings the whole group together, and they have to find out what has been done to them and what it means in their lives now and what choices it puts before them all too soon.

Those little cupcakes? They could.

And then, after 25 minutes, I click "Save and Exit." I forget all about it (except maybe to tweet it, or blog about it briefly) and I move on to another task. I've done my job for the day, as far as the cupcakes are concerned. I've planted a seed in the nursery. You don't sit there watching the ground covering a seed, waiting for it to sprout. You water it and put it somewhere warm and sunny and then you leave it alone.

One day I will look through my file full of Story Ideas du Jour, and the cupcake one will go ping! I'll print it up, make notes, and type a brand new draft about those nefarious cupcakes and those hapless ten-year-olds (and the hapless 20-somethings they became). It'll become the novel or screenplay it was meant to be.

But not today. Today, I'm still working on a story that got planted back in June of last year, that I selected out of the nursery late last week. The one about giant sentient Ants and a rather progressive barista learning how to talk to each other and turn a profit at the same time.

Or something like that.

It's a work in progress.

Today, pedaling away from Abbondanza around 12:45 PM, I had my usual rush of energy and good intentions. Having done a solid four-hour set of physical work in the greenhouse, and seeing the blueness of the sky and the long hours left in the day, I was full of plans. I would have lunch at Oskar Blues in Longmont, as seems to be my new post-farm routine. I would do my morning pages. I would blog. I would knock out a couple of articles for Demand Studios. I would then log onto the Sage ocean and host a cutter pillage from Lincoln to Morannon Island.

Stuff! I would do stuff! None of this going home and crapping out for the whole damn day. Stuff would Get Done! By me!

Then, halfway down my pint of One Nut Brown and two pages into my three, I ran out of steam. The sleepies caught up with me. I finished my pages, paid my check, and fell asleep on the bus somewhere between 63rd and 34th Streets. Once home, I had just enough energy to feed the cats and take a shower. Then I pretty much crapped out for the rest of the day, right on schedule.

And that's why I give myself Mondays off from writing.

But I'm awake now, and here's a nice blog post for you. Let's fill it with overwrought metaphor, shall we? The topic for today: Sifting Soil.

Planting seeds was the order for the day, as it had been all week. They were working on brassicas as I came in, with plans to move to celery next. So our job was to prepare more planting flats. We filled a good 70 flats with sifted soil mix, then brought them to the table to press them down to whatever planting depth was required. Now, celery seeds are itty-bitty, so two of the three varieties being planted wanted a scant 1/8" planting depth. The third variety was pelleted, which is to say that each tiny celery seed is encased in a pinhead-sized ball of clay to make it feasible for use in a certain kind of seed-planting machine. Pellets being bigger, they need more like a 3/16" planting depth. Or so.

So with all those flats, we needed a lot of soil mix. And the pile of sifted mix was getting low. So we sifted more.

Several weeks ago, we'd sifted compost through a screen to get all the clumps and rocks out. This compost was mixed with the other things previously mentioned--vermiculite, manure, organic fertilizer, stuff--and the resulting mix needed to be sifted through a finer screen before it could be used for greenhouse planting. That's what we did today. The finer screen, a sturdy mesh in a wooden frame about the width of an air-hockey table but somewhat shorter, was propped up upon four big upside-down trash cans. We shoveled soil mix on top. Then, gloves on hands, we scrubbed the soil through the screen. Scrub, scrub, scrub! And underneath the screen a faerie-dust drifting of soil accumulated, faster than you'd think, into a great soft pile. Eventually nothing would be left on top of the screen but a bunch of pebbles and clumps the size of rabbit droppings. We tipped those onto the ground for later clean up, shoveled more dirt onto the screen, and repeated the process.

Soil is the basic building block for gardening. For creativity, there's a sort of soil that has to be sifted too. Our life experiences, our hot buttons and emotional triggers, our personal tastes in art, and the catalog of sensation that defines physical existence--these are the raw material. We sift through it constantly, artists being introspective types, and we make preliminary creations out of it all: journal entries, rough sketches, all the five-finger exercises of our craft. Then we mix it up, sift it some more, toss out the clumps and the pebbles that would make it hard for a seed to grow, and we take what's left and we plant things in it so that works of art might grow out of that lovingly prepared soil.

Sometimes I find myself unable to switch mental channels while something unhappy, some frustrating chapter of my life or maybe an infuriating conversation I didn't come out of well, is re-running itself on the back of my eyelids. The instinct is to try to push the thought away. I'll unconsciously start humming to drown out the sound of my thoughts. But it's futile; the re-run has to run its course. If I deny it now, it'll crop back up tomorrow when I'm trying to enjoy a mindless but fun activity. And it won't go away until... shoot, I don't know. It doesn't go away until it goes away. And until it does go away, it's on infinite repeat.

Maybe it would help to imagine the re-runs as simply another iteration of sifting the soil. Maybe each time it's a finer mesh screen, and another layer of blockages and impurities will be scrubbed away. The anger blunts, the guilt recedes, and insights remain behind. Maybe eventually the re-runs of that particular incident will stop, having left me with a fine drift of faerie-dust in the greenhouse of my brain, ready for me to plant a new crop of dreams in.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just the same old obsessive brooding that doesn't help anyone. But having a metaphor to view the phenomenon through, even an overwrought metaphor, well, that should make the next re-run season less boring and painful.

Those with an eye on the calendar may have noticed that it's November. Yes, I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. Yes, I am a Municipal Liaison for Boulder again. You can buddy me at Nanowrimo.org via my handle "vortexae" if you like.

It's been going well. I've been sticking rather precisely to a schedule of 1667 words per day, which is just few enough to keep from getting overwhelmed by despair that my main character still hasn't met the ghost in the castle yet. Or that I don't really know much about my character once she's a teenager, a woman in her 20s, a woman in her 30s, etc. I just keep telling myself that exploring her childhood in detail will help me get to know the possibilities for her growing up. Meanwhile, I think I know why the ghost is in that castle. It's sort of half the traditional Beauty and the Beast set up, and half High Spirits only without the comedy.

My rough draft already has a beta reader volunteer--not that I usually like anyone to read my rough draft, but for this story there's precedent. I could have sworn I blogged this, but apparently I have not: Round about July 2005, I sat down with the creative writing prompt to take one of Tori Amos's more inscrutable songs and write a story that the lyrics could possibly, if you squint at them over your shoulder, be said to describe. I cued up "Toast" (audio link; lyrics here). After about an hour I had finished what I thought was the first scene of a short story. OK, a long scene, but rough drafts tend to be full of babble that'll get cut later, so, not worried. And I emailed it to John. And he called it "chapter 1" and asked "when can I read the rest?" And I said to the Muse, "You lied! You said this was a short story!" and She said, "No! Not lied, I was just, you know, mistaken..."

October this year had started and I still hadn't quite decided what plot I was going to try to stretch out over 50,000 words this year. John said, "When are you going to finish my ghost story?" I said, "You know what? I'll finish it in November." So I'm working on it.

(Also? It is not particularly subtle, naming the main character Melissa. Given that "Toast" is the last track off The Beekeeper. I C WUT U DID THERE.)

Today, I think, Melissa will finally meet the ghost. It will be midway through Chapter 2. Or it will be the cliffhanger of Chapter 2 and continue into Chapter 3, I'm not sure. I'll report on it later today, along with yesterday's pot roast. Because I feel very clever about yesterday's pot roast, that's why.

Monday was a hugely unexpected marathon day for the novel. I expected to just do a nice 1,500 or so, now that the Weekend Of Writing Dangerously was successfully over. I expected to put the novel away for the evening and begin working on a short story that needed revisions. But as I was biking over to my friend's house for a dinner-and-writing date, my Muse freakin' jumped me. Treacherous wench! And I mean that in the nicest possible way...

Biking is good for you. It's low-impact, unlike jogging, so your knees don't suffer; it's aerobic if you push yourself a little, which is good for the heart; and, while you bike, there is nothing to do whatsoever except think. And if you're a writer, sometimes your mind starts churning through the work in progress. Which my mind did. And what it came up with was something absolutely perfect for what I'd begin thinking of as "the big kiss scene."

Couple of tangents there.

First: If your two male leads fall in love with each other by the end of the book, and you want this to be a surprise to the reader despite all the really obvious hints you've been dropping, you cannot simply rely on "No one expects it of two guys!" It's 2008, for crying out loud. Same-sex relationships may not be universally accepted (cf. CA Proposition 8), but they're pretty universally known. You need something else to make your character's budding romance a surprise. Like, I dunno, character development or something. Basically, you want your plot not to look stupid when we enter that day and age where readers bring to the page that simple, unspoken understanding that any two (or three, or four) characters can have romantic potential. That day and age, if not here already, are coming soon. (And I'm really happy about that!)

Second: I'm really beginning to regret naming the secondary character "Rocket." There's a good reason for it, but it still sounds like a porn star name to me. Which becomes damnably silly if the guy's story arc is going to take a romantic turn. (Do arcs take turns? Hrm.) Maybe I can defuse this a bit by having Timothy make fun of it when he first meets him. "'Rocket'? Are you kidding? That's fucking stupid. I mean, overcompensate much?"

Anyway. Back from the tangents to the whole point of this post, which is this: A bite of candy is good to get you moving, but eating all your candy at once might leave you bereft of inspiration tomorrow.

You know what a candy-bar scene is? Holly Lisle coins this phrase in her excellent essay, How To Finish A Novel:

It's one that you're just itching to write -- something sweet enough that you can dangle it on a stick in front of yourself so that you can say, "When I've done these next three chapters, I'll get to write that one.

Make sure your candy-bar scenes are spread out through the book, not all clumped together. Write down a single sentence for each of them. Don't allow yourself to do anymore than that, or you'll lose the impetus to move through the intervening scenes.

Well, my mind and/or my Muse played a mean trick on me Monday night. They found a looming problem in my existing plan for the Big Kiss Scene--a problem that arose due to the surprising turn the story took this weekend--and then it/they solved it so elegantly (if I may flatter myself) that the Big Kiss Scene wouldn't get the hell out of my head until I'd just freakin' written it down.

So I did.

And the scene is OK, but now it's gone. I wrote it. I need more candy and I have none!

Also, since I skipped a good 5,000 words of character development and action that should intervene between where I left off and where the Big Kiss Scene happens, I have in my head a terrible impression of bad pacing and out-of-character behavior that threaten to make the Big Kiss seem, well, kinda silly. It doesn't matter that I'm going to fix that by writing the intervening words; the impression is in my head now. This makes thinking up those words difficult.

It's like web design, for me. I am terribly, terribly impressionable. My team lead where I used to work liked to brag on me a little, telling people how, when I interviewed for the job, "Niki totally passed the HTML test with flying colors programming blind!" It's not because I'm that good. It's that I'm that susceptible to first impressions. The test involved a web page layout of sufficient complexity that I really had to get most of the code down before I could allow myself to look at the results. If I get the unfinished, terrible, disjointed, badly laid-out result in front of my face, I'm going to have a hard time finishing the job. The unfinished image will take precedence over the desired finished product in my head. So, yeah, I built a fairly complex table layout with rounded corner graphics and stuff mostly blind, but that's because I'm not good enough to do it looking every step of the way.

So I try to make my rough drafts fairly presentable so that my later revision efforts aren't stymied by having a bad first impression of what I wrote. It's also why I have a hard time getting started in the first place; I'm terrified of "ruining" a valuable story idea by putting it down on the page wrong.

Today I am avoiding the issue entirely by scrolling backwards and rewriting the opening. There's a bunch of implied off-stage action that could be brought on-stage: Rocket becoming aware of the "new penny" situation and driving off to fulfill his role as mentor, Timothy finding the coin and teleporting for the first time, stuff like that. Also Timothy's back-story: how his past shaped his present anti-social, foul-mouthed self. And, speaking of him being all anti-social, how that character note reconciles with him being the one to lecture Rocket on their responsibility to ordinary human beings. Stuff like that. Also, at the place where I left off, Timothy's about to try to cook breakfast in a kitchen that suddenly isn't connected to a municipal electricity grid, and he's going to realize that there isn't a lot of firewood around to be gathered. Their stay in the setting of Beowulf (post-dragon) is limited. Which will be fun for the characters to discover and argue over.

So I guess I'm not stuck. Just... feeling really silly in the morning. Which is how writing anything the least sexy or transgressive leaves me, so, no big deal. Right?

But I still need to re-stock on candy.

(See, there, I nearly did that "disappearing in a puff of shame" thing again.)

It's November 2nd. What's your word count? Yes indeed, it's that time of year: National Novel Writing Month! And we had a huge handful of local and not-so-local participants come over for the traditional all-nighter kick-off party. Great conversation! Great food! And, starting at midnight, great productivity! I don't think any participants who attended left having written anything less than 1200 words.

This was, of course, why I knew I'd get nothing whatsoever done on the StyleCareer.com project on Friday. After I got home from work (for the last time), I had a lot of cleaning up and prep cooking to do. Then people came over, and it was no use thinking about anything but NaNoWriMo.

It was Samhain, by the way. John and I celebrated Samhain by filling out our ballots together over dinner. Symbolic, that. Out with the old, in with the new! Our contribution to turning over a new leaf for the new year!

So I did in fact reach and slightly surpass my daily 1667 for Day 1. Then, after everyone went home and I puttered around the vast Internets for a while, I went to bed. At 5:00 AM.

Saturday I got nothing at all done towards anything at all. I slept and read and slept and read. I went to a NaNoWriMo write-in, and did nothing more than smile, hand out stickers, and try to stay awake. We call this "all-nighter recovery."

So now I'm sacrificing NaNoWriMo Day 2 in order to finish up the StyleCareer.com project. My editor granted me an extension, and I am not going to ask for another one. I'm still feeling terrible at how little I got done on Thursday. How does one go into the Denver Public Library with the intention of working, but in fact end up reading web comic archives for four hours? I kept thinking to myself, "Just another few minutes. Then I'll start." And, "I really should start. Why am I not starting?" Click. Click. Not to over-dramatize my particular indulgence in the doldrums, but it's these sorts of shameful, stupid afternoons that bring me closest to possibly understanding what it's like to live with depression.

I thought hard about finishing the project via an all-nighter Thursday, but not only would that result in a much too rushed product, but then I'd be in terrible shape for the planned all-nighter Friday. Of course, now I may be looking at an all-nighter tonight, but that's not nearly as bad. I slept a lot yesterday, and I have nowhere to be tomorrow. Nothing scheduled. Hell, I can be a nocturnal writer now, if I want. I'm a free woman!

So that's the status report. There will quite likely be another one in the wee hours.

Enough about that. It's NaNoWriMo, did I mention? This year, for the first time, I have no idea what I'm writing. Nearly none. I'm out of ready-made novel plots! How did this happen? This past year has been a terrible one for ideas--I've let myself get out the habit of producing them. Been trying to fix that lately, though. Been going on writing dates with a friend, forcing myself to stay in the notebook or word processor just a little longer than I think I can. One Monday morning a few weeks back, I started a character sketch describing a man I saw exiting the bagel shop, and the character turned into one of two guys on a road trip, on the run from a mysterious, scary, supernatural something or other that was tracking them across the country. So that's where my Day 1 words went: imagining how that story might have started. Hopefully, the Muse will be kind, and She'll keep feeding me enough of the story each day so that I'll reach the end of it by November 30.

There are, admittedly, worse ways a writer can put off finishing and submitting a work in progress than by creating new works in progress. I mean, it's not like I totally wasted the day. Still, it is another day that I haven't resubmitted "Surfeit" anywhere. Ah, well.

But! New fiction!

It came out of a homework prompt from my writing group: Find something unfinished in your writing archives, something that you started long ago that never went anywhere, and rework it into a finished piece. (Or something that could feasibly become a finished piece.) I'm already doing that with the demonic sweater story. But that story's not finished, and I wanted to share with the class something that was. So I started going through my daily writing scraps from 2001 and lit upon three brief vignettes that caught my eye:

The conversation wound down to a full stop, words replaced with dinner-time noises in an otherwise-silence awkward and shamed. There was nothing left to say. Fifteen mouths, fifteen sets of silverware strove to fill the space with sounds, but the sounds were still a quality of silence.

She began to keep track of when they came and went. "I knew I could look up the schedules easily, in the books, on the Internet, but somehow keeping track myself (keeping track of the tracks) made the trains more mine.

"One day, I left the house at midnight, walked to the tracks, and leapt for the next open car.

"I nearly didn't make it. I would have died under the wheels had someone not grabbed my hand and pulled me into the car. A superhuman effort. I felt so stupid -- who did I think I was, Xena? Lara Croft? I'm just a dumb woman who didn't even go to college and couldn't even have babies properly. I crochet afghans in front of the TV all day, then I make dinner at 5 to be ready for my husband when he comes home at 6. On Sundays I make us both breakfast. Why did I think I could vault onto a speeding train?

"We talked a long time, that man and I. I'm not even sure he really exists, to tell you the truth. Not here. He says he's a tourist."

But she's not the same woman as actually gets on the train in the 2001 scrap. That scrap has more stories hiding in it. It was suggested, among my writing group, that there is a series of interrelated stories about train travel and train-hopping implied by this old piece of nothing much. "I'm not even sure he exists... He says he's a tourist" is a phrase that won't get out of my head now.

And there was a third, unrelated (for now) piece of story sitting in that old file:

Below, the lights of the city going down like candles into water. Ffft. One by twos by hundreds sinking into a pond of darkness. Two meals later, all hell would certainly break loose.

Oh, and, hey - new freelance deadline warning! Don't worry, this one's not 'til October 31 and I've already got a jump on it, as you can see. 500 words down, 19,500 words and a whole lot more research to go...

Because writing new stories is always easier than editing rough drafts, isn't it? Yeah, I know. I know. But--hey! New story!

First off, this story is not a Jumper rip-off. Promise.

While I was at the World Horror Convention the other weekend, I had a momentary conversation in the elevator with a man who had just arrived that afternoon. His morning had been spent teaching math at a local high-school. He could only come to the Con after he got off work. He found it amusing, how different the two environments were: a Salt Lake City high school, the World Horror Convention. Indeed.

So I got out the elevator on Floor 3 and moseyed over to the suite in which the film series was showing. The movie scheduled for that two-hour block was Poltergeist, which I'd last seen on HBO in, like, 1983. I hadn't watched it since, mainly because it scared the pants off me (I was six) but partly also because on the third night after watching it Mom told me, "If you really feel the need to sleep in here with us again, you just can't watch that movie anymore." So I didn't. In many ways I was a mindlessly obedient child. (Hey, I still feel like I'm doing something forbidden when I go looking for something in my parents' walk-in attic. I wasn't allowed in there as a kid.)

All of which is beside the point, which is that the casual elevator conversation sort of transmogrified itself in my head during the movie until it became something around which the short story began to take shape. The conversation instead took place at an office party somewhere in the U.S., and the main character was listening with half an ear to a man from London talk about how he used to teach in high school. "Teach what?" she asks, making conversation. "Maths," he says. And she sort of drifts off, thinking about how plurals are even more plural in London, except that Sports sort of become singular, and there are a lot more "U"s to go around, and then as she continues daydreaming about what it must be like across the Atlantic she literally drifts off--vanishes out of the boring office party and finds herself in a classroom in London. She has a rather hard time getting home.

At first I thought she'd be stuck there permanently for some reason, like maybe she was meant to be in London and had to find out why, but I couldn't really get interested in taking the story in that direction. All the fantastic would sort of stop at that point. Besides, it was too much like playing a tabletop role-playing game in which an inept gamemaster clumsily assembles the party by authorial fiat. "OK, so, you're in the middle of whatever you're doing when this mysterious guy appears and says 'You are needed elsewhere.' Then suddenly, like, whoa! You're standing in the woods and there's four people there looking at you--OK, everyone describe your characters to each other."

So instead of making her unable to teleport again, I thought about the other extreme. What would happen if the ability to teleport came so easily to her that she started doing it accidentally? If it was as easy as imagining a place, any place, real or fictional? If it was as easy as thinking--and as hard not to do?

Ever had someone distract you from your hiccups by telling you not to think of purple foxes?

So that's my excuse for not having worked on anything in my editing queue today. I got clobbered by a new story instead. Not that I've left my editing queue entirely untouched, understand - the other day I rewrote "The Witness" from scratch and from memory. That's the story I read for the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest at World Horror 2007. (You can read the winning stories from that year at the Twilight Tales website. Start here with the 1st place story and follow the links back to 2nd and 3rd.) I think I know how to make it better now. I think some of what will make it better is in the new version I wrote the other day. Maybe tomorrow I'll take both versions out, side by side, and - I dunno - synthesize them or something.

Oh, and Poltergeist still scares the pants off me. SRSLY.

Apparently Writer's Digest don't actually post a prompt a day anymore. They must have run out the bank or something. Now they only post one a week.

Here's the prompt that caused me such disgust the other day:

It's garbage day and you put your trash on the curb, but when you return home from work, it's still there (though everyone else's garbage has been taken away). The next week, it happens again--and again the following week. Why is the trash collector snubbing you? Write a scene explaining why he's skipping your garbage and how you figured it out.

I don't know exactly what it is about that prompt that just kills inspiration dead at my feet. Maybe it's the sixth grade English teacher style: Now, class, here's your assignment. Something about the way it's worded puts me back at four and a half feet off the ground looking up at a middle-aged man or woman (it doesn't matter which) with a blackboard behind their heads and a half-patronizing, half-eager smile on their face. Isn't that exciting, kids? Doesn't it just rev up the old idea juicer? And maybe it's the way the prompt closes off all the possibilities except the least interesting ones. They've already decided for you why the garbage collecter isn't taking your trash: He's snubbing you.

I'm just not interested in the story behind that social drama.

I told some friends about the ghastly badness of this prompt, and we started brainstorming how the prompt could have been made interesting by being left more open-ended or simply being worded differently. Most of our ideas centered around having one's garbage indeed taken--except for a single item left behind. "You and the garbage collector are vying for the love of the same woman; the items the g. c. leaves behind are to throw you off the track." "You and the garbage collector are spies in a vast network. The g. c. leaves items of your trash behind in order to convey coded messages which you will then pass along to the only other member of the network you know of." "Yes, but your spy network trades only in the most mundane of data. 'Mrs. Murphy is planning a Mac & Cheese dinner tonight.'" "The messages the g. c. leaves you are entirely about food. Is he trying to ask you out on a date?"

The spy network was my idea. I liked it, so I ran with it.

I retrieved the garbage can lid from where it had been left. As usual, the garbage collectors had tossed it on the ground, projecting it in the natural trajectory caused by letting go of the lid the moment it could be said to have been removed from the can. There'd been a bit of wind around lunchtime, too, so it had gone down the block a ways. I picked it up off Mrs. Murphy's lawn, sighed, and trudged back to my own driveway.

It was when I went to put the lid back on the can that I saw it. And I remembered.

So many years... I'd almost forgotten. "Act natural," they'd said, "blend in," and I'd done such a good job. I'd found employment, found a social group, made friends. "Try to think like one of them." I'd even married one of them, had children with him, two children, Tom and Renee, sixteen and ten years old and so beautiful like their father.

Twenty years, and you almost believe you're one of them-- until the message comes that it's time to be one of you again. Looking down into the garbage can I felt the rest of me in the back of my mind, hidden away for so long but beginning to stretch and yawn after its long sleep. The temperature of my blood shifted two degrees to the cooler, and the subtle halos I'd learned to ignore stood out in my vision around everything with a pulse. A sparrow taking off from the curb: a glow of red and a haze of violet in the corner of my eye.

I had been told they would contact me, and that I would know it when I saw it. I knew it now.

My garbage can that should have been empty contained one thing: the shed skin of a snake. And to prove it was no accident, the fragile tube of dead matter had been threaded through a large bead made of no material found on earth. Ourlithk. I had to control myself from pouncing on it like a magpie. The metal was beyond price. You didn't buy it; you were only ever given it by the very powerful, and then you knew you belonged to them.

Of course I belonged to them. I was one of them.

And so, apparently, was one of the garbage collectors. At least.

I rolled the can back into my garage, carefully acting as though nothing had happened. Just in case a neighbor was watching. Once inside with the garage door closed, I reached in slowly and retrieved the ourlithk bead. The snake skin crumbled at my touch. It had been merely a symbol of what I was supposed to do. The bead I brought into the kitchen with me, strung on a piece of twine, and hung around my neck. I would not remove it again while I stood upon the earth.

The rest of the week loomed ahead of me, a desert of dread and anticipation. I would have to act normal. And then, next Monday morning, I would wait for the garbage truck, and for my contact.

I updated my NaNoWriMo profile recently. The bit where it says, "Favorite writing music," it always used to say "Blue Man Group: Audio" there, because I usually prefer writing to instrumentals. I've even got my computer set to start playing the album at 6:00 AM in the hopes that I will, upon hearing "TV Song," wake up and write. Generally this doesn't work. Generally I just hit the MUTE button on the outside of the computer and go back to sleep.

A couple of years ago I update that field to say, in addition, "FlashBackRadio.com." All '80s, nothing but the '80s, live DJ love for the '80s with listener requests and dedications. I recommend it. When I'm anywhere with internet and I'm not having a craving for anything in particular, that's what I put on. And then I request Rush's "YYZ," and I type "Greetings and departures" where the request form prompts for a new message subject line.

That has changed this year. This year sometime I was listening to a-ha's East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and thinking for the hundredth time that I really ought to get ahold of the actual "one-hit-wonder" album that everyone thinks of when they think of a-ha. The one with "Take On Me" on it. That would be Hunting High And Low. For some reason I finally acted on that thought this November.

And the two albums have been on infinite repeat pretty much since.

That will probably change soon, because I'm starting to get that weird dissatisfied feeling, a sort of almost physical ennui, where I'm still singing along and getting the songs stuck in my head, but it's not as fun anymore. It's not like I get sick of 'em. It's more like getting a surfeit of 'em. Like the way you start munching in response to a sweets or snacks craving and then after a while you realize you're still eating the yummy stuff mechanically but not really enjoying the experience. My sing-along voice is getting a little tired. It's getting bored of the melodies and even the usual harmonies. Some really improbable counterpoints are starting to come out.

There's an unusual amount of storm imagery on these two albums. It's rather striking when strung together into one big playlist. HH&L ends in a song called "Here I Stand And Face The Rain." After that, the first song on ES/WM is "Crying in the Rain." It has some nice rumbly weather sound-effects over the entrance of the main melodic line. The same sound effects accompany the penultimate song on the album, "Rolling Thunder," bringing the album full-circle so effectively that the last song feels like an epilogue.

And, y'know, all that storm imagery is sorta appropriate, isn't it, given the title and topic of the novel I'm working on.

No, I didn't just make that connection. But I was still embarrassingly late making it. Maybe I figured this out by Day 7, I dunno. In any case, I'm probably going to stick with this playlist throughout November, even if I do sometimes feel like the taste has cloyed.

There may be more connections to make, or inspiration to take, from some of these songs' cryptic lyrics.

It's just as well that this rambling work of prose isn't intended for publication any time soon. If I were to try to submit it any time this year, it would come back within the week bearing a big red stamp saying, "HEROES RIP-OFF."

Which would be fair, I guess, considering that even though I've been working on this novel, on and off paper, for two decades now, the bit that screams "HEROES RIP-OFF" only came to me about two nights ago.

So, you know, just in case I lost all my inhibitions along with my sanity and took it into my head to try to publish this purplish sort of kind of real people fan fic thing, I'd have one last little element capable of dissuading me. Just in case.