author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I really really meant to come home from work today and get 2,000 words closer to THE END of The Bookwyrm's Hoard. Only I got tackled by a new story on my way home. While I was biking. I didn't know the Muse could run that fast.

The logical progression went something like this: I was reading Making Light, like I do. Specifically this thread about odd new so-called security measures at the US/Canada border. The bit about gunboats on the Great Lakes turned this-a-way. Which made me think about these time-sensitive submission guidelines.

Oh, go on. Follow the links. Let them open in new windows/tabs. It won't kill you.

Anyway, what do I know from pirates? Or the Great Lakes? But, y'know, I do know a fair bit about life on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. And while real-life piracy is a subject opaque to me, there are some famous specimens of the fantasy realms to be explored.

And by the time I got home I had a rough idea of the beginning and the end, along with which harmless bits of my childhood should be wedged in at which strategic points in the plot. Such as the building and subsequent demise of the neighborhood fishing pier, the question of where the cars on the Causeway go after they cross the horizon, and the miracle of actually catching an edible fish off the back of the Bonnabel Pumping Station.

Several hours later, I've got the edges slotted into place. Next: a handful of identical-looking blue sky pieces and identical-looking green-tree pieces that need to be placed experimentally side by side by side.

More tomorrow, no doubt. The nice thing about this particular subject is, it has a deadline. This time I mean to hit it.

Generally it's a good idea to sic your dreams on a plot conundrum. However, I'm afraid that Charles Welton will not be piloting a miniature giant robot in an attempt to assassinate Gwen during her reading/signing/wine-and-cheese reception at the bookstore's Grand Opening.

Dude! I know where the quill is! And I know what it does!

It came to me on the bus Wednesday night--I was using the hour-long bus ride between Boulder and Denver to get my daily 2K written. I was working on the scene with the one sympathetic family in the neighborhood, the one that actually tried to bring abuse charges against one of the missing kids' parents. The family comes to visit and they have a bit of a pow-wow. Well, the mom is more prepared to trust Gwen than the dad is, mainly because she grew up in the neighborhood too (so why doesn't she already know Gwen? Must think about this), but she wants to make sure Gwen really does have a history with The Bookwyrm's Hoard.

So she tells a story about Mrs. Nimbel and the quill, and she gently challenges Gwen to tell one of her own:

"...Anyway, I stormed out the house and came here. Like always. And Mrs. Nimbel said--" I could still hear her voice, surprisingly agile and sly, her voice "--she said, 'Gwen, what's with the glumsickle you're sucking on? Get over here and spit it out.'"

Cindy gave a little peal of laughter. "What's with that glumsickle, Mommy?" Dierdre patted her hand and favored her with a cautious smile.

"So I told her. And she did get out that quill, didn't she? A peacock's wing feather fitted with a brass wide-tip nib. And she made me tell her a question, just like you said. 'Do I have to be a doctor?' That's what I asked."

"And then what?"

Ron's voice made me jump. I hadn't been expecting him to get into the story. I looked up at him and said, "Well, I flung myself onto this sofa here, all dramatic-like, and I grabbed a magazine. I paged through it, got caught up in the articles, and after a while I reached the back cover and there was Mrs. Nimbel standing there with the paper in her hands. I read the question out loud back to myself, and what came out of my mouth, immediately, was, 'No. I have other obligations.' And then I just--like this--clapped my hand over my mouth, and said through my fingers, 'What the hell does that mean?'"

And I know where it is. That came to me too. I know where it is, why it got there, and how it's going to get found. It has also occurred to me that the thug's message about the parents wanting the bookstore gone isn't entirely a red herring. At least one parent is connected with the evil corporate mastermind guy, but it's not why I thought. It's much darker than that.

That I'm not going to reach THE END by 50K has nothing to do with plot after the Bookwyrm's grand opening. It has to do with how much plot is required in order to reach the grand opening.

She said "Get closer." She said, "What are you looking at?" She said, "Keep the pen moving." Presumably she's still saying all of that, and well should she, because it's true.

If the name is unfamiliar to you, get yourself a copy of Writing Down the Bones to start with. Read it. Do the "Try this" exercises. It won't take you long. At worst, you may simply decide it's all new age hokeyness designed to keep amateur writers eternally amateurs, and you'll kick the dust off your heels and move on. Or you may decide that it's a valuable addition to your personal arsenal of inspirational tricks and that you will go forth and do likewise forever more.

I'm in the latter camp. Today's NaNoWriMo session is an example of why.

Gwen is sitting at the big check-out desk in the bookstore, trying to figure out how to save both the store and her life. Doing the one seems mutually exclusive with the other. As she sits there thumbing through the phone book (SELF-DEFENSE, she thinks, and then thinks, but how much can I learn in a week? He said if I didn't clear out of here in a week I'm dead), she does like I do: her brain slides off the difficult thing and onto a thought more pleasant. To wit, herself as the owner of the bookstore she's loved since childhood, doing the things she idolized the previous owner for doing.

"Get closer," says Natalie. "What are you looking at?"

She runs her hand over the wood of the desk (sturdy oak, dark, glossy and smooth with age and use) and notes the many little cubbies, pigeon-holes, and drawers. One for every possible object. There is a cut-glass inkwell permanently affixed to the desk; the ink has dried to a crust in the months since the previous owner's death. Gwen will have to clean it out before she refills it. Metallic purple, she thinks, and remembers how the previous owner would take a quill pen from its place in that inkwell and write a fabulously curly-cued X at the "sign here" part of credit card slips and IOUs. Gwen imagines doing likewise. And because she is a young adult novelist, she imagines signing her name with that quill for teenage fans of her books.

The room takes on all three dimensions. I'm in there with Gwen. I'm reading the titles on the magazine rack, I'm lounging in the faux-leather chair by the window to the left of the door, and I'm opening the door to make the bells tied to the return bar jangle.

It occurs to me that what distracts Gwen from her reverie is a customer. Her first ever. A young girl here against the express wishes of her mother, who knows that the children who went missing over the past year were last seen at the bookstore. And, after much introductory conversation, the girl says, "Where is the quill?"

And Gwen looks around and says, "Crap! Where is the quill?" Neither of them can find it. Finding it will be vitally significant to the plot, especially as regards Gwen's relationship with the Bookwyrm and the Space Between The Stories.

The plot thickens. And all because Natalie Goldberg said "Get closer."

Of course, the guy I'm thinking of who can't stand Natalie Goldberg also doesn't much like NaNoWriMo, so this won't convince him. But for folks like him we can just pretend I didn't say NaNoWriMo, and that this is merely the first draft of a novel like any other novel. It is, actually. I simply happen to be writing it in November at the rate of 1,000-2,000 words per day.

If you don't recognize the manuscript stats at left, that's because I changed the title. "Putting Down Roots" is now "Seeds Of Our Future." I don't guarantee the new title's longevity, but it'll do for now.

There's this thing that I do. It looks a lot like procrastination if you're not me, if you're watching me from outside my head. Even inside my head they look a lot alike. But there's a huge difference in productivity, trust me.

Procrastination goes like this: I know I have to do something. Rewrite a story, clean the bathroom, whatever. But every time I think about doing it, my brain slides right off. It's like trying to grab a frictionless surface and not even noticing that I failed to take hold. At most, I'll think, "Sorry, I can't work on that story yet; I still have this freelance gig to finish up!" And I'll think I'm thinking, "I can't wait to have the freelance stuff done so I can go back to working on fiction," but in reality I'm all like, "Good thing I'm under another deadline, or I'd have to actually work on that story!"

But this other thing. This composting, soup-making, spell-casting thing. It's different. The key difference is, my brain gets a good grip on that slippery mental object and doesn't let go until it's done. In the case of cleaning the bathroom, I start to see myself doing it, I start visualizing myself hard at work at the task, and the visualization sort of accumulates weight until critical mass is reached and I must get up and do it. In the case of rewriting a story--this story, in fact--the story takes shape in my head until it must be put onto paper.

This isn't waiting for the Muse to visit. This is putting Her to work right now and not letting Her clock out until She's done.

Monday I finally finished compiling all the Borderlands critiques. By that time, I'd made some notes both mental and in ink towards plot shifts. Since enough people thought that the aliens were a red herring, I wrote down the question, "Remember why you put them there in the first place?" I thought back to the rough draft and the original plot logic, before I'd ever posited The Locusts of Gaia or any other plausible reason why our two main characters were suspected in the Ambassadors' disappearance. Another note I wrote down: "Notes towards a new opening--" and then the different places that different critiques had suggested starting: "sermon, falls asleep too quickly, supplies are running low." And so forth.

Over the next 48 hours, the new opening scene along with new configurations of, say, the fried perch argument or the banana reverie, underwent a slow congealing at the back of my head. Each time I consciously thought about them, there was something new in place, and it had all the weight of "That's how it happened." (You know that weight, right? When the comments came in and many of them said, "you don't need this fake sci-fi element, just make it about Daphne and Aaron and the pure horror/erotica plant thing," my mental reaction was, "No, you don't understand, the Ambassadors were there. It happened. Like 9/11 and the Challenger disaster and, and, my high school graduation all happened.")

So this morning at last I began to write the new opening scene. The "must" moment had arrived.

Now, don't be fooled. It's possible to squander the "must" moment, to not sit down and write when critical mass is reached but to put it off and put it off some more. A spring can't hold tension forever; it'll break or stretch under the strain. So the story can lose its push, weaken its hold, and then I'm just procrastinating again. I have to start the ignition countdown over again--and with what? I've already reread the old version and compiled critiques. What more can I do? Doubtless I'll come up with something, sometime, but not this and not now.

But I didn't squander the moment. I wrote. And now I've emailed the opening scene to the Super-Sekrit VPX Gmail Address so that my classmates can, if they wanna, tell me if it generates enough "gotta" to keep a reader interested. And I'll be going back to the rest of the rewrite in just a little while.

But first I need to let the next scene come together--it isn't quite soup yet. And while my back-burners simmer it along, I'll get another thousand words done on this year's November novel.

And that'll be the rest of my evening.

As I may or may not have mentioned, I attend a writing class, hosted by Melanie Tem, every second and fourth Wednesday down in Denver. Melanie gives us homework assignments--and if there are enough people new to the group, she explains that the assignments are to inspire, not to burden. "No, you don't have to do it." Doing it is mainly why I've written so many new drafts since I began attending in May of 2004.

The most recent homework assignment was this: Write a 10 page (2500 word) piece. Of whatever. In other words, "Oh, just write a brand new short story."

O.... K.

Well.

This would be why, with two short story rewrites pending, another 30K-word freelance deadline looming, and several critiques owing, I did none of those things today but instead wrote some brand new fiction.

It started out with Tarot cards, because that's what I do when I have no idea what to write. I favor the Vertigo Tarot, and I drew the Three of Swords, the High Priestess (a.k.a. Mad Hettie), and the Page of Swords. I spent a good 300 words just describing what was on the cards, but after that things sorta took off. All of my manuscripts acquire shorthand references, like "Ragnarok comes to Boulder" ("Snowflakes") or "the mermaid novel" (Drowning Boy) or "the one where people turn into plants" ("Putting Down Roots"). I think this new piece is going to get referred to as "The one with the prostitute who teleports her pimp into Alpha Centauri."

Yeah. I like it.

Its current working title, "Knowing the Territory," comes from my interpretation of Rachel Pollack's interpretation of the Vertigo Tarot's Page of Swords. And I would definitely argue that someone who is oddly gifted with the ability to, at times, apprehend the entire universe as a singularity--well, she knows the territory very well indeed.

But. Gods damn it. The Muse pulled another bait-and-switch on me. When the main character hands in her catastrophic resignation letter, that isn't the end of a short story. That's the end of chapter one. Of a brand new novel. (Everyone sing it with me now: "Like I didn't already have enough to do!")

Well. With this out of my system for the moment, tomorrow I'm going to be good and dutiful. I will plod through my checklist: Contact interview subjects for freelance projects and log 1500 words thereto. Do one of the critiques I owe. Begin reading through critiques of "Roots." But sometime in the near future there will be a rewrite of Chapter One of Territory and a plotting out of what comes next. Because this wants writing. When the Muse gets in touch, She means it.

From the Times-Picayune:

The prison, made up of 10 separate lockups, lost electricity and backup generators as it was inundated by floodwater. Stuck without food or water, inmates broke windows, burned blankets and rammed holes in buildings. Thirteen escaped before the State Department of Corrections sent guards to restore order and assist in a challenging three-day evacuation in which the prisoners were fished out by boat.

The report, released by the ACLU's National Prison Project, also addresses the current situation faced by the inmates, who were scattered among 38 Louisiana prisons and jails after the evacuation. Many of those prisoners remain incarcerated far from New Orleans due to the painstakingly slow recovery of the city's criminal justice system, states the report, entitled "Abandoned and Abused - Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina."

"Nearly every day, attorneys discover another prisoner whose case has slipped through the cracks," the report states. "These prisoners are doing 'Katrina time,' as it has come to be known."

(It also wants to make use of the phrase, "That man didn't touch the water," to describe someone who had a suspiciously disproportionately easy time during the storm and its aftermath. Mad propz to Deputy Ducre for that one.)

Who was the author who was said to write evocative phrases down on little slips of paper and put those slips of paper in a container he called his "demon box"? Yeah. One for the demon box.

Hullo. I'm in the middle of some persistent blahs at the moment, blahs with combine travel recovery apathy with holiday apathy. The result: I've spent the last couple of days mostly in bed, reading books picked up at Denver's Tattered Cover and Fairhaven's Village Books. I regret to say that the latter bookstore hasn't made as wise a choice in adhesive labelling as the former. A Tattered Cover book's pricing labels peel off clean and easy (as do those on a book bought at the Boulder Bookstore), whereas my Village Books purchases had labels I really had to work hard at removing. They did eventually come off, however, so they're worlds ahead still of some bookstores I could mention but don't.

However, in the midst of the past two days apathy, we are in life and joyous surprises. First, a new short story began really taking form on the plane from Denver to Seattle. It's not tangible enough yet to get it a place in the database, but it's close. It's one of those odd plots that started with a misperception: in this case, a hallucination. Except I don't really get hallucinations. Maybe it was an after-image. Or maybe it was what my friends and I have taken to calling "a Charles de Lint moment," just one of those random encounters one has with the weird and out-of-the-ordinary and possibly supernatural. Anyway. Whatever that blue glow at the top of Norwood Drive really was, in the story it's an angel. Or the ghost of an angel. And it shows up for about two seconds every evening at the intersection of Norwood and Broadway at a quarter to eleven.

So that was good. Then for the surprise waiting for me in my inbox when I finally checked email late Monday afternoon: I've been accepted to Viable Paradise X! [Edited to better reflect the resulting level of enthusiasm.] I suppose those first three chapters of Drowning Boy have benefitted even more greatly from the latest revision than I'd realized. Hooray!

Both of these good things necessitate work, so it's a good thing that I am pronouncing tomorrow A Day Free Of Apathy and getting right on it.

Well, sometimes fan fiction is bad for the brain, or at least is accompanied by a lack of a brain, as is evidenced by the case of Lori Jareo. Lori wrote a Star Wars fanfic, cranked it through a POD-machine, and then put it up for sale on Amazon. Despite trying to make a buck off of it in Bezos's backyard, she thinks she'll dodge the impending copyright/trademark violation cease-and-desist with the claim that she only did it for friends and family and that no one knows it exists. John "Whatever" Scalzi begs to differ.

But I digress. In its place, fan fiction can be good for the soul. It can be a playground in which the blocked writer lets the creative self play and play out from under the thumb of the editor-ego. And that's what I've been up to this week.

My dabblings in that arena have been few and, aside from one story that was turned in as an assignment in high-school English (a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale set in the world of Rush's 2112), largely unread. But every once in awhile I get this Idea. It tends to be the sort of Idea that sticks around for awhile.

Here's one of 'em.

I just got done feeding my annual craving to reread Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. If you've only ever seen the movie (and if, Gods forfend, you've suffered through the abomination that is the second movie), then you owe it to yourself right now to go get this book and read it. But if you've seen the movie, you'll remember how this disembodied narrator voice comes out of nowhere in the last minute of the movie and says something like, "Bastian made many more wishes and had many, many adventures. But that's another story." In the book, the narrative does that all the time. Some chapter will come to an end, and a secondary character will wave goodbye, and the narrative will hint at what will become of the character but then break off with, "But that's the beginning of another story that will be told at another time."

Ever since I first read this book, I've wanted to write a cycle of short stories, each one inspired by one of these "another story" teases. So this week I started playing around with one of the first prompts. It involves Cairon, the black zebra-striped centaur physician who assigns Atreyu his quest, whose "destiny was to lead him over very different and unexpected pathways" after he successfully delivers his message and nearly dies of the effort.

I have no illusions that the results will be publishable, not without seeking all the right permissions and of course rewriting and revising and rewriting again. But it's fun to dabble. It's a good thing to work on when I've just finished one project and can't seem to get started on another. And who knows? Maybe it will have a destiny upon unexpected pathways itself, ones beyond gathering cyber-dust at the bottom of my writing archive zip disk.

(And come to think of it, the Rapunzel story might in fact become publishable if the fanfic element remains oblique enough. Someone's looking for retold fairy tales.)

Well, that came out of nowhere. The first few lines of it occured to me as I walked down to the Dumpster to throw out some stuff. It's so warm out, I was thinking, you'd expect it would just go spring into summer and that's that, but April is supposedly the big snowy month in the Rockies. Hell, I'm told it's been known to snow on Midsummer up here. We don't actually get summer along the Front Range, I suppose; we just get occasional breaks between winter storms....

They've reopened some of the slopes in the Vail Valley. Katie and Joshua went, but I told them I'd sit this one out. I don't trust a June snow.

Tomorrow, the synopsis for Drowning Boy. Tomorrow a lot of things. But today's writing session was evidently all about playtime. And why not? Today was my day to work at the RRSR studios, editing WireReady playlists and managing the listener and volunteer databases. That counts as work. Why shouldn't I play in the evening?

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

Nyaah.