author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

No one needs this. I mean, really. No one actually needs me starting on the sequel to The Drowning Boy at this point. But that's what my brain was doing last night as I tried to get me to sleep. And since the coach car of an Amtrak train isn't nearly as easy to get to sleep in at night after two cups of coffee and one of tea as it is in the late morning after being up since six, my brain had a lot of time to write Chapter One.

Well, and of course it's to do with Brian Windlow's children. Why else would there be a sequel?

But... and this is the part where I beat myself about the head and shoulders with a broomstick... but my brain also decided last night that Brian isn't dead.

The hell? I said. After the penultimate chapter in Drowning Boy, you tell me he's not dead? What is this, a bad gothic romance?

Well, says my brain, it's not like we saw the body. And yes, if you want to know, this is a gothic romance. After a fashion, anyway. Whether it's bad remains to be seen.

But... but... not dead? Sharks, man! There were all sharks in the water!

It's hard to imagine a brain smiling smugly and quietly to itself while twiddling its thumbs, but at this point, mine managed it.

So I woke up this morning and I wrote the first 1500 or so words, which begin this way:

Three weeks into the swim season, my son came home with news that just about stopped my heart.

When I could breathe again, I said, "They don't like it, huh?" and congratulated myself on keeping my cool.

"And it's not like I do it that much," he said, nodding. He was eight years old and already a super-serious kid. "The chlorine hurts my nose. But it makes them so mad when I do it. They say I'm cheating."

"Well, you are, honey." Was I calm? I was calm like a Valium bouquet. I was calm like a three-toed sloth. "I mean, when they say 'underwater contest,' they're competing to see who can hold their breath the longest. If you're not holding your breath, that's cheating, right?" See how calm I was.

So this'll go on the shelf until I figure that out. Meanwhile, I've got a couple of novels to revise. I mean, it's not like I don't have enough to do here. Look, two more hours on Drowning Boy still hasn't got me to the end of Chapter Two, and revising that phone call with Mrs. Windlow is going to be unmitigated hell. So what do I need with starting brand new novels at this time, huh? I ask you.

As you may or may not know, I like to get my Tarot deck involved in my writing. Sometimes I'm determined to create new material, but I have no idea what to write about. Sometimes I'm just stuck on a story. In any case, I shuffle a few times, draw, and start babbling onto a blank page about what I see.

Typically I use the Vertigo Tarot. At times I'll cross-reference the Rider-Waite deck, which I keep in numeric order specifically for that reason, but it's Dave McKean's imagery that speaks to me much more than Pamela Colman-Smiths; and even if I get a little impatient with Rachel Pollack's interpretations from time to time, I find them more comfortably Jungian and modern than Waite's.

Which is all to explain why I got the impression that my Tarot deck was being singularly uncooperative the other day.

In the "Trilobite" story, Selby Oldham is a psychometrist. That's someone who gets psychic impressions from touching objects. You've probably seen a TV drama or read a book concerning a psychic working for the police, right? He or she touches the murder weapon and objects at the scene of the crime and gets flashes of how the killing occurred? Right. Well, Selby's like that, only less of the crime forensics and more stuff like paleontology and anthropology. Fossils and ancient artefacts.

She has, by the time of the story, lost hope in her dreams. She's living an eventless, unfulfilling life, working as a curator's assistant in a natural science museum. By the end of the story, she will have found inspiration to pursue her ambitions again. Only trouble was, I had no idea what her ambitions actually were.

So, hello Tarot! Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, "What are Selby's dreams?" shuffleshuffle, shuffle. And I drew...

The Heirophant. Reversed.

Again, recall, Vertigo Tarot. Which DC/Vertigo character did they choose for that particular Major Arcana card? That's right. Dream of the Endless. The Sandman. Morpheus His-Own-Self. And I drew him reversed.

That's right. In answer to "What dreams did Selby give up on?" I got, "She gave up on her dreams."

Imagine you asked your friend, "What plans do you have for Friday?" and your friend said, "Yeah, Friday..." and wandered off. That's about the impression I got.

And this ain't the first time it's said that kind of thing to me, either.

Of course, consulting the Rider-Waite's more traditional Heirophant (not to mention consulting a friend who actually supplements her paycheck by reading Tarot during the summertime) helped put things in perspective. "Oh, yes, tradition and passed-down wisdom and heirarchy and such. Maybe Selby was trying to climb a corporate ladder, or pursue a traditional education at a university, and it wasn't right for her for some reason." But still.

There was once a time when I stopped doing my freewriting exercises for a long time. When I started up again months later, and I used the Tarot deck as a prompt, shuffling just as thoroughly as ever, it gave me the same darn card it had given me all that time ago. Ten of Pentacles, it was: it shows a face with ten pentacle-coins stacked neatly atop his head; the tenth coin completely blocks his mouth. (I suppose one could read that the face is actually speaking the pentacle, but I see it stopping up his mouth and silencing him. Especially considering I drew it reversed.) It's a card I personally associate with the kind of writer's block that comes of too much intellectualizing and perfection-seeking.

"You know, that thing you were working on last year? Right. Well, you never quite finished dealing with that."

Yeah. I know. Smart-ass cards.

No, not me. I ain't quitting. No sir. I didn't do a full 2K today, but I did this much:

A daily word count of 1,667 would have put you at 36674 words.
You have averaged 1600.227 words per day thus far.
A daily average of 1859.375 will make you a winner!
Good luck!

But not everyone "wins" NaNoWriMo. And that's OK. From talking to at least two people today who started the challenge and then stopped, here are two reasons to give up on the idea of a single 50K work written in 30 days:

• When you're no longer interested in the story. One person I know started an entirely new novel during Week 2, and now has given up on that story too. But she still comes to write-ins and does stuff like freewriting and brainstorming. Sometimes a given story just dies, or needs to be put on the shelf for awhile. Pushing past the point of authorial interest will only guarantee an uninterested reader.
• When you're no longer interested in writing. Some people take on NaNoWriMo, having never written much before, with the intent to discover whether they have a book in them. Sometimes they discover that no, they don't. At that point, it's probably best to stop writing and move on to something one would prefer to spend time on. Because, heck, life's too short to spend on something you don't fundamentally enjoy. Granted, writing isn't always playtime, even for the most inspired writer in the world. It'll be work from time to time too. But if the work isn't fulfulling, move on to something else. Don't turn your daily word quotas into a penance undertaken for the sin of not coming out of NaNoWriMo a lifelong career writer.

Moving back into my own NaNoWriMo 2005 experience: I did a bit of kvetching today about how Right Off The Page is the second book in a series whose first book isn't written. Kandybar's response was a sort of "Oh, I hate it when that happens, I've totally done that." My husband, on the other hand, said, "You're an idiot!" He's very sweet and wants to see me get published, and he knows that if I'm banking on this series then I'll have to publish The Bookwyrm's Hoard first.

He also knows that means one more book for me to write before I'll finally get back to work on "the ghost story." This refers to an as-yet unnamed novel which began as a short story roughly inspired by thinking too much about Tori Amos's song "Toast." That alleged short story refused to show signs of ending after 2,000 words. (At this point I had Stern Words with my Muse about false advertising. "Oops," she said, "did I say short story? Maybe I, er, underestimated." She means lied.) John would like very much to read it, but only those 2,000 words exist as of yet. He would like more of it to exist, please, and as soon as possible.

It's times like this when I thank the Gods for supportive husbands. Some writers have spouses that say, "That's nice, dear, but when are you getting a real job?" or "What do you mean, you're busy? You're only writing." I have a spouse that says, "Is it finished yet? Can I read it? What do you mean, no?"

(He would also like me to be the next J. K. Rowling so he can retire on my book advances. Well, so would I.)

It's nearly Thanksgiving. I have thanks to give. This is not the only reason, but it's a big one.

It is now officially November, and now I have a word count. We had a Countdown To Word One House Party. CO_Butterfly came over, and my husband, AKA Worldnamer, pulled out his ancient decrepit Compaq (yes, we both have ancient decrepit Compaqs--mine's more ancient but less decrepit, haha), and we got to work. Well, we sort of worked. We also did a lot of chatting and goofing off. Sarah and Bridget were over for Halloween/Samhain goodness, moral support, and, well, just to be NaNoWriMo groupies.

Dude. Boulder is so hoppin', we have NaNoWriMo groupies.

(And no, that short story did not get written in time to submit. But, oh well. It'll still get written. I'm sure I'll find somewhere else that will publish an Adam & Eve spec fic story.)

As for that other novel, I had a dream last night. I had this weird dream wherein I was in the New Orleans area, at my parents' house, and going swimming at the neighbor's house every morning while the neighbor rode a bicycle around the bottom of the swimming pool... none of which is actually the point, because the point is that in the dream I got a call from Wizards of the Coast, which happened to be headquartered right there in Metairie. And they said, "We totally want to publish your book. How soon can you bring the full manuscript by?" And I said, "Dude! Right now!" And I brought it. And it was on this sort of old tape backup drive, and they were having trouble getting the file off the drive, and so I finally said, "Well, y'know, that isn't actually the real manuscript anyway... I'll bring you the real one in a day or two." I didn't want to admit that I hadn't actually finished the publishable draft. But the editor totally caught on and gave me this sort of pity hug like she was about to break the news to me that she wasn't going to buy my book anyway...

So. Yeah. I'll be doing both novels this November. And did I mention that I still haven't finished and submitted that other other novel? *Sigh*

Not that having too much writing to do is the worst of fates, or anything...

In case I ever get this thing published, I want to point out right here for the record that it's not autobiographical. I mean, just because I mentally set it in the neighborhood where I grew up, just because it sprouted from memories of one of my childhood friends and and her mother's mysterious reactions to some of our totally innocent games, that doesn't mean the plot ever actually happened. Not to me, anyway.

Erm. So there.

Anyway, woke up yesterday morning from a dream about reading a book. The first chapter had an illustration of a little girl in a pink dress, and it was entitled "The Kissing Room." So that image became the short story's narrator, and that title became the short story title. The girls in the book in the dream played at kissing to imitate what they saw on TV; in the story I ended up writing, that was the original reason the narrator was aware of, too, but other reasons come to light as the story progresses.

The story progressed, from beginning to end, over a pot of Kennilworth Ceylon tea and several hours at The Tea Spot. It's ten single-spaced pages long in WordPerfect 5.1, and if it were printed out there would probably be blood-and-sweat stains on it or something. It was that exhausting.

I am currently in that post-story state of "I can't believe I wrote that, it sucks, it's self-indulgent, I should be ashamed of it, there's no way I'm even going to go back and edit it, I should have worked on my novel instead, but that sucks too." You know how that goes.

But I wrote it. It didn't exist that morning, and by that afternoon, it existed. That's really cool.

Days like that remind me why I chose to be a writer.

Well, periodontist, actually. But it was at my dentist's office.

Yes yes yes long time no blog what a slacker what a bum talk about procrastination. Indeed. House painting, house cleaning, community knitting, Cessna flying, guest preparations, Saints watching, and all that jazz. Excuses, excuses.

Back to the dentist's. By the way, you would think that one could get some writing done while lying abed in post-op mode. You would think, wouldn't you? Uh-huh. Anyway, Friday my mouth got hacked into, in the service of keeping my teeth for my old age. Apparently it's a bad thing for tooth longevity when there's no thick, pink "attached tissue" in front of your tooth, but only the thin, darker, capillery-filled "movable tissue." And they have ways of making your mouth conform. It involves lots of local anasthetic, scapels, and stitches, and no eating of chewy things for days and days after.

This makes road trip novels like Neil Gaiman's American Gods a bad choice of post-op reading material. I mean, the characters keep stopping for hamburgers. Oh my sweet everloving Deities I want a hamburger.

Anyway, sitting in the dentist's chair and trying to ignore the sharp things. The periodontist says, "You can totally just close your eyes and go elsewhere, you know. I won't be offended. No. Seriously. Go paint your house or something." So I closed my eyes and tried once more to listen in on my characters' conversation again. I don't know what's been taking me so long about that--I guess not enough long, sustained time staring in panic at my computer. So apparently oral surgery is good for invoking the same sort of panic, I guess.

Brian: "Oh my God, Mike! You're alive!"

Mike: "Well, yeah. But you knew that."

Brian: "But that was a dream... wasn't it?"

Brian: [chuckles] "Little bro, you always were in denial."

That plus a few tips from Mike on how he actually would act in this scene, and I think we're rolling again.

(After that, the hovering-over-the-Puget-Sound visualization sort of morphed into standing on the red pedestrian bridge at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal and watching the pelicans preen themselves, and I got a little teary. Which is not wise when someone is sticking sharp things in your mouth. And now I have to add "Nostalgia" to the growing list of categories invoked by this entry. These entries really need to get a bit more focused.)

Meanwhile, Cate's coming to visit tomorrow. Excitement! More house cleaning! A trip to the airport! A trip to the other airport! Goths Having Tea! And early morning writing sessions while everyone else is still sleeping, if dailiness is to be cultivated. W00t!

More later, possibly with pictures.

This is the bit where I bore you with a page out of my dream journal. After that, you get some links, so if you want to skip the boredom, just page down a bit or click here.

So before I woke up this morning, I was in this huge, I mean gi-normous university library. Bigger than a convention hotel. I mean whoppin' large. And I was there after hours; I had some friend who was smuggling me in. Our reasons were both personal and political. Political, in the sense that I was working for some underground movement, the details of which escape my waking mind. Personal, because I had my novel to work on, and I needed to work on it all night every night until it was done.

See, in the dream, I'd gotten the call from Wizards of the Coast telling me to go ahead and send them the full manuscript of Drowning Boy. I'd said, "Oh boy! Will do!" and then I'd hung up and said, "Crap! OK, I'll do two and a half chapters a day, that'll finish in enough time to mail them the beast before ten days is out..."

But of course there were these people patrolling the library to make sure no one like me was stowing away. The fluorescent overheads would light up, boom boom boom, one after the other down the hall, and official-looking people would march through, and I'd have to do my best "Huh? Closing time? I slept through closing time?" face. Then I'd let them march me out of the library, and I'd be thinking OK, I can still do this if I do five chapters tomorrow...

A useful dream to get me back on schedule. Too bad the novel I've been working on most recently is Becoming Sara.

Pace to be picked up forthwith.

Meanwhile, here're your links. Hurricane Katrina links. Stuff y'all can do, that you might not have thought of doing, what with other stuff like The Red Cross and The Salvation Army coming to mind so readily.

• Habitat For Humanity: A nonprofit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry seeking to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world. They build homes, literally as well as monetarily. Donate money, or sign up to lend a hand in the disaster-affected areas.
• Officers of Avalon, a nonprofit organization representing, networking, and benefiting Pagans in law enforcement and other emergency response fields, has created The Avalon Cares fund. In its current incarnation, the fund raises money for The Red Cross's post-hurricane efforts, and sends volunteers to feed supplies into the affected areas.
• Veterans for Peace have set up camp in Covington, LA. That's in Saint Tammany Parish, right on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where the Causeway Bridge touches down (and, incidentally, where a majority of my aunts and uncles on my Mom's side live). The Vets have brought a whole bunch of supplies for the relief effort, but they need more. Click the link to see what they need and where to send it or, if you're in the area, drop it off. They could do with volunteers, too. Seems they're picking up a lot of FEMA's slack in the area. Gods know someone's got to.

And finally, there's Stories of Strength, an upcoming anthology edited and produced by Jenna Glatzer of AbsoluteWrite.com. The anthology will be published and sold via LuLu.com and all proceeds will be donated to the Red Cross. If you're a writer and you've little cash to donate outright, perhaps you can donate a thousand words of your professional skills. Submission deadline is September 16. That's this Friday, so get a move on!

Coming Up Next: Progress on the right novel! Pics! And addictive substances from the mid-'80s! Stay tuned.

Almost didn't post this evening. It's been a long and busy day in which the only times available to work on Drowning Boy were this morning (had I woken up two hours earlier, which I didn't) and right now. And if the IHOP was too uncomfortably public for composing a sex scene, imagine trying to write Hot 'N Steamy from the cramped seat of a crowded westbound #B bus.

Work today involved not only database input, web page modifications, and attempts to script a self-updating potcast feed, but also a lot of driving and a 3,000-foot change of altitude. And then it was a mad scramble to catch the westbound #S. And on the bus I had a story to critique and homework to complete for my writing class. Not that I get graded. Homework in this class is completely optional. But so many good ideas are born from homework exercises that I hate not to do them.

So here I am on the bus with a headache (cf. altitude change) and very reluctant to start on the novel. I'm thinking, "4 hours, all right, I mean 6 hours tomorrow. No, eight! Just--not tonight, OK?"

But wait just a moment there. I did my homework. If that's not writing, what is?

Hence the new manuscript title at upper left. The Bookwyrm's Horde is a metafictonal novel--rather, a transfictional novel--concerning an author who inherits a magically labrynthine bookstore after which the novel is named and who writes stories that children just fall right into. Literally. Also, the Bookwrym? He's real. He's big and purple and wears horn-rimmed glasses and, occasionally, eats people.

Over the past few years I've babbled out bite-sized bits of that novel at random intervals. The word count you see up there sums up all those vignettes. And I've only just realized that this, this here, is the real first book of my "book detective " series (the one that I hope won't get flagged as a Jasper Fforde rip-off; I swear I've been working on it, mentally at least, since before I ever heard of The Well Of Lost Plots.) So this realization puts much of the next novel--which involves a missing main character--into perspective. It also upsets my previous ideas about how Bookwyrm was going to shape up. But that's why story-writing is so fun, right? You never know what'll happen next.

So, just to prove I wasn't a complete bum today--well, as regards writing; I have been very busy otherwise, and yesterday too, just not so much with writing--here's what resulted from my homework assignment. The prompt was this: Take the phrase "message in a bottle" and reinterpret it. No desert islands, no literal bottles. Here goes.

Every day that she could steal a few minutes, she went to the library. She went like a fugitive, on frightened feet, staring about with haunted eyes. She would wait at the juncture in the path until a moment when no one could see which direction she chose. And she'd hide her face from the librarian at the information desk.

But if you were to follow her, if you were, say, a small brown mouse with peppercorn eyes and quiet, quiet toes, you'd see her sneak over to the middle-grade shelves. You'd see her picking her terrified way past the voices of children some five years her junior, flashing that hunted look up and down each aisle before venturing into its narrow confines. You'd know when she got close to her target by the way she began to allow her eyes to rest on book titles.

It wouldn't take her long to choose. Five minutes at the outside, and she'd have a book down in her hands, flipping madly through it. If you didn't know better, you'd think she just wanted to reread her favorite scene. And you'd be confused by the fear in her hands.

And when she found just the right page, she'd reach quick-quick into her back jeans pocket, whip out a piece of paper, and in one motion slip it into the book and the book back onto the shelf.

Then she'd run.

And if you happened to have seen her do it, you might have gone back to that book and searched it for her contribution. You wouldn't find it any other way; she chose books that never got checked out much. But if you were, say, just a little sandy mouse with clever paws and claims to literacy, you might have seen which book she chose, and you might have been able to open it up to the right page, and you might have been able to read...

"Page 168-and-a-half: Then, while Alison was still practicing her BROODING face at the window, she saw a little girl come running down the street. The little girl looked so distressed that Alison opened the window wide and leaned out and said, 'Hi! What's wrong?' And the little girl said, 'Please help me, I'm stuck in the real world and I have to get out, can I be in your book please?' And Alison said, 'Of course you can be in my book.'"

If you knew where to look--but of course you wouldn't--you could find almost ninety-nine notes like this one in almost ninety-nine books, and they'd all show a little girl meeting one of the characters and asking for permission to enter the story.

But since you're not a mousey-brown mouse with well-traveled feet, you don't know a thing about it until one day the newspapers report a missing child and quote woeful parents with tears running down their cheeks, and you just shake your head over the tragedy of a world in which even little girls aren't safe from evil. And you go on to put your coffee mug in the sink and kiss the cats goodbye, and you lock the door and you head into the office for another day of depressing sales calls.

But there's a lot more to know than what you know, and the thing about this little girl is, she was the first.

Gods bless throw-away lines of dialogue. Chapter 9 has its momentum back, and the key to regaining it was, indeed, Amy's "How am I supposed to marry a fish" quip.

It's amazing how often the babbling I do when I'm blocked turns out to be useful. Yay Muse!

There is a stained glass window in the door behind the bar at Conor O'Neill's in Boulder. It has writing on it, and that writing says,

"Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you fight with your neighber, it makes you shoot at your landlord, and it makes you miss him."

There's a band playing at Conor's, too. Big Paddy. They've been mainly playing rocked up old traditionals--"Star of the County Down", "The Drunken Sailor", and, what the hell, the odd U2 cover. Me and my laptop are tucked away in a walled-in nook around the corner from the bar, but it's still pretty darn loud in here. And it's only 11:00 PM yet. They could keep going until 1:00 with fairly little effort.

Today, I've taken my writing out on a date.

It's something Holly Lisle recommends doing when the fun of writing has disappeared and one doesn't know where to find it. Except of course she doesn't mean it literally, taking your writing out to dinner and a movie. What the hell. I felt like I had to get out of the house, so I took my writing out for a beer and some rockin' music.

Haven't done a lot. Mostly just reread Chapter 7, did some line-editing, and fixed the beginning to better match where the chapter has gone since then. Frankly, I'm getting worried about the time frame. At this rate, I'm not going to have this novel or Sara Peltierdone any time soon, much less by October 1.

But tonight? Not worrying much. The duo on the stage have started in on "Nancy Whisky" and the Smithwick Ale is pretty darn good, and I'm in a private little booth with just me and my writing having a romantic evening out. Tomorrow I don't have to worry, either, because tomorrow is a full day at home in which I can devote a lot of time to both novels if I so choose, and where's the need to worry when the worry's solution is in progress?

Tonight has been lots of fun, Writing. I think we should spend the whole day together, tomorrow. In our pajamas, painting each other's toenails. C'mon! It'll be fun.

(I think the metaphor ship has drifted.)