author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Five thousand words. Ho ho ho. More like 800. But that's more than I tackled both yesterday and the day before combined, so, moving in the right direction, right?

Fact is, I got all distracted with web design. I created the web page that'll pull up blog entries over at the new site, fiddled with the structure and the style sheet, and made categories and manuscripts linkable. It's still butt ugly, OK, but then I haven't finished fiddling. And look! Linkable categories! Manuscripts that aren't all NaNoWriMo novels (because I write other stuff too)! Blog sorting that doesn't set weird cookies on your machine! Duuuuude!

Not, of course, that the screen shot above quite does the page itself justice (or quite does anything else besides take up a crapload of space in this blog entry), but then you can't see the real thing just yet. It's all hidden in a password protected directory, accessible only as follows...

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Niki's Weblog: Staging Area"
AuthUserFile "/yadda/yadda/yadda/passwordfile"
AuthGroupFile /yadda/yadda/yadda/groupfile
Require group Me

Back to the novel. OK. Maybe I've blogged about this bit before, but--this novel is set in a very specific locale, one that actually exists, for the most part. My characters all live in the boarding house I lived in for all but my first two quarter-years of college. They go to the same college I went to. They're living in the same city. Zoom back in: same cafeteria I worked at, same Gasworks Park I took walks to, same boarding house on 7th Ave.

They do say, write what you know. Often, I do. They say, write your memories. If you lived through childhood you have plenty material for all the fiction you can write in a lifetime. And I did, and I do.

They do not say, expect said memories to bite you in the ass when you begin to write about them.

I'm moving my characters around the memories of that house--Brian here, Todd there, Amy at the kitchen table--and then who comes down the stairs but that gal whose stoneware I broke in the oven (sorry) or that guy whose radio got stolen by that other guy who proceeded to expire in his bed while I was out of town, or maybe the two guys who moved in from the dorms and played White Wolf roleplaying games with me and two other friends all night long every other weekend. And because not all memories are pleasant, here comes L----o slinking around the corner with that smirk on his face, and there's the new landlord and his smarmy son who I swear was just pissing us all off deliberately in order to encourage us to move out so he could move his friends in, and that guy who kept coming back to dig through our mailbox after he stayed only two months rent-free and got kicked out for the rent-free part. And of course Russ in the novel, that needling twerp who recognizes no form of "that's enough" as long as he's still amused, he never wore any face but that of that guy he was conciously based on.

And because friendships don't always stay sweet, there's the role-playing game gang again only this time no one's talking to anyone anymore, and laughter that used to warm the heart now cuts to the bone without changing one audible note.

And because forgiveness happens, there's some of that gang again on the phone or at the IHOP when John and I drove up from Oregon on a visit. And there's the guy Russ is based on, who really wasn't all that bad all the time, blasting Enya out the window to compete with the noise of the party across the street, and him and I sitting on the awning over the front door and laughing at them all.

Damn. Nostalgia strikes again. Soundbytes aren't really representative samples, no more so here than on Fox News. The people briefly and non-identifyingly described above, they all really exist (except the dead guy, anymore), and none of them are as bad as some of those sadder or angrier paragraphs make them out to be (except L----o, whom John met once and dubbed "The Creep" because, well, he was). With just those parenthetical exceptions, I miss them all.

Well, not the landlord's kid. And not the digging through the mail guy. He was just... wrong. But mostly the rest of them... yeah.

I was going to end by naming one of them and begging him to email me, because, Gods bless his parents, his name is So Damn Common that Google avails me nothing, and the constant failure to find even the smallest lead is painful. But now I'm shy of it; naming even one name of that crew might make the rest identifiable, and who knows but that they wouldn't thank me for it. So. I'll end with some keywords, instead. Dude, you know who you are. Talk to me. It's been too long.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Also known as "garou." Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon. Algernon, from The Importance of Being Earnest. NiN and that comic about the cat-girl. Bangor, Maine. The Talking Heads: Remain In Light. Tori Amos on the Dew Drop Inn tour (happy birthday). And, of course, there's always "Well, I've been to France..." (And for anyone who still needs to be told Seattle and the University of Washington, y'all really haven't been paying attention, have you?)

I feel like I'm writing my high-school senior yearbook "dot-dots" all over again. Look what comes of mining college memories to write a novel about college students. They oughtta post warnings.