author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

No dust bunnes for Niki. *Sigh.* My husband informs me that there will be dust bunnies next week, however, so I should not lose hope.

Why are dust bunnies a good thing? Well, that's for me to vaguely know and you to find out. Mwahahaha. More later.

So the boys' dialogue bit is moving along at a sloggity pace. Another 800 or so words last night, mostly involved with Brian snapping to the revelation that much of what he remembers as dreams weren't dreams after all. There's a lot of dramatic stuff in italics which, were it represented cinematically, would be in sudden, two-second long flashbacks distracting Brian from the current conversation. Sort of cliche, that. Sorry. Maybe today I can clean up the melodrama and get to the end of the chapter.

Last night also involved Writing In Strange Places. Sometimes I just want to get out of the house, away from the familiar, and put myself somewhere else specifically to write. It's an elaborate sort of ritual, a means by which the everyday mind gets jump-started into writer mind, and it really helps when my usual writing places--the kitchen table, the bed, the IHOP, the Tea Spot--get mentally fouled up, associated with web surfing and game playing instead of writing.

I thought maybe I'd go sit among the pumpkins at the grocery store, because sometimes you just have to sit in a pumpkin patch and that's as close as I'm going to get. But the store hadn't quite closed yet, and the fluorescents under the grocery store awning looked uninspiring, and I ended up in the North Boulder Memorial Gardens instead.

I'm not sure what it's really called. It's a long stretch of land in the crook of Diagonal Highway where it turns left from used-to-be-Iris onto also-known-as-Foothills. John and I came to walk here the night before he left town for his Las Vegas start-up software company adventure, back in, oh, 2001-ish. The place isn't lit at night, and I came in from the treeline to the west rather than the walkway from the south, so I had to keep an eye out for the flat depressions where memorial stones lay, thus avoiding a sprained ankle. I headed up to sit on the steps by the central tower.

There's an ornate door in that tower, making it look like some special memorial monument or maybe a mausoleum. In fact, the tower is nothing but a storage shed. I know this for a fact because, as you can see in the picture, the door was actually open. It was cracked just wide enough to admit my hand with a camera in it. Taking pictures with the flash on, I could see there wasn't much more in there than a styrofoam box full of decorative trinkets of a plasticky dulce et decorum est nature.

Which is sad, because when a door you're accustomed to being locked suddenly stands open before you, what you really want to find on the other side is, like, Narnia.

So I sat there on the steps and slogged away at Chapter 10 until I got too cold, at which point I packed it up, headed in, and put myself to bed, where I continued the Chapter 10 slog. Bed is a cool place to continue writing; I woke up with vague dreams about what Mike was saying to Brian. They weren't comfortable dreams, and I can't remember exact words, but the feeling was right, so that's all good.