author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

All fictional activity between last blog post and this one consists entirely of freewriting stints that may or may not become full stories. Nothing worth titling and entering into the manuscript database at this time. Some of the resulting chunks of babble form a sort of cohesive narrative, but whether it's the acorn of a novel or just me expanding on an abstract theme is not yet clear.

Outside, the city was on fire. This was not the first time, and many citizens continued throughout their day the way you would were your neigborhood undergoing construction. They picked their way around the embers, noted that downtown was not a good place to drive today, and, in ways both small and large, got on with their lives. The city burned and its citizens counted it an inconvenience.

...It was not a city of attached people. Like Zen monks, they took the loss of family heirlooms, homes, and inheritances in stride. It was going to pass someday. Today is merely sooner than not. But unlike Zen monks, they had attachments to other things: getting to work on time, doing what they wanted to be doing. They were philosophical about losing their homes but downright pissed off about getting off schedule.

You wouldn't want to visit.

...There used to be flowers out in front of my house. There used to be a house. It had a red roof, I think, that terra-cotta red they do with shingles and clay corners. But I don't recall the color of the door or even the shape of the door handle. In any case, it's gone now. The fire took it. And what scares me is, I never mourned. My first thought was, "I hope my car's OK. I need to go to Greenwood tomorrow night." And why did I have to go? To buy paint. To paint the living room walls.

The living room walls that are no longer there.

Data insufficient. General failure reading disk. (A)bort? (R)etry? (F)ail? (K)eep writing?

I've been avoiding getting back to work on Drowning Boy. I admit it. I am suffering from, or inflicting upon myself, that classic writer's malaise of being unable to bring myself to start. It's what makes most of my deadlined projects an unmitigated hell during the last few days of the timeline, and what makes so many of my short stories unfinished. I suspect it's a habit I'll have all my life.

In the meantime, in absence of a cure, the only effective workaround seems for me to be to sidle up on a project, catch it unawares. Open up the document and read through it and let myself naturally start editing the bits that need it, maybe. Open up a blank WordPerfect page and start typing, telling myself it doesn't matter. Lie back with the laptop on my knees and type myself a bedtime story.

Did you ever do that? Make yourself up bedtime stories and tell them to yourself at night? It used to take me forever to go to sleep when I was, oh, maybe eight or nine. Took me until darn near the teenage years to outgrow a kid's basic fear of the dark and the slight creaking sounds of a house at night. By the time I was in fifth grade or so, I'd finally gotten to where I didn't need one of my Neil Diamond tapes (usually Longfellow Seranade and Tap Root Manuscript) to drown out the silence, but it still took me an awful long time to get my senses to shut down and drop me off into unconsciousness. So I made up stories to pass the time. Sometimes I'd even whisper them out loud--whispering can tire you out real quick. Usually I just thought them. Pictured them. Tried to dream them. They were almost always a pre-teen's Mary Sue adventures in which she and either her schoolyard crush or her pop-star idols team up to save the world from evil.

(Hey, I grew up watching Scooby Doo. Remember all those celebrity cameos? Of course it seemed reasonable to imagine myself, too, solving mysteries and fighting crime alongside my favorite musicians and actors.)

Anyway. Technology having progressed to the point of internet-enabled word processors small enough to take to bed with you, the bedtime story habit isn't a bad one to revisit. And a surprising number of those mental Mary Sues have redeemable elements, if I can bring myself to remember them.

But tonight's tale, or worldbuilding exercise, or whatever, has nothing to do with those embarrassing old wish-fulfillment fantasies. It's more of a theme that came out of a dream I had some three years ago...

A man shows up after John and I wake up, and he says, "Did you hear about the fires in the night?" I say, "I thought I smelled a fire yesterday morning when I woke so early."

...and what I wrote about it after I recorded it for posterity.

He came into my room quietly, his bedside manner spotless. I was just waking up, moving slowly out of the realms of unconsciousness and into the fields he knew. He let me gather the shreds of myself into a more-or-less coherent handful before gently placing a bomb in my lap. This kind of bomb: "There were fires in the night. You heard?"

Of course I haven't heard, I wanted to say. I've been asleep, you idiot. But I don't say things like that, or so I'm told. All I really said was, "No."

"They were contained quickly, but they did a lot of damage even so." He glanced up at me, as though reading in my face how much more it was safe to tell. Then he returned to studying his hand. I pulled my hand out from under his. "Where?"

He began drumming his fingers, very slowly. First he lifted his index finger and put it down again. Then his middle finger. Then I got impatient. "Where--"

"Several places. Pretty much simultaneously. One - out in the open space. The yucca's still smoking. One in the south, took a few farms. One - one in the northwest of town." He stopped, left his fingers still on the bedsheets. Took a deep breath as though expecting a blow. "In your neighborhood."

"Oh." I found myself mourning more the blue heron nests than my house and what it held. You can't take it with you, they say. How convenient to have it burned up so you can't regret not being able to take it with you. "Oh," I said again, not sure what else to say. Oh good?

"I checked. You insurance policy is good, up to date, they'll pay you--"

"It's all right," I said. "What would I do with the money, anyway?" I guestured at the hospital room surrounding us, with its beeping machines and its dripping IV towers. "I suspected I wouldn't be going home again, this time."

He looked horrified. "Don't talk like that," he pleaded, but I already wasn't really hearing him.

I have no idea where the terminal illness angle came from. Stuff occurs. I follow it. Stories happen. Or at least babbledraft happens, and maybe it could become stories, someday.

And blog posts happen, freakin' long blog posts, posts chronicling very little useful writing in the previous day and acting like a smoke screen obscuring the shame of another day full of procrastination.

And other things. Lots of weird things today. Things I don't plan to go into here because they are either (a) boring, or (b) personal. Today was full of 'em.

But mostly it was full of procrastination.