author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

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.