author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Ye Gods. Between the book-as-other-world motif and the love triangles that seem to sprout up faster than I can justify them, this novel is practically turning into Fushigi Yugi.

I mean, really. Just about everyone seems to be motivated by jealousy over someone else, with one exception, and she's having existential crises worthy of an anime clone girl. Ye Frickin' Gods.

At times like these, I can see why NaNoWriMo participants are urged to send in the ninjas.

Yeehah! About a thousand words yesterday, almost three thousand today; I might actually finish this thing on time!

So Gwen and her husband Tim are babysitting the wayward fictional Brooke at the bookstore knows as The Bookwyrm's Horde (which, by the way, will be the title of the novel that precedes this one in the series). Tim runs the store in the mornings and Gwen in the afternoons. Meanwhile Brooke is just hanging out. We have discovered some things about interfictional cosmology (and when I say "we" I am not being coy and meaning "the reader"; I mean "I just discovered this stuff today, isn't it cool?"), such as...

• Brooke can't read any "sibling" fictions--books written by people who call the same place Gwen does "the real world." The words become intelligible to her.
• This is not a contradiction with Brooke having read the manuscript of the novel Gwen wrote. Brooke is in that novel. She can read it just fine.
• Fictional characters who have travelled to their author's "real world" are going to want to steer very clear of the Bookwyrm's Horde, or at least the actual shelves. They do not want to meet the Bookwyrm.
• The Bookwyrm's lair looks very different to an author than it does to a talemouse. For one thing, it's not nearly as scary.
• The Bookwyrm cannot tell stories. It can only collect them.

The manifesto obliges me to post every day, and to keep my post relatively centered around writing. Sunday's goth club outing¹ is not a valid subject for blogging, nor is the delightful Celtic Tatting book² Sarah got me. Ditto the wedding present³ I am frantically knitting for my friend and his bride-to-be.

So here's a very boring post to say, "Hey, look! I got a whole bunch of words written since last post!" In case you care, we're up to Chapter Thirteen, in which the talemouse meets the Bookwyrm. In my own opinion, which isn't very humble because in first draft stage my opinion is all that matters, it was pretty darn cool. I got to describe how Rakash Sketterkin finds his way into the Bookwyrm's lair, and to define the true nature of the Bookwyrm's horde (the actual horde, not the bookstore named after it). To describe and define those things, I had to decide and discover them. Yay NaNoWriMo! Daily word count quotas are good for me.

Now, I need to figure out why fictional characters don't want to go anywhere near the Bookwyrm. At least, not in their parent plotlines. The Wyrm probably wouldn't threaten their existence in their own plotlines.

In other news, the battery in my Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero appears to have joined the ranks of the undead. Or the resurrected, I'm not sure which. The computer has been running on battery power for 30 minutes without showing a drop in the battery charge meter, which is a huge improvement over last week's "pull out the plug and the computer immediately dies" routine. Yay zombie battery! Maybe next time I lend Willow my Averetec, I'll actually be able to use the Compaq on battery power.

And that's all.

(1. I'm sorry, I have no pictures to share of me gothed up and dancing to a slightly sped-up spin of VNVNation's "Neverending Light". Nor have I pictures of John, Sarah, or Jaerin, at least not such that I'm at liberty to share. Nor have I sustained actual bruises from the collision occasioned by two stoned dimwits who started rolling around on the floor and using us as pinball bumpers.)

(2. Dude! I had been trying to figure out how to do celtic knotworks all weekend! Apparently the answer is to tat chains, not loops, and use a paperclip to thread the chains into knots. Very cool.)

(3. The wedding is on December 3rd. If I knit really fast, there's hope. If I knit really fast and stop swapping threads or either notice more quickly when I've swapped threads or just give up on this whole "knit two socks at once" idea.)

So, I did about 2,000 words yesterday. I plan to do another 2,000 words today. But I'm having one of those "Who the hell cares about my petty concerns?" days, ever since hearing that they're pulling the plug on SciFiction. Damn it. Without my ever managing to sell Ellen Datlow a story for it. Double damn.

You should go there, now, and read the voluminous archives of short fiction. I think it'll be on display until the new year; after that, all bets are probably off. Today I read the latest original story on it ("Man For The Job," by Robert Reed) and over the next few weeks I'll read the archives in backwards order, one story at a time. Such a wealth of fiction should not go to waste. I hope someone (Ellen Datlow maybe?) will anthologize it.

So, yeah. Huge, huge bummer.

Talk to you in another 2,000 words, I suppose.

I've already lost track. When was it? Thursday? Thursday the Tenth. Right. No writing happened on Thursday, November the Tenth. It's a little misleading if you look at the Daily Word Count bar graph displayed on my NaNoWriMo profile; I suppose I must have roused myself long enough to actually update my word count. (As for the lack of bars on the Sixth and the Seventh, that had to do with being reeeally busy and then being on a train. I wrote, but I didn't get online to update my official word count.)

So what's up with that? Well, it had to do with going grocery shopping, making cat food, reducing the bedroom to its primal state of carpet and bare walls in order to clean really thoroughly, a surprise visit to Saturn of Longmont (my car didn't start the night before--surpirse!), and, so I'm told, a plume of toxic vapor over IBM. By the time I finally collapsed (from exhaustion, not from vaporized epoxy), it was in search of unconsciousness.

Which is a long way of saying that 2,000 words a day, which was at first a pleasant option to consider, is now a necessity. So it's a good damn thing I did just about that today.

Meanwhile, the story progresses. The characters keep doing things that surprise me. The chapter in which Gwen explains things to Brooke ("By the way? You're imaginary. I made you up") was not intended to have a mutual crying jag in the middle of it, but conversations between fictional characters will turn in strange ways. Also, that sex scene in chapter nine? It went and developed Serious Foreshadowing right there at the end. Yeah. Not expected.

That kind of stuff, characters doing stuff I hadn't planned on, saying things that have Themish and Metaphorical implications--it makes me fall in love with writing all over again.

*Bliss*

This to be said about IHOP's pumpkin pancakes: They go best with butter pecan syrup.

John and I pooped out of the IHOP All-Nighter at around midnight-thirty. I was tired, and he was getting bored. We're both hitting Week 2 with a vengence. Week 2 is when the novel stops being fun, see. I think I'm digging a few holes through that wall, though. Slowly but surely. Taking a spoon to the mortar and sccrrraaaaaaping awayyyyyyy.

The thing about all that scraping is, odd fragments of things show up amid the mortar crumbs. Paradoxically, I have to make up fresh details in order to give my talemouse an ambiguity to chew through. How does he get Brooke out of her own timeline and into Gwen's? He gnaws a hole where a little yellow flower grows in the park, just something that Gwen put there for color but didn't bother to identify or describe or even think about. And Brooke fell into the hole. How does he keep tabs on Brooke once Gwen finds her in Central Park? He rides in the skin of a bit-part character, a jogger I threw into the scene to keep Brooke and Gwen from turning into talking heads. Just something to distract Brooke for a moment, a jogger running by. Unnamed, unimagined, it gives Rakash Sketterkin a way in.

So there's a jogger that wasn't there before, and a yellow flower that I had to go back and add, just so I could say that the story was vague about the jogger or the flower.

I keep referring to the failure of "Gwen's author"--me--to imagine things properly, or to the fact that "Gwen's author" has never seen New York. Which sort of makes me a character in this book. If it's a Mary Sue thing, it's the oddest Mary Sue I ever did see.

Today's leap in word count is partially due to Greywolf--that's the New Orleans Municipal Liaison--inviting me into her daily NaNoChat, where participants participated in 15-minute word sprints. I got something like 228 and 336 words in those two races, words I think I can be proud of. Then another 800 or so at the IHOP later in the evening, followed by 300ish in bed just now. Today was a good day.

Tomorrow, well, who knows. Tomorrow will be full of laundry, house-cleaning, cat food making, and car repair. The car died on us today. I think its alternator went wherever it is that the dogs go at the end of a convention. You know. During the dead dog party.

With any luck I might still be able to, on top of everything, attend another write-in. Wish me luck!

Playing catch up! OK. Where did we leave off?

Ah yes. Partying until the last dog done died. Dude, I went up to the Consuite at about 6:00 PM and didn't leave until 2:00 AM. I think it's safe to say that of the World Fantasy and Horror Conventions I've attended (WHC '02 and '04; WFC '04 and '05), WFC '05 had the best attended, most hospitable, and most fully stocked Consuite of 'em all. Fred, we love ya. Additional shout-outs to Alma and Deck, Lucien Soulban, my fellow sock-knitter John (Hay?), Darcy (recipient of a brand new misshapen doily) and her fellow gatecrashers, and Kevin Przybylowski. And of course Jen Tishrean, fellow NaNo'er and fellow traveller whose train has probably reached its home station by now.

I slept through much of the return journey. Due to the aforementioned late night, I didn't get much sleep before it was time for Jen and I to pack up and run like the wind down eight blocks of State Street to the bus stop whence we'd be whisked away from Madison and down to Chicago. Then, due to much sight-seeing in Chicago, I slept through most of the afternoon on the train. Stayed up writing and reading and playing computer games in the lounge car, then slept the rest of the night away. And then I did the biking/bussing thing to get home from Union Station in Denver, and I slept through much of that afternoon.

I was awake enough to notice the neat stuff about catching a west-bound California Zephyr in Chicago, though. Since Chicago is the very beginning of the route, we got all the route-beginning announcements, like descriptions of the route, the cars, the services, and so forth. I made a reservation to eat in the dining car this time, which was neat. Got sat with two other party-of-ones, with whom I exchanged the sort of small-talk that substitutes for getting to know one another. I had the cod. The cod was quite good. The veggies, however, were limp and tasteless, and the rice pilaf was even more bland than that served at the WFC Awards Banquet. One of my dining companions found the chicken pretty dry, too. Butter and ranch dressing seemed to solve both problems.

When I finally woke up Tuesday afternoon, I headed down to Caffe Sole for a NaNoWriMo write-in. I used the Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 so that Willow could borrow my Averetec, and it's amazing how many distractions you can find on a DOS-bound non-networked computer. Just for instance, when I got to wondering about daily averages, I wrote myself a NaNoWriMo Progress Evaluator script in QBasic, which you can download if you so desire. (Its PHP incarnation is available here.)

Distractions aside, you can see that I made progress. More tonight, hopefully, at the IHOP All-Night Write-In. Stay tuned.

Short entry tonight. Very tired. Very happy. Just got back from a party. Those things that go on at cons. As parties go, this one rocked, like, literally. This was the annual WFC Folk Singing Do-hickey as MCd and performed by Patrick and Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Charles de Lint, and quite possibly others. I don't know who officially organizes this thing. I'm not sure it's exactly official. This year they'd taken over the Assembly room (the Madison Concourse labels its first floor meeting areas after ceremonial bits of the Capitol) by ten o'clock. I got back to my room at one thirty. There may have been other goings-on after Alma and Deck and I left, I don't know.

The upshot is, I've got multiple earworms playing simultaneously on the various tracks of my mental recording studio. "Angel Band" as performed by Teresa Neilsen Hayden and by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; "Free Man In Paris" ("the freelance editor's lament," I think someone called it) as performed by Patrick Neilsen Hayden; "Jersey Devil" as performed by Charles de Lint; and that's not to mention the annual comic dirging of "Teen Angel" or the various SF filks written and performed by Joe Haldeman or the very first audio-visual performance of Charles de Lint's "Cherokee Girl" (now with 100% more belly dancing). And more. Oh my Goodness yes. I'm going to be humming "Ain't Misbehaving" all the way to sleep, unless it morphs into "You Took Advantage Of Me." Or "Java Jive." "Java Jive" was not in fact performed, but it shares a chord progression with the other two.

The NaNo novel progressed today, but not by much. And you might call it cheating, as it was a copy-paste job. But! It was not a mere copy-paste job. It had Justification. You see, there's this, ahem, sex scene in Gwen's manuscript, which Gwen reviews. It reads very strangely now that all clauses pertaining to Brooke are gone. However, in a much later chapter, that scene is enacted with all its sentences intact as Brooke, regardless of being stranded in (for want of a better term) Real Life, follows the plot Gwen wrote. So I had to write the scene once in fragments in Chapter Two so Gwen could read it, then copy-paste it to Chapter Ten and write all the missing bits--swapping out the name of Brooke's original partner for that of the person with whom Brooke finds herself in (so-called) Real Life.

That sounded really twisted and kinky and grammatically confused. But it's meant to cause this really neat deja vu effect as the sentence fragments from Chapter Two resonate in your memory as you read Chapter Ten. Plus, it's a really hot scene.

This all presuming I get this right, of course.

Tomorrow: The awards banquet! The dead dog party! The Saints play the Bears! Onnnnnn Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

PS. This, apparently, is what I mean by a "short entry."

Today, after a lotta lotta panels, was the World Fantasy Convention Mass Autograph Party. This is the event that reminds me how well I do not do in big crowds. Thankfully, the WFC Gods had arranged everyone relatively logically and according to My Convenience. For instance, I went up to say hi to Alma and Deck, and they happened to be sitting next to Patricia McKillip, whose autograph I was seeking (this year I remembered to bring my old, beloved copy of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld). Steve Rasnic Tem (writer, writing teacher, and husband to Melanie Tem, ditto, whose classes I take twice monthly) was sitting next to Ellen Datlow. Charles de Lint (who faithfully emailed me the photo he took of me with the googly-eye goggles on last year), Charles Vess (with hand-drawn draft of illustrations for Neil Gaiman's "Blueberry Girl" bravely available for all comers to flip through and melt at the sight of), and Nina Hoffman (who's a good friend and fellow workshop member to Jen, whom I met on the bus and have been having write-ins with) were all in a convenient row--and their table was the one making all the jolly noises, so you know where the party is. And all the guys 'n gals with gaming fiction were kinda grouped together, too. (Hi, Lucien!)

Still, I felt like I was at Whole Foods on a particularly crowded day--you've got your grocery list organized by aisle and then you hope you don't forget anything because after fighting your way from the produce section all the way over to the bakery you do not want to do it all again.

(Oh, and don't be fooled. I am not actually on a first-name buddy-buddy basis with most of the names you'll recognize up there. But I find that after attending two WFCs and WHCs each, some of the regulars--some of them Names, but most of them just members like me--are starting to wave at me on arrival, even if they don't really know me beyond "face I see repeatedly at this con." So I wave back. Cons are cool.)

I may put up some photos later. Or not. We'll see.

One should strive to learn something new at every panel one attends, I think. I sure learned a lot. I'm hoping that the schmuck behind me in the second row at the panel on fairy tales has learned the folly of attempting to lecture Terri Windling, Jane Yolen, and other professionals about the fine art of world-building, or has at least learned that panels are for asking questions of, not arguing with. As for me, I learned that schmucks who would actually do that sort of thing exist. Another paradigm shift for me! I think that's at least 500 XP.

Ah, yes, writing. Rather slow this morning. Starting to get worried by how far behind I am! But today over dinner I got to meet the talemouse. For now, I'm calling him Rakash Sketterkin. I know a lot more about him today: how he travels, what he eats, and why he decided to interfere with Gwen Halpburn-Smith's novel. I also know more about Gwen's novel: what happens to Brooke in it, and how that informs what Brooke does when she escapes into Gwen's reality. Lastly, I actually cameo'd in the novel--I mentioned that "Gwen's author has never seen Central Park, hasn't even been to New York," and that this is why Rakash Sketterkin finds it so easy to travel "up" into Gwen's reality via Central Park. Talemice get in where details are not well thought out. (I might have mentioned that already.)

Anyway. More tomorrow, including the links I didn't bother inserting tonight. And possibly photos. For now, sleeeeeeeep.

Dangit! 1,700 shiny new words, and no way to update my word count at NaNoWriMo.org! The page is CSS-wacked and every link is broken due to passing through a broken session_confirm.php file. I'm sure they're working on it--in fact, I'm positive they're working on it, because the CSS-wackiness is somewhat different than it was an hour ago. But meanwhile, here I am with no way to get in.

For the record, I got 1,700 shiny new words written this morning. I'd like to raise that to 2,000, but I have returned the story to the point at which it beached itself the first time I tried to write it several years ago--before I knew that this was a sequel to The Bookwyrm's Horde--and I still don't know where it goes next. I'll probably work on the whole Snowflake Method of Novel Plotting thing some more. That'll help me figure out what scenes need writing.

Meanwhile, me and a fellow NaNoWriMo participant/WFC attendent I met on the bus from Chicago to Madison are sitting in a nice little cafe called Michelangelo's, enjoying the atmosphere, art, and free wi-fi. This is where I wrote my 1,700 shiny new words. I've run into a few more familiar faces, folks that tend to be at WFC and WHC every year, and we said "Hi" and "How's your year been" and "What's your name again? Sorry." And we're looking forward to finally getting all registered at 1:00 and going to the first panel at 2:00. The weather's gorgeous and I actually slept in a bed last night.

I am human again, and life, once again, is good. Nyah!

(Oh, and NaNoWriMo.org is fully functional once more, or at least close enough for rock 'n roll. Hooray!)