author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

...if words like "somehow", "something," and "vague" show up at regular intervals: "Diane woke up on the doorstep at 4:30 AM with a vague recollection of her father having stepped over her to let himself in."

Look, I know I should actually write a scene or make a decision here, but I have no idea what kind of relationship these two characters have yet. I'll come back to it. Onward!

...if characters occasionally set off into town with no other intention than "to see what the day will bring." Bonus points if those characters then start describing what they see in town in great, wordy detail.

I'm stuck. I haven't a clue what happens next. Maybe if I send my main character on a mapping expedition, they'll bump into some plot before they're through.

...if, immediately upon introducing a new secondary character, the narration pauses while the main character reminisces about how the two of them met and what has been going on in both their lives between then and now.

Gods. Infodump. Not that this info doesn't belong in the book, but.... Look, I'll weave it into the story more gracefully on the rewrite, OK?

Which is, of course, the point. All the infelicities introduced by a 50K-in-30-days regimen will be smoothed away when it comes time to revise the novel. O ye of little faith! A publishable book will emerge! Just you wait.

(Besides, if I hadn't been under pressure to hit 50K by November 30th, you know what would be there instead of the infodump on page 49 where Diane Lenner tells us all about her mutual history with Danny Wodemeier? That's right. Nothing. I'd probably still be working on the first draft, one perfect sentence at a time. And that ain't no pace at which to begin a novelist's career.)

Oh my Gods it's a book it has a lot of words in it and like a million things to keep straight like subplots and character development I mean look at the sheer freakin' mass of notes I'm taking and--

*wheeze*

Yeah. And that's just the first few scenes. Er. Yikes?

In other news, "Trilobite" has a word count. With actual words in it. Go me.

Also, I am inches closer to having a new laptop. WAC called Comp Ren back and OK'd the buy-out. Only, they OK'd it based on the price of the Averatec 3250 I was eying the other day, not at the price of the actual laptop I'm replacing. That's a $300 difference, and rather obnoxious given that I've actually decided on the 3360 model which is, while still less expensive than the broken 5110H, $200 more expensive than the 3250. So Comp Ren has called WAC back, and I hope to hear from them by, oh..... spring.

Woke up quite late today, toddled down to the mailbox, and found my official form rejection letter from Wizards Of The Coast regarding The Drowning Boy. Reactions?

1. Darn! I could have sworn my three-chapter excerpt was irresistable!
2. Figures. My synopsis and chapter outline were teh suxx0r.
3. Whew! Now I don't have to worry about racing the phone call with my rewrite!
4. Whoo-hoo! Another number located! Mine is 166! ...I have no idea what that means.

Like I said in the AW thread, I'm going to keep working on this one through December, hoping to have the rewrite close to finished. Then in January I'm going to primarily do whatever the NaNoPubYe Plan says to do with The Golden Bridle, making sure to schedule time for other projects as well. Like short stories. And work-for-hire projects. Etc.

So. Time to hit chapter 13. More later tonight. Probably.

I have managed to take an inadvertent couple of days off. I am not sure at all of the feasiblity of getting 25 more hours in by the Greeley meetup Jan 5, or even - stopping to think about all that's wrong with this draft of the novel - finishing a full cycle of revision by that date.

Gonna keep trying, of course, which will make the next four days rather demanding. Part of my problem is how easy it is to just procrastinate starting. Starting at all. Stopping whatever else I'm doing and just putting in one more hour...

Oh, just one more game of Atomica. Just one more try at Katamari Damacy "Make Star 6." Oh, just another few pages of this forum thread that's making my eyes glaze over.

There are even productive procrastination tasks, like working on the FAQ for the Neverending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story Engine, which has reopened for general use this morning. Or putting in a few more hours' work on my latest Little Bull Creations assignment, which is much easier to push myself on given that the deadline has teeth and the pay is guaranteed (neither of which can be said about writing one's first saleable novel).

Anything other than writing!

So, I've got a new strategy in my constant war against apathy. The thing causing me the most angst - in this case writing - will be the thing I do last thing at night and first thing in the morning. And I shall be ruthless. "Last thing" means no reading myself to sleep, however the omission pains me. "First thing" means not even getting out of bed. Just roll over, grab the laptop and open the document.

I've been rereading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Black And Blue Magic, which I'd been threatening to do ever since NaNoWriMo 2004 began, and it's been really a useful reminder that my YA unicorn novel really isn't as much like Snyder's lovely book as I'd thought. For one thing, Harry Houdini Marcos is twelve, and my main character is sixteen, and that difference isn't just a number. It explains a lot about why my plot got a bit more sexual than I realized it was going to, for one thing. But. I am not allowed to finish rereading it until I've finished rewriting the mermaid novel. Sorry, me. Consider the resulting discomfort mere withdrawel pangs. Take the lumps and move on.

At times like this, I sometimes find this thought helpful: "What will you regret more in 10 years - not having slept more/reread that book one more time/caught up on reading newsgroups, or not having finished writing your novel?" And then sometimes I find it as useful as a clinically depressed patient finds the advice, "Just think happy thoughts!"

At those times, I find it's best to pretend that it's actually one of the other times.

Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes.

I have not only crossed the 50K line, but I have also finished the story. That is so cool!

Well... there's probably a few loose ends that could be tied up. I still haven't decided whether Diane's parents get divorced or get back together, or exactly how Diane met Mitch. But these and other "what happened" sort of questions haven't left big holes in the novel - they've been sort of touched on and glossed over in vaguely satisfactory ways. No, the real problems with this draft have to do with the plot being as subtle as a concrete block falling on your head, and the moral of the story getting thwacked home with a sledgehammer. Editing this sucker will be a matter of making the basic story happen a little more gracefully.

Oh, and finally managing to memorize the Lenner/Wodemeier family tree. I kept forgetting which grandchild belonged to which daughter and how old each was and whether everyone's ages were plausible for the timeline. I'll sketch that one out when NaNoEdMo comes along.

So. Yay!

Tomorrow I'm probably going to get that short-short I mentioned turned in to somewhere or other, and not get a lot more done than that. Then, Wednesday, the first of December, will see those of us who can be bothered to show up having a bit of a celebratory dinner at Conor O'Neill's.

And then it's back to life as usual.

Now, if I can manage to keep up the 2K-a-day pace on all my writing projects, I will be a Golden Writing Goddess!

But unlike NaNoWriMo, in a normal writing life, I'll take weekends off.

That's all I have to say, really.

Oh, yes, and my contribution to the pot luck was Mom's Fabulous Spinach & Artichoke Dip, only with hearts o' palm instead of artichoke.

ML stands for Municipal Liaison. I got volunteered for this position when our previous ML, sgmoo, let us know that she'd be out of town for most of November (and indeed has not been heard from yet). She said, "I'm so glad vortexae has volunteered for the position; she'll do an excellent job." And I said, "I did what?" And she said, "That's the spirit!"

So I'm the Boulder ML this year. I get to try to organize write-ins and meet-ups, let folks know when said write-in and meet-ups are happening, and use my magical ML powers to do stuff like put these events on the calendar.

I also get to be the contact point for Fatty, the Goddess Of All NaNoWriMo Goodies. That means that when she is able to get those goodies together, I'm the one she's mailing 'em to and I get to distribute them to my Boulder-area NaNo buddies.

So today I got to start with that. I got to put on one of these classy little NaNoWriMo buttons, and I got to give one to Kandybar.

And then I left the Tea Spot for to catch a 205 back to my end of town, headphones trailing out of my bookbag and book in hand... and I left the Goodies Envelope behind.

It's OK! It's all right! I spoke to Mr. John Little, barista extraordinaire (and no relation to my husband - there are a lot of John Littles in this world), and it seems the envelope has already been discovered and turned in to the lost and found box.

(I think the conversation must have gone something like this: "Hey, I found this envelope here addressed to a Niki LeBoeuf-Little... do you know this person?" "Yeah... that's the very confused young lady that called me thinking she left her wallet here last week.")

So my husband has gone with a friend to Acqua Pazza, the Italian restaurant next door to the Tea Spot, for dinner, and has pledged to pick up the envelope and bring it home to me so I can continue distributing the NaNoWriMo Goodies. And tomorrow I should have better luck with holding onto them, 'cause the meet-up and write-in tomorrow evening is at my house. Nice and simple.

Now I just have to figure out what to cook us for dinner.

1. No sex, at least none onstage.

For some reason rape is an exception to the unwritten "no sex in YA novels" rule - I guess that's because rape is actually an act of violence, not of sex. Violence always seems to be more accepted for younger readers then sex is. (I say "accepted for," not "acceptable to," because younger readers will read anything you throw at them that doesn't make them feel too uncomfortable. It's when adults choose reading material for younger readers that these filters come into play.) I think it really comes down to our weirdly neurotic American puritanical heritage: you're never too young to suffer, say the Godly ones, but you must not under any circumstances be allowed to enjoy yourself until you're of statutory age of consent, married, and planning to stuff yourself with babies.

2. Adults mustn't see the supernatural thingie.

Oops.

3. The magic stuff has to go away by the end of the novel.

I always hated how the wing-juice ran out and the ponies all left forever and the Egypt game lost its appeal (Zylpha Keatley Snyder) and the girls stopped believing that they were witches (E. L. Konigsberg, Edmund Wallace Hildick). But I think in this story I've come up with a compromise between magic lasting forever without giving the girl superpowers forever, in a way that at least meets my standards for story necessity.

So are there any rules I missed?

How do we know this? We know this because it's the day after Thanksgiving, and the Tea Spot is serving up hot chocolate, and the ice-skating rink is open for business. Today was the rink's grand opening, along with the annual lighting up of Boulder. The star on Flagstaff Mountain has been turned on. That's how we know it's holiday season in Boulder.

I have a gripe, though. I've had this gripe for quite some time. I'm griping about the automatic synonymization of "Winter" with "Christmas." I'm griping that every single tune the ice-skaters in the grand opening ceremony twirled to was a Christmas tune. I'm griping that there's no Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, or Wiccan equivalent to the sentimental notion that "even the most hardened, cynical heart can believe at Christmas time!" Look, I don't care that Christmas has been secularized - that doesn't make it any less irksome to see it get exclusive favor from secular entities.

I mean, would it be all that bad to have a little mention of the Solstice? of Chanukkah? of Eid, Diwali, Kwanzaa? That would be so damn cool: an ice-dancing routine of African descent celebrating the seven virtues, with the dancers dressed in green, red, and yellow; then a reenactment of the consecrating of the temple with the miraculous eight-day duration of that tiny bit of lamp oil; and then a solemn yet divinely comic procession of divinities led by Ganesha around the rink.

Wouldn't it be cool if the onset of winter prompted a celebration of the entire community, every last heathen pagan atheist or god-fearing one of 'em? Wouldn't it be cool if the folks planning these festivities actually gave a damn about the diversity of their city... instead of brushing the non-Christians aside, putting on their church robes, and then pretending that calling it something vague like "the holiday season" somehow magically does the inclusivity work they've neglected by only celebrating one damn holiday?

Maybe one day. When I'm the boss of Boulder.

Wow.

OK. I've just written the penultimate scene in the book. I've decided at last exactly what leads up to the shooting scene, and how that comes about; and I've fleshed out a bit of what happens just after. (Best line of dialogue so far: One police officer says to another, "You asshole, put that away. You wanna tell your kids you shot a unicorn?") And I've finally figured out how to resolve Diane's relationship with the one-horned critter such that she loses the ability to change shape in a way actually required by the story.

Hint: no, she doesn't just lose the magic item. It's something better.

I'm not sure whether what I just wrote was awful purple yuck or transcendent glorious poetry. But I'm feeling like I just read something transcendent and glorious, anyway, so I'm just going to ride that wave for now and congratulate myself.

Now I really ought to pull out my short-short story draft and start revising it into something submittable. Except I'm kinda scattered at the moment...

Maybe it's the coffee. Many cups of coffee, on top of a glass of tea from Penny Lane, on top of a pot of tea from the Tea Spot. My brain went and drowned in caffeine. So... I guess I'll hit the keyboard again when I've managed to resuscitate it and dry it off.

Happy Thanksgiving!