author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

To my fellow United States citizens and residents, and to my fellow citizens of the global community: Happy Inauguration Day! The U.S. has a new President as of yesterday, and his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and I can't stop grinning.

I will put my exuberance here, for the record. Should I have occasion to regret it, as supporters of the previous President eventually did, I'll own up to it. But right now I can't imagine being disappointed because I don't expect miracles--I expect a continuation of the hard work and competence I saw during his campaign.

What the heck does this have to with a writing blog? Just this: I pledge to work as hard, in my own life, in my own career aspirations, in my craft and art, as I see our new President working for his own ideals. I admit that sounds cheesy. But watching him during his candidacy, watching his constant activity since the election (really, since when have we seriously paid attention to the Office of the President-Elect?), and watching him get to work on Day 1 (I am actually tuning in to CNN to find out what's up to--I've never done that before, and I actually avoided coverage of the previous President because he made me angry and nauseated), is nothing short of an inspiration. And it makes me feel like a bum. And I don't want to feel like a bum.

We find our role models where we can. I pledge to work as hard as I can see my role models have and do--because that's what "role model" means. We model our behavior--hopefully--after the inspirational examples set before us. So. Add another name to my list of role models.

It's kind of like a New Year's Resolution, except made on Inauguration Day rather than New Year's Day. I think that's fairly appropriate.

In other news, "Lambing Season" is in the slush again; I wish it well. And on the freelance non-fiction side, I'm working on some articles for upload to Constant Content. I was mildly excited to learn that one of my existing CC articles was recently purchased, and to find that this customer, unlike some previous ones, honored the Usage License requirement of including my by-line. (Read it here.) Apparently CC has also lowered their payment threshold from $50 to $5, which effectively removes the disconnect between selling an article and getting paid. All of which makes seeding that particular cloud look more worthwhile. So I will.

In the tradition of Silly Names Authors Have For Their Works, this blog entry is brought to you by the Demonic Sweater story. It is "finished" (scare quotes in acknowledgment of the eternally tenuous nature of that label) and in the mail. Huzzah!

As I may have mentioned, it was horrendous with typos, copy-paste errors, irrelevant infodumps, and stage-blocking stupidity when it first saw other eyes than mine. Among the logical errors were a man getting out of a car twice but only getting back in once, a woman working with a rigid-heddle loom on the ground (owie back!), and a full-grown sheep getting grievously injured by nothing more than an average-sized woman falling on it. Also, one of my friends actually googled the fictional address I gave Maud's farmhouse, and Google told him it was outside Colorado Springs. Fine. Fine! You don't get a fictional address, K? How d'ya like them apples? You just get told "east of Brighton and north of Weld County Road 2," and you're going to accept it!

The version I sent to my writing teacher Monday was better, but still embarrassingly full of typos. I spent a good chunk of the write-in reserved for actual NaNoWriMo'ing churning through and creating the new draft, and I am not so smooth that I can hide a rush-job. Probably one of the most mortifying "brain typos" in there--y'know, where at the last minute your brain inserts the wrong word for the one you want based on sharing an initial letter or basic sound?--was having someone set up her portable loom on the "big woman table". (Should be "wooden," obviously.) The visual is evocative and lovely, but not particularly appropriate.

Anyway, two days later and several detailed reviews later, the story is in the mail. Guaranteed 99% more typo-free! (That last 1% is properly left up to the powers that be, in about the same spirit as apocryphal Quaker quilting mistakes.)

I won't bore you with another glowing description of how much like a real writer putting a submission in the mail makes me feel. I do that song and dance every time. But I'm also on fire a bit because the last three days have been spent finishing a story. Not fartin' away time on the internet. Actually working on actually finishing an actual story for actual submission. My Gods, it's like I have a job or something!

Time to get back on shift - NaNoWriMo is a-callin' and I've fallen behind again!

Saturday morning I finally finished a complete draft of this story and emailed it to my writing group. Well, not so much Saturday morning as Saturday afternoon. It was 12:30. It was laaaaaate. I had promised to distribute it Wednesday, October 15th. I'd thought, "Tuesday's my nothing-but-writing day! Tuesday I'll finish it for sure!"

Yyyyeah right. Since when have I managed to do anything more productive with a Tuesday than sleep until noon (unless I went to the rock-climbing gym with John for 8:30 or so, and went back to sleep when I got home), crawl out of bed to do maybe half-an-hour of work of some sort, then crawl back into bed all disproportionately pleased with myself and feeling due a break? Yeah. Tuesday the 14th went much like that, only, no half-hour of work. And then, y'know, Wednesday through Friday were Wednesday through Friday. Full of stuff and things.

For what it's work, very soon the rest of the week will look like Tuesday. October 31st will be my last day on the clock at my part-time job. I'm gonna be an honest-to-garsh full-time writer finally. I mean, being a full-time writer was my plan back when I quit my full-time corporate web design job back in April 2004, but soon after I did that, the director of the non-profit I volunteer for asked me if I could spare ten to twenty hours a week to come in and fix their web page and do other miscellaneous tasks. And here I am four and a half years later. You'd think I wouldn't have any trouble staying productive on my own terms when I only work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday--and volunteer Thursdays at a local farm--and continue volunteering some four hours a week for the non-profit that is now also my employer--but by the time I bike home from the office I'm feeling like I ought to be allowed some play-time. And by the time I finish playing, it's bedtime. Apparently my self-discipline and time management skills are a bit more, say, non-existent than I like to admit.

So, starting November 1st, I'm a free agent again. Which is good news for for me on the NaNoWriMo front; I will have more time to go to write-ins and to organize stuff. However, Nov. 1 comes too late to help me out with current projects, so I need to dig up some self-discipline from somewhere or other and get things done. (About that, more later.)

Anyway. I finished this story Saturday. It has this is common with its origins: there's still a magically manipulative sweater involved. However, it's no longer set in and around a New Age store in north-west Denver. Its antagonist is no longer an individually acting eccentric employee. Instead, it's set in a fictitious community it unincorporated Adams County, east of Brighton. The antagonist is the central figure and namesake of the not-quite-town, and the whole town is in on her schemes. Which is to say, the magic involved in the sweater happens to be part and parcel of the community's way of life. And the protagonist walks right in thinking nothing's out of the ordinary. Think Wicker Man, only without the outsider's investigative motive. Think, if I've done this right, Shadows Over Insmouth.

Only I probably haven't done it right yet, which is why I volunteered it for Wednesday's critique session. Aside from one email bounce due to the recipient's mailbox being full, email did what email should and now several people whom I see twice a month and respect quite a lot will be reading it. Cringe! Nervousness and fright! I mean, given the last-minute nature of this story's composition, it's rather rough. It's probably a bit rushed at the end, even though the end came about a lot more organically and easily than I feared it would back when laying down scenes felt like a fractally infinite task. It's probably got copy-paste errors you could blow up a fictional neighborhood with.

And then there's knowing that I haven't exactly been the most gentle contributor to my writing group. I have been prone to Thinking Myself Right when commenting, rather than humbly offering "if it were my story I would" suggestions and "this might be just me, but" observations. And, being the prickly and temper-prone creature that I am, I've been guilty of causing a bit of... well, social tension. Which is the nice way of saying I've been kind of a bitch lately. I'm not proud of it. And I'm not under any illusion that people are going to be any kinder to me than I've been to them--not that I think anyone would be deliberately unkind out of some impulse towards vigilante justice; just that my effect on the tone of this group's discussions has not been for the better. I have to live in the environment I've helped create. So. Having given others a hard time, I don't expect to be given a particularly easy time myself. So I'm living on a steady diet of stomach lining and belated good intentions at the moment.

Um. Hi, y'all! I love y'all bunches! I promise to be good! (Please don't kill me.)

However frank and even merciless Wednesday's critique turns out to be, I think I'm going to need it. My head is an echo chamber, and when I last turned in a story (cf. "Turnips"), I was careless. The manuscript still had the blank template page header, for goodness's sake! It said "LeBoeuf / TITLE" in every upper-left-hand corner. And I mean, literally, "TITLE". Dammit. When Ellen Datlow lamented that so many manuscript submissions she had received revealed a lack of concern for manuscript submission format, she may well have been talking about me (if, that is, Nick Mamatas actually did think my story worth passing on to her, which I doubt). Beyond that, the story had stupidity in it, structural stupidity as well as line-by-line dumbness. Which is not to diminish the awesome assistance of my friend from VPX who did read it and gave me some great feedback on it, and then took the time to read the rewrite and confirm whether I'd fixed what he'd pointed out before as broken. Without his time and effort, the story would have sucked harder. It would have sucked great big granite boulders until the feldspar was striated. However, there's still a great deal of work to do. I printed out that story a couple weeks ago and began marking it up, and by the time I got to page five I understood that revisions wouldn't be a matter of a quick hour's gloss. Oh no. They'd begun to look like a good couple of afternoons' worth of work.

Which I would have taken care of by now. Really! Except, well, this story. Which I am sure will also get marked up thickly before the week is out. Or at least before the end of the month. Maybe. I hope. In any case, this story I have no illusions that is ready for prime time.

I hate that I didn't begin putting this story down on paper (electronically) until so late. I hate that I couldn't seem to get started on it for so long. The time spent composting seems to have helped, because the story has gone in an entirely different direction than I originally thought and this is certainly a change for the better. See? Better title already! But the late start means a late finish, because unlike some stories I've written, this one feels ... quantum?

No. The other word.

Fractal.

Every scene is not one scene closer to the end, because it reveals something else that has to happen before I reach the end. Look closer at one detail and many more details are revealed. It's turtles all the damn way down. Or sheep, really. It's sheep all the way down.

It feels like I'm building a goddamned house. Isn't it time to put the roof on yet? No! No it is not! And what's more, you forgot the insulation in this wall and the plumbing over here so you're going to have to tear down the drywall again. Dammit!

The result will be a better story. I have faith in this. But meanwhile the process of writing it seems endless. And I'm tired.

Hey, you! You little wide-eyed naive so-n-so who was all like "But writing's never really work, is it? Not if you really love it?" Remember? And I was all like, "Uh, yes, yes it is, actually," and she was all like, "I'm sorry you feel that way, maybe writing isn't really your calling"? Prepare for mental psychic slap-across-the-face number 417! You are my anti-muse and I hope your ears are burning!

I bet you pasted a little "lol" at the end of your post, too. Dingbat.

Several actual solid hours of fiction production this morning. About time. I was supposed to have a story emailed to my writing group, like, two days ago; as of now it's still just a collection of very rough scenes. And its critique is of necessity being put off for some time--the group only meets twice a month, after all. But I sat down and I wrote those scenes, dammit. From about 7:30 AM until 9:15 AM or so. At Joe's Espresso, which is the bestest place within walking distance to write at, in the morning.

Whaddaya know? I feel like a writer! Again! I like this feeling. Gee, think I should maybe do this more often?

I've recently babbled a bit about the odd habit-forming nature of guilt. I got that today. Late afternoon, playing Puzzle Pirates (like you do), I found myself suffering from a constant niggling feeling that "I should be doing something productive. There's something I should be doing that I'm putting off. I'm being bad, playing like this, when I should be working." And while that is quite true about, say, cleaning the kitchen or doing the household financials, it's not quite true about writing. I wrote, dammit. From about 7:30 AM etc. etc. etc.

It occurred to me that maybe it's not just that day after day of guilty procrastination forms a habit out of feeling guilty. It might also be that--could it be that?--I like writing. On a deep, fundamental, unconscious level. That "I should be writing" feeling? That's the aforesaid Deep Fundamental Unconscious pushing me towards an activity it finds delightful.

I like that possibility a lot better than the "Superego Weilding The Whip" hypothesis.

Maybe I should aim that impulse at "A Surfeit of Turnips," which, after all my bold words last month, is still hogging the couch, sneezing at the TV, and tossing used Kleenex on the floor. (This has something to do with my not having blogged here since then.) Maybe tomorrow. It's not like it needs that much work before being sent out again. Like, half an hour. That's all I need. I need to do it! Pronto! Stet! And ASAP!

Anyway, about the new fiction: It's the demonic sweater one. Only, this past weekend I finally figured out what's up with that sweater. It's not, strictly, demonic. It's possessive. It's all very bad destructive magic, but it's not in the service of beings from Hell or The Outer Dark. It's just because Mrs. Shemf needs someone to watch the sheep, OK? Is that so very wrong? (Yes. Yes, it is.)

In other news, and just to strengthen my position has having done my writing for the day, dammit, there was writing in the 7:00 AM to 7:30 AM half-hour, too. But instead of fiction production, it was random stream-of-consciousness being hand-scribbled for the space of three notebook pages, as recommended by Julia Cameron in her workbook The Artist's Way. I used to do her "morning pages" exercise, along with or alternately with timed "writing practice" vignettes a la Natalie Goldberg, daily. Religiously. And literally religiously, from time to time, as an offering to the Muse Calliope and other figures in my ecclectic Pagan pantheon. And somewhere along the way I got out of the habit. Then, yesterday, I read this most excellent blog post by Kit Whitfield...

However, the fact remains: I really can't handle a pen. When I turned eighteen I spent a year studying cooking and had to take a lot of lecture notes, which changed my handwriting from joined-up to printed under the pressure of needing legible notes, and now I have a fairly disjointed scrawl. The pen slips and slides all over the page, disobliging me in every direction; I just don't understand how some people manage to control it. In Middlemarch, George Eliot remarks that 'the end of Mr Brooke's pen was a thinking organ'; the end of my pen is making continual escape attempts.

Does this have an effect on my writing? I've been wondering about that. I write three 'morning pages' every day, as recommended by Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg, and those are done by hand; it's an extremely useful exercise, and while it generally produces ramblings about how I need to get the door fixed, with occasional bursts of insight into how to solve plot problems or personal revelations, the fact that it's done by hand is helpful. There's something informal about writing by hand that loosens you up.

In the past I used to write difficult scenes by hand, feeling that this would give them more emotional tone. Since taking to writing morning pages, I do that less; I feel that the three pages of handwriting loosen me up enough....

I was tickled to find my own experienced echoed by Real Published Authors, as I always am. In this case, it's both of these "loosening up" effects of pen on paper that I recognize. The "morning pages" excercise skims the scum off the top my brain--all the mundane, broody, day-planning, or just dumb words I have to get through before I can start writing actual stories. (Handwritten pages to rid the brain of such things is also nice last thing at night; it makes it easier for me to sleep and more likely that I'll dream interesting dreams rather than the one where I'm feeding the cats and can't find the Nupro supplements or whatever.) And when I'm having a hard time getting a story started--when I can't seem to find the "wedge" I need to open the cracks and let myself in--the pen and notebook sometimes help me find that way in.

In any case, I started with that this morning. And boy did my hand hurt after three pages! Not for nothing did Natalie Goldberg say of her years of writing practice that they had made her hand strong. I don't have Writing Down The Bones close at hand at the moment (I'm at the Boulder IHOP; my books are at home), but I believe in it she says she can put her fist straight through an aluminum school locker door: "My fourth grade students believe me when I tell them this, because they know it's true. My fifth grade students are more skeptical. I have to show them." That bit stuck with me hard enough that I borrowed it for the climax of a story--which you haven't read unless you're that one college teacher I submitted it to for my exam grade back in 1995--whose main character in fact had to write, as a biological necessity, copious amounts every month, and who ends up stopping a punch with her writing hand and breaking a few finger-bones in the process. Um. The other guy's bones. Not hers.

Anyway, yes. Hand hurts! (No bones broken, though.) And my handwriting--ye Gods, it sucks! But it was surprisingly easier to move into fiction-production mode after doing those three pages, and a lot easier to keep at the fiction for two solid hours, than I've found writing to be in a very long time. I recommend 'em, morning pages.

(I also recommend the rest of Kit Whitfield's blog. Deep literary insight some days, hilarious conversations with her cat on other days. What's not to like?)