author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hey, check this out. The Sheraton Mountain Vista has wi-fi in the lobby. Why the hell'd it take me so long to figure that out? Not that I minded going to Loaded Joe's for my internet fix, but when all I want to do is check email, Google a bit of info, or upload a blog entry, it's nice to have that two minutes from my door rather than ten.

Of course, internet in our room would be even better, but Starwood has not sprung for wireless repeaters. If I go out on the balcony I can sometimes get onto some unsecured private network in the area--its SSID is neither an out-of-the-box default, nor is it obviously related to a neighboring resort--but the flies out there are something awful. And computer monitors? Are ten-star fly attractors.

We'll be driving back to Boulder in a few hours. John wants to be at work for 8:00 AM, and he wants to stop at home and shave first. It's going to be a night of very little sleep and a morning of much earliness.

Chapter 10 is almost done. Brian has been reunited with Mike for the second time, and this time he knows he's not dreaming. I left off with them coming up to the surface to babble happy greetings to each other. No real information has yet been exchanged. The continuation of this conversation will need some careful engineering: Mike will tell Brian how he came to be where he is, a tale that will include admission of unsavory deeds which the elder brother utterly fails to regret; Brian will be shocked, horrified, and as disbelieving as I can paint him without making him look like I rolled him a 5 in Intelligence. That's because his ability to continue relating to his brother after this conversation will depend on how much he can convince himself that he had misheard, or misinterpreted, Mike's tale, and his journey from "he didn't really kill anyone, did he?" to "that bastard has to die" is supposed to take most of the first three quarters of the book. Once again, I've got a lot of delicate psychological tweaking to do here. It's a problem I'd like to sleep on, so I'm stopping here for the night.

And you know what? It's September. You know how far away October 1 is? Not very. You know what that means? Time to haul out Sara Peltier and get that manuscript ready for Delacorte. When we last left off, Sasha was walking into town to return Anubia's video rental and, unbeknownst to her, to run into her crush and find out whether he notices her magical self-image makeover. At this moment, I forget exactly what I'd intended to do with that. I expect tomorrow will involve a lot of rereading.

See you in Boulder.

One of the side benefits of fictioneering is the Fiction Bubble. The author immerses herself in her fictional world, seeing her characters' surroundings out of their eyes, building a wall of narrative around herself word by word. It can be a disadvantage, sure, if the Fiction Bubble makes it hard for the author to focus on Responsible Stuff, sure, but when the real world is full of Seriously Tragic Stuff Against Which One Feels Helpless, a good cushion of fiction between oneself and reality also serves as a cushion between oneself and the onset of clinical depression.

Addendum: This. And on that note, this too.

Cultivate dailiness, ye writers and storytellers, for the Truth may set ye free, but a good Lie can keep ye sane.

Nevertheless. I've begun a short story about rebuilding New Orleans. It's a ghost story, of course. The first few sentences go something like this:

They rebuilt New Orleans on top of its own bones in the year 2006. They caught the floating caskets and anchored them once more to their mausoleums. They planted a new Mardi Gras tree on Bonnabel Boulevard. They dried out Mandina's and put on a fresh pot of red beans and rice. And we all came home.

Meanwhile, Drowning Boy is swimming along. I wish I were going faster with it, but at least Chapter 10 isn't slogging at the sloggy non-speed of Chapter 7. More action and discovery of new worlds; less maudlin wallowing. Because the rewrite has Brian changing land for sea at Lake Union instead of Alki Beach, I had to get him through the Ballard Locks. Research can be fun! Another side benefit of fictioneering: the author never lacks for excuses to learn a little bit about everything.

Not that I don't have a good excuse already, what with being a human being in an interesting--sometimes too-interesting--world. But it's amazing how far down a tangent "I can use this in a story" will go.

Novel's progressed by another 500 words or so. I'll probably get another 500 or so done before the day is out, but blogging is sporadic due to no internet in the hotel room. I'm at Loaded Joe's for my wireless and for some rockin' damn music. It's the final Battle of the Bands competition of the summer. Mojitos and Bloody Marys are tasty. John can vouch for the hot chocolate. Beer's free. Someone who's been enjoying the free beer--Darryl? Therryl?--would like me to tell y'all, whoever y'all may be, that he says hello.

So I'll hang out here a bit more, and then head back to the hotel for more novel-writing.

Not that it matters.

John and I are in Avon, Colorado. We're doing that get-away-from-town thing we sometimes do on holiday weekends.

But who cares about my freakin' vacation?

The current estimate is that WOTC will start calling authors next week to get 'em to send in their full manuscripts, those they want to see. I'm going to try to get just as far through the novel as I can while I have no cats, cleaning, work, or random visits to interrupt.

But none of this matters.

A friendly gal from the NOLA.com forums who happens to be the niece of one of my parents' close neighbors emailed me with a link to satellite photography of our neighborhood. The houses are all standing. There's no water on the street. The levee is undamaged. My parents will have something to come home to. So will I.

But it's a house. Who. Fucking. Cares?

People are dying all over New Orleans. And FEMA have bugged out. Evacuation efforts by land, air, or sea can't go fast enough. And all air traffic was halted so that our precious President Bush could take a ceremonial tour of the area without feeling threatened. People are starving. There's no food, no clean water, nothing to eat or drink but what you can scavenge from what stores haven't been cleaned out yet. And Homeland Security forbade the Red Cross--the Red Cross! Loaded with supplies, food, and life-saving water--forbade the Red Cross to enter the city.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

I wish I was making that up. The Gods' Honest Fucking Truth: This is Homeland Security's rationale.

It is getting harder and harder not to believe that there exists a concerted Federal effort to kill the poor of New Orleans. Sorry, Mom. I know you're sick of hearing it. But nothing else makes sense.

You know what I want to do? I want to head down to Jeffco Aiport, load up a Cessna 172 with bottled water, and fly the hell down there. Land on I-10 after a few flyovers to get the poor stranded folks huddled there to clear the landing strip. Stop, pitch 'em all out, fly off again for more. Maybe take three people with me because that's all that plane will carry, three passengers and the pilot.

And I can't. I can't afford the rental or the gas. Nor can I afford to get shot down by the National Guard. That wouldn't help anyone.

I can, however, afford the donation John and I have made to the Red Cross. But Homeland Security won't let into the city the life-saving food and water we helped pay for. Because, of course, everyone who's still in the city is, according to Homeland Security, there by choice and they will choose to stay, choose to return, for the sake of a Red Cross doughnut.

You know, after 9/11, many authors felt that, compared to that tragedy, everything had ceased to matter. Why write books when so many people have died? I didn't share that despair--I felt that any celebration of life is always worth it.

But I'm coming very close to it now. At least with 9/11, you knew that everything the goverment could do was being done. But today, who cares about my novel? Anything that distracts the general public from the murder that is being committed on my city--there is no other word for what Homeland Security are doing by forbidding the Red Cross entrance--any distraction costs lives.

Stop reading this. Go do something. Shout it from the rooftops. Write emails and letters. Call your representatives. Get the assholes out of the Red Cross's way, get FEMA on the damn ground already, get food and water to the dying people stranded in my city. Please. Someone. Restore my faith in humanity.

Restore his faith, too. Gods know his faith in the rest of the government, at least, is no doubt crumbling.

Abundant good news today. My parents' house has been seen with real eyes; the good folks at NOLA.com's Jeff Parish Forum have posted that houses are standing, have sustained little wind damage, and have endured very little flooding, relatively speaking.

More good news: Mom's safe in Atlanta; Dad joined her there today; my brother's in Memphis looking for a job; John's sister weathered the storm in Hammond and repaired shortly after to Dallas; and the St. Tammany Parish Hospital contingent is both safe and still possessed of their Covington home.

Dad regaled me with the tale of two of his hunting buddies who blustered that they'd stick the storm out; this is home, if we leave they won't let us back in, and besides, when it's your time it's your time, that's all. Well, one of 'em got smart and left between the hurricane and the flood; the other's still there. Dad's been in touch with him every day, and he's been reporting on the state of the city. When we last heard from him, he was going to see if he could get to my parents' house, and, oh, while he was there, maybe borrow the generator Dad bought to keep the freezers going during blackouts. Heh.

As you might imagine, very little novel got done today. Scratch that: I did very little work on the novel today. (I prefer the active voice; passive makes me sound like I'm deferring responsibility.) Continued to tune in to WWL's live coverage, bop around the NOLA forums, and hit blogs.

But at least I did start rewriting the beginning of Chapter 10. Brian is headed up the channel towards the Sound, and he's beginning to think like an underwater person. Boats, for instance, are noisy, especially when the motors turn on. Things won't get quiet 'til he hits the salt water.

Huh. Boats. Wonder why I'd be thinking of boats.

Hey, look, a follow-up on yesterday's tirade about looters. After reading the racist ramblings of some of the (otherwise good-hearted) NOLA.com forum members (ain't namin' no names, go figure it out yourself), I realized that some things I thought were obvious aren't, and some things I didn't think needed saying, do. For instance, I sure as hell don't begrudge a NOLA refugee his grocery store spree. You gotta eat; shelter operations are woefully short on food, and what's in the flooded groceries will get thrown out anyway. Right? And to a certain extent I understand the grabbing of pawnable goods along with. Barter may well be a life-saver after the flood dries out but before NOLA's infrastructure is anywhere near back in place.

But. Shooting policeman? Shooting my NOPD? Trying to kill the very people who are helping to see you through the crisis? Bad! Bad! Bad! Terrorizing my unevacuated neighbors, who're hiding inside their homes for fear of the armed gangs roaming their streets? Bad! Bad! Bad! And you sure as hell don't need a plasma-screen TV and 50 pairs of Nikes. Put those BACK, you opportunistic asshole.

That said... don't trust the national media on this. The difference between opportunistic looting and survivalist scavenging is one of motive, not one of melanin.

And to the guy on NOLA.com who said of the looters, "Besides, look at them!" I say, look in your own mirror, chump.

Another word cut; got rid of some leftover Part 1 snippits that turned out not to have a place. Spent most of today reading the first half of Part 2 from the previous draft, reminding myself what I'd decided during the first read-through, deciding which decisions could still stand, and taking notes on how the chapters needed rearranging so that one thing leads to another.

Had a bit of a revelation about the Brian-Mike-Mrs. Windlow family dynamic. Revelations are good things. They make incidental supporting characters less villianous, and antagonists much, much more. Which is probably the way these things ought to be balanced.

Today was mostly an obsessive day. I spent pretty much my entire work session keeping WWL's live coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath floating next to my MS Access window, gluing one eye on the arial footage, trying to find out just how bad things were now that the levee was broken.

It was a day of ups and downs. John and I almost didn't go to work after getting the news from Mom. He sat there, numb over his fried eggs, thinking about his sister; I sat there reading three different packagings of the same AP news story, intermittently breaking into tears. My home, my home is gone. Then got to work, watched the news, read the Nola.com Jefferson Parish Forum, and learned that Bonnabel Place might not be all that submerged after all. One person even reported dry streets at Wisner and Poplar, and having walked all the way from there to Causeway without trouble. Then I got home, and read that the sandbagging of the levee breach would be abandoned untried, the pumps left to fail, Metairie left to submerge itself as the lake poured in and sought sea level. I don't understand why. Apparently Mayor Nagin doesn't either; WWL reported him as being "unhappy" that the helicopters never dropped the sandbags. But then I called Mom to tell her (she hasn't access to Internet in her hotel room), and she said she'd heard from the St. Tammany Hospital contingent and they were all OK, they were all alive, unhurt, they were not in any way part of the four-person death toll reported from St. Tammany Parish this afternoon. And John's sister isn't in Covington after all; she's in Dallas. And my brother's in Little Rock. Everyone's safe.

Now WWL is no longer reporting that sandbagging will be abandoned; they're just repeating the stuff about Jefferson Parish residents to be allowed back in on Monday to recover their essentials before evacuating once more for a month.

It was a day of slim silver linings. I learned that The Rock Boat has no plans to cancel; they may, however, ship from Galveston or Mobile. Final decision still pending. I learned that it is too late to acquire trip insurance, as Katrina's damage is now a preexisting condition. But I also learned that American will let us change our flight reservation once without charge. So maybe we're not out a bunch of money after all.

But I was so looking forward to sailing from the Port of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. I'd never done it before. It's a petty grief, but sometimes we cheer ourselves up with petty grievances. We use them to distract ourselves from great griefs, like the mental image of one's hometown sinking forever under brackish waves.

Not forever. New Orleans is too ornery not to recover and rebuild. And I want to be there. As soon as they say they can use physical volunteers, I want to go. What use calling myself a New Orleanian if I won't go help rebuild her?

But for now, of course, we have to stay out, out of the way and out of danger. For now, we get to donate money (and only money) to the Red Cross. We get to pray--or hope--or dream--or believe--as best as our personal convictions and suspensions of disbeliefs will allow.

And curse the damn opportunistic looters. There's a picture on the front of WWLTV.com that shows a man sitting in his driveway, and on his half-opened garage door is the spray-painted slogan, "Looters Will Be Shot." I am not generally fond of guns, but the crime of victimizing a fellow victim rates really high on my "kill 'em all and burn 'em in the innermost circle of Hell" list. And, as a practically card-carrying Wiccan, I'm obliged to admit I don't even believe in Hell.

Oh! Speaking of Wicca and such! Crow! This is me crowing! PanGaia's ish #42 is out. I'm in there. Crow! I'm in there with the most inoffensive yet unusual mispelling of my last name ever. I have to admit, while there are variations--my Mom and Dad typically put a space, whereas I somehow learned to run the whole thing together (as above)--I had never before seen the "Le" hyphenated to the "Boeuf" before. That gave me a giggle.

And today's in sore need of giggles, wouldn't you say? Damn straight I would.

Chapter 9 is over, and with it Part 1 ("Above")....

"He's gone."

"What do you mean?"

But I was broken. I only knew two words.

"He's gone."

Yesterday turned into my day off for the week (I say that so smoothly, just as though taking a day off per week was part of the original plan) because of a friend visiting from out of town. More a friend of my husband's, part of his core gaming group, but, hey, I like him just as many bunches, and once in a long long while I'll play too.

Like last night. After the six of us went out to dinner at Acqua Pazza (which, sadly, seemed to be having an off-night; better luck next time), we headed over to the largest house of those at our disposal, broke out the soda, beer, and espresso, and made some characters for this crazy AD&D/White Wolf hybrid system that my husband and our out-of-town friend had gone and thunk up. The intent was to keep the Dungeons & Dragons setting but ditch its play complexity, replacing D20 and rigid class concepts with the D10 "dot" pool those of y'all familiar with Mage: The Ascension or Vampire: The Masquerade might recognize.

And just to make things even more absurd and chaotic, John tossed into the mix a deck of Story Cards he bought at Gen Con Indy. Each card contains a very simple phrase and description: "Insomnia." "Surprise summoning." "Mistaken identity." These are dealt to the players. With them come the power to briefly take over the role of Dungeon Master/Game Master/Storyteller; you play a card and say how its contents happen in the story. For instance, during the requisite tavern meet-up at the beginning of the story, my character finds herself inadvertantly recruited for bartending duty. I play "Mote in eye" and say, "Suddenly, the bartender gets something in his eye!" John, our GM, rolls with it. "The bartender goes into the back room, clutching his eye and saying something about a splinter." At this point my character urges the rest of the party to leave the bar, right now, before the bartender recovers and sets me bussing tables or something.

It all worked surprisingly well. Resolving conflict becomes very simple when you don't have to memorize different dice combinations for each possible form of weaponry; a Ranger type just rolls the amount of D10s corresponding to DEX plus her Bow skill, and there you go. And everyone was eager to play their cards--on NPCs, on themselves, on each other. There's a "Lust" card in that deck, did you know? Yeah. One of the other players thought it would be funny to play it, resulting in my character having an unpleasant close shave with an amorous purple shrub. Ew.

We didn't get home until something like 2:00 AM. Lots of fun. We should have friends fly in from Paris more often.

Tomorrow the crew's coming over here to play a 13th Level AD&D adventure; I think I might sit it out due to my inexperience with straight AD&D at any level, and also due to some serious clean-up needed in the guest bedroom. Before that, of course, I mean to crack open the manuscript of Drowning Boy and really try to wrap my head around the order of events in the next few chapters. Sharks, assumed-dead family members, and mermaids. That's what I get to deal with over the next few writing sessions. Wish me luck...

Work on the novel today consisted mainly of reworking the bit right before the big sex scene. Said sex scene is still languishing at the halfway point. If you want to put it in terms of bases, we've hit home base but the crowd hasn't started cheering yet. There are some plot points to visit yet, some physical and some emotional, and I'm still pondering how to go about it. So I'm doing a lot of imagining, rewinding, re-imagining, blushing and humming with embarrassment, leg-crossing, and then more imagining, all the while getting distracted by later events in the book and how they might go.

Look, this would be easier if I were writing porn and only wanted to make the reader sweat. But what I'm doing here is mentally positioning characters for later events. The scripting has to be more precise. At the same time, of course, it needs to read naturally.

So what I did today was work with the bit of dialogue and its stage directions ramping up to the sexy stuff. It had been moving way too fast, resulting in the impression that the author got bored with the talking and slipped the characters aphrodesiacs so they'd just get on with it. After today's work, the symbolic marriage conversation seems to flow better. It's a lot more poignant, more desperate, more nicely full of fearful pauses, giving what follows the weight of a last chance.

Then again, it could still be utter crap. I've only got my own word for it, and--ha ha--I'm an unreliable narrator. Ha ha. Still, my hope is that I've got it to a point where tomorrow when I reread from the beginning of Chapter 9 I'll know where to go next.

In other news, I skeined up a length of the silk/mylar goodness discussed recently. (Photos of spinning projects will probably be uploaded Saturday, Circuit City willing.) Also, I biked around Boulder with John's T-Mobile Sidekick II, snapping photos of favorite eateries and writing up quickie reviews of them for NearLocal to earn the current promotional restaurant gift certificate. That's right, folks. "Will Work For Food." Or, at least, for $25 off the next time John and I and friends go stuff ourselves silly at Conor's.

Some time ago, I made a one-item-long wish list. Since then, although the letter of my wish (that the Tea Spot were open 24 hours) has not been granted, the Powers That Be have apparently heard the spirit of my lament. They moved heaven and earth, or at least that part of heaven and earth concerned with national diner chains, and transformed the Boulder IHOP into a free wifi hotspot.

I may never go home again.

Actually, I'm headed home pretty soon. Tomorrow's a long day, so I'd better get some sleep. I'm also thinking that this wasn't the smartest point in my novel to tackle in public. There are several reasons why sex scenes are best written in private, and one of them is the window right behind my head and the way it feeds my natural reading-over-my-shoulder paranoia. (I'd list other reasons, but most of them are TMI.) In any case, tonight's hour was slow going.

Just an hour. Just one frickin' hour. Look, today was loooooong. Today was very long and it involved plumbing. No, not that kind of plumbing. Dude, just because the novel's reached a plot-obligatory sex scene doesn't mean you have to take everything I say as a double entendre. I'm talking about replacing both the kitchen faucet and the bathroom faucet, which involved biking out to the hardware shop for new water supply hoses since the new valves installed this morning were 3/8" quarter-turner ball-joints in place of the old 1/2" screw-types. (Huh-huh. She said "screw". For cryin' out loud...). And then I had to deal with two obstinately leaking P-traps, which involved a lot of swearing and moaning and griping and sore thumbs. (From tightening the nuts, of course. Gutter-brain.) They're still leaking now.

I had expected this adventure in consumer installation to take a few hours. Maybe half a day. Definitely to be over by lunch. But oh no. I had just barely gotten around to feeding the cats and slipping into a well deserved hot bath when John got home from work. It was 5:15.

Got a bit more spinning done before I headed out to the IHOP. The blue-and-white is safely plied, skeined, washed, and dried, so today and yesterday (yesterday was a day off, by the way) belonged to a different project. That one time I went to the Estes Park Wool Market a couple of years ago, I picked up a fair bit of silk and a ziplock bag full of sparkly mylar. These are both rather tricky fibers to spin. Well, try mixing them up and spinning them. That's really tricky. But the result is fun. Ply together one strand pure silk and one strand silk/mylar, and you get this fingering-weight glitzy stuff suitable for creating whatever fashion accessory you'd like to turn heads with. I'm thinking, maybe a purse. I don't really own a purse, so it might be nice to make one. Maybe make one with beads on, just for added glitter.

(I'll upload some pictures as soon as I get ahold of a digital camera. John's got lost at GenCon, and the only other digital picture-taking implement in the house is his T-Mobile Sidekick II, which, being his cell phone, doesn't get loaned out often. Keeping in tune with the family tradition of low-end photo hardware, I've special-ordered the $99 Kodak C300 from Circuit City; I'd have it in my hands right now, only, I'm not the first to think that a hundred bucks for 3.2 megapixels is a good deal, and they're out of stock.)

Anyway, time to head home. Hard to pull myself away, but I've been nursing this pot of coffee way too long, and tomorrow's looking uncomfortably near. G'night, all.

Gods bless throw-away lines of dialogue. Chapter 9 has its momentum back, and the key to regaining it was, indeed, Amy's "How am I supposed to marry a fish" quip.

It's amazing how often the babbling I do when I'm blocked turns out to be useful. Yay Muse!

Not a lot to report today. It's Saturday, a day for which I had a lot of good intentions that all got shoved aside in order to reread Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix. Now, at last, I am ready to start on Half-Blood Prince. Which is good, because I'm sure John will be eager to read it as soon as I'm done hogging it.

Got a little ways into Chapter 9 today, which began not at all like I expected. See, I had this lovely, romantic vision for the segue between chapters. At the end of 8, they fall in the water and Brian discovers he can breathe down there. He smiles up at Amy through the water, and, after a moment of shock on Amy's part, they kiss at the opening of 9. This, of course, leads to happy sexy stuff happening for most of the chapter.

Only they didn't want to do it that way. Instead, Amy decided that Brian must be drowning--you know, the kind of conclusion a normal person would come to--and ended up trying to drag him back to shore. This would be more than just "a moment of shock." This would be fully sustained minute-long panic. But, hell, it's not like Amy knows she's in a fantasy novel.

She does eventually realize what's going on, and she engages in a fun little spot of dialogue with Brian, but now the momentum is wrecked. So I'm left trying to figure out how to get my bewildered but happily bantering characters to hit the next plot point.

There's some great lines, though. There's the bit where Brian says, "Put me back in," reminding me delightfully of MacDonald's The Light Princess (coincidentally also Chapter 9). And then there's the bit where Amy says, "OK, but how am I supposed to marry a fish?" Damn good question, if you ask me.

And so to bed, and, with luck, dreams that will make things clear. But first, a couple of chapters of Harry Potter 6. W00t.