author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So I did my 2K at the IHOP, and I was ready to clear out of there, but I'm still very much awake and not ready to go home. But it's getting a little too wintery for that "sitting outside random wiFi cafes at one AM" schtick. Tonight's not so bad, though, so I'm doing it anyway.

Not that I have much to report. I'm jumping around the novel like crazy, filling out some more plot tension in the climactic post-shooting scene after writing up an unattached last-meeting-with-the-old-woman scene (nearly made myself cry there - not like it's any great achievement to make me cry). I've passed the halfway point in the novel (about time!). And I just topped off my hot tea and fried chicken salad dinner by sucking the lemon wedge dry. "Force Ten" from the Rush album A Show Of Hands just now showed up on my random shuffling of every single MP3 and WMA on my laptop. And Café Bravo proudly features Glacier Homemade Ice Cream.

There. And isn't that more random useless facts than you can shake a stick at?

It's so true. Give someone all day to do something, and nothing will get done. I overslept and then goofed off all morning. This is not the way to get a novel written.

That said, once I did get around to writing, I managed to do one full cycle of three half-hour sessions. It's not exactly a jet-pack flight - more of a hop, really - but it did get me further down the block than I would have gone otherwise. Half an hour translates into roughly 1,000 words; three of those is 150% of my daily requirement. So that's all good.

I'm at the Tea Spot again. It's pretty busy on a Tuesday night. Hordes of people come and go, some with take-out or leftovers from other area restaurants. Outside, the skating rink is still undergoing construction. Thousands of little white tubes are being laid out in a flat net where the ice will be. They create a sort of loopy fringe around the edges where they connect to the main pipe. I assume they're what will keep the ice cold enough to stay ice. I seem to remember the third weekend in November as the date the rink is supposed to open, but don't quote me on that.

Eh. Not much point to reporting all this, except that it seems I ought to put more in this blog than, "Wrote three thousand words tonight. I rock. I keep losing money at Skilljam.com, though." I couldn't really tell you why I'm keeping a blog at all, except maybe because it's spiffy to have my own version of the Dreaded Word-count Bar, and because I like the idea of keeping a record of my own progress through this novel - how many words a day, when my dry spells were, when I scrambled to catch up, how insane was I on the last three days of November. And maybe if friends of mine are actually reading this, I won't be tempted to babble their ears off with a verbal brain dump about every little thing I thought and did on a given day, because they'll have already read it and won't need to hear it again. And maybe then I'll actually shut up and listen to what they have to say.

Hey, it must be Autopsychoanalysis Hour again. Who knew? Anyway, forget I said any of that. In summary: 3,000 words today and 1 pot of tea drunk. Go me.

Lookit dat. Put a little extra wordage in today's novel-writing session. Almost 300 words extra. Unfortunately, the extra sprint got me where I don't know where to go next. Tomorrow is, as always, another day; maybe I'll have figured it out by then.

Diane has had her second adventure, in which she slips into the unicorn's role as healer and protector. She also learns about the unicorn's attraction to innocence when her road home takes her past her friend's house. She finds herself in the conflicted position of seeing her friend through a unicorn's eyes. There's a lot of tension there, and none of it is really resolved when her friend comes over the next day to tell her about his close encounter. She has to pretend to be all excited and stuff when in fact she's going oh, crap, please don't talk about it.

See, it's a superhero story. Superheroes often find themselves discussing themselves with close friends and romantic interests who don't know their secret identity. Black and Blue Magic is in that way a superhero story too. Harry's discomfort when his neighbor tells him that she saw an angel is kind of what I was going for in this scene, only for Diane the gut-writhing apprehension is twisted up a bit tighter and there's less comic relief. I don't know why there's so little comic relief going on here. Maybe I'm taking it too seriously. Maybe Diane hasn't yet escaped MarySuedom, and it's myself I'm taking too seriously.

(Here ends the self-searching psychoanalysis portion of today's blog entry. Next up: NanoGoofiness!)

It's just me and SlyCrow today doing the pot-luck write-in thing. I rewarmed last week's chili, which only gets better over time, and devilled me up some eggs 'cause we're behind in our household Royal Crest Dairy delivery consumption. SlyCrow brought some very nice cornbread. We thought maybe Multivitamim and Willow might show tonight, but as of yet there has been no sign. We're listening to the Blue Man Group audio CD and the sound of our own typing.

I'm thinking I should actively seek out people to write with more often, even after NaNo is over - there's a certain amount of peer-pressure energy that keeps me from Alt-Tabbing over to Skilljam or Insaniquarium (or some other time-waster video game). I mean, how can I slack off when there are other people in the room hard at work?

I got a call from hubby-o'-mine, saying that after his gaming session (Dungeons And Dragons I think they're playing tonight) he'll have to go right back to the office and I probably won't see him until 5:00 AM tomorrow. That probably means we're both going to be sleeping in. I'm on a Mon/Wed/Fri schedule at RRSR, so I'll be home all day tomorrow. I may just try out the "6,000 Word Jet-Pack" idea that Chris Baty writes about in the Week Three Pep Talk chapter of his book. It goes something like this:

Pick a day when you have nothing to do. Get up and do three 30-minute writing sessions in a row. Go do something else for awhile. Lather. Rinse. Repeat for a total of 3 cycles of 3 30-minute sessions each. For bonus points, do it again the next day. Lord your 12,000 word jump over all your local NaNo buddies.

Thus, in the next couple of blog entries you will either see some lording-it-over going on here, or else some coulda-shoulda-didn't whinging. Stay tuned to find out which one it'll be.

Oooh, suspenseful!

This just in: The second book in Clive Barker's Abarat series is out. I hadn't expected to see it until 2005, and here it is, out in hardback on the endcap shelves in the Boulder Bookstore's young readers section when I went to go exchange Mr. Socks Fox for a copy with correctly cut pages. Whoot!

(By coincidence, when I went to go return my library books and pay my fine, I picked up a copy of Barker's The Thief Of Always from the paperback sale rack there. Who knew it was an omen?)

Abarat is the first book that, once I finished reading it, I flipped right back to page one and started over. It was sort of an "Ohhhh... I get it now," moment. The writing isn't by itself the best in the world, but the world that is this fantasy's setting is compelling, and the illustrations painted by the author are gorgeous and vivid. It's a story that really sticks with me and follows me into my dreams.

Right. So... I need to reread the first book again, but If I Recall Correctly, the hero is one Candy Quackenbush (ha! love it) from Chickentown, Missouri. Or another state that starts with an M. Her life ranges from utterly boring to sinisterly abused. One day, she's out wandering in a cornfield... and discovers a lighthouse. She becomes involved in the struggle between two very strange characters over the lighthouse's key, which when used correctly causes the sea to roll in. So off she sails, floats, swims to the archipelago known as The Abarat, where each island perpetuates a single hour of the day (making Time in actuality a Place), and the evil and creepy Prince of the Midnight Island is particularly interested in her for reasons that begin to come clear towards the end of the first book.

(I'm eager to see how many of my guesses about that are proven right in the second book.)

As I understand it, Clive Barker has been painting oil portraits of these characters for years. One day, IIRC, he realized that all these pictures he was painting were coming from a single story, and he sat down and wrote that story out. It'll span four books, each of them illustrated with prints of those paintings, and Disney's already bought the rights for the animated film, due out in 2005ish.

I'm hoping it'll turn out to be the first decent adaptation of a Clive Barker novel yet. (Don't even get me started on Lord of Illusions. Choke me with a nine of swords, why don't you.)

So go go go go read these books, 'cause they're that darn good, and 'cause it's neat to see Mr. Barker, known for his work in horror, doing astoundingly inventive young adult fantasy.

Here's the thing about NaNoWriMo. Reading fails to get done in proportion to writing that needs doing. Well, it does if you're on your best behavior. Even if they're books about writing.

And all four of the ones I checked out are overdue.

I hate library fines. $1.20 per book comes to $4.80 and that's, like, a nice pot of tea, or a sandwich at Half-Fast Subs, or a couple new books at a used bookstore that I'm not getting. I hate spending money on my own stupidity. Dammit.

I'm at the Tea Spot again with other Boulder NaNos. The majority of us reached our writing goals for the day (/me glances upward, *perk!*) so we're all goofing off and chatting and knitting and playing vider games and stuff. I guess I can go drop off my library books after this, and then head over to the Boulder Bookstore. My copy of Foxs In Socks is defective and needs to be traded in for a good one. What could possibly make a copy of a beloved Dr. Seuss book defective? Well, it's not that the pages are in upside-down. That's kinda cool. The problem is that all the pages are miscut. There's a blank white band at the bottoms, and the tops are all truncated. Slow Joe Crow's face isn't wholly there, and Sue's hair is flat up top while she Sews Socks.

And my husband won't let me read it to him until it's not defective, so, y'see I gotta get this exchange taken care of.

And that's about all I have to report.

Whoops.

1. Just reserved a table for 4 at the Boulder Dinner Theater in January.They're performing Cats. Yes. The Cats. As in, Weber meets Eliot. As in, "Macavity's not there." At the Boulder Dinner Theater.

If it weren't for this novel, I'd say January 20 couldn't come soon enough.

2. Going to visit my sister-in-law in Seattle in December. I like Seattle. Maybe I should make a list of places to observe in order to fix some detail inaccuracies in my 2003 NaNoWriMo novel.

3. Didn't write a single word since I woke up this morning. So that was my day off.

I'm still at the Saturn dealership now. There's no signal here, so I will have to post this later. (As you're reading it now, it must be later.)

I've written some really self-indulgent scenes of Diane's childhood friend reading her unicorn stories just like in the old days, and of Diane having some really disturbing dreams about him, and my word count is now a not entirely unacceptable number at which to stop for the day. I like the results of dividing the remainder by 2,000. They indicate I'll get a day off.

And I had this thought: It's totally unfair for me to complain about that unsympathetic couple at the bus stop, and not give well deserved kudos to another pair of people who, in a similarly needy circumstance, exhibited exactly the opposite sort of behavior. There actually are people in this world who give a damn about strangers in distress. More of them, I think, in Boulder than in Westminster.

So I mentioned yesterday's bicycle wipe-out, right? The road was wet and I took the curve at the speed I was accustomed to, and the bike went from vertical to horizontal in 0.5 seconds flat. It was one of those situations where you watch it happening in slow motion, and you feel really stupid about not being able to stop it happening. "Here we go... yep, skinned the knee, and there's my knuckles, and, yep, the forehead goes bonk. Whoo."

There were these two guys converging on the Goose Creek Path from the path that runs along Foothills from Pearl Street, and I confess that my first thought upon seeing them was please for the love of the Gods stop and stay out of my way. 'Cause the path I was on, y'see, it goes briefly up, and they were about to cross right in front of me at the top, and it's really devastating to have someone get in your way while you're toiling up a hill, even a small one. I veered to the left of the path to avoid them, and I thought uncharitable thoughts about what I perceived as typical pedestrian oblivion.

Next thing I know, I've done a face-plant on the pavement, and I'm trying to decide if I can sit up without wetting myself. And these guys about whom I was having uncharitable thoughts, they're running up to me and, very charitably, asking if I'm all right. See there? Instant karma's gonna get ya.

First words out of my mouth: "I bet that looked real stupid, huh?" I cry at the drop of a hat - it's often more a physical thing than an emotional one - and I had just impacted the pavement with somewhat more force than a hat-drop. So my voice is cracking and I'm leaking a goodly number of tears. They don't seem to find me pathetic for it. They assured me that no, no, this was a treacherous curve in the rain, it was perfectly understandable, people wipe out here all the time.

And they didn't even tell me off for not wearing my helmet. Guess they knew I was mentally kicking myself for that already. Although really I'm not sure how much good it would have done. Maybe it would have prevented the goose-egg on my forehead, but probably not the cut on the bridge of my nose.

The guy on my left, he actually offered me a handkerchief to mop my face up with. A real one. Probably cotton, woven linen-style, pristinely white, and he's suggesting I bleed all over it. I didn't knew people even carried handkerchiefs these days. They watched me mop up my scrapes, pronounced me probably not in need of stitches, and helped me get to my feet. While I satisfied myself that I wasn't concussed, he indicated that I should keep the hanky.

So, there ya go. Not everyone is a lizard-like reject from the human race. Some people actually care about others' misfortune. Some people, I might add, at the risk of sounding all pre-feminist, are actual gentlemen.

Maybe I can write these guys into my novel, should the plot call for helpful, kind strangers. Or maybe I'll just write their exemplary behavior into an already established character, such as Diane's childhood friend, the archetypal unicorn-attracting innocent with whom she will one day be married and have three daughters.

Because writers don't just take vengeance on icky people. If they're truly observant, they do something that's much more important. They celebrate good people.

If said good people are reading this right now... well, I washed off that hanky when I got to the office, and it came surprisingly clean. I'm carrying it on me now to remind myself, as I continue along my way, to emulate your kindness. You guys rock. Blessed be.

As Mr. Baty writes in No Plot? No Problem!, plot is simply the movement of characters over time. Therefore, if the plot appears stuck, let your characters get to moving.

And if you characters don't want to move, find some new characters.

Where do you find characters? You find them in real life. Go people watching.

I did a bit of that yesterday, albeit unhappily. See, the Denver RTD (bus) system involves a necessary evil known as the Westminster Park'n'Ride. It has platforms on either side of Highway 36. Getting back to Boulder from Federal and 32nd involves taking the #31 north to the West Platform, using the pedestrian overpass to walk across the highway, and then catching a westbound #B at the East Paltform – all the while hoping and praying that the B doesn't arrive while you're halfway across.

Part of this dilemma, I admit, I should have avoided by taking an earlier 31. Instead, I took the one scheduled to get to the Park'n'Ride at 10:12 PM. The B is scheduled to depart at 10:19.

I had my bike. But it had snowed, and the pedestrian flyover was treacherous with slush. If I'd tried to ride on the corkscrew ascent and descent, I'd have risked repeating the accident I had that morning on the eastbound Goose Creek bike path where it switchbacks to go under Foothills. (I'd post pictures of my face, just to get the point across, but you'd think I was just fishing for sympathy. So leave it at this: it's not pretty. No stitches, though. Apply hanky to bleeding spots and get on with the day. I was lucky. Wear your bicycle helmets, boys and girls!)

So I'm about 2/3 the way across when, yes, the B shows up. And me, I start hollering, "Stop that bus!" at the top of my lungs as the bus disgorges its passengers. One of them I swear looks up at me. But the B pulls away as I limp the rest of the way down to the platform.

And as a couple who got off the bus cross paths with me, doubtless on their way to pick up their car, I say to them, "I wish someone had told the bus driver to wait!"

And the look they gave me can only be described as, "Forgive me, but exactly what species are you?" Kind of a cross between "And I should care... why?" and "Funny, I thought I heard something. Must have been the wind."

It was that look that just devastated me. I swear, I sat down in the bus shelter and sobbed. Maybe I was just weak from gulping cold air and running as fast as I could, but I was a wreck. I sat there and just howled, knowing I'd be waiting half and hour in the cold for the next bus and that the people I'd appealed to simply couldn't be bothered to acknowledge my existence.

By the time I finished having my little tantrum, I had made my decision. These people were going to be in my novel.

I got to the IHOP Write-In a little late, where Kandybar and her friend Dana were already hard at work, and I jumped right into a climactic ending scene in my novel. Diane has just seen her Older Disreputable Boyfriend shoot her class mate (and evolving love interest) and drive off, and she goes running out in the street to try to flag down some help. That couple, those evil uncaring unsympathetic lizards, are driving the only car passing by. And they give her that very look. Excuse me, but... why should I care?

As writerly revenge goes, it isn't nearly as satisfying as the short story I just submitted to SciFiction, which story was "inspired" by the excreble behavior of a family of children sharing a flight with me from Phoenix to Denver. In that story, well-deserved harm actually comes to those kids, whereas in my novel, that couple are merely revealed as the rejects from the human race they truly are.

But still. It was sweet. And worth about 1,000 words.

Ha-ha. Off to take the car to the shop for its check-up now. I hope to get a good 'nother 1,000 words done in the waiting room. Talk to ya later...

Chris Baty knows! He knows with the knowing of many, many people who know! His knowing is neither to be no-no'd nor naysay'd, because he knows!

The "Week Two Wall" is real. It is no joke. It exists, and it is out to get you.

Lookit! I don't even have enough words yet to rightfully consider myself in week 2! But there's that damn wall. It is a wall full of slogans, one on every demon-inscribed brick, and the slogans say things like, "This novel is crap," "You call that a plot?" "You realize it's completely unoriginal, right?" and "Of course you don't know what happens next! The characters are all stupid!"

And of course there's this: I cannot continue writing days upon days of "Diane woke up. She went to school. She went home again, possibly running into Important Characters. She then either turned into a unicorn and ran around the Front Range all night, or she decided she was too scared or maybe that she needed her sleep. She went to sleep. She woke up and went to school."

Obviously, compression has to happen somewhere. I believe a rereading of Snyder's Black And Blue Magic and Season of Ponies is in order. Both are wonderful examples of the sub-genre of teenage supernatural coming-of-age fantasies to which I am attempting to contribute. They follow their protagonists over an entire summer, and somehow manage not to go "and then she woke up, and then she went to find Ponyboy, and she either found him and had more wonderful adventures or she didn't find him and was sad, and then she went home, had dinner, and went to bed, and then she woke up again."

But first I have to reach my 2000 words for the day. Midnight is fast approaching. There is no time to reread favorite books.

So I guess for now I will walk into that Wall and attempt to knock it over with my forehead, and write how Diane gets home from school and decides whether her evening plans will involve running around on all fours in the mountains again.

Mad props to all the other NaNo'ers out there who are doubtless having angsty Week Two Wall moments of their own. We can do this, y'all.