author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

His name is Uno. In this picture, he looks like he takes after Mommy. But in fact he is a lazy ass.

The pot-luck write-in at my place mentioned yesterday, did in fact happen today. In attendance were myself, SlyCrow, and épinards. Those of us who were writing did in fact actually reach our writing goals (/me glances at 2007 word diff between this blog entry and yesterday's), and we stuffed our faces full of - lessee, how'd I put it on the forums? "Kick-ass chili and mouthwatering homemade bread." Yummmmmmmm.

I did a whole bunch of house-cleaning before everyone showed up. Don't thank me. It was a selfish and calculating act. I cleaned up before I started writing, so that when I started writing, I couldn't procrastinate by cleaning the bathroom. Because - get this - it was already clean. And, unlike some, I don't reclean clean things. I find other ways to procrastinate. Ways that actually serve a purpose.

Like, getting up and spooning myself another helping of chili with sour cream and green onions and cheese on top.

Diane has made it home and gone to bed and woken up and gone to school and started to come home from school. All of which came out, really, no more interestingly than that. (Except for the near encounter with the cougar. Dun-dun-dunnnnnnh.) Now she's gone and run into Mitch, the Older And Disreputable Boyfriend Type. Mitch exists in my head as a sort of mobile grunt that has the potential to explode into violence. I guess all characters have to start somewhere. He started as a plot necessity, so I'm not exactly surprised at his current flatness.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, and I have no actual events planned except going into the office and slotting more data into a database. (I have this part-time job that, among other things, involves fixing a very broken MS Access database. This means I have to relearn Access. And cuss out its various "I'm helping! Bizzaro! I'm helping!" wizards.) Lots of time to witter over trying to write the next 2000 words.

Wish me luck!

P.S. Oh hey. It turned out that there was a copy of No Plot? No Problem! on the shelf at the Boulder Bookstore. What luck! Now, there is no copy there at all, because I bought it and brought it home. As for Pen On Fire, that one I had to order.

OK, check it out. I have 43,620 words left to write, and 23 days (not counting today) to write them in. That comes out to some 1,900 words a day. So if I write 2K a day from here on out - and I did write 2K today - then I'll be able to take a couple days off and still win!

We had a great turn out at the Tea Spot social today. In attendance were, in order of appearance, Kandybar, SlyCrow, mimsyborogove, and Willow. And myself, of course. I'm vortexae. And we all managed to cram ourselves into a single booth. Everyone's gone now (and I'll head for home myself after I get this posted), but then it's past 5:00 PM now, and people started arriving around 12:30, so I think we all managed to do our time.

Kandybar wins the prize for words written so far and words written here, today. But as you can see I made some progress myself, as did mimsyborogove. And in between paragraphs there was some chatting too. It was a nice sort of Write-in/Meet-up hybrid. And now I am thoroughly caffeinated. (I highly recommend the "Golden Thunder" Darjeeling now available at the Tea Spot.)

Tomorrow we'll be having a write-in at my house. I plan to make some vegetarian chili with garnishes of grated cheddar and sour cream ready to go. SlyCrow and mimsyborogove are likely to be there, and if it goes well we'll do it again next week Monday too when Willow might be able to join us.

I'm really liking this write-in thing. Last year we didn't really have any, and if I wanted to actually write at the meet-ups I had to be all antisocial and stuff. But this year it seems, like I said, that the line between social gathering and writing date has blurred in a yummy way so that it's easy to shift between the two modes. It helps when you have a whole bunch of people show up ready to write and socialize too; that way you don't feel like you're the only one A) talking everyone's ear off, or B) ignoring everyone and furiously typing.

I got Diane through most of her first transformation scene, and up to the point where she realizes she'll have to cooperate with the ghost in order to get home again. I left off right in the middle of a paragraph, and I'll probably do a bit more writing tonight just so I can see her home by bedtime. Which may mean that I'll earn a third day off sometime this month. Hurrah!

So I'm going to head to the Boulder Bookstore now, place an order for Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!, and pick up a copy (if they have one) of Pen On Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide To Igniting The Writer Within. And then I'm going to head home.

All in all... another good day. *happy sigh*

Hey, check it out. Progress on the novel and progress on the blog. I got most of the blog-and-novel-editing interface done today.

I also found out that this year's XOOP BBS over at NaNoWriMo.org is a bit more secure than last year, when I was able to ship my novel stats data over directly to the page that edits my profile. This year, I can't affect the fields on the form page, and I can't call the form processing page. I suppose that's all good security practice on the part of XOOP, but I really wanted to be able to edit my stats both on this page and on NaNoWriMo.org all with a single push of a button. So instead I have the Edit Novel Submission on my web page pull up NaNoWriMo.org in a new window, where I go ahead and make the same edits all over again.

The novel is starting off slowly, mostly because I don't really know the main characters very well yet. And also because I haven't had much chance to indulge in dialogue except in the "framing" scenes - that is, the scenes of Diane some sixty or so years into the future telling the story to her grandchildren, which scenes act as a structural frame for the story itself. It's a better situation than last year, where I was trying to let character write plot on the fly. At least this year if I get stuck I can skip ahead and write the unicorn-and-lion scene, or the confrontation with Diane's father's latest girlfriend. Or I can make up a classroom scene with the kid she's going to fall in love with eventually. And writing those scenes at least will teach me more about who Diane is and exactly what her gripes are. But since I still don't know her very well, and I haven't had much of an opportunity to let her find her voice, it's slow going.

Anyway, today my task was to get Diane through the initial confrontation over dinner (initial to the book, but nothing new to her really) and over to the point where she gets mad and storms out onto the balcony to be alone and incidentally discovers the magical properties of the unicorn horn talisman. I had to decide, too, exactly how the talisman works. That decision both proceeds from and affects the way in which she accidentally stumbles into her first transformation.

I mean, how do you get a sixteen-year-old girl to put a strange rock in her mouth, or hold it up to her forehead, or whatever? In the initial dream I had that led to this plot, I had to hold the piece of horn tightly in my fist while it was wet. But dreams don't have to be logical. Nor do they have to be clean. I mean, in my dream, the only way I could tell that I'd transformed was by looking at my shadow. I was continually aware of this lumpy piece of ivory in my hand. And even if Diane, in clean fiction, holds the talisman in a hand that disappears from consciousness as the hoof takes its place, well, how does she then turn back? Does she somehow flex the two halves of the hoof and let the talisman fall out? And what sense does it make to associate the horn with a stone caught in the unicorn's hoof? See, I have all these logical concerns that my dream was too inconsiderate to address for me.

In the end I had her find the talisman physically pleasing to the touch, like a hematite worry stone is, all cool and smooth and round, so she's just standing there and rolling it about her hands and face when she accidentally gets it in the right place. It sticks there and triggers the transformation.

Wow. It sounds really dumb when I put it like that. Eh, I may yet change it. But in any case, the question of how she turns back to human form is unresolved. It seems kind of violent to have her wedge her horn in a crevace and break it off. And I don't think the unicorn's ghost will let her get away with that. Maybe we'll just go all Deep Wizardry and have her shed the horn when she consciously reasserts her human thoughts. When in doubt, usurp an existing fantasy convention for your own nefarious schemes. Har.

So tonight I left off with Diane-the-younger running north on four legs, not yet aware that there's a ghost in this body with her, and Diane-the-elder going misty-eyed as the children ask her what it was like. The latter of those I'll go ahead and put up as my excerpt now, because I'm rather proud of it. It's a little purple yet, but I think it's got real promise.

See you tomorrow, when I'll be blogging live from The Tea Spot!

Oh, the suspense! Ah, the unremittant cliffhanger! Ooh, the now-properly-working word count bar!

So, yeah. I was able to drive away from Gallup just fine. The sun drove off those few flakes of snow, and I woke up feeling like a McDonald's burger under the warming lamp. Gallup was not a problem.

Raton, however, was another story. Someone please kick some sense into me next time I drive through Raton in early winter, OK? Remind me what a really good idea it is to check the weather, and how nice it is to have alternate driving plans. See, I didn't make it to my precinct's polling place on time on November 2nd, 'cause there was this snow problem going on.

So here I am getting sleepy again, it's going on 6:30 in the afternoon, and the rain is getting harder and colder as I approach Raton. In fact, it's snow. Blowing snow. Did I mention I was sleepy? And the steering wheel seems to have a lot more play than I'm used to. So I figure, stop in Raton, park at another Holiday Inn Express, check the weather online, see if it's going to get better soon or worse, figure out whether I should wait out the weather or push on ahead. The first exit into Raton looks to be what I want. I put on my right turn signal, slow down, begin moving into the exit lane – and then, because the road is now composed entirely of black ice, proceed to do a graceful 180 that leaves me looking scared and stupid in the triangle of asphalt between the highway and the exit lane. Thank the Gods no one was coming, 'cause otherwise you might be in suspense for the foreseeable future without me to write the rest of this story.

With the fear of the Reaper now firmly settled into the back of my skull, I inch down the exit lane at about 10 mph until I finally join up with the main drag. The Holiday Inn Express is on my left. I get into the next left turn lane, do a U-turn that I hope isn't illegal, and suddenly realize that the road now looks really familiar. "Ah. This is where the I-25 S business loop through Raton merges back into I-25 South. I'm getting back on the highway. Shit." The next damn exit was about 3 miles down, at I think Highway 64, which gets you to Taos. I didn't go to Taos, of course. I turned around and headed back to Raton, noticing now how the blowing snow diminishes visibility when you're headed north much, much worse than when you're headed south. Noticing also that this time I was not alone on the highway – a semi was coming up behind me.

Thankfully, this time I managed not to spin around when exiting. And I figured out that instead of U-turning I had to take a left, and then another left, and then another left, and then a right. This Holiday Inn Express was not built to be conveniently accessible, let me tell you. And if the snow plows hadn't yet gotten to I-25, then this little series of town roads wasn't even on their schedule. But I managed to toddle into a parking spot and fight the wind and get into the hotel lobby.

WiFi access: Check! Comfy sofa: Check! Cell phone: No signal. Damn. Ok, pay phone? Check!

Hope of getting home tonight? Nuh-uh. Hope of getting a room for the night? Keep dreaming. Raton Pass was closed, and everything in Raton was booked full of stranded travellers. "Try going to Las Vegas. 90 miles to the south." No thank you. I'd rather camp out on the couch.

I spent the next few hours on the phone and on email with my husband and one of the other election judges, apologizing in my most grovelling fashion for not being able to open the polls with them after all, and thanking them for running interference for me. I can't remember when the last time I had to have someone call me at a pay phone was. It makes the other folks in the lobby look at you funny, I'll say that much. I did some gabbing with other stranded folks. There was a couple who were driving someone else's car from point A to point B for them. There were three nice ladies and their two dogs, a mastiff and a pit bull if I remember correctly (when I asked, the words "pit bull" were whispered as though they feared eviction for having such an allegedly vicious breed of dog with them). And then there was this pair of Puerto Rican New Orleanians who just couldn't get over the coincidence of running into a hometown girl in New Mexico of all places. (Barry and Raúl, if you're reading this, thank you ever so much for the offer of a bed to crash in. As it turned out, the manager cleared up a meeting room and laid out some rollaways for us to sleep on. At $10 a bed, it wasn't so bad a deal for such unorthodox circumstances. I meant to leave y'all a note at the desk expressing my gratitude, but alas, I am a ditz and forgot.)

They opened the pass at 10:00 that night, but I was in no mood to push my luck. I left at about dawn the next morning, bearing coffee and tea and french toast and a bagel from the breakfast room, rocking out to another Yes playlist. (Union is a perennial favorite in the LeBoeuf-Little household; "Lift Me Up" was pretty much our courtship song. I don't think I'd listened to Talk since I was dating Mr. Wrong back in college. It was a lot better than I remembered it. Open Your Eyes was OK for the first two songs, which absolutely rock out, but the rest of it was just plain silly.) Raton pass was, well, passable. I got a speeding warning outside Trinidad. And I hit rush hour in Colorado Springs and Denver too. Did you know it's possible to type while driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic? Yeah. You just put the laptop on your lap, drive with one hand, and type with the other. When the placement of the keys require you to either switch hands or look down, for the Gods' sake, switch hands! Oddly enough, the enforced slow pace of such typing made the next few sentences of the novel come out much easier. My brain works better when it is obliged to slow down.

And there you have it. Made it back to Boulder and got to the polling place around 10:30. Of Election Day itself, and its aftermath, of course, the less said the better.

And that is way too long for a blog entry when I'm this far behind on my word count. I'll stop now.

The problem with driving on absolutely no sleep is, you have to pull over to nap a lot. I thought I'd be doing more writing on the way, but both in Flagstaff and Holbrook all I did was sleep.
 
Right now I'm in Gallup, parked at a Holiday Inn Express. This particular line of motels seems to have gone in for wireless internet in all its outlets. I'm loving it. But I'm also looking at the sky and wondering if I'm making a mistake stopping here. The sun is shining down uncomfortably hot on my face, but tiny flakes of snow are falling, making distinct "tap taps" on my windshield.
 
Well, I was starting to fall asleep just waiting at the light to turn into this parking lot, so it would behoove me to snooze a bit regardless. With any luck I-40 E will continue to be passable when I wake up.
 
Oh. And a couple hundred more words. Yippie!

It's just going to have to wait until I get home.

I'm still at the hotel in Tempe, but I won't be for long. The car is all packed up. All that's left is for me to get my own happy ass in there along with my bookbag, laptop, printer, humorous back-support pillow ("The Witch Is In") and print-out of a new short story to mail to SciFiction.

I'll be driving on no sleep and a heck of a lot of coffee. As I type this, the hotel staff are making their way down the halls dropping off copies of the USA Today—just to give you an idea of what time it is. (Heck, those of you who pay a little attention have already read the datestamp on the blog entry. Duh.) WFC2004 is some ten hours over and done. And you know what I just found out? I can get internet in my room. My window faces ASU campus, and if I'm sitting over here at the desk, I can sometimes connect to SSID "asu_tempe". And sometimes I can even stay connected for a significant amount of time.

It seems to be more reliable with the window open.

My last act before leaving this hotel room for good is to start my novel, remembering the wise words of one of the WFC panelists (whose name I have shamefully forgotten): If you can't put in your four hours a day, put in a few sentences at a time, several times during the day. Do what you can if you can't do more. And so I have put down a little over 300 words of the opening scene which begins the outer story that frames the inner one.

I'll be hitting the road soon. Next stop: Flagstaff. I'll try to pull up in range of a wireless signal there, type a few more hundred words on this novel, and blog about it. In any case, the goal is to get home in enough time to get a good night's sleep before—eek!—opening the polls tomorrow morning. That is - in 27 hours. 27 hours until election day! You had just better show up, is all I'm sayin'.

So apparently my MLdom (municipal liaison stuff) is now official. Gods help me. Erin emailed to tell me that I've got the actual moderator superpowers in the Colorado:Elsewhere forums. Go me. I guess I'd better go use them or something.

So I would have blogged on this earlier - like, a sort of running commentary on the wifi hotspots waiting for the intrepid traveler along the road from Boulder to Tempe - but I still haven't (re)made myself an interface to use from my web site, and PHPMyAdmin wasn't liking me much for some reason. I think it was suspicious of the networks from which I was connecting. Now, why it likes the one in the hotel is beyond me - but then I'm getting ahead of myself.
 
I left Boulder around 8:00 yesterday, having gone through the usual barrage of good intentions about cleaning up the house before I leave and really only managing to get around to cleaning out the fridge. Incompletely. (John, if you're reading this, the older of the two milk jugs really needs to be poured down the drain. Trust me on this.) Pulled up MapQuest directions and WiFiFreeSpot listings for my edification along the way. Ripped a whole bunch of CDs to my computer for use with my newest RadioShak purchase, a Headphone-Jack-To-Tape-Player audio adapter, just like used to be popular when CD Walkmen first came out. Stopped at Whole Foods for whatever I could remember was needed, mostly along the lines of drinks and snacks. Then hit the road.
 
It took something like an hour to cross Denver. I had meant to leave at 6:00 AM but I overslept, thus subjecting myself to Rush Hour Traffic. The long Simon & Garfunkel playlist I'd queued up helped, but, really. Had I known that I was destined to hit Phoenix rush hour the next morning, I might have just given up and turned around. Good thing I didn't know.
 
I took my first break in Pueblo. With the Colorado page of WiFiFreeSpot already loaded up in my browser, I went lookng for Solår Coffee. Discovered that the grocery store did not actually stock maps of Pueblo. Got good directions from the manager, though, and was in the right neighborhood shortly thereafter. It goes something like this: Take the 1st Street exit off I-25 and hang a right on 1st. Hang an immediate right on Santa Fe. Go left on 4th and park near 4th and Main. Solår Coffee is 421 N Main, in that big intimidating building that looks like a post office. It is, in fact, the "Historic Federal Building." The cafe is comfy, and the barrista was very kind to me. I had a nap on the couch when I should have been writing.
 
My next stop was going to be in Raton, but that's, like, wimpy. I'd barely been on the road an hour when I got there. But I took a ride down the I-25 Business Loop in search of Raton's single WiFiFreeSpot New Mexico listing anyway: PennyRich International Internet Cafe And Book Oasis, round about 2nd and Clark. (2nd Street is the I-25 Business Loop. Just go south on that until you cross Clark, and the cafe is on your right.) It appeared not to be open yet (it was just going on 2:00 PM) but I got a good signal just sitting out in my car in front. So I took advantage of that to map out my next stop: Las Vegas, New Mexico. (I also put the entire YesYears box set into Windows Media Player for my next playlist.)
 
Now, I could swear I've been in the Las Vegas Historic Plaza before. Seems to me John and I once stayed at the Knight's Rest Inn nearby, and then found breakfast in the Plaza Circle. You take the street west from the circle and that's where Second Tome Around, the next internet cafe on my list, was. The listing says something about Bridge Street but it looked like it was on West National. It's a tiny little used bookshop with a cafe in the back, and I never quite succeeded in connecting to their network. Well, I lie - I got connected for all of one minute, lost the connection, and never got reconnected. The tea was nice, though. I had the "purple sage earl grey green tea," and if that sounds like too many colors in one pot of tea, take it up with the New Mexico Coffee Company, not me, 'cause I liked it quite well. All three advertized flavors came through and blended well.
 
I tried walking down the street to the Plaza Hotel, another WiFiFreeSpot listing, but the "free" part of their wireless is for hotel guests only. For non-guests, it would be $10, a little steep for a five minute MapQuest hit I thought.
 
That was the last internet cafe stop I took. I lined up three Tori Amos albums to take me as far beyond Albequerque as that would go. It was 6:00 PM and I wanted to start making some real progress. Just past Albequerque my computer hibernated, and when I pulled over to deal with that, I discovered that the lunar eclipse had started.
 
I climbed up on top my car to watch. The moon was half obscured when I noticed it, and when about half an hour later it reached totality, the disk had taken on a pumpkin-like appearance, more orange than I was expecting. Me, I wanted a good ol' New Testament "moon turns to blood" spectacle, but I guess you can't be too picky. It was a lovely hour of skywatching, even considering the yahoos that pulled up nearby and left their freakin' headlights on and wouldn't turn them off even when I asked. Oh well.
 
I wanted to watch the eclipse begin to end, but I couldn't really afford the time. It was already 9:00 PM when I took off again, restarting the Tori Amos setlist and swearing I wouldn't stop until Flagstaff. Actually, I flagged a little short of Flagstaff and had a nap in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express. Then I managed to get to Flagstaff and turn the corner from I-40 W to I-17 S, and stopped again.
 
When I woke up at 5:00 AM, it was snowing. Snowing hard. From a privacy point of view, that was great, 'cause no one could see into the car. But from a driving point of view, not so great. Fifteen minutes later I was back on I-17 S, singing along nervously to the Talking Heads Sand in the Vaseline album, absolutely sure I was going to die. I survived by respectfully tailgating this truck that was tailgating this car that was tailgating this semi that apparently could see where it was going a lot better than we could, and we all just kept our eyes glued for dear life to the taillights of the car ahead, at 35 mph, for about fifty or so miles.
 
Eventually the snow lightened and turned to rain, and it stayed rain right up until I got stuck in (did I mention?) Phoenix Rush Hour Traffic.
 
So here I am now. The wireless situation at the Tempe Mission Palms is what I call "enforced sociability style" - the signal won't actually reach the individual rooms, so you have to do internetty stuff down in the lobby where you might actually meet people. I've already had a great chat with this gal who'll be on a panel tomorrow, and I was able to flag Alma down when she arrived too so we could decide when to have dinner. So that's all good.
 
All for now. More later, maybe. Then again, maybe not. We'll have to see, won't we?

Ok, so, I voted. The absentee ballot is back in its envelope with one box filled in per race and/or issue. I'll hand that sucker over on my way to taking my cat Uno to the vet.
 
Are you voting? (Say yes.) Good! Good citizen! You get a cookie. Are you voting early? (Say yes.) Very good! Your county clerk's office will thank you for not being part of the November 2 mob.
 
But wait - are you helping out even more by being an election judge or poll watcher? Will you spend that Tuesday driving fellow citizens to their polling places? Are you volunteering or temping at your county clerk's office?
 
Well, ya should. Really. The people in that office have been working 80 hour weeks leading up to this election. They have been scrambling to keep up with election and registration laws that in some states have changed as recently as last week. They are eyeing the months after election day with resignation, preparing themselves for the inevitable litigation to follow the vote. The least you can do is help 'em out in some way.
 
Not only is democracy not a spectator sport, it's also not a business/client relationship. Do your part to keep it running smoothly. Early/absentee voting and election judge service: Remove yourself from the problem and apply yourself to the solution!
 
OK, yeah, I'm done. Thanks for listening. We now return your to your regularly scheduled and less political NaNoWriMo blog.