author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today it's back to the print-out and the scribbling. Just the scribbling for now--no need for a rush job. The call for submissions ends July 1, Tuesday as it turns out, so I can finish up the revision Tuesday morning and email it then.

See, it's not that I'm putting things off until the last minute. It's that I'm taking advantage of all the time that remains. That sounds plausible, doesn't it?

Things I need to fix in the current draft include...

1. Overuse of the words "sudden" and "suddenly." There are other ways to communicate this adverbial property. Try a few.
2. Overuse of throat-clearing constructions: "begins to," "manages to," "allows [her/him]self to." Make each instance justify its existence, then cut it out anyway until each only happens once in the story.
3. Dilution of key plot elements and themes.

That last is tricky. I was looking for opportunities to make it more clear that the object in the wooden box is actually, literally Caroline's heart, because this is a thing that needs to be known throughout the story rather than alluded to obliquely until revealed dramatically. So of course I started noticing the word "heart" popping up everywhere. Hearts breaking, the heart of the matter, heart-stopping shocks. Too many heart metaphors, too many metaphorical references to Demi's heart, and I run the risk of diluting the actual plot element I'm trying to work with. So I crossed them out when I found them and scribbled alternate phrasings.

Which led to noticing other dilutions. Like, an unnecessary reference to Diana the Huntress, muddying the waters in which I want the Demeter/Persephone theme to shine clear. Like too many gun-related turns of phrase that aren't consciously put there to echo the gunshot that kicked off the plot. And then there's mentions of fire/heat/warmth/flames, which need to point clearly at either the literal fire in the hearth and the *ahem* fire down below, and not get thrown in every time the English language tries to build a fire metaphor. And now I'm looking askance at the multiple incidences of breaking glass...

It's possible I'm taking this "don't dilute stuff" thing a little too far. (Maybe both incidences of breaking glass can point profitably at each other.) Argh.

Good thing I've got all weekend. Well, not really--I've got the roller derby bout on Saturday and the WFTDA reassessments on Sunday. And Monday-farm-day doesn't generally make a good work day.

Well.

Good thing I've still got Tuesday morning.

Oh hey there. Blog white-outs are fun, aren't they? Apparently my code isn't quite PHP 5.4 ready, so I've scrolled things back to PHP 5.3 for now. If you can read this, it probably worked. (It's also possible that you're a visitor from far in the future, that being when I'll likely next have the time and patience to try to update my blog code. How are things? Who's president, and have we got flying cars yet?)

I got some feedback on my story today, and it got me thinking not just about this story but also about my writing tendencies in general. That's the best kind of feedback--the kind that doesn't just address the work at hand but also makes me a better writer. Or at least provides me with the opportunity to become a better writer. If I fail to avail myself of that opportunity, it isn't the critiquer's fault. He tried!

The thought goes something like this.

There's a "rule" in writing speculative fiction--and I use scare-quotes advisedly here--that you can get away with one, and only one, impossible thing. Two things and you lose the reader's suspension of disbelief. Now, this is a ridiculously simplistic "rule," but, like most "rules' of writing, it points in the direction of a truth: You have to earn and keep the reader's trust. The reader will trust you when you give them impossible things to believe if, and only if, you continue to be trustworthy when it comes to things they actually have experience with. Your characters have to behave like real people. Your portrait of a real life city needs to ring true for someone who's been there or lives there. Your portrayal of specialized areas of knowledge--guns, archery, horses, astronomy, whatever--needs to withstand at least a cursory fact-check. Basically, "this is a fantasy novel" can account for the flight of dragons that strafes Shreveport, Louisiana, but it can't account for the dragons having set aflame the county clerk & recorder's office in that town (given that Louisiana doesn't have counties), nor the crescent moon on the eastern horizon as the sun sets over the destruction (given that a crescent moon rises around dawn). And if you then have your main characters stand there looking up information about dragons on their smartphones when there are people trapped in the burning building across the street, either you've just lost your reader's patience and good will entirely, or you're one of the authors of the Left Behind novels. Neither is a situation worth celebrating.

Anyway. "You get one impossible thing." And I think there is another "rule" in the same vein, which goes like this: "You get one dramatic reveal."

Again, simplistic, but it points in a direction I apparently need to aim my mind. Because I seem to err on the side of the coy and the subtle these days, understating all the unusual or fantastical things that are going on in the story. This is possibly because my point-of-view character knows all those things quite well, and so it would be out of character for them to narrate about them too explicitly. Still, the result is undesirable. If everything is held close to the chest and revealed only subtly or at the end of the story, the reader has no certainty to stand on.

So I sort of have to decide which one of my unusual facts is the one to be revealed only at the climax of the story. The rest should be stated in a more up-front way, thus to do the work of world-building, scene-setting, and attention-grabbing.

As with the other rule, "one" is a simplistic way to put it. Sometimes "one" means "this handful of things that are all related." The main gist is, the reader has to be able to cling to something in order to make it to the end for the dramatic reveal. That is why not everything can be the dramatic reveal. Choose your dramatic reveal carefully, and put everything else in service to getting the reader there.

And now I am going to lose consciousness in 0.2 seconds, because I am that tired. Zonk

And yet more biking! This is getting to be a regular habit. It helps that today was Bike to Work Day. It was a warm ride from home to downtown, but I stopped frequently to sample the snacks and drinks offered at the various breakfast stations. Now if I can just avoid getting rained on while I bike home, I'll be in good shape... to go to roller derby tonight and really work out.

I tweaked the story a little more today (yes, after refreshing my memory concerning "The Red-Head Song"--Bobbie Mae might now be plausibly considered to be singing it to meter, if not on key). Mostly I'm just poking at it. A weekend away from it has not created sufficient distance across which to look at it with fresh eyes, alas, but at least I'm catching the odd clunky turn of phrase.

It's OK though. The heavy lifting happened in the previous weeks. All I really ask right now is that what I submit on Friday be a better manuscript than what I've got Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. I think that's reasonable.

I've begun expanding my day-to-day content writing options again. I mean, the ones that actually pay something vaguely reasonable. I have a lot of fun with Examiner, but "fun" is mostly all it is. I'd like to be able to make at least a little regular and reliable income, fiction sales being neither. So. Demand Media Studios, where in the past I've been able to earn between $15 and $30 for a 500-word article, is oddly devoid of titles in my approved channel at this moment, so there goes that idea. I'm investigating what it would take to apply for another. In the meantime, there's Textbroker, which doesn't pay a hell of a lot but is easy--most of its clients want blog posts written around random phrases they got off Quora.

If I exerted a little more effort I could probably find freelance assignments that pay better and might even be a credit to my byline, but I'm wary of putting too much focus in that direction. I'm very protective of my fiction-writing time right now. Getting to the point of actually finishing and submitting stories regularly, and staying there, has taken no small amount of effort. I'm not eager to make it harder on myself. (On that note--the space glue apocalypse story came back from its latest outing, bearing a form rejection letter. I shooed it out the door again.)

So... that's the state of the Niki, I guess. Um. How are you?

Despite all the whining yesterday, I seem to have bicycled almost ten miles today. About half of it was a sustained uphill journey of varying intensities. I'm not entirely sure why I chose to bike after the exertions of the previous few days. It was probably a mixture of vague guilt ("Really, how can I justify taking the car anywhere within city limits on such a lovely summer's day?") and an irrational pleasure in the picture of me pulling up to the ballot drop-off location on my bike. (Today's the deadline for the Democratic primary election in Boulder. There were only two contested seats. John and I voted anyway, because that's how we roll.)

I'm pleased to say that unlike last time, my copy of Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood was actually on the NoBo Corner Library's hold shelf where the email said it would be. After that bike ride, I'd have been rather irked if things were otherwise. (Public Service Announcement: The hold shelf is not for random browsing! If it is on the hold shelf, you must not take it unless that little slip of paper sticking out of it has your name on it! If you are checking out a book at the self-checkout kiosk, please notice if the kiosk tells you "You can't check this out! It is on hold for another patron!" Seriously, people.)

Anyway. Spent much of today's working time in submissions procedures. I got a rejection email yesterday, so today I responded as the freelance fictioneer is wont to do: sent that piece to another market, sent that market another piece. Then I considered the six drabbles that SpeckLit did not select for publication and chose five of them to send to another purveyor of microfiction.

Meanwhile, there's this other story, the one I'm contemplating submitting to Athena's Daughters II before the week is out. It's with friends for critique, all of whom I have, I hope, convincingly assured that they need not hurry to return their feedback before then. As I said before, either AD2 rejects it and I include my friends' feedback for next submission, or AD2 accepts it and I include my friends' feedback in a post-acceptance revision. It's all good.

But in the meantime, there's the small matter of AD2 desiring submissions to be PG13. That is,

Stories must conform to the “Indiana Jones” rule of thumb regarding, sex, violence, language, drug use, etc. We try to keep things here appropriate for most audiences, so if it’s something you’d conceivably see in an Indiana Jones story, it should be fine (i.e., melting faces are okay, F-bombs, in general, are not).

I'd like to register deep disapproval over the pathological idea that fatal violence is acceptable for "most audiences" while strong language and sexual references are not. But said pathological idea didn't exactly originate with the editors of AD2. They're already trying to push through another of the pathological idea sets in our society, that being that the one that says that female protagonists aren't interesting and female authors aren't important. One has to pick one's battles.

So today I did a FIND on every instance of the f-bomb and replaced it with, in most places, other forms of reference to the sex act. Except for the one where Bobbie Mae was re-bawdifying the lyrics to "The Red-Head Song." Now she is being just as coy as the original lyrics, only louder and with more floral variation. And who doesn't like more flowers? I hear that the two red-headed lasses famed in story and song like best of all to get... flowers.

So, this story. This story that I began trying to write seriously since at least midway through 2011. This story that began with a dream from some undocumented time long before that, at least as early as May 2004. (At least, that's the date on the story's oldest draft.) This story that has been through multiple false starts and aborted attempts over the years to achieve a publishable revision of that original dream-scribble. This Gods-damned story.

It's finally finished.

That is, a respectable draft of sufficient quality to put before other readers' eyes--in this case, a small handful of friends who have been kind enough to volunteer to read it--is finished and has been sent off for their critique.

I will probably have another "Oh my Gods it's finally done!" moment when I finish the (probably post-critique) draft and submit the story to a market, mind you. (And that will probably be next week.) But just getting it to this point is huge. Once a story reaches the critique-ready stage, anything is possible.

(Just shut up about all the stories that have been through one or more critiques and still haven't reached the submittable stage. I'm getting to those, OK?)

So, huzzah and hallelujah! Io evohe and stuff! And also thunk. (That's the sound of me falling over in triumphant exhaustion. But you knew that.)

See you after the weekend.

The revision is going pretty well. I'm actually enjoying it. Shock! Apparently, once I have a print-out with scribbles on it, I lose that aimless and panicky feeling of Oh crap now what do I do and I just start following the instructions on the page. Doesn't matter that I'm the one who wrote the instructions. I just follow them. It's like magic. "Rephrase this as a statement." You mean like this? This is what you mean. "Make his voice more casual, distinct from that of the narrator." Sure thing, yup. "Simplify stage blocking in this passage." OK. "Omit this bit; it's redundant." Zap

I guess the workaround for my revisophobia is just that simple. Print it out and I can't help scribbling on it; scribble on it and I can't help doing what the scribbles say. That just leaves the first problem: Getting me to sit down to a revision session in the first place. I have no simple magic solutions to that one, although starting the timer on Focusbooster helps. Timer's running--better get to work.

I'm pleased that this draft is going to wrap up soon. An even more perfect market for the story than Sword & Sorceress has turned up, that being the sequel to an anthology I was bummed to have missed the first time around, that being Athena's Daughters II. The deadline for the submissions call is July 1. The maximum word count is 6,000, which conveniently aligns with my intention to reduce the story's word count by about ten percent.

And while I can't reasonably expect any of my critique friends to have time to read it--I mean, I can ask, but this is super short notice to request a critique--I can make the story the best I can, submit it, and either apply the results of friends' critiques to a revision before its next outing should the story get rejected, or to a post-acceptance edit should the story get accepted. In any case, the story will be A. better than it was, and B. finished. And it's about time.

I printed out the story, all 28 pages of it in standard manuscript format. (How did it get to be 28 pages long? How did it reach 6,500 words?) I always self-edit better from paper than from the computer screen. It's how I read others' manuscripts for critique, too. Put a double-spaced, 12-point story in front of me and a brightly colored pen in my hand, and it's like flipping the "editor" switch on in my head. The manuscript will be full of scribbles by the time I'm done. (I always worry that the sheer number of scribbles will alarm the author whose manuscript I just defaced. I have thoughts, I think them on the page, I think them in quantity and with great verbosity.) It doesn't matter if the story is mine or someone else's; the resulting forest of scribble is just as profuse.

Trying to take my own advice, I went into tonight's read-through trying to focus on one thing only, and nothing but that one thing. On this pass, that thing was making the house more of a quasi-sentient character. Basically, there's a bit at the beginning of the wake scene, where Demi remembers someone commenting...

that the house was "too big," that two women and one small child rattled around in it like the last three beans in the bin. Demi had protested mildly and with perfect accuracy, "It's everything we need."

Which, in my head, meant that the house provides everything they need, up to and including extra rooms for parties or a nursery for when Caroline is newborn. The house is almost a fourth Deity in this small, self-contained pantheon. But I never really followed through on that thought in this draft, other than having the fire in the fireplace responding to Demi's moods--and that could just be part of the way the weather outside responds to the fact that she's grieving Caroline's death. (Or it could be mistaken for a rip-off of Howl's Moving Castle, which would be unfortunate.)

So I went through today intending only to look for places where I could mention the house's supernatural responsiveness: the refrigerator always having the ingredients Demi wants to cook with, the wine cellar never being too small for Bobbi Mae's growing collection of home brewed beverages, the door reluctant to open when bad news comes knocking. My hope is that this sort of helps move the narrative into Mythology Headspace.

But the editor in my head cannot stand to let a thought go unscribbled. There is no way to get her to understand that, yes, that phrase there may well need tightening up, the stage blocking here does need to be simplified, the story needs to be shortened by about 750 words, yes, this is all true, but we'll talk about that later, OK? We are only concentrating on one thing today, right? Right? Hey, come back here! Where do you think you're going with that pen?

This is why the read-through took about two hours. And why the first round of revision type-ins can wait for tomorrow.

Today I got to wield the hula hoe for my first time this season. Yay?

*pant* *pant* *wheeze*

The hula hoe invariably goes with hot, sunny weather. It comes out when the weeds pop up and the ground is dry and flaky. For me, it also usually means an aching back and blistered fingers, because I still haven't gotten this right. I must be getting better at it, though, because each year the back aches less and there are fewer blisters.

And fewer unfortunate casualties on the field.

To reiterate: The business end of a hula hoe is a sharp loop of steel that slices just beneath the soil through the roots of weeds both seen and unseen. It lets you deal with weeds faster than if you were picking them by hand. It won't help you with the weeds that are using the wanted crop as a sort of human shield, so to speak, but you can get very close to the line of the crop without missing a beat. If you're clever, that is. And strong. And skilled at maneuvering the tool through the dirt.

There are so many failure modes with this thing. You can be careless at recognizing which plant is the plant you want to keep, and scythe right through friend and foe alike. It's an easy mistake to make if the crop is very young and hard to spot, like just-sprouted onions, shallots, or other alliums. It's also easy if the plant you're trying to keep (burdock) looks, at least from one's standing-up vantage point, remarkably like the weeds you're trying to knock back (lamb's quarter). Then you can be clumsy with the hoe itself and let it slip into the crop line while giving it a particularly vigorous tug--this happens more often than not because I've given it a particularly vigorous tug, possibly because I'm fighting with the tool instead of working with it or because I'm trying to go too deep and I'm meeting too much soil resistance. Or maybe it's because I've just hit a rock.

Or it could be because I'm getting tired and hot and thirsty, and suddenly a five-foot pole with a piece of steel on the end feels terribly heavy, and both my back and my thighs are killing me so there's really no ideal posture left for the job anymore.

Yes, yes. Whine, whine, whine. Actually, today was not so bad. It was murderously hot and sunny, but I was wearing my Full Armor of Sun Protection while hydrating faithfully. And I wasn't at it for more than an hour at a time--an hour before lunch and an hour after. Behold! In the remainder of my day there was knitting, and bicycling, and going out with new friends, and no napping at all! Pretty good considering I didn't sleep well last night and then got up at 6:30. So despite my whining, the physical labor did not in fact kill me for the afternoon.

But even with as many seasons under my belt as I've got, I still get very insecure. I mean, at any moment the hoe could slip and I could kill a significant sample of the crop population! And I know I severed at least one burdock seedling today. Realistically, one is a fairly acceptable margin of error, but it's always sobering when it happens.

Look out, here comes your writing metaphor for the week.

Similarly, despite long experience with writing and revising, I still get scared I'm going to kill the story I'm rewriting. I'll go into the editing process certain that the thing I think needs to go was in fact the story's saving grace, or that in the process of tightening things up I'll remove everything that made the prose live on the page. Even now, I find I don't wholly trust my ear for Story. I don't entirely credit myself with the ability to tell the manuscript's good from bad. If improving a piece requires the fiction-writing equivalent of a sense of pitch, on some level, I'm sure I'm actually tone deaf.

This is very timely, because revising a draft is what I'm going to be doing this week. And I know that even a very clumsy, ham-handed draft has the potential to be killed on the page.

I have to keep reminding myself, "You've been doing this for years. You've sold stories for publication! Give yourself credit for learning a thing or two. If nothing else, give the editors who bought your stories credit for knowing good stuff when they read it." Or even, "Well, regardless, you have to try, because the thing isn't publishable in its current form."

When I start feeling insecure about my ability to wield the hula hoe without causing collateral damage, I don't just put down the tool and run away. What do I do? I guess I slow down. I slow way down. I make shorter strokes and shallower ones, so that I'm more in control of where the sharp end of the tool goes. Sometimes, if I'm not sure I've spotted the crop among the weeds, I do put the tool down--but only for the time it takes me to kneel in the dirt and pull out some bindweed by hand.

There's a parallel for that in writing. Go slower. Take a closer look at particular aspects of the story. Make a bunch of smaller changes rather than one big sweeping one. If my confidence in my "sense of pitch" is low, I can remind myself that I am capable of recognizing a tune sung on key--I can go re-read a favorite book, noting as I do those elements that make it work so well. (Or go re-read a fun but flawed book, noting the blunders and missed opportunities.) When it's someone else's writing that I'm reading, I never lose faith in my ability to tell writing I like from writing I don't like. I can use the act of analyzing others' writing as a sort of jump-start.

At least my editing mistakes are more reversible than my farming ones. There is no CTRL-Z for a severed seedling.

My goal was to finish this draft of "Caroline's Wake" by the end of the working week, i.e. Friday evening. I'm pleased to say I have achieved my goal. It involved less stress than anticipated, too. I got to the end of the scene that was driving me nuts yesterday; the final scene fell into place today easily and naturally, as a denouement should. Ta-da!

To be painstakingly honest, I did not meet my entire goal, which was the have the draft done and ready for critique. As I worked on it yesterday and today, as I babbled to myself about it in today's edition of the Morning Pages, I discovered some small slight issues I'd like to clean up before letting other people's eyes take a gander. The "hot and heavy" part of the seduction scene needs some cleaning up, as the same energy that made it effective and effortless to write has undoubtedly also weighted it a little on the self-indulgent side. (Please feel free to insert whatever innuendo you want there. Far be it from me to spoil your fun and tell you to get your mind out of the gutter. You're obviously having a lot of fun down there.) And given that the story plays around the edges of some taboo/squick boundaries, it's important that the reader realize, or at least suspect, that the main characters are Goddesses. I need to make the hints about that a lot less subtle. Oh, it sounds unsubtle here on the blog where I'm all THIS IS A PERSEPHONE AND DEMETER STORY, GET IT, GET IT? But things are more ambiguous on the page. Which means that certain things a reader would kind of let fly because Oh, We're In Mythology Headspace, It's OK might instead make the reader go What? No. Just NO.

So there's still a lot of "get it right" work to do next week. But that's OK, because the "get it written" part is solidly done. And that's a huge relief.

Meanwhile--hooray weekend! And it's a weekend with no roller derby practice, because the league observes Father's Day as a holiday. Much as I love derby, it's nice to get a Sunday off and relax. But it will not be an entirely non-skating weekend, because I'll be rolling around during the G'Knight Ride festivities. Wanna come eat good food, drink a beer, jam to some great local music, and watch a roller derby mini-bout? It'll be in Roosevelt Park, in Longmont, 900 Longs Peak Avenue. The demo bout will be at 4 PM, Saturday the 14th, on the Roosevelt Pavillion. See you there!

Well, that was easy. All I had to do was have Andy wash some dishes.

That's a little glib, admittedly. There's a bit more to it than that. What it really came down to was remembering that he's a character, not a stereotype. And, despite my best intentions, I was alternately writing him as a stereotypically sloppy drunk or a stereotypically sleazy pick-up artist. But the initial detail I changed that turned him from a stereotype back into a character, was having Demi come back upstairs and find him not lounging around suggestively on the couch but instead cleaning up the mess left from the party. Hey, he genuinely wants to help. He's got entitlement complexes out the wazoo which have led him to do something very horrible indeed, but his conscience won't let him leave Demi to clean up dirty dishes and broken glass alone. Characters are complex, y'all.

This required rewriting all the stage directions in the beginning of that scene. In doing so, I realized another mistake I'd been making. In the second scene, Bobbie Mae gets drunk and climbs up on the kitchen counter, which results in a lot of broken glass and punch on the ground. In this scene, all that debris... has just disappeared? I certainly never mentioned it again, despite Demi surely having to walk through it to prepare their late-night dinner. Whoops. So now they're cleaning up that stuff together like a comfortable, domestic couple. Awww.

A comfortable, domestic couple who are, separately and simultaneously, playing very deeply in the Land of Creepy and Problematic Consent Issues, but still. Just for those five minutes of story time, before things get morally icky again, we can say "awww."

Once again, two problems in search of the same solution. Nothing there "just because." Previously unrelated things becoming related. Story getting tighter. My short story theory is invincible!

So this time through the draft I hit the steam-powered locomotive tipping point where it becomes effortless to type through to the end of the scene because now I know how to get there. It'll need some tightening up, but that's OK. I can do that tomorrow, after I write the final scene, which will be easy a hell of a lot easier than this scene was. Yayyyy.

Exit author, in the direction of beer and popcorn and that pint of mango chili margarita sorbet from Glacier.