author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This scene. This story. Ye Gods. Did I say I was generally good at writing dialog? Did I say it's usually easy and enjoyable? Bwa-ha. The universe is laughing at me and my dialog hubris. Because the dialog I'm writing for this scene, or at least this part of the scene, sounds like it belongs in a cheesy porno. You know what I'm talking about? When the only point of the contrived "plot" and stilted conversation is to get the leading actors to the bit with the sex in it? This is kind of like that, only without the sex.

I mean, yes, it's a seduction scene, but no, sex isn't going to actually happen. At least, not like the characters expect it to. Or maybe not at all. I haven't decided. That makes it so, so much worse. It's like someone took the actual sex out of a bad porno and left in the cheesy seduction talk. I think I'm going to go hide in a hole now.

The problem is, I have a checklist of Things That Must Happen, and I simply haven't figured out a natural way to get those Things to Happen. So every piece of blocking and every line of dialog pushes the characters around like a cattle prod and makes a dull, heavy thud when it lands.

Progress has been made this week, don't get me wrong. The problem of the scene feeling rushed came unstuck when Demi decided she had time to whip up a quick bearnaise sauce to go with the seared venison. And the idiot plot problem got a plausible solution when Andy broke his glass tumbler and sent shards all over the carpet. So maybe I can hope the problem of the seduction scene being all bad-porno-awkward will fix itself tomorrow.

It really is amazing what fixes itself when I just sit down and start typing--just trust the things that I already know to lead me to the solutions I need. I already knew that Andy was being morose and pissed off by turns, "pity me" with one sentence and "dammit" with the next; I also knew he needed to be the reason that Demi would lose track of a thing she really ought not to lose track of. So I let him unload. And in the course of his unloading, he rage-smashed his glass. Picking up after that mess--"No, no, it's OK, you sit tight and I'll clean this up"--turns out to be a really effective distraction.

I have this theory about short stories: Most logical problems in them come from needlessly multiplying entities. Short stories work best when they're tightly constructed, every element in them doing two or three jobs at once. It's amazing how many problems I end up solving by collapsing two characters into one, condensing two scenes into a single scene, or drawing extra connections between seemingly unrelated details. It's a good theory. The evidence seems to support it. The problem is, I usually don't remember it until after it's happened.

But, see, I remember it now. So maybe I can use it. Ask myself, "What details wound up in this scene arbitrarily, purely because I had to think something up and that's what I thought up? Can I make those details work harder at justifying their existence?"

Nothing comes to mind immediately. It may have to wait until I next sit down to write.

I don't like how long it's taking me to finish this story.

Well, I don't like how long it takes me to finish any story, but--one thing at a time.

I'm poking at this story at a rate of a half hour here, an hour there, measuring my progress by the clock rather than by completion, checking off the ticky-box for "Yes, I beat my head against a brick wall for the prescribed amount of time today" and getting very little for my pain. Something has got to change.

By the way, if this dissatisfaction in the face of my slow pace now sounds contradictory to my stoic resignation to said slow pace then, well, then, I contradict myself. I am vast; I contain multitudes. It is a human being's 100% prerogative to change one's mind, and I am changing mine about this.

Here's the thing that occurred to me: Practice makes permanent. You've heard that before, right? It's a thing my guitar teacher used to say back when I took lessons during my high school years. "Practice makes permanent. Not perfect. Permanent." Meaning, the outcome of your practice depends on what you practice, and how. You can erase your mistakes or you can entrench them. I fear that right now I am entrenching the frustrating and entirely unhelpful mistake of not finishing the damn story. I would very much like to practice finishing stories, please and thank you.

I'm going to lay it on the line here: This draft will be done, and ready to email to friends offering critiques, by the weekend. That's my goal, that's my intention, and that's my solemn promise that I'm making to myself. It's a scary promise to make, because what if I fail? But I don't think I will fail. It seems like an eminently reasonable goal. Hell, if I can't finish a draft in a week, what am I doing with my time? Seriously.

I'm not sure what that means on a day-to-day basis other than a lot of stress on Friday. But it'll come to me. Something'll come to me, anyway.

I hope it will be a useful and encouraging something.

One of the earliest pieces of advice a new writer often gets is, "Finish it first. Then edit." There's a good reason for that. It's a corrective for the writer who can't seem to finish anything. If you keep revising Chapter 1 and never get to Chapter 3, or if you've never actually reached THE END on anything longer than a 500-word flash story, then that advice is probably what you need to hear. Alternately: "Don't worry about getting it right, just get it written."

I have benefited from that advice. When I was just starting out with short stories, and then later when I was getting over my twenty-year delusion that "I just don't have novel-length ideas," it was exactly the right advice for me.

Today it was absolutely worthless.

Well. Not exactly. But today I finally admitted it wasn't the right strategy for where I'm at in "Caroline's Wake." I've been trying to use that strategy to get to the end of the current draft, but it's only getting me to the next potential answer to the question "Why is it crappy and can I make it stop?" This is not a bad place to get to! But I can't keep going forward from there. Instead, I have to stop and apply the newly discovered answer to the place where it goes. Then I have to micro-revise everything forward from the place where it went to the place where I left off. And then I can go forward, at least until I stumble upon the next anti-crappiness antidote I need to apply to some other bit I thought I was done with.

That probably didn't make sense. Trying again.

Here is how I would much rather create the current draft: "Thing [A] happens, which leads to thing [B], then embarrassingly terrible dialog [C] that no one will ever read if I can help it, and then other thing [D] happening, also more awful words spoken by two-dimensional characters [X] and [Y], and then the big thing happens." If I could do it that way, why then I would reach THE END. Also drafting and revision would be easily separable tasks, discrete items on a checklist I can check off. I like checking items off checklists.

But here instead is what's happening: "Thing [A] happens, which leads to thing [B], then embarrassingly terrible dia-- Hey! This dialog wouldn't be nearly as embarrassingly terrible if it could take into account that thing [A] happened in a slightly different way from how I've got it. Awesome! OK. So. Thing [A] happens in a slightly different way, which leads to thing [B] happening in a somewhat improved way, and the there's some less embarrassingly terrible dialog [C] that might someday be worth putting in front of an audience, and then other thing [D] happens but wait a moment, if I can also incorporate improvement [xyz] into thing [B]..."

That probably didn't make sense either, but I'm going to leave it there. In any case, I know what I mean. And what I mean is, it's a slow damn way to work--too bad right now it seems to be the only way to work.

Two inches forward, one inch back.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

On the plus side, what with all that lathering and rinsing, I can at least look forward to a clean draft. Get it? Ha-ha? Ha.

I have no critters to report on today. Oh, well, there was a bee in the house--clearly, the bees are still getting in; they have not been replaced with bats in the style of traditional cumulative narratives, e.g. "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly." Alas, for bats are way cooler to encounter up close, and, rabies notwithstanding, far less scary. They don't have stingers. Barbed stingers that keep actively pumping venom into you after being detached from the dying bee. And randomly finding dead bees around the house? Not much better! I suffer from a low-grade constant background-noise-level fear that I will step barefoot on a bee that got into the house and died. I seriously got stung that way once. This was back when we lived in Oregon, more than a decade ago. The memory remains fresh.

That said, it's probably the bat (and attendant rabies concerns) that will get our homeowners' association management to take seriously my complaints that the roof isn't critter-tight. Bats are a Big Deal, while bees are seen as just a fact of life--despite the fact that more people die or require emergency care from bee stings in a year (thanks to allergies which John and I fortunately do not have) than have been known to contract rabies in the past twenty.

I have this to report: The story persists in not being easy. Remember how I said I was just going to have to slap some awful dialog on the page and see where it takes me? It is horrible dialog. It's cringingly bad. It makes me not want to look at it ever again. It makes me question myself: if I'm having such a hard time having a character believably say certain things and want to do other certain things, is it possible that maybe the plot I've come up with is just stupid? Generally I get good results when I trust my dreams and turn them into stories, but maybe I'm being too faithful in this case?

There's nothing for it but to keep splatting words on the page. As an act of faith, if need be. And to resist the temptation to go haring off after the latest story idea that showed up, accompanied by electricity! and excitement! and NRE!, in my daily freewriting exercises.

I always knew it was hard, this writing gig. But why does it have to be painful?

Argh.

I'm finally beginning to peck away at the third scene of "Caroline's Wake." It is an entirely different order of difficult than the previous scene was. I believe that in a previous blog post I might have optimistically suggested that it would be easy? Ha! Ha-ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-HA. It is not easy. It is not even within shouting distance of easy.

The problem is pacing and revelation. Also character development that feels natural but happens over a frightingly short space of text. This is the scene where We Find Out Important Things. The problem is, these Important Things are not things that the character revealing them is likely to reveal ever. So I have to make it believable that he'd blurt this shit out and expect the POV character to find it acceptable.

I do not consider "Well, he's really, really drunk" to be sufficient reason for him to spill the beans. They are very important beans. They are beans of devastation. They are the sort of beans you don't ever, ever cook for company.

On the other hand, one only has to page back through some Captain Awkward posts (with particular attention to this one) to realize that, out in the wide and very real world, there are men who will say absolutely ridiculous things, things that are multiple levels of wrong and bad and ew, and somehow expect these things to evoke appreciation and attraction or at the very least acceptance from the women they're trying to seduce. I can't count the number of times a man (or a woman!) has told me an appallingly sexist joke, and has then been flabbergasted and offended that, far from finding the joke funny, I experienced it as a rhetorically vicious attack upon my own self and person. Or men who unconsciously assume that the women they're trying to seduce have no wants or needs that fail to intersect conveniently with their (the men's) own desires. So I guess "He's really drunk, and he's also That Guy" can be enough of a reason, if executed correctly.

Except, if I didn't know better, there's plenty Captain Awkward examples I wouldn't find believable either.

Argh.

So this will be the week I pick at it here, and pick at it there, and freewrite on it, and make lists about it, and experiment with pacing, and just up and splat some truly awful dialog onto the page. And then chip away at the "marble" thus created until what's left is a believable and emotionally satisfying scene that climaxes the story.

Hello, this week. You are daunting. Nevertheless, you and I must come to terms. So let's get on with it.

Tonight there was progress towards our goal to Paint All The Unpainted Bits. We completed what conceivably was and will be the most difficult part of the project, ever: The Nexus.

That's what I'm going to call it. It's that squarish piece of the house, three of whose walls are doors into bedrooms or the bathroom, and whose fourth side is partially enclosed by the short end of the living room closet. Where that wall ends is the opening into the living room. In most homes, the passageway that functions as a place to keep all the bedroom doors would be called a "hallway." In this home, it's just not big enough. So I'm going to call it The Nexus.

Because it is a Nexus and not a hallway, there is not a lot of room between the various doors. Masking off the doorjambs was a titchy business. Painting in between the doorjambs was even titchier, especially when we got down to the floor. This is what made it the most difficult, nastiest, least enjoyable part of the house painting project.

I recommend always starting with the worst part of any particular task. I painting the tiny, detail-oriented, brain-melting bits that required the little hand brush first. That way I could finish on the high note of "Yayyyyy! Free of corners! No more fiddly bits! Paint roller! Wheeeeee!" Always try to finish on a high note. If nothing else, it makes it easier to bring oneself to start the next similar project.

As for writing... well. I started with such good intentions! And then somehow my half-hour email break turned into hours of taking care of every piece of household administration and maintenance imaginable.

Around 2:00 I finally broke away for lunch, over which I managed about 40 minutes working on "Caroline's Wake." Those 40 minutes were spent converting the first scene from past tense to present tense, then whittling away at the first two scenes with a meticulousness that, even in the midst of doing it, I recognized as avoidance behavior. Editing existing draft in order to avoid writing more first draft. I suppose I rationalized it as "I'll continue working on this after lunch." But I did not. Other things snapped up my attention and monopolized my sense of obligation.

Moral of the story? There are several:

1. Get up earlier so that there's time in a day to absorb set-backs like these.
2. Set a timer when email-and-housework break begins. Go back to writing when the timer goes off. If tasks remain, rejoice! Take a second email-and-housework break later. Time it, too.
3. Sometimes the purpose of Tuesday is simply to teach lessons by which Wednesday may profit.

Also, that 40-minute revision was by no means wasted time. It was a damn fine revision. I expect when I finally start drafting the third scene (tomorrow! For reals!), it will be all the better for having a more solid first and second scene to emerge from.

For the second time I've missed a Sword and Sorceress submissions deadline. It's already 11:30 as I begin writing this blog post. There is no way I'm finishing the story and preparing it for submission in under half an hour.

I just left it too late, is all.

For one thing, I left almost the entirety of the second scene and the rest of the story after for today. That was pretty dubious from the start. Then I woke up with a headache, and that headache refused to shift itself all day. I didn't really feel able to work on it until the headache finally faded around 7:30 or 8:00 tonight. That was what sealed my defeat.

Nevertheless, I sat down to work on it, thinking, "Hey, it's still possible! And even if it isn't, it'll be time well spent." And it was time well spent. I just wish I'd spent the time last Tuesday.

I can get really pathological about deadlines. The closer they get, the less time I have to finish, the more resistance builds up around the project, making it even harder to use what time remains. It's not that illogical, really--it's just that the project gets scarier the closer the deadline gets, so I panic, and in my panic I avoid the project really hard.

The good news is, I've finished the second scene, the one with all the moving pieces and bit-part characters. I probably need to go over it again and smear a light glaze of "other people in the room" over the top of it, just to more convincingly texture it as a crowded party setting. And I probably need to massage the pacing a little, give more of an impression of the hours passing until the scene culminates at drunk-o-clock. (These are more reasons why a story shouldn't still be in incomplete rough draft form on deadline day.) But the basic building blocks of the scene are all there, and it reads fairly smoothly.

Getting it even this far is an accomplishment that did not at all look feasible last night or this morning. It's amazing how suddenly the writing looks possible when you just sit down and make yourself start writing, isn't it? *shakes head, sighs, feels stupid*

The next scene is easy. There are only two people in it, and despite it representing the emotional climax of the piece, the actual action is minimal. The real challenge is in making the dialogue natural and not clunky, given the job it's going to have to do, the things that have to get said and reacted to. But since dialogue is typically something I find easy and fun, it'll probably be OK.

I should not find myself avoiding it, is what I'm saying.

So I can't submit it to Sword and Sorceress 29. But I can think of several places it might be a good fit for, and I'm looking forward to sending it to one of them.

Meanwhile, I get a weekend.

Spam! What's it good for? Character name generation! In my Junk folder during tonight's ritual scanning for false positives before deletion:

Hedwig Sorenson (who wants to share some diabetes healing secrets)
Janice Bauer (who wants me to give my lungs a fighting chance and try e-cigs)
Jennifer Rodman (ditto--look, people, I don't even smoke)
Kurt Rambis (a cash offer? for me? darling, you shouldn't have)
Kyle St. John (who thinks my family might be disappointed when they find out... something)
Mike Ward (China is dumping their gold fast! You have to! See why!)

When I try to think up character names, if I don't have something already predisposing me in a particular direction (like, say, "Caroline" as an oblique phonetic nod to "Kore"), sometimes my brain just cycles through the same five or six suggestions. The contents of my junk folder are not subject to the limits of that cycle. Honestly, I would never have thought up the last names St. John or Rambis without external prompting. Maybe that's what I'll name the very nice lady at the wake who knew Caroline the last time she was day-care-attending age.

What I really miss is when Baysian filtering was kinda sorta the new big thing in anti-spam manuevers, and spammers were embedding their links in a wall of random, computer-generated text to try to avoid matching the filter's patterns. This resulted in surprisingly good freewriting prompts. I used to keep a file of the best ones, but then I deleted it under the assumption that the next day's email would infallibly bring more. Sadly, this no longer seems to be the case.

But we'll always have Hedwig Sorenson and her encyclopedia of diabetes healing secrets, I suppose. Someday it will be possible to name a character in an English-language short story "Hedwig" without putting everyone in mind of owls, right?

Once upon a long, long time ago, like... oh, say, 1992? Anyway, I wrote a story. And no, you cannot read it, because it was embarrassingly full of the Mary Sue.

Surely you've met the Mary Sue? Oh, Mary Sue is wonderful! She's perfect! She's sexy and adorable and everyone loves her. And yet they can never really know her, not truly, not in all her mystical, magical splendor. She is not from this world, you see, she was always destined to leave it and go home again...

In short, it was one of those stories that teenagers write about the storybook character they kind of sort of wish they could be. And also nobody understands them.

Hey, I have a lot of compassion for Teenage Me. But at the same time, I have to admit, she was not immune to the allure of the cuckoo child story: "Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day, the King and Queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they'll be happy for ever and ever."

But, being a teenager, I lacked sufficient awareness to prevent me from showing this story to Mom. This story in which a much misunderstood woman went back to her real home and her real parents. I kind of wish I could go back in time and slap myself. "Hey! Hey, you! You do not put this story in front of your adoptive parents. What exactly are they going to think you think of them, huh?"

But, happily, Mom didn't pick up on the vibe of "You're not my REAL mommy!" Or if she did, she never mentioned it. No, what stuck with her was the very dramatic conclusion of the story in which the protagonist's return to her home world also had something to do with Lake Pontchartrain leaping its levee boundaries and flooding the city.

Something like the following year or maybe the year after that, New Orleans had a particularly nasty brush with Maybe This One's Gonna Be the Big One. There was a heck of a lot of flash flooding. (This was at least ten years before Hurricane Katrina.) And Mom said to me, only half joking, "Niki, you write things and they come true! Stop it!"

Well. About that.

These days I find myself writing a lot of stories about snow. And they are not happy winter wonderland stories. There's the one about the midsummer week snowstorm that turns out to precursor Ragnarok. There's the one about the snow-glue disaster from outer space. And now there's "Caroline's Wake," a reimagining of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which of course the death of the Persephone character ushers in a particularly vicious snowstorm.

You might think it's an obsession or something. But, look, I live in Colorado right now. It snows here.

Anyway, that's what I'm working on when TWO FRICKIN' INCHES OF SNOW DUMP ON THE FRONT RANGE IN THE SECOND WEEKEND OF MAY.

And I can hear my mother saying, "Stop writing about things that come true!"

If I still had that overinflated teenage opinion of myself, I might get worried about this sort of thing. But, really, think about it--if there's a writer out there who's making things happen by writing about it (and I have a novel that I drafted about that, by the way), why would it be me? Why wouldn't it be a much better writer, someone much farther along their path to greatness, someone who's got lots of stuff published and a shelf full of awards? Why, to be precise, didn't Connie Willis usher in the snowpocalypse with her novella "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know"? That would have been just fine. Her snowpocalypse was temporary, lasting just long enough to catalyze a sense of, depending on the character, wonder or forgiveness or love rekindled.

Guess what? Connie Willis is in Colorado too! Where, as I mentioned, it snows.

Writers are not unaware of the world around them. When they live places where hurricanes and flooding are a yearly danger, they think about floodtastrophes. When they live where the winter gets snowy and they don't like it much, thank you, they write about snowpocalypses. And if it snows in May in Boulder or flash-floods in August in Metairie, well, are you surprised? We all know that stuff happens. We know it's a hazard of our territory. It's on our minds.

And stuff that's on writers' minds tends to show up in writers' fiction. That's pretty much it.

So if it snows again in two weeks DON'T BLAME ME, OK?! I'm not predicting, I'm just complaining.

OK, so, that feeling? That awful "I have no idea how to write the next scene" feeling? The one that doesn't get better even after hours of preparatory freewriting? That feeling is not a valid reason not to write the next scene.

In fact, that feeling is a clear signal that it's time to write the next scene.

Seriously, feeling like "I don't know how to write it" doesn't get better by not writing. It doesn't turn into certainty and optimism just by thinking about the scene some more. It's a sign that I've hit the end of the usefulness of thinking, and I need to put words on the page to find out what the words are.

One of these days, I'll start remembering that right from the start. And the sooner the better. Because this painful process that involves several weeks of "I don't know how to write the next bit" followed by a day where I finally take a stab at writing it and arrive at epiphany thereby, well, it could stand to lose a few weeks off the front.

In other news, jigsaw sudoku is evil and should not be contemplated until after the work day is over.