author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

It's Thursday. I wrote. It wasn't Novelling, but it was a lot less worthless than some of the other things I do that aren't Novelling.

It went something like this...

• Put together a writing resume; submitted said resume towards a write-for-hire gig.
• Whipped up a saucy little short-short in response to a request posted over at Constant-Content.com.

Bonus link! If anyone reading this is interested in quick daily lists of freelance leads, I gotcher smack righteer.

In case I ever get this thing published, I want to point out right here for the record that it's not autobiographical. I mean, just because I mentally set it in the neighborhood where I grew up, just because it sprouted from memories of one of my childhood friends and and her mother's mysterious reactions to some of our totally innocent games, that doesn't mean the plot ever actually happened. Not to me, anyway.

Erm. So there.

Anyway, woke up yesterday morning from a dream about reading a book. The first chapter had an illustration of a little girl in a pink dress, and it was entitled "The Kissing Room." So that image became the short story's narrator, and that title became the short story title. The girls in the book in the dream played at kissing to imitate what they saw on TV; in the story I ended up writing, that was the original reason the narrator was aware of, too, but other reasons come to light as the story progresses.

The story progressed, from beginning to end, over a pot of Kennilworth Ceylon tea and several hours at The Tea Spot. It's ten single-spaced pages long in WordPerfect 5.1, and if it were printed out there would probably be blood-and-sweat stains on it or something. It was that exhausting.

I am currently in that post-story state of "I can't believe I wrote that, it sucks, it's self-indulgent, I should be ashamed of it, there's no way I'm even going to go back and edit it, I should have worked on my novel instead, but that sucks too." You know how that goes.

But I wrote it. It didn't exist that morning, and by that afternoon, it existed. That's really cool.

Days like that remind me why I chose to be a writer.

Hello. I'm attempting to eat a ham and cheese sandwich without using my front teeth. It's loads of fun. You should try it sometime. No, really.

Ahem. That was me attempting to distract you. You're not supposed to notice how long it's been since my last update. Didn't work, did it? Drat. Oh well. It's been something like six days since my last update. But I have Reasons! They're over there, on the right. Lookit! Lookittapicture!

I'm the short one. John's the male one. That leaves Cate to be the one in the middle. We're at the Dushanbe Tea House on a Friday afternoon, having just had pots of tea and three plates full of dainties and suchlike. (Which I attempted to eat without using my front teeth.) We're about to head next door to the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. And we started the day at 8,000 feet above sea level. And that was just Friday.

You can click on the picture to find out how John met Cate. They were at Gen Con. And see, there's the thing. You just never know, right, when your husband meets a new friend while he's out of town, whether you'll actually get along with said husband's said friend. You hope you will, but differences have happened before, and if you don't get along, that'll suck, because he's really good friends with her and she'll be in town for half a week and if you don't actually end up liking each other that'll make it a really long and uncomfortable half-week, right?

Yes, I worry. Can you tell? I'm a neurotic little bundle of nerves. But the bright side to that is, when things don't turn out for the worst, I get all pleasantly surprised and delighted. And "delight" is the word for when someone arrives on Wednesday generous enough to accept you for the sake of your marriage to her friend, and leaves on Saturday having become your friend too. See? No suckage!

And "melancholy," of course, is the word for the drive back from the airport after saying goodbye. But John and I are scheming. Oh yes. We scheme and plot and move our eyebrows up and down in shifty, scheming ways. By the end of the year, there will be another visit. Oh yes. And we three shall terrorize Bloomington! Mwahahahahaaaaa!

(And by then, I'll be able to use my front teeth when I eat ham-and-cheese sandwiches and tea-time dainties. Yay!)

So what with one thing and another, today was my first day getting back to the Novel. Nothing new today, unfortunately. Just cleaning up the page-and-a-half leading up to where I left off last time. But hey! Now that page-and-a-half is sparkling clean.

Well, periodontist, actually. But it was at my dentist's office.

Yes yes yes long time no blog what a slacker what a bum talk about procrastination. Indeed. House painting, house cleaning, community knitting, Cessna flying, guest preparations, Saints watching, and all that jazz. Excuses, excuses.

Back to the dentist's. By the way, you would think that one could get some writing done while lying abed in post-op mode. You would think, wouldn't you? Uh-huh. Anyway, Friday my mouth got hacked into, in the service of keeping my teeth for my old age. Apparently it's a bad thing for tooth longevity when there's no thick, pink "attached tissue" in front of your tooth, but only the thin, darker, capillery-filled "movable tissue." And they have ways of making your mouth conform. It involves lots of local anasthetic, scapels, and stitches, and no eating of chewy things for days and days after.

This makes road trip novels like Neil Gaiman's American Gods a bad choice of post-op reading material. I mean, the characters keep stopping for hamburgers. Oh my sweet everloving Deities I want a hamburger.

Anyway, sitting in the dentist's chair and trying to ignore the sharp things. The periodontist says, "You can totally just close your eyes and go elsewhere, you know. I won't be offended. No. Seriously. Go paint your house or something." So I closed my eyes and tried once more to listen in on my characters' conversation again. I don't know what's been taking me so long about that--I guess not enough long, sustained time staring in panic at my computer. So apparently oral surgery is good for invoking the same sort of panic, I guess.

Brian: "Oh my God, Mike! You're alive!"

Mike: "Well, yeah. But you knew that."

Brian: "But that was a dream... wasn't it?"

Brian: [chuckles] "Little bro, you always were in denial."

That plus a few tips from Mike on how he actually would act in this scene, and I think we're rolling again.

(After that, the hovering-over-the-Puget-Sound visualization sort of morphed into standing on the red pedestrian bridge at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal and watching the pelicans preen themselves, and I got a little teary. Which is not wise when someone is sticking sharp things in your mouth. And now I have to add "Nostalgia" to the growing list of categories invoked by this entry. These entries really need to get a bit more focused.)

Meanwhile, Cate's coming to visit tomorrow. Excitement! More house cleaning! A trip to the airport! A trip to the other airport! Goths Having Tea! And early morning writing sessions while everyone else is still sleeping, if dailiness is to be cultivated. W00t!

More later, possibly with pictures.

At right: Uno argues his usefulness in helping John re-assemble our bachelor-pad-style entertainment center, which we'd disassembled in order to paint the last living room wall. Meanwhile, I discover twenty-year-old addictions hiding underneath all that dust.

Sometimes, to break out of a rut or rediscover your passions, you just have to rearrange the furniture. We've been spending a lot of time on the couch since moving its L shape to face west and south. It's just so comfortable now. With the entertainment center against the west wall, we can watch TV or manipulate the CD-player aspect of the PS2 by remote from the kitchen table, and wires no longer lie in walkways. The desktop computer has its own little nitch, the up-lamp is out of the way, the modem and router are easier to get to--the living room is just more livable.

At least, for now. Give us a few months, and we'll be sick of it again, ready to rearrange the furniture once more.

We're in heavy-duty clean-up mode not just because of wanting to get at and paint walls, not just because of wanting to rearrange our living space, but also because of an impending visit. Someone John met at GenCon, a lovely gal by the name of Cate, will be staying with us during the third week of September. If she's able to find the futon in the second bedroom and even sleep on it without risking a broken limb getting to it, that would be considered a bonus.

Of course we want to show Cate the sights of Boulder. Afternoon tea at the Dushanbe Teahouse, for instance, is obligatory. And since the best sights of any mountain town are seen from above, we've got a flight in a Cessna 172 planned for Thursday morning the 22nd. Which means I need to get back up to speed in a hurry. My log book shows exactly two flights in the past year. Two hours with an instructor back in February, and an overnight cross country to Rock Springs, Wyoming, in September of last year.

As of now we can add to that an hour with an instructor today. Whee! I can still fly! Good morning, November 64548. Pleased to meet you. How's your engine feeling today? Full throttle for cruise, huh? Tch. Oooh, nice taxi steering...

I'll be doing some solo practice on Monday, since we only had time for two of my three takeoffs/landings needed for me to legally take passengers. And then we've got three hours on the 22nd to play, or go to Greeley for lunch, or whatever. And then in October, I've signed up for the mountain course one of the instructors offers. Some ground school, some basics, and then a cross-country from Boulder to Leadville and Glenwood Springs and other scenic points. October is going to be expensive. But it's going to be gorgeous.

So. Flying, cleaning house, moving furniture... Writing! Yes. Well, no rejection letter from WOTC yet, so Drowning Boy is still a priority. Still haven't convinced the brothers Windlow to let me listen in on their reunion conversation. I'm starting to get peeved at them. And October is coming up super-quick, but my read-through of Becoming Sara is still stuck in the middle of Chapter 2, which isn't even to mention that the rewrite stopped at around Chapter 5 and hasn't progressed. Retooled part of some key dialogue last night, though.

I'm. So. Damn. Slow. But hey! I can fly!

This is the bit where I bore you with a page out of my dream journal. After that, you get some links, so if you want to skip the boredom, just page down a bit or click here.

So before I woke up this morning, I was in this huge, I mean gi-normous university library. Bigger than a convention hotel. I mean whoppin' large. And I was there after hours; I had some friend who was smuggling me in. Our reasons were both personal and political. Political, in the sense that I was working for some underground movement, the details of which escape my waking mind. Personal, because I had my novel to work on, and I needed to work on it all night every night until it was done.

See, in the dream, I'd gotten the call from Wizards of the Coast telling me to go ahead and send them the full manuscript of Drowning Boy. I'd said, "Oh boy! Will do!" and then I'd hung up and said, "Crap! OK, I'll do two and a half chapters a day, that'll finish in enough time to mail them the beast before ten days is out..."

But of course there were these people patrolling the library to make sure no one like me was stowing away. The fluorescent overheads would light up, boom boom boom, one after the other down the hall, and official-looking people would march through, and I'd have to do my best "Huh? Closing time? I slept through closing time?" face. Then I'd let them march me out of the library, and I'd be thinking OK, I can still do this if I do five chapters tomorrow...

A useful dream to get me back on schedule. Too bad the novel I've been working on most recently is Becoming Sara.

Pace to be picked up forthwith.

Meanwhile, here're your links. Hurricane Katrina links. Stuff y'all can do, that you might not have thought of doing, what with other stuff like The Red Cross and The Salvation Army coming to mind so readily.

• Habitat For Humanity: A nonprofit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry seeking to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world. They build homes, literally as well as monetarily. Donate money, or sign up to lend a hand in the disaster-affected areas.
• Officers of Avalon, a nonprofit organization representing, networking, and benefiting Pagans in law enforcement and other emergency response fields, has created The Avalon Cares fund. In its current incarnation, the fund raises money for The Red Cross's post-hurricane efforts, and sends volunteers to feed supplies into the affected areas.
• Veterans for Peace have set up camp in Covington, LA. That's in Saint Tammany Parish, right on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where the Causeway Bridge touches down (and, incidentally, where a majority of my aunts and uncles on my Mom's side live). The Vets have brought a whole bunch of supplies for the relief effort, but they need more. Click the link to see what they need and where to send it or, if you're in the area, drop it off. They could do with volunteers, too. Seems they're picking up a lot of FEMA's slack in the area. Gods know someone's got to.

And finally, there's Stories of Strength, an upcoming anthology edited and produced by Jenna Glatzer of AbsoluteWrite.com. The anthology will be published and sold via LuLu.com and all proceeds will be donated to the Red Cross. If you're a writer and you've little cash to donate outright, perhaps you can donate a thousand words of your professional skills. Submission deadline is September 16. That's this Friday, so get a move on!

Coming Up Next: Progress on the right novel! Pics! And addictive substances from the mid-'80s! Stay tuned.

This'll be a long, long entry, and another one having nothing to do with work on any particular manuscript (though thoughts of them arise). As writing goes, I've been a bum these last few days. The excuses are rife, and run the gamut from office work to home improvement, from social engagements to bicycle maintenance.

Also sleep and irregular sleeping habits. The late-late-late Wednesday night at the IHOP lead to a following Thursday of sleepwalking from obligation to obligation. (I really need to get better at all-nighter recovery.) Then on Friday my husband and I took the living room apart and painted one of the walls thus revealed. Saturday involved finishing touches on the paint job, an initial stab at reassembling the living room, and watching Disc 2 of Fushigi Yugi over a pot-luck dinner with friends.

My interest in the show flagging as it progressed (I must be broken; everyone else thinks it improves with each episode), I took a stab at working on the code for this blog. Discovered some huge CSS problems in Internet Explorer (y'all might have said something!) and tried to fix them. Created the Category and Manuscript sorting menus now available in the left margin. Ended up with something that works in both browsers, except that one entry persists, for reasons unknown to me, in wonkifying itself in Internet Explorer, and only when my I-can-see-it-you-can't editing menu isn't displayed.

(But, hey! W3C says it validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional!)

And I've been working my way through a stack of library books. John and I hit the library a couple Thursdays ago, and I started in on Viable Paradise's Suggested Research Reading For Aspiring Fantasists. I have now finally read The King In Yellow, along with three science fiction novels by Jack Vance and one of Nesbit's children's fantasies that I hadn't gotten my hands on before.

Also in that stack was a last-minute impulse pick, The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper. Which leads to the reason for the title of this post, here, and indeed its existence. I finished reading that book just now, and thoughts of it, aided by too much Coca Cola during the anime viewing and too much garlic during dinner, have been impeding all attempts to get to sleep. So I figured, what the hell: I should get up and write down those thoughts, because if I'm going to have insomnia I might as well share it with the world.

Thought The First: I do think Ms. Tepper has totally given up on the human race.

No, really. Her characters are always striving for a better world, but they are without exception merely carriers of good intentions whose effectiveness depends on a nudge, or even a shove, from the angels. Or the fairies. Or various imaginations of Deity. And as her books' publication dates get later and later (if the sampling I've read is any indication) these supernatural beings have been increasingly wrathful ones. They remorselessly sweep away the chaff of humanity, using disease and catastrophe to solve the problem of overpopulation and unfailingly leaving alive those open-minded humans that are either the deities' annointed heroes or those that are amenable to being shepherded by said heroes. The epilogues invariably show these virtuous survivors making plans to build themselves a new Eden.

Which is why I say "earned utopias." The deus ex machina doesn't simply wave a wand and create paradise; it pushes a sort of reset button that cleanses the world of those who don't want/deserve paradise, preparing the way for those left to work hard at creating paradise themselves, something that is only possible after the reset enacted by, or the powers granted by, the deus.

These are not books that show readers the way back to the Garden. At most, these books preach a particular morality--one I admit I agree with: a doctrine of feminism and environmentalism and responsible reproductive choice and religious tolerance. But these values are not themselves what saves humanity. Instead, the message seems to be, "If you don't adhere to these values, the Avenging Angel will delete you. Then, the Avenging Angel will hand over the keys to the kingdom to those people who do adhere to these values." The reader comes away not with ideas for saving the world but merely with a better understanding of the author's dogma. Those of us who agree with the author's values might indulge momentarily in her fantasies of vengeful nature Goddesses eating up whole cities, or fungal symbiotes imposing worldwide harmony, but we don't come away with any sort of pragmatic direction for real world activism.

And it's not that I expect pragmatic direction from every science fiction novel, but I do expect to see some faith in humanity's ability to save itself without depending on divine intervention. Or on the godly destruction of the unrighteous, for that matter! Recent Tepper novels have a lot more in common with premillenial dispensationalistic fantasies than I think her fans (myself among them) would like to admit.

Thought the Second: Tepper's apocalypses don't follow real-life social dynamics.

I yearn to write a short story whose punchline is "On the last day was the Rapture, when in a twinkling of an eye God's chosen people were taken away to Heaven, and the environmentalists inherited the earth." But real-life catastrophes don't work that way. Catastrophes don't discriminate between the virtuous and the bigots. They do discriminate, but not in ways conducive to righteousness.

For instance, look at New Orleans. If we were living in a Tepper novel, by and large the breached levee would be a means for Deity to cleanse the city of corrupt politicians, children of undeserved privilege, and bigots of both the racial and the religious kind. Those left behind would be the poor, the black, the gays and lesbians, the voodoo practitioners, the strippers, the prostitutes, all of them working together to survive and to rebuild their home in the image of good egalitarian ideals. But look what really happened: those with means got the hell out, and many of those left behind--too poor to own a car, or too old or infirm to travel, those that could not afford to abandon what little they had, those with little more to their names than their pride and their idea of home--simply drowned. The survivors have been denied food, water, aid, and dignity by the botched plans of the well-intentioned in government and the disinterest of less-well-intentioned government figures. They've even been denied attempts to leave under their own power. In their starving desperation, the stranded survivors, having learned that it's every man for himself, have in many cases turned on each other.

But that brings us back to deus ex machina. In a Tepper novel, the flood wouldn't just be the inevitable result of a 200-mile-wide Category Four hurricane and the underfunding of the levees. It would be guided by some supernatural figure (maybe the ghost of Marie LeVeaux) who would take an active hand in saving the sheep and drowning the goats. Heroes would arise in its wake bearing gifts and miraculous powers, ready to smack down government obstructionists (who'd all get eaten by alligators) and lead the poor but honest survivors to rebuild their home in a manner condoned and encouraged by Mother Nature.

I'm not sure I'd want to live in that world, tell you the truth. I want to see humanity win out against both aversity and averice without the crutch of avenging angels, super powers, misanthropic reset buttons, or any of the other artificial oversimplifications Tepper perpetrates on her worlds.

Of course, I'll be the first to admit that the short story I'm starting to write about the rebuilding of New Orleans will probably fall afoul of all of the above. But if I do my job right, the supernatural aid will exact a price, and the ethical situations therein won't be monochrome.

Or maybe it will be just as much a wish-fulfillment fantasy as any of Tepper's god-enforced utopias. Maybe the story will evoke not hope in humanity but longing for something else. I don't know yet; it's not finished. But I can swear this much: it won't be anything I need feel ashamed of longing for.

And is, at times, to repent. But not today. My goodness, that first chapter needed some revision. I meant to just read quick through the chapters I'd revised back in March, but every infelicity of phrase just jumped right out of the computer and pinched my nose. Nose-pinching hurts!

Apparently I like really long sentences with commas in the middle, an independent clause on one side of the comma and an adverbial dependent clause on the other. Like that. And I seem fond of phrases like "pristine journal" and "shrinking against the wall." Smack me with a thesaurus and julienne-slice my paragraphs, Mr. Book Doctor! I mean, really.

It's another late-late-late night at the IHOP. Considering my plans for early tomorrow morningabout four hours later this morning, it's probably time I wrapped this up and headed home. Bleargh.

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

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

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

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

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

See you in Boulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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