author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Not a lot to report today. It's Saturday, a day for which I had a lot of good intentions that all got shoved aside in order to reread Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix. Now, at last, I am ready to start on Half-Blood Prince. Which is good, because I'm sure John will be eager to read it as soon as I'm done hogging it.

Got a little ways into Chapter 9 today, which began not at all like I expected. See, I had this lovely, romantic vision for the segue between chapters. At the end of 8, they fall in the water and Brian discovers he can breathe down there. He smiles up at Amy through the water, and, after a moment of shock on Amy's part, they kiss at the opening of 9. This, of course, leads to happy sexy stuff happening for most of the chapter.

Only they didn't want to do it that way. Instead, Amy decided that Brian must be drowning--you know, the kind of conclusion a normal person would come to--and ended up trying to drag him back to shore. This would be more than just "a moment of shock." This would be fully sustained minute-long panic. But, hell, it's not like Amy knows she's in a fantasy novel.

She does eventually realize what's going on, and she engages in a fun little spot of dialogue with Brian, but now the momentum is wrecked. So I'm left trying to figure out how to get my bewildered but happily bantering characters to hit the next plot point.

There's some great lines, though. There's the bit where Brian says, "Put me back in," reminding me delightfully of MacDonald's The Light Princess (coincidentally also Chapter 9). And then there's the bit where Amy says, "OK, but how am I supposed to marry a fish?" Damn good question, if you ask me.

And so to bed, and, with luck, dreams that will make things clear. But first, a couple of chapters of Harry Potter 6. W00t.

First, boot up your word processor and open the novel in progress. Find where you left of yesterday. Now open up some music-playing software and load up Enya's Watermark album.

Close your eyes and breathe.

Breathe in; focus on your third eye/brow chakra (a spot between and above your eyes, just do it, OK?) as you do. It glows brighter and brighter as your belly expands with air. Pretend you're actually inhaling through your brow chakra rather than through your nose. Now hold onto that breath. Feel your brow chakra pulsing with warmth and light.

Just before you begin to feel tense from holding your breath, begin to let it out slowly. Shift your focus to your heart chakra (a spot in the center of your chest). Pretend you are exhaling out of your heart chakra, and feel it glow brighter and brighter. When you are empty of air, hold onto that emptiness for a little while before inhaling again.

Continue to do this, eyes closed and thinking only of the breath, until the title track of "Watermark" comes to an end.

Now, as the next track, "Cursum Perficio," begins to play, pick up some wool and start carding it. The motion of the combs goes well with the pulse of the song. Stay conscious of your breath. By the end of the song, you'll have a whole bunch of wool ready to spin, so go ahead and spin it. Take your time and enjoy the calm motion of the spinning wheel. Don't rush yourself to feed out the fiber. How slowly can you work the treadles?

Don't try to think about anything. Just trust that as the spinning wheel imposes order on the wool, so will the process impose clarity on the thoughts you are not yet thinking.

Continue spinning until the album is done. Now return to your laptop. You left off yesterday at the beginning of the Chapter 8 rewrite. Go back through what you have written already, cleaning up the narration and smoothing out the dialogue. Now write the rest of the chapter. Wind the tension tighter and tighter until it at last, at the end, it breaks--

and the main character has learned to breathe.

In case anyone's keeping score (hi John!), yes. I did indeed work on the novel today. In fact, I finally finished the Chapter 7 rewrite and plowed right on into Chapter 8. Now, I am going to sleep.

So John's all GenConning right now, which means it's just me and the cats in the house. Boring. Quiet. A little lonely. But, you know, keeping busy. For instance, right after I got home from bringing him to the airport, I went back to the spinning wheel.

I got the wheel a few years ago when I finally succumbed to the temptation of Shuttles's store-wide 10% while-in-class discount. I was taking the Beginning Wheel-Spinning class at the time, which was super cool in that every student got to actually borrow a wheel for the whole week between classes. This gave me a chance to fall head over heels in love with the Schact double treadle. (My Gods, I'd forgotten how expensive it was. Damn good thing we were a two-income household at the time.) So I succumbed, and the wheel came home with me for good, along with a bottle of oil, a threading hook, and a Lazy Kate.

What also came home with me was a whole big mess of white wool, which it had been my homework to wash and card, and a smaller mess of variegated blue wool, which we'd all dyed together on the last day of class. And I am here to tell you that I still haven't spun it all. I started, and I also started in on some two-ply fingering weight yarn made from "The Beast" (that gray-brown-white wool of no particular lineage which Shuttles sells for something like $.49/lb) which I am proud to say has made it into two thirds of a lacy sock. But after a few months I kinda slacked off.

So now I'm trying to finish off these unfinished projects. Today I carded and spun a whole bunch of the blue stuff, and once it's all spun up I'll ply it together with the white stuff, which will look super goofy and'll probably make a nice pom-pom hat someday. After that, I'll have to figure out how to deal with the whole heel/toe reinforcement thread issue so I can finish the sock. Maybe I'll just skip it. Anyway, I have to finish knitting the darn thing so I can finally get The Beast off my fourth bobbin.

Right. So, lots of time spinning. And spinning is a mindless activity. Keep the treadles moving in a nice, even rhythm; keep the fiber coming in nice, consistent draws. Stop now and again to move the thread onto the next hook of the flyer. Mindless. You would think, with all that mind freed up, a writer could totally use that time to brainstorm her novel.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I don't know, maybe it's like meditation. You have to practice that kind of thing. As it is, when I knit or crochet I think math, and when I spin, I think not at all. Well, maybe I think, "Ugh, this blue dye is getting all over my fingers," or, "Yuck, all this lanolin is starting to gross me out." Or, "Damn, this yarn is over-spun. Good thing I'm going to ply it."

But that's all. I try to start myself thinking things like, "OK, here it is--Amy and Todd having a bit of a heart-to-heart, and Russ comes in and starts being an ass. How's that dialogue going to go?" And then I stop thinking. It's like I'm trying to turn the ignition and get the car to go, but all I'm hearing is whirr-whirr-whirr and no vroom. I'm gonna have to push this sucker uphill, 'cause that engine just ain't starting.

And yet, I put off writing and hit the spinning wheel, or the knitting needles, telling myself I'll think about the story while I'm fibercrafting. I'm priming the engine, I'm brainstorming, I'm getting ready to write.

Really!

Maybe it just has to be learned.

Heycheckitoutgadgets!

The screenshot you are now looking at comes to you courtesy of Sinner Computing. The programs name sounds a lot like an intentional double entendre, considering the name of the company and all, but a glance at the other programs in their line-up seems to indicate that it's just a happy coincidence which does not represent their normal naming conventions. Too bad, really. But that's not the point!

The point is, it counts seconds. Then it stops counting seconds, if you've told it when to do so. Then, it makes noises.

Which, of course, is very, very useful. It means I can press "Start," ALT-TAB over to WordPerfect 5.1 (in its itty-bitty DOS window, cho kawaii), then write and write and write resisting the urge to look at the clock until an hour or two later when a pop-up window pops up saying "Finished!" and Gaelic Storm's version of "Nancy Whiskey" starts playing out of my laptop speakers.

Which is what I did today. And I only ALT-TABbed over to check where the count-down was at once.

OK, maybe twice.

(Oh. Yeah. About Sunday and Monday. I took Sunday off. That was on purpose. And Monday, I came home from the office with a headache but nevertheless got all interested in my spinning wheel, which I hadn't really touched for something like a year. Decided it was about time I finally plied together those two bobbins of dyed angora that had been languishing neglected all this time. Then went on to make a grossly overspun single ply out of our anime night host's puppy-doggy's combed-out undercoat (the collecting of which Saturday night we can blame for the sudden reawakening of interest in home-spun yarn). It knitted up a lot like mohair, oddly enough. I'd tell you what breed of doggy it is, if only I could remember. It's one of them husky-wolfie-looking things. Anyway, by the time I was done, my headache had gotten all worse-like and I went to bed early. Which only proves, once again, that writing has to come before other pursuits, just in case of migraine.)

So... yeah. It's anime night. Anime night means that John and I and some of John's coworkers and gaming friends all get together for pot-luck and DVD viewing. It happens about once every other week, Saturday nights. We started the year with Gazuraki (if you're curious about Gazuraki, my advice is don't), we continued with Read Or Dream: The TV (to reward ourselves for suffering through Gazuraki), and last time we watched a couple of disks of Full Metal Panic (which was also much better than Gazuraki).

(Look, it really is that bad. You just wait until the "clearance from the U.N." scene. It's bad.)

Today: Fushigi Yugi ("The Mystery Play"), Disk 1.

(Yes, I know they translate it "Mysterious Play." They're wrong. I'm allowed to call them wrong. On the first episode, a teacher asked a student to translate "El libro está en el biblioteca," and the English subtitle on the Spanish phrase had nothing in it about libraries, books, or location.)

Fushigi Yugi is pretty darn classic, as anime goes. Lots of chibi stuff, lots of preadolescent crush drama, lots of sweat drops and gluttony, lots of scenes where everything freezes, the heroine is pictured against a starry sky, and internal monologue occurs in abundance.

I'm, er, not a fan.

The story is great! Don't get me wrong! But I've just never been fond of these weird motifs that anime fans feel entitled to get when they sit down for another feature. I mean, I was convinced I hated anime until I saw Lain: Serial Experiments. Lain represents adult-level anime with total lack of childish tropes. Love it love it. (It also involves classic adult anime themes, such as cyberpunk, characters who might have been made-not-born, and total brain-breaking upfuckédness.) Other non-juvenile anime features I like: Cowboy Bebop. Wolf's Rain. R.O.D., both the movie and the TV. Oh, and FLCL, which John will tell you he absolutely has not seen, nope, didn't see a thing, the abomination never happened. But, FLCL notwithstanding, if I never again see another cartoon character develop a feline split lip to indicate how pleased he or she is with him- or herself, you know, that's just fine with me.

Still, looking forward to next fortnight's installation.

Meanwhile, over at the WIP, the current spate of dialogue progressed another 400 words, and another character made an entrance. The pieces, slowly, are being put into place. Mwa-ha-ha-haaa.

At Conor's again. The Indulgers are playing tonight. John just arrived. Wednesday I had a date with my writing; tonight I have a date with my husband. Woot! More later...

OK, it's later. The band have finally started. We probably won't stay for the full set, having been here for at least an hour already, but it's been fun thus far. They're sounding good, but unfortunately the balance isn't quite surviving the transition to the back room. We're mostly getting the bass and the fiddle.

Not much to say about the novel today, beyond that the current scene advanced some 400 words, technically, and by leaps and bounds, conceptually. Sometimes you just need to spend a few minutes with the cats, a lint brush, and an itty bitty spindle to spin the cats' nondescript tabby fur on, to make the next few pages of dialogue come clear in your mind.

Hey look! They just dimmed the lights. I'm bliiiiiind!

(Half the drunken forum posting on the Internet, I'm convinced, comes of installing wiFi in Irish pubs. I mean, what were they thinking? Oh, don't look at me--I've barely half-drunk my own pint. I'm just doing my best impression of drunken posting. I live to amuse.)

Still haven't finished Chapter 7. I really have to give Amy something more useful to do than twiddle her thumbs and wait for the end of the chapter. I'm one sentence away from getting her and Todd into that bit of necessary conversation--the one, in fact, that necessitates the switch in narrator, because it reveals things that Brian is not to know--during which Russ and then Brian will interrupt them, closing the chapter with a lovely piece of brutality we'll all enjoy (if guiltily) because the victim is Russ. I'll have to go back through the Novel So Far and make sure that Russ has been adequately presented as That Guy You Love To Hate, so as to best make way for the Schadenfreude. The effect I'm looking for is "Finally, that asshole is getting the beating he deserves! ...Wait. Ok, enough beating now. No, really. Stop! I don't want to see him die...."

Which all sounds very fiendish and manipulative. Probably because it is.

From time to time it occurs to me to worry that, as a writer, I'm setting myself up to be mistrusted by the community. Whatever community. Writers of fiction make their livings telling lies, after all--telling lies and pulling readers' strings. And yes, those lies stand in the service of Truth, and the string-pulling is exactly why the reader returns to a good book again and again, but still. The power to manipulate the heart and mind by use of words alone is a little alarming. Are those who have that power objects of suspicion? I don't claim to have that power in any significant degree as yet, but I'm reaching for it. I wonder if I'll regret achieving it.

Maybe the choice to use such a power to create works of unabashed fiction, as opposed to running for office or charming congregations into mass Koolaid imbibery, is enough to restore a writer's credibility. Unlike the corrupt politician or charismatic megalomaniac preacher, we're not trying to fob off our lies as fact.

Well, with the exception of folks like, I dunno, Carlos Casteneda or something.

There is a stained glass window in the door behind the bar at Conor O'Neill's in Boulder. It has writing on it, and that writing says,

"Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you fight with your neighber, it makes you shoot at your landlord, and it makes you miss him."

There's a band playing at Conor's, too. Big Paddy. They've been mainly playing rocked up old traditionals--"Star of the County Down", "The Drunken Sailor", and, what the hell, the odd U2 cover. Me and my laptop are tucked away in a walled-in nook around the corner from the bar, but it's still pretty darn loud in here. And it's only 11:00 PM yet. They could keep going until 1:00 with fairly little effort.

Today, I've taken my writing out on a date.

It's something Holly Lisle recommends doing when the fun of writing has disappeared and one doesn't know where to find it. Except of course she doesn't mean it literally, taking your writing out to dinner and a movie. What the hell. I felt like I had to get out of the house, so I took my writing out for a beer and some rockin' music.

Haven't done a lot. Mostly just reread Chapter 7, did some line-editing, and fixed the beginning to better match where the chapter has gone since then. Frankly, I'm getting worried about the time frame. At this rate, I'm not going to have this novel or Sara Peltierdone any time soon, much less by October 1.

But tonight? Not worrying much. The duo on the stage have started in on "Nancy Whisky" and the Smithwick Ale is pretty darn good, and I'm in a private little booth with just me and my writing having a romantic evening out. Tomorrow I don't have to worry, either, because tomorrow is a full day at home in which I can devote a lot of time to both novels if I so choose, and where's the need to worry when the worry's solution is in progress?

Tonight has been lots of fun, Writing. I think we should spend the whole day together, tomorrow. In our pajamas, painting each other's toenails. C'mon! It'll be fun.

(I think the metaphor ship has drifted.)

A suspiciously post-free weekend is easily explained by my having been in Santa Clara, California. I rather thought I'd actually write and blog all weekend long, but this was a jam-packed stuffed-with-fun weekend involving people that haven't been in my daily life for far too long to neglect on those so rare occasions when I actually get to see them. People like this person and that person, neither of whom I notice have updated their blogs in a while. Get with it, people! Bwah-ha-ha. Anyway, August 4th found me doing the day-before-flying Decapitated Chicken Dance, and for August 5th through the 8th I was on vacation. So there's my excuse.

For examples of the Fun with which the weekend was stuffed, see attached photos. (That will be "photos," plural, upon moving this blog entry to the new website. I restructured the database over there to allow multiple images to be associated with a given blog entry. Go me.) I, personally, was also stuffed with Fun, in the personage of candy Lego blocks. Bulk candy stores are teh bomb. They're like trick-or-treating and coming home with nothing but the good stuff. (They are unlike trick-or-treating in that the candy isn't free. The quarter-pounds add up pretty fast.)

I did try to hit the novel, but it seemed every time I had some time set aside, I managed only to get as far as my Morning Pages ritual. Found a wifi spot pretty close to the hotel, a lovely little joint called House of Bagels that sold three types of lox and piled it on a bagel for me with cream cheese and cucumbers, and ended up taking care of bits and pieces of email (mostly concerned with remote access to databases for efficient migration of blog posts from one domain to another) and running out the laptop's battery. There was only one free outlet in the cafe, and it had a blank plate screwed over it. I didn't think the management would think much of my whipping out a flat-head screwdriver and HAXX0Ring their electric bill.

Came home to some goody-goody-gumdrops in the mail. The contract from BBI Media had arrived. It's official--"Faith-Based Charity, Pagan Style" will be in Issue #42 of PanGaia. It will also be on the website, if the extra compensation for electronic rights is any indication. I did the happy dance, signed that puppy, and dropped it back into the mail before heading out into my day.

And yes, writing happened. Got Amy and Brian through their almost-encounter at Gasworks. Will probably finish Chapter 7 tomorrow. Chapter 7 is really, really long.