author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today's type-in didn't cover much more ground, page-wise, but it had its satisfying moments.

Here's what was covered: Sasha is still sitting in the ice cream parlor with her journal. Now that some of her hostile classmates are arriving, she's covering up her unease by caricaturing them in her writing. She flinches away from writing about the boys who were harassing her today. Then her sister walks in and they get to talking.

Doesn't sound like a lot, does it? I know. But I'm feeling happy with the way I restructured the concept. Before, it was one long paragraph in which she considers writing unflattering portrayals of Stan and Tina. Now, I actually include some quotes from her journal to contrast with the real live football jock and cheerleader girlfriend.

Another thing about this scene: Stan and Tina were a one-hit wonder during NaNoWriMo. I pulled some names out of the blue for the sake of, y'know, having names. Natalie Goldberg would advise, "Say 'crepe myrtle', not 'tree'." So I try to be specific. But James MacDonald, of the notoriously hefty Learn Writing With Uncle Jim thread at AbsoluteWrite, would say, "Don't name a character unless you plan to do something with him." Which puts me in mind of the old adage about firearms and mantlepieces: If in Act I a gun is shown prominently displayed above the fireplace, by Act III it should have fallen into the fire and blown up. Or, failing that, someone should have pulled the trigger.

Thus, I tweak. About two-thirds into the original plot, we have an icky scene in which Hector and Jason take bullying to a new level and actually try to rape Sasha. She fights them off and goes home planning to sic her magic notebook on them. This scene is augmented by an insinuation that H&J had earlier succeeded in doing the same to one of Sasha's classmates, which gives Sasha's vengeance extra fuel: "I can't let them hurt anyone else." So, noting my "one-hit wonder" critique of Stan and Tina in Chapter One, I ditch the random classmate and substitute Tina for the unpleasant role of Martyr For The Main Character's Cause. (Sorry, Tina.)

But then I got to thinking about working Stan and Tina's relationship into the plot. Maybe H&J assault Tina out of some warped urge to use her to hurt Stan? If so, why? Maybe because Stan came to Sasha's rescue one day when H&J were harassing her. That makes the bullies a little more human, or at least a more understandable specimen of sociopathy: They aren't simply monsters hanging out in the bushes waiting to pounce on the next skirt walking by. Instead, they're acting from a monstrously twisted desire for pay-back. We can hold them up as a model that Sasha, in her own quest for revenge, imitates and, we hope, shies away from before she becomes a monster herself.

So all we need now is to give Sasha a scene in which she A) successfully repells a serious attack from Hector and Jason, and B) is inspired to new depths of unethical magic. At this point, do I really need H&J to actually attack Sasha herself? Why not let the attack on Tina do double-duty, and lower the stakes back to the level of plot necessity at the same time? Have Sasha interrupt the attack and rescue Tina. This, incidentally, rescues Hector and Jason, too--rescues them from themselves.

So now the bullies are established as Really Bad, Sasha is demonstrated to be Bad Ass, and motivation for vigilante voodoo is created. The sexual assault count of the novel lowers from "totally maudlin" down to "probably necessary to the plot, but I'm still thinking about it." And for an added bonus, the mouse repays the lion. That is: Stan saves Sasha; Sasha saves Stan's girlfriend. (It works out if you consider Stan and Tina a single entity for the sake of plot algebra.) Sasha gets a little proof (which she'll ignore for the moment but learn to appreciate later) that she doesn't need magic to make friends, and thus the moral of the story is quietly reinforced.

Now that's making a scene work for its money!

Please note: The above narration of my thought processes makes me sound horribly callous about sexual assault. I'm not. Promise. It just comes across that way when I sit down and plot out a novel. Try writing one yourself; you'll see.

Hey, look at that. Another two days of Doing Nothing. Didn't manage to get anything done before work, had no energy for anything after work. Friday, in fact, ended in a raging headache of the caffeine withdrawel sort. I need to pick a couple of days when going cold turkey won't kill any deadlines, and just suffer it out. And then be a lot more careful about when I indulge.

Look, I'm a control freak, OK? Addictions don't dictate what I put in my body! I do!!!

*deep breath*

OK. Type-in has progressed from page 2 to page... 5. Yup. Three whole pages. I'm beginning to wonder whether I didn't take enough time to get things right during the mark-up phase, or whether one can only really get things right after re-reading the whole darn thing. There are things I know now, things about how the book as a whole must be shaped, that I didn't know when I started scribbling notes in the margins of Chapter One. Knowing them now, I find myself moving very slowly under the weight of that goddamned type-A perfectionist impulse with which the Goddess saw fit to endow me.

Do type-B personalities have more fun? The lack of perfectionist neuroses doesn't seem to diminish their chances of success...

Shouldn't complain. The book will be loads better for my nitpicking. As long as I keep moving from cover to cover, don't let the Search For The Perfect Word bring me to a standstill, the book will get done.

Just--maybe not in 50 hours.

Hey, did you see that word count change? Uh-huh. I done started typin'.

See, all those unanswered questions, they don't actually pertain to the first three chapters. So I figured if I get started now, by the time I reach chapter 4 I'll have either figured out what I need to do next as far as scene restructuring goes, or I can skip to the ending chapters and fill in the blanks after that. By then, some of the middle book will surface as inevitable, and I'll write that down, which'll lead to the next inevitable bits, and so on.

Of course, I had to put off the typing for just another hour by doing other stuff... like.... Rereading my notebook from back to front, paying attention to any notes that I'd need to keep at the back of my head for Chapters One to Three. Stopping at every note that said, "Research such-n-such," and going for little side-trips on the Internet. I now know some neat stuff, like when final exams will be this year at this one high school in Troy, Alabama, and what kind of whether Mobile has in May, what kind of strange but poetically logical things women did for postcoital contraception in the days before the morning after pill, what's at I-10 Alabama Exit 58, and... yeah.

I have to wonder: is it always going to be like this? Putting off each 2-hour progress block for as long as possible? Scribbling to myself over pages and pages of spiral notebook that boil down to "I have no idea what I'm doing"? Bookending my way backwards into the middle of the story arc? Hopping from inevitability to inevitability? Whee! Is it any wonder I'm more enamoured of having written, sometimes, than of actually writing?

I am trying to think of the sentences I'm typing now as something like final. This makes the typing go very, very slowly. See, I'm allowed to be a perfectionist at this stage in the game.

Lucky me.

Finished the manuscript mark-up today. Reread all the separate notes I've taken along the way. Total completely illegible notes about which I have absolutely no idea: One. Total notes indicating problems I still haven't decided how to resolve: Fifteen or so. Total notes indicating problems for which I have solutions, but whose solutions I don't feel I can implement until after I figure out those fifteen or so mentioned last sentence: Pretty much all the rest of them.

Sometimes, stories just happen. I watch them unfold in my head and I write them down. Those kinds of stories are very little trouble to write. But sometimes I have to decide which way a story goes. I have to consider the consequences of each idea and figure out which idea results in the better story. Those kinds of stories are hard.

Guess which kind this is. Go on. Guess.

So the second half of today's session was taken up by me talking to myself on paper. "Rethink ending: what is proper effect of the 'exorcism' spell?" "Split up Sasha's first two spells into different scenes, or no?" "How exactly is Uncle Matt necessary to the resolution?" I don't think I'm going to get any of those answered without a long walk and a nap first. Luckily, I'm about a mile and a half's walk from home, and I'm very good at napping.

On that note: If you're in the Boulder area, do stop in at Cafe Bravo's for caffeinated beverages (some with little tapioca pearls at the bottom) and lunch things. Tell 'em the gal who hogged the leather couches all Tuesday morning long sent you.

You know, after reading this section of manuscript--pages 190 through 217, if you must know--I feel like I should make it absolutely clear, before anyone else reads it, that this novel is not autobiographical in any way that counts. It has a few details supplied from my high school memories, but the actual character dynamics are all imaginary. Sasha's big sister is not my Mary Sue. Well, in some ways she's everyone's Mary Sue--she's the model from which Sasha's notebook begins taking shape--but she's got her flaws.

And, just to be absolutely clear, her Mom is not my Mom.

In the course of marking up the manuscript, I've been thinking about a sub-plot that stayed fairly unexplored during the thirty hectic days of NaNoWriMo 2002. A story arc that never got a chance to arc. Sasha's big sister was the victim of an extremely traumatic experience some three years ago, and her mother's role in the aftermath was not a supportive one. At the time that Sasha's story starts, her mother continues to consider the older girl guilty. Both women, for their own reasons, are concerned that Sasha might stumble into a similar ordeal.

That their concern colors the story, I already knew. But I had neglected to explore, until now, the possibilities of the mother and the older sister coming toward some sort of reconciliation. There won't be any big epiphany, but I want to at least sow some quiet seeds that might indicate future growth in that direction after Sasha's story ends.

The reason I'm protesting about my own Mom here should be pretty obvious. Seems the older I get and the more of the world I see, the more I appreciate my parents; I hadn't realized that imagining dysfunctional families for my novels would have the same effect.

Mom, I love you bunches. I really do. You're probably not reading this, and you'd probably have no idea what I was talking about if you were, but I gotta say it: Thanks for being absolutely nothing like Diane Edgar-Greyson.

(Oh. And in other news, I'm out of the woods as far as plot tangles are concerned. Nothing like getting right up to the climax of the book to make things easy again! I guess plot tangles mostly occur when the author doesn't really know how to get from the premise to the climax and, consequently, babbles a lot.)

Wow, nothing like a deadline shouted out to the four corners of the Internet to make me completely come to a standstill.

Well, either that, or it was attempting to get by on five hours of sleep a night. Wednesday morning I felt great; Thursday morning I felt great but I needed a nap in the afternoorn; and Friday morning I woke up with a sore throat. The problem with sick is, it may keep you home, but it keeps you from doing all the things you'd like to stay home from work to do. Dammit.

So I'm just wrapping up Chapter 6 Mk II, which contains nowhere near as much original NaNoDraft material as I thought it would, but whose almost-but-not-quite sex scene is a whole lot less clumsy than it was first time around. Plus there's more assholey Russ goodness. You may send me mocking emails if you wish, but I'll have you know that Russ can mock your lights out. (I have this secret but unlikely hope that the real-life person upon whom Russ is modeled will someday read this book, recognize himself, and send me nasty letters about it. But then I have lots of little vengeance fantasies running around in my sick little head. Oh yes. Locked up in my head where it's safe.)

There shall be more over the course of the morning, and then in the afternoon I'll have to hit the other projects for a few hours. I took all weekend off from the official manuscript of NaNoEdMo 2005, the better to work on this puppy right here (for all the good that did me), which means I'm no longer ahead of schedule. And then there's this short story I want to put in the mail by the tenth. Excuses, excuses. Yes indeed.

Western society lives in a most incredible state of denial. The more I hear about schools wanting to ban books like The Giver and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, the more I'm amazed at the sheer duplicity of it all. "We can't let teenagers read about sex like it was normal!" When of course not only is sex normal to humanity, it's exceedingly normal to adolescence. I mean, think about the hormonal storm that puberty unleashes in a teenager. If YA literature conspires to pretend sex doesn't exist--or to only acknowledge sex as That From Which Godly Folk Refrain--why are we surprised when kids don't know how to handle their urges and start hating themselves for having those urges?

It's just freakin' stupid, OK? That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

None of which helps me figure out how best to handle the main story arc of my novel, in which a love spell comes to fruition with frightening effectiveness. The "climax" of that problem occurs when the two main characters Very Nearly Do It, and if you can't put that in YA literature, where the heck do you put it, given that the characters are high-school students? How do you write about real live fourteen-year-olds with hormones and emotions and believable complexity and still escape the censure of your community?

You get one lie for free, because it's fiction. I've already used up my lie quota on the magic notebook. I'm not going to push my luck by pretending that teenagers Never, Ever Think About That.

I remember a phone conversation with my grandmother recently; she had just finished complaining about all the sex and violence in today's TV, all the nudes in today's artwork, all the sex in today's pop songs... and then she wants to know when she gets to read my book. "I don't think you'll like it much," I said.

Neil Gaiman: "I once said in an interview that I'd just about got used to the idea that my parents would probably be reading anything I wrote when I realised that my kids were now reading anything I wrote."

Whoo-boy, type-in's gonna be fun.

So this manuscript's trend of getting all Sasha's changes mixed up is only getting worse. I'm getting to the point where I'll be reluctant to mark up a page at all, simply because I'm still agnostic as to whether that page will still exist after I get all the threads sorted out.

What helps is thinking of the main story arc in three phases:

1. Sasha changes her attitude and the world responds
2. Sasha begins to notice physical and more blatant changes in herself and others
3. Sasha is actively causing supernatural change and things are getting out of control.

The end of tonight's mark-up session, page 109, had a scene that will be the main indicator that we have moved from Stage 2 to Stage 3: Sasha takes a strand of her crush's hair and magically entangles him into her notebook so she can affect him directly with the hot-and-heavy fantasies she's written in there.

Which brings me back to the problem of Sex and the Young Adult Novel. In my 2004 novel, things just got really adult, I'm afraid. There was no way around it; unicorn stories all hint at ideas of sexual innocence and experience, and the story arc wasn't coy. This time around, I think discretion is the better part of valor, and I'll do a lot of "between the asterisks" stuff.

And that's all I've got for now.

In case anyone's been paying attention to such things: Yes, my word count is somewhat lower than 50K. Have faith; all shall be as before, and better! Or at least that's what I keep telling myself. Remember what I said about having to generate more first draft as part of the rewrite? Yeah. Only, thankfully, it's sort of draft one-and-a-half, because this new material is being written by someone who actually knows where she's going. Joy!

Today's a home-all-day-writing day, so this afternoon after a couple hours on the other novel I should be able to whip out Chapters 6 and 7. Those'll be a mix of old material and new--there's still Brian's reunion at the house with Amy and what that reveals, only without the "just testing you" trip to the airport since Brian instead spent the evening getting reacquainted with his brother; and there'll be a bit more time, character development, and believable events between now and the end of the first half of the book.

I'm kicking myself for how many days I let go by without working on this poor beastie, but with any luck I'll make up the time and get it done by the end of the weekend--only a week later than my original plan--at which time I'm estimating the word count'll be closer to 75K and the chapter count'll be a nice round 20. If that doesn't happen, you have my permission to send me mocking emails on Monday.

Hit the first big need for a scene restructure tonight. Apparently, back in November 2002, three ideas hit me all at once, and I tried to make them all happen almost simultaneously. I'm thinking they need to be put in sequence. That'll draw out the main story arc a little longer, giving me more time to show gradual character change.

In less abstract terms: This book is about the price of getting what you wish for. It's about a high school freshman named Sasha--unattractive, un-admired, unaccepted--who wants to be pretty and brave and loved. It's about what happens when she gets her hands on a magic notebook, one that makes everything she writes come true.

She writes three changes in the chapters I marked up tonight. She writes herself a meeting with the boy she has a crush on; she writes herself a minor victory over her most feared bullies; and she writes herself a kiss. I'd managed to smoosh the first two up into one cycle of write-and-come-true, and the third sort of clumsily evolved from there. They'll turn into three separate cycles, each showing her confidence growing and the pace of change accelerating, magic spells having effects more and more blatant as the story progresses.

I also found a minor story arc hiding in a conversation between Sasha and her older sister. Not quite sure how to pull it off, but I can sort of see the shape of it from here. See, this is why the re-type doesn't happen until after one complete read-through.

Incidentally, I highly recommend doing the markup in the bath. Carolyn See recommends a glass of wine, to combat the writer's natural tendency to tense up when confronted with her own writing; I recommend a long hot soak. It may be time to invest in a bathtub desk.