author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I have managed to take an inadvertent couple of days off. I am not sure at all of the feasiblity of getting 25 more hours in by the Greeley meetup Jan 5, or even - stopping to think about all that's wrong with this draft of the novel - finishing a full cycle of revision by that date.

Gonna keep trying, of course, which will make the next four days rather demanding. Part of my problem is how easy it is to just procrastinate starting. Starting at all. Stopping whatever else I'm doing and just putting in one more hour...

Oh, just one more game of Atomica. Just one more try at Katamari Damacy "Make Star 6." Oh, just another few pages of this forum thread that's making my eyes glaze over.

There are even productive procrastination tasks, like working on the FAQ for the Neverending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story Engine, which has reopened for general use this morning. Or putting in a few more hours' work on my latest Little Bull Creations assignment, which is much easier to push myself on given that the deadline has teeth and the pay is guaranteed (neither of which can be said about writing one's first saleable novel).

Anything other than writing!

So, I've got a new strategy in my constant war against apathy. The thing causing me the most angst - in this case writing - will be the thing I do last thing at night and first thing in the morning. And I shall be ruthless. "Last thing" means no reading myself to sleep, however the omission pains me. "First thing" means not even getting out of bed. Just roll over, grab the laptop and open the document.

I've been rereading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Black And Blue Magic, which I'd been threatening to do ever since NaNoWriMo 2004 began, and it's been really a useful reminder that my YA unicorn novel really isn't as much like Snyder's lovely book as I'd thought. For one thing, Harry Houdini Marcos is twelve, and my main character is sixteen, and that difference isn't just a number. It explains a lot about why my plot got a bit more sexual than I realized it was going to, for one thing. But. I am not allowed to finish rereading it until I've finished rewriting the mermaid novel. Sorry, me. Consider the resulting discomfort mere withdrawel pangs. Take the lumps and move on.

At times like this, I sometimes find this thought helpful: "What will you regret more in 10 years - not having slept more/reread that book one more time/caught up on reading newsgroups, or not having finished writing your novel?" And then sometimes I find it as useful as a clinically depressed patient finds the advice, "Just think happy thoughts!"

At those times, I find it's best to pretend that it's actually one of the other times.

This ain't no NaNoWriMo anymore. Editing is allowed.

Sunday I was moaning about creating first draft when I ought to be revising what I have. Well, today I'm polishing the new scenes until they seem done. I don't want to have to do a second pass, after all - if anything, just one reread for typos and obvious stupidity. So I'll be taking the time, when new scenes need to be written, to go over the new scenes and make 'em as perfect as reasonable assessments of time allow.

Accordingly, I've changed the excerpt on this site again. I've put up the entirety of the first chapter, and I'm actually quite proud of it.

I'm not going to go crazy with the excerpts, of course - too much of that, and the whole thing comes dangerously close to being previously published. But I like the idea of providing friends and family with that first glimpse, like when you pull a book off the shelf and start reading the initial scene just to decide whether you want to buy it.

Not that I'm inviting anyone to tell me whether they'd buy it. I am so not ready for that kind of pressure. But, y'know, pretend.

Edit hours are up. Word count has dropped. Scenes have been cut, and new scenes are being written.

I have spent four hours today producing more first draft. Isn't there something wrong with that? There is something wrong with that. I'm afraid this won't be a one-pass anything, not until I manage to produce prose that I can reread later without shuddering.

For now, I figure if I treat each scene like its own little short story, then maybe I can polish the novel one scene at a time and keep from buckling under the weight. But given that I've just rewritten the first two scenes practically from scratch, this revision cycle probably won't be the last.

Drat. Oh well, onward and all that. I put part of one of the new scenes on the Excerpt page, mainly because I was sick of the old one. The new one's pretty klutzy, though. Feel free to point and laugh. I did.

Spent an hour running down my list of accuracy/consistency concerns and looking up stuff. I have a whole bunch of Firefox tabs open now. Did you know...

• ...that it's the "Sea-Tac" International Airport but it's the town of SeaTac? Check the hyphens. *sigh* Consistency is all I ask!
• ...That the bar "Flowers" in the Seattle U. District has the same street number as the house in which I lived during my college years (and in which I'm locating my main characters)?
• ...that it's bloody impossible to find a straight transcript of a commercial airline's flight attendants' "safety features" speech? I'm reduced to looking up as many different versions of the "airplane humor" email forward as I can find, and inferring the original from the overlap.
• ...that a typical United Airlines flight from Seattle to Denver utilizes a Boeing 757-200? I have no idea what Frontier use, because Frontier won't tell you until, presumably, after you've entered credit card information.
• ...that a Boeing 757-200's Vne (never exceed) speed is expressed, not in knots, but in a maximum percentage of the speed of sound?
• ...that 2001 was a truly, truly sad year for pop hits?
• ...that, because I know you just can't get enough of this stuff, the tooth of extinct Carcharocles megalodon (freakin' huge prehistoric shark dino thing) was three to four inches long?

Spent another hour doodling out a timeline. Some of the best novel-plotting advice I have ever run across can be found here. Yes, that's a link to Teresa Neilsen Hayden's Making Light blog; specifically, to commentary posted by Jo Walton to an open thread. Some of the best literary conversations you've ever read go on there. Anyway, the point is, go there, read what Jo has to say about finding plot, and then page down for more goodness about writing novels and avoiding scammy publish-on-demand outfits.

If you do, you eventually get to my real point, which is, timelines. Scott Lynch says, "Don't forget that the characters off-stage should be taking action simultaneously with the characters currently on the page." Damn good advice, that. Secondary characters are not just loafing around backstage waiting for their cues. They're pursuing engineering degrees and helping mom to raise a passel of younger siblings and teaching this year's youngsters the laws of the sea and terrorizing the Puget Sound.

Not all at once, of course. Timelines! Time is what keeps events from happening simultaneously and getting all muddled up thereby.

Revelation of the evening: I have no idea what the main character's mother is doing in this timeline. She exists mainly as a menacing motivation factor in the main character's flashback allowance. I guess maybe she is waiting for her cue.

Damn. I have a lot less novel written than I thought I had.

I have been reminded that my deadline is January fifth. Whoo! Five whole more days! I can still make it at three and a half hours a day!

Tonight, I finished "the manuscript slog." Me and my bloody pen finally reached the last page of the print-out. From here on out, I get to actually rewrite. I don't know whether I'm looking forward to it or not. A little of both, I suppose. On the one hand I get to stop looking at how bad the first draft is and instead start actively fixing it. On the other hand... I have to fix it.

Hey, just a note here: Holly Lisle says that after the slog, your ratio of marked-up pages to clean pages should be about 2:1 or 3:1, right? I have to wonder - what kind of miraculous first draft is it where any page stays clean of marks? I think in this entire manuscript there are maybe 200 words, maximum, that can stand as they are. And that's counting words like "the," "and," or "well." And no, those 200 words are not all on the same page.

Ah well. Chalk it up as one more reason why NaNoWriMo isn't necessarily conducive to redeemable first drafts. At least, not without a lot of discipline.

I know where to get Yule logs now. I mean, on years where I'm not lucky enough to happen to be traipsing down the railroad corridor after tree trimming day. You do this. You talk to these guys, you drive down and wander about their yard, you show 'em which piece of tree you're interested in, and they charge you a couple bucks. Or not. If you're not too keen on getting a perfectly round and smooth birch log, if you pick an interestingly gnarled piece of "junk wood," maybe they'll tell you to just take it away and Happy Yuletide to you.

My piece of junkwood is burning very nicely. I wish I'd taken a picture of the whole ensemble before we torched it. It was a feat of architecture. Two layers of grocery store firewood interlaced with newspaper with the Log on top and then a bunch of holly and cedar draped over it and the last charcoal scrap of last year's log at the bottom, then one little splash of brandy and one little match. Phoom! Fire.

And the fruitcake is pretty darn yummy too, I gotta say. We took it out of its cognac cocoon and began devouring it. Oh boy. You people who don't like fruitcake, I don't get you.

Round about five-thirty we're going to get in the car - those of us who are here and awake at five-thirty - and head out to Red Rocks for the annual "Drumming Up The Sun" event. This is where a whole bunch of area Pagans stand around in the amphitheater making noise until the sun rises, at which point everyone makes a lot more noise. Then they head off somewhere and have breakfast. This year, I plan to actually get to Red Rocks before everyone else leaves. I have much better directions this time around.

Not a lot of writing (or editing) getting done tonight, though. I like to spend Solstice night on those activities with which I want to fill the coming year, but right now my brain is mush. And there are guests over. Mostly we're sitting around watching my husband, John, play "Rogue Ops" on his new X-Box (early Yuletide gift to himself). Sedentary stuff like that. If I make it to five-thirty without dozing off (again), I'll be doing pretty dang good.

I mean, productivity? You've got to be kidding...

The original seed of this novel came from wanting to turn The Little Mermaid around. I wanted to write a story in which after the mermaid rescues the prince, instead of the mermaid following him onto the land, the prince goes into the water after her. (I tried the idea out on my husband, who promptly said, "He'd drown," forgetting, I suppose, that we're talking about fairy tale fantasy where magic isn't against the rules.)

Of course, what made this idea take over NaNoWriMo 2003, shoving the unicorn girl story aside to wait another year, was giving in to the prurient adolescent impulse (and, really, are we ever too old for prurient adolescent impulses?) to sexualize the first encounter of the two main characters, resulting in a whole bunch of implications that wouldn't get out of my head. But that's not the point.

The point is, I did want to incorporate the key elements of Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale into this story. Somewhere during the painful rush for fifty thousand words I lost sight of that goal, and now, coming back to the manuscript, I find myself wondering whether attempting it now would result in too much artificiality.

But there are some places where I can see that I tried to inject the fairy tale into the story. The meeting with the Great White is reminiscent of the Little Mermaid's interview with the sea witch, certainly. And the Inanna/Ereskegal motif isn't completely out of place - Inanna's casting aside of her many acoutrements at the gates of the underworld can be seen in Anderson's mermaid's sacrifice of her tail, her voice, and the ability to move without pain.

And there's a point at which, in my story, the mermaids refer to the main character as "silent stalker" - they cannot hear his movements the way they can hear each other's.

Obviously I wanted to oblige my main character, like the fairy tale mermaid, to give up his voice. But I guess I forgot about that along the way. Or maybe I decided it was too much trouble to deal with in 30 days. In any case, there are pages and pages of long conversations between the MC and his seagoing lover. Long, pointless conversations. Word-padding conversations.

It occurs to me that if I make him mute, that magically removes a whooooole bunch of awful purple dialogue from the manuscript. And that would be a very good thing.

Plus it's a lot more plausible to call him "silent" because he can't speak (no air vibrating against his vocal chords, duh) than it would be to somehow posit that his swimming makes no sound. He pushes the water about just as much as any mermaid does, so it would be silly to say they couldn't hear him moving.

And - oh boy, bonus! - the MC's inability to comminicate with the very person who could give him all the answers he needs would give me a brand new sub-conflict to play with. I don't know if it'll be as integral to the final outcome as the Little Mermaid's silence was in Anderson's fairy tale (because she couldn't speak, she couldn't win the prince's love, and so she lost her life), but it's certainly got legs.

Fins, I mean. It's got fins.

Because then I'd really be doing the NaNoEdMo thing. I mean, I'm trying to do it right now, but as it's December I don't have the sense of participating in a huge marathon run with competitors from all around the globe. It's bad enough that I've told pretty much everyone I know that I'm trying to get through one revision cycle before Jan 1 - good darn thing I haven't told the whole world.

Because, of course, 43 hours to go divided by 13 days left is about 3 hours and 20 minutes per day. Starting today. And the thing about hours of revision is, you can't get them done any faster than at a rate of 1:1.

Holly Lisle recommends "Nerves of Steel" on her list of implements necessary to the One-Pass Manuscript Revision technique. She says she's kidding, but I think the only joke is saying that they're available for purchase at Wal*Mart. I mean, after just one hour of slogging through this manuscript, I can't sit still. I've got all sorts of contradictory stuff going on in my head...

"Ooh! Now I see what the overarching theme this scene serves is! I want to rewrite it now!" Except of course that would mean I might have to rewrite it five times by the time I got done with the red pen and the manuscript print-out. The last scene may, on reconsideration, also inform the revision of this scene.

"But there's no way I'll keep this all straight in my head for when I'm done slogging through!" That's why I'm taking notes. "Argh! But my notes are all mixed up!" Yeah. Good luck there.

"There's too much crap that needs to be done to make this thing publishable! It sucks! It sucks big granite boulders until all the quartz is gone! I can't redeem this dreck!" Which is why, I think, writing is a sort of religion; a certain amount of the process is built on faith.

Bleargh. Back to the grind, anyway. There was a time on Thursday when I was getting excited about really seeing clearly the main themes and character dynamics that drive the plot. Today, unfortunately, all I seem to be able to see is ick. It's obviously one of those days that separates the career novelist from the hobbyist writer - on a day like today, the one gets to work while the other goes back to bed.

"If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it." -Brenda Ueland

On days like today it's good to know that successful and famous authors have days like today too. Not because I enjoy seeing others in pain, understand, but because I'm encouraged to see that when others share that pain they keep writing (and publishing) anyway. It's proof that perseverance is not only possible but prudent. (Ha-ha! Alliteration.) Besides, if even Neil Gaiman has days when the writing's so hard he'd rather do anything else, then having that kind of day isn't necessarily my cue to throw in the towel.

Either stay up until two in the morning programming, or wake up at 6:30 to meet a writer friend at the coffee shop. Not both. These two options are mutually exclusive.

...which won't exactly top the charts as a big band swing pop tune, but it sounds like it ought to be one, at least. The long story is, they're replacing the floors in the laundry rooms of my building, so in the meantime I have to take my dirty clothes to the laundromat in Diagonal Plaza. Last night I took my novel draft over there along with two loads of St. John's Bay jeans and Hanes Her Way undies and the rest of the fauna.

So, whee for me. I ended up hacking out some 1500 words from the very beginning of the book. X. Cut. Gone. Well - those pages have been set aside to be mined for redeemable material at a later date, anyway. But still.

Admittedly, they did have to go - they were fine examples of my ability to waste oodles of text in getting characters from point A to point B. Great word-padding for NaNoWriMo, but not very good substance for a novel. Which leads me to the following conclusion. You ready for this? OK, here we go: NaNoWriMo is not necessarily good for your first draft.

No no no really. Let's try that again, and more accurately: NaNoWriMo only produces workable first drafts if the author begins with the goal of a workable first draft. There. That's somewhat less extreme.

See, if you bop around the forums, you will see all manner of unhealthy suggestions offered on the assumption that those reading care only about crossing a 50K-word finish line, and not about which 50K words cross that line with them. Suggestions such as, "write a scene involving ninjas! You can fit ninjas into any story!" And, "do a find and replace on all your contractions - 'do not' is two words!" And, "Expand all your acronyms! 'International Business Machines' is three times the wordage of 'IBM'!"

Suggestions like those remind me of coffee and cigarettes and all-night writing sprees when what your body really needs are a nutritious meal and a good night's sleep. Not that the occasional all-nighter isn't a useful way of challenging yourself, understand, but what I'm talking about here is the difference between a torturous one-month marathon that leaves you unwilling to run for a whole 'nother year, and a month of solid, healthy running practice. Some NaNoWriMo participants only want to run that marathon and then go back to the couch all year, so to speak, and that's OK for them. Me, I want my November production to be part of lifelong writing career. So NaNoWriMo has to be fun, not torture, and it has to produce a draft I can be proud of.

Thus, my goals for NaNoWriMo are a little more stringent than those of many other NaNoWriMoers:

• I have to tell a story that I'm willing to live with after November.

• I have to tell that story, and not tell around that story.

• Lastly, I have to write as though I'll want to read it later.

In short, a NaNoWriMo undertaking, for me, has to resemble in some ways the first draft of a short story. From the beginning, the hope is to produce a first draft - not just a 50K-word ramble. This of course means that I'll be heartbroken if November's output turns out to be unredeemable after all. I've got more at stake than I would otherwise. But it's having stakes in the matter that gets me to the finish line. And I've survived broken hearts before.

Hell, I've had to rip five hours of knitting back into a ball of yarn. I know all about surviving heartbreak.

OK, time to unravel another 15 rows of lace... *grooooan*