author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I had met
my quota
of words
due yesterday

which accomplishment
I probably
should have blogged
at the time

Forgive me
I was tired last night
and my head was hurting
and I had nothing left to say

What? Cat food? Screw that. That's boring. Fruitcake is where it's at. Fruitcake in the oven for the next 3 hours, slowly making my house smell niiiiice.

Today, SlyCrow and Kandybar and I all went to Caffe Luna, in Longmont, and held miniature writing races where we'd set a timer for five or ten minutes and see who got the most words written in that time. I started the day at 29,131 (how the hell do I remember that?) and you can see where I'm at now. I highly recommend this activity. Especially if you type fast. Kandybar kept track of the math, and I'd watch to see if she punched the air triumphantly or gave me a squinty glare to see which of us had beaten the other by five words or so.

Caffe Luna claims to have free wiFi available. Actually, what it has is wiFi available. Boingo Wireless, to be exact - the kind where you need a login, and you either have a monthly subscription or else you "pay as you go," and that's not free, not in the littlest bit. Good thing we weren't there to web surf.

Not much else to report. It's Teen Titans tonight on Cartoon Network, followed by Justice League Unlimited and Megas XLR. And somewhere in there I want to do another 45 minute writing session or so, just to try to get me up to the 33K mark. And that's all I got for now.

(Oh, all right. Homemade cat food. Bake 1 lb chicken livers and 2lb ground turkey breast. When cooked, chop the liver fine and crumble the turkey. Take 1.75 cups uncooked brown rice and cook it. Open a can of pumpkin - not pumpkin pie mix, OK, just regular pumpkin - and set it aside. Open up a bag of Wellness brand dry cat food. Now, make up five batches of cat food by mixing 2/3 C turkey, 1/3 C chicken liver, 1 C rice, 1 C dry cat food, and 1/4 C pumpkin per batch. Stick all the batches but one in the freezer. That last batch goes in a closeable container in the fridge. Feed 1/3 C twice a day to overweight tabby cats with finicky digestion. In Uno and Null's case, said cats will lose weight and their digestion will improve.)

(Take leftover pumpkin and mix with falafel and a little olive oil. Form patties. Fry 'em and eat 'em like hamburgers.)

(Take leftover turkey and mix it into mac and cheese. Or saute up some celery, onions, scallions, and garlic to mix with leftover turkey; add a cup of water, a half cup uncooked jasmine rice, a couple boullion cubes, some chili powder and cayenne pepper, and a couple bay leaves. Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. Voila - Cajun dirty rice!)

(There oughtn't to be leftover brown rice. If there is, add it to the Cajun dirty rice during the last five minutes of cooking the jasmine rice.)

It's time for my thousand word blogging break. Readers - all two of you - rejoice!

So I have this fruitcake recipe. Someone sweet sent it to me a few years back on the condition that after I followed it I send her a slice. Which I did. And then I never did it again. Make the fruitcake, I mean.

But now the Tea Spot (I never get tired of linking them!) is selling little slices of the stuff, heavy in cherries and walnut, and you know what? I gotta do it again.

So yesterday when I went to Whole Foods to pick up the ingredients for cat food (about this, more later) I also started in on fruitcake preparations. This is both the fun and the obnoxious part: bopping up and down the bulk goods aisle, deciding which dried and/or candied fruits to include, scooping them into little baggies with PLU numbered twist-ties, and weighing them to see if I'm adding up to 3.75 lbs yet. I got...

• pecans
• walnuts
• almonds
• currants
• bing cherries
• sour cherries
• black mission figs
• dates
• cranberries
• candied ginger
• and sweetened papaya spears.

Now. About chopping up dried fruits. Dried fruits are sticky. I don't care how much your friendly Pampered Chef Dealer hyped the Food Chopper, it is useless for chopping dried fruit. Dried fruit sticks to the blades at the very first slice and then rides them clear of ever getting sliced again. Besides, you don't want randomly minced fruit; you want cubed cherries and quartered dates. So stick with the knife. It's old fashioned but it works.

By the way - here's a little bit of trivia for you. True or false: "It is safe to leave bags of dried fruit out on the kitchen counter in a cat-infested household." False! I came back from retrieving the second load of groceries to find Uno and Null regarding a scattering of black mission figs, occasionally batting them to watch how they rolled. Bad kitty-owner!

So now I have a bowl of chopped-up dried fruit sitting in a covered bowl and happily getting drunk on half a cup of cognac. Tomorrow there will be the mixing of the batter, the baking of the cake, and the beginning of the process of curing the cake in more cognac in my big round Tupperware™. I plan to let that sucker pickle right up until Solstice. Yes, yes, I know. "Waste of good cognac." Well, you know what? It's just as much a waste to leave the stuff sitting on the kitchen counter until it spontaneously quadruple-distills itself. Which is what would happen. Believe me, the last third of a cup of brandy from the bottle I used on my last fruitcake was still hanging around as of yesterday. So, deal.

Next entry: A musical interlude, with homemade cat food. You (all two of you) may want to skip it, as it involves baked chicken liver.

Tuesday, Kandybar uttered a cry of lamentation:

Man, Niki's caught up with me while I was cavorting around the country side.... And I won't get to write until tonight! *sob*

Looks like you're still leading me by about 2K - guess I'd better put in another 3K day just to cut that lead a bit! *maniacal laughter*

Thursday was supposed to be an all-writing, all-the-time day... but it started with a trip with Uno and Null to the vet for their semi-annual kitty check-up, after which I came home and just about died. By the time I recovered it was time to go grocery shopping for cat food fixin's and fruitcake ingredients, and the onerous tasks of mixing up homemade cat food and processing various types of dried fruit (about which, more later) left me with just about enough energy to declare a moratorium on actual work for the night.

Now I'm behind - well, not really, not if I get to 28K tonight and stick to my 2K/day pace - but I'm no longer ahead of schedule - and Kandybar's past 33K!

*Whiiiiine*

Why, look! I appear to have acquired a NaNoWriMo Enemy! And I wasn't even looking for one! Well. Time to kick some butt, that's what I say.

(Meanwhile, I need a new vet. One that isn't afraid of my cat. Any takers?)

Yeah, so I devoured Abarat Book Two: Days of Magic, Nights of War pretty much over the 24 hours following its purchase. That stuff about how books don't get read during NaNoWriMo? Apparently, there's an exception.

Now I am in agony because now I have to wait for Book three. That's gonna be, like, a whole 'nother year. At least! Wow. I think now I know how a Harry Potter fanatic must have felt after eating up Goblet of Fire the day after it came out.

So I did my 2K at the IHOP, and I was ready to clear out of there, but I'm still very much awake and not ready to go home. But it's getting a little too wintery for that "sitting outside random wiFi cafes at one AM" schtick. Tonight's not so bad, though, so I'm doing it anyway.

Not that I have much to report. I'm jumping around the novel like crazy, filling out some more plot tension in the climactic post-shooting scene after writing up an unattached last-meeting-with-the-old-woman scene (nearly made myself cry there - not like it's any great achievement to make me cry). I've passed the halfway point in the novel (about time!). And I just topped off my hot tea and fried chicken salad dinner by sucking the lemon wedge dry. "Force Ten" from the Rush album A Show Of Hands just now showed up on my random shuffling of every single MP3 and WMA on my laptop. And Café Bravo proudly features Glacier Homemade Ice Cream.

There. And isn't that more random useless facts than you can shake a stick at?

It's so true. Give someone all day to do something, and nothing will get done. I overslept and then goofed off all morning. This is not the way to get a novel written.

That said, once I did get around to writing, I managed to do one full cycle of three half-hour sessions. It's not exactly a jet-pack flight - more of a hop, really - but it did get me further down the block than I would have gone otherwise. Half an hour translates into roughly 1,000 words; three of those is 150% of my daily requirement. So that's all good.

I'm at the Tea Spot again. It's pretty busy on a Tuesday night. Hordes of people come and go, some with take-out or leftovers from other area restaurants. Outside, the skating rink is still undergoing construction. Thousands of little white tubes are being laid out in a flat net where the ice will be. They create a sort of loopy fringe around the edges where they connect to the main pipe. I assume they're what will keep the ice cold enough to stay ice. I seem to remember the third weekend in November as the date the rink is supposed to open, but don't quote me on that.

Eh. Not much point to reporting all this, except that it seems I ought to put more in this blog than, "Wrote three thousand words tonight. I rock. I keep losing money at Skilljam.com, though." I couldn't really tell you why I'm keeping a blog at all, except maybe because it's spiffy to have my own version of the Dreaded Word-count Bar, and because I like the idea of keeping a record of my own progress through this novel - how many words a day, when my dry spells were, when I scrambled to catch up, how insane was I on the last three days of November. And maybe if friends of mine are actually reading this, I won't be tempted to babble their ears off with a verbal brain dump about every little thing I thought and did on a given day, because they'll have already read it and won't need to hear it again. And maybe then I'll actually shut up and listen to what they have to say.

Hey, it must be Autopsychoanalysis Hour again. Who knew? Anyway, forget I said any of that. In summary: 3,000 words today and 1 pot of tea drunk. Go me.

Lookit dat. Put a little extra wordage in today's novel-writing session. Almost 300 words extra. Unfortunately, the extra sprint got me where I don't know where to go next. Tomorrow is, as always, another day; maybe I'll have figured it out by then.

Diane has had her second adventure, in which she slips into the unicorn's role as healer and protector. She also learns about the unicorn's attraction to innocence when her road home takes her past her friend's house. She finds herself in the conflicted position of seeing her friend through a unicorn's eyes. There's a lot of tension there, and none of it is really resolved when her friend comes over the next day to tell her about his close encounter. She has to pretend to be all excited and stuff when in fact she's going oh, crap, please don't talk about it.

See, it's a superhero story. Superheroes often find themselves discussing themselves with close friends and romantic interests who don't know their secret identity. Black and Blue Magic is in that way a superhero story too. Harry's discomfort when his neighbor tells him that she saw an angel is kind of what I was going for in this scene, only for Diane the gut-writhing apprehension is twisted up a bit tighter and there's less comic relief. I don't know why there's so little comic relief going on here. Maybe I'm taking it too seriously. Maybe Diane hasn't yet escaped MarySuedom, and it's myself I'm taking too seriously.

(Here ends the self-searching psychoanalysis portion of today's blog entry. Next up: NanoGoofiness!)

It's just me and SlyCrow today doing the pot-luck write-in thing. I rewarmed last week's chili, which only gets better over time, and devilled me up some eggs 'cause we're behind in our household Royal Crest Dairy delivery consumption. SlyCrow brought some very nice cornbread. We thought maybe Multivitamim and Willow might show tonight, but as of yet there has been no sign. We're listening to the Blue Man Group audio CD and the sound of our own typing.

I'm thinking I should actively seek out people to write with more often, even after NaNo is over - there's a certain amount of peer-pressure energy that keeps me from Alt-Tabbing over to Skilljam or Insaniquarium (or some other time-waster video game). I mean, how can I slack off when there are other people in the room hard at work?

I got a call from hubby-o'-mine, saying that after his gaming session (Dungeons And Dragons I think they're playing tonight) he'll have to go right back to the office and I probably won't see him until 5:00 AM tomorrow. That probably means we're both going to be sleeping in. I'm on a Mon/Wed/Fri schedule at RRSR, so I'll be home all day tomorrow. I may just try out the "6,000 Word Jet-Pack" idea that Chris Baty writes about in the Week Three Pep Talk chapter of his book. It goes something like this:

Pick a day when you have nothing to do. Get up and do three 30-minute writing sessions in a row. Go do something else for awhile. Lather. Rinse. Repeat for a total of 3 cycles of 3 30-minute sessions each. For bonus points, do it again the next day. Lord your 12,000 word jump over all your local NaNo buddies.

Thus, in the next couple of blog entries you will either see some lording-it-over going on here, or else some coulda-shoulda-didn't whinging. Stay tuned to find out which one it'll be.

Oooh, suspenseful!

This just in: The second book in Clive Barker's Abarat series is out. I hadn't expected to see it until 2005, and here it is, out in hardback on the endcap shelves in the Boulder Bookstore's young readers section when I went to go exchange Mr. Socks Fox for a copy with correctly cut pages. Whoot!

(By coincidence, when I went to go return my library books and pay my fine, I picked up a copy of Barker's The Thief Of Always from the paperback sale rack there. Who knew it was an omen?)

Abarat is the first book that, once I finished reading it, I flipped right back to page one and started over. It was sort of an "Ohhhh... I get it now," moment. The writing isn't by itself the best in the world, but the world that is this fantasy's setting is compelling, and the illustrations painted by the author are gorgeous and vivid. It's a story that really sticks with me and follows me into my dreams.

Right. So... I need to reread the first book again, but If I Recall Correctly, the hero is one Candy Quackenbush (ha! love it) from Chickentown, Missouri. Or another state that starts with an M. Her life ranges from utterly boring to sinisterly abused. One day, she's out wandering in a cornfield... and discovers a lighthouse. She becomes involved in the struggle between two very strange characters over the lighthouse's key, which when used correctly causes the sea to roll in. So off she sails, floats, swims to the archipelago known as The Abarat, where each island perpetuates a single hour of the day (making Time in actuality a Place), and the evil and creepy Prince of the Midnight Island is particularly interested in her for reasons that begin to come clear towards the end of the first book.

(I'm eager to see how many of my guesses about that are proven right in the second book.)

As I understand it, Clive Barker has been painting oil portraits of these characters for years. One day, IIRC, he realized that all these pictures he was painting were coming from a single story, and he sat down and wrote that story out. It'll span four books, each of them illustrated with prints of those paintings, and Disney's already bought the rights for the animated film, due out in 2005ish.

I'm hoping it'll turn out to be the first decent adaptation of a Clive Barker novel yet. (Don't even get me started on Lord of Illusions. Choke me with a nine of swords, why don't you.)

So go go go go read these books, 'cause they're that darn good, and 'cause it's neat to see Mr. Barker, known for his work in horror, doing astoundingly inventive young adult fantasy.

Here's the thing about NaNoWriMo. Reading fails to get done in proportion to writing that needs doing. Well, it does if you're on your best behavior. Even if they're books about writing.

And all four of the ones I checked out are overdue.

I hate library fines. $1.20 per book comes to $4.80 and that's, like, a nice pot of tea, or a sandwich at Half-Fast Subs, or a couple new books at a used bookstore that I'm not getting. I hate spending money on my own stupidity. Dammit.

I'm at the Tea Spot again with other Boulder NaNos. The majority of us reached our writing goals for the day (/me glances upward, *perk!*) so we're all goofing off and chatting and knitting and playing vider games and stuff. I guess I can go drop off my library books after this, and then head over to the Boulder Bookstore. My copy of Foxs In Socks is defective and needs to be traded in for a good one. What could possibly make a copy of a beloved Dr. Seuss book defective? Well, it's not that the pages are in upside-down. That's kinda cool. The problem is that all the pages are miscut. There's a blank white band at the bottoms, and the tops are all truncated. Slow Joe Crow's face isn't wholly there, and Sue's hair is flat up top while she Sews Socks.

And my husband won't let me read it to him until it's not defective, so, y'see I gotta get this exchange taken care of.

And that's about all I have to report.