author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This to be said about IHOP's pumpkin pancakes: They go best with butter pecan syrup.

John and I pooped out of the IHOP All-Nighter at around midnight-thirty. I was tired, and he was getting bored. We're both hitting Week 2 with a vengence. Week 2 is when the novel stops being fun, see. I think I'm digging a few holes through that wall, though. Slowly but surely. Taking a spoon to the mortar and sccrrraaaaaaping awayyyyyyy.

The thing about all that scraping is, odd fragments of things show up amid the mortar crumbs. Paradoxically, I have to make up fresh details in order to give my talemouse an ambiguity to chew through. How does he get Brooke out of her own timeline and into Gwen's? He gnaws a hole where a little yellow flower grows in the park, just something that Gwen put there for color but didn't bother to identify or describe or even think about. And Brooke fell into the hole. How does he keep tabs on Brooke once Gwen finds her in Central Park? He rides in the skin of a bit-part character, a jogger I threw into the scene to keep Brooke and Gwen from turning into talking heads. Just something to distract Brooke for a moment, a jogger running by. Unnamed, unimagined, it gives Rakash Sketterkin a way in.

So there's a jogger that wasn't there before, and a yellow flower that I had to go back and add, just so I could say that the story was vague about the jogger or the flower.

I keep referring to the failure of "Gwen's author"--me--to imagine things properly, or to the fact that "Gwen's author" has never seen New York. Which sort of makes me a character in this book. If it's a Mary Sue thing, it's the oddest Mary Sue I ever did see.

Today's leap in word count is partially due to Greywolf--that's the New Orleans Municipal Liaison--inviting me into her daily NaNoChat, where participants participated in 15-minute word sprints. I got something like 228 and 336 words in those two races, words I think I can be proud of. Then another 800 or so at the IHOP later in the evening, followed by 300ish in bed just now. Today was a good day.

Tomorrow, well, who knows. Tomorrow will be full of laundry, house-cleaning, cat food making, and car repair. The car died on us today. I think its alternator went wherever it is that the dogs go at the end of a convention. You know. During the dead dog party.

With any luck I might still be able to, on top of everything, attend another write-in. Wish me luck!

Playing catch up! OK. Where did we leave off?

Ah yes. Partying until the last dog done died. Dude, I went up to the Consuite at about 6:00 PM and didn't leave until 2:00 AM. I think it's safe to say that of the World Fantasy and Horror Conventions I've attended (WHC '02 and '04; WFC '04 and '05), WFC '05 had the best attended, most hospitable, and most fully stocked Consuite of 'em all. Fred, we love ya. Additional shout-outs to Alma and Deck, Lucien Soulban, my fellow sock-knitter John (Hay?), Darcy (recipient of a brand new misshapen doily) and her fellow gatecrashers, and Kevin Przybylowski. And of course Jen Tishrean, fellow NaNo'er and fellow traveller whose train has probably reached its home station by now.

I slept through much of the return journey. Due to the aforementioned late night, I didn't get much sleep before it was time for Jen and I to pack up and run like the wind down eight blocks of State Street to the bus stop whence we'd be whisked away from Madison and down to Chicago. Then, due to much sight-seeing in Chicago, I slept through most of the afternoon on the train. Stayed up writing and reading and playing computer games in the lounge car, then slept the rest of the night away. And then I did the biking/bussing thing to get home from Union Station in Denver, and I slept through much of that afternoon.

I was awake enough to notice the neat stuff about catching a west-bound California Zephyr in Chicago, though. Since Chicago is the very beginning of the route, we got all the route-beginning announcements, like descriptions of the route, the cars, the services, and so forth. I made a reservation to eat in the dining car this time, which was neat. Got sat with two other party-of-ones, with whom I exchanged the sort of small-talk that substitutes for getting to know one another. I had the cod. The cod was quite good. The veggies, however, were limp and tasteless, and the rice pilaf was even more bland than that served at the WFC Awards Banquet. One of my dining companions found the chicken pretty dry, too. Butter and ranch dressing seemed to solve both problems.

When I finally woke up Tuesday afternoon, I headed down to Caffe Sole for a NaNoWriMo write-in. I used the Ancient Decrepit Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 so that Willow could borrow my Averetec, and it's amazing how many distractions you can find on a DOS-bound non-networked computer. Just for instance, when I got to wondering about daily averages, I wrote myself a NaNoWriMo Progress Evaluator script in QBasic, which you can download if you so desire. (Its PHP incarnation is available here.)

Distractions aside, you can see that I made progress. More tonight, hopefully, at the IHOP All-Night Write-In. Stay tuned.

Short entry tonight. Very tired. Very happy. Just got back from a party. Those things that go on at cons. As parties go, this one rocked, like, literally. This was the annual WFC Folk Singing Do-hickey as MCd and performed by Patrick and Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Charles de Lint, and quite possibly others. I don't know who officially organizes this thing. I'm not sure it's exactly official. This year they'd taken over the Assembly room (the Madison Concourse labels its first floor meeting areas after ceremonial bits of the Capitol) by ten o'clock. I got back to my room at one thirty. There may have been other goings-on after Alma and Deck and I left, I don't know.

The upshot is, I've got multiple earworms playing simultaneously on the various tracks of my mental recording studio. "Angel Band" as performed by Teresa Neilsen Hayden and by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; "Free Man In Paris" ("the freelance editor's lament," I think someone called it) as performed by Patrick Neilsen Hayden; "Jersey Devil" as performed by Charles de Lint; and that's not to mention the annual comic dirging of "Teen Angel" or the various SF filks written and performed by Joe Haldeman or the very first audio-visual performance of Charles de Lint's "Cherokee Girl" (now with 100% more belly dancing). And more. Oh my Goodness yes. I'm going to be humming "Ain't Misbehaving" all the way to sleep, unless it morphs into "You Took Advantage Of Me." Or "Java Jive." "Java Jive" was not in fact performed, but it shares a chord progression with the other two.

The NaNo novel progressed today, but not by much. And you might call it cheating, as it was a copy-paste job. But! It was not a mere copy-paste job. It had Justification. You see, there's this, ahem, sex scene in Gwen's manuscript, which Gwen reviews. It reads very strangely now that all clauses pertaining to Brooke are gone. However, in a much later chapter, that scene is enacted with all its sentences intact as Brooke, regardless of being stranded in (for want of a better term) Real Life, follows the plot Gwen wrote. So I had to write the scene once in fragments in Chapter Two so Gwen could read it, then copy-paste it to Chapter Ten and write all the missing bits--swapping out the name of Brooke's original partner for that of the person with whom Brooke finds herself in (so-called) Real Life.

That sounded really twisted and kinky and grammatically confused. But it's meant to cause this really neat deja vu effect as the sentence fragments from Chapter Two resonate in your memory as you read Chapter Ten. Plus, it's a really hot scene.

This all presuming I get this right, of course.

Tomorrow: The awards banquet! The dead dog party! The Saints play the Bears! Onnnnnn Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

PS. This, apparently, is what I mean by a "short entry."

Today, after a lotta lotta panels, was the World Fantasy Convention Mass Autograph Party. This is the event that reminds me how well I do not do in big crowds. Thankfully, the WFC Gods had arranged everyone relatively logically and according to My Convenience. For instance, I went up to say hi to Alma and Deck, and they happened to be sitting next to Patricia McKillip, whose autograph I was seeking (this year I remembered to bring my old, beloved copy of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld). Steve Rasnic Tem (writer, writing teacher, and husband to Melanie Tem, ditto, whose classes I take twice monthly) was sitting next to Ellen Datlow. Charles de Lint (who faithfully emailed me the photo he took of me with the googly-eye goggles on last year), Charles Vess (with hand-drawn draft of illustrations for Neil Gaiman's "Blueberry Girl" bravely available for all comers to flip through and melt at the sight of), and Nina Hoffman (who's a good friend and fellow workshop member to Jen, whom I met on the bus and have been having write-ins with) were all in a convenient row--and their table was the one making all the jolly noises, so you know where the party is. And all the guys 'n gals with gaming fiction were kinda grouped together, too. (Hi, Lucien!)

Still, I felt like I was at Whole Foods on a particularly crowded day--you've got your grocery list organized by aisle and then you hope you don't forget anything because after fighting your way from the produce section all the way over to the bakery you do not want to do it all again.

(Oh, and don't be fooled. I am not actually on a first-name buddy-buddy basis with most of the names you'll recognize up there. But I find that after attending two WFCs and WHCs each, some of the regulars--some of them Names, but most of them just members like me--are starting to wave at me on arrival, even if they don't really know me beyond "face I see repeatedly at this con." So I wave back. Cons are cool.)

I may put up some photos later. Or not. We'll see.

One should strive to learn something new at every panel one attends, I think. I sure learned a lot. I'm hoping that the schmuck behind me in the second row at the panel on fairy tales has learned the folly of attempting to lecture Terri Windling, Jane Yolen, and other professionals about the fine art of world-building, or has at least learned that panels are for asking questions of, not arguing with. As for me, I learned that schmucks who would actually do that sort of thing exist. Another paradigm shift for me! I think that's at least 500 XP.

Ah, yes, writing. Rather slow this morning. Starting to get worried by how far behind I am! But today over dinner I got to meet the talemouse. For now, I'm calling him Rakash Sketterkin. I know a lot more about him today: how he travels, what he eats, and why he decided to interfere with Gwen Halpburn-Smith's novel. I also know more about Gwen's novel: what happens to Brooke in it, and how that informs what Brooke does when she escapes into Gwen's reality. Lastly, I actually cameo'd in the novel--I mentioned that "Gwen's author has never seen Central Park, hasn't even been to New York," and that this is why Rakash Sketterkin finds it so easy to travel "up" into Gwen's reality via Central Park. Talemice get in where details are not well thought out. (I might have mentioned that already.)

Anyway. More tomorrow, including the links I didn't bother inserting tonight. And possibly photos. For now, sleeeeeeeep.

Dangit! 1,700 shiny new words, and no way to update my word count at NaNoWriMo.org! The page is CSS-wacked and every link is broken due to passing through a broken session_confirm.php file. I'm sure they're working on it--in fact, I'm positive they're working on it, because the CSS-wackiness is somewhat different than it was an hour ago. But meanwhile, here I am with no way to get in.

For the record, I got 1,700 shiny new words written this morning. I'd like to raise that to 2,000, but I have returned the story to the point at which it beached itself the first time I tried to write it several years ago--before I knew that this was a sequel to The Bookwyrm's Horde--and I still don't know where it goes next. I'll probably work on the whole Snowflake Method of Novel Plotting thing some more. That'll help me figure out what scenes need writing.

Meanwhile, me and a fellow NaNoWriMo participant/WFC attendent I met on the bus from Chicago to Madison are sitting in a nice little cafe called Michelangelo's, enjoying the atmosphere, art, and free wi-fi. This is where I wrote my 1,700 shiny new words. I've run into a few more familiar faces, folks that tend to be at WFC and WHC every year, and we said "Hi" and "How's your year been" and "What's your name again? Sorry." And we're looking forward to finally getting all registered at 1:00 and going to the first panel at 2:00. The weather's gorgeous and I actually slept in a bed last night.

I am human again, and life, once again, is good. Nyah!

(Oh, and NaNoWriMo.org is fully functional once more, or at least close enough for rock 'n roll. Hooray!)

I am now a virgin in one less way than before. I have been on a train.

The California Zephyr, in fact, on the Denver-Chicago leg. It was cool. I was worried, but eighteen hours in coach wasn't all that bad. See, they assign you to a car, and then you just pick a seat on that car (shoving your boarding pass into the shelf above your seat to mark your territory and incidentally prove that you belong on board). And in my car, the ratio of people to seats was greater than 2, so everyone got to stretch out across a pair. Seats come with plenty of leg room, the usual foot rest and seat-back tray table, and a cushioned leg rest that took me until this morning to discover and figure out.

Then there's the sightseer lounge car. Its top side has windows that curve right up to the roof, and side-viewing chairs with elbow tables and cupholders in the wall. Its bottom level is a diner with booth tables and a snack counter. Both levels have TVs at both ends of the car; I understand they showed Mr. & Mrs. Smith Tuesday evening, but I ended up not watching it. I stayed up journalling, and then I went right to sleep. It's amazing how comfy you can get on those chairs. I didn't wake up until 6:30 AM when we stopped in Omaha, Nebraska.

That's right. I've been to Omaha, whither lead all roads.

(Sorry. That might be an inside joke. Or, at the very least, a location joke: "You had to be there." Whatever.)

I never did make it to the actual diner car, but I gather that's where actual meals were served at actual tables, as opposed to microwaved eggy bagels and bagged sandwiches in the sightseer lounge car. I'll have to try that on the ride home. And I never took a look at the sleeper car, figuring I wouldn't be allowed. I hear it's made up of very narrow rooms that consist pretty much of a bed and nothing else. If I ever take the train all the way from Denver to New Orleans, I'll have to spring for one of them. It more than doubles the price of the ticket, though, and coach is relatively comfy. But I guess it's the lack of privacy that gets to a person after awhile. Three nights on the train is too long for many to go without a room of their own.

I wrote more than 2,000 NaNo-countable words on that train and, later, on the bus from Chicago to Madison. I know things about this novel now that, several years of chewing on the plot notwithstanding, I didn't know before. That Gwen's agent is Chinese and learned English as a second language, for instance. Or that her novel's main character, Brooke, dances at a strip club managed by a nutbar name of Mickey, and the bouncer there is named Ronnie. Or that the talemouse shows up in Gwen's book as Brooke's kindhearted landlord. Talemice get in via the more vaguely imagined parts of books; an exclusively off-stage character mentioned only by function, not name, might well be or become a talemouse. I've also learned that I've forgotten the original name I gave him, and the notebook where I wrote down and played Tarot with that name is not in Madison with me; it's at home. Bugger. For now he's "Mr. Rakash." And Gwen is "Gwen Halpurn-Smith".

We write to find things out. We don't always find out interesting things, but if we don't write we don't find out anything.

The Hospitality Suite was already open tonight, even though registration for the con hasn't yet begun. I saw Alma and Deck there, learned a lot about the relationship of Utah to the Church of Latter Day Saints, and drank a tiny amount of some very nice scotch. All in all, I consider that a successful night.

Tomorrow: Another 2000+ words! Con registration! Breakfast in downtown Madison, Wisconsin! Check back for all the excitement!

It is now officially November, and now I have a word count. We had a Countdown To Word One House Party. CO_Butterfly came over, and my husband, AKA Worldnamer, pulled out his ancient decrepit Compaq (yes, we both have ancient decrepit Compaqs--mine's more ancient but less decrepit, haha), and we got to work. Well, we sort of worked. We also did a lot of chatting and goofing off. Sarah and Bridget were over for Halloween/Samhain goodness, moral support, and, well, just to be NaNoWriMo groupies.

Dude. Boulder is so hoppin', we have NaNoWriMo groupies.

(And no, that short story did not get written in time to submit. But, oh well. It'll still get written. I'm sure I'll find somewhere else that will publish an Adam & Eve spec fic story.)

As for that other novel, I had a dream last night. I had this weird dream wherein I was in the New Orleans area, at my parents' house, and going swimming at the neighbor's house every morning while the neighbor rode a bicycle around the bottom of the swimming pool... none of which is actually the point, because the point is that in the dream I got a call from Wizards of the Coast, which happened to be headquartered right there in Metairie. And they said, "We totally want to publish your book. How soon can you bring the full manuscript by?" And I said, "Dude! Right now!" And I brought it. And it was on this sort of old tape backup drive, and they were having trouble getting the file off the drive, and so I finally said, "Well, y'know, that isn't actually the real manuscript anyway... I'll bring you the real one in a day or two." I didn't want to admit that I hadn't actually finished the publishable draft. But the editor totally caught on and gave me this sort of pity hug like she was about to break the news to me that she wasn't going to buy my book anyway...

So. Yeah. I'll be doing both novels this November. And did I mention that I still haven't finished and submitted that other other novel? *Sigh*

Not that having too much writing to do is the worst of fates, or anything...

So, that work-for-hire thingie? Yeah. That's done. Time for me to remember where I left off in the various novels and short stories I'd put on hold in order to hit the deadline.

While writing up a brief bio for the editor to use or not as appropriate, I discovered something. PanGaia issue #42 is now online. And my article is indeed among those you can read in PDF format: here.

In other news, it's looking like my yen to blog about my surroundings will be fulfilled once the Denver Metroblogging website gets up and running. Yay! Metroblogger is a fine old respectable venue, for online values of "old" anyway, and I'll be proud to be on the team.

Meanwhile, down here in the New Orleans area, we are feeling the effects of Hurricane Wilma. Stupendous northerly winds are rushing across the city--not wings of the storm, precisely, but a current caused by the hurricane's low pressure system in the Gulf yanking the air out of the high pressure system that is our incoming cold front. The ghost town of the 9th Ward got two feet of water last night. The blue tarp on the roof with the long slats on top was flapping, bumping, and squeaking all night long. And you can actually hear the wind howling in my parents' sink. 35 years in this house, and they've never heard that happen before. I leaned over, put my hand to my ear, and said, "Mom! I can hear the sea!" We didn't stop laughing for something like five minutes.

So y'all know about Mr. Scalzi's call for submissions? The one where you're supposed to take a big fat science fiction cliche and reinvent it in 5,000 words or less?

I got me an an idea. Maybe I'll even be able to finish it in time.

Woo! Two concerts to report on. Feels like lots and lots more. Here we go.

Trippin Billies, Tuesday night: You know, I think I had more fun listening to this cover band at the Fox than I did at the actual Dave Matthews Band show at Jazz Fest 2005. The Fox was less crowded; I had somewhere to sit; and I was so close to the stage that I kept getting looks from the lead guitarist and from the violinist, as much as to say, "You're really into it, aren't you? Or maybe you're just insane?"

For me, there were two highlights of the evening. Most noticeably there was the violinist's solo. He sampled each riff he played into a repeating loop until by the time he was done he was playing with an entire orchestra of himself. More subtlely, there was the moment when the singer stopped pinching his voice in an attempt to sound more like Dave Matthews his-own-self, and just relaxed and sang like someone with a damn fine singing voice.

It isn't actually that hard to be a Dave Matthews cover band, as long as you can find a versatile saxophonist and a super-human violinist. And it helps if your vocalist has about a three octave range. Nothing to it, if you've got all that. Then you just play the songs, and no one cares whether you're actually the Real Thing or not, because the songs are so very happy-making. Me, I have about three or four songs I absolutely love, and all the rest of the songs I don't know all that well but I still want to just pick them up and hug them. Look, there's enough doom and gloom in the world; we need music that's life-affirming as much as we need cathartic wails and politically aware dirges. The latter has its place, but sometimes you just need to swing-dance, or smile wistfully, or jump up and down and clap your hands and sing.

Dresden Dolls et. al., Wednesday night: Which is to say, Dresden Dolls but also openers Faun Fables and Devotchka, and an unexpected burlesque-style strip tease in between the two opening acts, making the show feel like a classic variety show.

Faun Fables turned out to be a solo act, a lady in "Mediterranean pirate" garb who accompanied herself on guitar or with a complex percussive stomping dance of her high-heeled boots while she sang folk ballads, ancient Greek chants, and compositions of her own. The climax of her set was a melencholy lament during which photographs were lovingly displayed by candlelight, and at last the singer transformed herself into a framed photograph too.

Devotchka were a quartet playing music that sounded like a mix of Slavik and Latin on drum, upright bass or tuba (flugelhorn?) depending on which instrument that musician picked up, guitar, violin, and this weird old-time thing consisting of a miked up wooden speaker box with an antenna sticking up which the guitarist would jiggle to make a sound like a musical saw. Their act had a lot of energy. There'd have been more dancing if people weren't jammed in shoulder to shoulder.

As for the strip tease, what's to say? The music was "Experience Unecessary" and the stripper was wearing purple pasties with blue glitter.

Which brings us to Dresden Dolls. I had never actually heard them before, barring one song that Cate played for John and me. They did in fact play that song, "Coin-Operated Boy," complete with the "record skipping" effect halfway through, which was absolutely amazing to watch. The technical skill involved in that trick is nothing to sneeze at, and that skill was in evidence all through the show.

There was a very Tori Amos element to the lyrics, an emotional rawness unafraid to put itself in semi-shocking terms. A lot of black humor. A lot of cleverness that makes you laugh before you realize you've been handed a grenade. (Note to the audience: You know that song with the verses about sitting by the window in the morning and masturbating? If your only reaction was to fantasize lewdly about the singer, you weren't paying attention.) It was the kind of concert where I was glad to have someone I loved holding me. Some of those songs really hurt. But I'd still go see them all over again tonight and tomorrow and again if I could.

Besides the fantastic "record skipping" thing, there was the sorta-kinda duelling pianos bit (only of course it was one piano versus one set of drums) when she said to him, "It's so hard to take you seriously in that dress." There was "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" peformed by the keyboardist on the drums and the drummer on distorted acoustic guitar. There was the anecdote about how female musicians might respond when male fans yell "I want to have your baby!" (Someone yelled that at Faun Fables, too; she just said, "That would save me a lot of work, wouldn't it?")

And then there was me totally forgetting to pick up any CDs before I left, dangnabit! Guess I have some internet shopping to do.

And of course that's not even to mention the mountain flying cross-country I finally flew yesterday, or the progress on the novel, or how I might have to take a few days off from the novel in order to stay on track with the work-for-hire gig. Meh! More later, therefore.