author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hit my deadline. Got paid. The world continues to turn.

Now... back to life as usual.

More later. Right now, running backups. Have you backed up your writing recently? You better! Go on--it'll give you something to do while I figure out how best to dance for everybody's amusement.

Hello all. Just entering minute-to-midnight deadline mode again. Deadlines which have paychecks and external pressures attached get priority in my schedule, even if they have nothing to do with novels and short stories. Such is life.

Will try to make time tomorrow for things not work-for-hire related, such as blogging about my birthday weekend (I'm 30! Hello, multiple-of-ten angst! ...OK, I'm over it) on Denver Metblogs (hello, Denver Metblogs! Did you miss me? ...No?), critiquing others' fiction as well as my own (hello, Golden Bridle! I know you've missed me), and creating new stories for publication and not (hello... ah, well, that would be telling).

And, um, paying the bills. Hello, the evil, evil bills. They sit in an evil pile on top the piano and they taunt me.

But nevermind that. Tomorrow is Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day! We need a plan, you 'n me, a cunning plan to go and get us some! I suspect it will involve some strategic queuing up and waiting around on the Pearl Street Mall. In the snow. In the snow. Gods damn it.

Maybe they'll offer us in the Rockies a free mug of hot chocolate instead.

Well, sometimes fan fiction is bad for the brain, or at least is accompanied by a lack of a brain, as is evidenced by the case of Lori Jareo. Lori wrote a Star Wars fanfic, cranked it through a POD-machine, and then put it up for sale on Amazon. Despite trying to make a buck off of it in Bezos's backyard, she thinks she'll dodge the impending copyright/trademark violation cease-and-desist with the claim that she only did it for friends and family and that no one knows it exists. John "Whatever" Scalzi begs to differ.

But I digress. In its place, fan fiction can be good for the soul. It can be a playground in which the blocked writer lets the creative self play and play out from under the thumb of the editor-ego. And that's what I've been up to this week.

My dabblings in that arena have been few and, aside from one story that was turned in as an assignment in high-school English (a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale set in the world of Rush's 2112), largely unread. But every once in awhile I get this Idea. It tends to be the sort of Idea that sticks around for awhile.

Here's one of 'em.

I just got done feeding my annual craving to reread Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. If you've only ever seen the movie (and if, Gods forfend, you've suffered through the abomination that is the second movie), then you owe it to yourself right now to go get this book and read it. But if you've seen the movie, you'll remember how this disembodied narrator voice comes out of nowhere in the last minute of the movie and says something like, "Bastian made many more wishes and had many, many adventures. But that's another story." In the book, the narrative does that all the time. Some chapter will come to an end, and a secondary character will wave goodbye, and the narrative will hint at what will become of the character but then break off with, "But that's the beginning of another story that will be told at another time."

Ever since I first read this book, I've wanted to write a cycle of short stories, each one inspired by one of these "another story" teases. So this week I started playing around with one of the first prompts. It involves Cairon, the black zebra-striped centaur physician who assigns Atreyu his quest, whose "destiny was to lead him over very different and unexpected pathways" after he successfully delivers his message and nearly dies of the effort.

I have no illusions that the results will be publishable, not without seeking all the right permissions and of course rewriting and revising and rewriting again. But it's fun to dabble. It's a good thing to work on when I've just finished one project and can't seem to get started on another. And who knows? Maybe it will have a destiny upon unexpected pathways itself, ones beyond gathering cyber-dust at the bottom of my writing archive zip disk.

(And come to think of it, the Rapunzel story might in fact become publishable if the fanfic element remains oblique enough. Someone's looking for retold fairy tales.)

Quoth Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

Want to strike a blow against scam agents? Link to the 20 Worst Agents list. While you're at it, link to Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors. You could even link to Everything you wanted to know about literary agents and On the getting of agents. But the 20 Worst Agents list—that's the important one.

Remember, friends, the wisdom of Yog Sysop: "Money Flows Towards The Author." Remember that a literary agent who is paid out of your advance and royalties has an economic incentive to sell your book, and a so-called "agent" who is paid from up-front fees, editing charges, and annual "retainers" has no such incentive. Remember that an advance against royalties is a both the publisher's estimate of how much a book will sell and a publisher's investment in getting that book to sell; realize what that implies about a $1 advance. Remember that an agent who makes a big deal about being "first-time author friendly" or a publisher who claims to "give your book the chance it deserves" isn't interested in your career; s/he's interested in your naivety.

Follow the links above and innoculate yourself against scams.

So those three chapters got another round of polishing, and the synopsis got whittled down to 900 words. And every one of those words was wanted, let me tell you.

Let me tell you something else. FedEx Kinkos charges $0.49 per page on their black-and-white printer. Fifty cents! For one sheet! One crappy cover letter: Fifty cents! One crappy 900 word synopsis: Two bucks! I'm damn glad I printed out the 9,100 word three-chapter writing sample on a friend's laser printer instead. That one was almost twenty bucks long. Next time, I'm-a goin' price-shopping. There's another copy center 'cross the street from the Kinkos; they might offer more reasonable prices.

Or I might just get my printer nozzle cleaned out and print from home like I used to.

Never, never, never-never never feed your Canon i450 generic-compatible ink. Hold out for genuine Canon ink. Or you'll get drop-shadows and blurs in your printouts and boy will you be sorry.

So, yeah. Application to VP going into the mail mañana.

...oh wait. I have.

I'll say it again anyway: Synopsis writing suuuuuucks.

On the good side, I did get through the three pages of narrative summary without ever quite giving in to the little voice in my head that is quick to tell me what an awful, awful book this is, how pervected and gratuitous and wrong. I wrote through the paragraphs describing each of the scenes that woke that voice up, nodded peacefully at said voice until it went away, and pretended not to care every time that voice came back.

Thus I reached the end. It's 1,682 words long, just under three pages single-spaced, and it will need a thorough revision later on this evening. With any luck I will put the darn thing in the mail tomorrow morning on my way to work.

More later.

Aaaaaand another one goes back out into the world.

Have I ever linked to The Black Hole? Black Hole good. It's a database of paying F/SH/H markets and their minimum/maximum/average submission response times. It also contains relatively up-to-date guideline and masthead information. It's toothsome, low-fat, and high in fiber. Go nibble on it yourself.

Now. Now I have so badly got to write a synopsis for Drowning Boy. More later. Probably after sunrise.

This is just to say that the short story "Turbulence" has now gathered its fifth rejection letter. It will not see print in Asimov's. *Sigh*

This is also to say that the short story in question was only allowed to visit long enough for a cup of tea and a little chat. Then it was propelled firmly out the door again. Consider it re-slushed.

And that is all.

Well, that came out of nowhere. The first few lines of it occured to me as I walked down to the Dumpster to throw out some stuff. It's so warm out, I was thinking, you'd expect it would just go spring into summer and that's that, but April is supposedly the big snowy month in the Rockies. Hell, I'm told it's been known to snow on Midsummer up here. We don't actually get summer along the Front Range, I suppose; we just get occasional breaks between winter storms....

They've reopened some of the slopes in the Vail Valley. Katie and Joshua went, but I told them I'd sit this one out. I don't trust a June snow.

Tomorrow, the synopsis for Drowning Boy. Tomorrow a lot of things. But today's writing session was evidently all about playtime. And why not? Today was my day to work at the RRSR studios, editing WireReady playlists and managing the listener and volunteer databases. That counts as work. Why shouldn't I play in the evening?

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.

Nyaah.

Or as ready as they can look on the day the task is done. I should read them over again later, though, after I write up the synopsis. In any case, I got to the end of Chapter Three.

By the time he got back to Seattle (in the passenger seat of a green Saturn coupe whose driver held contradictory opinions about hitchhiking), a crimson sea was once more washing over the world. But this time it was the healthy, rose-touched red of sunset. It had nothing to do with lack of air. Brian was breathing just fine. Air moved into him comfortably and out again with each breath, just like air should. He was exhausted, true, but there was nothing wrong with him really, nothing at all.

He was alive and well. He wasn't on his way to Colorado.

And he never would be again.

I'm not entirely sure what happens in the book. I haven't entirely decided. I suppose I'd better just make the best guess I can and trust that it'll be good enough to get me in the door.

The exceedingly friendly lounge car steward on the train from Chicago to New Orleans asked me something relevant here. "Do you think you need it?" He meant the workshop. He meant, can writing be taught? Are workshops worth it? And yes, enough of the craft of writing is teachable that there's no question workshops can be worth it. But it remains a good question: Why do I want to go? What do I hope to learn? When I think about Big Name Authors (or even medium-name authors) reading my sorry attempts at telling this story and pointing out all the ways in which I've gotten it wrong, I cringe, I really do. But I still want to go. Why?

I really hope I have a better reason than the fan-girl one. "Ohmygawd like I totally want to meet Big Name Authors and have them read my Stuff *swoon* it'll be so rad!"

Maybe I'm hoping that the very knowledge that I've spent a lot of money to go, and put a lot of face on the line, will push me into high performance mode. I always have worked well under pressure. I hate it, but it works. Maybe that's why I procrastinate. Maybe I'm doomed to procrastinate all my life.

Victoria Nelson has some very kind things to say about procrastination. She says that we should stop punishing ourselves with the word and start looking at it as a statement of fact: I have put off my task until tomorrow. Why have I done this? What is preventing my unconscious creator mind from working with my conscious ego? What can my ego do to improve relations with my unconscious? Only I don't know how to answer that question. Creation happens in a state of grace, she says. You can't make it happen by force of will; you can only relax and allow the miracle to happen. And let yourself write as an act of play instead of a chore. Have fun.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of all this advice, but kind words and having fun seem like a good place to start. Better than hating myself for taking all day to get started, anyway.

In other news, I've been messing around a bit with the blog code. I'm quite pleased with having converted the blog entries table from being indexed by timestamp to being indexed by an auto_increment ID number instead, and revising all the display and entry management code to reflect that, all in under twelve hours. Unfortunately, you can't see that. What you can see is I've put the Random Writing-Related Quote back onto the page. Yay! Bask in its radiance! It is a thing of beauty!

(Yes, I know. I need to get out more. Hush.)