author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Sweet! Another Constant-Content sale. Somebody else decided they were willing to pay money to put my words on their website. In this case, it's a cute little trivia list about the ten dollar bill. I know, I know, not exactly inspiring stuff, but trivia lists were selling at the time, so I wrote one. Again, the purchase was anonymous, so until Google finds it I won't know where or whether you can read it. I'll link it when I know. If you're feeling watch-doggy, the title is "Ten Surprising Facts About Ten U.S. Dollars." The purchaser paid for exclusive rights to use it, so it should only appear in one place with my byline intact.

Thank you, anonymous purchaser!

In other news, there's a familiar name in Heliotrope Issue 1. Heliotrope is a professionally paying ezine (pays $.05/word for short fiction) that I just came across via their submissions call thread at Absolute Write (submission guidelines here). They ought to have sounded familiar to me, because during the live reading Saturday night at the Borderlands workshop, one of the students read this story of his, or as much of it as would fit in 10 minutes. Then Elizabeth Monteleone called "Time!" and he had to stop. I wanted intensely to know how it ended. Now I get to find out! Yay! Congrats, Mr. Colangelo!

Wearing my Metroblogging hat and back-filling my New Orleans visit, I've gotten as far as... Day 1 of the Habitat work week. But in my defense, it's a long damn post. So there. I think the rest of them will be somewhat shorter, having gotten some of the "how ESTHFH works" stuff out of the way.

[back of hand to forehead, eyes rolled heavenward] On I slog.

Meanwhile, rather than getting stuck in the past, I have put up a post at Denver Metblogs celebrating the annual corn harvest in Longmont. The recipe is tried and true as of early this afternoon, so if you are not averse to dairy products or foods with a high glycemic index (SugarBusters need not apply), have at it and enjoy.

Meanmeanwhile (is that a word?), thoughts are straying towards the inevitable revision of the soon-to-be-retitled "Putting Down Roots". As usual, I'm squeamish about reading all those comments everyone wrote in the margins. I don't think that ever gets any easier; pushing the fear aside and reading the critiques anyway, it only becomes habitual, not easy. But I can't put it off. A golden opportunity for an editorial audience opened up for me at the writing workshop, and I can neither run the risk of letting it go stale or submitting anything less than the best this story can be.

Some thoughts to incorporate in the revision, culled at random from my memory of the past weekend:

• People don't talk to bananas, at least not in a serious horror/SF story; and
• People don't go from worrying that their spouse might be deathly ill to pressuring said spouse for sex in the space of a paragraph; and
• If a character is going to be more ignorant than the reader, he needs a good excuse; and finally
• If you're going to have aliens in a story, you'd better damn well mean it.

From the Times-Picayune:

The prison, made up of 10 separate lockups, lost electricity and backup generators as it was inundated by floodwater. Stuck without food or water, inmates broke windows, burned blankets and rammed holes in buildings. Thirteen escaped before the State Department of Corrections sent guards to restore order and assist in a challenging three-day evacuation in which the prisoners were fished out by boat.

The report, released by the ACLU's National Prison Project, also addresses the current situation faced by the inmates, who were scattered among 38 Louisiana prisons and jails after the evacuation. Many of those prisoners remain incarcerated far from New Orleans due to the painstakingly slow recovery of the city's criminal justice system, states the report, entitled "Abandoned and Abused - Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina."

"Nearly every day, attorneys discover another prisoner whose case has slipped through the cracks," the report states. "These prisoners are doing 'Katrina time,' as it has come to be known."

(It also wants to make use of the phrase, "That man didn't touch the water," to describe someone who had a suspiciously disproportionately easy time during the storm and its aftermath. Mad propz to Deputy Ducre for that one.)

Who was the author who was said to write evocative phrases down on little slips of paper and put those slips of paper in a container he called his "demon box"? Yeah. One for the demon box.

Because I am behind.

I have blog posts to write for both the New Orleans and Denver pages at Metroblogging, because I've been in both places recently. But because both places involved vast amounts of Busy Up To My Eyeballs (Habitat for Humanity, StyleCareer.com, Borderlands Press Writers' Boot Camp, and election judge duties), somehow the bloggity never got done.

Yes, I know back-dating is for losers. Whoop-de-doo. Back-dated content is better than no content at all, that's what I say.

Off I go, then!

So. I read stuff. Out loud. Like I sometimes do. A lot of other people did, too. The floor of the general meeting room was host to quite a few characters, some quiet and some loud and some jovial and some absolutely insane like guanola.

I read "Snowflakes" Version 2, because Version 3 is still stuck where I left off about a month and a half ago. And I was changing words here and there because them Critique Circle critters made me very consious of Version 2's inadequacies. But no one seemed to mind, because the narrator in that story is in the bat-shit insane category--or at least appears to be if you don't assume that everything she's telling you is true (except for the bit about Not Being Interested In Josh That Way)--and that can be a little distracting.

She was not the craziest of them, however. She was only crazy like Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." There were others that were crazy. Crazy like Woody Allen. Crazy like Naked Lunch! (Do not talk to me about cockroaches and earwigs! Talk to this guy about such things! He will tell you!)

Tomorrow: Breakfast! Return of manuscripts to those fellow writers with whom today's scheduling did not grant me an audience! (Some writers I had in not one but two sessions; some I had not at all. We are all a little confused by this.) A closing speech from our instructors! Tearful farewells!

And--oh yeah--presentation of our completed homework assignments via a non-participating reader!

(Homework assignments, did she say?)

Tonight: Working on said homework assignment like it's sundown on November 30th!

Today has been interesting. It has certainly not been an unqualified win for Ego, so, y'know, that's good. It's been a little inconsistent, sure. The first instructor told me I was writing the wrong story entirely, and that the things in the background should be in the foreground, and that there wasn't any drama. The second praised the story to the high heavens and told me I should send it to Editor X and tell 'er that he sent me. I suspect that the story's rewrite needs are somewhere in between.

Note to self: All characters have favorite music, favorite food, and things they do with their days. It's probably worthwhile to let these things show, at least a little.

Tonight: reading aloud! Like karaoke but more literary! w00t!

Well, I'm here. I'm sitting at a desk in an apartment in a family dormatory building on Towson University campus in the state of Maryland. If that isn't enough prepositional phrases for you, you can add "after the big Borderlands Press Writers' Boot Camp kick-off." And now I am about to drop.

I mean, it's not that they've begun to work our asses off yet. It's that I got very little sleep last night, which has been a theme all through my second week in New Orleans, when all of a sudden I had the time, energy, and unmitigated panic with which to address my fast approaching deadlines...

and I'm flying American Airlines, who have to make every freakin' flight go through the huge pain in my ass that is the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, regardless of actual geography...

and the Baltimore airport is strewn with detours so that I gotta walk half a mile in one direction to get my luggage and half a mile in the other direction to get on the Super Shuttle...

and every Sheraton desk clerk within phoning distance has to put me on hold for five minutes before they can take the fifteen seconds to give me the next phone number...

and I have with me a collection of very high quality full-leaf, muslin-bagged tea and no implement suitable for boiling water in. Not ideal!

Tomorrow, presumably after I get a good night's sleep, my ass will be entirely worked off. Instructors/authors Doug Clegg, F. Paul Wilson, Tom Tessier, and Tom Monteleone spent much of tonight's kick-off meeting telling us, in the general, why all our stories pretty much sucked. I expect tomorrow in our small-group 1-instructor 2-hour sessions they will tell each of us about the suckage in the excrutiating specific. Fellow workshop members have been telling me that they liked my story very much, which makes me glow and gives me warm fuzzies, but in no way tempts me to think that I'll be exempt from having my story get ripped to utter shreds by the professionals.

It's a good thing. Whatever's left after the shredding will be the kernel of what "Putting Down Roots" really wants to be. And that's why I'm here.

*blink-blink*

Just got an email from Constant Content. Apparently, this sweet little erotica short-short that I wrote up in response to someone's request for fiction featuring their lingerie catalog... sold.

The buyer wishes to remain anonymous. I have no idea where it's going to be published.

If any of y'all happen to Google it up before I do, lemme know, 'K? (And if it shows up without my byline, really let me know, 'cause the rights they bought doesn't allow removal of my byline. And every request currently having to do with lingerie seems to ask for the set of rights include byline removal. So I'm worried they might've made a mistake. We Shall See.)

*blink-blink*

...Sweet!

...does not denote a similar dearth of progress.

I'm getting stuff done over here. Since I get on a plane Saturday morning, you can imagine I'm just a tad stressed out. [Insert primal scream here] Once I manage to safely catch all the balls I'm juggling, I'll be back with More Bloggity. Meanwhile, I'm afraid you'll just have to wait. Sorry.

Well, let me at least leave you with something to read. Here you go: Stephen King's "Everything You Need To Know About Writing Successfully - In Ten Minutes." Enjoy!

Well, I'm not. I know people sometimes say "Not that I'm bitter or anything" in a sarcastic sort of way to imply that yes, they are bitter, very bitter indeed, and they'll hope you realize that and sympathize with them, but me, I'm not.

No, really!

Anyway, Twenty Epics is out. And you should buy it. And so, in fact, should I.

The anthology's submission guidelines proposed the riddle, "How can a work of short fiction be 'epic'?" You might remember that I submitted a story to this anthology, but I don't think I ever blogged about the rejection letter. Said letter made me very happy with its handwritten note complimenting my writing while lamenting the story just wasn't quite epic enough. Having failed to answer the riddle myself, I am very curious to read the riddle's various solutions.

It's so very difficult to be bitter when there are 20 new stories to be read, all of them guaranteed epic!

(Meanwhile, this is not the "more later with writing" post I promised. But I am home, and the Dell Inspiron E1505 is with me, and I am using it, and it rocks.)