author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

John and I are on Maui. To be precise, we're in the town of Ka'anapali, just north along the shore from Lahaina. To get here, you follow highway 30 (the Honoapi'ilani Highway) clockwise around the south shore from the bay. This can be complicated if, for instance, the mountain is on fire. We arrived at Kaluhui Airport at 6:30 PM yesterday afternoon to find the highway had been closed; we had dinner and then found the highway had been reopened--partially; and we sat in a taxi in traffic for 3 hours before checking into the Westin Ka'anapali Ocean Villas at, depending on which of us two you ask, 12:30 or 1:00 AM.

Someone on the radio said of the fire, "They're saying it looks like you're on the big island watching the lava come down the mountain." It did. The entire edge of mountain was glowing with flames and embers. Burning trees looked like being lit up for Christmas. We got a nice long look at the devastation, waiting in traffic to reach the partially blocked stretch of Hwy 30.

So it will probably surprise no one that I did not, in fact, finish and submit a rewrite of "Snowflakes". I meant to finish the rewrite on the plane and then submit it from the hotel, but the story needs a lot more work than I had time to give it, and I wasn't up for anything this morning other than staggering to the bed and falling unconscious.

The freelance gig did get completed, though, so that's good.

Right now, all John and I have planned is sunrise on Mt. Haleakala tomorrow morning and a luau Monday night. I intend to get rewrites of "Snowflakes" and the soon-to-be-renamed "Putting Down Roots" while I'm here, as well as do some read-throughs and critiques I've promised. Which should be very easily accomplished, as we don't plan to overstuff our week on Maui with stress and events.

Vacation rocks. So long as the rock isn't on fire.

And sometimes that time and place are never and nowhere. Quoth PNH:

Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn't funny and it wasn't okay. I understand (from third parties; I haven't spoken to her about it) that Connie Willis's position is that Ellison has done worse and she can handle him, but I really didn't want to watch it and neither, I think, did a lot of other people in the audience. Up to then the comedic schtick aspects of the Hugo presentation had been genuinely funny. After that, I think, many of us just wanted it all to stop.

Just as with George W. Bush's now-famous uninvited shoulder-rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the basic message of Ellison's tit-grab is this: "Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. If you are female, you'll never be safe. You can be the political leader of the most powerful country in Europe. You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will."

It's not okay. It's not funny. It wasn't a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn't want to watch it. It's another thing that's going to stop.

Knowing me, had I actually been there, I would have blushed with rage and said not a word, for fear of being smacked down by Mr. Ellison's clever tongue and a roomful of acquiescing silence. Then I'd've gone looking for a knot of attendees to gripe with at the bar afterwards.

But I can fantasize. And I am in good company in the fantasizing, apparently.

And Patrick is absolutely right about what this kind of behavior, from Bush or Ellison, is intended to communicate. And that it has got to stop. And it is going to stop.

Look! They're finished! The "Margaritaville Parrot Knee Socks" are finished! And they fit, and they stay up, and they look awesome.

Tree is leaving for Burning Man today. I gave the socks to her yesterday after finally grafting off the last cuff, sewing in the elastic, and basting on the bows. They really aren't graduation presents anymore. They're "My First Burning Man" presents. Tree will be the envy of the playa.

And now I can proceed to my Handknit Bikini Experiment.

Of course I can't just blog about knitting. That's not Actually Writing. Besides, these so-called "thumbnails" (click for full-sized, high-quality JPEGs) are too big for such a short blog entry. They'll hang down and stomp all over my blog entry about Nice Surprises. So, without further ado, Other Stuff that Isn't Knitting.

More Freelance Deadlines! Got another StyleCareer eGuide to complete for August 31. What is this one about? Wouldn't you like to know!

Short Story Revisions! I have two to do. As I've said, "Putting Down Roots" needs to be rewritten and submitted ASAP. However, between freelance gigs and knitting, life continues to happen. So I've slated it for the first week of September, which is A) after the eGuide deadline, and B) to take place in Hawaii. Not that John and I don't plan on doing Hawaii things while being in Hawaii, of course. But I do have a tendency to treat vacations as writing workshops, even when they aren't actual formal writing workshops. This is a good thing.

The other short story needing revision is "Snowflakes." Yeah, that still. I may have mentioned earlier that the webzine Firefox News publishes fiction? Yes. Themed fiction. For $.01/word up to $100. Submission guidelines are this-a-way. The current submission period calls for stories appropriate to the theme "It's the End of the World As We Know It," which is obviously perfect. Well, obviously to those who have read it (Critique Circle) or heard me read it (Borderlands Boot Camp Summer '06, Nancy Kilpatrick's Self-Editing Workshop at World Horror '06). Yes, it's not usually best practice to submit first to a lower-paying market, but in the case of synchronicity I will make an exception. Deadline: September 1.

Next: How I will manage to do 3000 words per day on the freelance gig and spend at least an hour a day on revising a short story until it's ready, every day until August 31. Hint: With much difficulty, stress, and pulling out of eyelashes.

But! Socks! So there.

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.