author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Confession time: I didn't think this up. Not only didn't I think this up, but I only got into it because it's shiny. Its suggested benefit in story building only took effect later. Tonight, actually.

The "this" in question is the idea of using Celtic knots and braids as a plotting mechanism. James D. Macdonald tells us about this in his famous and long-lived "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" thread over at the AbsoluteWrite.com forums. (Go read it. From the beginning. Yes, it will take you awhile. Take your time and do the homework assignments as you get to them.)

Like I said, my first thought was "Ooh! Shiny!" My first action was not to try plotting a brand new story, but instead to run off and learn how to draw these things, which I mainly got the hang of, and to show off my new hobby in a Comicollage contribution.

Now, I'm not sure I can do what Uncle Jim does anyway. I don't think I can use a knot to come up with a plot from scratch, not the way he describes doing it. What's intuitive for one writer isn't intuitive for another. But I thought maybe I could design a knot or braid based on the way things were already shaping up, and use the resulting pattern to figure out where the Nano-novel was going next.

Three threads were about all I could keep in my head at once. So I named those threads "Gwen and the bookstore" (blue/gray), "The talemouse" (blue), and "The corporate thug" (maroon). (The colors come courtesy of the particular selection of le pens I had on me at the time.) Each thread represented not just that character but also his-or-her goals, interests, and actions.

Then I tried braiding those threads. I quickly found out that in a simple braid, you end up with a rock-scissors-paper conundrum: each thread has only one relationship, "win" (over) or "lose" (under), with each of the other two threads. That makes it exceedingly symmetrical, but it doesn't suggest an interesting progression of scenes. So I messed with it some more, hoping to get a bit more variation--and I got the image you see here.

I think this may well be the perfect basic three-character pattern ever. OK, well, maybe not, but it's pretty cool. See, you have the gray-blue thread for the protagonist, who stays in that tight twist representing the central plot. Then you have the supporting character in blue and the antagonist in maroon who alternately help/hinder the protagonist and oppose each other. The braid runs chronologically along a timeline, and each intersection is a scene that can be described as "[thread on top] [does something] to [thread on bottom]." For a bonus, the braid emphasizes that the secondary and the antagonist have plots of their own which intersect "off-stage." I need to flesh them out.

After I drew this out and labeled the threads, I started labeling the intersections. It mapped surprisingly well to those scenes I already have written or planned, and suggested new scenes I would need to invent. (Note: letters in list correspond to letters labeling intersections in the .GIF, and text in brackets indicates scenes that weren't already planned but were instead suggested by the braid.)

1. The talemouse first rescues an abused child by disappearing him from Gwen's world and putting him into one of the books Gwen wrote. This affects Gwen because neighborhood suspicion falls on the bookstore when kids start disappearing, and because her books have been changed.
2. [I guess here the talemouse witnesses something the corporation plans to do, and that spurs the talemouse into action he would not otherwise have taken.]
3. Gwen accepts, takes possession of, and makes plans to reopen the bequeathed bookstore. This affects the corporation, who wanted to buy the place. Gwen's action threatens the corporation.
4. The corporation sends a thug to threaten Gwen and scare her off.
5. [Here the talemouse must take some action to try to protect Gwen from the thug. Maybe he'll influence the neighborhood beat cop, who is currently not well disposed towards Gwen.]
6. [Here something Gwen does will change the talemouse's course of action, causing him to trust her more maybe, resulting in...]
7. [...the talemouse indirectly reuniting Gwen with the Bookwyrm, whom she last saw when she was a child.]

Unlike a self-contained knot that might lend itself to the abstract concerns of theme and relationship, this braid is a literal storyboard. That has its limitations. It'll need a shake-up somewhere just to keep the dynamics from getting too predictable. I think that the pattern will have to change drastically after one full repeat, which is to say, after the talemouse causes Gwen to meet the Bookwyrm once more (which is to say, grown-up Peter Pan remembers how to fly, with a little help from Tinkerbell). Also, I should probably put in a couple new threads for Gwen's agent and, once I decide how he gets into the story, Gwen's love interest. (I may have mentioned that she's married in Right Off The Page? Hubby-to-be needs to play a part in this story. Maybe he'll be the security cop Gwen hires when the beat cop makes it clear he can't care less.) Both those characters are going to play real parts, not just be "prop characters" like the Bookwyrm and the missing children. And then there's the beat cop and maybe a representative parent-of-missing child. And then, and then, and then....

And then a lot of stuff. But for now, that's the first part of the book mapped out. Plus I get to make shiny pretties in Adobe Illustrator! What's not to like?

I only got my notebook out once yesterday at the polling place, and that was to jot down the URL associated with the cute fuzzy hat that the Machine Judge was knitting. What was I thinking, finish the short story rewrite at the polls? I didn't even hit the NaNo-novel that day. After my working day ended at 9:30 PM (that's a fifteen-anna-half hour working day, I'll have you know), I was just about up for a bike ride to The Dark Horse for their Tuesday night Burger Madness special, and then sleep.

Today was a different story. Today I broke 10,000 on the NaNo-novel. Most of it was Gwen reminiscing about her "imaginary friend" and her unorthodox book-finding procedure at the bookstore throughout her childhood. The surprise for me today was when I realized that the bookstore was no longer magic for Gwen. Gwen is Peter Pan grown up. Part of the plot development will be her re-learning, so to speak, how to fly.

The other surprise was the totally cliche occurrence of the main character receiving a warning at knife point to pack it in and leave town. This will be the adult version of a Scooby Doo plot, I'm afraid: the villain's motivation is to scare those meddling kids away from his base of operations. In other words, he grabs her, tells her that everyone knows she's involved in the recent child disappearances, and that she'd better leave town before she finds herself on the wrong end of vigilante justice; when in actuality he's connected with corporate interests that want to turn the bookstore property into something new and tall and shiny and profit bearing.

I am both impressed with myself over the Peter Pan angle and depressed with myself over the Scooby Doo angle. But don't worry. I'm not writing in a talking Great Dane for Gwen. I'll be writing in her husband-to-be at some point, but not a big talking dog.

Which is not to say that you should not visit the polls tomorrow. Not at all. You should totally go to the polls and VOTE. Really, few things are as depressing in this so-called democratic republic than the concept that a 20% turnout is considered high. Go vote! However, I will continue to whine about how much life will suck for me as I work the 14-hour day involved in running my home precinct's polling place. During a general election. With poll watchers telling me how to do my job.

And no laptop.

I am not allowed to bring my laptop! It is electronic. It has ports. It could potentially be used to hack into the electronic voting booth that I'll be running. So it's not allowed on the premises.

And for once I have nothing ready to knit.

*cry*

So given that work on the Nano-novel tomorrow will be a no-go, I prioritized it today. I brainstormed about how to throw pointier rocks at Gwen, who is up the tree of Being In Charge Of A Bookstore No One Will Shop At Because Of Suspicions Of Past Criminal Activity. She thinks she knows how to handle this. She is wrong! So wrong! Give me an hour, and I'll figure out why she's wrong. Something to do with digging up copies of her own books and discovering one of the missing children in it, I think. Also, I decided that the scene with 7-yr-old Gwen meeting the Bookwyrm, which I've written before, will be rewritten from the point of view of the talemouse, who will be amazed at seeing a story character travel to the place between stories.

Meanwhile, I plan to bring the short story along with me in hard copy tomorrow: critiqued copies, print-out of current work, and spiral notebook. Perhaps by the end of the day I'll have something ready to type up. I am so very sick of dragging this revision out.

I should not feel guilty about today. I should not feel under-accomplished. I wrote some 2300 words towards November's 50,000-word goal, and all of it was new material--nothing I'd already imagined in the years I've been kicking this novel idea around in my head. Well, yes, I sort of riffed off the phenomenon of Gwen and Vai holding a crisis conference lunch at their favorite Chinese restaurant, sure, I'd already done that in Right Off The Page, but I'm allowed to give these characters a routine. I did it with brand new words. I was careful not to just repetitively cover ground sufficiently covered last year. I was a writing machine. 2300 sparkly words! All of them new!

That's good, right? That's totally awesome, right?

Don't be fooled. It was 2300 words of procrastination. While I was working on The Bookwyrm's Hoard, I was very deliberately not working on the short story. Dammit.

I'll go do that now, shall I?

I hate writing science fiction! It has to make sense! I am sitting here with pen and paper trying to decide what the timeline is for the plant virus to take effect, and how exactly Daphne catches it, and how--if she only contracts it once she gets to Lac Des Allemands--she and Aaron don't hear about it on TV what with people contracting it directly from the source before they even leave Kenner. Gahhh!

On second thought, that sort of logical mechanics isn't just a province of science fiction... I hate writing fiction! Fiction has to make sense! Why can't it all just be striking turns of phrase and smooth dialogue and stunning imagery? I hate having to make it make sense!

*sigh*

As for the other on-going project, I'm still behind schedule. About 20 words per day behind schedule. Which, multiplied by 26 remaining days, isn't so bad. But I have this sense of dread following me around, because I haven't done very much more than rewrite from memory things I've already written here and there in past years. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do when I use up that material and have to figure out exactly how the rest of the novel goes.

Maybe this weekend I can spend some time plotting and outlining. I still haven't played with yWriter's nifty Outliner machinery yet. Maybe I'll do that.

Simplifying what I said yesterday: The difference between Procrastination and Soup-making is the difference between thinking about the project and not thinking about the project. And the "must" moment is never totally lost, although the contents of the soup may need to be reheated.

I say this now because I did a lot of soup-making last night and today. Falling asleep, I saw in my head the near-invisible Ambassadors holding their tentacle-like limbs into the air in front of the Saint Louis Cathedral for the small birds to perch on. I re-worded the very ending of the story. Aaron's two moments of realization came clear to me.

And then, instead of writing the scenes down, I played video games. I read blogs. I looked at the clock and said, "Oh, crap! Only an hour left to Novemeber 3! Must log some words so that my bar chart doesn't lose a bar!"

And so I opened up The Bookwyrm's Hoard instead and wrote about how Gwen became a writer.

There is probably a special procrastination hell for writers who pretend to be writing by writing stories whose protagonists are writers. I promise, once again, that Gwen will not become a Mary Sue! I promise!

In any case, the piece of scene I wrote is something I've written before, but rewriting it from memory allowed it to be influenced by my more recent understanding of the character since writing the first draft of Right Off The Page.

OK. Now, I really shall work on the short story. I think part of my problem is, I'm not totally clear on how to rewrite Daphne's banana reverie. I think instead tonight I shall rewrite the ending scene. Actual words bubbled up in the soup this afternoon; I should get them down before the soup cools off.

Well, it gets me 900 words in half an hour. Dunno what it does for you.

I finally couldn't stand it any more. Typing stuff like [##gwenslastname##] and [##agentsname##] all the time--I drew the line at [##talemousesnameskittlessomethingwasn'tit?##] and finally copied last year's NaNoWriMo draft over from master zip disk to hard drive. So those would be "Halpburn," "Vai" (did I ever give him a last name?), and "Rakash Sketterkin." I figured that out while rereading chapters 1 through 3, which are surprisingly good for NaNoWriMo output even if I do say so myself at this late date. Only I'd totally forgotten what Gwen's voice was like, and that I'd written her POV bits last year in present tense. Yesterday morning's output looks really, really stilted. I guess I'll go back sometime and fix that. Gwen's proper voice is talkative enough that the revision will only help my word count.

(And by yesterday morning of course I mean November 1. Right now it is November 3, but only just.)

I'm still behind. I'm using SpaceJock Software's yWriter2, and it has a handy tool for calculating daily word counts--you can give it any start and end dates and grant word count total, but it was specifically created for NaNoWriMo. It tells me I have... to write 1768 words per day starting tomorrow if I'm gonna win this.

That's not so bad.

No, wait! That's 1768 starting Saturday! If I push my computer clock back to Thursday, it says "28 days left; 1705 words to write per day." That's even better!

(OK, now I am thoroughly waxing the cat, or vacuuming it, or taping bacon to it, or doing something else that neither the cat nor my writing deadlines like much at all.)

Now I can go back to the short story with a clean conscience. But first! Sleep.

If you don't recognize the manuscript stats at left, that's because I changed the title. "Putting Down Roots" is now "Seeds Of Our Future." I don't guarantee the new title's longevity, but it'll do for now.

There's this thing that I do. It looks a lot like procrastination if you're not me, if you're watching me from outside my head. Even inside my head they look a lot alike. But there's a huge difference in productivity, trust me.

Procrastination goes like this: I know I have to do something. Rewrite a story, clean the bathroom, whatever. But every time I think about doing it, my brain slides right off. It's like trying to grab a frictionless surface and not even noticing that I failed to take hold. At most, I'll think, "Sorry, I can't work on that story yet; I still have this freelance gig to finish up!" And I'll think I'm thinking, "I can't wait to have the freelance stuff done so I can go back to working on fiction," but in reality I'm all like, "Good thing I'm under another deadline, or I'd have to actually work on that story!"

But this other thing. This composting, soup-making, spell-casting thing. It's different. The key difference is, my brain gets a good grip on that slippery mental object and doesn't let go until it's done. In the case of cleaning the bathroom, I start to see myself doing it, I start visualizing myself hard at work at the task, and the visualization sort of accumulates weight until critical mass is reached and I must get up and do it. In the case of rewriting a story--this story, in fact--the story takes shape in my head until it must be put onto paper.

This isn't waiting for the Muse to visit. This is putting Her to work right now and not letting Her clock out until She's done.

Monday I finally finished compiling all the Borderlands critiques. By that time, I'd made some notes both mental and in ink towards plot shifts. Since enough people thought that the aliens were a red herring, I wrote down the question, "Remember why you put them there in the first place?" I thought back to the rough draft and the original plot logic, before I'd ever posited The Locusts of Gaia or any other plausible reason why our two main characters were suspected in the Ambassadors' disappearance. Another note I wrote down: "Notes towards a new opening--" and then the different places that different critiques had suggested starting: "sermon, falls asleep too quickly, supplies are running low." And so forth.

Over the next 48 hours, the new opening scene along with new configurations of, say, the fried perch argument or the banana reverie, underwent a slow congealing at the back of my head. Each time I consciously thought about them, there was something new in place, and it had all the weight of "That's how it happened." (You know that weight, right? When the comments came in and many of them said, "you don't need this fake sci-fi element, just make it about Daphne and Aaron and the pure horror/erotica plant thing," my mental reaction was, "No, you don't understand, the Ambassadors were there. It happened. Like 9/11 and the Challenger disaster and, and, my high school graduation all happened.")

So this morning at last I began to write the new opening scene. The "must" moment had arrived.

Now, don't be fooled. It's possible to squander the "must" moment, to not sit down and write when critical mass is reached but to put it off and put it off some more. A spring can't hold tension forever; it'll break or stretch under the strain. So the story can lose its push, weaken its hold, and then I'm just procrastinating again. I have to start the ignition countdown over again--and with what? I've already reread the old version and compiled critiques. What more can I do? Doubtless I'll come up with something, sometime, but not this and not now.

But I didn't squander the moment. I wrote. And now I've emailed the opening scene to the Super-Sekrit VPX Gmail Address so that my classmates can, if they wanna, tell me if it generates enough "gotta" to keep a reader interested. And I'll be going back to the rest of the rewrite in just a little while.

But first I need to let the next scene come together--it isn't quite soup yet. And while my back-burners simmer it along, I'll get another thousand words done on this year's November novel.

And that'll be the rest of my evening.

Revision Status: "Putting Down Roots" will probably not hit the mail today. (And why is that, Niki?) Because the darn thing has almost completely rewritten itself in my head on a plot level. Like, where the virus comes from, and why the aliens are on Earth, and all that. The plot is twisting itself back into its original shape, but it's taking a lot of its recent developments with it, with the result that I'm not working on the... [counts on fingers] ...6th draft of this story so much as writing a new one with the same characters, climax, and ending. So I haven't gotten anywhere near completion since last blog post. Dammit. Working on that will take priority; I don't mind being a little behind on NaNoWriMo in the meantime.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo: Have reset the word count on "The Bookwyrm's Hoard"--those 7.5K or so came from summing together all the words from all the snippets I've drafted through the years, any of which I'll end up rewriting from memory this month if the novel still wants them in it. This morning, after the clock hit midnight and the calendar hit November, I broke the first thousand, but it was all very clumsy. I'm not entirely sure where the novel's going beyond the plot premises of Gwen taking over the bookstore and children vanishing into her books.

Last night's This morning's NaNoWriMo kick-off was very well attended, and the people who showed up all had a productive session. One of 'em even crossed the 2K mark. Then things devolved into mere socialization and cat stories until about 4 AM. It was fun. And I am paying the price today. But, having slept until about 3:00 PM, I think I'm recovered enough to get on with things. Like, rewriting short stories. And cleaning up in the kitchen.

Going way, way back to the Borderlands Press Writers' Boot Camp experience... why? Because I finally sat down with all 30+ copies of my story that the instructors and other students returned to me, and I read all their comments tonight. I'm sorta subconsciously compiling a coherent impression of What Needs Doing. Meanwhile, I have some Thoughts.

Thought the First: Names Are Important. If you, dear reader, should ever take part in a big group workshop in which you will be one among many commenting on a single story, please, for the love of Whomever You Hold Dear, put your effing name on your copy! Especially if you're one of the Instructors! It's not been so long that I can't still put a name to a face, and I can sorta put the tenor of a set of comments to the memory of a particular break-out session, but memory isn't infallible, and it would sure be nice to know who thought what.

[Note to self: Alternately, I could write the critiquer's name at the top of the copy when he or she hands it back to me. Y'know. Rather than, for example, having an attack of workshopping nerves, tucking it away face down under my notebook, and pretending it doesn't exist for the rest of the day.]

Thought the Second: Paper-clips don't work so good en masse. Acquisitions editors and slush readers famously despise the staple. Paper-clips come off and go back on easily, which staples do not do. But if you take 30+ copies of a 15-page story, all paper-clipped together, and put them in a stack and shove the stack in your bookbag to shlep around town, those paper-clips become very indiscriminate as to what paper they clip.

Thought the Third: There can be too much of a good thing. The way the Boot Camp was set up, there were four classrooms and four two-hour sessions throughout the Big Saturday. Each of the four instructors presided over a classroom, leading a critique session consisting of five or six students and their stories. Thus each student got critiqued by each instructor and, theoretically, each student. Unfortunately, the students were divided into sections such that some of us saw each other twice but others not at all, so we didn't actually get face-to-face critiques with every other student. But we were all supposed to read and critique everyone else's stories regardless--and, oddly enough, I don't feel like 30+ critiques gives me any better of a spectrum than the 5 or 6 I get from my fellow attendees at Melanie Tem's twice-monthly classes.

In fact, I'm starting to get confused. Five people thought the opening was too slow; two more thought it was perfect. One person was totally confused about the plot, another said maybe I was too subtle, another two said they liked the way the plot snuck up on them. Several people thought the space aliens were unnecessary, nothing more than a red herring intended to articially wedge the story into the science fiction genre; several other people thought the aliens were totally cool. Triangulation is a bitch.

Not that I'm really complaining. Like most writers, I consider every beta reader to be a blessing. (And the ones that said things like, "Your story made me sick to my stomach, but in a good way," really made my night! Yay!) But there is such thing as an embarrassment of riches. Stephen Wright once quipped, "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" I'm currently trying to figure out where to put it all.

The issue of the four sessions is something I wish I'd put on my feedback questionaire at the end of the workshop. What I think Borderlands Press should have done was either only have us read the stories of students we'd share a session with (which is what Viable Paradise did), or else try to divide us into sections so that everyone got face-time with everyone. The usefulness of a particular comment is greatly amplified by remembering the student who brought it up in class and the brief discussion that led to. By the same token, a manuscript copy full of lots of underlining without further comment, no name, and no memory of how those underlined passages were discussed... I just don't know what to do with that.

[Note in the interest of accuracy: According to fellow student William D. Zeranski, who is a meticulous record-keeper to be trusted in these matters, there were Twenty-Two Students. So my constant reference to "30+ copies" is probably an exaggeration. So, OK, I got 20+ copies. Still! My point stands, dammit!]

Thought the Fourth: My, That's A Well-Vacuumed Cat. My procrastination tendencies are TEH SUXX0R. However, my high score in Worldwinner's version of hard-level Luxor since the addition of the 5-minute time limit is now somewhere around 192K. I will totally rock the competition ladder. Ph34r my l337 ski11z.

...And that's all I got. It's 3:18 AM in Boulder. I have the IHOP to walk home from and a lot to think about on the way. Tomorrow and Tuesday I will be trying to put those thoughts to work. And Wednesday I'll have this sucker in the mail.