author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Rewriting has felt impossible lately. I've got a rough draft queue a mile long and I can't seem to get myself to finish anything. I've been whining about this to everyone who knows me. Today, I'm gonna crow a bit instead.

Here's the theory I've been working from: The Revision Block comes from fear--from being intimidated by the task of Making Something Publishable Out Of This Piece of Crap Rough Draft. (Hush. To the intimidated writer, every non-final draft is a piece of crap.) To get over the Revision Block, I've got to find something I can manage to revise, finish, and submit. So, back away from the thing with all the avoidance juju and try revising something that feels less important, less intimidating. Something with stakes that aren't so high.

So I've been meaning to work on "A Handshake Deal," as it's the newest rough draft with a beginning, middle, and end. But guess what? "Been meaning to" is a huge source of avoidance juju! Just like every email that's sitting in my Inbox marked unread since, oh, last June (sorry y'all), any manuscript mentally marked "to be revised" will acquire the ability to intimidate.

So today I decided to retreat a bit further and write a brand-new story from a brand-new idea, an idea so brand-new that I wouldn't have a clue what it was until I started typing. Then I'd revise it, immediately, before it could accumulate the first hint of avoidance juju.

I used to do something similar every morning in college. The exercise I set myself was to write something which filled exactly one page in WordPerfect and had a beginning, middle, and an end. Then I'd revise it just enough to meet the arbitrary length requirement. Most of these vignettes came to about 700 words long. They took about a half-hour to finish (for these standards of "finish"). At the end of the year I'd print them all out and bind them into a chapbook. I'm really proud of those chapbooks.

And I'm rather proud of today's work, too: A 400-word spec-fic piece about how an apocalyptic occurrence impacts a tiny circle of humanity. The idea sprang out of that most banal of complaints, "It's hot." (Have you seen the forecast for Boulder? The NOAA used the lava-colored sky icon for this coming Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. That never bodes well.)

Both beta readers who've thus far read the story say they like it a lot. Of course, they're A) my husband, and B) one of my best friends, so it's possible there may be some bias going on. But they're both people who A) write occasionally themselves, and B) I can trust to be truthful. So that's enough positive feedback to make my poor little easily-intimidated ego sit up with pride. Tomorrow I'll read the story aloud to some writer friends I haven't seen in awhile. (They don't know this yet.) After that, I'll give it a final revision. I'll probably change the title ("The Day The Sidewalks Melted" has a hint of "gotta" in it, but I fear it's a cheap "gotta" as it adds nothing new; it merely pre-echoes the first sentence of the story). Then I'll email it to a paying market Sunday morning.

On Monday, the process starts over.

Lather, rinse, repeat enough--reassure myself with enough proof that I can finish things, and do so reliably--and I might actually be able to sit down with one of the stories in the revision queue. Cross your fingers for me.

Meanwhile: Let it be known to all and sundry that John and I will be attending Denvention3, aka WorldCon 2008. It'll be in Denver. What better opportunity for me to (*gulp*) attend a scarily huge convention for the first time?

Also, am flying again. Yay! Give me a few weeks and I'll be a legal pilot in command once more.

And that's the news.

Haven't quite hit the story rewrites yet. Will soon. Am meanwhile throwing stuff at the page that may or may not turn into anything worth a title. Some of it goes like this.

Observe her, there, beside the fountain downstairs in the library. Don't worry about seeming rude. She'll never notice your eyes upon her. She's not really here, you see. Not while those pages are turning.

She sits like a child, butt on the floor and legs straight out in front of her. Her right hand idly rests upon the fountain's edge, where the pool sinks below feet level, and her fingers are getting wet. It's OK, though. She's left-handed. She's not getting the pages wet. Sometimes her right hand seeks the hand of the bronze ballerina who kneels upon a bronze paving stone in the pool. Sometimes the fingers of her right hand dip deeper to pick up a penny, twist it through the liquid light, pass it from finger to finger like a carnival juggler. Sometimes she scratches her scalp and leaves chlorinated drops in her hair.

She is aware of none of this. She's not here, I tell you. She's not even in her body. The words her eyes pick up merely pass through on their way to her consciousness, which wanders around some far-off Matrix with a radio antenna in her ear. The left hand turns pages by remote control.

Unaware of our eyes, or the water, or the children running past her in a great roiling boister, she is yet keeping an ear open for some few things. Those things that cue that it is time to close the book. "The library will be closing in five minutes," is one of them. "Sadie, we're ready to go home." That's another. When these signals filter through her body's answering machine to the soul that is picking up messages far elsewhere, the left hand does a fearsome thing. It closes the book and makes the otherworld disappear.

Then Sadie rubs her wet hand dry upon her jeans, recoils her hair at the nape of her neck, and stands up on legs full of knee-popping and stiff-stretching. Wincing at the protestation of joints makes the faint lines reappear beside eyes and mouth. She no longer seems childlike. She no longer appears young. But she is not in great practice being aware of her body, so she does not count this a tragedy. She simply hobbles for a few steps until her legs limber up again and continues normally to the checkout counter. The book goes in her purse and the woman goes back to her friends (if they called her to leave) or simply to her car (if the library's closing time was the only impetus).

Once she arrives home, she will make the world disappear again. This world. The otherworld will be there, waiting for her, like a video tape left on pause.

This is Sadie's life. She spends only what time is necessary here with us, at work or eating or taking care of the children. Or socializing with friends over coffee, reassuring them that she remains among the living in both mind and body. But when she's able, when she can get away with it, she opens a book and disappears.

Our story begins, like many stories begin, on a day that begins like any other. Like any good story, that day soon diverges from routine, for what else are stories about if not the point of no return? For Sadie, the point came when she opened a book like any other book--or was it? Was it the book that differed, or something in her mind? Did something that noticed her comings and goings finally act upon it? Because, sometime later, she reached the point at which she realized she had passed the point of no return. And that was when she closed the book.

And the otherworld failed to let her go.

Well, that's what happens with me, anyway.

Like I said. If you can't get started on the one project, for the Gods' sake, write something else.

In other news, my first bloody mary experiment in Boulder has been semi-successful. Here in the land of No Effing Zing-Zang Anywhere, I went to Whole Foods and picked up a bottle of a local product called "Premium Gourmet Bloody Mary Mix." Also some V8 to cut it with, in case it packed the horseradish in a stomach-lining-corroding proprotions. Also a selection of pickled products in bottles and off the olive bar for use in garnish: marinated mini-onions, olives stuffed with garlic, hot pickled green beans (another local product, which the local grocery clerk (being local and not from New Orleans where a bloody mary doubles as your pre-dinner salad) thought was a very odd garnish for a bloody mary), capers, and those awesome little bumpy garlicky pickles.

But you know what we're missing? You know what I couldn't find at Whole Foods, neither on the baking aisle nor among the bulk spices?

You know what's not crusting the edges of my glass in this lovely picture here?

CELERY SALT.

This is why we're only talking semi-successful here. Maybe tomorrow I'll call... shudder... Safeway.

Some mornings are obviously not meant to be productive.

I unwisely saved the tidying up of my article for today during work. This isn't as unethical as it sounds; some days I'm mainly just covering the phones and making myself available for random desk clerk and computer sub-guru tasks. Given where I left off Wednesday, I thought today would be one of those days. Today was not one of those days. Today was non-stop.

Which means that I actually managed to let the June 15 deadline on the bikini top article slip by me. Granted, I had no idea "June 15" meant "June 15 at 2:00 PM MDT," but I should have just finished the dang thing and emailed it last night. My own fault, this. I emailed it in anyway to give the editor the option of slipping it in under the wire or holding onto it for next month.

The moral of this story, folks, is this: When you set your alarm clock for 6:00 AM, mean it. Sometimes those two hours before you have to be in the office are all the day you get to call your own.

So that's my wake-up call for the week. Also, I've been working my way through Becoming A Writer again (read all about it at BurnzPost!), which means "wake to write" is a debt of honor. Another debt of honor is "schedule your writing." Yesterday I was very good about both these things. I overslept, but I spent my first half hour awake typing away on the Compaq Contura Aero. Over the course of that half hour--mainly a spate of journaling--I decided that I'd schedule further writing for 2:30 PM.

Now, recently I've pledged my housewifely services unto my husband, which is to say, he said "I wish this house were cleaner," and I said, "Me too. You know what? I'm home three days a week, thanks to your excellence and generosity. How about I get back on a cleaning schedule?" It's not a hard cleaning schedule. It's two rooms a week until I run out of rooms, starting over again each first week of the month. There are six rooms. This is no hardship.

However, I'm not exactly fond of cleaning.

What "I will write at 2:30" did was give me a light at the end of the long dark tunnel of cleaning the bathroom. (And if you don't believe that's a long dark tunnel, you haven't seen the mildew and soap scum all over the bathtub.) At 2:30 PM, I would be done. I would have put the cleaning supplies away and scarpered off to Korea House for a writing date with kim chee chi gae.

It's true that us writers do things like totally sanitize the kitchen rather than write. But by making a date with myself, and not allowing myself to write until the time arrived, I managed to reverse my mental perspective on the two tasks. I was--yes!--looking forward to writing.

Bottle that up and sell it, ma'am, and that's the end to writer's block as we know it! Or at least as I know it.

So, more of the same tomorrow, only on a different project. Maybe a short story re-write. *Gasp!* Just maybe.

Sometimes what you get is a blog post.

Which is to say, the answer to "how do you get a bikini top knit pattern down to 600 words" is the same as the answer to "how do you write a pattern for something as custom-fit as a bikini top?" The answer is, you don't. You turn back to your favorite sock knitting book and you write a mathematical method.

Gee I'm clever. I knit the dang thing with Gibson-Roberts' "C"s and "L"s in mind, and it takes me until two days before deadline to realize that's the way I'll have to approach writing about it.

But once I figured that out (which epiphany occurred over a scrumptious fish dinner at Pappadeaux, the relation of which to Highway 36 is a blog post all on its own), it got much easier. I realized what I was really writing was a blog post about how I overcame the challenges inherent in knitting functional swim wear. And I can do blog posts. Only, I usually get to break them up into two blog posts if they get too long. This one I can't, not really. If there's going to be a second article, it'll have to be accepted separately by the editor, and it's going to have to be about knitting the bikini bottom.

...which I haven't knit yet.

Well, we all know what I'm going to be doing in July!

Why yes, I've been lolcatting around lately. How can you tell? It's gotten really bad around here, to the point that, at Water World Saturday, stuff like "Can we has go faster, plz?" and "We can has acceleration!" started coming out of my mouth whenever John 'n me 'n Taylor got stuck and came loose again in one of the tube slide rides. "We're in ur tube slide, causin bottlenecks" was another favorite. As was the observation that we must have somehow gotten onto the internet because this ride was obviously a series of tubes.

John tells me I owe him a dollar for the bad joke jar for that last one, and I don't even work at the office where the bad joke jar resides. Funny, that.

That aside, my current-most writing project, aside from keeping up with the blogzes, is to somehow usefully describe the knitting of my bikini top in 600 words or less. This may or may not work. We Shall See.

I've also finished re-reading Dorothea Brande's 1934 classic, Becoming A Writer, which is oodles more useful than I remembered. Somehow all I recalled from last read-through was the "wake to write" and "schedule writing dates with yourself" advice, and I'd forgotten all about the story incubation meditation techniques. And it's been fun speculating on whether Ms. Brande would have adored laptops or despised them, based on what she says about the importance of typing and having a travel typewriter but doing nothing other than writing at the typewriter. I think she would have recommended using the laptop only for writing and acquiring a desktop computer for things like email and video games.

But that's enough of that for now. I don't want to steal the thunder from a series of blog posts on the subject of that book which I'm planning on uploading to Burnzpost.

Of late, most of my writing has been unpublishable journal entries and, like I said, keeping up with the blogging gigs. But this is in keeping with my temporary solution for the single project form of the Block. If a have a particular project I have to work on, one short story rewrite or freelance deadline that gets top priority over everything else, and inability to get started on that project causes a total writing bottleneck--then write something else. Every day. Reliably. It's the daily act of writing and not the daily product that's important in breaking through the Block.

Of course, that in and of itself won't get deadlines met. But I find that the journaling can help me ease into the high-priority project, especially if my journal entry segues into a bout of talking to myself about that project. And if something that happened the day before keeps me from concentrating on the serious work, journaling about the event or fictionalizing it into a new story draft can sometimes satisfy whatever annoying part of my brain insists on chewing on it.

In the interest of not increasing this post's category count, I'll put off talking about the ongoing behind-the-scenes website redesign (still in progress) or my new flying lessons schedule (i r gonna b legal pilot agin lolz) for another post. And maybe I'll rethink the current category list, 'cause I don't have one for flying or for The Block or... right. Later.

More later, then.

Look! (Where?) Over there! (At what?) Writing!

Triumphal fanfare, angels descend in a chorus, small children with little paper-unrolly noisemakers go 'tweeee'

So, like I said once or twice before (or maybe a few more than that), I attend a semimonthly writer's group, writing class, thingie, over which Melanie Tem and her dog Dominique preside with wisdom and exuberance after hours at West Side Books, aka The Big Purple Bookstore In Highland Square. Very informal thing. Whoever shows, shows. Sometimes manuscripts get critiqued (like my Captain Hook story last month). Sometimes not, and we just do in-class writing, or homework show-n-tell, or craft-n-industry discussions. Homework? Yes! Homework. Which you do if you feel like it. Melanie announces the homework prompt at the end of one class, and next time we meet, people who did something along those lines read it aloud.

The homework for tonight was to write something inspired by the seven deadly sins.

So, what the hell. I spun off "lust" and finally put on paper about three-fourths of the first draft of the Qabbalistic hostile corporate takeover story that's been knocking around in my head for some years now. "So, it's erotica," I told my classmates, "or at least erotic. Which is why I'm not going to share in until it's quite done."

"Erotic? Ooooh!"

"Yeah. A sort of erotic corporate horror story. With golems."

"...Right! OK."

See the pretty picture? That's what I wrote it on. Every once in awhile I remember my aging Compaq Contura Aero (not to be confused with the modern palmtop device of similar name), and I haul it out and charge up its battery and find a floppy drive for file transfer... and I write. And the funny thing is, stuff actually gets done.

The Compaq is not internet-enabled!

It could be. It once was. Give me a while with Telix and find me a phone number to dial and I'll possibly even remember how to make it work. But today, unlike in 1994, there aren't nearly as many dial-up text-only internet access points. Plus our telephone line gets AM radio, so, not so good for data transfer.

In any case: Light, ultra-portable, bump-resistant, Dvorak enabled, and Totally Temptation Free.

Well, almost temptation-free. Maybe 97.3% temptation-free. Because there's only so long you can play QBasic games like Nibbles and Gorilla before you're bored stiff. (I'm pretty good at Nibbles, though.)

What reminded me this time around was Maud's Blog. Maud Newton blogs splendiferously, and last month she blogged about Stephen Elliot's article in Poets&Writers: "Surviving a Month Without Internet." It wasn't so much the novelty of going off the grid for 30 days that resonated with me--I'm a total online junkie, I'm a telecommuting freelance writer for goodness's sake--as it was these excerpts:

Since I'm most creative in the mornings, I've decided no Internet until after lunch.

Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity.... Dedicate at least half of your day to handling non-Internet tasks exclusively. Write a list of things you need to do when you do get online so your Internet time will be more productive.

The urge to screw around is always strongest when the work's not going well. And if you work at a computer, screwing around is only a click away. But when the work's not going well is exactly the time to turn the Internet off.

If I leave the house with the Compaq, I don't get "just one more" anything. I get Nibbles, and I get WordPerfect 5.1 staring me in the face.

And--you know what?--when I look at that computer with its tiny keyboard and its monochrome screen filled from edge to edge with WP51 exactly as it was meant to back in 1990, it's like someone turned on the Batsignal for the Muse. My poor Pavlovian association-driven brain has one last surefire writing association that I haven't totally destroyed by being lazy: The Compaq Contura Aero means Writing.

And it ain't gots no nets no more.

Bwahahahaaaa!

Ssssh.

Iz big sekret.

Hey yeah, that's right: Not much bloggage for awhile here. And look! No manuscript association. That must mean I've been a lazy ass.

In discussing that much maligned and possibly mythical creature Writer's Block, I'm not making excuses. No no-no no no no! I am having a philosophical discussion.

Go on. Believe it. And meanwhile, I've got this bridge... no. Had this bridge. It is tragically off the market at current.

So. Writer's block. The forms it takes. Let's start with Impending Deadlines of Doom.

Impending Deadlines of Doom cause this writer to go, "Oh no! I have Umpteen Thousand words to write by Tomorrow! I'd better work on that project first. But when I'm done today's allotment of Wordage, I shall reward myself by enhancing my body of fictional work!"

This sounds well and good, and it is--when The Block is not in play. I should note that The Block is oftentimes more cynically known as Total Lack of Self-Discipline. However, it is not useful for the Blocked Writer to call it this, because such terminology leads to Self-Loathing, which is another form that The Block takes.

At this point I should quote a bit from Victoria Nelson's fantastic book On Writer's Block. My copy has sadly gone missing, however. This essay quotes a most appropriate bit: "If you beat yourself because you procrastinate, your problem is not that you procrastinate. Your problem is you beat yourself." My point exactly.

So as soon as I make the work-and-reward proclamation I find myself making exactly Zero Headway on the Umpteen Thousand Word Project. Why?

Firstly, because The Block isn't particular about which writing it blocks. I find myself totally unable to start that project for the same mysterious reason I find myself totally unable to write new fiction or edit existing drafts.

Secondly, because if I never produce today's allotment of Wordage, I will not have to write or edit fiction. Procrastination on the Deadline of Doom now has the "value" of aiding procrastination on the fiction.

I'm not 100% sure how to get out of that loop. My Type-A personality says, "Well, you just have to do it, dummy! Stop whining and get to work!" However, see above about Self-Loathing and beating oneself for procrastinating. My Type-A personality is not always my friend.

More on this subject to further cogitation and researching ideas.

On to The Block, Form the Second: Being Sick As The Dog.

I just happen to be enduring a round of the weekend flu-bug. It starts with a sore throat and post-nasal drip, the latter exacerbating the former. It continues with thermometers swearing that one's temperature is normal or even slightly below normal, and this despite whole-body muscle aches and chills. I have been treating myself with plenty bed rest, hot honey-and-vinegar drinks (I don't have any lemon juice in the house and I quite like apple cider vinegar), hot tea, and hot scotch toddies. And long baths.

Which I point out not to elicit e-mail of sympathy, but to demonstrate a reason why I haven't been writing.

I often look back on my year-and-a-half of chemotherapy (long story involving acute myelogenous leukemia, several fantastic oncologists, the wonderful staff of Children's Hospital of New Orleans, and Metairie Park Country Day School's willingness to accommodate all my absences) and wonder why I didn't get any writing done. Disregard that I was only 11 going on 12. I decided to be a writer at age 6. Disregard the lack of ubiquitous laptop computers in 1987. I knew how to write longhand. Why didn't I put any of that time to use, rather than spending it watching Bumper Stumpers on the hospital television?

Because I felt like crap, that's why. Even when I wasn't nauseated or fevered, I had absolutely no energy. Being in a hospital, being kept home from school, being unable to go outside--these things were depressing, and I don't mean my immune system. Thinking back to that time, I was either miserable or else celebrating short interims of not feeling miserable by, oddly enough, playing. Aside from getting my homework done so as not to fail 6th grade, I spent my up-and-about time goofing off.

Today, less sick now than then but sick enough, I find myself indulging in lot of mindless, escapist pastimes to avoid having to be aware of living in my own skin. Because living in my own skin hurts right now, thanks. Reading myself asleep helps me escape that.

This makes perfect sense, but these days I really, truly have stuff I need to get done. Thankfully, I do have some preliminary workarounds:

• Apply any and all symptomatic relief remedies so as to reduce abject misery (I am in fact sitting in the tub and sipping a hot toddy as I write this)
• Assign oneself small tasks (such as short blogging stints and non-contact brainstorming)
• Reward oneself for completing small tasks (Good for you! You blogged! You get more hot water in the tub and an hour's reading!)

My next small task coming up will be to start WordPerfect 5.1 and jot down what I brainstormed over the past few days. Nothing full-fledged or publishable. Just some short snippets of prose that might, some day, accrue substance. It's only a very little bit of writing, true, but any overtures in that direction deserve positive reenforcement

This weekend "Captain Hook" got an expositionectomy. Then it hit the email. On Wednesday I'll get to hear what my bimonthly writing group thinks about it. Since the last thing I submitted there for critique was "Right Door, Wrong Time" (and boy it's been awhile), they're probably going to get Ideas about me and my seeming penchant for Putting Children In Harm's Way. OK, well, Guillermo del Toro I'm not, but I admit that the dangerous side of faerie tales and magic is a concept worth exploring, even when--especially when--the main characters are legally minors. It's sort of a side-effect of my wanting to treat fantasy as reality. If magic is real, it plays by real rules. If magic is risky, there's no lower age limit on when you start to run the risk. Sometimes when the Goblin King steals your baby brother, he doesn't give him back.

(It's probably worth noting that I don't have children. One or two people reading this story may decide I oughtn't ever to. Which is fine. John and I have no plans in that direction. You may proceed to feel relieved.)

In other news, today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day! Jo Walton announced it last week in response to the entertaining kerfluffle caused by current SFWA VP Howard Hendrix (Ph.D.) screeding off about how writers who put their work on the Internet for free are no better than strike-breaking scabs, "pixel-stained technopeasant wretches" who're "undercutting the efforts of [their] fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all."

Bwa-ha-ha.

Anyway, I'm not certified professional quality as of yet (though I'm trying!), but in honor of the day I'm finally gonna turn this Obligatory Vanity Domain into a real Author's Official Web Site. Which is to say, I'm going to build the "Recently Published" RSS for the front page (although "recently" is sort of a relative term by now) and also put some excerpts, reprints, and freebies up where y'all can read 'em.

Check back throughout the day. Changes will be on-going and stuff will be showing up. After I'm done I'll put a more general update at BurnzPost pointing out choice places one might spend one's time drinking all that free milk from the cow y'all ain't having to buy. So to speak.

21:56 MDT: Recent Publication list is now up. Sorry it took so long. Will post excerpts, reprints, and other freebies over the week.

In other other news, I am just now today turned 31. Woot. Given that 31 is not a number that brims with frothy excitement--"Yay! It's my tenth anniversary of being legal to drink in the U.S.! Let's go out for a beer!"--it was a pleasant surprise to hear that Jo had declared it a special day for all minimally techno-savvy writers. (It also being Shakespeare's birthday doesn't hurt.)

OK, enough of that. Let's go out for a beer.

And this one has no manuscript stats attached because it's just not writing related. Too bad. Not everything is.

This update goes out to anyone who's ever grabbed me by the left hand and said, "Oh no! Where'd the stone from your wedding ring go? Emergency! Nobody move!" and got my sad-eyed puppy-dog-faced story of how it's actually been missing since December 2005, on a Friday that began with an hour and a half of periodontal surgery, continued with me lying all miserable in bed, and ended with me half-heartedly helping my husband paint the bathroom and move books around. After which we discovered that my ring was without stone.

It's a unique ring. It's got a History. It started out as half of a $5 pair of one-size-fits-nobody hematite bands bought at a vendor table in the New Orleans French Market. A diamond-tipped Dremel bit for etching Meaningful Runes into each ring before exchanging them at the altar brought the total cost up to about $15. Well, hematite being what it is (brittle), my ring broke about a year or so later. I was wearing it when an automatic grocery store sliding glass door stuck halfway open as I tried to leave. I slapped at the door to make it move, and the ring flew off in three pieces. A couple years after that (and a couple income brackets higher), we brought the etched piece to Hurdle's Jewelry where Keith Hurdle accomplished the daunting task of setting it in a white gold band.

An uncharitable eye might liken the effect to that of a mood ring stuck on Bleak Despair And Sadness. But that wouldn't be fair. Mr. Hurdle really did a beautiful job. Nothing else walking out of a jeweler's shop looks quite like it. I'd get asked about it all the time. Heck, the periodontist asked me about it on that fateful day while we were waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect.

And then the dang stone went missing.

I took our bedroom apart, bared it to the walls. I looked all over the tarp I'd sat on to spray-paint the bathroom fan cover. I looked under and around the bookshelf I'd helped John set in order. No little arc of hematite showed up. I went over the carpets with a fine-toothed comb before vacuuming. I then went through the contents of the vacuum bag with my bare hands, and in a household containing two tabby cats and two long-haired humans, that's not for the faint of heart. Still no stone. Could it have come loose as I bussed home from the dentist office that morning? Could it have popped out during the fan-cover-painting project and rolled right off the balcony? Bleak Despair And Sadness!

Between recovering from surgery and hitting other scheduling obstacles, somehow we never got around to searching the guest room more thoroughly. Then, a few months later, we had a friend move in. I asked him to keep half an eye out for it in his travels. In the meantime, I tried to convince myself that it wasn't gone forever--it was safely in the guest room somewhere just waiting for us to find it.

Our friend moved out about a week ago. With the room suddenly uninhabited, John and I decided it was high time we painted those four walls. (We've been painting at a rate of about one wall per six months ever since we bought the place in August 2000. We hope to finish the job before we finish paying off the mortgage.) So today we emptied that sucker of all furniture and wall fixtures. This included the bookshelf that I was helping John reorder at the time the stone got lost. My pet theory was that the stone popped loose while I was trying to shove more books onto that shelf than reasonably could be expected to fit. I think my hand had been sandwiched between a C++ Primer and a Chemistry textbook at the time.

We proved that theory tonight. Blessed, blessed be!--we found that stone.

I was carrying one of the cement blocks from the guest room to the kitchen when I saw the little arc of hematite lying on the living room floor. It must have been stuck to one of the blocks, or sitting inside it, and then fallen off as the block was being transported.

After a year and a half, my wedding ring is complete once more.

I have to keep telling myself that every fifteen minutes. Bleak Sadness And Despair gets to be a habit after fifteen months, y'see. I have to keep reminding myself that we found the stone, I have it back, and that the proper emotions are in fact Delirious Joy And Happiness.

The stone and the ring are in a sandwich bag waiting to be taken back to Hurdle's for reassembly. I may also finally ask to have my engagement ring assembled. The ring is a gift from both of our mothers: John's mom gave me the band, which had been her mother's; and, seeing that the original stone was long gone (strange how generations fall into parallel), my mom, a most knowledgeable and obsessive collector of gemstones, gave me one of her tanzanites to crown it. It's about time I had the stone set and the ring sized for actual wearing. And yes, it's kind of unusual to wait until one's ninth year of marriage to start wearing an engagement ring, but what's one more unconventionality, more or less?

My wedding stone came back. We found my wedding stone. Hooray!

This has been the best Saturday ever.