author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

There is an art to withholding information from characters and readers. There's a line beyond which lies the hell of Authorial Contrivance and the "Well, Duh!" reaction. We want to stay on the correct side of that line.

It's only natural that the author knows more than the characters and the reader. The author knows the whole story as one complete thing, whereas the reader is being told the story bit by bit and the characters are living it as it unfurls. But after that things get a little hairy. Some things the characters know but the reader doesn't. Some things the reader knows but the characters don't. Some characters know more than others about certain things.

And eventually everyone discovers stuff. Managing that discovery convincingly is an art.

So here's the thing. The main character's mother was, for all intents and purposes, a supernatural being. She wielded some remarkable powers which were as capable of causing tragedy as triumph. Our main character knows nothing of this, and the woman raising her--who was very close to the MC's mother but won't tell the MC for fear of the MC asking questions--would like to keep it that way. But at the same time, she is scared witless that the main character will inherit both those powers and the related tragedies. In today's scene, these conflicting goals (to keep the MC in the dark, but to forewarn the MC against catastrophe) cause the tension to escalate for both characters. The MC just wants to borrow the car and go on a date; her guardian is scared of the entire idea of the MC experiencing sexystuffs because the MC's mother had a way of causing fatalities when her emotions got out of control.

And here I am knowing everything about it and hating the conversation I'm writing because everything seems far too obvious. "Jeez, I'm writing an MC with an INT roll of 6! Surely she should be able to see through her guardian's lies about the extent to which she knew the MC's mother. Surely she should be able to figure out what her guardian's worried about? And surely any reader can see through what's up with that whole not-so-imaginary friend business, what with the NSIF going on about 'I knew her before.' I mean, well, duh!"

These sorts of insecurities will probably only be assuaged by the reactions of a beta reader. And beta readers aren't getting a hold of this in November, let me tell you. They may never. (You'll notice there's still no excerpt posted at my NaNoWriMo Profile.)

If the above sounds kind of cryptic, it's meant to be. I'm still not ready to get very specific here. I'm mainly just whining. (See? This post falls under the Whining category.) I am not likely to get less cryptic tomorrow, either. The stuff I'm really shy about letting anyone read is coming up in the next few scenes. But it will then be followed by several months (in story time) of the (relatively) boring time-passing stuff that I never bothered thinking about before (because it wasn't emotionally compelling to a daydreaming high-schooler). That might be safe to share. It might even be less boring than I fear. We'll have to see.

Not likely to fall behind tomorrow, either. Will be at the Tea Spot from noon until five. Noon until two is designated for writing, and I can't see why I wouldn't.

You know what I found out today? My main character's brand-new boyfriend (that was a new discovery last month, that she has a boyfriend) has got an elderly relative he refers to as Aunt Widget.

The story all takes place in the New Orleans area. The boyfriend is actually at his grandmother's place in Pearl River. Large southern families get nicknames. They do. Gods know that in my southern family, more people in it have silly nicknames than don't. Some bestowed by parents. Some by siblings. Some by very small children who hadn't got that pronunciation thing down yet. Some by the merciless affection of neighborhood friends (to this day, all the used-ta-been kids from my old block call me "Nooba." Sometimes "Nooba-cheese." I'm not entirely sure why, to tell you the truth). And then there's the collection of family codewords for ordinary objects, and individual phrases as simple as "Oh, apricots!" (I think Mom would have to tell you that one, I'd only get the details wrong) that will reduce the whole holiday gathering to tears of laughter because they all know exactly what hilarious exploit that refers to.

And then there's the way outsiders and former outsiders react to all this chaos. My husband has a southern family, too, but it's not nearly so large, and his left eyebrow got a workout the first time he met all my relatives. I mean, what with him always turning towards me and raising it sardonically while repeating, sardonically, the name he just heard. And being from Houston didn't somehow prepare him for me shopping at (R. I. P.) Schweggmann's. "OK, one more thing on my list," I said, "what was it now?"

"Oh," he says, "the muck-muck."

I looked at him blankly for a moment, then realized. "That's chow-chow, you dingbat!"

Right. Because "chow-chow" is a perfectly normal name for a mustard-based condiment. (Which Zatarain's no longer makes, I am deeply distressed to report. Apparently someone is selling jars of the stuff on Underbid. Soon as I get home on my own encrypted signal, and as soon as I figure out whether anyone's selling the stuff for cheaper, I'm placing a goddamned order, damnit!)

Which--to make a long story short ("Too late!" -entire cast of Clue)--is what sort of stuff I was drawing on when my characters had the following conversation:

"Sorry, my Aunt Widget just walked in. Wanna tell her Merry Christmas?"

"MERRY CHRISTMAS AUNT GIZMO!"

(in the distance) "What? Who you talking to? Get off the phone and come have dinner."

"OK. Gotta go."

"Tell your Aunt Thingamabob bon apetit for me."

I feel like it's trying to turn into a chapter from Good Omens. "Fine old Lancashire name, Device! Nothing wrong with it at all! Are you laughing? Stop laughing!" But, y'know, nothing wrong with that. At all.

So, no writing yesterday. Not a single word. Lots of reading, lots of sleeping, no writing. Was in bed all day with a headache. (Awww.) It was that tight neck-muscle sort of headache, the one where there's an invisible spike going in at one of those two lumpy edges of skull to the left and right of the top of the spine and out the corresponding eyebrow ridge. I think maybe getting a flu shot Wednesday had something to do with it. No, I absolutely do not believe "the flu shot gives you the flu," that's silly (the killed virii in the injection can't infect you[1]), but I absolutely do get the typical recognized "flu-lite" side effects of achy muscles and touch-o-fever. Achy muscles are tight muscles. Tight muscles mean headache. And there ya go.

[1] Public Service Announcement: There are two good reasons you should get vaccinated if you're able. First, to prevent getting infected and spending a week out of work, in bed, or in the hospital. Second to avoid carrying the disease and thus infecting others and landing them in bed, the hospital, or, if they are very vulnerable, the grave. If you are able (and there are valid reasons why you might not be), you should get vaccinated--if not for your own sake, than for the sake of those who cannot (and there are valid reasons why some cannot) avail themselves of vaccination. The lives you save might be more than your own!

But here's the thing about neck-muscle headaches and staying in bed. The combination means they only get worse. Why? Because staying in bed in practically the same position all day only makes neck muscles tighter. Also, being asleep means not drinking water, and headaches thrive on dehydration. Boy did I feel stupid when I finally got up.

So today I feel much better. The muscle aches aren't less, but the headache is, probably because I've been up and moving all day. The hot soak in the tub probably helped too. (Maybe the aches are less after all.) And now I'm at Cafe Play working on two days' worth of NaNo wordage. As my total right now this minute is greater than 1,667 times 8, I'm allowed a break to blog in. And do other things in, because NaNoWriMo isn't the only thing I'm behind in.

Off to those other things now. Also, bringing the total up to 1,667 * 9. Laters.

Get yer mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about plot.

OK, well, the scene I'm thinking of did have sexual elements. But that's not the point. Point is, sometimes in writing a long piece of work, there's a temptation to, er, blow one's wad a bit early. Maybe it's just me. I've got this whole novel in my head, and some scenes are clearer in my head than others. Generally, the more tension in the scene, the more clear it is. Which means I'm more likely to start writing it, like, now.

That didn't make a lot of sense.

Um.

Think of fairy tales, where things happen three times. Three nights the adventurer watches over the twelve princesses to discover why their shoes turn up all worn through by dawn. The first two nights, some magic spell puts him to sleep and he misses the whole thing. But by the third night he's figured it out, he avoids the trap, and he follows the princesses down the stair to the ballroom where they're ensorcelled to dance the night away. It can't happen until the third night, else the dramatic tension goes fizzle. But there's a temptation to write it Right Now, because it's cool.

Yesterday I managed to write a scene like that, only to realize that I'd cranked the stakes up way too high way too soon. It left me nowhere to go, no way to increase the tension over the next couple chapters.

This is where I plug Spacejock Software's yWriter. (Here we go again.)

So, yWriter is essentially project management for novelists. You define chapters and scenes, and each shows up as a separate writing space. The chapters you've defined are listed off to the left. Whichever one is selected, its scene list shows up in the middle. Double-click on a scene description to open up the text editor to write that scene. (If that was confusing, just take a look at the screenshots on the yWriter website.)

As November approached, I defined the chapters and scenes for this novel, and on November 1, I began writing the text that belonged in Chapter 1, Scene 1.

So when I realized that what I'd just written needed to happen on the third fairy tale night rather than on the first, all I had to do was cut the text from Chapter 2 Scene 3 and paste it into Chapter 3 Scene 2. I could do this because Chapter 3 Scene 2 already exists, even though it has a word count of 0. (Also, I made a mental note that i'd need to create a few more scenes in between, and figure out what happened. Because, unlike a fairy tale, I need more than just "The next night, the prince fell asleep again.") Yay for yWriter!

Other than that, all I have to report is that I have remained on track. I got a bit behind yesterday, but I'm all caught up now. 10,086 is greater than 1,667 times 6. Whee! Good for me!

And you know what? Most of the people I see at write-ins in my region have consistently higher word counts than me.

Have I said Boulder rocks? Boulder rocks.

Hello. Back for more, as promised. Also, the Saints totally did kick the Jaguars' collective butts. It was brilliantly played. How about that onside kick, eh? "No, really, a field goal is nice, but we really wanted a touchdown. So... we're not gonna give you the ball just yet." And I'm all like, "Is that even legal?" because I'm not really knowledgeable about football at all, I just like watching my team win.

Anyway. One football game and 1667 words later...

So after digging up the "Namarie Sue" Making Light blog post to link to yesterday, I started reading it (and much of what it linked to) afresh. And part of the ensuing conversation rang very true, especially considering it mentions NaNoWriMo:

Mitch Wagner: "As a reader and wannabe fiction writer myself, I hate to think of up-and-coming writers who might be scared off of writing idealized versions of themselves because they're afraid of committing Mary Sue."

Kass Fireborn: Unfortunately, I gather it's so: Writing the Non-Mary-Sue Female Protagonist [now-defunct link to old NaNoWriMo forum topic]. There are five pages there discussing the problem of, well, writing the Non-Mary-Sue female protagonist, and that's just one of the threads which bring the concern up--and these days, NaNoWriMo is a broad enough cross-spectrum of future writers so you can figure if it's got that much of a discussion there, it's a problem elsewhere, as well. [...] So what you get, basically, is an effect on two kinds of people. One group contains people who, yes, might have written a Mary Sue if they hadn't seen this sort of thing, and went back and rethought their characters and as a result got something with better depth. The other group is full of people who wouldn't have written a Mary Sue--but they think they could have. They also think of not for grammar guides they'd have misused a semicolon, and if not for a class on plot structure they'd have had a novel that went nowhere. And so they go back and rethink their characters too, and start carefully sanding away certain bits of them, because they'd hate to give offense or do something as horrible as writing a Mary Sue. [...] If this sanding gets taken to extremes, what they end up with is, I suppose, a sort of anti-Mary Sue--a character so unremarkable you can't care about her at all.

I think the thing to remember here is, once again, rough draft. What you end up with on December 1 is a huge amount of total rough draft. Rough draft is supposed to be flawed. No one writes it perfectly on the first try--well, maybe some people do, but their example is not useful to us mere mortals. Our rough drafts get better as we continue practicing our craft, but then so do our revision skills, and our standards rise too. So we don't so much aspire to write publishable rough draft as we aspire to have better stories at the end of the writing-revising-polishing process.

As it is, the conclusions people came to on that Making Light comment thread can be summarized as follows: You can have author-insertion that isn't a Mary Sue. You can have admirable characters that aren't Mary Sues. Mary Sue is, quite simply, bad writing. If your wish-fulfillment story is well-written and its main character is well-rounded, it's not going to be a Mary Sue.

Also: A Mary Sue is the character that you're told to like. Because the author says so. For no other reason. Which condemnation says nothing at all about those characters that you come to like because they're genuinely likable.

Also: A pre-emptive remedy for Mary Sue-itis might be, "OK, so you have God-like powers. Now what?"

Also: Read the whole thread. It's good for you.

On a nearly unrelated note, Kass's mention of NaNoWriMo came about because several people upthread were outing themselves as NaNoWriMo participants: "It's rapidly becoming impossible to encounter a fairly large body of prospective writers without tripping over at least one WriMo." And this was 2003. There's even more more of us now. That we Nano'ers are considered a significant portion of the future write population, and that we can gab with pro writers who don't look down at us for choosing this method to produce our rough drafts, is a fine fine thing.

Yes. We're three days in already, and I have this to report: I'm solidly on the 30-day NaNoWriMo schedule. Truly. 1,667 words or more per day, every day. 5141 words so far.

I rock.

As promised, the novel under development is one I always said would never, ever, ever be read by anyone else. On the one hand, it originated in the stuff of pre-teen fantasy, a protagonist all Mary Sue supported by characters drawn straight from the realm of high school crushes and pop celebrity idols. And on the other hand[1], the main character's strengths, capabilities, and her very name all came out of what folks in the shaman business like to call "a big dream." The idea of telling tales about this character for the entertainment of the general public feels like sacrilege.

[1]Given that those two problems are at opposite ends of the banal-to-sacred spectrum, it follows that whoever owns those two hands has an extremely wide armspan.

I'm finding out interesting things about my main character that make her much less Mary Sue-ish. Did you know she doesn't read? She simply doesn't read. Story does not appeal to her. The idea that I might write a character who doesn't share my tendency to devour books was not one that had occurred to me before, say, November 1 2007. Then I added this to what I already knew about her, which was that she didn't have much of a social life, and I boggled. What the hell does she do for fun? If she doesn't read, and she doesn't have many friends, what's left to occupy her time when she runs out of homework? Origami, for crying out loud? Stamp collecting? Whittling, maybe?

That this is a dilemma probably says more about me than I'd prefer.

The Boulder contingent (of NaNoWriMo participants) has been as active and excited about another flurry of novel-writing madness as anyone could hope. It's not safe to plan kick-off events! Every one 'em, with the exception of the traditional midnight "three, two, one, WRITE!" pot-luck at Chez LeBoeuf-Little, has turned into a recurring weekly write-in due to attendees heading home again with the words, "So... same time again next week?" We have next weeks coming out our collective wazoo. Saturdays at the Tea Spot, Tuesdays at the Burnt Toast, Wednesdays at Caffe Sole, Fridays at Cafe Play, Tuesday and Friday lunch hours at Vic's II Downtown, and that's not even getting into our Longmont writer-in-residence at the Deja Brew and various plots hatching for meet-ups in Lafayette/Louisville/Broomfield.

And you know what? Words are getting written at these write-ins. Words by the thousand. I'm all self-congratulatory because I'm sticking to the traditional words-per-day recommendation rather than falling behind on Day 2, but at least three write-in regulars are pushing 10,000 already. Boulder loves to write.

This year is said to be the biggest NaNoWriMo event ever. (Every year is the biggest ever. Sign-up numbers have never decreased.) And the official web site, as usual, is feeling the burn. All the above events are on the calendar, except the calendar is inaccessible what with the website being down for maintenance at the moment. And before that it was de facto down by virtue of page timeouts by the score. I'm surprised people are managing to stay informed about events. And yet each has been extremely well attended. Like I said, Boulder rocks.

So there's yer kick-off report. More tomorrow, probably after the Saints kick some Jaguar butt at lunch-time. If you need me, I'll be playing a game of Go with my husband at the Lazy Dog and making incoherent fan-girl noises at the bar TV.

OK. SRSLY. Here's the plan.

Tomorrow (er, later today) is Saturday. It's also the day I have a Cessna 172 reserved for a flight out of Boulder. Me and a friend, our plan is to get in that plane around 8:15 AM and go up to Cheyenne, kinda like I did two weeks ago, and have a productive writing date at the airport diner there. Then we'll fly back in time to arrive around 12:30 PM.

I'm not exactly certain that the flying part of that is going to happen. A cold front is moving in tonight, and that may mean high winds. Cheyenne area is forecasting 15 knot winds around when we'd be taking off to go home. Before it starting saying "NIL," Rocky Mountain Metro was talking about 15 gusting to 24 knots. Also? Winds from the west. Landing on Runway 26 in Boulder. In high winds and gusty conditions! I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with that. I'm not even certain I should aspire to be comfortable with that.

I'll have to reevaluate in the morning, when the new TAFS show up. (That's "Terminal Aerodrome Forecast." Yer welcome.)

However, the writing date part of the plan will go off as planned. It may not be in Cheyenne. It may be in Highland Square. It may be right here in Boulder. But we're gonna go plonk ourselves and our laptops somewhere wired-n-caffeinated, and we're gonna write.

Gonna write a bit now, actually. Just noodle around for about 5 minutes, see what I think up before I drift off to sleep.

No, you won't get to see that either. But it'll happen!

And so it did.

Look, that doesn't mean I'm going to show you.

Worked from nine to five. Really. Worked. I'm not exactly sure where all those hours went. They Went To The Cause.

Biked home. (Three miles. Uphill.)

Rested momentarily.

Then, from seven until nine that evening, did such things as you see in these photos here.

Writing will happen tomorrow.

So. It's later. This post, I think, counts as "more."

It may not have entirely escaped notice that I've been rather absent from this blog of late. I've been sort of pendulum-swinging between hard-core goofing off and hard-core panicked productivity. The "Thunk" from the previous post marked my exiting the latter mode and returning to the former.

Let's review:

Thunk, onomatopoeia, the sound of something with a high word count and high stress level landing in my editor's inbox. (See also Thwumph, likewise, the sound of me hitting the sack after an all-night writing binge.)

So I've been goofing off a bit since. My main characters in Puzzle Pirates have been going to Atlantis a lot, earning plenty pieces of eight at their distilling jobs, and trading pieces of eight for doubloons. My most favorite paperbacks are getting a rereading work out. Sleep is happening in great quantities. Also cooking. My grandmother once gave me a copy of Kenneth Lo's The Top One Hundred Chinese Dishes and I've been working my way through the sections on noodles, rice, eggs, and tofu.

However. I've got another deadline of an even higher word count coming up on the 29th of this month, and I'm hoping to avoid the thunk/thwumph cycle. Also hoping to avoid stretching out that deadline into November, because November is holy. November is when new novels get written at a rate of no less than 1,667 words a day. And speaking of which--fiction! It's what that "hey I wanna be a writer when I grow up!" thing was all about! Might be nice to start actually submitting short stories here and there again...

Thus, the plan: After posting this, it's 1500 words on the work-for-hire contract and then a bit of fictional noodling.

And then some Puzzle Pirates. Nensieuisge needs a new sword, after all.

So, more later. And more later after that. And after that. And so on.