author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Me, circa June 2001:

Write faster than you can whine!

There are, admittedly, worse ways a writer can put off finishing and submitting a work in progress than by creating new works in progress. I mean, it's not like I totally wasted the day. Still, it is another day that I haven't resubmitted "Surfeit" anywhere. Ah, well.

But! New fiction!

It came out of a homework prompt from my writing group: Find something unfinished in your writing archives, something that you started long ago that never went anywhere, and rework it into a finished piece. (Or something that could feasibly become a finished piece.) I'm already doing that with the demonic sweater story. But that story's not finished, and I wanted to share with the class something that was. So I started going through my daily writing scraps from 2001 and lit upon three brief vignettes that caught my eye:

The conversation wound down to a full stop, words replaced with dinner-time noises in an otherwise-silence awkward and shamed. There was nothing left to say. Fifteen mouths, fifteen sets of silverware strove to fill the space with sounds, but the sounds were still a quality of silence.

She began to keep track of when they came and went. "I knew I could look up the schedules easily, in the books, on the Internet, but somehow keeping track myself (keeping track of the tracks) made the trains more mine.

"One day, I left the house at midnight, walked to the tracks, and leapt for the next open car.

"I nearly didn't make it. I would have died under the wheels had someone not grabbed my hand and pulled me into the car. A superhuman effort. I felt so stupid -- who did I think I was, Xena? Lara Croft? I'm just a dumb woman who didn't even go to college and couldn't even have babies properly. I crochet afghans in front of the TV all day, then I make dinner at 5 to be ready for my husband when he comes home at 6. On Sundays I make us both breakfast. Why did I think I could vault onto a speeding train?

"We talked a long time, that man and I. I'm not even sure he really exists, to tell you the truth. Not here. He says he's a tourist."

But she's not the same woman as actually gets on the train in the 2001 scrap. That scrap has more stories hiding in it. It was suggested, among my writing group, that there is a series of interrelated stories about train travel and train-hopping implied by this old piece of nothing much. "I'm not even sure he exists... He says he's a tourist" is a phrase that won't get out of my head now.

And there was a third, unrelated (for now) piece of story sitting in that old file:

Below, the lights of the city going down like candles into water. Ffft. One by twos by hundreds sinking into a pond of darkness. Two meals later, all hell would certainly break loose.

Oh, and, hey - new freelance deadline warning! Don't worry, this one's not 'til October 31 and I've already got a jump on it, as you can see. 500 words down, 19,500 words and a whole lot more research to go...

Several actual solid hours of fiction production this morning. About time. I was supposed to have a story emailed to my writing group, like, two days ago; as of now it's still just a collection of very rough scenes. And its critique is of necessity being put off for some time--the group only meets twice a month, after all. But I sat down and I wrote those scenes, dammit. From about 7:30 AM until 9:15 AM or so. At Joe's Espresso, which is the bestest place within walking distance to write at, in the morning.

Whaddaya know? I feel like a writer! Again! I like this feeling. Gee, think I should maybe do this more often?

I've recently babbled a bit about the odd habit-forming nature of guilt. I got that today. Late afternoon, playing Puzzle Pirates (like you do), I found myself suffering from a constant niggling feeling that "I should be doing something productive. There's something I should be doing that I'm putting off. I'm being bad, playing like this, when I should be working." And while that is quite true about, say, cleaning the kitchen or doing the household financials, it's not quite true about writing. I wrote, dammit. From about 7:30 AM etc. etc. etc.

It occurred to me that maybe it's not just that day after day of guilty procrastination forms a habit out of feeling guilty. It might also be that--could it be that?--I like writing. On a deep, fundamental, unconscious level. That "I should be writing" feeling? That's the aforesaid Deep Fundamental Unconscious pushing me towards an activity it finds delightful.

I like that possibility a lot better than the "Superego Weilding The Whip" hypothesis.

Maybe I should aim that impulse at "A Surfeit of Turnips," which, after all my bold words last month, is still hogging the couch, sneezing at the TV, and tossing used Kleenex on the floor. (This has something to do with my not having blogged here since then.) Maybe tomorrow. It's not like it needs that much work before being sent out again. Like, half an hour. That's all I need. I need to do it! Pronto! Stet! And ASAP!

Anyway, about the new fiction: It's the demonic sweater one. Only, this past weekend I finally figured out what's up with that sweater. It's not, strictly, demonic. It's possessive. It's all very bad destructive magic, but it's not in the service of beings from Hell or The Outer Dark. It's just because Mrs. Shemf needs someone to watch the sheep, OK? Is that so very wrong? (Yes. Yes, it is.)

In other news, and just to strengthen my position has having done my writing for the day, dammit, there was writing in the 7:00 AM to 7:30 AM half-hour, too. But instead of fiction production, it was random stream-of-consciousness being hand-scribbled for the space of three notebook pages, as recommended by Julia Cameron in her workbook The Artist's Way. I used to do her "morning pages" exercise, along with or alternately with timed "writing practice" vignettes a la Natalie Goldberg, daily. Religiously. And literally religiously, from time to time, as an offering to the Muse Calliope and other figures in my ecclectic Pagan pantheon. And somewhere along the way I got out of the habit. Then, yesterday, I read this most excellent blog post by Kit Whitfield...

However, the fact remains: I really can't handle a pen. When I turned eighteen I spent a year studying cooking and had to take a lot of lecture notes, which changed my handwriting from joined-up to printed under the pressure of needing legible notes, and now I have a fairly disjointed scrawl. The pen slips and slides all over the page, disobliging me in every direction; I just don't understand how some people manage to control it. In Middlemarch, George Eliot remarks that 'the end of Mr Brooke's pen was a thinking organ'; the end of my pen is making continual escape attempts.

Does this have an effect on my writing? I've been wondering about that. I write three 'morning pages' every day, as recommended by Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg, and those are done by hand; it's an extremely useful exercise, and while it generally produces ramblings about how I need to get the door fixed, with occasional bursts of insight into how to solve plot problems or personal revelations, the fact that it's done by hand is helpful. There's something informal about writing by hand that loosens you up.

In the past I used to write difficult scenes by hand, feeling that this would give them more emotional tone. Since taking to writing morning pages, I do that less; I feel that the three pages of handwriting loosen me up enough....

I was tickled to find my own experienced echoed by Real Published Authors, as I always am. In this case, it's both of these "loosening up" effects of pen on paper that I recognize. The "morning pages" excercise skims the scum off the top my brain--all the mundane, broody, day-planning, or just dumb words I have to get through before I can start writing actual stories. (Handwritten pages to rid the brain of such things is also nice last thing at night; it makes it easier for me to sleep and more likely that I'll dream interesting dreams rather than the one where I'm feeding the cats and can't find the Nupro supplements or whatever.) And when I'm having a hard time getting a story started--when I can't seem to find the "wedge" I need to open the cracks and let myself in--the pen and notebook sometimes help me find that way in.

In any case, I started with that this morning. And boy did my hand hurt after three pages! Not for nothing did Natalie Goldberg say of her years of writing practice that they had made her hand strong. I don't have Writing Down The Bones close at hand at the moment (I'm at the Boulder IHOP; my books are at home), but I believe in it she says she can put her fist straight through an aluminum school locker door: "My fourth grade students believe me when I tell them this, because they know it's true. My fifth grade students are more skeptical. I have to show them." That bit stuck with me hard enough that I borrowed it for the climax of a story--which you haven't read unless you're that one college teacher I submitted it to for my exam grade back in 1995--whose main character in fact had to write, as a biological necessity, copious amounts every month, and who ends up stopping a punch with her writing hand and breaking a few finger-bones in the process. Um. The other guy's bones. Not hers.

Anyway, yes. Hand hurts! (No bones broken, though.) And my handwriting--ye Gods, it sucks! But it was surprisingly easier to move into fiction-production mode after doing those three pages, and a lot easier to keep at the fiction for two solid hours, than I've found writing to be in a very long time. I recommend 'em, morning pages.

(I also recommend the rest of Kit Whitfield's blog. Deep literary insight some days, hilarious conversations with her cat on other days. What's not to like?)

Well, and I did go spin yarn. For several hours. I now have all three singles of my Cloud City "Primrose" (some dyed merino I picked up at the wool market) all spun and ready to ply. (If you're on Ravelry, I'm NicoleJLeBoeuf and it's in my Stash. Link will probably only work if you're logged in.)

These several hours at the spinning wheel did wonders for unwinding my naturally high-strung temperment, but did not work any weird supernatural charm on certain anthology editors. I mean, not that I expected it to--I'm superstitious, sure, but not that superstitious--but it didn't. "A Surfeit of Turnips" will not grace the pages of the Haunted Legends collection. Ah well.

So I'll give the story a gentle once-over (I can't believe I turned it in with "momento" where "memento" should have been! also, some lumps remain) and then send it Right Back Out Again.

You know the adage: "Never let a manuscript sleep over!" Because, I swear, you let 'em sleep over, they take over the couch, throw trash in the floor, and, before you work up the guts to evict them, they've burned cigarette holes in the carpet and uphostery. And you never know when and where you'll find their discarded underclothes a year later. So. Best not to go there.

After that, I think I have a date with some knitting. I mean, fictional knitting. With demons or something. No, of course I didn't mean real-life knitting--the singles aren't even plied yet. Duh. And, unlike the characters in this story I'm thinking of, I always bind off before summoning.

(I know, I know. But I only put that joke here to prevent myself giving in to the temptation to put it in my story.)

I form habits.

I think this is just one of those things that some people are more prone to than others. We're all habit-forming beasts to some extent, but I think some of us form them more easily than others. It may be related to the concept of "an addictive personality"--you know, the tendency to become addicted to chemicals or experiences that others can easily partake of in moderation? Right. I think I form habits just a little bit too readily.

Did you know stress can be a habit? I don't think I'd quite realized it myself.

Today I'm sitting here feeling guilty for not working hard on the project I finished and turned in yesterday. (THUNK.) I've been working on it long enough and stressing out about it long enough that I'm in the habit of stress. It's bizarre.

Clearly, I need to go sit at the spinning wheel and make yarn for an hour. Or play more Puzzle Pirates.

Tomorrow: FICTION! Woot! Or maybe some long-delayed WorldCon blogging. Or maybe both! Crazy talk, that is. CRAZY talk.

DID YOU KNOW?!

The majority of Spell Check accidents happen in the home,* and of those, the bathroom is statistically the most likely place for them. Take special care when using Spell Check in the bathroom!

*No, not in the offices of Publish America. Those would be Spell Check deliberates.

I do believe this is my first professional submission in mumble mumble ahem months. Also my first professional fiction submission in somewhat longer. Man, where's my head been? It's been up... something. Obviously.

Anyway, I've now written, rewritten, and submitted a story to the aforementioned Haunted Legends anthology. I used the ghost story that I demonstrate pulling my hair out over here. Briefly, the memory of it popped into my head while I was, I think, half asleep on the bus home after working my weekly 5-hour volunteer shift at the local Community Supported Agriculture-style farm--never underestimate the power of exhaustion to bring back-burner content quite suddenly to the fore apropos of nothing. I spent the next week trying to find that story and/or remember where I'd read it. Once I found it, I started writing.

...Sorta. Actually, I kept procrastinating. "Hey, I've still got 5... no, 4... no, 3 days left until deadline. I'm a genius under deadline. I have time."

Then a fellow Viable Paradise X alumnus got a-hold of me via IM and cackled madly. "Ahahahaha! I have finished my story for Haunted Legends!" He also complained of the loss of objectivity and sanity that come of spending many consecutive hours thrashing about on the printed page.

Oh, it was so on. I admitted to not being... ahem ...quite done yet, and suggested that he email me his story for beta reading; I would email him my story along with comments on his. By the next morning.

Yay! In one fell swoop I got a beta reader and insane pressure to finish the story, like, NAO!

So I did (although only for values of "next morning" that equal noon). And he did. And I rewrote today (after another 5 hours at the farm and a little bit of running around town interviewing people for the currently assigned StyleCareer.com eGuide). And I submitted it.

Yay!

I really, honestly, at least for right now this moment, am totally unconcerned as to whether the story gets rejected or accepted. Ask me again tomorrow and that will probably have changed.

But right now, today, I am a writer.

YAY!

In case you haven't heard about it yet, here's some submissions guidelines we should all be paying close attention to. Please note that I am not affiliated with Haunted Legends in any way except the usual, which is as hopeful author hopefully submitting a story to the editors.

Haunted Legends, to be published by Tor Books, seeks to reinvigorate the genre of "true" regional ghost stories by asking some of today's leading writers to riff on traditional tales from around the world. We don't just want you to retell an old ghost story, but to renovate it so that the story is dark and unsettling all over again.

Classic tales of the Jersey Devil, the spirits of the Tower of London, ghost lights, and phantom hitchhikers continue to capture the imagination. The Haunted Legends difference is that our contributors will tell the stories in ways they've never been told before.

We pay 6 cents a word, up to 8000 words.

The open-reading period will begin on midnight, EDT of July 15, 2008 and end 11:59p.m., July 31, 2008.

All submissions must be emailed as a RTF file to Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas at hauntedlegends@gmail.com. Please send no more than one submission. Please send no correspondence, such as queries, to hauntedlegends@gmail.com either before or after the reading period – all mail sent to the address at any time other than the reading period will be automatically deleted unread.

Note that much of the anthology is full and that a large number of ghost stories, especially those with an American or UK origin, are thus already "taken" by authors who have been personally solicited for work. Your best bet for this anthology is to go far afield – we are especially interested in renovations of traditional ghost stories from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, or in other tales that may not be well-known.

We also want to emphasize that we are interested only in traditional ghost stories made new again by the ingenuity of the writer. We do not want "campfire" versions of old stories, or slavish recitations. Think of new forms, new voices, new themes, new ways of considering these classic tales. Do not send us your trunk stories. It should be as though your version was always occulted within the classic rendition, but never before perceived or acknowledged.

And now, a brief AFAQ (anticipated frequently asked questions):

May I query you with an idea for a ghost story to make sure that it has not already been taken?

No, you may not. If you believe that your idea is already taken, you may wish to research another idea. Indeed, even if the idea has not already been claimed by one of the solicited authors, you may well still face competition from a dozen other variations in the slush. Novelty is your best approach.

Well, what if I query you anyway?

I may decide to give you a misleading answer, or no answer at all.

So how about if I query Ellen Datlow instead? She's the nice one, anyways.

You have misapprehended the situation. Let us put it this way: when was the last time Ellen Datlow had an open-reading period for any of her original anthologies? She doesn't want your queries either.

Can I just make up a ghost story?

No. You have to find an existing one and renovate it in an utterly brilliant fashion.

How will you will be able to tell the difference?

We are obsessive experts and we are friends with even more obsessive experts.

Is this all some kind of cruel joke?

I'd call it the end result of a large number of compromises, all of which were necessary to guarantee any sort of open-reading period.

This is madness! Why does everything have to be so hard all the time? Why are we pitted against one another in these awful competitions, and for crumbs? Crumbs, I tell you, crumbs! As if we were starving rats. I hate you!

Fools! Your despair only makes me stronger!

I've been mining my old archives. This was in them:

The best trap for a Muse is to write. Don't sit around waiting for her to drop by and wave her magic wand. Start writing. Write crap if that's all you have at the moment. Keep writing. Follow that trail that you're making--it leads to Her. When you find Her... DON'T STOP! Keep at it.

—Me, no later than April 17, 1995

Me, today: No duh.

And yet, sometimes it's good to be reminded. Thanks for the reminder, almost-19-year-old me!

In case anyone was wondering when I'd finally get around to fixing my AllRSS (the RSS feed compiling the last ten blog posts I've posted anywhere, featured on my home page and on LiveJournal) so that it displayed something more useful than a PHP error citing weirdness at Metroblogging... it's fixed now.

Reminder to self: double-check that any future site-upgrades at Metroblogging do not mangle the AllRSS. Double-check the moment you hear of said site-upgrades, not some two months later. Please.