author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today, Feb 2, is Imbolc, one of the eight Sabbats celebrated in the Wiccan calendar and sacred to many other Pagan traditions as well. Though today's Pagan religious systems vary as to how much actual Real True Ancient Traditions they contain, Imbolc was indeed celebrated in pre-Christian times. It was the feast day of the Goddess Brigid, beloved of the Celts. And when Christianity took hold in the region, she became Saint Brigid, and her Day became Candlemas.

Now, Brigid and Brigid's Day have connections to all things dairy, because Brigid watches over the milk-bearing livestock. Google up the two words "brigid dairy" and you'll find a bunch of them named after Her. Imbolc falls at the time of the year when the cows and the ewes first begin producing milk for the year. And so Brigid watches over dairies, those who work the dairies, and the young animals who need that milk to thrive.

But Brigid has other concerns: healing, the tending of the sick and the poor, the waxing of the light from late winter into early spring. And She is the patron Goddess of those who create. She has a particular affinity for blacksmiths. "And the poets call on Her, too...."

Now you know what poets are like – they are people who feed their souls on beauty, and a verse that won’t run to its meter is as painful to them as a wrenched knee is to the rest of us. But a poet wants more, too – a poet wants a verse to go out and do some good; for the poet shapes the verse – which is what the root of the word poetry means, after all – but then she sets the verse out to do some shaping of its own. So the poets call on Brigid, saying, Brigid, heal my words so that they run to the meter, and Brigid, light the flame of inspiration so that I can bend the words to my purpose, but most of all, they say, Brigid, let my words go out to others to be a source of wisdom, wisdom that does the service of healing, and wisdom that gives the gift that is needed, and wisdom that inspires the souls of women and men.

And so this comes right back around to yr. humble Blogger, who's a bit of a lapsed Wiccan, or at least an inobservant one, but who couldn't let the day go by with out acknowledging Imbolc, and Brigid, and Brigid's gifts of wisdom and inspiration to poets. You see I've been at Her altar today--there's a word count on the new story. There's a whole bunch of new scenes. They're not very good yet, they're only 1st draft and then some, but, as I've found, I can't write the story right the first time. It's got to be down on the page before I can figure out what the story really is.

Not that it should take a High Holy Sabbat to get me writing--but I wasn't going to not write today. Not hardly.

Maybe tomorrow I can finish that first draft and really figure myself out. And maybe I can also figure out what good this story wants to do in the world. We're in the entertainment industry, us fiction writers, we live by our ability to make readers turn pages, but there's other stuff a good story does. I'm not always sure what else my stories are doing, especially the ones down on the Horror end of the Fantasy spectrum like this one, but when I get 'em right, I know they do something. Brigid knows better than I what that something is, I suppose. I can't go after it in specific. I can only write the best story I can, and trust in that touch of Her grace.

Oh! And I also messed around in the dairy, so to speak. I mean, that jug of milk that's a bit past its expiry date? I made it into paneer. Hooray for paneer! John and me and Avedan all nibbled a bit of the trimmed edges before I put the squared slab into the freezer bag where I accumulate paneer against the next time I make saag. Which should be around spinach harvest time. Eostre, maybe?

Sometimes a day just kinda gets away from me, and I just get nothing useful done. The typewriter doesn't come out. The short story scenes don't get written. And then it's 11:30 PM and I'm sleepy and it's so very easy to think, "You know, screw it. I'm going to bed. Writing can happen tomorrow."

But there's always another 15 minutes.

My laptop is coming to bed with me, and I'm going to poke at the half-formed scenes in my head before I lose consciousness.

The short story I'm currently avoiding working on occurs in a very strange conceptual overlap. Writers do that, and poets; I'm convinced it's a universal part of creativity. Totally unconnected thoughts get their wires crossed, thanks to that unruly and involuntary associative quality of imagination, and the resulting circuit does things that the electronic components manufacturers never dreamed of and would probably get superstitious about.

It starts with a recent homework prompt from Melanie Tem's writing group. (I seem to have mentioned this before.) She shared an anecdote concerning a writer she knew who'd been working on the same novel for years. He'd constantly get within sight of the end, then tear it all up and rewrite from the beginning. It's not all that uncommon; how many of us progress from incremental rewrite to incremental rewrite without ever finishing the first draft? But the prompt was, "Why can't they finish the book? What would happen if they did?"

Then a friend alerted me to an anthology I ought to be submitting to, and its theme dovetailed nicely with the prompt. Clearly, if the book ever ceases to be in a constant state of construction, something nasty will escape and do terrible things.

And of course that thought led to the famous Winchester Mystery House, which Mrs. Winchester kept in a constant state of construction for, so legend has it, a fairly similar reason. More or less. Meanwhile, flailing around for some sort of structure, I considered conversations between the writer and a psychologist, the latter cluelessly offering irrelevant professional insights on writer's block. Kind of like Richard Matheson's short story "Person to Person," in which the shrink tries to convince the narrator that the phone in his head is just an invention of a troubled subconscious mind. It isn't, of course.

So far, so good. One thought leading in an orderly and explainable fashion to the next. What I don't get is why the poem "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" popped into my head as an alternative structural frame.

Then while I was mulling all that over, the uncanny blackbird die-off in Arkansas happened.

So there you go. Lots of weird ideas and not a word written. As author Kit Whitfield put it, I've got mostly ideas about a story but not much in the way of ideas for a story. I don't have a good handle on the main character, I don't know what they write, I can't really see where they live and work, and I can't decide on the supernatural mechanics involved in trapping an infernal monster inside an unfinished novel manuscript.

But I've printed out the poem and hung it over my desk, and I've read some literary criticism about it. I've done some research on the Winchester House and the fallen blackbirds. I've got ideas toward the structure of the story, ideas like "Thirteen small scenes, each somehow connected with a poem stanza and having a blackbird in it somewhere if only in a very minor way. The last scene should involve the bird die-off and a day that dawns directly onto evening because of the snow." Structural clues like that often makes the difference between thinking in futile circles and actually writing something that goes somewhere. It's how "And On the Seventh Day" finally got written all those years ago; once I knew that there should be seven scenes, one for each of the days of the week in an oblique parallel to Genesis 1, I could write the story.

And I think tomorrow I'll be dusting off the typewriter. It worked last time, after all.

I made some. One of them was, "Devise a writing schedule with great specificity, and stick to it." This post is to announce my having done the first half of that.

It goes something like this:

1. Four days a week (Tue.-Fri.),
2. write a 6-hour work day,
3. which includes
   • blogging gigs,
   • fiction,
   • and paid content writing.

The time spent on blogging and content writing can shift. The people paying me to blog and write articles can shift. But the fiction has to happen. It absolutely does, and for no less than 2 hours a day. It's what it's all about, after all. So I'm trying to put it closer to the beginning of the day, to make sure it happens. Or at least to change the order of tasks around every day so that no one thing becomes The Thing That Never Happens. (About this, more later. Like, later this week. Probably.)

As to the second half of that resolution... well. Tomorrow is Monday. A whole new week. A whole new week plus an extra day because Abbondanza has not yet called its volunteers back to the farm for the spring. Every week is a chance to start fresh! And so I shall.

That blogging once every work day? Blogging here? I'd like to get back into that too. Consider this a new start.

So recently I've been trying to create and adhere to a useful daily schedule, as per New Year's Resolution the First. And one of the things I want to get done during a typical work-day, rather than, say, once per week, is a spot of web content writing or other project guaranteed to result in money. In trying to improve my output there, I have figured out something really important about researched content writing, such as a writer for Demand Media Studios ends up doing. About how I do said writing, anyway; your mileage may vary.

You ready? Here it is:

Too much data kills.

So I'm researching an article about fruit trees and how they metabolize stuff. This naturally leads to college course study guides describing photosynthesis and cell respiration. And the photosynthesis equation, which I dimly remember from high school. And the krebs cycle, to which I attribute most of the physical pain and nausea that resulted from my taking the AP Biology test (which I passed, but which the University of Washington had absolutely no use for, so there went uncounted hours of my life I will never get back). And molecules of ATP and ADP and NADP, some with ionic plus signs on the end signifying something or other and--

And this is a $15 article I'm writing, here. I should not feel like I have to write a chemistry thesis. But I'm staring at these course study guides and my brain is spinning and my tummy is churning and writing is not happening.

Then I find a PDF describing the process in a chatty, breezy tone and from a broad top-down view rather than from under a microscope. It's all "Light hits leaves, therefore chemical energy, therefore water breaks down and carbon dioxide breaks down and viola, oxygen and glucose! Yaaaaay!" And suddenly things are very simple in my head, and I'm mentally composing the first two sections of the paper. Yaaaaay.

It really comes down to finding the right reference articles that have the right balance of info detail. Also to knowing what kind of info needs to go into the article, so I can distill the right amount of detail from a microscope-level description of photosynthesis if I need to. Also remembering that I'm only getting $15 to $20 for the article, let's keep the time spent per article short, OK?

Besides, I've got a novel to edit. I can't do that if I'm spending all day attempting to relearn the krebs cycle.

When I was in fourth grade, I stole a book.

I won't say it's the only time I've been a thief. As a youngster, I once "borrowed" a few pennies from my grandmother's table when she and her daughters were playing penny-ante Boo-Ray. In fifth grade once I picked up fifteen cents, the exact amount of spare change you got back from a dollar from the lunch cashier at St. Catherine, telling myself that found change on the ground was fair game, even the ground right underneath the monkeybars right after classmates had been hanging upside down there. As an adult in the workforce, I've committed my share of "oops, I cooked too many hot dogs, these will have to be thrown out" and I've taken home the odd office supply item too.

But only in one case did I steal a thing outright, with no rationalization prepared, with no contrived justification in my head but only a blatant desire for a thing that wasn't mine. And it was a book.

There was this battered copy of Edmund Wallace Hildick's The Active-Enzyme, Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch amongst the random collection of middle grade books in my home room. It was on the bottom shelf, half-invisible due to the dog-eared state of its spine. Already a committed fantasy reader, attracted to stories about kids and magic, I settled down on the carpet to read as much as I could before my block of free time came to an end. I read it over several days, nibbling it and biting it and swallowing it whole over a series of free periods. I loved it.

I loved it so much I took it home with me and never brought it back.

Actually, depending on how you count vices, this book was the occasion of more than one.

Arrogance, for instance. Thinking that what I enjoyed must necessarily be univerally enjoyable, I eagerly brought it to the teacher's attention when she was next looking for read-aloud material. Shame and embarrassment soon followed when my classmates bored of it and the teacher abandoned it before the end of Chapter 1.

Then there's witchcraft itself, and heresy, and disobeying one's parents. This was the book that firmly cemented in my head the notion that casting spells was something I could really do, thus laying the groundwork for my discovery of witchcraft as part of a religion people actually practiced. Which the Catholic Church was probably not down with, and my parents definitely weren't down with.

See, unlike most stories of youngsters doing magic I'd read until then, this one was realistic. Hildick's protagonist, Alison, is neither spirited away to Narnia nor visited by fairies nor given supernatural gifts. Instead, she finds a book forgotten on a shelf and begins experimenting with the magic spells described therein. The synchronicity wasn't lost on me: I, too, had found a book forgotten on a shelf, just as though, meant for me alone, it were disguising itself against other curious eyes. And the spells Alison performs are clearly spelled out on the page, easy for a reader to try -- complete with Alison cavalierly substituting whatever came to hand when the grimoir called for things she couldn't find. And the author left the results of her spells deliberately ambiguous: coincidence, or magic? You decide.

Remember the furor over kids turning to witchcraft over Harry Potter? I found that ridiculous from the start. Any kid who tries to emulate Rowling's wizards will be disappointed on the first attempt. No, if you want a book that gives real-world-followable instructions on magic that you can convince yourself actually worked, and bears certain resemblances to modern-day Wicca, that's Hildick's book.

So. Fiercely wanting to hold onto my newly found witchcraft instruction manual, freshly convinced that I was alone in valuing the story, and worried that the teacher, having been made aware of its existence and its universal disapprobation (well, near-universal, but I was a known freak; I liked Neil Diamond and I was a girl who played with Transformers), might cull the shelves and make the book vanish forever... well, I simply preempted her, and performed the vanishing act myself.

I still have it today, even more battered than ever, squirreled away in a chest of precious things. I get it out and reread it periodically. It's a damn good book. Hildick died in 2001, recently enough for me to feel keenly the regret of never getting a chance to tell him how that book changed my life. And it did. The witchcraft thing? Superficial. I'd have gotten there eventually. No, there were more important effects. In that book, Hildick spoke to the pre-teen's constant undercurrent of frustration in a mature flowing language that challenged the young reader to competence. He didn't talk down to me; he understood me, and he respected me. In under 300 pages, in a book published three years before I was born, he conveyed to me what it was to be me.

Being a child means being surrounded by, ruled by, and often belittled by a sea of adult voices. Those adult voices said that if I thought I was being treated unfairly, I was wrong and it would all make sense when I was older. They said that if I was unhappy it was because I brought it on myself, usually by being disrespectful. They that if I was frustrated I must be overreacting. If A then B. QED.

But Hildick created the character of Alison, and from the first page her frustrations are respected even when they are overreactions. Her sense of injustice is validated even when no one really can be accused of being unfair. In writing Alison, he told me I was not alone. I wasn't a freak. Gods, it was good to hear.

Why am I telling this story now?

Well, see, I lied way up there in the third paragraph, about that being the only time I stole something outright. Sort of. I mean, had I told this story this morning it would still have been true. Um. Except not if I hadn't been very good Tuesday afternoon...

I confess. I have discovered in myself a disturbing tendency to wish to liberate books. Specifically, neglected books. Books being misused as decorations. While others steal coffee cups from Denny's, I'm tempted by the monogrammed blank hardbacks in the Banana Republic outlet in the Lakeside Mall. (Why does a clothing store have a decorative pile of books? And why not use real books from a library sale? And how cool would it be to use one of their blanks as my next dream diary?) The obviously valuable collectables getting dusty at the Dark Horse, those I don't think I'd touch...

...but this book that's now in my canvas tote bag, it was published in 1981, it has library markings all over it down to the shelving sticker on its spine, it was hardly a valuable collectable, and it wanted so badly to be read.

When I was at my cousin's pre-wedding cocktail party at a French Quarter restaurant, I stole a book...

Is December over? Yes, along with 2010. Did I finish a new story draft or revise-and-submit an existing story? No. Am I feeling ashamed of myself like a shameful little shame-filled thing? Why yes, I believe I am.

Only that sort of feeling never got a person anywhere without its being scrapped for parts first. Those parts turn out to be "motivation to do better" and "recognition of what it takes to do better."

So. January 2011: The month of doing better. Now with New! New! New Year's Resolutions!

If I weren't so persnickety about "meme" has a definition, effing learn it I'd call it a "meme." But I won't, being persnickety about such things. ("Persnickety." Hah. It is to chortle. How about "vehement and rageful like unto fire"? That's better.) Instead, I'm calling it a list of New Year's Resolutions for Writers. I posted it as an Examiner Hot List today, probably making it a bit more prescriptive than it ought to be. Now, I'm gonna post the personal version here.

I resolve to...

1. Devise a writing schedule with great specificity, and stick to it.
2. Come to each scheduled writing time with work-in-progress intent.
3. Investigate publications local to me.
4. Volunteer some portion of my writing time pro-bono.
5. Decide on a Big Goal and begin working toward it.

On the other hand, I'm not going to entirely waste writing time this week. This week takes up far too much January for that. Some work will get done. Also some concrete thinking; the above list is great, but only as a vague outline. As a blueprint, it lacks actionable instruction. I'll be working on the blueprint this week. I'll just be working on more of a chaotic schedule until my return to Boulder, is all.

All for now. More later. Happy New Year!

It's only fair to warn everybody: It's that time of year again.

Tuesday I went to the grocery and picked up half a pound of slivered almonds; varying amounts of golden raisins, currants, dried strawberries, diced dried pineapple, diced dried papaya, and candied ginger; and a buddha hand citron.

That night I did my best to julienne the strawberries. They, the raisins, and the currants went into a mixing bowl with 1/2 cup Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, an additional shot of which went into me.

Last night I sliced the citron into inch-long thin strips (in between turns of Dominion: Prosperity -- that second one's a YouTube link, btw) and candied the heck outta them. While they were cooking, I sliced up the candied ginger and set the results aside. Then I turned off the heat when the ice-water method said "Stop already! You wanted the thread stage? Dude, I don't care that your thermometer isn't showing higher than 220 degrees, your thermometer knows nothing, we're rapidly approaching the soft-ball stage! You want citron pralines? I didn't think so!" Strain and dry.

This morning the citron is well and truly turned into candy, and the reserved syrup is doing very yummy things to my morning cuppa tea. I'm contemplating heading back to the grocery for sugar, as I've run out. And then maybe heading over to The Container Store, if that still exists, to pick up new containers to store beans in, since that's what's in my big, round, can-handle-a-tube-cake Rubbermaid container.

And then mixing and baking the fruitcake.

Seeing as how I'm a couple weeks late making with the baking, I'll need to use extra whiskey to get it drunk between now and Solstice.

So! Warning duly emitted, it is now time to get on with the business of the day. About that, one hopes, more later.

So I'm celebrating NaNoWriMo being over by getting the heck out of town. Whee! Bridget and I didn't exactly intend the timing to work out this way -- it just happened to be the first weekend available at the Sheraton Mountain Villa from when I called back in early October to make the reservation. I made the call sort of late; Bridget had to kick me electronically about it. "Avon lady wants to go to Avon!" I emailed back, "Good idea!"

Somewhere along the way we started a tradition of treating ourselves to a writing retreat once a year or so. There are worse ways to make sure an annual time share week gets used.

The first time we did it, during one of our daily pedestrian pilgrimages from the Sheraton to Loaded Joe's, Bridget noticed the statue standing at the traffic circle where Avon Road and West Benchmark meet. "Is that the Avon Lady?" she said? Then, maybe five years later, she became an Avon Lady herself. The connection wasn't causal, though it may have been gestaltic. That first trip is also the origin date for our tendency to refer to our favorite bar/cafe/wi-fi hotspot as "Exploded Joe's." It only takes one slip of the short-term memory to start a tradition. (Ask me sometime about "fermentas" in musical notation.)

So. On a writing retreat. But am I writing? Well... two Demand Studios articles in two days is more than I managed all November. And I've kept up with my Examiner pages, which I did manage to maintain more or less throughout NaNoWriMo. Thus and thus for the daily professional hackery. But what about fiction?

Goal the First: Daily free-writing, also known as "Story Idea Du Jour." I did it Wednesday, the day I finally threw up my hands and said, "You know what? Today's my day off." And I did it Friday morning here in Avon. I'm getting something really juicy about a book that's like the Winchester House, in that its creator believes that something awful will happen the moment that it is no longer actively under construction. Possibly a demon will escape.

Goal the Second: Grab a story from the pile of stories waiting to be made ready for submission, and work the hell out of it. I've decided on "Unfinished Letter" but I haven't done any work on it yet. I think I may be in that stage of composting that resembles procrastination. I have my hard copies with peer critique notes on them; I think I shall read them before I sleep tonight. Also, I'd like to get my hands on some epistolary literature from the U.S. Pioneer West at the turn of the twentieth century, in hopes of shifting the voice away from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and more towards something like, I dunno, that's the point, I don't know. More like the U.S. Pioneer West at the turn of the century, that's all.

But of course we are in Avon. We are not holing up in a hotel room and writing nonstop. We're on vacation. That means Karaoke with Sandman at Loaded Joe's (I don't care how many photos Sandman puts up on Facebook; I only got up on the stage once! This year!). That means walking our feet flat up at Beaver Creek Village and nearly getting flattened by skiers. That means paying homage to the Avon Lady statue, eating at Fiesta Jalisco, drinking our share of Loaded Joe's "Irish Americano", toasting marshmellows for s'mores at the fire pit by the pool.

Also, that means feeding ourselves lovely meals prepared in our minimal villa kitchenette. We're very proud of this. The Sheraton Mountain Vista has rooms of two basic floor plans, one small and one large, paired off into two-bedroom lockoffs. John and I actually own a week in the 2-bedroom unit, but what we had left to use during this season (there's an exchange rate involving StarOptions[TM] and three basic seasons) got us the smaller floor plan. And the smaller unit has, as far as cooking goes, pretty much a sink and a coffeepot and a combination microwave/convection-oven. Also a certain amount of flatware and cookery aids.

Using just these resources, here's how dinner went tonight:

1. In the large, shallow, uncovered dish: 1 Field Roast brand "Hazelnut Cranberry Roast En Croute". These are fantastic and only produced during the holiday season.
    
2. In the smaller, covered casserole: 2 apples, sliced but not peeled, mixed with 1 packet syrup from Denny's and about a tablespoon cinnamon from Loaded Joe's coffee condiment bar.
    
3. Place roast atop rack in oven. Place casserole, its lid on but upside-down so as to take up less vertical space, below rack in oven.
    
4. Oven buttons: "Roast", "425", "45:00".
    
5. With about 15 minutes remaining, remove apples from casserole and pile around uncovered roast. Drizzle juices over roast. Return roast to rack in oven; finish baking. Wash out covered casserole meanwhile.
    
6. Pull roast from oven and set to cool. Meanwhile, follow the microwave directions for a packet of Uncle Ben's Long Grain & Wild Rice, Sun-Dried Tomato Florentine. Nuke it in the covered casserole, mixing in a bag of Eating Right brand Broccoli Stir Fry mix.
    
7. Eat. Make happy noises if so inclined.

Clearly we are mad geniuses. But then, what else do you expect from two authors?

With that declaration, begone guilt and come early bedtime!

That is all.