author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

No, of course that bar hasn't moved 3,250 words to the right. Yes, I know I'm in deep ca-ca. Indeed. Look, don't bother me and my nice fuzzy coat of comforting denial. I am in pain right now, all around the collarbone, and the creases under my eyes are sticky with tears, and it's all Aeire's fault.

Still don't get it? Try reading this one. Yeah. That one's pretty good. Hmm. So's this other one.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a three-hour nap to take.

42,147 divided by 13 equals
3242.0769230769230769230769230769

That is all. Carry on.

OK. Check this out.

Right now - I mean, right now this minute - if I wanted to finish the novel in a week, I'd have to write 7,000 words a day. Well, 7,150.

That kind of makes the daily 3,000-plus-change I actually have to accomplish, in order to chalk up a win for NaNoWriMo '03, seem fairly doable.

(Sorry - just got distracted. FlashbackRadio.com played the opening theme to Fat Albert, and my brain rubbernecked.)

It got easier to increase my word count in a hurry because I reached the bit where the Main Character indulges in a gripe session with his best friend. And for me dialogue tends to come naturally. Both characters end up sounding like me in show-off mode, but at least they're saying things real people might say, and there's an undercurrent of humor running through it.

The only problem is, the story isn't actually going anywhere. The story is, in fact, sitting in a bar griping about its mother and the tragedy of a fine stout going to waste.

At least the word count is growing, and at a rate greater than 300 words a day. And the nice thing about doing something I'm good at, like dialogue, is that it restores my confidence in my writing ability in general. And that's a boost that'll carry me through the next thousand words, easy.

I heartily recommend it, if you're a good 20K behind schedule as well. Warm up to your writing session by doing whatever kind of writing reminds you how much fun writing is. 'Cause if it ain't fun, what the blistering Hell are you doing it for?

So, there's seven of us here now, and things are getting a little bit noisy. Sgmoo is exhorting me to go register NaNoProMo.org, for National Novel Procrastination Month - "I mean, you're online. Get on top of it!" I demurred, preferring to put it off until next month.

The topic has since moved on to the logistics of writing an entire novel of maniacal laughter, and how many words it would come to, and how you would spell them.

I had intended to get some writing done here, but I've hit a difficult part, and the Boulder Meet-up is distracting. It's certainly easier to think about spelling maniacal laughter and analyzing the cocoa content of chocolate chips from Whole Foods than it is to figure out how my main character plausibly discovers the nature of his highly unlikely problem.

Meanwhile, I Am Clever. Again. When I update my word count here, it also updates my word count on nanowrimo.org, along with my novel's title and the excerpt I'm displaying. Cool, huh? I may even make my novel excerpt visible from here. Stay Tuned.

Yeah. Phone call. Got it written - go, me!

In fact, I'm just about finished with The Prologue, or, more properly, Part I: Air. These are the ten single-spaced pages in which Our Hero finds out that He Has A Problem. I'm almost done writing him up to the realization of the exact extent of that Problem, and the scene will close with him driving back to Seattle knowing he will never be able to leave it.

Scene fades on westerly point of view, the Geo dwindles towards the Puget Sound, sun sets over the Pacific in a rather illogical way considering Our Hero had started out in the early morning and hadn't gone more than 15 miles but who cares it's symbolic.

And then what?

And then my sense of immediate structure dissolves. I know that my character needs a daily life and that supporting characters figure into it but really it's just marking time as interestingly as possible until The Problem Gets Worse.

Once upon a time, I wrote a lovely story of which I'm still very proud, about an angel who lost his wings. I wrote it for college, so naturally it came down to last-minute deadline panic during which I didn't know how I'd ever finish. What finally cut me loose and allowed me to tell that story from beginning to end was structure. I saw how the tale could happen over a week, with both the biblical allusions to Genesis (seven days) and to the Passion (death is explored on a Friday and rebirth on a Sunday). Each day would house one scene, essentially. And so the rough draft was no longer the aimless wanderings of an explorer with no sense of direction but instead an exercise in filling in blanks.

This year's novel does have a structure, but it's a pretty wide one, especially since I'm still reluctant to make any choices about the ultimate forms that the crises will take. That understood, it goes something like this:

Part I: Air In which Our Hero learns He Has A Problem, and we are tantalized with hints as to its Origin.
Part II: Earth In which Our Hero learns to live with his Problem, but is unprepared when the Problem takes a turn for the worse. A Crisis is reached.
Part III: Water In which a short-term Solution is found. Of necessity this solution causes a most inconvenient and unjust situation. The Truth is discovered, prompting Our Hero to make a difficult Choice (but not before enjoying Intimate Relations with a Mermaid; he's had a Rough Time Of It and deserves a little bit of Fun).
Part IV: Fire In which a final Resolution is reached, and our story Ends.

If that sounded a little vague, it's because I don't want to give anything away. If this ever gets published, you wouldn't want me to spoil the plot, would you? I myself have been avoiding finding out what's going to happen as much as possible!

So. Part II is going to consist of quite a lot of "day in the life" style word count padding. And Part III will contain much angst. Any more than that, I'll just have to read it to find out. And to read it, of course, I'll have to write it.

Quick! "Why does a writer write?"

Because it's not there.

My character is avoiding a phone call right now. Accordingly, I am avoiding writing about it.

My word count is depressing me. 3,130 is not quite the total recommended for the end of Day Two - and here it is November 7th! I hope to catch up this weekend. Heck, I hope to catch up on a lot of things this weekend: studying for my pilot license exam, inputting data for Little Bull Creations's current client, balancing up the household accounts about a week late...

See what I mean? A butt-load of crap to do!

But last night I went to my Magic Secret Hideyhole to write... and it worked. Granted, I only got about 200 words written, and a mere 50 or so of them were actually after the end of the previous session's output - but that was only because I was tired. It felt good. Writing in the dark, in a place only I can go - it felt good.

I've always loved attic spaces. It's something I'll probably never outgrow: the otherworld privacy, the dark place that brings Let's Pretend just one step closer to reality, the place that is not a place in a time outside of time... And the attic was always forbidden to me as a child, for fear I'd impale myself on a roof nail or clumsily crush a family treasure. That sense of taboo has not lessened as I have gotten older. At 27 I still feel like I'm tresspassing, and it adds to the attraction.

Maybe my love of early mornings is related. Both attics and the pre-dawn hours feel intensely private - places and times that belong to only me. And in those space/times I can get a lot of gloriously selfish work done.

So if I don't get around to writing that phone call beforehand, I'm sure I can get it written tonight in my Magic Secret Hideyhole. As Stephen King says, we all need a place on which we can close the door, in which we can go privately insane.

(Well, maybe he didn't put it exactly that way.)

...is when you realize that what you thought was an idea for a novel was actually just an idea for an opening scene and a snippet of Act II drama.

I'm there. I am so there. My character is now on a bus home after his initial disturbing brush with fate, alone at last with his thoughts... which means I have to figure out what these thoughts of his are.

And no, I can't just skip over to the aforementioned Act II drama. Said drama really ought to be informed by those things I learn by writing the intervening bits of story — things like what my character does with his every day life, who his friends are, what his family is like, who especially will miss him when it comes out that he can never go home to Denver again.

I don't really know this boy. I don't know what it's like to miss Denver either — I'm too busy angsting over what it means to miss New Orleans. And I haven't the first clue about being a pre-law student! I've studiously avoided anything to do with the law all my life!

As usual, there's an appropriate writers' cliche for First Scene Slump: Write it to find out. Several hundred words later, I'll know something.

I have a buttload of stuff to do. And I don't mean, like, one polite little pert butt-cheek, here. I mean a huge honkin' assload of crap.

Sorry. Was that rude of me? (Yes.) Do I care? (No.) Why? (Because I've just realized exactly what a mess I'we gotten myself into! I mean, look at that word count!)

As usual, the inescapable conclusion is, if I'm buried up to my neck in the brown stuff, it's 'cause I put myself there.

It's actually kind of an empowering thought. However, I'm probably not going to meditate on it until December.

If there's one effect switching to Dvorak has had more than any other (besides slowing my typing down from 90 wpm to about 20, and besides tempting me to choose my words based on how easy they are to type), it's that of making me aware of what letter combinations are particular repeat offenders in my writing.

I've noticed, for example, that I use the word "again" a lot. Without, I might add, improving my "again"-typing skills by any significant amount. Also, I'm seeing a bunch of words that start with "us"--"usually", "usefully", "used". And far, far too many adjectives!

What this seems to do to my writing is, I'll get to a word like "useful" and, recognizing the feel of typing it, I'll attempt to think of another word in order not to be repetitive, when in fact it's not that word I've been overusing so much as it's been bits of that word.

What overall effect this will have on my rough draft has yet to be seen.

Anyway... more tomorrow.

Look! Pretties!

OK. I am a clever little Vortex. See, there's this slick word-count bar at the top of the page, it's made of two itty-bitty divs all dressed up in CSS to go out and meet the nice people, and there's an unimposing Log In link at the bottom of the page that I can click so I can enter humungo long-ass run-on sentences like this one right on the web page, there are links I can use to edit existing blog entries or just delete them entirely...

All right, genius. What's missing?

Yeah. That nicely decorated word count hasn't moved all day, has it?

Guess I'd better save developing the random quote administrative tool for later...and write now.