author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I'm in Montreal today, and will be until Tuesday morning. Montreal is where WorldCon is this year. It is full of lovely architecture, found art, great food, and cab drivers that speak only French. This weekend it is also full of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fans enjoying the heck out of each other's company.

Today I took some pictures. That's kinda news. I carry a camera with me but I'm sort of missing the shutterbug instinct, so the machine stays useless in the bookbag most of the time. It stayed there during this morning's "Stroll With The Stars" (a morning walk about town in company with several Industry Names, sort of a moving kaffeeklatsch without the sign-up sheet). That was silly. But I took it out for a couple of things today.

First, there's Leah Bobet doing her half-hour of autograph duty. Leah writes fiction, critiques manuscripts at this year's writing workshops, and edits the online speculative fiction magazine Ideomancer. Which is where I submitted "Sidewalks" at the end of June. Leah's response to this was not a rejection letter, but a rewrite request back on July 20th. This is a first for me, for a fiction submission. And it blows my mind. I always thought short fiction, especially short-short fiction, pretty much got accepted or rejected as is; how could a 500-word story be worth the time an editor takes going back and forth with the writer over revisions? Short fiction magazines are on tight budgets as it is! And yet here we are.

Rewriting "Sidewalks," as I've said here before, scares the crap out of me. Such a short story is like a tightrope walk; it balances on such a fragile line between the twin pitfalls of overwriting and underwriting. And I've already taken some falls on the overwriting side, making me really nervous when I'm asked to make something clearer or more explicit. When the response to my first rewrite came back asking for a second, I swear my mental reaction was "O Gods, what now? Don't make me do this! I'll break it for sure!" But then I printed out Leah's email, poured myself a shot of Glenmorangie and a bathtub of piping hot water, and contemplated the task in as relaxed a manner as my high-strung little self could manage.

I'm extremely glad for this process, and not just because it's not a rejection letter. Without the rewrite request, I might have been content with the story as it was. Sometimes it takes another reader to point out that the story isn't all it could be, and what it could be is worth striving for. Now, even if everything falls through and this process doesn't end in publication, I will still have a vastly improved story. That's pure gold.

I sent off the second rewrite shortly before WorldCon. I'd refrained from blogging about it while the process was still ongoing, up to now, but it's become too hard to resist. I mean, I've got pictures of Leah and me proudly displaying our knitting at WorldCon! (Leah is knitting her first pair of socks. They have a lovely ribbing that's a sort of barberpole lace. It's a pattern from Ravelry whose name I forget.) So not only am I all a-squee over having a fiction editor take this kind of interest in my story, but on top of that I got to geek out about knitting with said editor! How cool is that?

The third picture is Paul Cornell. Paul won a Hugo last year for a two-part Doctor Who episode that he wrote. It was based on a tie-in novel from several Doctors ago which he also wrote. And some readers may have noticed that a chapter in that novel bears a title ripped straight from a Kate Bush lyric. This sort of thing rarely turns out to be coincidence. Paul is a huge Kate Bush fan, and today I got to hear him give a presentation on her music as great fantasy writing. Do you know how seriously cool it is to hear someone whose work you admire totally geek out--in an educated, serious, literature-analysis way--about someone else whose work you admire? It's way cool. In fact, Paul has the coolest theory I have ever heard about the plot of The Ninth Wave (essentially Side 2 of Hounds of Love). (It involves alien abduction.)

This is what makes WorldCon the beautiful wonderful miraculous magical event that it is. Finding out who your heroes consider their heroes. Hearing them enthuse hard in full fan mode about their heroes. Also, finding out that you have more in common with those in the industry than just the industry itself. And I haven't even gotten into the other panels I attended today, or the great conversations at the Making Light party, or or or or or...

It's 3:30 AM. I should wrap this up and go to sleep. Good night!

I spent the better part of this past weekend with my Tuesday writing group in Nederland (elevation 8,233) where we did what writers do when we get together: We wrote. A lot. We also ate a variety of yummy things, walked our feet off, gawked at baby swallows at the post office, oohed and aahed at the scenery, lounged in the hot tub, and enjoyed the constant affections of two cats and a dog.

Tenaya took advantage of her family being out on a fishing trip to invite Ellen and I up to her house, which is cozy and spacious, well furnished in creature comforts, and also possessed of possibly the best view in town. See photo 1: this is the view from Tenaya's porch. The rooftops of central Ned, and the lake behind it--you can just make out the dam. From the desk Tenaya set me up at, I could see this view each time I looked out the window.

Next photo: Tenaya and Ellen smiling big happy smiles of accomplishment! This was taken Sunday afternoon just before Ellen and I departed for the bus station.

We had spent that morning and the day before alternating 2-hour writing sessions with breaks for food, exercise, and self-pampering. I got two brand new scenes for a brand new short story written ("Janet's Fibercrafts and Miscellaneous Services", temporary working title), and I submitted my very first content article to Demand Studios (it was subsequently approved and I got paid for it, yay!). Tenaya and Ellen were both deep in the organization stage of novel revisions, condensing scenes and considering character story arcs. Occasionally hummingbirds would buzz the garden (in which Tenaya and Ellen are sitting in this photo), or the pets would wander through, or someone would put on another pot of coffee or tea.

Group writing retreats: I can't recommend them strongly enough. With writing comes a multitude of snares: loneliness, aimlessness, self-doubt and self-effacement, even despair. A writing retreat can trip all those traps and render them harmless--at least temporarily. The constant company of friends who are equally determined to Get Writing Done is a good antidote for the solitary nature of the work. Holding each other to an agreed-upon schedule adds structure and inspiration to keep a writer on task and excited about it. And the very act of dedicating a weekend together to Writing And Nothing But Writing goes a long way to combat the everyday wear-and-tear damage a writer's confidence can sustain: "Are you working, or are you just writing?" "Am I interrupting something? Oh, you're just writing." "Everyone writes--how hard can it be?" Writers writing together are constantly reassuring each other, just with their continued presence and dedication, that what we are doing here is important. Important enough to protect it by turning off the phones, leaving everyday responsibilities in the hands of a kind friend or family member, to beg off invitations and social would-be obligations with "When--this weekend? Oh, I can't. I'll be busy writing."

We talked about having another one of these retreats soon, taking turns as hosts. I'm going to try to reserve us a weekend at the Sheraton Mountain Vista in Avon come late August or September; that worked out really well a couple years back. It's gorgeous up there in the Vail Valley. But if that doesn't work out, there's no reason we can't just congregate at my house. It's a pretty ordinary space compared to Nederland or Avon, sure, but even ordinary spaces can be consecrated to a purpose. Ask Tenaya: However exotic the location seemed to me, to her it was simply her house. She lives there day in and day out. She invited us up to help her make it special--by virtue of how we used it. Even a small corner of a two-bedroom apartment in the middle of the city can become special, dedicated to a special task. And never doubt that the task is special. Special enough to devote one's working life to it.

This is precisely what Second Life does best, in my opinion: brings together a virtual group to do the same sort of stuff you might do with a group in real life, only without the travel expenses, while using the tools of the virtual world viewing application to enhance the group experience. That doesn't mean I don't indulge in casino games or spend spare computing cycles with my avatar in camping chairs, mind you; I'm only human and I like free Linden Dollars as much as the next person. But it's the group activity potential that really gets me excited about virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular.

My avatar, Kavella Maa, is sitting in the audience at a place called "The waterstage and writers' circle". (For those unfamiliar, that link will take you to a portal web page which prompts you for permission to launch the Second Life world viewer and teleport you there.) There are cushions on the wooden dockside risers that you can click on to make your avatar sit properly (which usually works as advertised but sometimes leaves you facing off to the left so you have to get up and try again).

On stage is a microphone where open mic participants stand to read their works.

When an author mounts the stage, everyone in the audience receives a notecard (a text file object that you can create, save, keep in your inventory, and copy to others' inventories) with the text of their material on it. The authors read their material aloud; little green icons that mean "sound emanating from this point" appear above their heads, denoting that the voice you hear is indeed coming from the person controlling that avatar. If you use your camera controls to zoom in on the author reading, their voice gets louder, mimicking the effect of moving closer to hear better in a face-to-face group. (You can also set your preferences to modulate volume based on your avatar's position rather than your camera's.)

Meanwhile, the audience can comment as freely as they like on Local Chat, or even greet new arrivals with great verbosity, without fear of interrupting; Local Chat is text-only.

Each Wednesday at 2 PM Pacific Time, this Writers' Circle meets, organized by Jilly Kid of the Writers Guild - that's a group you can join - and MC'd by Hastings Bournemouth. Jilly sends out notices reminding the group about the event--and assigning a fun theme which authors may choose to incorporate into their offerings. This week, the theme is "Teddy Bear Picnic Day". Attendees can click on a sign beside the stage to have a free teddy bear T-shirt dropped into their inventory. (I'm wearing mine, of course.) Among the works written specifically for the theme are "Life's No Picnic," a poem by Aribella Lafleur, who wonders how teddy bears can even have picnics, having tummies full of fluff as they do; and "The Homophobic Hunter and the Un-caring Bear," a poem with sly humor and a wonderful rhyme scheme by... oh, dang it! the author didn't include his avatar name in the notecard! Dude, by-lines are important! We're also hearing non-themed excerpts from longer works by Huckleberry Hax and Arkady Poliatevska (whose profile appears strangely devoid of URL today, or else I'd make that a link too.

This is, of course, an incomplete list of authors who read today. I'm not taking minutes here.

There are flaws, of course. A bit of lag here and there, some authors having mic trouble, the odd audience member promoting themselves to co-presenters by commenting over the voice channel at inappropriate times. Y'know. Flaws happen. But, on the whole, the event and venue make me happy. It's a virtual world app doing what it should, and it's doing it about writing. I get to hear the voices of people whole states or even oceans away from me while I sit comfortably in the Seven Cups Tea House in Denver and work on a short story rewrite*. And I'm thinking about what I might share next week, if I get my butt in gear in time.

*Short story rewrite: Took another look at "Lambing Season" before resubmitting it and was unhappy with the blah-ness of the first few paragraphs. Am reframing the entire story via a top-end rewrite. Am hoping I have not killed the poor thing.

So there's this One-Minute Weird Tales thing, which I may have mentioned before. At this time, there's just one on the site. Weird Tales would like there to be more, so, they're encouraging submissions. So I wrote a little something... oh, Tuesday. I think. Yeah. Tuesday.

I just submitted it today.

Why so long? Because I couldn't decide on a freaking title, that's why! Gah. But then, in a story 120 words long, the title comprises a non-trivial percentage of the text, right? Deserves a bit of thought, right? Possible not six days of thought, though. In any case, I stopped whiffling, and it's on it's way now. Go me.

In other news, I've started pulling another story idea out of the Demonbox and potentially into the light of other people's eyeballs. Kicking and screaming. See, I'm in Chicago. It's Monday night. Monday night in Chicago means Twilight Tales Open Mic! Or, as it turned out, Twilight Tales Mini-Workshop. I wanted to bring something short to share and get critiqued, just in case there was room on the schedule. So I spent much of today trying to decide which half-baked idea might profitably go back into the oven. And then, once I decided, I spent half the afternoon getting around to the blackbirds-leaving-the-wire moment of "OK, all right, time to get to work! Really!"

So I ended up leaving myself only 30 minutes to get a real draft done--as opposed to the "babble draft" that was sitting on my hard drive, containing characters with no excuse for being in the story beyond the fact that they were in front of my eyes when I wrote it. I mean, this two-year-old draft had "I Am A Writing Exercise!" written all over it. You read it, you can almost hear Natalie Goldberg's voice saying "What are you looking at? Fifteen minutes. Go." And this was not getting turned into something presentable in 30 minutes.

Which was fine. On the one hand, the event was well attended, and the last person due a turn in the hot seat ended up postponing until next time. No one was hurting for me not offering up more that my opinions on others' writing. (As to that: Gods, I'm a mouth. Sorry.) And on the other hand, the simple act of getting started on the draft was beneficial in and of itself. Now I have something else to work on during my multi-city writing retreat.

A bit about the "getting started." This came up on the Absolute Write forums: Someone started a thread called "How do you motivate yourself to write?" Someone who, much like me (more frequently than I like to admit), has a work in progress but has a hard time making themselves sit down and work on progressing it. And the thread turned into a real treasure house of strategies for beating writer's block. Writers being a varied bunch, the suggestions offered were wildly divergent. So... read it. If one trick doesn't work for you, another will. Some depend on guilt and duty, others on excitement and play. Others depend on psychology, hypnosis, mood-altering of the non-drug-related kind. Some mix and match!

My main contribution was about the "getting started" thing that I keep mentioning but not really going into. My issue is, once I get the right momentum going, it sustains itself. The trick is generating that momentum in the first place. I've got, like, rubber in my butt and springs in my ALT-TAB fingers--I sit down, I get up again; I open up my word processor of choice, I ALT-TAB away to some blog or other. What finally works is to identify the first bite of any given task: Reading the critiques. Fixing the teeny-tiny nit-picky stuff in the draft. Describing the one scene. Printing out the babble draft and scribbling notes on it. Something, some small nibble like that--it "tricks" me into entering the room where the story is, and being in that room at all will result in story happening. For five hours, if need be.

(I have to admit that being away from constant Internet access does help.)

So I'm all started now. With any luck (and discipline), I'll manage to continue the momentum tomorrow evening on the train. We Shall See.

(Boy, this entry fits under a lot of categories. Also, I'm sure we can dig out 9 other ways of looking at procrastination and make a nifty pastiche reeeeal easy. "A writer and a story / Are one. / A writer and a story and an hour of Puzzle Pirates / Are one." You can probably fill in the rest.)

Met Ellen and Lady T for lunch today at Saxy's. Wrote. Inserted a new small something into the current Rocket-and-Timothy scene (the one where I left off Nov 30). That being, "Don't just have Timothy say that 'I'm better and quicker at this teleporting thing now.' Have him demonstrate it. This will both terrify and impress Rocket--but it will not change his mind." Ooh, more contradictions!

Anyway, we gently bothered the couple sitting beside us to pass my power cord under their table and plug it in for us. This was followed by my usual explanation for why I keep a 6-plug power outlet with me at all times; because often, and especially during November, I am in cafes with limited outlet availablity in company with several writers-with-laptops. The couple sitting at the table next to us were impressed, or curious, or something, and so we got to talking.

Confession: I don't have too many "clueless non-writers say the darndest things!" examples. Many writers have them, but I have been blessed with supportive family, lots of writer friends, and a laptop-cafe culture. When I whip out my laptop in a restaurant, I get mistaken for a college student, which occupation is much more widely understood. I don't typically get inundated with "What are you working on?" style questions followed by clueless assertions about my answer.

I have a few examples. They're pretty mild.

Example the first: I recall my former boss telling me over lunch that, whatever novel I was currently working on, I should try to get it published by Random House, because they publish good books. I said, "But I'm not sure this will be suited for Random House." (In fact, I was thinking Tor would be a better first choice. Or simply seeking an agent who works with urban fantasies, and letting them make that decision.) He said that I should try Random House anyway. What could it hurt? I might even get published by them! ...Now, I've received my share of "not suitable for this market" rejection letters, and those from markets I actually consciously concluded were suitable matches. Their opinion differed from mine on that subject, but not for lack of my trying. Sometimes you just miss. But at least you're trying to hit the dartboard, not just flinging missiles at random vertical surfaces! But, I suppose, to someone who has not made a study of the industry, there are simply publishers who publish good stuff and those who do not. I think he intended to pay me a compliment by suggesting that my work was good enough for a publisher he admired. Sweet, but rather baseless if so; he hadn't actually read my writing.

(Herein lies a rant about "if you think I'm easily pleased enough to accept baseless flattery as a compliment, you're not complimenting me; you're insulting my intelligence!" But that is not the topic for today.)

Another example: Once upon a time at the bar at Gunther Toody's (the one on middle Wadsworth in Denver, possibly no longer extant), I pulled out my spiral notebook and began a fifteen minute writing exercise on the topic "I am looking at." Restaurants are a great place for these, because there's a lot to look at. Furnishing, bric-a-brac, customers, oh my. Anyhoo, some of them customers came up to sit near me, and one asked, "What are you writing? A book?" I didn't feel the need to discuss, so I gave a curt little Yeah, sure, whatever. "Can I read it?" Er, sure. Once it's published. I kept scribbling. This was really par for the course. What made my jaw drop was the man responding with, "Well, I'm a publisher!" What the hell do you say to that? Indeed you are, my dear, and I'm Agatha Christie! I think what I actually said was Then you can read it when it's finished.

So much for my limited repertoire of Clueless Non-writers Say The Darndest Things anecdotes. I actually have more Clueless Writers Say... anecdotes than otherwise, strangely enough. Among them is the oft-cited "But if writing is your life, it isn't really work, is it?" Yes. Yes, it bloody well is. "Oh! I'm sorry to hear that you consider it work. But I have to ask, though, if that's the case, do you really consider writing to be your calling?"

This year's NaNoWriMo added to my anecdote stash admirably! Because here's the thing with NaNoWriMo: You write in public places a lot, and you do it in groups. And so you print out a "National Novel Writing Month Write-In" table tent so that other participants who may not recognize your face can find you. And this means explaining to non-participants what the words on your table tent mean.

Generic Conversation While Waiting For Write-In Quorum:

Me: "National Novel Writing Month is an annual challenge: Write a story of minimum length of fifty thousand words in thirty days."

Them: [Expressions of awe at this feat, followed by] "So you're a writer?" [Followed by inquiries as to subject matter, followed by Clueless Non-writers Say The Darndest Things! anecdote.total++]

But today... You know, I'm really not sure where today's conversation falls. Non-writer, or writer? Depends on why the man in Saxy's asked me what he asked me...

Conversation with table-neighbor at Saxy's:

Him: "So do you write for yourself, or do you write to be published?"

Me: "Well... I write. And then sometimes I try to publish the results."

Him: "But do you do one more than the other? Or at the same time? Or..."

Me: "At the same time, certainly. All my fiction begins as something I write for myself. Otherwise it's no good; it doesn't get finished or polished or sent out."

Him: "But, don't you sometimes just give the audience what they want?"

Me, getting bewildered: "No, not really--if I wasn't personally interested in it, the results wouldn't be good enough to give them what they want, see? It wouldn't be any good."

Him: "Not necessarily. They might not have the intelligence to see that or to want better."

I suspect he left unconvinced. And I was left to wonder: is he a generic salesman mistaking writing for an industry akin to sales (he was clearly a real estate or apartment lease broker, judging by the cell phone conversations none of us could help but overhear)? Is he someone who simply misunderstands the entertainment industry? Or is he perhaps nursing dreams of busting out as a novelist, and he wants to hear that it's as easy as "giv[ing] the audience what they want"?

The one thing I clearly got from that conversation was a clear and distinct contempt for the consumer. And, hey, having worked in customer service, I can share that contempt in very specific anecdote format. I have some war stories, boy. But contempt for the consumer as a business model? Bad, bad, bad bad bad wrong. Worse still when I hear it from the mouths of fellow writers! Ick ick ickity ick! Add to the "ick" factor the implied assumption that I should share this contempt--ew! I... I need to go wash my soul off. With anti-bacterial scrub, chlorine bleach, and vinegar.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Er.

For now, anyway.

So, yes, as of about 9:30 PM last night I completed the eking out of my 7th NaNoWriMo win. (7th? Good Gods--quickly assembles mental list of NaNoWriMo novel drafts of yore--Yes, that's right, I've done this every year since 2002!) "Eking out" because, once yWriter told me I had more than 50K words, I used its handy "Export obfuscated NaNoWriMo text" command, opened the resulting text file, Selected All (CTRL-A), Copied (CTRL-C), and Pasted (CTRL-V) this into the NaNoWriMo Word Count Validator, and was rewarded with a word count downsizing to about 49380. I think it's the usual deal where the em-dash formation I'm in the habit of using (word!--'nother word!) causes two words to count as one in more conservative word count algorithms. Whatever. So I went back to the scene I was working on, did another few paragraphs, tried again, and so forth until the word count you see here. And the purple "Winner!" bar and the proud happy Viking Longship image and the web page icons and all that.

So I took today off. Well, not off off; I had to tackle the household finances, which had sort of languished for a month and a half. Dug out all the bills from the pile of Stuff To Be Dealt With, some of them past due; paid them; pulled up the checking and saving accounts online and made sure my balances matched theirs; y'know. The stuff you ignore when you're frantically trying to meet a deadline. I got that done. But otherwise, today was a play day. I went to the gym and rocked out in the bouldering cave, and I went to IHOP with friends and played Puzzle Pirates until I was completing carpentry puzzles in my brain on the bike ride home.

Tomorrow, however, I write again. For one thing, the novel still isn't really done. I haven't really gotten my characters from point A to point B, where point A is "at each other's throats" and B is "angrily declaring love for each other". I still haven't entirely disentangled my idea of how the bad guy functions and how the main character plans to fight him/her/it, although I do understand how the main character actually ends up defeating it. And, as usual, I haven't figured out a useful denouement. A novel-length story will often exist in my head with a total Hannah-Barbera laugh-track ending ("Quick, someone say something goofy so we can all laugh and go home!") for months before I finally figure out how to tie the bow on that package.

Also, there are other stories than the Demonic Sweater Story that could be finished and sent out to meet the nice people.

So. Today was playtime. Tomorrow is back-to-work time. To be precise, tomorrow at 11:30 when some NaNoWriMo buddies and I will meet up for coffee and writing time. Just because the calendar's ticked over from November to December doesn't mean the write-ins have to stop.

Saturday morning I finally finished a complete draft of this story and emailed it to my writing group. Well, not so much Saturday morning as Saturday afternoon. It was 12:30. It was laaaaaate. I had promised to distribute it Wednesday, October 15th. I'd thought, "Tuesday's my nothing-but-writing day! Tuesday I'll finish it for sure!"

Yyyyeah right. Since when have I managed to do anything more productive with a Tuesday than sleep until noon (unless I went to the rock-climbing gym with John for 8:30 or so, and went back to sleep when I got home), crawl out of bed to do maybe half-an-hour of work of some sort, then crawl back into bed all disproportionately pleased with myself and feeling due a break? Yeah. Tuesday the 14th went much like that, only, no half-hour of work. And then, y'know, Wednesday through Friday were Wednesday through Friday. Full of stuff and things.

For what it's work, very soon the rest of the week will look like Tuesday. October 31st will be my last day on the clock at my part-time job. I'm gonna be an honest-to-garsh full-time writer finally. I mean, being a full-time writer was my plan back when I quit my full-time corporate web design job back in April 2004, but soon after I did that, the director of the non-profit I volunteer for asked me if I could spare ten to twenty hours a week to come in and fix their web page and do other miscellaneous tasks. And here I am four and a half years later. You'd think I wouldn't have any trouble staying productive on my own terms when I only work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday--and volunteer Thursdays at a local farm--and continue volunteering some four hours a week for the non-profit that is now also my employer--but by the time I bike home from the office I'm feeling like I ought to be allowed some play-time. And by the time I finish playing, it's bedtime. Apparently my self-discipline and time management skills are a bit more, say, non-existent than I like to admit.

So, starting November 1st, I'm a free agent again. Which is good news for for me on the NaNoWriMo front; I will have more time to go to write-ins and to organize stuff. However, Nov. 1 comes too late to help me out with current projects, so I need to dig up some self-discipline from somewhere or other and get things done. (About that, more later.)

Anyway. I finished this story Saturday. It has this is common with its origins: there's still a magically manipulative sweater involved. However, it's no longer set in and around a New Age store in north-west Denver. Its antagonist is no longer an individually acting eccentric employee. Instead, it's set in a fictitious community it unincorporated Adams County, east of Brighton. The antagonist is the central figure and namesake of the not-quite-town, and the whole town is in on her schemes. Which is to say, the magic involved in the sweater happens to be part and parcel of the community's way of life. And the protagonist walks right in thinking nothing's out of the ordinary. Think Wicker Man, only without the outsider's investigative motive. Think, if I've done this right, Shadows Over Insmouth.

Only I probably haven't done it right yet, which is why I volunteered it for Wednesday's critique session. Aside from one email bounce due to the recipient's mailbox being full, email did what email should and now several people whom I see twice a month and respect quite a lot will be reading it. Cringe! Nervousness and fright! I mean, given the last-minute nature of this story's composition, it's rather rough. It's probably a bit rushed at the end, even though the end came about a lot more organically and easily than I feared it would back when laying down scenes felt like a fractally infinite task. It's probably got copy-paste errors you could blow up a fictional neighborhood with.

And then there's knowing that I haven't exactly been the most gentle contributor to my writing group. I have been prone to Thinking Myself Right when commenting, rather than humbly offering "if it were my story I would" suggestions and "this might be just me, but" observations. And, being the prickly and temper-prone creature that I am, I've been guilty of causing a bit of... well, social tension. Which is the nice way of saying I've been kind of a bitch lately. I'm not proud of it. And I'm not under any illusion that people are going to be any kinder to me than I've been to them--not that I think anyone would be deliberately unkind out of some impulse towards vigilante justice; just that my effect on the tone of this group's discussions has not been for the better. I have to live in the environment I've helped create. So. Having given others a hard time, I don't expect to be given a particularly easy time myself. So I'm living on a steady diet of stomach lining and belated good intentions at the moment.

Um. Hi, y'all! I love y'all bunches! I promise to be good! (Please don't kill me.)

However frank and even merciless Wednesday's critique turns out to be, I think I'm going to need it. My head is an echo chamber, and when I last turned in a story (cf. "Turnips"), I was careless. The manuscript still had the blank template page header, for goodness's sake! It said "LeBoeuf / TITLE" in every upper-left-hand corner. And I mean, literally, "TITLE". Dammit. When Ellen Datlow lamented that so many manuscript submissions she had received revealed a lack of concern for manuscript submission format, she may well have been talking about me (if, that is, Nick Mamatas actually did think my story worth passing on to her, which I doubt). Beyond that, the story had stupidity in it, structural stupidity as well as line-by-line dumbness. Which is not to diminish the awesome assistance of my friend from VPX who did read it and gave me some great feedback on it, and then took the time to read the rewrite and confirm whether I'd fixed what he'd pointed out before as broken. Without his time and effort, the story would have sucked harder. It would have sucked great big granite boulders until the feldspar was striated. However, there's still a great deal of work to do. I printed out that story a couple weeks ago and began marking it up, and by the time I got to page five I understood that revisions wouldn't be a matter of a quick hour's gloss. Oh no. They'd begun to look like a good couple of afternoons' worth of work.

Which I would have taken care of by now. Really! Except, well, this story. Which I am sure will also get marked up thickly before the week is out. Or at least before the end of the month. Maybe. I hope. In any case, this story I have no illusions that is ready for prime time.

Yesterday my word count actually went backwards. I stopped using yWriter's word count and started using the NaNoWriMo Word Count Validator, because I have to get my happy purple WINNER bar and my shiny WINNER certificate, after all. And just like that my total went from some 49,800 to 48,600 or so. (I personally blame the em-dash.)

Yesterday I finally got to the beginning of the end book crisis. I got through the whole sex and death bit, which was admittedly clumsier than I'd have liked it to be but editing will happen later. After that come scenes I've rehearsed in my head for years, so I'm not worried about finishing. I just got done with the confrontation scene after the sex and death bit. It involves a lot of yelling at each other and someone breaking a window to make their dramatic exit off the 4th floor of, hypothetically, the French Quarter Hyatt. Unless it's the Mariott I'm thinking of. Who cares? It's November.

Anyway, today being Day 30, we're going to have our traditional mad dash for the finish line at the IHOP tonight. I'm at Vic's Downtown with the lunchtime crew at the moment, and I'm about to dive back in and write the next scene. The one where the not-so-imaginary-friend is reunited with the main character permanently and all the MCs questions are answered. Then I'll update my word count, get all my happy WINNER stuff, and take a break until IHOP, where I'll write the denouement and the magic words "The End."

And that's the plan.

Yes, I did break 40,000 at the Write-A-Thon yesterday! And my total of some 7500 words produced at that location won me the third prize, a bag full of Neat Stuff! (I now, for instance, own a small Moleskine notepad, so I can maybe figure out why everyone loves these things so much.) I also went home with a lot of the extra stickers from the Denver region, so maybe I can get those to the high schoolers and the Longmont contingent.

The Organizer is actually one of the founding doners for NaNoWriMo, and she'd in fact been to the San Francisco Write-A-Thon. She hopes that next year we can have another Colorado Write-A-Thon with planning further in advance and smaller, localized Write-A-Thons that similarly function as fundraisers for the Office of Letters & Light. I'm looking forward to it.

I would, of course, have blogged this yesterday, but I was already half falling asleep at the keyboard during the Write-A-Thon. John and I pretty much collapsed when we got home. Actually, we collapsed on the sofas out by the Wii, where we downloaded the original NES "Metroid" game and had a very relaxed nostalgia session.

Right now I'm at the Lazy Dog in downtown Boulder, attempting to watch the Saints v. Panthers game at a sort of oblique angle and working on today's 1667. Join me if you're in the area and don't mind football crowds.

Update: We won, by the way. We kicked their butts, and then we kicked their puppies. And now we're biting our nails over next week's game against Tampa Bay.

The Denver NaNoWriMo Contingent has come up with an awesome idea. I just overheard the organizer telling us how this came about. Apparently she was on the phone with Chris Baty (founder of the whole she-bang), who was talking about the famed San Fransisco Write-In, which makes those of us who can't get over to San Fransisco really jealous, and she said to him, "Just shut up about it, I have to go plan the Colorado Write-A-Thon!" And she hung up and immediately began to match deed to word.

So here we are: 4:00 PM, in a conference room behind the Panera in the Park Meadows Mall, fairly close to the dead center of the state, in the company of writers from all over (but mostly Denver and Boulder), getting ready to Write Like The Wind. Apparently there will be prizes for those who write the most words while here. Also for those who write the least, because our Organizer likes underdogs. (She's a Broncos fan.)

You can see how many words I've got. I'll blog again after, and you can see how many I did. Personally, I want to break 40,000, because that's All Caught Up. I got behind this past week what with wrapping up a freelance project that oughtn't to have gone on past October, and I've been banking on today for catching up.

Anyway, better get to it. Hugs & kisses--!