author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This is just to report that the short story manuscript whose title features prominently in this blog entry is in the slush again. Wish it luck and prepare it a comforting homecoming should it come back on its shield rather than with it.

Also, today has been another freelance-happy day. Produced about 400 words of sample article for one prospective client, about 615 words of possibly saleable nonsense for Constant-Content.com, and about 350 words of writing excercise for happy forum fun. So that's, like, almost 1500 words. That's almost a full NaNoWriMo day, or something.

(Speaking of NaNoWriMo, if you're in the Boulder area, maybe you should come by The Tea Spot on October 8.)

I will also apparently start blogging about Boulder and thereabouts in the newly opened Denver chapter of CitySceneBlog.com. If they like my posts, they might actually start paying me. Not, I should stress, a possibility I'm banking on here. Why am I taking on such a gig for only a very slim chance of payment some unknown time in the future? Because it looks like fun. Because I think I'd like a blogging outlet where non-writing-relevant posts aren't verboten, are in fact encouraged. And that ain't happening here in my Actually Writing Blog, not if I'm behaving myself like I should.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have a couple boys out in the Puget Sound to eavesdrop on.

And She won't always stick to the subject at hand. I mean, I told Her I need to write Chapter 7, right? But nooooooo.

I woke up early, what with all this 95+ degree heat going around, and lay there between 6:30 and 8:30 trying to get back to sleep. Not without some success, of course--I can sleep all day if I'm really persistent. What can I say? It's a gift. Anyway, I kept trying to think about Chapter 7 as I fell back asleep.

Chapter 7, according to the current chapter outline, has a lot going on. At the end of the previous chapter, Brian's reunion with Amy leads to a disturbing revelation of something seriously wrong. So he'll spend most of the next chapter avoiding Amy and, with her, any recurrence of the problem. He avoids Todd, too, because Todd just keeps harping on it. Finally, Brian'll try to run away, but of course he can't get far from the water before he starts his fish-out-of-water act. So he comes back and walks in on Russ being an ass to Amy, and he totally loses it, like in the cafeteria but worse, nearly killing his housemate. So what does he do when he realizes what he's done? That's right. He runs away again.

That's a whole heckalotta maudlin "OMGwhathaveIdone" purplage. What keeps it from drowning in self-pity is, it'll be the first of several chapters, occurring with increasing frequency throughout the rest of the novel, that's written from Amy's first-person point of view.

But that leaves another problem. Status at beginning of chapter: Brian no longer trusts himself around Amy. Status at end of chapter: Brian no longer trusts himself around anyone. A perfectly valid shift for a chapter to provide, but the first status happens too soon after Amy's arrival, and the latter happens without even a nod towards any sort of realistic idea of incremental change.

In other words, this is a chapter in which very little happens at too fast a pace.

So I invited the Muse to mull over it with me while I was usefully half-asleep. But did She? Oh no. Wouldn't even give it a thought. Instead, she's all like, "OK, so, after Goblet of Fire, Rita Skeeter can't do anything, right? But, get this, she's taking on journalism apprentices, OK, and one of them will become Harry's next journalistic nemesis!"

Which would be great if I wanted to write Harry Potter fanfic. But, see, I'm not.

Still, though the Muse may be a chatterbox, a writer ignores Her at her peril. I've filed it away for later abstraction. I'm thinking I may actually have the basis for a cyberpunkish story involving beyond-the-grave vengeance and a virus that gets spread via the written word. So there's that. And then there's a dream I had before that which has given me the premise for another novel in the "book detective" series. Which is all very cool, of course, given the ideal of inventing new story ideas every day.

But.

It's not Chapter Seven, dammit!

Better luck tomorrow, I'm sure. Bridget and I are doing coffee at Cafe Bravo's; doubtless I'll brute-force my way into a solution.

Things worth mentioning:

• I haven't touched this novel since March. Shameful, I know. But I am still planning on submitting it to Delacorte this year, so expect to see some leaves getting turned over awful quickly at Chez LeBoeuf-Little.
• That chapter excerpt I spruced up and entered into the Absolute Write Idol contest among the 300-some other entries? Honorable mention! So cool. Which leads to my second shameful confession: I didn't vote in a single one of the ensuing weeks of competition between the finalists! What was I so busy doing? Not working on novels, apparently. Shameful! I'm so very sorry! Jenny Glatzer may commence to kicking my ass, well, right about now.

Not with the novel. Gods no. It's only partway through Chapter 4. I am but barely begun.

At this moment, Sasha is walking down Wilcox Rd/County Road 64 towards I-10, where the Water Hawk Shopping Plaza is. Her sister just shoved her out of the house with a video tape rental return errand. Sasha's trying to figure out just what her sister is up to, and is about to run straight into the first tangible effect of the previous night's magic spell. She's going to like it, but boy is it going to weird her out. Hell, she's already a little weirded out.

So, anyway, 50 hours. Whoot! My NaNoEdMo buddy up in Fort Collins noticed my little blue bar turn green with completion even as I was PMing him the news, and he's already sent a validation email over to Headquarters. So I don't have one of those checkmarky things (shown at upper right) of my own yet, as checkmarks are awarded manually, but seeing how quickly they've been going up, I'm sure I'll get one soon.

Tomorrow is my long day at the studio. I put in both volunteer time and paid time on Fridays, so I'll be there from 7:45 AM through at least 3:15. Then I may just lounge around the house all day, because I can. The day after that, my husband and I are going to do some biking around town, bake a lasagna, and go watch anime shows at a friend's house--it's a biweekly tradition. But on Sunday...

Sunday I'm goin' back to the grind. Bridget and I'll probably do the Tea Spot thing at eleven. I'll log a couple more hours on the novel, but I'll work on other things too! 'Cause I can do that now! I ain't under the gun no more! At least, not for now!

Trust me, I always manage to get myself under the gun for one thing or another. I hate it, but I keep doing it. The next gun will probably be my two-week deadline for my reserved topics at WriteForCash.

Such is life. But I suppose, as we live and learn, it gets less sucher as we go along.

Pardon the late blog on this subject, but life's been a lot like that lately. Late to everything. Taxes, paying the bills, blogging about stuff. You know.

Sunday night I decided to grab an excerpt from this novel and enter it into the Absolute Write Idol contest. What's that, you ask? Why, it's a combination of Absolute Write and American Idol, of course! If you are unfamiliar with the former, then for goodness sake, click the link. If you are unfamiliar with the latter, I can't help you; my TV stays pretty much locked on Cartoon Network.

Anyway, I entered. I also put the same excerpt on my Novel Excerpt page, but, that being subject to change without notice, I've linked to the relevant post at the AW Forum.

So I got a whole 4.25 hours logged on Sunday, at least two of them because of my efforts for the contest. And in those two hours I didn't progress through the novel at all, but I can at least say that 1000 almost-perfect words got polished into a gleaming 700 word gem of perfection. So, nyah.

(Some say, "If you keep on at this rate, it'll be months until you're done with the novel! Being done is better than being perfect, right?" But, hey, Delacorte isn't accepting submissions until October. I have time. And I believe in avoiding repetition. The result of one time through the manuscript should be a near-perfect, submission-ready manuscript (submission-ready after one last read-through for typos, anyway), not a manuscript that needs yet another full revision cycle.)

The excerpt I used came from Chapter Two, which was a beast of a chapter to revise. It's full of dialogue. Dialogue is one of my strong points, but each bit of it needs to work triple-time. This is true of short stories, too: dialogue advances plot, reveals character, and can be used to slip the reader bits of back-story. The thing about dialogue in the early chapters of a novel, though, is there's a lot of back-story that's relevant, and there's a lot of plot coming up, and there's a lot more character complexity on display. (Did I say "a lot"? I mean A LOT!) So each sentence that each character spouts, however casual and natural I may end up making it sound, has to be carefully scripted. This is why, after 39.75 hours of editing, I'm barely half-way through Chapter Three. (Chapter Three is also full of story-advancing, character-developing dialogue.)

It's OK, though. I mean to keep at this 2-hour-a-day schedule for the foreseeable future. Or at least continue trying to adhere to said schedule, with hopefully more success as time proceeds. The novel doesn't have to be done by March. It just has to be 50 hours closer to done.

That said, I have 10-and-a-quarter hours yet to log by tomorrow night. So we can safely assume that today and tomorrow will rate somewhat more than two hours each.

Things I will do next time:

• Have a schedule.
  
• Bring laundry detergent.
  
• Bring a camera.
  
• Not turn on the TV.
  
• Memorize the "I don't actually ski" speech

So Bridget and I drove on up last Sunday for a two-night stay in the standard bedroom suite. We brought our laptops and our works-in-progress, an ice chest full of food, a bag of even more food, and, in Bridget's case, yoga equipment. We can now say we have test-driven the home resort and found it to be all that and at least half a bag of chips.

Wireless internet is not officially available at the Mountain Vista. At the desk, they give you a little piece of paper with the local access numbers for AOL, MSN, Juno, &etc, and if you're an owner the local call is free. (Bridget found that she couldn't actually use the number for MSN. It was constantly busy.) However, I am here to tell you that throughout the day two different unsecure networks with out-of-the-box SSIDs floated in and out of range. Usually they were "look but don't touch"--that is, my computer attempted to connect briefly before throwing up its little hands in despair--but once in a while I did get through.

Now, if you want reliable internet, what you do is, you walk out of the resort, you hang a right, you hang another right at the traffic circle with the horse statue, you walk down to the last traffic circle before the street dips under the highway, and you head into the strip mall on the left. This contains Loaded Joe's, a cafe/bar/wiFi hotspot. (I emailed WiFi Free Spot about them, and the webmaster had the new link up within the hour. He's quick.) A word of caution, however: If you are hungry, either rise with the sun or fortify yourself elsewhere, because the breakfast burritos sell out rapidly.

There isn't a lot in the way of desk space in the standard bedroom, not much more than the table itself, which we kept messy with food things pretty much the whole time. But I found that if I put my laptop on the little drink stand that's next to the armless chair in the bedroom, and opened my three-ring binder with the manuscript in it on the foldy-strapy-suitcase-stand-thingy, I could work on the WIP comfortably.

I admit I did not get noticeably more writing done at the resort than I do on a typical day at home with nowhere to be. Mainly that was because of cooking meals and soaking in the hot tub and going for long walks, all of which were enjoyable uses of our time. However, there were other reasons. Sleeping late on Monday and Tuesday. Not getting right to work after unpacking and eating Sunday evening. Websurfing whenever I got a useable wiFi signal. Websurfing the hell out of our time at Joe's. Turning on the TV and watching Iron Chef and Teen Titans, for crying out loud.

Next time, I hereby decree there will be Schedules. We will Nag Each Other about them. We will Crack The Whip whenever whip-cracking is appropriate. So I Say; So It Will Be DONE!

And... we will learn not to sound so tongue-tied when some well-meaning resort person on the elevator says to us, "Why aren't you on the slopes?" "We don't ski; we're writers" has a nice ring, but it implies one can't be both, and that bothers me. How about, "We don't ski; we're just here on a writing retreat"? I like that better.

To all two or three of you who actually read this and might be wondering: No, I'm not dead, and the novel's not dead.

As to the blog, I'm trying to do a bit of rebuilding on it such that it accomodates other writing subjects besides those novels I've drafted as part of NaNoWriMo. I've been doing a bunch of work on short fiction these last few months, and I've also been hanging out in the AbsoluteWrite forums where the demise or the cleaning-up of PublishAmerica is being ardently hoped for. So many writing subjects to talk about! So many ways to organize blog entries! Plus I wanna try writing my own RSS feed, too.

And as to the novel, I confess to dragging my heels. But! I've written a Whole New Short Story! To submit here! Go me.

So. More later, as available. Kisses.

Sent out two copies of my picture book manuscript today. This means I have fulfilled my "one submission a month" requirement for January. Nyah.

I'm very pleased with the latest rewrite--the story's a lot tighter now, all extraneous elements removed, each remaining Thing tying setup and ending together in a neat little bow. OK, well, it's probably not that perfect. I can think of one Thing still in it that serves no purpose except 1) to establish the main character's physical setting in a "Damn That Television" sort of way, and 2) to establish a Saturday morning routine for the family. But I do think a certain amount of extraneous detail of this sort is necessary; otherwise, your characters might as well be floating in front of a blue screen.

What do I mean by "Damn That Television"? Well, it happens to be the first line of a Talking Heads song, and it got stuck in my brain after reading a forum post by James D. McDonald. Who's he? He's the "Uncle Jim" of "Learn Writing With Uncle Jim" fame. The forum post I'm thinking of addresses the issue of Point of View, and quotes an instructive article by Rob Killheffer. (Notice that the link in the AbsoluteWrite.com forum post no longer works; the article had moved sometime since December 2003. My link does work. Please click on it.)

Here's the relevant excerpt:

Interlude: The Voyeur Camera

It’s television’s fault. Television and movies. Visual media. In so many of these indie publications the narrative point of view slides around like a hot rock on ice, and observations intrude without any clear viewpoint at all. Consider this, from Thoughtmaster: "a skeletal face…whose shifting features left the viewer confused." What viewer? Or this: "The voice was surprisingly strong from such a diaphanous figure." Surprising to whom? Surely not to the only other person in the scene, who knows the speaker well.

These writers’ imaginations have been shaped by visual storytelling, in which there’s always an implied viewpoint — that of the audience, the camera, the peeping lens. They conceive their scenes as if they’re presented on a screen, and when they commit their prose, the camera remains, lurking outside the frame.

There’s no other explanation for scene shifts like those in Exile. As Jeff Friedrick and his pal Carl leave the bar where they’ve met, we’re told: "At the bar, a man turned his head and watched them go. He was tall, and a brief flare of light revealed reddish hair. Before the spotlight moved on, odd points of light deep in green eyes gave the impression of motion.…" Gave the impression to whom? The viewing protocols of film and television help us make sense of it: The two men who have been the focus of the scene get up and head for the door, and the camera pans aside to settle on this watcher. His reddish hair is "revealed" to us, the audience. We’re the ones who receive the "impression of motion." It’s as if, in these moments, the authors are not crafting prose but working out a screenplay. I recall the oldest and most basic advice offered to the aspiring writer: Read! Read! And read some more! If you want to write a novel, don’t draw your skills from the big — or the small — screen.

Spent an hour running down my list of accuracy/consistency concerns and looking up stuff. I have a whole bunch of Firefox tabs open now. Did you know...

• ...that it's the "Sea-Tac" International Airport but it's the town of SeaTac? Check the hyphens. *sigh* Consistency is all I ask!
• ...That the bar "Flowers" in the Seattle U. District has the same street number as the house in which I lived during my college years (and in which I'm locating my main characters)?
• ...that it's bloody impossible to find a straight transcript of a commercial airline's flight attendants' "safety features" speech? I'm reduced to looking up as many different versions of the "airplane humor" email forward as I can find, and inferring the original from the overlap.
• ...that a typical United Airlines flight from Seattle to Denver utilizes a Boeing 757-200? I have no idea what Frontier use, because Frontier won't tell you until, presumably, after you've entered credit card information.
• ...that a Boeing 757-200's Vne (never exceed) speed is expressed, not in knots, but in a maximum percentage of the speed of sound?
• ...that 2001 was a truly, truly sad year for pop hits?
• ...that, because I know you just can't get enough of this stuff, the tooth of extinct Carcharocles megalodon (freakin' huge prehistoric shark dino thing) was three to four inches long?

Spent another hour doodling out a timeline. Some of the best novel-plotting advice I have ever run across can be found here. Yes, that's a link to Teresa Neilsen Hayden's Making Light blog; specifically, to commentary posted by Jo Walton to an open thread. Some of the best literary conversations you've ever read go on there. Anyway, the point is, go there, read what Jo has to say about finding plot, and then page down for more goodness about writing novels and avoiding scammy publish-on-demand outfits.

If you do, you eventually get to my real point, which is, timelines. Scott Lynch says, "Don't forget that the characters off-stage should be taking action simultaneously with the characters currently on the page." Damn good advice, that. Secondary characters are not just loafing around backstage waiting for their cues. They're pursuing engineering degrees and helping mom to raise a passel of younger siblings and teaching this year's youngsters the laws of the sea and terrorizing the Puget Sound.

Not all at once, of course. Timelines! Time is what keeps events from happening simultaneously and getting all muddled up thereby.

Revelation of the evening: I have no idea what the main character's mother is doing in this timeline. She exists mainly as a menacing motivation factor in the main character's flashback allowance. I guess maybe she is waiting for her cue.

Damn. I have a lot less novel written than I thought I had.

OK, so it's not really a misery journey. I admit I am misusing the term. But, never having revised a book before, let alone one of my so-called novel drafts, and knowing how I start to get the creeping horrors when it's time to revise a short story... I am being duly pessimistic. Misery! Horrors! Novel Revision Hell!

Why am I doing this now? Well, it's too soon to start revising my 2004 novel. I am a firm believer of composting the first draft, having that quiet faith in round new potatoes springing from the rotten, sprouting remains of the old tubers you pitched out into the backyard. Also, which is more to the point, having the too-close-to-the-text syndrome something awful. And as for my 2002 NaNoWriMo expedition, well, it didn't seem as good a fit for what I have in mind...

Wizards of the Coast is seeking proposals for its brand-new line of fiction! Our exciting new imprint will publish science fiction, fantasy, horror, alternate history, magic realism, or anything in-between. If it can be shelved in the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror section of your local bookstore, we want it! We're interested both in the first book in a trilogy or longer series as well as stand-alone stories.

We are looking for the best, most original idea as well as compelling writing. We'll consider any style and subject matter. Please be aware, though, that what will count most for us is your ability to tell an exciting, original story in prose that makes us want to keep turning the pages.

To launch this book and the new imprint under which it will be published, we are planning a substantial marketing campaign. This book will be one of the most important that we publish in 2006.

So I'm considering submitting this novel right here. Worse case scenario, I have a ready-to-flog book that didn't get accepted. Best case scenario, I have a humungo monster marketing machine jump-start to my career.

Actually, the worst case scenario, if my paranoia is at all well founded, is that I submit it, they like it, they don't feel like paying me for it, and they'll run off into that misty territory where the legal agreement's "idea submission" subclause (c) meets the "waiver" clause, and they'll steal my novel. I'm hoping that someone who's more knowledgeable than I in the ways of publishing contracts can take a look at the legal agreement and advise me as to whether I should even be considering touching this contest with a ten-foot pole. (Yes, yes, I know that "but what if they steal my manuscript?" worry is frightfully amateurish. Look, I'm willing to quack like that duck if it keeps me from getting slaughtered like a lamb.)

But what the hell. Even if I oughtn't to submit, I'll have a finished novel. To submit elsewhere. And to shake happily in the face of Jethro and his Greeley Novel Finishing Month Pledge, which I have Undersigned myself to as follows:

Welcome to the Greeley Novelists Finishing Month!

We the undersigned vow to reach our own personal goals by January 5, 2005. We will encourage and applaud each other to strive to reach these lofty goals (unless, of course, we fail to reach those goals which gives the other GreNos free reign to change your middle name to "Nunn.")

We undertake this challenge knowing full-well that our friends, family and loved ones will be largely ignored for large blocks of time. We understand this is the same month as Christmas, New Year's Eve and probably lots of auto-ped accidents and that no sane people would even attempt it at this time of year. We don't care. We will do this...

Name: Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

Personal Goal: Completing one (1) revision cycle on my 2003 NaNoWriMo Novel (working title: "The Drowning Boy") with option to submit it to WOTC's Novel Proposal Contest by mid-February.

So I got started thinking about it last night. I printed me out a copy of Holly Lisle's One-Pass Manuscript Revision technique and scrounged around for a one-subject spiral notebook and wrote down, "Theme:" ... and then I played video games until bedtime. But it's a start!

Better still was taking a longish walk down to the Whole Foods at Pearl and 30th Streets for some groceries, and rehashing the story arc in my head. Those who know me (and those who have lived with me) know that such rehashing was prone to coming out of my head. I talk to myself think out loud. Well, how am I gonna know what I'm thinking unless I tell myself, eh? Anyway, by the time I got home again with the cat food fixings and the sushi elements and the dishwashing liquid and the toilet paper (and the painful shoulders buckling under the weight of the two canvas sacks)... I had all sorts of insights about the story. To whit:

• The parallels, symmetries, and contradictions between the main character and his brother
• The odd sort of moral relativity introduced by positing a species that reproduces only by mating with drowning humans and refraining from rescuing them
• The difference between said reproduction and true sexual predation
• The way the main character's two closest acquaintances react to his time on land growing short
• And how life's basic unfairness doesn't let us off the hook from the responsibilty of acting justly.