author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes.

I have not only crossed the 50K line, but I have also finished the story. That is so cool!

Well... there's probably a few loose ends that could be tied up. I still haven't decided whether Diane's parents get divorced or get back together, or exactly how Diane met Mitch. But these and other "what happened" sort of questions haven't left big holes in the novel - they've been sort of touched on and glossed over in vaguely satisfactory ways. No, the real problems with this draft have to do with the plot being as subtle as a concrete block falling on your head, and the moral of the story getting thwacked home with a sledgehammer. Editing this sucker will be a matter of making the basic story happen a little more gracefully.

Oh, and finally managing to memorize the Lenner/Wodemeier family tree. I kept forgetting which grandchild belonged to which daughter and how old each was and whether everyone's ages were plausible for the timeline. I'll sketch that one out when NaNoEdMo comes along.

So. Yay!

Tomorrow I'm probably going to get that short-short I mentioned turned in to somewhere or other, and not get a lot more done than that. Then, Wednesday, the first of December, will see those of us who can be bothered to show up having a bit of a celebratory dinner at Conor O'Neill's.

And then it's back to life as usual.

Now, if I can manage to keep up the 2K-a-day pace on all my writing projects, I will be a Golden Writing Goddess!

But unlike NaNoWriMo, in a normal writing life, I'll take weekends off.

That's all I have to say, really.

Oh, yes, and my contribution to the pot luck was Mom's Fabulous Spinach & Artichoke Dip, only with hearts o' palm instead of artichoke.

ML stands for Municipal Liaison. I got volunteered for this position when our previous ML, sgmoo, let us know that she'd be out of town for most of November (and indeed has not been heard from yet). She said, "I'm so glad vortexae has volunteered for the position; she'll do an excellent job." And I said, "I did what?" And she said, "That's the spirit!"

So I'm the Boulder ML this year. I get to try to organize write-ins and meet-ups, let folks know when said write-in and meet-ups are happening, and use my magical ML powers to do stuff like put these events on the calendar.

I also get to be the contact point for Fatty, the Goddess Of All NaNoWriMo Goodies. That means that when she is able to get those goodies together, I'm the one she's mailing 'em to and I get to distribute them to my Boulder-area NaNo buddies.

So today I got to start with that. I got to put on one of these classy little NaNoWriMo buttons, and I got to give one to Kandybar.

And then I left the Tea Spot for to catch a 205 back to my end of town, headphones trailing out of my bookbag and book in hand... and I left the Goodies Envelope behind.

It's OK! It's all right! I spoke to Mr. John Little, barista extraordinaire (and no relation to my husband - there are a lot of John Littles in this world), and it seems the envelope has already been discovered and turned in to the lost and found box.

(I think the conversation must have gone something like this: "Hey, I found this envelope here addressed to a Niki LeBoeuf-Little... do you know this person?" "Yeah... that's the very confused young lady that called me thinking she left her wallet here last week.")

So my husband has gone with a friend to Acqua Pazza, the Italian restaurant next door to the Tea Spot, for dinner, and has pledged to pick up the envelope and bring it home to me so I can continue distributing the NaNoWriMo Goodies. And tomorrow I should have better luck with holding onto them, 'cause the meet-up and write-in tomorrow evening is at my house. Nice and simple.

Now I just have to figure out what to cook us for dinner.

1. That the Tea Spot were open all night long. 9:30 just seems so... early!

2. Actually, there is no 2. At least, not at the moment. Psyche! Sorry 'bout that.

Lookit dat. Put a little extra wordage in today's novel-writing session. Almost 300 words extra. Unfortunately, the extra sprint got me where I don't know where to go next. Tomorrow is, as always, another day; maybe I'll have figured it out by then.

Diane has had her second adventure, in which she slips into the unicorn's role as healer and protector. She also learns about the unicorn's attraction to innocence when her road home takes her past her friend's house. She finds herself in the conflicted position of seeing her friend through a unicorn's eyes. There's a lot of tension there, and none of it is really resolved when her friend comes over the next day to tell her about his close encounter. She has to pretend to be all excited and stuff when in fact she's going oh, crap, please don't talk about it.

See, it's a superhero story. Superheroes often find themselves discussing themselves with close friends and romantic interests who don't know their secret identity. Black and Blue Magic is in that way a superhero story too. Harry's discomfort when his neighbor tells him that she saw an angel is kind of what I was going for in this scene, only for Diane the gut-writhing apprehension is twisted up a bit tighter and there's less comic relief. I don't know why there's so little comic relief going on here. Maybe I'm taking it too seriously. Maybe Diane hasn't yet escaped MarySuedom, and it's myself I'm taking too seriously.

(Here ends the self-searching psychoanalysis portion of today's blog entry. Next up: NanoGoofiness!)

It's just me and SlyCrow today doing the pot-luck write-in thing. I rewarmed last week's chili, which only gets better over time, and devilled me up some eggs 'cause we're behind in our household Royal Crest Dairy delivery consumption. SlyCrow brought some very nice cornbread. We thought maybe Multivitamim and Willow might show tonight, but as of yet there has been no sign. We're listening to the Blue Man Group audio CD and the sound of our own typing.

I'm thinking I should actively seek out people to write with more often, even after NaNo is over - there's a certain amount of peer-pressure energy that keeps me from Alt-Tabbing over to Skilljam or Insaniquarium (or some other time-waster video game). I mean, how can I slack off when there are other people in the room hard at work?

I got a call from hubby-o'-mine, saying that after his gaming session (Dungeons And Dragons I think they're playing tonight) he'll have to go right back to the office and I probably won't see him until 5:00 AM tomorrow. That probably means we're both going to be sleeping in. I'm on a Mon/Wed/Fri schedule at RRSR, so I'll be home all day tomorrow. I may just try out the "6,000 Word Jet-Pack" idea that Chris Baty writes about in the Week Three Pep Talk chapter of his book. It goes something like this:

Pick a day when you have nothing to do. Get up and do three 30-minute writing sessions in a row. Go do something else for awhile. Lather. Rinse. Repeat for a total of 3 cycles of 3 30-minute sessions each. For bonus points, do it again the next day. Lord your 12,000 word jump over all your local NaNo buddies.

Thus, in the next couple of blog entries you will either see some lording-it-over going on here, or else some coulda-shoulda-didn't whinging. Stay tuned to find out which one it'll be.

Oooh, suspenseful!

Here's the thing about NaNoWriMo. Reading fails to get done in proportion to writing that needs doing. Well, it does if you're on your best behavior. Even if they're books about writing.

And all four of the ones I checked out are overdue.

I hate library fines. $1.20 per book comes to $4.80 and that's, like, a nice pot of tea, or a sandwich at Half-Fast Subs, or a couple new books at a used bookstore that I'm not getting. I hate spending money on my own stupidity. Dammit.

I'm at the Tea Spot again with other Boulder NaNos. The majority of us reached our writing goals for the day (/me glances upward, *perk!*) so we're all goofing off and chatting and knitting and playing vider games and stuff. I guess I can go drop off my library books after this, and then head over to the Boulder Bookstore. My copy of Foxs In Socks is defective and needs to be traded in for a good one. What could possibly make a copy of a beloved Dr. Seuss book defective? Well, it's not that the pages are in upside-down. That's kinda cool. The problem is that all the pages are miscut. There's a blank white band at the bottoms, and the tops are all truncated. Slow Joe Crow's face isn't wholly there, and Sue's hair is flat up top while she Sews Socks.

And my husband won't let me read it to him until it's not defective, so, y'see I gotta get this exchange taken care of.

And that's about all I have to report.

1. Just reserved a table for 4 at the Boulder Dinner Theater in January.They're performing Cats. Yes. The Cats. As in, Weber meets Eliot. As in, "Macavity's not there." At the Boulder Dinner Theater.

If it weren't for this novel, I'd say January 20 couldn't come soon enough.

2. Going to visit my sister-in-law in Seattle in December. I like Seattle. Maybe I should make a list of places to observe in order to fix some detail inaccuracies in my 2003 NaNoWriMo novel.

3. Didn't write a single word since I woke up this morning. So that was my day off.

As Mr. Baty writes in No Plot? No Problem!, plot is simply the movement of characters over time. Therefore, if the plot appears stuck, let your characters get to moving.

And if you characters don't want to move, find some new characters.

Where do you find characters? You find them in real life. Go people watching.

I did a bit of that yesterday, albeit unhappily. See, the Denver RTD (bus) system involves a necessary evil known as the Westminster Park'n'Ride. It has platforms on either side of Highway 36. Getting back to Boulder from Federal and 32nd involves taking the #31 north to the West Platform, using the pedestrian overpass to walk across the highway, and then catching a westbound #B at the East Paltform – all the while hoping and praying that the B doesn't arrive while you're halfway across.

Part of this dilemma, I admit, I should have avoided by taking an earlier 31. Instead, I took the one scheduled to get to the Park'n'Ride at 10:12 PM. The B is scheduled to depart at 10:19.

I had my bike. But it had snowed, and the pedestrian flyover was treacherous with slush. If I'd tried to ride on the corkscrew ascent and descent, I'd have risked repeating the accident I had that morning on the eastbound Goose Creek bike path where it switchbacks to go under Foothills. (I'd post pictures of my face, just to get the point across, but you'd think I was just fishing for sympathy. So leave it at this: it's not pretty. No stitches, though. Apply hanky to bleeding spots and get on with the day. I was lucky. Wear your bicycle helmets, boys and girls!)

So I'm about 2/3 the way across when, yes, the B shows up. And me, I start hollering, "Stop that bus!" at the top of my lungs as the bus disgorges its passengers. One of them I swear looks up at me. But the B pulls away as I limp the rest of the way down to the platform.

And as a couple who got off the bus cross paths with me, doubtless on their way to pick up their car, I say to them, "I wish someone had told the bus driver to wait!"

And the look they gave me can only be described as, "Forgive me, but exactly what species are you?" Kind of a cross between "And I should care... why?" and "Funny, I thought I heard something. Must have been the wind."

It was that look that just devastated me. I swear, I sat down in the bus shelter and sobbed. Maybe I was just weak from gulping cold air and running as fast as I could, but I was a wreck. I sat there and just howled, knowing I'd be waiting half and hour in the cold for the next bus and that the people I'd appealed to simply couldn't be bothered to acknowledge my existence.

By the time I finished having my little tantrum, I had made my decision. These people were going to be in my novel.

I got to the IHOP Write-In a little late, where Kandybar and her friend Dana were already hard at work, and I jumped right into a climactic ending scene in my novel. Diane has just seen her Older Disreputable Boyfriend shoot her class mate (and evolving love interest) and drive off, and she goes running out in the street to try to flag down some help. That couple, those evil uncaring unsympathetic lizards, are driving the only car passing by. And they give her that very look. Excuse me, but... why should I care?

As writerly revenge goes, it isn't nearly as satisfying as the short story I just submitted to SciFiction, which story was "inspired" by the excreble behavior of a family of children sharing a flight with me from Phoenix to Denver. In that story, well-deserved harm actually comes to those kids, whereas in my novel, that couple are merely revealed as the rejects from the human race they truly are.

But still. It was sweet. And worth about 1,000 words.

Ha-ha. Off to take the car to the shop for its check-up now. I hope to get a good 'nother 1,000 words done in the waiting room. Talk to ya later...

His name is Uno. In this picture, he looks like he takes after Mommy. But in fact he is a lazy ass.

The pot-luck write-in at my place mentioned yesterday, did in fact happen today. In attendance were myself, SlyCrow, and épinards. Those of us who were writing did in fact actually reach our writing goals (/me glances at 2007 word diff between this blog entry and yesterday's), and we stuffed our faces full of - lessee, how'd I put it on the forums? "Kick-ass chili and mouthwatering homemade bread." Yummmmmmmm.

I did a whole bunch of house-cleaning before everyone showed up. Don't thank me. It was a selfish and calculating act. I cleaned up before I started writing, so that when I started writing, I couldn't procrastinate by cleaning the bathroom. Because - get this - it was already clean. And, unlike some, I don't reclean clean things. I find other ways to procrastinate. Ways that actually serve a purpose.

Like, getting up and spooning myself another helping of chili with sour cream and green onions and cheese on top.

Diane has made it home and gone to bed and woken up and gone to school and started to come home from school. All of which came out, really, no more interestingly than that. (Except for the near encounter with the cougar. Dun-dun-dunnnnnnh.) Now she's gone and run into Mitch, the Older And Disreputable Boyfriend Type. Mitch exists in my head as a sort of mobile grunt that has the potential to explode into violence. I guess all characters have to start somewhere. He started as a plot necessity, so I'm not exactly surprised at his current flatness.

Tomorrow is Tuesday, and I have no actual events planned except going into the office and slotting more data into a database. (I have this part-time job that, among other things, involves fixing a very broken MS Access database. This means I have to relearn Access. And cuss out its various "I'm helping! Bizzaro! I'm helping!" wizards.) Lots of time to witter over trying to write the next 2000 words.

Wish me luck!

P.S. Oh hey. It turned out that there was a copy of No Plot? No Problem! on the shelf at the Boulder Bookstore. What luck! Now, there is no copy there at all, because I bought it and brought it home. As for Pen On Fire, that one I had to order.

OK, check it out. I have 43,620 words left to write, and 23 days (not counting today) to write them in. That comes out to some 1,900 words a day. So if I write 2K a day from here on out - and I did write 2K today - then I'll be able to take a couple days off and still win!

We had a great turn out at the Tea Spot social today. In attendance were, in order of appearance, Kandybar, SlyCrow, mimsyborogove, and Willow. And myself, of course. I'm vortexae. And we all managed to cram ourselves into a single booth. Everyone's gone now (and I'll head for home myself after I get this posted), but then it's past 5:00 PM now, and people started arriving around 12:30, so I think we all managed to do our time.

Kandybar wins the prize for words written so far and words written here, today. But as you can see I made some progress myself, as did mimsyborogove. And in between paragraphs there was some chatting too. It was a nice sort of Write-in/Meet-up hybrid. And now I am thoroughly caffeinated. (I highly recommend the "Golden Thunder" Darjeeling now available at the Tea Spot.)

Tomorrow we'll be having a write-in at my house. I plan to make some vegetarian chili with garnishes of grated cheddar and sour cream ready to go. SlyCrow and mimsyborogove are likely to be there, and if it goes well we'll do it again next week Monday too when Willow might be able to join us.

I'm really liking this write-in thing. Last year we didn't really have any, and if I wanted to actually write at the meet-ups I had to be all antisocial and stuff. But this year it seems, like I said, that the line between social gathering and writing date has blurred in a yummy way so that it's easy to shift between the two modes. It helps when you have a whole bunch of people show up ready to write and socialize too; that way you don't feel like you're the only one A) talking everyone's ear off, or B) ignoring everyone and furiously typing.

I got Diane through most of her first transformation scene, and up to the point where she realizes she'll have to cooperate with the ghost in order to get home again. I left off right in the middle of a paragraph, and I'll probably do a bit more writing tonight just so I can see her home by bedtime. Which may mean that I'll earn a third day off sometime this month. Hurrah!

So I'm going to head to the Boulder Bookstore now, place an order for Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!, and pick up a copy (if they have one) of Pen On Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide To Igniting The Writer Within. And then I'm going to head home.

All in all... another good day. *happy sigh*