author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

The good thing about writing rituals is, they perform the purpose of any ritual. Which is: to shift your mindset in a conducive direction. Conducive to what? To whatever you're doing ritual for. Going to Mass puts church-goers in a frame of mind more in touch with God, community and prayer. Casting the circle puts Wiccans in a headspace where worship and magic come naturally. And writing rituals, theoretically, make it easier to achieve the focus needed for a productive writing session.

The traditional disadvantage to writing rituals is depending on them. I like to light a yellow candle, sip a mug of Assam or Pu Erh Tuo Cha, and turn on something instrumental and pleasant that won't monopolize my brain, like Blue Man Group: Audio or the Ink movie soundtrack. The combination generally turns on the "Time to write!" switch in my brain. But what if there's no quality tea to be had, the mp3s are on the other computer, and I'm in a no-flame zone?

So I'm trying to come up with writing rituals that require no external components, such that I'm never unable to perform them. This would make relying on them no downside at all. Well, except for the one perceived by people who like to huff that "if you need tricks to get you writing, you aren't a real writer." People like that can just ignore this post, kthxbai.

Three things you always have with you when you write:

1. Something to write with
2. Something to write on
3. Something to write about

For a while my thoughts were excessively religious. "The pen is my athame, which is Fire; the paper represents Earth and the ground I walk on; inspiration is Air; my imaginative attention to the world around me is Water." Except I'm not always using a pen, and my writing isn't always particularly imaginative. I mean, it's hard to get all RomantiWiccan about Demand Studios articles with titles like "How Does the H-R Diagram Explain the Life Cycle of a Star?" (Coming to you soon from eHow.com and Demand Studios and me!)

(And yet writing remains, for me, as much a religious vocation as a career goal...)

So the ritual use of "what I'm going to write with/on" has to accommodate both pen and laptop keyboard, both paper and word processor. The role of "what I'm going to write about" must encompass both the creation of fantastic worlds and the writing of how-to documents.

What I end up with are meditations. Here's one; feel free to use it if you find it useful.

Gaze meditatively at your blank sheet of paper or new word processor document. Envision whatever you plan to write about, even if you have no concrete idea, as a tangible, visible, simple object: a flower, a feather, an apple, etc. See this object on the page/screen. Hold this visualization until it's strong and comfortable.

Now let the object dissolve in your mind's eye and see a Door appearing to take its place. Give it solid detail: see every crack in the wood or inconsistency in its paint. Has it a doorknob? What sort? A doorknocker? Made of what? Is there a peephole? Which side can see through it?

Now see the Door opening. It opens away from you, "inward" from the point of view of someone approaching you. As it opens fully, you see The Muse standing in the doorway, smiling. Let yourself envision The Muse in full detail: gender, complexion, clothing, and all. The Muse need not be adult. The Muse need not be human. The Muse certainly won't be the same every time you do this.

What can you see of the room, or the world, on the other side of the door?

Now The Muse reaches out to you. Imagine that you lean forward, out from the safety of your chair and your body, and you take that offered hand (or paw, or mandible, or tentacle). Imagine that you allow yourself to be drawn through the door.

Remain inside this daydream for a minute or two, experiencing whatever is on the other side of this door.

When you are ready, begin writing.

This will be a brief post* and not very polished as blog posts go. I'm tired and attempting to make an early night of it. I know, I know--an early night at WorldCon? That's unpossible! Yet I shall try.

Tonight's big event was the awarding of the Hugos, when the World Science Fiction Society presents big heavy rocket-shaped trophies to people what done good. This is my second time attending the Hugos, and once again they made me both giggly and teary-eyed. The reason for that is why I wanted to blog a bit before I slept.

Towards the beginning of the presentation, we get the IN MEMORIAM list. Names of those members of ours community who have died since the last WorldCon are projected on the big screens. Charles N. Brown, founder of Locus Magazine. Forrest J. Ackerman, "Mr. Science Fiction." And, heartbreakingly, the list went on for pages. After each name was a word or two describing what their role had been: author, editor, artist, etc.

The list was a very inclusive list. Walter Cronkite was mentioned, though he was not someone you'd have thought of as being part of SF/F fandom. His tag was "space exploration enthusiast." Michael Jackson, too: "genre music video." Fandom is ecumenical and all-embracing. Many of the people we count as our own might be surprised to find themselves in that number.

So that's the easy answer to why I get teary. But it goes deeper. See, a lot of the names, they got tagged with just one word: "Fan."

Science fiction and fantasy has its celebrities. Dang straight it does--ask Neil Gaiman, who appears increasingly chagrined as the years go by at his rock star status. (He observed at the "Finding Fandom" panel that his power to create a roomful of applause with a single word--"Sandman"--was a dangerous one that ought only to be used for good. He has been heard to observe that his simply walking into a con party halts all conversation.) And yet in fandom, "celebrity" doesn't imply the same sort of separation between the celeb and pleb as it does in other entertainment industries (my parenthetical comments last sentence notwithstanding). The line between fan and pro blurs to the point that someone might get nominated for "Best Fan Writer" the same year they're nominated for "Best Novel." The line blurs because every pro started out a fan, many fans aspire to be pros, and every pro remains a fan. Thanks to cons, acquaintanceships and friendships form across that blurry line and grow strong.

Tonight, John Scalzi won a Hugo for Best Related Book. Last year, I sat down with six or seven other fans at Scalzi's kaffeeklatsch and we all enjoyed a rambling conversation with him about anything and everything. Tonight, Ellen Datlow won a Hugo for Best Editor, Short Form. Friday morning she and I and several other early risers all chatted beside the fountain while waiting for the daily walk around town to get under way. Tonight, Elizabeth Bear won a Hugo for Best Novelette. This morning, I sat in a small conference room with a handful of WorldCon attendees to hear Bear read us some excerpts from her upcoming novel.

And all of us have been passing each other in the hallways, nodding to and smiling to and greeting each other right across that pro/fan boundary line that isn't much of a boundary at all. "Fan." It's a title we all share here. It doesn't get replaced by other titles--it just gets augmented. "Fan." It's title enough to get you missed sorely by the rest of the community when you're no longer with us here on Earth. The inclusiveness of that is truly touching. It reminds me that "home" isn't just a place; it's people too.

So that's the second reason the Hugos make me teary. The third, which is also the reason I get giggly--well, you watch. Watch what happens when someone gets the award and comes up to accept it. Watch Frank Wu (Best Fan Artist sorry, got that wrong before) galumphing up onto the stage, tripping over his own feet up the stairs, out of breath with hurry and utter surprise. Watch him playing with his Hugo, zooming the rocket ship around in the air and making whooshing noises. Watch him bounding back to his seat, still wielding his Hugo in toy rocket position, while the next category gets underway. And this isn't even his first Hugo, either! It's heartwarming and funny and makes you want to go over and give him a hug. Because you'd be galumphing and bounding and whooshing, too! And listen to the recipients who can barely utter their thanks over the sudden lump in their throats. Or the ones who get punchy and start interrupting their own acceptance speech trains of thought by looking down at the trophy they're holding--as though they can't believe they actually have one in their hot little hands--and blurt out, "Fuck this thing is heavy!"

The Hugos event is full of those little human moments--those moments when you realize, with the force of epiphany, "We're all humans together, and I love these humans, they're funny and wonderful and just like me, really." You want to just encircle the entire auditorium in your arms and not let go.

So I'm a little weepy right now and full of smiles. And very, very sleepy. And now that I have said what I wanted to say, hot damn! I get to go to sleep now! G'night!

* or not. Brief, that is.

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.

Went to my usual bimonthly writing group Wednesday, and, as sometimes happens when there's no manuscript for critique in a given classtime, the conversation turned from commenting on each other's in-class writing to sharing with each other our writing processes. Specifically, the question was, "Where are you in your writing?"

I both love and hate that question. Love, because I love talking shop. I love talking about myself--why, yes, I've got a bit of an ego, how can you tell?--and I love getting together with other writers and attempting to put our experiences into words. Verbalizing my inner world requires a certain introspective clarity; in trying to find the words, I am forced to look more closely at mental realities I've been taking for granted. It's a process that results in knowing myself better. Which, yay!

But I hate that question, too, mainly because, if I'm going to be truthful, I have to give an answer beginning with, "Still difficult. Writing more now, but every single freakin' day it's a struggle to get past the resistances and fears and feelings of inadequacy that I call WRITER'S BLOCK. Every. Single. Day."

So I started there. But in continuing, I shared with my colleagues the current thing that's been working well for me (for certain definitions of "well"). "I've been letting myself consider writing to be play," I said, "so as to escape the downward spiral of guilt I've been flailing around in for years."

One of my friends said, "It's just the opposite with me. I have to tell myself that writing is my job, or it won't get done."

I am, of course, paraphrasing. But the conversation made me think about that balance between work and play that I think needs to be struck.

So. Writing as play. I've spent far too much time stuck in the idea of "OK, I quit my day job. I owe it to myself and my husband to GET STUFF DONE! Must work! Must turn out new short stories! Must get published! WHAT THE HELL I DIDN'T GET ANY WRITING DONE YESTERDAY I AM WASTING EVERYONE'S TIME I'M A BAD PERSON I SUUUUUUCK."

(The above has been dramatized for your entertainment.)

Obviously there's a problem with that. Well, not for everyone. For me, anyway. My reaction to obligation and guilt is less to get the thing done and more to hide away from the thing, because the thing, whatever it is, gets associated with Reasons To Conclude I'm A Bad Person. Also, the more I don't do, the more there is to do, the more impossible it seems to do. So. I've had ample opportunity to watch myself flail between the twin ouchies of "if you don't do it you're a waste of oxygen" and "you have to do it ALL, today, or yesterday for preference."

Which leads to the changes in my routine, methods, and attitude I've been attempting to effect lately. First, instead of Writing As Obligation, there's Writing As Play-On-The-Page. And second, instead of Get It All Done NOW, there's Just Take A Nibble.

But at the same time, I recognize that, as my friend put it, writing is my job now. It's how I want to make money. It's how I want to spend my working day. I can't just play; I have to produce. There's only so far "I'll take care of the quantity and the Gods will take care of the quality" goes before I realize I do have to get some quality out there if I want to be published.

So it's a balancing act. It's got to be play enough that I want to do it. But it's got to be work enough that I do do it, daily, with the aim of finished drafts I can submit to paying markets.

Recognizing that, I'm not so much changing my current approach as I am my perception of it. I'm working on Writing Is Play, No Pressure because until recently I've had too much weight in the Writing Is My Job half of the scale. It'll be time to shift my focus only when the scales shift.

But in the meantime I can probably risk injecting some direction into my daily "playtime". That means two things: Knowing what finishable, potentially submittable project to work on tomorrow, and knowing which, say, two hours of the day (or so) will be devoted to working on it. Having that in mind the night before allows me to wake up with a sense of purpose, a structure within which to Get Things Done. I'm a very Type-A creature; I thrive on structure.

Doesn't mean I did a good job today, mind. But yesterday I was fairly productive: got to the end of this week's rough draft (never mind that it was last week's rough draft, and that of the week before... anyway, about that, more later), and even uploaded an article to eHow (about what? Three guesses). Go me! {{pats self on back}} But then I woke up today, and dragged about the house until my first externally-enforced obligation. Gah.

Well. I knew consistency was once of my Areas Where Improvement Is Needed.

So. To summarize: A possible balancing point is to consider writing play, but impose a structure of What and When upon it in order to get work done. How well will this work? Find out next time, when I babble some more! Maybe.

Hello, not dead. Not still stuck in Reading Dep week either. In fact, am doing lots of reading. Erm. Not as much writing. But! I have a self-imposed deadline of April 8 for... something. Something involving the secret nightlife of used bookstores.

About this, more later. Instead, tonight, this:

There's a wonderfully (unintentionally) funny (if dim) bad review of Coraline at [LINK]. It's the kind of review that makes you suspect the reviewer is reviewing the inside of his own head, and not the film at all.

It's a gem of the genre. The reviewer really digs deep to find things to dislike. They've read the book as well as watched the movie, so they can show you how the book!OtherMother's mouthing of Fundamentalist Christian watch-words reveals Gaiman's contempt for Christian domesticity (I am not making this up). They've peered closely at P. Craig Russell's illustrations in order to draw sinister inferences about Henry Selick's decision to leave certain imagery out of the movie (I swear, I'm not making this up). And, best of all, they've unearthed snippets of interviews with Neil Gaiman in order to prove what a terrible, horrible, no-good child-corrupter he really is, really, a horrible criminal mind who thinks that the Disney Channel's idyllic scenes of happiness equate to pornography (seriously, I'm not kidding, click the link). I am honestly unsure that I've ever seen someone go to such lengths to miss a point before.

But. Here's the thing that most sharply, sharp as Despair's fish hook (because sometimes ignorance in others truly occasions despair!), caught my eye:

From a story standpoint, the book is a hodge-podge of incidents and images. Gaiman is famous and has the ability to trade on the brand of his name. He can put almost anything on the market, and it will sell. For example, this quotation of how the book came to be published is revealing:

And I had a small, Wednesday Addams sort of daughter who liked stories with strange mothers and cellars and dank places and creepy stuff, and so I started to write her one. And then I realized I hadn’t written anything for 5 years, and I’d better get a contract, otherwise it would never be finished. So I sent it to a publisher, and my editor called me up and said, ‘So what happens next?’ and I said, ‘If you send me a contract, we will both find out.’

In other words, he didn't have a story outline. Incidents just morphed into a kind of tale over a period of five years without any underlying moral or an awareness of absolute good or evil.

Incidents just morphed into a kind of tale over a period of five years without any underlying moral or an awareness of absolute good or evil.

Have you noticed what happens when an author starts with a moral premise and then writes the story as a conscious vehicle for that moral? What happens is, you get the Left Behind books, which are not so much a story as they are the implausible outline of a story based on a checklist so rigid that no character may act like a real person for fear of wandering off message. You get The Fresco, Sheri S. Tepper's towering debacle of strawmen embodying all her political pet peeves, which get knocked down by This Week's Mary Sue and her supporting cast of divine interventionists. You get a plot that's not just a narrative convention but an onomatopoeticism; it sounds like something massive, treading, plot, plot, plot, over your abused imagination.

Recently I had the extreme pleasure of viewing, not once but twice, Denver-based Double Edge Films's gorgeous production Ink. (Instead of repeating myself, I direct you to the gushing praise I committed, sploosh, all over the Metroblogging Denver web site. (As of this writing you have until April 9 to see it at the Starz FilmCenter in Denver. Also, the soundtrack is about to make me start bawling again.) Ink is a heartwarming--no, heart-uplifting tale of love, loss, and redemption. It's about the thin line between despair and hope, and how it's never too late to cross it. It's about the power of a story to send our spirits soaring or to mire us in the abyss. But did writer and produce Jamin Winans set out to write a moral fable? He did not. He started with a simple image, one that terrified him as a child: the evil queen from Disney's Snow White in her guise as an apple-selling crone. He imagined just such a frightening hook-nosed figure stealing a child out of her bed. And then he followed the chain of questions and answers that arose from that image: Who is that antagonist, and why the kidnapping? Who is the child? Where are her parents?

"Incidents just morphed into a kind of tale...." And had they not--had Winans started with a moral outline of the sort this dimwitted ChristianAnswers.net reviewer seems to require--Ink would not be as moving as it is. Nor would it mean as much to its viewers, who have been buying out every seat in the house or nearly so night after night since it opened three weeks ago for what was initially planned to be a two-week run.

Take issue with Gaiman needing a contract before he finished writing Coraline if you must (though that would miss the point, too, which is that when you're a busy professional writer with deadlines to meet and only 24 hours in a day you tend to finish the projects you've been actually contracted to finish first), but don't complain about the lack of an outline, for crying out loud. And be grateful for every story that doesn't originate in a rigid moral checklist; that way lies, well, the bulk of the dreck published by the Christian Booksellers' Association, apparently.

I suspect I might find a correlation there if I investigated ChristianAnswers.net's catalog of books for sale, but life is short and there are so many more fulfilling things to do with my attention. About which, cf. "self-imposed deadline of April 8", above.

The sad thing is, there actually was an underlying moral basis to the creation of Coraline, even if it didn't present the author with an "outline" or involve "absolute good and evil". And the reviewer knows it, and chooses to deny it. How do I know the reviewer knows it? Because I very much doubt that the reviewer read Neil Gaiman's comments about the Disney Channel's acceptable plots or about the five years of "we'll find out" without reading the rest of the interview, right on the same page with the bits the reviewer quoted, where Gaiman says, right on the very next line after "we will both find out"....

I wanted to tell my daughters big, important things, like ‘being brave does not mean that you are not scared.’

Forgetting how to believe in magic is not the first tragedy of growing up. It is the second tragedy. As effect follows cause, it follows the first tragedy, which is this: forgetting to believe in magic.

When I was much younger--in high school, in college--I was obsessed with all things occult. I discovered Wicca, and began practicing ritual in observance of the seasons and the phases of the moon with the devoutness of the new convert. I had my first lucid dream, and devoted great amounts of energy toward learning to reproduce the experience. I read exhaustively on astral projection. I loaned my friends books and scared my friends' parents. I'd cast spells. And they'd work.

And as I grew in my writing apprenticeship, I saw that too through a religiomagickal lens. I developed the belief that when we humans feel a vocational calling, what we are feeling is the Universe's need for us to perform that role. My desire to be a writer was proof that Writer was the function I was designed for. And I offered up my writing on the altar of the Goddess.

I'm not sure when that stopped. Some time after college; some time after marriage; some time after acquiring pets, buying a house, working a full time job. It didn't automatically restart after I quit the job, either.

I don't resent the people in my life or regret the turns my life has taken thus far. But I do regret having forgotten to make room in my new life for those things important to my old life. Maybe I saw my new life as being the end result of magic, wishing, and prayer, for which there was no more use now that the goals were achieved.

But as long as life continues, there are further goals. Even if the goal is only "More of that, please," there's a goal to be worked for, because you don't get "more of that" by sitting on your butt in a pool of stagnation. Happiness takes continuous work. So does love. So does career fulfillment, contentment, peace. It isn't something you reach and rest on; it's something you run to keep up with, forever, and that's OK, because you love it.

Where was I going with this? I'm not sure. I'm sort of just babbling here. I think I'm just putting the world on notice that I've remembered about magic now.

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.

Monday was a hugely unexpected marathon day for the novel. I expected to just do a nice 1,500 or so, now that the Weekend Of Writing Dangerously was successfully over. I expected to put the novel away for the evening and begin working on a short story that needed revisions. But as I was biking over to my friend's house for a dinner-and-writing date, my Muse freakin' jumped me. Treacherous wench! And I mean that in the nicest possible way...

Biking is good for you. It's low-impact, unlike jogging, so your knees don't suffer; it's aerobic if you push yourself a little, which is good for the heart; and, while you bike, there is nothing to do whatsoever except think. And if you're a writer, sometimes your mind starts churning through the work in progress. Which my mind did. And what it came up with was something absolutely perfect for what I'd begin thinking of as "the big kiss scene."

Couple of tangents there.

First: If your two male leads fall in love with each other by the end of the book, and you want this to be a surprise to the reader despite all the really obvious hints you've been dropping, you cannot simply rely on "No one expects it of two guys!" It's 2008, for crying out loud. Same-sex relationships may not be universally accepted (cf. CA Proposition 8), but they're pretty universally known. You need something else to make your character's budding romance a surprise. Like, I dunno, character development or something. Basically, you want your plot not to look stupid when we enter that day and age where readers bring to the page that simple, unspoken understanding that any two (or three, or four) characters can have romantic potential. That day and age, if not here already, are coming soon. (And I'm really happy about that!)

Second: I'm really beginning to regret naming the secondary character "Rocket." There's a good reason for it, but it still sounds like a porn star name to me. Which becomes damnably silly if the guy's story arc is going to take a romantic turn. (Do arcs take turns? Hrm.) Maybe I can defuse this a bit by having Timothy make fun of it when he first meets him. "'Rocket'? Are you kidding? That's fucking stupid. I mean, overcompensate much?"

Anyway. Back from the tangents to the whole point of this post, which is this: A bite of candy is good to get you moving, but eating all your candy at once might leave you bereft of inspiration tomorrow.

You know what a candy-bar scene is? Holly Lisle coins this phrase in her excellent essay, How To Finish A Novel:

It's one that you're just itching to write -- something sweet enough that you can dangle it on a stick in front of yourself so that you can say, "When I've done these next three chapters, I'll get to write that one.

Make sure your candy-bar scenes are spread out through the book, not all clumped together. Write down a single sentence for each of them. Don't allow yourself to do anymore than that, or you'll lose the impetus to move through the intervening scenes.

Well, my mind and/or my Muse played a mean trick on me Monday night. They found a looming problem in my existing plan for the Big Kiss Scene--a problem that arose due to the surprising turn the story took this weekend--and then it/they solved it so elegantly (if I may flatter myself) that the Big Kiss Scene wouldn't get the hell out of my head until I'd just freakin' written it down.

So I did.

And the scene is OK, but now it's gone. I wrote it. I need more candy and I have none!

Also, since I skipped a good 5,000 words of character development and action that should intervene between where I left off and where the Big Kiss Scene happens, I have in my head a terrible impression of bad pacing and out-of-character behavior that threaten to make the Big Kiss seem, well, kinda silly. It doesn't matter that I'm going to fix that by writing the intervening words; the impression is in my head now. This makes thinking up those words difficult.

It's like web design, for me. I am terribly, terribly impressionable. My team lead where I used to work liked to brag on me a little, telling people how, when I interviewed for the job, "Niki totally passed the HTML test with flying colors programming blind!" It's not because I'm that good. It's that I'm that susceptible to first impressions. The test involved a web page layout of sufficient complexity that I really had to get most of the code down before I could allow myself to look at the results. If I get the unfinished, terrible, disjointed, badly laid-out result in front of my face, I'm going to have a hard time finishing the job. The unfinished image will take precedence over the desired finished product in my head. So, yeah, I built a fairly complex table layout with rounded corner graphics and stuff mostly blind, but that's because I'm not good enough to do it looking every step of the way.

So I try to make my rough drafts fairly presentable so that my later revision efforts aren't stymied by having a bad first impression of what I wrote. It's also why I have a hard time getting started in the first place; I'm terrified of "ruining" a valuable story idea by putting it down on the page wrong.

Today I am avoiding the issue entirely by scrolling backwards and rewriting the opening. There's a bunch of implied off-stage action that could be brought on-stage: Rocket becoming aware of the "new penny" situation and driving off to fulfill his role as mentor, Timothy finding the coin and teleporting for the first time, stuff like that. Also Timothy's back-story: how his past shaped his present anti-social, foul-mouthed self. And, speaking of him being all anti-social, how that character note reconciles with him being the one to lecture Rocket on their responsibility to ordinary human beings. Stuff like that. Also, at the place where I left off, Timothy's about to try to cook breakfast in a kitchen that suddenly isn't connected to a municipal electricity grid, and he's going to realize that there isn't a lot of firewood around to be gathered. Their stay in the setting of Beowulf (post-dragon) is limited. Which will be fun for the characters to discover and argue over.

So I guess I'm not stuck. Just... feeling really silly in the morning. Which is how writing anything the least sexy or transgressive leaves me, so, no big deal. Right?

But I still need to re-stock on candy.

Writing is an occupation with very few instances of external positive feedback. At least, for the beginning/amateur/unpublished writer. You're functioning in a vacuum most of the time. Sometimes you send out a story, and most of the time it comes back with a rejection letter attached. If you're lucky, the rejection letter says something like, "Sorry we couldn't use your story this time. It's really well-written and we hope you will continue to think of us." But most of the time the writer has to look inside for confirmation.

This, by the way, is one reason that peer critique groups might be popular. It isn't just the pragmatic necessity of getting comments from someone who doesn't already have the story living in their brain; it's also the chance to get someone in the real world to say, "Hey, this is good stuff. It has some flaws you need to fix, but you know what? You really are a writer."

That's my theory, anyway. A theory. The one I'm working on today.

Internal positive feedback comes in several flavors, most of which a writer has to discover herself. The most common one, I've found, is the simple enjoyment of the process. Writing is quite definitely work, but it is often fun too, especially in the rough draft phase. Which is something NaNoWriMo has going for it. NaNoWriMo is all about rough draft and having fun. And the fun comes in a bunch of flavors itself: the fun of telling a story no one else has heard yet because you made it up; the fun of knowing you can tell a story, that you are capable of inventing stuff whole cloth out of your head; the fun of being surprised when characters do something unexpected, or, if you prefer to sound less insane than that, the fun of suddenly having an unexpected idea about what your characters should do.

Me, I think the insane-sounding stuff is fun precisely because it sounds insane. Hell, I believe in magic. With or without a k at the end. I converted to Wicca partly out of a rebellion against the mundanity of the world: "The Goddess is too alive and magic is too afoot, so there!" I will cheerfully tell you that I expected yesterday's portion of the story to go one way, but that my characters had another plan, and if you tell me that my characters cannot have a plan because they are not real, I will blow a raspberry at you because they are too real, so there, thththbbbp!

For instance, here's what happened yesterday. Here was my plan. I expected Rocket to throw a tantrum and storm out when he couldn't convince Timothy not to get himself killed taking on the bad guy. I had his speech all thought out in my mind: "Fine. Fine! But if you think I'm going to stick around and watch you die, you can just keep thinking." Then he'd stomp out the door and not show up again until later on that night when he would try one desperate last time to change Timothy's mind.

That's what I expected to happen. But when I got to that point, Rocket did something else. He tossed aside ethical considerations and attractive melodrama, and instead brought the full power of his "What I say is true" supernatural ability to bear on Timothy, forcing him instantaneously to teleport them both the hell away from the bad guy. Then, to prevent him simply teleporting back once his magical influence had faded, he punched him out. And then a dragon nearly fried them both to a crisp, because, being given no time or free will to choose one location over another, Timothy had teleported them to somewhere that didn't actually exist. Or, rather, that existed in the same way that I think Timothy and Rocket exist. Which is to say, it was fictional. And the dragon was the one which Beowulf was going to kill himself slaying shortly afterward.

I was watching the New Orleans Saints pound the crap out of the Kansas City Chiefs at the time, and sitting next to a good friend who was doing her thesis on Beowulf. These circumstances may have influenced the punching-out part and the dragon part. Hard to say.

So that's part of the fun: being surprised by your characters. But later that evening I was surprised by another sort of writer enjoyment: realizing that my own half-written novel was living in my head the way a published novel does. You know that feeling? You get halfway through reading that book, you have to set it aside so you can get to work on time or whatever, and the story stays in your head, niggling at you: What happens next? You can't wait to get home, to read the next page, to be in the company of the characters you've been following...

Well, I was feeling that way about my novel yesterday. Even after I reached 30,000--ten thousand words in a weekend! go me!--and I was taking a well-deserved break with Puzzle Pirates and blogs, that niggling thing was happening. The part of my brain that gets addicted to experiences easily--the part that imagines me playing more Puzzle Pirates when I ought to be writing--that part of my brain was imagining the story even while I was trying to take a break from writing it.

The scene I'd stopped in the middle of, not knowing what comes next? It kept resurfacing in the back of my addled little brain. I wanted to know what happened next. And it wasn't that I wanted to figure out what happened next, being the writer and all. I wanted to turn the page and find out what happened next, like a reader.

And that's cool. Cool and fun.

Which is all I really wanted to say today.

Me, circa June 2001:

Write faster than you can whine!