author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I've been mining my old archives. This was in them:

The best trap for a Muse is to write. Don't sit around waiting for her to drop by and wave her magic wand. Start writing. Write crap if that's all you have at the moment. Keep writing. Follow that trail that you're making--it leads to Her. When you find Her... DON'T STOP! Keep at it.

—Me, no later than April 17, 1995

Me, today: No duh.

And yet, sometimes it's good to be reminded. Thanks for the reminder, almost-19-year-old me!

Chez LeBoeuf-Little has acquired a pet snail. Have I told you this story yet? Briefly, we were washing two pounds of fresh spinach and a snail floated to the top. Now we have a pet snail.

It's thriving like nobody's business. Its shell has grown by half a whorl since we first found the wee beastie, and if it doesn't get a nice thumb-sized bit of vegetation to munch on every evening, it gets uppity. And whatever you feed it, it will eat it all up. Not a trace remains the next morning. It's a ravenous eating machine!

Here's the thing, though: its mouth is small. Way small. And it doesn't have teeth. All it can do is put its mouth around the next three millimeters of veg and rasp at it with its little sandpapery tongue. Give a snail enough time, though, and this process will suffice to consume leafs of lettuce three times its size and carrot slices five inches long--the latter remarkably like slucking up a spaghetto in slow motion.

Nibble nibble, bit by bit, "she ate that whale, because she said she would!"

Which puts me uneasily in mind of any writing project that's ever seemed so huge that the only reasonable course of action was to procrastinate the hell of out of it.

Nibble by nibble. Bit by bit. 500 words by 800 words. Scene by sentence by word.

Patient and persistent as a snail.

Which is the quasipoetic way of saying that I haven't finished or even really started my short story rewrite yet--and John and I are getting on that train tomorrow. So you know what I'll be nibbling away at today, in between laundry and housecleaning and all the other things that fill the day before travel. The first nibble in the queue will be a new scene wherein Daphne meets one of the extraterrestrial "Ambassadors" face-to-face and shakes its (for want of a better word) hand. Which starts two separate event-wheels in motion, both deadly in the extreme.

I copped out of describing the aliens before; Daphne merely observed that they didn't respond well to cameras, that something about the way light hit them, or missed them, gave the viewer an impression of a vague gray blob with too many limbs. One of the Borderlands instructors read that sentence out loud and then gave me a look. And I said, "Yeah, I admit it. Cop out." It's coming clearer now. The "too many limbs" are thread-like pseudopodia, root-like even, some carrying the being across the ground like centipede legs, some raised up to manipulate matter like hands at the end of arms, and some giving the impression of a wild shock of hair like dandelion down. The light seems to pass between these threads rather than hit them straight on, so that if they're moving they're hard to catch sight of. If you're very observant and don't blink, you can see the sparkle and shimmer of them passing by.

Nibble nibble nibble.

When I was much younger and I read Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time for the very first time, several points in the novel stuck with me hard. One of them was the period of time during which the main character, Meg, convalesced in the care of an alien species who were blind. They had long delicate fingers, they talked to the stars and each other via telepathy, and they had no eyes. At one point, Meg complained of the darkness on the planet--I think it must have been too far from the sun to have a proper day, although how it stayed warm enough for life I forget. (Note to self: Reread the Time Trilogy sometime soon.) Anyway, she complained that it was dark.

"What is dark?" said her caretaker.

"It's when there's no light."

"What is light?"

"Well, it's what allows you to see."

"But what do you mean, see?"

Meg couldn't answer. How do you explain vision, light, color, to someone without eyes? I wonder whether there is a similar disconnect between most of us humans who can see and those who are blind from birth--only, humans who have never experienced vision do nevertheless live among people who do, and speak languages with many vision-based metaphors ("Let me see" for let me think about it; "Look it up" for research it; "True colors" for true nature; "Vamos a ver"/"We'll see" for vamos a descubrir/we'll find out; etc). They have at least been vicariously exposed to the experience. Without even those metaphors surrounding them in daily speech, how can a species of sightless sentient beings comprehend what vision is like to a human? Are there any words we could use that would convey the concept?

How would another sort of animal with seven senses explain to us six-sensed humans their additional mode of perceiving the world? How would they describe an eighth color?

it is how those without voice speak to you
it's how you know they're there

now believe me when I tell you
that there are different degrees of thereness
we call them colors

how do you imagine a tree?

when you touch the bark
it snags on your skin
it leaves tears of sap
(how the pine-blood smells? we call that amber)

when it is in full leaf
it causes a cool place beneath its
well-clad branches
(that coolness is known as green)

it is so tall, its topmost branches
you can never touch
and when the wind hasn't yet arrived
you cannot hear the leaves whisper
and when the winter's overstayed its welcome
the branches give no shade

you ask me how I know they are there
their thereness is thin
and gray

Another disappointingly non-writing-related blog entry from me. Except, it kinda sorta relates to writing. Inasmuch any philosophy of how society should work can apply to writing, that is. I'm just passing it along because it's that good.

My current rules for working in this new world:

1. Make something other people can use.
2. Respond to existing conversations.
3. Buy real.
4. Use your best material.
5. The neighbor you beggar is a customer you've lost.
6. You own a share in the world, your country, your government, your laws, your economy, your community, your public discourse, and in the well-being of its citizenry. Do not let yourself be tricked into despising it. The share you abandon will be snatched up by the same people who are telling you it's worthless.

—Teresa Nielsen Hayden, in commentary.

Read the whole thread for both artistry in blogging and further discussion of what it means to be a viable and beneficial part of today's creative economy. (One might argue that there is no other economy worth speaking of, but that is a discussion for another time. You can have that discussion if you want; I have Deadlines and must disappear now.)

The way these rules apply to writing are fairly obvious, although, like the symbols of an alethiometer, the applications reveal more hidden depth the more you follow the associations...

What other people can use. The writer should never forget that s/he's part of the entertainment industry. Well, that's probably overstating things. Not every writing is meant to be entertaining. However, it must be part of what might be termed a communication industry. If the writing fails to communicate, then the reader cannot use it, and no amount of artistry can save it.

Existing conversations. Writing doesn't live in a vacuum, no more than does the writer. It responds to the pressures, issues, and concerns surrounding the writer's life. A book responds to the real conversations of the day, or it doesn't get read much.

Real. The thread in which Teresa posts talks about buying objects made with real components: oak rather than pressboard, leather rather than plastic, wool rather than fake fur. There's an analog to this in writing, I think. In writerly circles, the question "What does the writer owe the reader?" often comes up. It elicits answers varying from "The truth" to "A ripping good story" to "Nothing at all." My own response is somewhere in between. It's not that the writer owes the reader anything directly. Who knows whether there will, in fact, be a reader? The writer's obligation is, I'd say, to the writing. To the story. And to him/herself. The obligation is to write something real. A story we had to tell, one that we're emotionally invested in, one that speaks to real concerns we ourselves have. If we do that, then we'll find we've fulfilled our obligation to the reader quite adequately. But if we don't, we've pulled a cheap trick and made the equivalent of bubble gum and cheap pleather purses, something valuable not in lasting service to the consumer/reader but rather in its producer-enriching need for frequent replacement.

Put another way: if we ourselves are bored with what we're writing, how can we expect a reader to be interested in the result?

Best material. Never do a half-assed job. Never be a hack in the pejorative sense. If you hold a certain publisher in contempt (say, it's a second-string magazine and you don't want to "waste" your best writing for $0.01/word), it is better to not submit anything at all to them than to submit sub-par work. Anything you publish is attached to your name. Anything you write that isn't published is still attached to the way you view yourself as a writer. Well, that's how it works with me, anyway. Don't hold back: always write the best material that's in you. You won't waste it. There will be more. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but your name, your self-esteem, your craft are where you rise or fall. Never sell yourself short.

The neighbor you beggar. What can I say? Contempt for your reader is the road to self-destruction. I suppose I might point out the recent anti-piracy circus in the SFWA, but really, does a rational human being need to be shown examples as to why it is bad business to treat one's customer as though s/he were a criminal or an idiot? Is this not simply obvious on its face? As a writer, your customers are your publisher and your readers. Respect them, or suffer their disrespect in return. It's really that simple.

The share you abandon. This is the most abstract and all-encompassing of Teresa's rules, I think, and the one that deserves the most thinking-about. I don't think I want to try to reword it much. Mostly I want to just meditate on it. But I'll offer the conversation this much: We all have unique opportunities to make the world a better place. We mustn't let the cynics convince us not to bother. Else entropy triumphs. This is true in writing as much as it is true in philanthropy and politics.

Finally, Teresa further clarifies "buying real" some hours later in the comment thread.

This is your reading assignment. Go to it. (Meanwhile, like I said, disappearing now.)

Get yer mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about plot.

OK, well, the scene I'm thinking of did have sexual elements. But that's not the point. Point is, sometimes in writing a long piece of work, there's a temptation to, er, blow one's wad a bit early. Maybe it's just me. I've got this whole novel in my head, and some scenes are clearer in my head than others. Generally, the more tension in the scene, the more clear it is. Which means I'm more likely to start writing it, like, now.

That didn't make a lot of sense.

Um.

Think of fairy tales, where things happen three times. Three nights the adventurer watches over the twelve princesses to discover why their shoes turn up all worn through by dawn. The first two nights, some magic spell puts him to sleep and he misses the whole thing. But by the third night he's figured it out, he avoids the trap, and he follows the princesses down the stair to the ballroom where they're ensorcelled to dance the night away. It can't happen until the third night, else the dramatic tension goes fizzle. But there's a temptation to write it Right Now, because it's cool.

Yesterday I managed to write a scene like that, only to realize that I'd cranked the stakes up way too high way too soon. It left me nowhere to go, no way to increase the tension over the next couple chapters.

This is where I plug Spacejock Software's yWriter. (Here we go again.)

So, yWriter is essentially project management for novelists. You define chapters and scenes, and each shows up as a separate writing space. The chapters you've defined are listed off to the left. Whichever one is selected, its scene list shows up in the middle. Double-click on a scene description to open up the text editor to write that scene. (If that was confusing, just take a look at the screenshots on the yWriter website.)

As November approached, I defined the chapters and scenes for this novel, and on November 1, I began writing the text that belonged in Chapter 1, Scene 1.

So when I realized that what I'd just written needed to happen on the third fairy tale night rather than on the first, all I had to do was cut the text from Chapter 2 Scene 3 and paste it into Chapter 3 Scene 2. I could do this because Chapter 3 Scene 2 already exists, even though it has a word count of 0. (Also, I made a mental note that i'd need to create a few more scenes in between, and figure out what happened. Because, unlike a fairy tale, I need more than just "The next night, the prince fell asleep again.") Yay for yWriter!

Other than that, all I have to report is that I have remained on track. I got a bit behind yesterday, but I'm all caught up now. 10,086 is greater than 1,667 times 6. Whee! Good for me!

And you know what? Most of the people I see at write-ins in my region have consistently higher word counts than me.

Have I said Boulder rocks? Boulder rocks.

Look! (Where?) Over there! (At what?) Writing!

Triumphal fanfare, angels descend in a chorus, small children with little paper-unrolly noisemakers go 'tweeee'

So, like I said once or twice before (or maybe a few more than that), I attend a semimonthly writer's group, writing class, thingie, over which Melanie Tem and her dog Dominique preside with wisdom and exuberance after hours at West Side Books, aka The Big Purple Bookstore In Highland Square. Very informal thing. Whoever shows, shows. Sometimes manuscripts get critiqued (like my Captain Hook story last month). Sometimes not, and we just do in-class writing, or homework show-n-tell, or craft-n-industry discussions. Homework? Yes! Homework. Which you do if you feel like it. Melanie announces the homework prompt at the end of one class, and next time we meet, people who did something along those lines read it aloud.

The homework for tonight was to write something inspired by the seven deadly sins.

So, what the hell. I spun off "lust" and finally put on paper about three-fourths of the first draft of the Qabbalistic hostile corporate takeover story that's been knocking around in my head for some years now. "So, it's erotica," I told my classmates, "or at least erotic. Which is why I'm not going to share in until it's quite done."

"Erotic? Ooooh!"

"Yeah. A sort of erotic corporate horror story. With golems."

"...Right! OK."

See the pretty picture? That's what I wrote it on. Every once in awhile I remember my aging Compaq Contura Aero (not to be confused with the modern palmtop device of similar name), and I haul it out and charge up its battery and find a floppy drive for file transfer... and I write. And the funny thing is, stuff actually gets done.

The Compaq is not internet-enabled!

It could be. It once was. Give me a while with Telix and find me a phone number to dial and I'll possibly even remember how to make it work. But today, unlike in 1994, there aren't nearly as many dial-up text-only internet access points. Plus our telephone line gets AM radio, so, not so good for data transfer.

In any case: Light, ultra-portable, bump-resistant, Dvorak enabled, and Totally Temptation Free.

Well, almost temptation-free. Maybe 97.3% temptation-free. Because there's only so long you can play QBasic games like Nibbles and Gorilla before you're bored stiff. (I'm pretty good at Nibbles, though.)

What reminded me this time around was Maud's Blog. Maud Newton blogs splendiferously, and last month she blogged about Stephen Elliot's article in Poets&Writers: "Surviving a Month Without Internet." It wasn't so much the novelty of going off the grid for 30 days that resonated with me--I'm a total online junkie, I'm a telecommuting freelance writer for goodness's sake--as it was these excerpts:

Since I'm most creative in the mornings, I've decided no Internet until after lunch.

Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity.... Dedicate at least half of your day to handling non-Internet tasks exclusively. Write a list of things you need to do when you do get online so your Internet time will be more productive.

The urge to screw around is always strongest when the work's not going well. And if you work at a computer, screwing around is only a click away. But when the work's not going well is exactly the time to turn the Internet off.

If I leave the house with the Compaq, I don't get "just one more" anything. I get Nibbles, and I get WordPerfect 5.1 staring me in the face.

And--you know what?--when I look at that computer with its tiny keyboard and its monochrome screen filled from edge to edge with WP51 exactly as it was meant to back in 1990, it's like someone turned on the Batsignal for the Muse. My poor Pavlovian association-driven brain has one last surefire writing association that I haven't totally destroyed by being lazy: The Compaq Contura Aero means Writing.

And it ain't gots no nets no more.

Bwahahahaaaa!

Hey yeah, that's right: Not much bloggage for awhile here. And look! No manuscript association. That must mean I've been a lazy ass.

In discussing that much maligned and possibly mythical creature Writer's Block, I'm not making excuses. No no-no no no no! I am having a philosophical discussion.

Go on. Believe it. And meanwhile, I've got this bridge... no. Had this bridge. It is tragically off the market at current.

So. Writer's block. The forms it takes. Let's start with Impending Deadlines of Doom.

Impending Deadlines of Doom cause this writer to go, "Oh no! I have Umpteen Thousand words to write by Tomorrow! I'd better work on that project first. But when I'm done today's allotment of Wordage, I shall reward myself by enhancing my body of fictional work!"

This sounds well and good, and it is--when The Block is not in play. I should note that The Block is oftentimes more cynically known as Total Lack of Self-Discipline. However, it is not useful for the Blocked Writer to call it this, because such terminology leads to Self-Loathing, which is another form that The Block takes.

At this point I should quote a bit from Victoria Nelson's fantastic book On Writer's Block. My copy has sadly gone missing, however. This essay quotes a most appropriate bit: "If you beat yourself because you procrastinate, your problem is not that you procrastinate. Your problem is you beat yourself." My point exactly.

So as soon as I make the work-and-reward proclamation I find myself making exactly Zero Headway on the Umpteen Thousand Word Project. Why?

Firstly, because The Block isn't particular about which writing it blocks. I find myself totally unable to start that project for the same mysterious reason I find myself totally unable to write new fiction or edit existing drafts.

Secondly, because if I never produce today's allotment of Wordage, I will not have to write or edit fiction. Procrastination on the Deadline of Doom now has the "value" of aiding procrastination on the fiction.

I'm not 100% sure how to get out of that loop. My Type-A personality says, "Well, you just have to do it, dummy! Stop whining and get to work!" However, see above about Self-Loathing and beating oneself for procrastinating. My Type-A personality is not always my friend.

More on this subject to further cogitation and researching ideas.

On to The Block, Form the Second: Being Sick As The Dog.

I just happen to be enduring a round of the weekend flu-bug. It starts with a sore throat and post-nasal drip, the latter exacerbating the former. It continues with thermometers swearing that one's temperature is normal or even slightly below normal, and this despite whole-body muscle aches and chills. I have been treating myself with plenty bed rest, hot honey-and-vinegar drinks (I don't have any lemon juice in the house and I quite like apple cider vinegar), hot tea, and hot scotch toddies. And long baths.

Which I point out not to elicit e-mail of sympathy, but to demonstrate a reason why I haven't been writing.

I often look back on my year-and-a-half of chemotherapy (long story involving acute myelogenous leukemia, several fantastic oncologists, the wonderful staff of Children's Hospital of New Orleans, and Metairie Park Country Day School's willingness to accommodate all my absences) and wonder why I didn't get any writing done. Disregard that I was only 11 going on 12. I decided to be a writer at age 6. Disregard the lack of ubiquitous laptop computers in 1987. I knew how to write longhand. Why didn't I put any of that time to use, rather than spending it watching Bumper Stumpers on the hospital television?

Because I felt like crap, that's why. Even when I wasn't nauseated or fevered, I had absolutely no energy. Being in a hospital, being kept home from school, being unable to go outside--these things were depressing, and I don't mean my immune system. Thinking back to that time, I was either miserable or else celebrating short interims of not feeling miserable by, oddly enough, playing. Aside from getting my homework done so as not to fail 6th grade, I spent my up-and-about time goofing off.

Today, less sick now than then but sick enough, I find myself indulging in lot of mindless, escapist pastimes to avoid having to be aware of living in my own skin. Because living in my own skin hurts right now, thanks. Reading myself asleep helps me escape that.

This makes perfect sense, but these days I really, truly have stuff I need to get done. Thankfully, I do have some preliminary workarounds:

• Apply any and all symptomatic relief remedies so as to reduce abject misery (I am in fact sitting in the tub and sipping a hot toddy as I write this)
• Assign oneself small tasks (such as short blogging stints and non-contact brainstorming)
• Reward oneself for completing small tasks (Good for you! You blogged! You get more hot water in the tub and an hour's reading!)

My next small task coming up will be to start WordPerfect 5.1 and jot down what I brainstormed over the past few days. Nothing full-fledged or publishable. Just some short snippets of prose that might, some day, accrue substance. It's only a very little bit of writing, true, but any overtures in that direction deserve positive reenforcement

Hullo. Not dead. The short story's on hold for a few days, though--dangit--so I can meet a paying deadline. So I'm going to unload a few links on you. Look sharp, here they come--

Charles Stross on the writer's lifestyle (Via By The Way)

Firstly, forget the romance of the writer's lifestyle and the aesthetic beauty of having a Vocation that calls you to create High Art and lends you total creative control. That's all guff. Any depiction of the way novelists live and work that you see in the popular media is wrong. It's romanticized clap-trap. Here's the skinny:

You are a self-employed business-person. Occasionally you may be half of a partnership — I know a few husband-and-wife teams — but in general novelists are solitary creatures. You work in a service industry where output is proportional to hours spent working per person, and where it is very difficult to subcontract work out to hirelings unless you are rich, famous, and have had thirty years of seniority in which to build up a loyal customer base. So you eat or starve on the basis of your ability to put your bum in a chair and write. BIC or die, that's the first rule.

The Tightrope Walker blog on writing what you love (via retterson)

But I've seen other writers, just as excellent, back away because -- although they're clearly packed taut with talent -- they think there's some bar there, some Berlin Wall of the mind -- basically, a big sign at the end of a nowhere road that says, "Anything you try to write will be lifeless. Boring. A canteen of sand in the desert. Don't even try."

To them I say: potato chips.

Hmm. I may have linked that latter one before. It feels familiar. ...Oh, well. Enjoy.

Also, for those of y'all subscribed to my RSS feed via LiveJournal (you would do that by adding nicolejleboeuf to your Friends list) yes, yes I know that there's something fishy about the timestamps coming off my Metroblogging posts. There's a six- or seven-hour diff between the time on the post itself to the time on the post summary that shows up on LJ. At some point, probably after Monday, I'll look into that. 'Til then, pretend it's an exciting adventure in time travel. Yay!

This just in: The deadline for submissions to Shimmer's "Pirate" issue has been extended a whole 'nother month! (Well, a little less than a whole month, what with the next month being February and all, but anyway...) So saith the Slush God!

This means I can procrastinate that sucker right up until Feb 26 and submit roughly the same quality I would have tomorrow!

...but I won't. I did a good solid 500 words on the new draft Monday/yesterday (haven't been to bed yet, all confused about how to define "tomorrow" and "today" and such), and I expect to do no less every day until the draft is finished. No breaks! I'm just allowed to be slower, that's all.

(I'm also allowed to prioritize my Feb 12 freelance deadline. Which is a relief, 'cause it would be nice to get that in on time, get paid on time, and pay my credit card bill on time. Yay for promptitude!.)

I have too much fiction lined up behind this story waiting to be finished and sent off; another month spent dawdling would not be a good idea.

On a not entirely unrelated tangent: Over at AbsoluteWrite.com, the regulars are asking each other this timeless question: What's the difference between a writer and a wanna-be? I have been avoiding that thread because Certain People make me all Huffy about it, and I have a tendency to get a bit Snarky. But I can tell you the difference. Yes, I can. The difference is this: a writer writes. A wanna-be only thinks about writing.

Here's the big secret, though: Being one doesn't mean you can't also be the other. You can be both. On alternating days, maybe. Or months. A wanna-be in January and a writer in February and then, as soon as the story's done, you're a wanna-be again for a few days until you jump back in the ring and become a writer writing a brand new story.

In Spanish, there are two verbs that mean "to be." Estar is for temporary and locational conditions (death, oddly, being one of them, which may bespeak an tacit cultural belief in reincarnation, or zombies, or more likely looking for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come etc. etc. but that's beside the point); ser is for more permanent, defining characteristics. I think the description "wanna-be" probably takes estar.

Writing a story, we are told, is like sculpting an elephant: you start with a marble block and you remove the bits that aren't elephant. Except it's more like sculpting a chimerical beastie no one has ever seen before except you, just once, in a dream after a late night consuming too much tequila and not enough orange juice. You're not exactly sure what you saw, come to think of it. But it was cool.

This makes it a little difficult to figure out which bits of the marble block to remove.

And then there's the other big difference between writing a story and sculpting an elephant. Writing a story means you have to make the marble yourself. This is a point Chris Baty drove home in a pep-talk from his No Plot? No Problem! Writing Kit. When you write your first draft of the story or novel you'll later sculpt into something beautiful, you're actually conjuring up the raw material. Out of thin air. Poof.

I began writing this short story rather like I write a NaNoWriMo novel. I sort of just splortched out a series of babbled scene wanna-bes, filtered not at all for quality or connectivity, jumped around the timeline, deleted nothing, inserted whatever crossed my mind. The result is a hodge-podge that hasn't, in fact, coelesced into draft one. Apparently I'm fairly good at making mediocre marble. All my writing of late has been like that. Splortchy. And then when I try to revise one of my other stories, long or short, I end up stuck on paragraph two.

I've been in a slump.

I've been telling people that my slump is really just that temporary valley of despair a writer ends up in after a particularly intense learning experience. It's the paralysis that results from realizing that ye Gods, I really do suck, I have so much still to learn, I have insurmountable buttloads of stupid in my story, I am ashamed of even trying to write. It's not just me. A few other VPX alumni have copped to it, too--having a hard time jumping back in, wondering whether they were actually meant to be writers at all. But if you are going to be a writer, then you have to get out of the slump again. You gotta pick yourself up and get back to writing. If you do, lo and behold, you discover you can still do this, and even better than before, because you've begun incorporating all the lessons you just learned. And then suddenly it's easy and fun or at least rewarding again.

Getting out of the slump doesn't happen by itself. A writer has to put forth that effort. I've been procrastinating instead, and I'm running out of plausible excuses.

I've had several people suggest to me that outlining might be the best way to dig myself out. All this workshopping of late has got me fixated on details but has lost me the sight of the big picture. Whatever stage a given story is at, I need to make sure I have at least a rough field guide for identifying the chimera in the marble.

That's mostly what I've done today. Outlining. Asking myself questions: What's the theme? What's the plot? Who are these characters? And which bits of the splortched excuse for a rough draft have absolutely nothing to do with any of it? Do I need to quarry more marble?

And why am I stopping to blog this when all I've done towards answering these questions is fifteen minutes of thinking on paper?

...Right. I gotta go.