author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I feel an explanation is owed, as people who pay me to write may visit my blog and get the wrong impression.

All it means is, the stuff I write purely because I want to make a living as a writer. One happy day I shall make a living as a fiction writer, but for now I'm paying for my fiction habit out of my work-for-hire contract fees. (For instance, tuition to the Borderlands Boot Camp.)

Writers who simply write what sells, because it sells, are often disparagingly called "hacks." [Edited to add link to discussion: Is "hack" an insult? Was Shakespear a hack?]

Now, I don't seriously think I'm a hack, don't worry. And I think I do rather better than a hack job on my work-for-hire assignments, so my editor shouldn't worry.

But the lingo is in the lexicon. It's hard to resist using it in a sort of tongue-in-cheek, gently self-deprecating way. See? Profitable hackery. Writing done purely for the money.

So there you go.

Whew, that's better. My conscience is all appeased now.

Or as ready as they can look on the day the task is done. I should read them over again later, though, after I write up the synopsis. In any case, I got to the end of Chapter Three.

By the time he got back to Seattle (in the passenger seat of a green Saturn coupe whose driver held contradictory opinions about hitchhiking), a crimson sea was once more washing over the world. But this time it was the healthy, rose-touched red of sunset. It had nothing to do with lack of air. Brian was breathing just fine. Air moved into him comfortably and out again with each breath, just like air should. He was exhausted, true, but there was nothing wrong with him really, nothing at all.

He was alive and well. He wasn't on his way to Colorado.

And he never would be again.

I'm not entirely sure what happens in the book. I haven't entirely decided. I suppose I'd better just make the best guess I can and trust that it'll be good enough to get me in the door.

The exceedingly friendly lounge car steward on the train from Chicago to New Orleans asked me something relevant here. "Do you think you need it?" He meant the workshop. He meant, can writing be taught? Are workshops worth it? And yes, enough of the craft of writing is teachable that there's no question workshops can be worth it. But it remains a good question: Why do I want to go? What do I hope to learn? When I think about Big Name Authors (or even medium-name authors) reading my sorry attempts at telling this story and pointing out all the ways in which I've gotten it wrong, I cringe, I really do. But I still want to go. Why?

I really hope I have a better reason than the fan-girl one. "Ohmygawd like I totally want to meet Big Name Authors and have them read my Stuff *swoon* it'll be so rad!"

Maybe I'm hoping that the very knowledge that I've spent a lot of money to go, and put a lot of face on the line, will push me into high performance mode. I always have worked well under pressure. I hate it, but it works. Maybe that's why I procrastinate. Maybe I'm doomed to procrastinate all my life.

Victoria Nelson has some very kind things to say about procrastination. She says that we should stop punishing ourselves with the word and start looking at it as a statement of fact: I have put off my task until tomorrow. Why have I done this? What is preventing my unconscious creator mind from working with my conscious ego? What can my ego do to improve relations with my unconscious? Only I don't know how to answer that question. Creation happens in a state of grace, she says. You can't make it happen by force of will; you can only relax and allow the miracle to happen. And let yourself write as an act of play instead of a chore. Have fun.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of all this advice, but kind words and having fun seem like a good place to start. Better than hating myself for taking all day to get started, anyway.

In other news, I've been messing around a bit with the blog code. I'm quite pleased with having converted the blog entries table from being indexed by timestamp to being indexed by an auto_increment ID number instead, and revising all the display and entry management code to reflect that, all in under twelve hours. Unfortunately, you can't see that. What you can see is I've put the Random Writing-Related Quote back onto the page. Yay! Bask in its radiance! It is a thing of beauty!

(Yes, I know. I need to get out more. Hush.)

A huge black crow swept across the sky accompanied, half a mile below, by its shadow on the forest of apartment building roofs. For half a second the distance between the two birds grew and then shrank again as the crow's shadow passed over a clearing, a small square of soil between the buildings. The bird's wing blocked the sun and flickered in a woman's eye. She blinked and cast above her for the source of the irregularity, squinting against the sun's rays, but the crow had gone, well on its way towards whatever it is crows seek.

Nothing grew on this patch of soil. It had been years since the woman had tried. Now she simply sat there for half an hour out of this day or that, imagining herself a flower that tried to grow in the barren would-be garden. She saw herself a green shoot that sprang up from the half-buried seed, saw her questing tip put forth leaves and then a bud--but she couldn't get the bud to open into blossom. She could not see herself bloom.

Because it provides context. It provides a frame. If one writes bedtime stories last thing before sleep and then wakes to make more stories out of what dreams one remembers, these activities form a sort of contextual bracket around the day. It becomes a day in the life of a writer, and not merely a day in which one writes.

That's why.

And so, that settled, good-night.

Yesterday, I was in gloom. Gloom! I was absolutely certain that This Book Would Not Be. I was midway through working on that first scene, with Babba and Diane (sounds like a John Cougar Mellencamp song), and I found myself just throwing words at the wall and watching none of them stick. I couldn't seem to gracefully or convincingly convey how the bad-ass cool chick turns into a wide-eyed child again in the old homeless woman's presence, or why, and I couldn't figure out exactly why Babba decides to give the talisman to her out of all the teenage girls in Boulder, or how to reconcile contradictory bits of Babba's personal history with the unicorn, or, or, or--gaaahhhhh! I suck! I suck like a great big sucky thing!

Today, however, I finished rewriting the scene. And it ended totally differently from in the first draft. It revealed less, it was more visceral, it got a little creepy, and it got me just totally, totally happy. I was once more convinced that I could write! Yes! Yes I could! And this book will not suck all the quartz out of great granite boulders, no, it will instead rock those granite boulders like they've never been rocked before.

No, I am not actually bipolar. But thank you for your concern.

I told my husband about this phenomenon, and he, doubtless thinking of a friend of ours, said, "Like stripping."

I kinda went blink-blink while I processed that, and eventually said, "I guess so, yeah. Or like any field of expertise."

It's true. Whether you write or paint or program or dance nude for a living, the bad days can make you feel incompetent and depressed, low in the self-esteem department, prompting you to question your life choices, your attractiveness, your very status as human. And the good days can make you say, "I can so do this. I am a total writing genius," or "Damn, I'm one hot chica."

Right now, as far as I'm concerned, I am one hot chica escritora.

Even if I maybe did just call myself overheated writing desk.

Yes, first time hitting the novel since the wee hours of Friday night. What do I have to say for myself? Thththbbbp. "Thththbbbp" is what I've got to say for myself. What are you going to do about it, that's what I'd like to know. You don't feel you could love me but....

Eh, whatever.

Today's task: Rewrite the first real scene of the novel, in which Diane skips school, runs into Babba, and gets given the talisman. You know? It's kind of fun. I feel like I'm actually getting to make them real characters now. First draft, the arcs of the various characters' developments weren't exactly in place. All I had were echoes from their future possible perfections ringie-dinging around on the page. I get to listen for those echoes now and try to justify them. So Diane is a lot more surly in this first scene and a lot less ambivalent about hanging around with Mitch. She's irritated and she's dying for a smoke. And Babba actually has more of a consistent voice, too. I actually know who she is and where she's been this time around. In 1802, for example, she was in Tattingstone.

So I'm not done with that scene, not hardly nearly yet, but I have Other Things need working on tonight if I'm going to stay on a schedule that'll keep me from pulling some miserable all-nighters this weekend. Hurray for being on schedule!

Meanwhile, here. Have a link. Therein you'll find Miss Snark, the literary agent, addressing the question, "When should I just give up on this whole writing thing?"

When you're standing at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter is busy discussing his novel with Miss Snark.

Some like to harp on this fact more than others. You'll find them on writing-related forums all over the Internet. They can often be heard pointing out signs by which one will know that one is destined to be a life-long crap producer. "Look, real writers write because they have to. If that doesn't describe you, no amount of X Words Per Day tricks will make you a writer." "If you find it so hard, maybe you ought to be doing something else." I can only presume that such doomsayers are themselves struggling or even published writers who feel threatened by the army of would-be writers hurling themselves bodily from catapults at the great stone wall standing between would-be and did-become. The doomsayers must want to discourage them from continuing the assault, out of fear that they might become competition. "Look, just stop. You'll never be a writer. Go do something easier, like law school."

And the doomsayers can just bloody well shut up, right? Because yes some would-be writers will never reach the land of did-become. Some will never get published. Some will never even finish a single story.

But you know what? It ain't our place to say who that'll be.

It's said that where there's life, there's hope. That goes for just about anything you might want to aim your life at. No amount of crap you produce today, fellow writer, can indicate for sure that you won't start spinning straw into gold tomorrow. Or the tomorrow after that. Or in thirty years. The only way to succeed is to keep trying, and the only positive indication of utter failure is to stop trying.

And even then, you might start trying again next week.

So fie upon doomsayers. You'll give up when you're dead. Until then, for as long as you love it, keep writing.

It probably says something unflattering about me that one of my passtimes is reading ancient USENET flame wars. I can say that thus far I have not actually given in to temptation and posted responses to five-year-old posts. But it's been a near thing.

[Begin anecdote] ##Trust me, this is going somewhere.

There was this post at the AbsoluteWrite.com forums which I can't seem to find anymore, sorry, but it linked to this thread here. (Don't click the link! It will eat your soul!) The "discussion" has an all star cast and one very clueless, rude would-be author suffering from Golden Word syndrome. (Don't be tempted!) It probably wouldn't have been nearly as long a thread as it became were it not for a spectacularly stunning exchange between the would-be author and one of the shining stars in that all-star cast. She gave his awful novel excerpt a detailed critique, lovely in its thoroughness and more generous than he deserved. He dismissed it as petty. She said she was therefore puzzled as to what he expected in a critique. His response? "If you've ever written a real book... you'd know. :)"

(Yes, that was a smiley on the end there. As in, "I've just been breathtakingly rude but don't take offense because I tacked a smiley onto the end of it!")

They say that on the Internet no one can hear you scream, but even over that distance of five years I could hear the distinct sound of a convention full of authors' and editors' jaws dropping.

(But really, don't read it! There but for your forebearance will go weeks of your productive life!)

So shortly after that happened, another star in that cast picked up the gauntlet and began a new thread in which he gave this would-be author's excerpt an even more detailed page-by-page critique. For which everyone else in the thread was grateful, except of course for the one person who had been specifically asked to killfile it. He didn't, so there was more juicy flamage, With The Result That...

[End anecdote]

[Do getToThePoint]

##Told you this was going somewhere!

...he found himself used as the example in a fascinating discussion about the banality of evil.

While reading Gene's latest excesses, with increasing horror, I also noted quietly that this is an interesting way to introduce a villain into a trusting community. The back of my head considered that, as there aren't many vicious pathological liars around in most people's lives, thanks be, I may be reading other people's versions of Gene Steinberg as Dark Lord for years to come.

The discussion that followed held examples of real live evil, which is rarely as flashy as Darth Vador or flamboyant as The Joker. Real pathological evil is hard to recognize, because most of us tell ourselves it doesn't exist, certainly not in our circle of friends. Pathologically evil people take advantage of our tendency to assume motives of goodwill in all. How many times have I myself quoted the Author's Creed For Creating Three-Dimensional Antagonists: "No one is the villain in their autobiography"?

It's true. I cling to my faith that the Creed is true. However, do not underestimate an antagonist's ability to reframe their villainy in their internal narrative. In real life, it isn't always helpful to tell yourself that they just want the best for everyone and are misguided as to what the best is. They may actually want the worst for you--but are convinced that desiring the worst for you is reasonable.

Not going to go into details about it, not going to name names, but... my husband and I are recently on the rebound from someone who fits the description. And the sad thing is, that someone probably has legitimate historical reasons for being broken in her particular ways. But she absolutely did not want the best for anyone; she merely was convinced that some of us were evil and out to get her and needed to be destroyed. Once you finally realize--and it can take a long time to realize--that this person expects her friends to make her the center of their lives, prioritized higher than preexisting friendships, than family, than marriage; and that her more obnoxious behavior, far from being unconscious, comprises active attempts to break up those preexisting relationships by which she feels threatened; that wrecks every pattern you have for interaction. You can no longer assume goodwill as a motive. You can no longer take for granted a beneficient common ground.

The point here is not "poor pitiful me, I have seen Evil." The point here is, realistic evil--or a damn good facsimile thereof--comes in all different flavors. A villain needn't be a misguided philanthropist or a self-described benevolent dictator to be three-dimensional. Sometimes the villain has an unjustified persecution complex, or an overdeveloped sense of vigilante-ism. And whatever the flavor, it's valuable to recognize a villain when it shows up in your life. Not just because you're better off wasting less time and energy on people like that (really; the self-defense mechanisms by which we manage them in our lives can be actively bad for the soul), but also because once you recognize it, you, for certain writerly values of the word "you," can use it.

'Cause when you're a writer, and you find yourself losing at the games of life, that's your consolation prize.

So I've got bad guys in The Golden Bridle. I've got a high school clique leader who's downright nasty. I've got the protagonist's boyfriend who uses the protagonist in all the worst ways. I've even got the protagonist herself, who starts off the novel in her guise as Bad-Ass Cool Chick, a guise she's build out of self-defense over the years. None of these people are motivated by wanting the best for everyone. They want the best for themselves, and they treat others poorly, and they rationalize their poor treatment of others as being the only way to give themselves the best, which of course they're convinced they deserve.

And when I stopped to think about it, I realize that many of the examples raised in the USENET thread I'm linking you to here, as well as the example I mention from my own life, they've got threads of behavior and rationalization that make sense in the context of my bad guys. And I thought, damn. These people are so right.

So I'm passing on the link as a public service to writers everywhere. Enjoy.

But don't, for the love of the Gods, read that first thread. Or, if you do, limit yourself to the "Cooking for Writers Who Forget To Eat" subthread. Recipes are very cool. And the posts where people invent whole fictional accountings for the rude would-be writer's mental state, that's kind of interesting and heart-warming. And--

[do slapSelfSilly]

Look, it's not worth it!

Hey-checkitout-lookover-here. Someone else made some resolutions for the coming year. And they're pretty good. A goodly helping of writerly resolutionnessage, right over there, along with a lovely dollop of total anal-retentive "We Love Outlines" structural organization. Man after my own heart, that.

Not that I can totally adopt any particular one of those resolutions, of course. Everyone's got different goals. But the important thing is to make one's own goals concrete, solid enough to throw numbers into it and wrap it up in an outline. I'd do the same at the moment, only it's late at night and I'm totally chicken. Were I well-rested and more gutsy at the moment, I'd probably say something like "1,000 words of fresh new prose or 2 hours of revision every day, 5 days a week, just like Carolyn See says to do; also, toss three old stories back in the slush this month and at least one new one next month. And then there's the two novels I'm editing...."

The problem with me when I'm gutsy is, I'm stupid. Who the hell can do all that crap on top of 15,000 contracted words of researched and interviewed nonfiction?

It's something to try for, sure. Just not something to beat myself over the head with.

I do know I can't do 3 critiques a week. More like one and a half, to take care of both Critters and my local writing class. But I can at least resolve to do that much. The nice thing about manuscript critiquing is, every manuscript I read puts me in mind of manuscripts of my own. Usually the sort that are languishing at the back of a drawer, or maybe a third of the way down the directory file listing when sorted by date in descending order. I should probably add "Putting Down Roots" to my list of stories that ought to go back into the slush, for instance. And "Somewhere Else Red And Green."

(Caution: Short story titles subject to change without notice.)

A new New Year's resolution for me: I shall be prolific. Primarily in my finishing of work and submitting of work, and secondarily in my beginning of new work, I shall be prolific. I shall totally be able to apply that adjective, "prolific," unto myself.

With a straight face, even.

No, really!

Resolution the First: To submit the first few chapters of The Drowning Boy as my application to Viable Paradise. This will happen before my Mardi Gras train trip home, or by the time I've finished the current rewrite, whichever comes first.

Resolution the Second: To submit The Golden Bridle to the National Novel Publishing Year process, and to submit it to Delacorte no later than October 31, 2006. To that end, I have printed out the manuscript and am now beginning the first read-through.

Resolution the Third: To renew my commitment to One Professional Submission Per Month. To that end, I will put "Turbulence" and "Heroes To Believe In" back into the slush by the end of this month, and I hope to finish and submit "Threnody For Trilobite Blue" by the end of next month. (Speaking of "Trilobite," can anyone tell me whether any part of the mountain ranges now in Oklahoma were peeking up above sea level during the Early Devonian? I'm having a hard time finding this out.)

Resolution the Fourth: To be a member in good standing of the Critters community, faithfully submitting at least one critique per week, and submitting "Trilobite" unto their tender mercies by the end of this month.

Resolution the Fifth: To engage in more reliably money-seeking writerly behavior alongside my fictional pursuits. To that end, I have, as has already been noted, accepted a couple new work-for-hire projects, one due late January, the other mid-February.

Resolution The Highest: To act like a friggin' writer, dammit! I mean it this year!

...Wish me luck.

Chapter nineteen is halfway done. Mickey's first victim is in the hospital recovering from having been sucked into Brooke's plot. Brooke has just finished recapping how her date went up to that point, and exactly what happened when Mickey showed up. I think, plotwise, I'm in the first scene of Act Three.

I meant just to do about 2,000 words today, but the whole getting shot in Central Park thing was kind of exciting to write about, so I just kept going. Now, my calculator tells me, I've averaged about 1,586 words a day and will need to meet a daily quota of 1,854 words going forward. The numbers just get better and better!

Except, of course, having written to the end of my steam tonight, I'm not sure where I'm going tomorrow. I suppose something to do with Gwen's realization that even if she herself isn't involved with Brooke, someone will be, because that's how the plot goes, and Mickey will try to kill that someone, because that's how the plot goes. And that if he succeeds in killing someone from Real Life things will be Bad. And that the only way to solve things is to put everyone back in the book regardless of how unfair that is.

I want this book to address deep philosophical concerns, such as how Gwen has victimized her antagonist by making him too two-dimensional, and how characters can't be spared but they can be treated like real people rather than like constructs, and how writers maybe fall prey to the temptation to treat real life people as characters who can be manipulated for the author's convenience... but right now I'll be pleased just to get all the plot down.

Meh. Grandiose philosophical themes are a second draft matter. Time to inject lit crit goodness during the rewrite.

One of the side benefits of fictioneering is the Fiction Bubble. The author immerses herself in her fictional world, seeing her characters' surroundings out of their eyes, building a wall of narrative around herself word by word. It can be a disadvantage, sure, if the Fiction Bubble makes it hard for the author to focus on Responsible Stuff, sure, but when the real world is full of Seriously Tragic Stuff Against Which One Feels Helpless, a good cushion of fiction between oneself and reality also serves as a cushion between oneself and the onset of clinical depression.

Addendum: This. And on that note, this too.

Cultivate dailiness, ye writers and storytellers, for the Truth may set ye free, but a good Lie can keep ye sane.

Nevertheless. I've begun a short story about rebuilding New Orleans. It's a ghost story, of course. The first few sentences go something like this:

They rebuilt New Orleans on top of its own bones in the year 2006. They caught the floating caskets and anchored them once more to their mausoleums. They planted a new Mardi Gras tree on Bonnabel Boulevard. They dried out Mandina's and put on a fresh pot of red beans and rice. And we all came home.

Meanwhile, Drowning Boy is swimming along. I wish I were going faster with it, but at least Chapter 10 isn't slogging at the sloggy non-speed of Chapter 7. More action and discovery of new worlds; less maudlin wallowing. Because the rewrite has Brian changing land for sea at Lake Union instead of Alki Beach, I had to get him through the Ballard Locks. Research can be fun! Another side benefit of fictioneering: the author never lacks for excuses to learn a little bit about everything.

Not that I don't have a good excuse already, what with being a human being in an interesting--sometimes too-interesting--world. But it's amazing how far down a tangent "I can use this in a story" will go.