author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Just a brief announcement here:

If you own a Canon BJ-10sx (that's a 12ish-year-old portable inkjet printer) and you have been frustrated trying to get it to print anything beyond gibberish to your modern laptop over a parallel-to-USB adapter cable...

That is, if you have ever found yourself in a situation akin to the one in which I found myself whilst on a train to San Francisco (I had a three-plug extension cord, the coach seat next to the outlet, and the agog admiration of the coach car steward for essentially bringing my entire office onboard)...

If you're there, and you're just about to throw your ancient printer right out the window...

Don't.

Re-attach the automatic sheet feeder, flip DIP switch #1 back into the ON position, and all will be well.

...On the other hand, the dang thing is now working just fine even without the auto feeder attached. Why it chose to spew gibberish while I desperately needed to print out my story for Nancy's workshop, but is quite innocently printing out perfect test pages now, I don't even pretend to know. Maybe it was just being perverse. Regardless, I will refrain from acts of violence. Yes I will.

The story workshopped Saturday has been committed to email as of nine hours ago. As for myself, I am in the Emeryville train station, ready to be committed to rail in about an hour.

Before leaving San Francisco, before finishing and emailing my story, before sitting around half the night in the Hospitality Suite at the Dead Dog Party knitting and watching Adult Swim, I actually got out of the hotel for a bit. I started out by asking the hotel staff, "How do I get to an Amtrak bus stop tomorrow morning?" Oddly enough, the staff member seemed aware only of the Ferry Building stop, and the only way he seemed to know how to get me there was allll the way down Van Ness on a southbound #47 to Market Street, and then alll the way back over on the Market Street cable car, forming a nice big "V" shape over the map of downtown San Francisco in doing so.

"What about Pier 39?" I asked, because Amtrak's pamphlet showed it would pick up passengers there too, and the northbound #47 bus would go right there. Believe me, with my luggage, I didn't want any more transfer points than were strictly necessary.

"Look, all you need to do is get to the Ferry Building, see?" He redrew the "V" shape. "Like that."

"And there's no route to just get me there straight?" I drew a line across the top of the "V" from the circle he'd drawn at the Holiday Inn to the circle he'd drawn at the Ferry Building. The line that capped the "V" went along a street I'd become familiar with, California, as I'd taken the #1 bus along it to the hotel on Thursday morning after checking out of the Green Tortoise Adventure Hostel. It was one of the cross streets that demarcated the block containing the Holiday Inn. "Nothing runs directly along California between here and there?"

"Not that I know of!" he said cheerfully.

I was doubtful. I decided to scout things out for myself. I took the northbound #47 up to Pier 39 / Fisherman's Wharf, found the Amtrak bus stop there, and said to myself, "A-ha!" Then I commenced to putter. I was at Pier 39, after all. There were supposedly all sorts of fun things here. Restaurants, and candy, and an arcade, and a merry-go-round, and seals! Well, actually, sea lions, you can tell the difference because they're smarter and have visible ear flaps and so forth, but--seals!!!! Like fifty or sixty of 'em, laying out on the platforms between the piers and barking at each other and scritching themselves behind the ears with their foot-like flippers and lounging with their furry bellies in the air and--wow! Sea lions. Dude.

Then I figured I'd just walk along the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building. It was good exercise and pretty too. I located the Amtrak stop there as well, ate an Ahi sandwich and worked on the workshopped story at a restaurant in the Ferry Building, and finally turned inland to get on the Market Street cable car.

And then I found out that there is a public transit route that caps the damn "V" that the hotel staff member drew. I found the damn rout that runs right along California. It's the California cable car, duh, and it runs practically from the Ferry Building right out to Van Ness and then stops.

Rather a convenient line of public transportation for the hotel staff to be completely unaware of, don't you think?

At this point in the narration, the author pauses to regale you with a nightmare. I don't have many nightmares. When I do, they tend to fall into one of a handful of categories. There's the airplane or car trouble dream, in which I can't brake or steer or land worth a damn--I had one of those Sunday morning, finding myself awakening at the controls of a Boeing 757 which I had absolutely no training to handle or certification to pilot and which my husband was steering within mere feet of the water. I had to grab the yoke to force us into a wings-a-tilt position so we'd fit underneath a bridge coming straight up. "Why are you flying so close to the water?" I screeched; "Because I'm more comfortable there," he said. I corrected this as soon as I could, but we were not in VFR conditions and I didn't know what to do other than land and wait for help. I later told the jet pilot who came to take the plane home, "Really, I swear, I just sort of woke up in the cockpit. I don't know how I got there."

So that's the vehicle trouble dream. It used to take place in cars, but now it almost exclusively takes place in airplanes because, well, piloting stresses me out more.

Then there's the nightmare of pursuit in which some monstrous person or thing chases me at a walking speed, knowing I can run but I can't hide. That one has happened only very, very rarely since I got into my 20s.

And the nightmare of being unprepared for school happens fairly frequently. It almost always puts me back in high school, not college. I've heard others say the same. We form more of a stressy connection with the school our parents chose, maybe, than with the school we chose to escape to. Or maybe high school is more grounded in the subconscious, being usually in our home neighborhoods and associated with rites of passage like the sweet sixteen, learning to drive, and so forth.

Well, you probably recognize all those dreams. Especially the school one. And you'll probably recognize this one, too: the nightmare of falling. Only when I have it, it's special. It's quite precise. It very rarely involves a straight freefall; instead, it begins on an inclined plane. And I'm in a vehicle of some sort: a roller coaster, a car, a bus, maybe even a waterslide. And I am going down or up a very steep incline, so very steep and increasingly so that inevitably my vehicle's wheels (or, in the case of the waterslide, my butt cheeks) lose contact with the road (or track or slide) and begins to fall as though the plane had become perpendicular to the ground.

The entire way up Nob Hill while riding the California Street Cable Car, I kept thinking, "Greeeeat. Fresh fodder for my falling-off-an-inclined-plane nightmares. Just what I needed."

Because California Street is pretty damn steep. I'd wager 10%, some of those blocks. And the cable car is two-thirds open to the sides. My entire stay in the Holiday Inn, I'd fallen asleep and woken up staring at a Photoshop-filtered picture of people riding a San Francisco trolly (ding! ding! think Rice-a-Roni!), and I'd marvelled at the way they some of them stood on the running board and held onto the side pole as they rode. Was that allowed? Was the driver aware? Yes the driver is aware, and it is in fact expected, and it is not the norm for someone sitting on the bench in the open bit to clutch the side pole and the back of the bench with white knuckles and shaking arms as the car rides up past Chinatown.

Yes I'm a wimp. What's your point?

On my way back to the Ferry Building with luggage this morning, I sat in the enclosed section in the middle. I still did my share of white-knuckling, especially when a young lady stepped right out onto the running board in preparation for her stop about two blocks above the heart of Chinatown. I suppose people get used to the darndest things.

Hell, I suppose if I can get used to steering an airplane, or to chatting with Big Name Authors at conventions without going all "hrrrr dahhhh thhbbbb uh You Rock, Sir! i er ummm....", or with reading my own fiction aloud in front of a group of strangers (which group includes said Big Name Author(s)), other people can get used to seemingly death-defying feats such as hanging out the side of a cable car going 10 miles an hour down a 10% grade incline. Each to their own.

Just got the email back yesterday afternoon from Fictitious Force. They will not be publishing "Turbulence" after all. Deep *sigh*. The email said something that made me smile, though: "Your story made our second round, but we ultimately decided not to publish it." Oooh! My story was not an immediate "we don't think so"! That's kinda cool.

Meanwhile, I just got done attending the first session of Nancy Kilpatrick's Editing Workshop at the World Horror Convention. I passed out copies of "Still Life In June", which I brought up to something like presentable over the last couple days. Tomorrow we're all going to read our stories aloud, as we have a three hour session and Nancy has figured that all the reading will take 67 minutes total. (One minute per page.) A really exciting thing, besides the excitement of having my work put in front of Nancy herself, is that Stephen Jones will be sitting in on tomorrow's session too. That's just too cool.

A lot of things are cool today.

Now I'm going to take a nap, because one of the things that is uncool is my raging sore throat. I'm hoping to feel well enough to enter the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest tonight... which involves reading aloud. Quickly. Yeesh.

Yes! I have entered this contest right here. In order to make the story acceptable for that contest, it not only had to be totally rewritten from its beginnings as a high school writing assignment (it burns! it burns! the awful bad teenage writing burnsss us!), but then the result of rewriting it had to be slashed down from 4,500 words to 2,500. Oh ouch. Oh, owie wowie. I, er, didn't actually need that left arm, did I?

In other news, I am sitting in the lobby of the Green Tortoise Hostel in San Francisco. Tomorrow sometime before 10 I have to get to the hotel that's hosting the World Horror Convention. I am hoping that the transit hurts less than the walk from the Ferry Building to the hostel. "Oh, it's just a couple blocks up to Broadway and then like another block to the left. You can't miss it." If those were two blocks to Broadway, they were looooong blocks. And then it was at least six blocks up Broadway to the hostel. Up as in uphill. Uphill as in San Francisco Bay Area uphill. With luggage. Owwwwww.

So I'm going to sleep now. Tomorrow starts bright and early, and I'm beat.

Hello all. Just entering minute-to-midnight deadline mode again. Deadlines which have paychecks and external pressures attached get priority in my schedule, even if they have nothing to do with novels and short stories. Such is life.

Will try to make time tomorrow for things not work-for-hire related, such as blogging about my birthday weekend (I'm 30! Hello, multiple-of-ten angst! ...OK, I'm over it) on Denver Metblogs (hello, Denver Metblogs! Did you miss me? ...No?), critiquing others' fiction as well as my own (hello, Golden Bridle! I know you've missed me), and creating new stories for publication and not (hello... ah, well, that would be telling).

And, um, paying the bills. Hello, the evil, evil bills. They sit in an evil pile on top the piano and they taunt me.

But nevermind that. Tomorrow is Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day! We need a plan, you 'n me, a cunning plan to go and get us some! I suspect it will involve some strategic queuing up and waiting around on the Pearl Street Mall. In the snow. In the snow. Gods damn it.

Maybe they'll offer us in the Rockies a free mug of hot chocolate instead.

So those three chapters got another round of polishing, and the synopsis got whittled down to 900 words. And every one of those words was wanted, let me tell you.

Let me tell you something else. FedEx Kinkos charges $0.49 per page on their black-and-white printer. Fifty cents! For one sheet! One crappy cover letter: Fifty cents! One crappy 900 word synopsis: Two bucks! I'm damn glad I printed out the 9,100 word three-chapter writing sample on a friend's laser printer instead. That one was almost twenty bucks long. Next time, I'm-a goin' price-shopping. There's another copy center 'cross the street from the Kinkos; they might offer more reasonable prices.

Or I might just get my printer nozzle cleaned out and print from home like I used to.

Never, never, never-never never feed your Canon i450 generic-compatible ink. Hold out for genuine Canon ink. Or you'll get drop-shadows and blurs in your printouts and boy will you be sorry.

So, yeah. Application to VP going into the mail mañana.

Finally cracked open the novel again and made a couple more inches' progress. I'm at the bit where Brian first realizes that his little breathing problem has something to do with heading east, and I feel a little like him, moving forward at a snail's pace and fighting myself the whole way. Now, he's going to have to turn back because there ain't nothing you can do about being a fish out of water except head back to the sea. But me, I've gotta keep crawling.

I have a whole four pages to go until I reach the end of Chapter Three. And the closer I get, the slower I go. It's like I'm afraid of finishing, because then I'd have to actually submit writing to someone who'll read it and maybe like it and invite me to attend a workshop where they'll help me make it better. Horrors!

What the hell is this? Y'all other writers out there, you know what I'm talking about. And if you're all like, "Not me, thank you very much, I can't not write, I deny the existence of writers' block, I don't know what your problem is at all," then, good for you. I'm not talking to you. Shut up. The rest of y'all, y'all know, right? What is this, fear of success? Fear of completion? Fear of leaving the safety of one's nice, comfortable rut?

It's probably time to reread Victoria Nelson' On Writer's Block. I seem to recall her having something to say about these things: the block that comes from unconsiously savoring the limitless possibilities of incompletion; the block that comes from reluctance to commit; the block that comes from fear of finishing the work. And, wise writer that she is, she also has a few things to say about the tendency to mentally excoriate oneself for not having written today, and thus make it even harder to write the next day. I'm really good at that mental excoriation stuff.

It's almost 4 Aye Emm. Time for a nap or something.

This has not been one of my most productive weeks.

Well, not novel-wise, anyway. In other ways, it's been quite fast-paced. For instance, I've got myself all signed up for the World Horror Convention, including the Editor's Workshop (topic: "Professional Help," ha ha ha *groan*). I've gotten initial hold of everyone I want to interview for my latest work-for-hire gig. I have even gotten interviewed for a possible new web development job (no! no! don't wanna! can't make me! ...well, OK) with a follow-up interview next week.

But the novel? Er. Eek?

I've decided on just the first three chapters, since that's a better place, storywise, to break off. The application guidelines say up to 10,000 words, not exactly 10,000 words, after all. And I've only just started on the chapter three line-by-line. If I had to get through Chapter 4, too, I'd never get this dang thing in on time.

Today's headache: Flashbacks.

That's all. No long, drawn-out explanation. Just: Flashbacks. Flashbacks, and the segue between past perfect and simple past. Ew, I say. Ewwwwwww.