author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hello, the blog! I have a picture for you, which I drew. And I'll have you know that I don't do much drawing, 'cause it's harrrrrrrrd, so go ahead and feel special about it. I do!

This drawing is my monster. It's my dear little fearing monster from the Imposter Syndrome family. Isn't it adorable? It's a picture of its future self, after it has successfully moved out of its family home and into a safer place where it can learn to take better care of itself and me.

That may have been a little obscure. The logic goes like this: The Imposter Syndrome family is made up of a bunch of monsters, all of whom say, each one in its own special way, "It's only a matter of time before you find out you're not really a writer. And that will suck rocks." This particular member of that family tries to protect me from that inevitable discovery by preventing me from writing at all. In this picture, the fuzzbucket is handling its fears in a much more constructive way: in order to reassure itself and me that I really am a writer, it is urging me to pick up that pen and write.

Also it's a Legend of Zelda joke, because that's funny. (You probably didn't need to be told that.)

I did the sketch during the 5:00 PM write-in today. Because it was a write-in, our fearless leader gave us writing prompts and time to work with them or on our preexisting projects. But she also gave us monster pencils and big sheets of monster paper in case we wanted to contribute a monster drawing to the big red notebook. The theory is, conference participants fill up the notebook with monster drawings, the notebook gets auctioned off, and someone goes home with THE most awesome souvenir of Sirens 2011 or indeed of any conference ever.

I'm sure the original intention was to collect drawings of the fantasy monsters that are the theme of Sirens 2011. I'm pretty sure no one was thinking in terms of this sort of internal monster. But I've had this in my head to create since Wednesday's long walk, Zelda quote and all, and so there you go. The original went into the notebook, and the photo came home with me.

So. Speaking of writing and not writing: Remember that bit yesterday about "I want to go home and write forever, starting tomorrow"? Add another tomorrow. I am exhausted all over again and then some. This conference is wearing me out. In all the right ways, yes, with my brain all tingly from ideas I hadn't ideated before, but wearing me out nonetheless.

Today our keynote speaker was Laini Taylor, and she too had that "I want to write forever" effect on me. She gave a speech that was all about stories: the narrative expectations of life books had given her as a teenager; the desire to escape into a book and live in a book but not really live in a book (because who really wants to have to try to keep a pet dragon fed? Especially in this economy?); and the opportunity cost of every choice, in story writing as in life, which is to make impossible every other choice you could have made. "If I choose to become a mermaid... there goes my tap-dancing career!"

But the bulk of her speech was to make these points by telling a story. She wrote a story specially for this keynote speech, and she told it to us, stopping now and again at cliffhanger points to further make these points with related stories, some of which were fictional and some of which were biographical or autobiographical. And though a lot of characters showed up on the main page, I'd say the main character of her story was Story. "This," her story was saying (in that meta way that stories do say things), "is what it's like to write stories."

I know I, for one, when faced with the common writerly woe of a headstrong story insisting upon some element or direction that I didn't plan on adding and am not happy about being forced to add, will forever-from-now imagine -- in addition to the things I have already imagined -- a horde of extra cooks all salting the soup with unwanted monkeys.

So that was awesome. And somehow I am going to need to hold onto this sense of "you are awesome and writing is awesome and I want to write forever because you make it look easy and fun and like a total adventure!!!" that I'm getting by listening to the guests of honor talk about writing, because I'm not going to get to act on it until probably next week.

And although I am having a great time here in the Vail Valley and I don't especially want to leave, I'm very much looking forward to next week's daily writing. It will be a blast.

Exhausted to the point of dropping where I stand, so this will be very short. Well, maybe not so much short as in fact kind of long but consisting of very short thoughts. And actually, once I put them in bullet list format, they weren't all that short, either. Nor particularly coherent.

• Story notes: Caroline's suitor, as it turns out, was not working the marketing department with her at some job or other. He knew her from the hunting lodge. Because I'd already decided she was a hunter (because why just be Kore when you can be Diana too?), and, in short story writing, it is almost never a bad idea to condense entities. (This is not in the document file, nor yet reflected in the story's official word count. I scribbled it in my notebook over breakfast. Or maybe I thought really hard about scribbling it. One or the other.)
  
• More story notes: Billie Rae has a really gruesome keepsake from the last time Caroline was murdered. (Neither of them were going by those names at that time.) The nature of the keepsake owes some inspiration to Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and specifically Maelga and her collection of witchy oddments. I haven't decided whether the previous owner of the keepsake survived their amputation. (This bit I did manage to scribble down. Along with other things I don't remember right now. For what it's worth, it occurred to me in the shower. "Billie Rae strung his fingerbones on a necklace the way today's children make jewelry out of penne macaroni." Such cheerful thoughts I have in the shower.)
  
• Important for life in general: If you ever find yourself training to work the checkout stand at Office Depot, or any other retail outlet with a customer loyalty reward card program, remember this. No matter how hard your trainer tells you to sell that customer loyalty reward card program, no matter how many new accounts you're expected to open in a day, it is never appropriate to argue with the customer after she has declined to open one. Seriously: No means no, guys.
  
• It is also never appropriate to view the customer as an opportunity to practice your charm. Your alleged charm. That stuff you're displaying that you think is charm? That's actually what the kids these days call "douchebaggery."
  
• On Glitch: Adjustable quantity picker. Finally. LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE

And now for a second bulleted list, which we shall call "First impressions of Sirens." Remember Sirens? (Remember Alice?) The conference started today. We went to it. We shall be going to it through Sunday morning.

• Any lingering sticker shock at the price of attending membership ($200) began to fade once they pointed us to the "afternoon tea" buffet table, and vanished completely at the cheese and chocolate reception.
  
• I only began to regret not staying at the con hotel when I looked at the con hotel's hot tubs. I'm bringing my bathing suit tomorrow and I may just smuggle myself into that steaming water with the gorgeous overlook view of the river.
  
• Justine Larbalestier has written a lot more books than the Magic or Madness trilogy, and I must read everything. I have made a start by purchasing books: Liar, and the Zombies vs. Unicorns anthology she edited with Holly Black. I fear that this is only the start of my book-purchasing for the weekend.
  
• Elvis: sexist fuck, Y/Y? Seriously. I mean... wow.

• Listening to Justine Larbalestier talk about the writing of her books and everything that went into them makes me want to go home and write forever. Because of stupid only-too-human exhaustion, forever starts tomorrow. At the soonest.
  

More coherent thoughts from before the reception may be found at Boulder Writing Examiner, and, I hope, here tomorrow. Right now, I go flop.

*flop*

Today is an exercise in self-forgiveness. Some days, none of the stuff on the Big Scary Checklist get done, and then it's 9:30 PM and I'm tired. And beating myself up for getting nothing done doesn't help. Like, what, tired-and-guilty is better than just plain tired?

So. I hereby officially forgive myself for not writing today.

I did other things. For one, I did my Wednesday morning volunteer reading for AINC. I do three and a half hours of reading for them each week. On Wednesdays, it's 54 minutes of employment ads from varying parts of Colorado, and the recording has to be uploaded by 2:00 PM. It actually takes more like an hour and a half because I have to gather the reading material from several newspaper websites and then sort out the ads that don't have verbally tranmittable contact information. (Phone numbers are good. Email addresses are good. "Click here to apply" is not so good.)

Why, by the way, am I so reluctant to acknowledge how this task screws with my day? I guess I'm in denial here. I don't want to admit that this hour and a half has to come from somewhere. I mean, it would be nice if I could pull it out of a pocket dimension and magically have 26-hour Wednesdays, but I can't. And so it's an hour and a half I can't spend writing, it's an hour and a half of my productive energy for the day, and it's even more time taken because afterwards I sort of need a break. And I just need to take all this into account when planning the shape of my Wednesdays and my expectations thereof.

Lori and I tried out a couple restaurants up here. Lunch was at the Avon Bakery & Deli, whose bread really is just that fantastic. And dinner was at China Garden inside the Lodge at Avon Center. It was more expensive than I had remembered, but the food was delicious and the portions were generous enough to feed us for lunch tomorrow.

I had a good long afternoon walk along the riverside path, mildly regretful that I didn't have time to do the four-mile hike all the way to Edwards. I went as far as that townhouse campus that's just west of Nottingham Lake, where I settled down on a pillow-like boulder at the foot of what looked like an ex-bridge (which will be a completed bridge again in the near future, if the active construction crew across the river was any indication) and read some more of Cameron's Walking in this World. And it was just as well I didn't go any farther, because by the time I got back to our room, I was exhausted. That was pretty much the energy expenditure that all but guaranteed that the productive part of my day was over.

I wish I had more energy in a day. The stuff listed here ought not to have eaten up my day's allotment of potential. But "oughts" are sort of useless, because they aren't "is."

This morning I woke up dreading today, knowing that I needed to work on my short story and feeling scared of it. And the fear won the day, which makes me sad. But in the fear I recognized an opportunity for monster watching. "Monsters" is how Havi Brooks, whose blog I have become quite fond of, conceptualizes these fears and blocks and inner obstacles. You should read the whole post linked above, but here's the nutshell edition:

When you're working on a stuck or sitting with a hurt or working through the layers, you eventually discover that your stuck just wants to protect you.

Your monster means well. It's just going about it all wrong.

Your monster is small and vulnerable and fuzzy. And it just wants to know that you'll be okay. And that's why it makes itself so big and fierce — to scare you into letting it take care of you.

And once it knows that you know, it can turn into something else.

So I tried to have a little chat with my "stuck" in the safety of my Morning Pages. I called it "Dear little fearing monster," and I asked it -- asked myself, really, but writing dialogue is more fun for me than writing angsty internal monologue -- what precisely its goal here was.

As it turns out, it's trying to protect me from the ineviteble blow of finally discovering that I can't actually write and every success so far has just been a fluke and I'm not really a writer which means I'm not really anyone at all.

Dear little fearing monster comes from the family Imposter Syndrome. It's a family that many writers become familiar with. I see successful writers bemoaning it on Twitter with a frequency that is both depressng ("You mean it never goes away?") and heartening ("You mean even the big kids feel that way?"). I am in good company here.

So I had me a chat with this scion of that familiar family. "Dear little fearing monster! In protecting me, you're not letting me write. You're so afraid I'll find out I'm not cut out to be a writer that you're not letting me be a writer. In attempting to protect me from this bad thing, you're actually making the bad thing happen."

"Well, that makes sense... but what if I do let you write, and you write something that's no good?"

"I'll revise it."

"But what if you can't revise it enough? What if it'll never be any good?"

"I'll never know. I'll just keep revising it, or, in a pinch, put it away temporarily and move on to the next story. You can't prove a 'never'; you can only create one -- by deciding never to try."

(I say things like that a lot. For instance, my rote response to anyone who argues against encouraging would-be writers because, they say, some people aren't cut out to be writers and really just shouldn't try. People really do say that, and I find it rage-inducing. So I've got my response down to a slogan: "The only way to prove a person will never make it as a writer is by getting them to stop writing." Of course, the rage-inducing naysayers then like to say that anyone who can be so easily discouraged doesn't have what it takes to make it as a writer anyway. Because apparently they think that only the invulnerable deserve to survive? Only those with skin two inches thick have anything to say worth hearing? Really? How convenient to bullies, then, that no blame accrues to them, but only to their victims for being bullyable! Gah. This would be the point at which I am obliged to remove myself from the presence of such compassionless pieces of excrement, lest I do them a violence. Besides, it's not them I'm talking to. I'm talking to my colleagues, to my friends, to the walking wounded: "The only way it can be true that you'll never make it as a writer is if you stop writing. And even if you do stop writing today, you can always pick up the pen tomorrow.")

To make a long story short -- and I'd better, since the original conversation went on for two full pages of longhand, even without parenthetical asides -- I gave the monster job security. I gave it permission to keep scaring me. But I told it to change its method. That old refrain of "But what if today you try to write and discover that you're no good?" It's no longer allowed. I am taking it out of that toolbox and throwing it off a cliff. The replacement tool is, "But what if you never write again?"

My little monster has full permission to nag me with that question. And I will respond to that question with, "Nonsense. Look! I am writing now."

That was this morning at about 9:00 AM. Thirteen hours later I haven't written all day, and my monster is concerned. I would like to reassure the dear little thing that a day without writing doesn't mean no writing ever again. Tomorrow, unlike today, the AINC reading can be done late in the evening, so I have no reason not to go straight from Morning Pages to story.

But "tomorrow" doesn't appease the monster. The monster knows I said "tomorrow" yesterday, and see what happened?

But look! I am writing right now. And now I will take what I wrote and paste it into my blog editor, and send it out to meet the nice people of Internetlandia.

Hello, Internetlandia! My monster says hi!

In some ways, today went even better than yesterday. Remember yesterday's checklist? Everything got checked off today that got checked off yesterday: Morning Pages, both Day Job Writing components (those being Examiner.com and Demand Media), and Fiction. And this time I didn't cheat on the Day Job Writing -- which is to say, instead of just completing a rewrite request on a Demand Media article, and a rewrite request which consisted only of a copy editor's request for reference clarification, today I wrote an actual article. And submitted it. (And got it accepted, too. So: yay! More money on Friday!)

But there was a cheat component today, too. I didn't get to the short story until about half an hour ago -- at least, not to the putting-words-on-the-page part; I was thinking about it all day, including while asleep -- and all I wrote were a few sentences.

They were fairly lovely sentences though, I think. They came out of an observation that yesterday's writing lacked specificity. Who were all these people in the womens' house? Which normal human beings come to the funeral of a Goddess? What names do I put in the places where I've currently got "[NAME]"? These questions did not get answers yet. But I imagined myself standing where Demi stands, gazing from her living room out across the frozen lake, and I thought of the chill that bites through window glass when it's cold enough to freeze lakes. And that's what's in the few sentences I pecked out tonight.

That's stories for you. Sometimes they come in miserly dribs and drabs, and you've just got to set your bucket out to catch whatever little falls in.

Lori and I continue enjoying our retreat. We took a walk aroud the lake that's at the far end of the soccer field -- Nottingham Lake, Google Maps tells me. And, on my insistence, we dropped by the library again. I got a library card for the Eagle Valley District a couple years ago, thinking that John and I could check out DVDs to watch together. This week I've been checking out Julia Cameron books. Yesterday it was Vein of Gold, but after reading through the first few chapters I don't think it's where I am right now. So today it was Walking in this World, which still isn't exactly right, but it's closer. Lori and I are doing quite a lot of walking, after all.

The Italian restaurant in the Lodge at Avon is under new management. The Tuesday lunch special, a baked tortellini with a Caesar salad side, was very tasty and just the right size.

Loaded Joe's continues comfy and convenient. Especially comfy. Both today and yesterday I nearly fell asleep on their sofa. So both days I came back to the Sheraton Mountain Vista after Joe's and had a nap. (This is the "including while asleep" I mentioned earlier.) Tomorrow and Thursday Loaded Joe's will be closed for some minor renovations. I hope we get a chance despite the conference to see how those renovations turn out.

We had dinner in the room tonight. Lori makes a delicious pesto. She bought some wine to go with it. Now I am full and sleepy.

Somewhere tonight I got distracted by the archives of the web comic Three Panel Soul. Now I am trying to remember the short story that Lem's guest strip is referencing. Neither title, author, nor anthology are coming to mind. I remember this much: it involves living one's life over again several times on the way to saving the world and dying too soon. I think it's on my bookshelf back home.

That's pretty much it for today, and probably more than was really necessary. It's late and my blogging abilities are devolving into brain-dump. Heigh ho.

I suppose tomorrow I should continue the strategy of starting with whatever I skimped on the previous day. Today I hit the Demand Media article directly after Morning Pages because I'd skimped on that part of my checklist yesteday. Tomorrow I suppose I had best start with the short story.

Another writing-related event is around the corner: Sirens, a conference dedicated to women in fantasy literature. (I have been telling people "women in science fiction and fantasy," but looking at the Sirens website now, I see that was too broad a description.) This will be my first year attending, since I only just found out about it last year during NaNoWriMo (which is just around the corner, by the way) when Zak and Sharon visited around Thanksgiving and asked if I'd be going.

The theme of Sirens for 2011 will be "monsters," and panels promise to focus not just fantastical beasts who happen to be female, but also on the distressing tendency to treat women as monstrous. It should be no surprise to anyone to hear that this is right up my alley.

I'll be blogging about Sirens over at Boulder Writing Examiner, of course, because this is the sort of thing that Boulder-area writers should know about. What I'll be blogging about over here, where things are All About Me, is the awesome half-week of pure writing retreat that Lori and I are having during the run-up to Sirens.

We're staying at the Sheraton Mountain Vista, same place as Bridget and I stayed at last year (though, looking back, I see I got the hotel/resort's name wrong), writing and perpetrating yummy cooking experiments. (Looking back, I also see that weekend was where "Blackbird" started taking off in my head. "Unfinished Letter" has made no progress since then, to my shame.) Using the timeshare week for a writing retreat has, as I said then, become a bit of a tradition for me. It seemed the convenient thing to do when Lori and I stopped waffling around and decided that yes, dang it, we'll be attending Sirens.

We drove up yesterday, but no writing got done then, mainly because we had just driven up from Boulder. Add to this my early-morning start driving a friend to the airport, and the sum was exhaustion.

But today was a different story. We were both up by 7:30 AM, drinking coffee and doing writerly things. Writerly things continued throughout the day. Lori is concentrating exclusively on her novel-in-progress; I heard her say "Finished the chapter!" at least twice today. As for me, my writerly things consisted of the following:

• Morning Pages (for the first time in ever)
• Two Examiner articles (here and here)
• The first scene in the Persephone/Demeter story's new draft (from blank page, hence the word count drop)
• A Demand Media rewrite

Also a bunch of Glitch got played, much of it while watching Monday Night Football. I was rooting for the Buccs over the Colts, 'cause I want our division to represent, yo.

My main goal this week is to find a way for my fiction writing to coexist peacefully with my "day job" writing, ideally such that both get some of my time each day. If today is any indication, this is indeed possible. At least, it is when I have not cats and bills and housework and groceries and other errands of daily life to run. Making it work while on retreat is easy. Bringing the lessons back to the day-to-day will be something else entirely.

But I'm not going to fall into the trap of "That's nice, but it could be better" or beat myself up with the stick of "That's nice, but it's not much, is it?" I'm going to appreciate what I get done each day. Which isn't something I've been historically good at, sure, but new habits gotta come from somewhere.

I'm getting mentions in reviews. It's surreal.

Blood and Other Cravings is getting reviewed. It's getting quite nice reviews. And the surreal thing is when one of them mentions my story specifically. And favorably. With complimentary adjectives. Wow.

Here's a handful of reviews and/or reader responses that are online right now:

• Shroud Magazine
• The Tomb of Dark Delights (No permalink; review may drift downward the page over time)
• The first review from Publisher's Weekly

Pretty much all of these made me grin foolishly and sort of float about for the rest of the day. And beyond the immediate happiness of "They like me! They said so! They mentioned me by name!" there's the simple pride in knowing I got to be part of a book that reviewers agree is full of wonderful stories.

Ellen Datlow is posting about reviews on her LJ as they happen. Her alerts are how I'm finding out about 'em.

Another awesome thing that's up: The Vampire Book Club is giving away a copy of Blood and Other Cravings to one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is leave a comment in response to the post describing "what draws you to vampires." To kick things off, they first posed the question to the anthology's contributors, and the answers some of us came up with are published there for your reading pleasure.

It was a weird question for me. I'm not actually aware of being drawn to vampire stories, and I certainly didn't set out to write one. And yet in a way that's what I ended up doing. Why? "Because I had this weird dream" sort of lacks something as an answer. I hope the answer I finally came up with is interesting, or at least doesn't sound gawdawfully pretentious.

(I have no idea where the paragraph breaks came from. No one else seems to have them, and I'm pretty sure I didn't put them there.)

The last bit of news concerning this anthology is that there may be certain anthology-promoting activities at World Fantasy 2011 should enough contributors be around to participate. I'm hoping to be part of that. It depends on if I make it off the wait list and into actual attending membership; WFC sold out this year because, I think, of its all-star Guest of Honor list. (WFC, what were you thinking? You are small. Why are you fielding a World Con-sized GoH docket?) It also depends on if I just go "F*&# it" and head over to San Diego for the weekend regardless.

So there were email communications about that this morning. Then, because apparently driving around Denver and bussing back up to Boulder is the Most Exhausting Thing Evar, I wound up hard asleep for a few hours this afternoon and dreamt that I suddenly remembered I was supposed to send Ellen a recording of me reading my story by today at 5:35 PM, and it was 5:30 PM now, but I was going to record it anyway, but John was sitting next to me making a lot of noise on his computer so I couldn't. As it happens, 5:35 AM is when my bus leaves the Amtrak station Monday morning, which because the Amtrak station only opens at 5:30 is why I was in Denver picking up my tickets ahead of time. O HAI THER BRAIN I C WUT U DID THER

Er. About that bus. The bus goes to Raton, New Mexico, whence my train to Chicago, whence my train to New Orleans. Yes, this is more complicated than it ought to be. The California Zephyr is not running between Denver and Chicago during the month of September because what with flooding in Omaha and track damage and freight traffic bottlenecks, there was so much constant lateness they just gave up. It seems I've been negotiating non-standard Amtrak accommodations all year. This appears to be what happens to rail travel when every waterway in the US appears eager to flood at the slightest provocation. Please to stop that, US waterways! Also, please to reverse global climate change and stop messing with weather systems. Please?

I suppose I could just break down and get airfare. But I'm out of practice putting up with airport TSA stupidity. It's been so nice not having to worry over whether some bully in a uniform is going to make an issue over my knitting needles, fountain pens, or electronic accessories. And I'm kind of looking forward to riding the Southwest Chief for the first time.

I think finishing a story's final revision and converting it for email submission not only before noon but also from a medical waiting room is kind of bad-ass. Don't you? I do. And then submitting it from the diner down the road, over a plate of The Best Tamales In Town, IMHO (In My Humble Opinion).

Brief note about that: The Moonlight Diner is what I do if I have to go to the airport and there is time to wait around. Their staff are friendly and pleased to see me, they keep the coffee coming, and their wi-fi is reliable; but their food is on the whole not worth it. Pick up Popeye's on I-270 and eat it on the way over. But the Parkway Diner off 47th in Boulder is what I do by choice. It's what I do to treat myself after spending the morning at a medical appointment nearby. It's delicious and just as friendly, if not even more so, and if its wi-fi is less reliable, well, today it's working fine.

Anyway. Scene X got a total rewrite, as did the end of Scene XIII. And I changed the title from "The Only Moving Thing" to a line from Stanza VIII, "The Blackbird Is Involved in What I Know." I think that's a better summary of the story. The former was too coy, or cute, or something.

Got an email from my friend late last night announcing that his rewrite was also finished. I really like this submitting in tandem thing, but I bet we could both have done with finishing up about a week earlier than this. Morning of Deadline Day is... stressy.

But it's really hard to rush the composting process. Aside from meditating at the spinning wheel, I have no strategies for speeding things up. I'm not saying I have to wait until I'm inspired to write--I do have the ideal of showing up at the page every day--but it seems that particular stories have to wait until I'm inspired.

Again, it's like compost. Compost proceeds at its own pace; you can't rush the microbes. You can encourage faster composting by tweaking the envirnoment, of course--3 parts "brown" to 1 part "green," maintain proper moisture levels, turn the pile every few days--but none of this will get you instant potting soil on demand.

Just so with stories. I can do my daily free-writing exercises, I can think about the story all day and try to dream about it at night, but until it comes together it won't come together.

I'm just glad this one came together in time for the THUNK of manuscript hitting slush pile to happen on Deadline Day and not after.

Also, the THUNK of a work of fiction doesn't signal the same sort of THUD of imminent author collapse as does the THUNK of, say, all those 15K-word StyleCareer eGuides. I may actually get other work done today. Or at least I'm going to play real hard. Fiction is refreshing!

All for now. Battery failing. Until later!

So Friday I produced a new finished draft, mostly at the Moonlight Diner again. Friday night I emailed it to a good friend who's also working on a story for submission to the same anthology. Got some great comments back from him over the weekend, which I mostly fed to the composting brain to work on while I took the weekend off. The biggest thing is that Scene X isn't quite yet there. I figured. It's close, but it's (in my opinion) too much with the clue-by-four to the head between the characters' role-reversal and the backstory exposition, and (in my friend's wise opinion) structurally awkward because of all the "you"s you get when you combine 2nd person narration with dialogue. So I've been idly thinking about that, this weekend.

I also reciprocated with the story critique, which required me to finally learn how to use Google Docs. Google Docs is spooky. It'll tell you if someone you've shared a document is viewing it at the same time you are. It'll let you watch them edit it. This little pink cursor shows up right where the other person has it, so you can tell exactly which of your line-by-line comments they're looking at. And that's where I get all self-conscious and close the browser window. (My friend points out that this means we could have real-time chat in the margins of a manuscript. I admit this sounds useful.)

Tonight I'm working on a final revision. It's not going to be done while tonight is still tonight. My aim is to submit this thing tomorrow morning, which just happens to be deadline day for the anthology. (My friend is on roughly the same timeline.) I know what I'm going to do for Scene X--it's going to have the same goal-role-reversal, but will hopefully be a bit more subtle and a lot shorter. It'll have a lot less exposition because, really, we don't need to know as much backstory as I have personally figured out, does it? And I caught a bunch of typos, repeating words, and other infelicities to fix.

And I realized all over again that serious work on finishable fiction is one of the few things guaranteed to leave me feeling good at the end of a day. So. More of that, yes? Yes. And maybe not just on weekdays.

Still not done. Still not done. This story isn't easy. It ought to have been easy. Why is it not easy?

So I read it aloud to my writing class last night. And I got some great feedback. I also got a big honkin' case of Doubt and Uncertainty. Like you do.

I mean, look. The narrator's back-story with the monster at the end of the book. Did it actually do something before, and if so, how'd it get reigned in again? Or did it just threaten really loudly, and if so, how, in the absence of some tragedy to remind the narrator that This Could Happen Again And It Will Be Your Fault, do I raise the stakes? Why is every option flawed? Why does every single idea fail to satisfy? Also, everyone's right--the shrink character is one character too many. Maybe replace scenes 6 and 10 with phone calls between the narrator and the lover. When in doubt, condense characters. But what does that make the scenes do now?

The last story I wrote was easy and it came out beautifully and it sold on its first time in the slush. Why can't this one be easy?

Excuse me, I'll just be over here whining.

(In better news, my writing classmates agreed that the connection to the Stevens poem isn't glaringly obvious, not even to those who are familiar with the poem. And they suggested a line from stanza 1 for a title: "The Only Moving Thing." I think it works.)

Finished a draft yesterday. Still don't know quite what this story is, other than bloated; don't really know what its title wants to be, other than "not that." To fix the one, I'm doing a "quick" (ha!) revision pass this afternoon before emailing it to, or reading it to, friends and colleagues. To fix the latter, I plan on throwing this piece on the mercy of said friends and colleagues.

In case anyone's interested, Open Office Writer will open WordPerfect 5.1 documents remarkably well. However, the conversion is not without its flaws. All table structures in my WP51 document get visible borders that then have to be removed...

1. Right-click inside table
2. Select "Table..."
3. Under "Borders" tab, in the Line/Style section, choose "None"

...and all tabs need to be reinserted, which is most easily done using RegEx Find & Replace. Which isn't simple. Open Office Writer's implementation of Regular Expressions is... non-standard. The expression "\n" means "paragraph mark" in the Replace With field, but "newline" in the Search Field. Or something. So apparently the thing to do is search for the first character of each line and prepend a tab:

Search For: ^(.)
Replace With: \t$1

And you should definitely not click "Replace All." This ends in tears. Have patience and perform the replacement one at a time; when it finds a new line that should not begin with a tab, press the "Find" button to skip this instance and move on to the next.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a novel-length document. Probably refrain from using WP51 for my draft revisions, I guess. Just export RTF from yWriter and open the RTF with Open Office. Which is fine for novels written in yWriter; not so fine for novels written in WP51.

This is one of those "bridges" you only "cross" upon arrival, so I hear.