author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

You remember the scene, right? A black cat crosses the red carpet in the hallway, hisses, then continues on its way--only to vanish two steps later and reappear five steps behind. With a brief digital blur, it reenacts its most recent past. The protagonist is startled. So are we. "A glitch in the Matrix," we are told. A memory hitch, a redraw jitter, a fault revealing the computerized nature of the fictional world.

Meanwhile, in the "real" world, the Matrix glitches again. John and I are in Chicago, visiting the Field Museum. In the Africa exhibit there stands an elephant tusk from a royal altar in Benin, a spiraling story carved into its six or seven foot length: the Oba would have commissioned this work to commemorate his father's reign. As a work of literature, it grabs our attention, because (the informative plaque tells us) there is no single translation. The iconography is properly interpreted as overlapping layers of story. Like a sedimentary rock, each narrative strata resembles the one beneath it but differs here and there in key ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt.

At the time, we understand this to mean that a single reading contains these multifaceted interpretations. That the tusk always contains in its deliberately broad-reaching icons several related stories, each considered true, each accessible in the carving, from the point of view of a member of the court in a given generation. Researching it now, I think maybe I misunderstood; articles such as Barbara W. Blackmun's "From Trader to Priest in Two Hundred Years" (Art Journal; June 1, 1988) seem to imply that the layers of varying interpretation were not designed from the beginning but rather accreted over the years. The ambiguous nature of the icons and the prioritizing of "cherished values" over "linear, factual recording of past events" allowed successive generations to seamlessly reinvent the story, changing the past to better suit the values of the present. Nevertheless, at the time, John and I were both enchanted by the idea of multiple narratives coexisting upon the same "page." Both of us wanted to tuck the paradigm under our arms, spirit it home, and infuse it into our respective relationships with storytelling.

Like most museums, the Field Museum strives to be interactive. Some of its exhibits include hands-on demonstrations. Some are labeled with pop-up books instead of plaques. "How many languages are spoken on the African continent? Lift this page to find out!" Tools from our childhood classrooms, prompting us to respond as children ready to learn. In this spirit, a three-ring binder was affixed to one of the shelves bordering the exhibit case. "Flip through the pages to see different possible stories this tusk could be telling."

So I did.

But each page was identical to the first.

Only one story was being told. Repeatedly. With word-for-word accuracy.

In fiction, I do weird. I love to read it, I strive to write it. And I'm in the habit of believing it. When I think I'm seeing oddness in the world around me, like everyone else I insert a logical explanation: "Administrative glitch. Or maybe it's supposed to be 10 copies of the same thing. Whatever." But before I get there, the weirdness gets there first.

"A glitch in the Matrix. The world is throwing duplicates, like a computer running too many processes. When I look up, I'll see a line of duplicate carved tusks in identical glass cases stretching off as far as the eye can see."

For just a moment, I know this to be true. Then the logical explanation cuts in and restores order to my world. Safe, predictable, comforting order. Boring order.

So two months later I start writing the story in which the weirdness usurps the boring. And the weirdness, as it turns out, has layers of weird lurking underneath, weird strata imperfectly mimicking even weirder strata.

This should be fun.

I'm still under orders to keep mum concerning the details regarding my recent sale of "First Breath," unless by some chance said orders have been rescinded without my knowledge. Playing it safe, I assume that not. But apparently it's never too early for a success to turn me into a stupidly immobile writer-wannabe hack. I shouldn't be surprised; it takes so very little to do that. Besides, we all know how success itself can turn around and cause writer's block. I should have seen this coming.

Now, first off, I feel pretty weird referring to the sale as "success." A success, yes. A very important success, very true. A landmark I've wanted to reach since, oh, age 14. But, nevertheless, a single short story sale cannot be considered Success With A Capital "S" Or A Definitive Article, not when the long-term goal is to be able to support myself and my family by making stuff up and writing it down.

This is why I keep saying, "Time to write the next thing!" Which is... a lot of pressure, oddly.

Because here's the thing: I keep catching myself trying to write not simply the next thing, but the next thing that this editor will buy. Instead of simply looking for another idea I can turn into a story, I've been searching for the idea. You know the one. The one that will turn itself into a story by dint of yanking the hapless author out of bed and plunking her down in front of the typewriter with an inviolable command to Write! and Write now! and Not To Stop Until It Is Finished!

If that's what I've been doing, it's no wonder I'm not getting past "I don't know what to write" these days. Because that idea? That idea is a myth. It is a fantastic creature. It is--

Well, wait. That's wrong. I know it's wrong, you know it's wrong, every writer who ever had an idea haul them to their daily work by the scruff of the neck or had fictional characters insist they take dictation knows that it's wrong to say that such an idea is mere myth. It exists, all right. Really and truly--but only insofar as, given a working writer's full attention, every idea is that idea. It's the difference between "There are no such things as unicorns" and "Of course unicorns exist, duh. Here's a picture of a narwhal."

(For the record, I absolutely believe unicorns exist. Unconditionally.)

There are a lot of wrong lessons to learn from having sold a story. Among them are "Write something else JUST LIKE IT!" and "Save your energy for writing stories that obsess you, like that one did!" It's all well and good to make your ideas compete for your attention and only work on the one that succeeds in grabbing it. But to wait, sit there with your pen or keyboard motionless, until the right idea appears? No.

Any lesson that takes the writer out of the driver's seat is the wrong one.

A better lesson is, "See what you did there? Take the next idea you have, and do it again." Do what again? "Give it your attention. Feed it to your right brain. Dream on it. Spend time typing about it." Take an active role, and turn the next idea into that idea.

Which will turn around and hijack you.

Enjoy the ride.

(...I'm not sure I'm OK with that metaphor, really. Perhaps tomorrow I'll have a better one. Sleep tight, kids.)

From the Amtrak to the BX, from the station straight to work. John and I just got back this morning on a train from Chicago, having spent a fantastically action-packed Memorial Day weekend there. A night spent in sleeping accommodations meant we were well-rested and ready to get back to our respective jobs pretty much the moment we pulled in.

For both of us, since May 17, our respective jobs are primarily in downtown Boulder. Which is to say: John took a position with a small programming start-up in a location he can bus, bike, or even walk to (in good weather and with 45 minutes to spare), and I happily rearranged my own writing routine such that I accompany him there most days. He goes to the office, and I go to some place quiet and endowed with electrical outlets and wi-fi. Maybe I do my Morning Pages on a bench by the creek, maybe pull out the laptop and do some freewriting, until the Boulder Public Library opens at 10:00. (Once I gave into temptation and spent the pre-library hour at Tee & Cakes. Hard on the wallet. Easy on the yummm.) Maybe I spend the hours until lunch working on Demand Studios articles in the upstairs quiet zone. Maybe I meet John for lunch, if he has time. Maybe we try a downtown establishment with an interesting lunch special. Maybe we make lunch. (I bought bento boxes! I want to fill them up with Stuff!) Maybe I go to Atlas Purveyors for the afternoon stretch, working on short stories and blogging gigs if there's time.

That's a lot of maybe. The definitely is, I go to work. And I work.

It helps to leave the house to go to work; I don't end up running errands or cleaning the house or chasing the cats instead of writing. It helps even more to leave in the company of someone who's heading to work himself. Self-discipline is largely a matter of mindset, and the morning go-to-work routine changes a mindset. Also, this is my first time since 2004 working roughly in the same location as my husband; I'd forgotten how much I'd missed commuting together, going to lunch together, simply being nearby rather than at opposite ends of a highway.

Today, we got off the BX, walked to his office, stowed our luggage, and then went our separate ways: he to renew his Diet Coke supply, me to order a pot of pu erh at Atlas. I had a lot to do, so it was best to spend the day all in one place. Atlas are very hospitable to all-day work sessions, even bums like me who buy one pot of tea and re-steep it all day long.

(Atlas recently got a hilariously absurd negative review on Yelp.com. The owner blew it up, printed it out, and enshrined it on the wall-to-wall chalkboard for all to enjoy.)

It felt weird how normal everything felt today, being back in Boulder, getting back to work. I mean, last night I went to sleep somewhere in Nebraska. Yesterday morning I woke up in Chicago. I guess traveling has to bring you back home sometime, but the transition was so seamless that I barely noticed it, making Boulder feel a strange place to be.

Then I thought, "You know what's really weird? That 'normal' means calling this cafe my office for the day, watching people walk by, writing stories half the day and paid article gigs the other half. And calling somewhere else my office tomorrow."

Then things got really circular. I stopped thinking and went back to writing.

Today's fiction task: write down the zombie story I've been entertaining in my head all weekend long. If you followed the links above, you'll have found one to Tee & Cakes's short story contest (here's their original announcement). The three words that were the story prompt put me in mind of nothing so much as Popcap.com's "Plants vs. Zombies" game (though I admit playing it during any downtime with John this weekend helped). So it's a bit of a pastiche on that, and a bit of a spoof on popular expectations about the inevitable zombie apocalypse. It also incorporates something I learned about chickens a couple weeks ago at Abbondanza.

The result is now in Tee & Cakes's inbox. If it doesn't make the cut, I think I just might send it to Weird Tales.

And that's the news.

Remember yesterday's overwrought, overstretched metaphor? "So it's like a seedling nursery, right? Only it's in suspended animation." It's exactly like that, actually.

So I do the Twitter thing. My blog posts broadcast there via RSS, and I get downright tweet-headed when I'm on a train or at a convention. And sometimes I tweet the "Story Idea du Jour"--for example, this.

The Story Idea du Jour comes directly out of this daily routine I'm working on, where I sit down with the task of writing something new, something so brand-new that I don't even know what it's going to be until it's done. It is very self-reassuring to come up with a shiny new story idea daily. It reaffirms the known but hard-to-keep-hold-of fact that story ideas don't run out. Truly they don't. Ideas are not only a dime a dozen, they're growing on trees. And the more I force myself to come up with new ones, the easier it is to come up with new ones.

"Coming up with ideas" isn't quite right. I'm coming up with ideas all the time without even trying. I'd wager tomorrow's breakfast that we all do. The trick is recognizing them as ideas and not reflexively rejecting them. Morning Pages are also good for fomenting the habit of recognition and breaking the habit of rejection: Keep the pen moving. Don't stop for three pages. Recognize each thought and transcribe it. Don't audition your thoughts against some "worth writing about" yardstick. Write them all down. So with story ideas. What's in your head right now this second? That right there, yes, that, that's a story idea. Pay it some attention. Play with it.

When I started my 25-minute timer, I was also timing some cupcakes in the oven. (We had a cupcake-designing party for April Fool's Day. We had some icing left over. How do you use up leftover icing? You make more cupcakes.) 25 minutes to freewrite on some idea or other; 25 minutes to bake cupcakes. Isn't it great how these things work out? But in any case, after beating together flour and sugar and milk and shortening and so on, after pouring out batter into little paper cups inside the six spaces on a muffin tin, my head was full of cupcake. In fact, what my head kept saying was, "The little cupcake that could."

Isn't that awesome? "The Little Cupcake That Could." That's awesome. But--what the crap is it about?

Twenty-five minutes later, it was about some esoteric ingredient masquerading as extra flour, bought at a questionable shop that happened to be convenient on the way home from a particularly hassled day at work, that got baked into cupcakes, that got served at a ten-year-old's birthday party, that changed the lives of the birthday party attendants forever. Years later, something terrible happens to one of them, and this brings the whole group together, and they have to find out what has been done to them and what it means in their lives now and what choices it puts before them all too soon.

Those little cupcakes? They could.

And then, after 25 minutes, I click "Save and Exit." I forget all about it (except maybe to tweet it, or blog about it briefly) and I move on to another task. I've done my job for the day, as far as the cupcakes are concerned. I've planted a seed in the nursery. You don't sit there watching the ground covering a seed, waiting for it to sprout. You water it and put it somewhere warm and sunny and then you leave it alone.

One day I will look through my file full of Story Ideas du Jour, and the cupcake one will go ping! I'll print it up, make notes, and type a brand new draft about those nefarious cupcakes and those hapless ten-year-olds (and the hapless 20-somethings they became). It'll become the novel or screenplay it was meant to be.

But not today. Today, I'm still working on a story that got planted back in June of last year, that I selected out of the nursery late last week. The one about giant sentient Ants and a rather progressive barista learning how to talk to each other and turn a profit at the same time.

Or something like that.

It's a work in progress.

Today, pedaling away from Abbondanza around 12:45 PM, I had my usual rush of energy and good intentions. Having done a solid four-hour set of physical work in the greenhouse, and seeing the blueness of the sky and the long hours left in the day, I was full of plans. I would have lunch at Oskar Blues in Longmont, as seems to be my new post-farm routine. I would do my morning pages. I would blog. I would knock out a couple of articles for Demand Studios. I would then log onto the Sage ocean and host a cutter pillage from Lincoln to Morannon Island.

Stuff! I would do stuff! None of this going home and crapping out for the whole damn day. Stuff would Get Done! By me!

Then, halfway down my pint of One Nut Brown and two pages into my three, I ran out of steam. The sleepies caught up with me. I finished my pages, paid my check, and fell asleep on the bus somewhere between 63rd and 34th Streets. Once home, I had just enough energy to feed the cats and take a shower. Then I pretty much crapped out for the rest of the day, right on schedule.

And that's why I give myself Mondays off from writing.

But I'm awake now, and here's a nice blog post for you. Let's fill it with overwrought metaphor, shall we? The topic for today: Sifting Soil.

Planting seeds was the order for the day, as it had been all week. They were working on brassicas as I came in, with plans to move to celery next. So our job was to prepare more planting flats. We filled a good 70 flats with sifted soil mix, then brought them to the table to press them down to whatever planting depth was required. Now, celery seeds are itty-bitty, so two of the three varieties being planted wanted a scant 1/8" planting depth. The third variety was pelleted, which is to say that each tiny celery seed is encased in a pinhead-sized ball of clay to make it feasible for use in a certain kind of seed-planting machine. Pellets being bigger, they need more like a 3/16" planting depth. Or so.

So with all those flats, we needed a lot of soil mix. And the pile of sifted mix was getting low. So we sifted more.

Several weeks ago, we'd sifted compost through a screen to get all the clumps and rocks out. This compost was mixed with the other things previously mentioned--vermiculite, manure, organic fertilizer, stuff--and the resulting mix needed to be sifted through a finer screen before it could be used for greenhouse planting. That's what we did today. The finer screen, a sturdy mesh in a wooden frame about the width of an air-hockey table but somewhat shorter, was propped up upon four big upside-down trash cans. We shoveled soil mix on top. Then, gloves on hands, we scrubbed the soil through the screen. Scrub, scrub, scrub! And underneath the screen a faerie-dust drifting of soil accumulated, faster than you'd think, into a great soft pile. Eventually nothing would be left on top of the screen but a bunch of pebbles and clumps the size of rabbit droppings. We tipped those onto the ground for later clean up, shoveled more dirt onto the screen, and repeated the process.

Soil is the basic building block for gardening. For creativity, there's a sort of soil that has to be sifted too. Our life experiences, our hot buttons and emotional triggers, our personal tastes in art, and the catalog of sensation that defines physical existence--these are the raw material. We sift through it constantly, artists being introspective types, and we make preliminary creations out of it all: journal entries, rough sketches, all the five-finger exercises of our craft. Then we mix it up, sift it some more, toss out the clumps and the pebbles that would make it hard for a seed to grow, and we take what's left and we plant things in it so that works of art might grow out of that lovingly prepared soil.

Sometimes I find myself unable to switch mental channels while something unhappy, some frustrating chapter of my life or maybe an infuriating conversation I didn't come out of well, is re-running itself on the back of my eyelids. The instinct is to try to push the thought away. I'll unconsciously start humming to drown out the sound of my thoughts. But it's futile; the re-run has to run its course. If I deny it now, it'll crop back up tomorrow when I'm trying to enjoy a mindless but fun activity. And it won't go away until... shoot, I don't know. It doesn't go away until it goes away. And until it does go away, it's on infinite repeat.

Maybe it would help to imagine the re-runs as simply another iteration of sifting the soil. Maybe each time it's a finer mesh screen, and another layer of blockages and impurities will be scrubbed away. The anger blunts, the guilt recedes, and insights remain behind. Maybe eventually the re-runs of that particular incident will stop, having left me with a fine drift of faerie-dust in the greenhouse of my brain, ready for me to plant a new crop of dreams in.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just the same old obsessive brooding that doesn't help anyone. But having a metaphor to view the phenomenon through, even an overwrought metaphor, well, that should make the next re-run season less boring and painful.

Those with an eye on the calendar may have noticed that it's November. Yes, I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. Yes, I am a Municipal Liaison for Boulder again. You can buddy me at Nanowrimo.org via my handle "vortexae" if you like.

It's been going well. I've been sticking rather precisely to a schedule of 1667 words per day, which is just few enough to keep from getting overwhelmed by despair that my main character still hasn't met the ghost in the castle yet. Or that I don't really know much about my character once she's a teenager, a woman in her 20s, a woman in her 30s, etc. I just keep telling myself that exploring her childhood in detail will help me get to know the possibilities for her growing up. Meanwhile, I think I know why the ghost is in that castle. It's sort of half the traditional Beauty and the Beast set up, and half High Spirits only without the comedy.

My rough draft already has a beta reader volunteer--not that I usually like anyone to read my rough draft, but for this story there's precedent. I could have sworn I blogged this, but apparently I have not: Round about July 2005, I sat down with the creative writing prompt to take one of Tori Amos's more inscrutable songs and write a story that the lyrics could possibly, if you squint at them over your shoulder, be said to describe. I cued up "Toast" (audio link; lyrics here). After about an hour I had finished what I thought was the first scene of a short story. OK, a long scene, but rough drafts tend to be full of babble that'll get cut later, so, not worried. And I emailed it to John. And he called it "chapter 1" and asked "when can I read the rest?" And I said to the Muse, "You lied! You said this was a short story!" and She said, "No! Not lied, I was just, you know, mistaken..."

October this year had started and I still hadn't quite decided what plot I was going to try to stretch out over 50,000 words this year. John said, "When are you going to finish my ghost story?" I said, "You know what? I'll finish it in November." So I'm working on it.

(Also? It is not particularly subtle, naming the main character Melissa. Given that "Toast" is the last track off The Beekeeper. I C WUT U DID THERE.)

Today, I think, Melissa will finally meet the ghost. It will be midway through Chapter 2. Or it will be the cliffhanger of Chapter 2 and continue into Chapter 3, I'm not sure. I'll report on it later today, along with yesterday's pot roast. Because I feel very clever about yesterday's pot roast, that's why.

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

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

Couple of tangents there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I still need to re-stock on candy.

(See, there, I nearly did that "disappearing in a puff of shame" thing again.)

It's November 2nd. What's your word count? Yes indeed, it's that time of year: National Novel Writing Month! And we had a huge handful of local and not-so-local participants come over for the traditional all-nighter kick-off party. Great conversation! Great food! And, starting at midnight, great productivity! I don't think any participants who attended left having written anything less than 1200 words.

This was, of course, why I knew I'd get nothing whatsoever done on the StyleCareer.com project on Friday. After I got home from work (for the last time), I had a lot of cleaning up and prep cooking to do. Then people came over, and it was no use thinking about anything but NaNoWriMo.

It was Samhain, by the way. John and I celebrated Samhain by filling out our ballots together over dinner. Symbolic, that. Out with the old, in with the new! Our contribution to turning over a new leaf for the new year!

So I did in fact reach and slightly surpass my daily 1667 for Day 1. Then, after everyone went home and I puttered around the vast Internets for a while, I went to bed. At 5:00 AM.

Saturday I got nothing at all done towards anything at all. I slept and read and slept and read. I went to a NaNoWriMo write-in, and did nothing more than smile, hand out stickers, and try to stay awake. We call this "all-nighter recovery."

So now I'm sacrificing NaNoWriMo Day 2 in order to finish up the StyleCareer.com project. My editor granted me an extension, and I am not going to ask for another one. I'm still feeling terrible at how little I got done on Thursday. How does one go into the Denver Public Library with the intention of working, but in fact end up reading web comic archives for four hours? I kept thinking to myself, "Just another few minutes. Then I'll start." And, "I really should start. Why am I not starting?" Click. Click. Not to over-dramatize my particular indulgence in the doldrums, but it's these sorts of shameful, stupid afternoons that bring me closest to possibly understanding what it's like to live with depression.

I thought hard about finishing the project via an all-nighter Thursday, but not only would that result in a much too rushed product, but then I'd be in terrible shape for the planned all-nighter Friday. Of course, now I may be looking at an all-nighter tonight, but that's not nearly as bad. I slept a lot yesterday, and I have nowhere to be tomorrow. Nothing scheduled. Hell, I can be a nocturnal writer now, if I want. I'm a free woman!

So that's the status report. There will quite likely be another one in the wee hours.

Enough about that. It's NaNoWriMo, did I mention? This year, for the first time, I have no idea what I'm writing. Nearly none. I'm out of ready-made novel plots! How did this happen? This past year has been a terrible one for ideas--I've let myself get out the habit of producing them. Been trying to fix that lately, though. Been going on writing dates with a friend, forcing myself to stay in the notebook or word processor just a little longer than I think I can. One Monday morning a few weeks back, I started a character sketch describing a man I saw exiting the bagel shop, and the character turned into one of two guys on a road trip, on the run from a mysterious, scary, supernatural something or other that was tracking them across the country. So that's where my Day 1 words went: imagining how that story might have started. Hopefully, the Muse will be kind, and She'll keep feeding me enough of the story each day so that I'll reach the end of it by November 30.

There are, admittedly, worse ways a writer can put off finishing and submitting a work in progress than by creating new works in progress. I mean, it's not like I totally wasted the day. Still, it is another day that I haven't resubmitted "Surfeit" anywhere. Ah, well.

But! New fiction!

It came out of a homework prompt from my writing group: Find something unfinished in your writing archives, something that you started long ago that never went anywhere, and rework it into a finished piece. (Or something that could feasibly become a finished piece.) I'm already doing that with the demonic sweater story. But that story's not finished, and I wanted to share with the class something that was. So I started going through my daily writing scraps from 2001 and lit upon three brief vignettes that caught my eye:

The conversation wound down to a full stop, words replaced with dinner-time noises in an otherwise-silence awkward and shamed. There was nothing left to say. Fifteen mouths, fifteen sets of silverware strove to fill the space with sounds, but the sounds were still a quality of silence.

She began to keep track of when they came and went. "I knew I could look up the schedules easily, in the books, on the Internet, but somehow keeping track myself (keeping track of the tracks) made the trains more mine.

"One day, I left the house at midnight, walked to the tracks, and leapt for the next open car.

"I nearly didn't make it. I would have died under the wheels had someone not grabbed my hand and pulled me into the car. A superhuman effort. I felt so stupid -- who did I think I was, Xena? Lara Croft? I'm just a dumb woman who didn't even go to college and couldn't even have babies properly. I crochet afghans in front of the TV all day, then I make dinner at 5 to be ready for my husband when he comes home at 6. On Sundays I make us both breakfast. Why did I think I could vault onto a speeding train?

"We talked a long time, that man and I. I'm not even sure he really exists, to tell you the truth. Not here. He says he's a tourist."

But she's not the same woman as actually gets on the train in the 2001 scrap. That scrap has more stories hiding in it. It was suggested, among my writing group, that there is a series of interrelated stories about train travel and train-hopping implied by this old piece of nothing much. "I'm not even sure he exists... He says he's a tourist" is a phrase that won't get out of my head now.

And there was a third, unrelated (for now) piece of story sitting in that old file:

Below, the lights of the city going down like candles into water. Ffft. One by twos by hundreds sinking into a pond of darkness. Two meals later, all hell would certainly break loose.

Oh, and, hey - new freelance deadline warning! Don't worry, this one's not 'til October 31 and I've already got a jump on it, as you can see. 500 words down, 19,500 words and a whole lot more research to go...

Because writing new stories is always easier than editing rough drafts, isn't it? Yeah, I know. I know. But--hey! New story!

First off, this story is not a Jumper rip-off. Promise.

While I was at the World Horror Convention the other weekend, I had a momentary conversation in the elevator with a man who had just arrived that afternoon. His morning had been spent teaching math at a local high-school. He could only come to the Con after he got off work. He found it amusing, how different the two environments were: a Salt Lake City high school, the World Horror Convention. Indeed.

So I got out the elevator on Floor 3 and moseyed over to the suite in which the film series was showing. The movie scheduled for that two-hour block was Poltergeist, which I'd last seen on HBO in, like, 1983. I hadn't watched it since, mainly because it scared the pants off me (I was six) but partly also because on the third night after watching it Mom told me, "If you really feel the need to sleep in here with us again, you just can't watch that movie anymore." So I didn't. In many ways I was a mindlessly obedient child. (Hey, I still feel like I'm doing something forbidden when I go looking for something in my parents' walk-in attic. I wasn't allowed in there as a kid.)

All of which is beside the point, which is that the casual elevator conversation sort of transmogrified itself in my head during the movie until it became something around which the short story began to take shape. The conversation instead took place at an office party somewhere in the U.S., and the main character was listening with half an ear to a man from London talk about how he used to teach in high school. "Teach what?" she asks, making conversation. "Maths," he says. And she sort of drifts off, thinking about how plurals are even more plural in London, except that Sports sort of become singular, and there are a lot more "U"s to go around, and then as she continues daydreaming about what it must be like across the Atlantic she literally drifts off--vanishes out of the boring office party and finds herself in a classroom in London. She has a rather hard time getting home.

At first I thought she'd be stuck there permanently for some reason, like maybe she was meant to be in London and had to find out why, but I couldn't really get interested in taking the story in that direction. All the fantastic would sort of stop at that point. Besides, it was too much like playing a tabletop role-playing game in which an inept gamemaster clumsily assembles the party by authorial fiat. "OK, so, you're in the middle of whatever you're doing when this mysterious guy appears and says 'You are needed elsewhere.' Then suddenly, like, whoa! You're standing in the woods and there's four people there looking at you--OK, everyone describe your characters to each other."

So instead of making her unable to teleport again, I thought about the other extreme. What would happen if the ability to teleport came so easily to her that she started doing it accidentally? If it was as easy as imagining a place, any place, real or fictional? If it was as easy as thinking--and as hard not to do?

Ever had someone distract you from your hiccups by telling you not to think of purple foxes?

So that's my excuse for not having worked on anything in my editing queue today. I got clobbered by a new story instead. Not that I've left my editing queue entirely untouched, understand - the other day I rewrote "The Witness" from scratch and from memory. That's the story I read for the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest at World Horror 2007. (You can read the winning stories from that year at the Twilight Tales website. Start here with the 1st place story and follow the links back to 2nd and 3rd.) I think I know how to make it better now. I think some of what will make it better is in the new version I wrote the other day. Maybe tomorrow I'll take both versions out, side by side, and - I dunno - synthesize them or something.

Oh, and Poltergeist still scares the pants off me. SRSLY.