author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Lo, 'tis a Friday. Have a new Friday Fictionette. "A Word in Your Ear" deals with a Princess coming of age and discovering a larger world, at the cost of the security she know in her own smaller one. Which is typically what happens when a child becomes an adult, but things are always more earth-shattering for Princesses.

The Fictionette springs in part from a Tarot card drawn for a writing prompt, and it reaches back in continuity to one of the first Friday Fictionettes ever released. The second, in fact. Ever. So there is quite probably a novel hiding in the intersection between the third week of October 2015 and the first of September 2014. Which is one of the expected results of the project. Create a new story idea every day, cultivate four of them per month into a publishable story-like object, reap presentable stories come harvest time. Not like I'm exactly hurting for story ideas, mind you. The problem has more to do with the time needed to do them justice. Nevertheless--winning!

In other news, John and I have been exceptionally good citizens. We took our mail-in ballots out to lunch and completed them. Note the date: Usually we put this task off until about two days before election day, necessitating a trip to the County Clerk and Recorder's Office to drop the ballots off by hand. But we have dropped them off in our home mailbox's outgoing slot with first-class postage attached, because two and a half weeks is plenty time for the U.S. Post to deliver them. Winning.

In yet other news, John takes his duties as assistant coach to the Boulder County Bombers very seriously. He is researching workouts--power workouts, strength workouts, endurance workouts, metabolic workouts, plyometric workouts--and I, lucky soul, get to be his guinea pig. To be fair, he too is doing workouts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but--"I want to see how this workout affects an athletically trained person," he says, "unlike me." So off I got to do Haydens and ski-jumps and depth jumps and plank hops for half an hour. And, dang it, I say "thank you" when we're done, because I know it's making me a stronger, more powerful skater.

And now I am sitting in the tub, sweating and soaking out the aches of a full roller derby week made fuller by having homework.

Winning!

Today was an improvement. Instead of sleeping late and dragging around the house because of headaches and sinus pressure, I slept late and dragged about the house for the sheer pleasure of being pain-free for the first time in two days. Seriously, we are talking no small amount of bliss here.

Also, I had a dream I wanted to dwell on, or perhaps dwell in, for a little while after initially waking up with it. It involved moving into a new house, entertaining a very small child guest therein, and discovering an oven mitt full of cat hair that was defying the laws of physics. I blame late-night reading of the blog and other writings of Robert Jackson Bennett. On the one hand, the bit about acknowledging property boundaries for the communal fiction that they are, and recognizing the implied nightmare therein; and on the other hand, the bit about the Roomba.

So I got started late, but I did get started. I got busy with my submission procedures: I logged two rejection letters and sent one of the rejected stories back out again to a new market. One of the rejection letters was, happily, a response to a query letter I sent out last month seeking the status of a story I submitted last year. While I'd always prefer the story be accepted and published, it's a relief also to have the story simply pop free and be available for me to submit elsewhere. Which I hope to do tomorrow.

I got busy with overdue blogging: I finally wrote up the results of my recent Puzzle Pirates Seal o' Piracy experiments for the betterment of all. Examiner has recently moved to a new editorial model where everything you submit must be reviewed before it'll go live. I was disappointed to not be immediately placed on their list of writers the quality of whose output is sufficiently trusted that they can automatically bypass the review stage, admittedly. But given that I uploaded the post just before leaving for scrimmage, and the post had been approved and published by the time I got home, I can't complain too much. We'll see if they're just as quick at Saturday mornings; the blockade round-up is timely stuff.

Then I got home from scrimmage and got busy in the kitchen. Have I mentioned Ad Astra: The 50th Anniversary SFWA Cookbook? It's a cookbook. It's handsomely covered and conveniently spiral bound. You can buy a copy, physical or electronic. I'm in it, hawking my crockpot red beans and rice on page 154, but more to the point, a handful of handy, tasty, quick & easy mug cake recipes are in it. These are recipes where you mix everything up in a mug and then microwave the resulting batter, and you get a one-person dessert that honestly took more time to pull out and measure all the ingredients than it did to cook.

I made the Banana Cake from page 30 in one of my large tea/soup mugs. I had bananas turning black in the fridge, after all, but it's been so hot, I've been reluctant to bake more banana bread. Microwaving a mug for four minutes produces a lot less heat and just as much deliciousness. I did it twice, because the recipe only called for half a banana, and what else am I going to do with the second half of the banana? And that was fine. It was delicious twice. I had one of them before my humongous antipasta salad (we ordered Blackjack Pizza when we got home from scrimmage, and I honestly find that salad with all its cold cuts and bacon and olives and cheese and hugeness to be more filling and more fulfilling than pizza), and another afterwards. With a beer. An Abita Turbodog, to be precise.

I should point out, though, if you should acquire a copy of Ad Astra (and you should! Money well spent and for a good cause!) that the bit about "1/4 c baking powder" has got to be a typo. When you look at the other mug cake recipes, and when you look at the 1/3 c flour and pinch of salt in this one, you realize 1/4 tsp is a lot more likely. I have mentioned this to the wonderful and hard-working editors, in case they are putting together an errata page.

I'm pretty sure my red beans and rice recipe came out as intended. I skimmed it, anyway, and it looked OK. Maybe next time I make the stuff I'll use Ad Astra instead of my usual index card cheat-sheet and double-check.

As if I don't have enough to work on already, I got up this morning in a terrible excitement about two brand new story ideas, straight out of dreams. That's a gift. That's a precious, unlooked-for gift--the dreams themselves, handing me the kernels of new stories on a silver platter, but also the excitement. Excitement about a new story--it's been way too long since I've felt that. That's absolutely a gift.

It's also very much a mixed blessing when I'm trying to get other things done. Thanks awfully, subconscious!

In one dream, all the statues had come to life, humans alongside animals both fantastical and mundane passing through the city as animate marble, cement, iron. As the bus I was riding on passed through a neighborhood full of old oaks, we saw a big old house whose decorative copper-verdigris fence was waking up. Green deer were untangling themselves from the knot the artist had worked them into, and were picking their way over and around their fellows out onto the sidewalk. Suddenly the neighborhood was full of deer, centaurs, and men and women on horseback, all the color of copper verdigris. "Look," I said to John, who was sitting next to me on the bus, "it's the perfect color for them."

In another dream, an owl I thought I'd shot dead in a careless and much-regretted moment turned out to be alive after all, but the relief of that turned into horror when it changed shape to reveal itself a nefarious spirit in disguise, to whom we both would be in thrall until it finished feeding off of us and we died.

"I had these wonderful mythopoetic dreams this morning," I said to John, "one of them a pure delight and the other a fantastic horror movie. I can't wait to make them into stories. All I have to do is excise all the Daffy Duck bits and give them more of a narrative shape."

"Daffy Duck bits" are the parts of the dream that are too banal or just too silly for the story the dream inspires. My calling them that comes from the dream that gave rise to the short story "First Breath." The dream's main plot repeated itself, as dream elements often do. The first time, I was in a crowd of people in a large cave, and someone pointed out to me a figure in a grey hooded robe. "Don't let her touch you," I was told. "You mustn't let her touch you." Or what? Or she'd become me, and I'd become nothing at all. I ran and ran through the caves, the hooded figure getting closer all the time... Then the chase scene started over, but with an oblivious and sputtering Daffy Duck in my place, comically falling hip-deep into a hole and asking the hooded, robed figure to pull him out.

As you might expect, Daffy Duck appears nowhere in any draft of the story, let alone the version published in Blood and Other Cravings. Similarly, there's some utterly ridiculous things in my dreams from this morning. Some of the verdigris centaurs were cobbled together backwards, such that their human halves face their horse's asses. And when we attempted to lock the owl-demon out of our house, it ran pipes up through the floor, spewing a noxiously yellow sleepy gas into the house to knock us out so it could gain entrance. Which we knew because the gas left a yellow stain wash up and down my legs. Also there was frozen corn defrosting in the oven that happened to be built into the back wall of our bedroom... See? Daffy Duck bits.

Regardless, so much of both stories is already there, fully formed, in the dream. Not an occurrence I can plan for. All I can do is be grateful when it happens. I certainly can't complain, except maybe a little about the timing.

Dreams are awesome! They're what make sleep worth it!

Behold! On this very last day of the month, we have the Friday Fictionette for the fourth week of June 2015. It's called "Every Note Passes Away Forever." It's got music in it, and also another funeral. Possibly a tiny bit derivative--I mean reminiscent--of the beginning of Tepper's Raising the Stones, now that I think about it. Sorry?

Patterns! After weeks of doing these freewriting sessions every day (or almost every day, shut up), patterns tend to emerge in the way I respond to writing prompts. After a while, it's like a metro bus system, and each writing prompt is like a stop on a bus route. Turns out, some of these stops are on the same bus route. They go to the same places, but maybe they see different sights along the way.

I'm still a bit behind and will have to choose the June 2015 Fictionette Freebie tomorrow. I'm also like two months behind in posting Wattpad excerpts. Backfilling the audiofictionettes? Have not even begun to think about it. But this is a good week for getting caught up. My roller derby team is taking the week off (a well-deserved break after the game on June 27) and some of our friends are out of town, so hopefully I'll be able to put all that sudden glut of free time to good use.

Meanwhile, I have begun reading Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs. I brought it home from the Boulder Bookstore on June 19, the Friday that was declared TorsDay in response to a threatened boycott of Tor Books. (The threatened boycott was in fact laughable, but we're SFF fans. If we can at all afford it, we'll jump at any excuse to buy more books.) Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Bennett isn't published by Tor, is he?" Indeed, City of Stairs falls under the Random Penguin umbrella. (OK, Random House Inc. But "Random Penguin" is more fun. It sounds like a chapter of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) But while my arms were full of books by Elizabeth Bear and Jo Walton and Cherie Priest and an anthology by the VanderMeers (and if you think that sounds like a heavy armful, you are right!), I spotted the Bennett and I pounced. Without dropping any books.

Bennett is also the author of the Shirley Jackson Award-winning American Elsewhere, which persists in being one of my favorite books ever. It lives on the horror end of the SFF street and it's got beings from beyond space and time, a female protagonist who kicks ass while dealing with seriously strange mother-daughter issues, no romantic subplot whatsoever, and supernaturally unreliable architecture. I am a fan of supernaturally unreliable architecture. (Speaking of which, have you read this fantastic House of Leaves/Sherlock Holmes crossover fanfic? You're welcome!).

Bennett's Locus Award-nominated City of Stairs also has supernaturally unreliable architecture (the eponymous stairs, miraculous walls that are sort of transparent and opaque at the same time, buildings stuck half inside other buildings), but the beings from beyond space are less cthulhuoid and more, well, Gods.

I'm only three chapters in, mind you. I would very much like to be four chapters in or more, which is why I'm going to end this blog post here.

Hey look! It's last week's fictionette. It's called "Adventures in Posthumous Journalism," which, given Wednesday's blog post, is about what you'd expect. Weird thing is, I never got around to the idea that first kicked things off (the fanatical group that opposes utopias as leading to stagnation). Which is great. The idea that kicked things off was dauntingly huge--like, a novel's worth of worldbuilding--and that wasn't going to fit in under no 1,500 words, unh-uh, no way. Much less threatening to just let the main character make her way through the first scene of that hypothetical novel, mouthing off as she goes. But I thought I might at least get to mention the original idea just a bit before the cut-off. But no.

I should just stop issuing positive statements about timing. Yesterday was worthless. There was no getting things done yesterday. Yesterday I woke up with a headache and a sore back and a sore neck and things didn't so much get better as they got vaguely tolerable, at least tolerable enough to go to scrimmage carrying along with me the even vaguer hope that roller derby cures everything. It cured most things. Everything was a lot less sore afterwards. Well, the big sore things. There were new little sore things, but that's roller derby for you. I'll happily take on new bruises in exchange for getting rid of that sore, tight upper back.

But the moral of the story is, I'm not allowed to say things like "Tomorrow is as late as I'm letting this thing get," because some fool imp in my brain hears that and sabotages it to kablooey.

So I'll say this much: I'm not going to get the June 19 fictionette up over the weekend! My weekend is totally full! It involves a wedding anniversary date at the new drive-in theater in Denver, a sort of roller derby barn raising, a furniture shopping trip, a grocery trip, some various housewarming operations, and quite possibly even more excitement than that. So I'm not even tempted to promise the weekend.

But it'll go up just as soon after that as I possibly can manage.

So things continue to be late over here. But they are getting better! I at least managed to get a solid work session in on the Fictionette that was due out June 12. To no one's surprise, it didn't get done in the car on the way to Nebraska--but I did actually work on it then, which is something. Since then I've been nibbling on it a bit every day. I hoped to have it up by now, but I suppose it will have to be tomorrow. (It had just better be tomorrow. I am not letting it go later than that.)

It's kind of a dark one, involving a terrorist plot and a tragic death. I honestly wasn't looking forward to writing it. This is what happens if I don't get my freewriting done every day; when it's time to choose one to turn into a Fictionette, I don't have lots of choices, and I wind up having to choose the one that's the least bad. And comforting myself that I won't have to Fictionette it up until this week next month. Then "this week next month" turns into this week and I'm all, er. Really? This is what I assigned myself? Oh, hell.

I've been warming up to it over the week, though, especially since I decided the narrator would be the dead person. Writing from the point of view of a ghost, especially one who's not letting death stop her from becoming a great journalist, is kinda fun. Interesting, at least.

I don't even remember which of the freewriting sessions from this week last month is scheduled to become the June 19 Fictionette. I haven't even looked at it. Gah.

Which is not to say this hasn't been a productive week! It has! I've been more-or-less sticking to my daily plans for writing. But it's just been slow, not least because there's all this other stuff to be productive about. We've been cleaning up, rearranging stuff, and retrieving things from the rented storage unit. Also shopping for hardware. John has been slowly converting our storage closet downstairs into an honest-to-goodness workshop; to that end, he has brought back from Home Depot an honest-to-goodness workbench. Also an AC outlet that stacks into a lightbulb socket. Tomorrow or the next day, the boards-and-brick-bookshelves come home. (They won't be enough, especially since some of them are going into the storage closet, to better organize our storage. We need more bookshelves. One over there, and one over there, and also one out there.) Then Sunday, we just might, for the first time in our lives, become the proud owners of patio furniture.

And yet, with all this going on (and roller derby too), I somehow found time to post to File770.com a filk of half of Rush's "Freewill" on the topic of the Sad/Rabid Puppy Hugos Ballot Takeover of 2015. Because it got in my head and wouldn't leave, OK? These things happen! ...What?

Maybe I need sleep.

Waking up on the train Wednesday morning the 31st, I had that dream again, the one where I go home and discover a pet that I'd totally forgotten about and been neglecting for years. As you might imagine, it's a dream full of guilt and self-recrimination. But because the pet is always alive and healthy, or at least mostly healthy, it's not too late to do something about the situation. So there's guilt, but there's also relief, a sense of undeserved reprieve, while I scramble to make things right.

Great timing, brain. If you're going to give me a kick in the subconscious about childhood aspirations and responsibilities, why not deliver it on my way to New Orleans, so I can maybe do something about it while I'm there? (Do what? I don't know. Go through my boxes in the attic. Go visit teenage haunts. Something.) But no, you had to drop it on me as the train arrived in Denver. Great.

Sometimes the dream invents a pet for the sake of giving me guilt over it. Once, I dreamed that a miniature horse was waiting for me in my old closet in my childhood bedroom. I opened the door, and there it was, just standing there, patiently waiting for me to feed it.

Most often, though, the dream is about a real pet I took care of throughout my childhood, an albino parakeet whom I had from ages eight to fifteen or so, and whom I had unimaginatively named White Wing. That's who the dream was about yesterday morning:

A too-small birdcage, maybe two feet by one foot by eight inches tall, crowded with quiet parakeets of all colors. One of them is White Wing. I had forgotten about them, hadn't fed them in ages, and this isn't the first time I forgot about them too. I hurry to give them food. I don't have the proper food I used to give them, just this bag of small sunflower seeds that my parents picked up. It's labeled for budgies, but the dark blue one with black accents is mildly sick soon after eating. I resolve to get the proper food as soon as I can.

White Wing is an especially appropriate focus for the dream because there was a period of time when I did neglect her. It was totally understandable: I had just been diagnosed with leukemia and whisked away to the hospital. I wasn't at home to take care of my budgie. But I wasn't even thinking about it until I came home and she wasn't in my room. Apparently someone told my parents that there was a chance I could catch something from her, or from the mites she might be carrying, while my immune system was suppressed, so they moved her to another room and cleaned mine very thoroughly. I had no idea they were doing that; I was busy being bored at the hospital, wondering when they'd let me go home.

(Note to self: There's probably something here in the dream about gratitude owed to my parents. In certain ways this visit home was fairly trying, which made it difficult to remember gratitude and appreciation.)

Having White Wing in the next room over, where I couldn't hear or see her without consciously going to her, rather than in my room where her activity was a constant part of my life, made it easy for her daily care to slip my mind from time to time. I'd remember late in the day with a sudden oh shit! And yes, I'd feel guilty about spending less time with her than I should.

So she's permanently etched in that part of my subconscious symbols lexicon. There are other associations that this visit would have reawakened, but I don't have the energy to go into them right now. They are not happy associations, and I don't want to deal with them at the moment. Besides, this post is getting long enough as it is. So let's stick with the "neglected responsibilities from childhood" theme for now.

(By the way, did y'all know I have a website all about dreams and dream interpretation? I have been neglecting it for far too long, too. The public dream journal is probably chock full of link spam by now. I need to clean out the database and give the whole site an overhaul.)

Anyway, every time I have this dream, I think about what I valued during my childhood that might have fallen off my radar. Am I making good strides toward the writing career I always envisioned having? I was fascinated by lucid dreams and out-of-body travels back then; when's the last time I tried to have a lucid dream? What about my religious/spiritual identity, practices, observances? Discovering Wicca meant so much to me around that time, but this year, being at my parents' house and also exhausted (or lazy), we didn't even observe the Winter Solstice.

Things like that.

Sometimes, even if I don't have good answers, I can honor this dream in a symbolic way. I can't necessarily reclaim a sense of spiritual urgency or suddenly get a book published overnight, but I can participate in some other activity I enjoyed during the White Wing years. For instance, I used to cross-stitch a lot when I was in and out of the hospital. It was something to do with the long, boring hours lying in bed. I worked any pattern or kit Mom brought me: teddy bear bookmarks, fleur-de-lis, streetcars, all manner of Christmas ornaments.

I did much less cross-stitch through high school and college, though I still found patterns from time to time to work as gifts: Witches Stitches' "Star Maiden" for my sister-in-law, an illustrated Prayer of St. Francis for Mom. But when I picked up knitting about fifteen years ago, it usurped cross-stitch entirely.

Well. Today, I started a new pattern: "Hurricane Tracking Map: Cajun Style!" by Leslie Wristers. I bought it at The Quarter Stitch during a visit home some eight to ten years ago--probably ten or more, come to think of it, as Katrina hadn't happened yet. But I never touched it until very recently, in early November, and even then all I did was go to the store and buy cloth and thread for it.

But I made the first few stitches on it tonight.

Look, younger me! I am cross-stitching again! And it's a New Orleans-themed pattern, too! I haven't forgotten you, I promise.

I'm going to keep this one short, because I'm not at home. I'm out at a friend's house, where there has been food and beer and margaritas and cards. Now there are very random conversations going on at a loud volume, and I am enjoying my usual role in these circumstances of "smart-ass fly on the wall."

I am very good at multi-tasking. Well. Maybe not very good. I'm multi-tasking, anyway.

Anyway, it's Friday, so here's a fictionette. As the Author's Note over there says, it came out of a dream--or, at least, the urge to turn the dream into something that made a kind of narrative sense. Since you can totally click that link and read about it, I won't repeat it here.

I will say, I've been trying to make sense of the "nurse" bit ever since writing up the Author's Note. Here it is in all its morning-after-the-dream glory:

Another diner catches me and asks, "So, do you like your hobby?" They mean my writing time at my desk in the corner. I explain that actually the writing is my job, and "I'm just the relief nurse for Corey while she's out." I don't know why I said "nurse" instead of "staff" or "waitress" or "server."

(What, you didn't expect dream journal excerpts when you started reading this blog?)

Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that "substitute nurse (when you're not even medically trained)" is an intensification of "substitute server (when you're not even on staff)." The latter theme might indicate a tendency on the part of the dreamer to over-volunteer and over-commit, and a problem with setting reasonable limits on one's sense of responsibility. The former takes it up a notch: "You cannot fix (heal) everyone and everything! Stop trying!"

So, OK. Taken under advisement. Thank you, dream. Would prefer you stick more to story ideas and less to psychoanalysis, yeah? But I suppose dream's gotta dream.

Now, about that cover art... Yes, that is my coffee cup. On my desk. No, I did not steal that coffee cup from Denny's. I bought it fair and square from Cen-Tex Supply in Boulder (no longer there, alas). Bought a vinegar shaker from them, too, just like the ones they have at Metairie Park Country Day for red beans and rice Wednesdays.

I get asked that, about whether I stole that coffee cup, from time to time. Less so these days, no doubt because it's a college hijinx type of question, and I'm closer to 40 than I am to my college years now. (And even during my college years I didn't get up to much in the way of college hijinx.) But when it comes out, the question isn't exactly a question. It's more of an exclamation of recognition: "Oh, you stole a Denny's cup too! Everyone does that sometime in their lives, don't they?" And then I have to say no, no I didn't. And then things get weird and awkward, like they do when you enthusiastically mistake someone for someone else.

Hey, I've committed my own small petty thefts. I have, from time to time, liberated unloved books. I am also guilty of hoarding hotel soap during multi-night stays, because soap is useful and housekeeping brings more at the drop of a hat and why should it go to waste? I just don't typically steal supplies from the restaurants I dine in, is all.

You've got your vices, I've got mine, is what I'm saying.

So the fruitcake is now wrapped in a booze-soaked cheese-cloth, which means I won't have much to say about it until Christmas. Filling that conversational gap is the next bi-fold door off the living room closet, half of which is on the porch getting its paint stripped. It will be difficult to think about pretty much anything else until that particular sub-project is done.

Since I have very little of substance to share today, you get an online source of word prompts. Virtual Writers' World is the blog of--or, rather, it is a blog in association with--a Second Life group of which I'm a member, Virtual Writers Inc. I very rarely find myself participating in their activities at the time they are announced, but I have of late begun dipping into their group notices for word prompts whenever I do get around to my daily freewriting.

For an example, check out this week's schedule. There are two single-word prompts for every weekday--that's for the twice-daily "writers' dash" exercise--as well as more involved prompts for the 7-days-a-week "500 Word Snatch" activity. And here's something I didn't know about: Fridays are now "dedicated dash and drabble day," inspired by this podcast.

And there's even more stuff going on in the Twitter hashtags #wordscrim and #writersdash and also #500WS.

You should totally go over there and check it all out. I'll be right behind you, soon as I scrape this paint off these doors.

This blog post comes to you after a successful arrival and first couple days in Avon. I have run away from home for the weekend, which means I've got no responsibilities but the writing ones. Granted, this theory has been put sorely to the test by my having visited the library and brought six books with me back to the Christie Lodge--Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals is the first temptation on the to-be-tempted by pile, and I'm halfway through it already--but it is a test I intend to pass, darn it. Look, there's evidence in my favor. To wit:

• "Keeping Time," a 1,200-word expansion on what was originally a 739-word entry in the 2012 edition of the annual Weekend Warrior flash fiction contest on Codex, got emailed to a prospective market late Sunday night. Sunday, of course, was the deadline for that particular submissions call.
• Sunday was also the deadline for submissions to SpeckLit for publication during the first quarter of 2015. I sent in two new drabbles. I'd have preferred to send the full slate of ten, but two was what I had. I'm rather proud of those two, too.
• Speaking of SpeckLit, I cast my votes for the Best of SpeckLit 2014 Q3 (also a November 30 deadline). Did you?

I got right back to work on the novel today, too, and with inspiration from the most unlikely of places. I recently stumbled across The Pervocracy, "a kinky, feminist sexblog" if I may borrow Cliff's own words to describe it. (My own words began with "a whip-smart kink blog," but I couldn't seem to continue on from the pun. Which, I hasten to add, was meant with sincere admiration.) Cliff is reading Fifty Shades of Grey and blogging about it one chapter at a time. Like many people, I began reading this series for the lulz, but past chapter 12 my attitude became one of horrified ongoing enlightenment. I'd heard about this book's representation of BDSM being offensively inaccurate. What I hadn't known, because I hadn't gone looking for details, was that E. L. James has chronicled a deeply abusive relationship in disturbing detail--you can play Potential Abusive Partner Red Flag Bingo with these books--then marketed it as desirable romance. And if you're saying, "Well, but, duh, it began as Twilight fanfic, and that's exactly what Twilight is." To which all I can say is,

[TRIGGER WARNING]

when Edward broke into Bella's room, all he did was watch her sleep. He did not rape her and leave her sobbing all night long on the bathroom floor.

Seriously. Chapter 12, y'all. It makes Edward's hinge-oiling shenanigans look sweet by comparison. Apparently some people really need to be told that D/s doesn't mean "the Dom is allowed to sexually assault the sub if it sounds like she's trying to end the relationship."

So what does this painful horror story have to do with Iron Wheels beyond a both having a nodding acquaintance with Twilight? I'm getting to that.

Much earlier in the read-through, when there were red flags for potential abuse popping up everywhere but it was still possible to laugh about it, Cliff had a fantastic observation about the character of Anastasia Steele. James has, for the purposes of the plot, carefully written her to be so "pure" as to be unrealistic. This goes well beyond our toxic social notions of "virginity" or "innocence." Ana has not only never kissed anyone, had sexy thoughts about others, or experienced orgasm--she has also apparently never exercised in her life? Oh, and she has no idea how to use a computer. She has never used Google nor sent a frickin' email, ever, in her life. Despite being a college graduate (apparently I'm wrong here, she graduates in chapter 14) who is currently pursuing a career in journalism. I cannot imagine how one can be a journalist in the 21st century without being able to do cursory fact-checks on the internet, but then I can't imagine writing a novel set in Seattle without fact-checking things like what the nearby international airport is called, or the relative positions of Vancouver WA and Portland OR. And yet here we are with a novel for which the author has apparently fact-checked none of these things and more besides. So there you go.

But Cliff's observation is this:

Okay, new theory: Ana spontaneously appeared out of nothingness, full-grown, a few days before the events of the book. She's never done anything before because she literally did not exist.

And I thought, "Oh. That's almost literally true of Etienne Farfield, isn't it?"

Etienne is a changeling. Her entire function for hundreds of years has been to look exactly like, so as to temporarily replace, stolen infants. The way I imagine it, this means she has not been an autonomous being at all until the novel takes place. Between "assignments," she is simply stored, in stasis, a wind-up toy that isn't wound up. So her conscious existence up to now has consisted entirely of a brain incapable of verbal thought and a body incapable of performing any but the most rudimentary of voluntary movements. But now, suddenly, she's walking around like a real girl, pretending to be a normal human high school senior.

For some reason, it took reading Cliff's half-joking observation about Ana Steele to make me realize that if you really do have a character that was born yesterday, you have to put some real thought into all the implications of that. You have to work with those implications. But the good news is, you get to play with those implications. What's it like, thinking in words for the first time? What's it like, suddenly confronting the ability to do things? How does she get up to speed on this whole "being human" thing? How does it work when she's not actually replacing someone this time around? Or isn't she?

So that's what I played with today--writing yet another brand new first scene, one that starts with her narrating what it's like to wake up as a human teenager for the first time.

Where it will go tomorrow is anybody's guess.