author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Since I've been blogging this week, I've been having doubts. This stuff I say I remember: did it really happen that way? It's more than just "Was the poem on display in first or third grade?" or "Was it tenth grade or twelfth grade when Mr. Day and Ms. Petersen showed me how you submit a story for publication?" Since I've name-checked actual people, I'm half-expecting any of them to show up on Facebook or in my email to tell me, "I don't know what you're talking about. Did you make this up?" I'm very much afraid that I may have done just that.

At some point during the last decade, I was engaging in some of that mild daughter-to-mother-about-husband griping that you hear about in sit-coms and romances. Nothing important, nothing damning, just a half-laughing exasperated kvetch about a silly argument John and I had had that week. At some point, Mom laughed and said, "Niki, hasn't he learned yet that you remember everything?"

Woo uncomfortable. Because, growing up, that wasn't a compliment. It was synonymous with "You sure can hold a grudge, can't you?" When the fact was, I did remember things, hurtful things among them, with a high level of emotional detail and a word-for-word recall. And it would be like living the episode all over again. The only advantage was, the intervening time had allowed me to match words to experience. So I'd describe the memory, explain the way it had hurt, try to get someone who didn't live inside my head to understand.

But was I then, am I now, remembering things correctly? It seems that it's less likely that I have an astonishing memory than that I have a normal, vague, wishy-washy memory alongside a writer's instinct to convert everything into narratives. I tell myself stories about what happened, and the stories take the place of the memory. I'm not sure how much of what I remember is the event, and how much is the cleaned-up, narratively sound story I made up around the event.

I wonder if other writers have this doubt?

The upshot of all this maundering is, I'm not sure exactly when the previous or following events happened, or even quite whether they happened in exactly this way. But this is the story I'm going to tell about them.

Sometime between my sophomore and senior years, Ms. Petersen encouraged me to submit a story I'd written to a local contest. My family will remember this, because I think Mom did a lot of reading it to aunts and uncles over the phone: "Dancers of Land and Sea," a quiet little conversational story that took place in a mental institution between an insufficiently subordinate woman, a psychologically cut-off drowning survivor, and a cynical and skeptical doctor. I didn't know anything about mental institutions outside our high school's recent production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I had a tendency to get preachy with The Moral Of The Story, but the results seemed to work. The story was apparently pretty decent for my age and lack of experience. It placed second in the contest.

Have I blogged about this before? It feels familiar. Maybe because I've told this story a lot to friends, face to face, fossilizing the memory in layers of tidy narrative. This time around I want to emphasize something specific: I would never have entered the contest without my teacher making me aware of it--and without her telling me, "This story you wrote? You should enter it. It's good." I was a headstrong, independent, stubborn bull of a girl with an ego that could have floated a hot air balloon--but its amazing how far that wouldn't have gotten me just on its own. I needed someone in my corner pushing me out into the center of the ring.

The contest awards were to be given out at the New Orleans Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival. Does anyone remember the NOSF3? Google reassures me that about two people mention it. I wouldn't know; I didn't know the first thing about conventions, didn't go to one until 2002. If I'd had my way that night, I wouldn't have gone at all. I hated getting dressed up, I mean in dresses, and I hated the goddamned pretentious ritual of formal occasions. And I was going to have to put up with all that and keep my elbows off the table and not drink out my soup bowl or use my fingers to pinch the last unwieldy bits on my plate against my fork. But Mom wouldn't let me get out of it. (For which, my sincere thanks.) Off we went to the French Quarter and the convention hotel.

The award banquet was as uncomfortable as I'd expected, of course. The table was cluttered, there was no good place for my legs to go, my feet didn't touch the floor so I couldn't support myself in a relaxed posture, and I was afraid of breaking one of the million incomprehensible rules that made the difference between "good manners" and "I can't believe how badly you embarrassed me tonight!" Nothing really changes; the last bit is no longer a factor, but the rest? Why must there be so many things at every place setting?

But then came the various awards. And then came the award for my contest: something like the NOSF3 Young Writers Award, something like that. And then it was time for me to walk toward the front of the room and accept my certificate from the smiling lady holding out her hand to shake mine.

I was learning a lot about the mechanics of the writing and publishing industry. But I knew nothing yet about the people in it. I knew which authors I liked to read, of course, but of publishers and editors and the sorts of people who go to professional conventions I was very very ignorant. I was shaking hands with Ellen Datlow, then editor of Omni Magazine. I don't think I'd heard either name before in my life.

"You should submit something to Omni," she told me. "Thank you," I said. I went back to my table.

And dang if I didn't take her at her word. A real editor, someone who puts stories in magazines that people actually read, had told me to submit! Hot damn! I wasted no time. I acquired a copy of Omni's submission guidelines. I followed them to the letter. I agonized over a cover letter mentioning our brief meeting at NOSF3 and her kind invitation to submit. I mailed off my contest-winning story!

And, very soon after that, I had my very first rejection letter--and my very first real-life lesson in the importance of researching your market. As you know (Bob), Omni published science fiction. "Dancers" was very much urban fantasy.

Oops. But "Oops" notwithstanding, I had a goal now. And not just a goal, but a set-your-heart-on-it, pursue-it-through-the-years goal. I had failed this time, but just wait. One day... one day... But then Omni Magazine folded, and I still hadn't been published in it. But that was OK, because a few years after that there was SciFiction. And one day... one day... And SciFiction closed its doors too, but still I had this goal. And the intervening years had convinced me it was an important goal: One day, I would sell a story to Ellen Datlow.

Which is the punchline that this series of blog posts has been leading up to: One day is today.

That professional sale of my story "First Breath" I mentioned a few months ago? I get to blab about the details now, because the table of contents (TOC) has been announced and everything. My story will appear in Ellen Datlow's forthcoming anthology Blood and Other Cravings, to be published by Tor in, so the estimate goes, the fall of 2011.

*blink* *blink* Wow. That means that, in addition to being in a Datlow anthology, I'm going to be published by Tor. Wow. *blink*

Maybe if I say it enough times it'll seem ordinary.

But a really important thing here is--I would never have submitted the story if I didn't, again, have a writer in my corner pushing me forward. I've been attending a bimonthly writing class in Denver for about 6 years. Local writer Melanie Tem--I'd say "horror writer," but that would be woefully incomplete; The Deceiver is far too complex a family drama to be simply called horror; and have you read her and Steve's The Man on the Ceiling?--anyway, Melanie hosts a writing group that I've been going to since running into one of her students at World Horror 2004. It's a pretty basic class. Sometimes we critique a manuscript, sometimes we bring in shorter pieces to read aloud, and sometimes we read aloud very short pieces written right there in class. Sometimes we just talk shop.

I volunteered "First Breath" for the group to review, and, as you may remember, my heart was in my teeth about it. I mean, it has sexy stuffs in it! But another student had brought in a piece the time before that had an actual complete sex scene in it, so screw fear, let's do this. And as it turned out the comments around the table were overwhelmingly positive, and the negatives were overwhelmingly helpful, and everything was overwhelmingly awesome. Peer critique went like peer critique should.

Then, about a week later, Melanie emailed me. Ellen Datlow was putting out the call for submissions to a closed anthology, she said, and Melanie, who'd been invited to submit, had also been given the go-ahead to pass the invite along to me. (Apparently she'd said something like, "So I have this student, I have no idea why she isn't published yet, who just turned in this amazing story..." This is me, blushing and stammering: *blush*) The anthology would have to do with vampires, but not your ordinary vampires, and Melanie thought my story would be a perfect fit. "But they're not vampires, not really..." Yeah, but they kinda sorta were, right? Just not blood-suckers. Which the submission guideline specifically wanted them not to be. So. Perfect, right?

Right. Apparently so. I received an acceptance-conditional-upon-revision on May 2, and within a few days I was signing and mailing back a contract. How weird to think that last time I mailed an envelope to this address, I was out by the outgoing mailbox with my purple fountain pen waiting for the post officer to show up so I could beg him to give me the envelope back momentarily so I could scribble VAMPIRISM on the outside like I'd totally forgotten to the day before. Insecurity then, totally incredulity now. Wow.

I cannot begin to tell you--well, I can begin, but "begin" is about all I can do--what Melanie's support means to me. This wasn't the first invite-only anthology she got me permission to submit to. When she emailed me about this one, I thanked her profusely: "I feel honored that you keep sending opportunities like this my way." To which she replied, matter-of-factly, "I'm on a mission to get you published." Support like that, you can't count on getting it. You can only thank the powers that be for the blessing of having it.

I feel sort of like I've written those two pages of writer's acknowledgments you get at the beginning of novels, which is a little silly when the piece I've sold is under 3,000 words long. But this sale feels like a huge landmark in my personal path as a writer. It isn't the goal, certainly not a final destination, but it's a goal I've had close to my heart since that night at a downtown New Orleans hotel. I think goals are like playing connect-the-dots, really. Or climbing a rock face. You only ever aim for the next dot, the next hold, because until you get to the next one, you can't really work on the one after that. But then you do, and so you can. So you go on.

But before going on, this set of holds is a good place to pause, rest my arms, and think about some of the people (and there are ever so many more!) without whose support I'd have never gotten this far up the mountain.

I love you all.

In addition to being given absolute permission to follow that star, a budding writer needs support that maybe their parents, if they're not writers themselves, can't give: concrete knowledge about the path leading to that star. Also knowledge about avoiding things unhelpful to the journey. Knowledge that enables, and knowledge that inoculates.

These days, though I've never submitted a book for publication but once (unsuccessfully) nor attempted to attract the interest of an agent, I feel fairly confident I can avoid the scammy pitfalls that many writers fall prey to when they first begin seeking publication. And if you get me on my soapbox I can talk about the hallmarks of publishing scams and bad agents until the cows have not only come home but have also been tucked into bed. I devoutly hope some of my soapbox time has helped prevent a friend from falling into the 7-year clutches of Publish America or the black hole that is the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency.

I learned a lot of what I know in that regard from the good writers and editors in the AbsoluteWrite.com Forum community. That's where I heard "Yog's Law: Money flows toward the writer," i.e. don't pay to be published; the proper relationship of writer to publisher is as a vendor, not as a customer. That's where I learned that reputable publishers consider readers their customers, that reputable agents only get paid when you do, that fee-bearing contests are generally less useful than the for-free, year-round "contest" you enter every time you submit a story to a paying market, that an advance against royalties is the publisher's estimate of how much your book will sell. That a reputable publisher or agent generally doesn't surf the internet in search of more manuscripts, since they get plenty mailed to them without asking. That if a publisher or agent tells you they'll give you "the chance you deserve," that their competition is "afraid of them" because they're going to single-handedly "revolutionize the industry," you should turn your back and run--not walk--as far away from them as quickly as you can.

The more a writer knows about how the industry works, the better choices they can make and the less likely they are to be wooed by incompetents and frauds. But that knowledge needs a home prepared for it in the writer's mind.

For that, I have a couple more teachers to thank.

I continued on at Metairie Park Country Day (with the exception of 5th grade, about which long story), and eventually I got to my sophomore year in high school. That year I had the opportunity to give up a free period (free periods! oooh!) and instead take a one-on-one writing elective in the brand-spanking-new computer lab.

(This is also when I started using WordPerfect 5.1. The computer lab was full of Macs, and my parents had a PC running Windows 3.1. MS Works was no more compatible with, well, anything then than it is now. My brother's after-school tutor lent me the 5.25" floppies to illicitly install WP51, and the rest is history.)

Our English department boasted not one but two published authors: Betsy Petersen and Chet Day. Under them (making it more of a two-to-one class than a one-on-one), I had a designated daily class period in which nothing was expected of me but the sound of typing. If I finished a piece, I could of course turn the draft in for them to read and comment on.

What a boon that was for a young writer! I believe I've gushed about this before: Designated writing time doesn't only give a writer time to ply her craft; it also gives her explicit permission to take time to write. You see the difference? That elective didn't just say, "It's important enough to spend an hour every day doing it." It said, "You are allowed to consider writing this important." This is exceedingly vital permission to give a beginning writer. Oftentimes we don't get it at all. It's much more the case that we hear, "Are you busy? Oh, just writing, huh? In that case, you can spare some time to watch my kids/chop some vegetables/run an errand for me..."

But I got told, "Writing is important. If you want to make it your life, then give it space in your life every day." And having learned that, I've strived to surrounded myself with people who respect that. It's a good thing.

So that was awesome. Then, in senior year, we did it again, but this time with a fellow classmate. (Hi, Chip!). Throughout the year the two of us read each other's work and critiqued it under Mr. Day's and Ms. Petersen's guidance. And that was even more awesome.

And at some point during that year (or the sophomore one, I'm not sure), I asked our teachers, "So... how does one go about getting a story published?"

I remember Mr. Day's answer like it was this morning. "Well, first, do you think you're ready for your story to get rejected?"

"If I'm not," said I, "I had better be."

And so I learned about preparing a manuscript for professional submission, about researching a market's content and guidelines, about form rejections and personal rejections. I learned how to navigate the library's copy of The Writer's Market. But, more importantly, I learned how to think about rejection letters. I learned that submitting a manuscript may feel like baring your soul to an uncaring world which will spit in your face, but that in reality it's just attempting to sell a product. And I made my very first professional submission and I got my very first rejection letter. (About this, more later.)

I'm not going to claim that I magically bypassed that whole "taking it personally" thing that we writers do when we get rejected. I'm still there. No matter how much I go, "Ah, another rejection letter. Time to submit elsewhere!" I've still got that voice in my head going "But... but... but don't they love me?" Like acrophobia while rock climbing, I doubt that voice will ever go away.

But I learned from the beginning that I would feel that way, and that the goal was to keep submitting anyway. And to be a professional about it. And also to not make a jackass of myself by letting that awful rejected feeling dictate how I react.

Instinctual fear of heights? Climb anyway; you're safe. Instinctual fear of rejection? Keep writing and keep submitting. The fear never gets smaller. But the task of moving forward despite the fear gets easier, and that makes the fear seem smaller.

Another thing I learned: Reasonable expectations. A rejection letter means either the story hasn't found the right editor or the story simply isn't ready. It doesn't mean the publishing industry is broken or unprepared for the shining spectacle of my golden words. Knowing that is key to being a professional, to improving the writer's craft, to avoiding the scammers who prey on rejection disillusionment, and to allowing an editor to help improve the story even more after your story gets... *gulp* ...accepted.

This is getting long, and the punchline I'm trying to get to is still a ways off. So here's one of those "To be continued" endings Mrs. Waters would remember from way back when, and we'll finish up tomorrow.

Hello, blog I'm supposed to be updating daily but instead have been hitting maybe twice a month! For the record, I'm a little embarrassed at the high percentage of Examiner posts in my Uber-RSS. It's like, I used to write fiction, but now I'm totally selling out on SEO content writing for cents on the click. *hangs head in shame*

But I've been having these writing-related thoughts recently. Some of them go like this: "Damn, I should be writing. Why have I not written today?" But some of them are more interesting, and they don't fit well under the "Boulder Writing Examiner" rubric. So. Lucky thing I have this personal blog, right?

I've been thinking about what it means to have known since age 6 that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Age 6 can be a pretty blissful time, but it's not ideal if you want people to actually take your hopes and dreams seriously. I have memories of being asked, repeatedly, by aunts and uncles and friends of my parents, "What's your favorite dinosaur, Niki?" not because anyone was interested in the answer, but because it was so cute that a kid in first grade could reliably pronounce a 5-syllable word. (That word, for the record, was "Archeopteryx.") I remember being very aware of this well-meaning but patronizing behavior on the part of the grown-ups around me, of being treated like a well-trained pet who could do a trick. Being six doesn't mean being oblivious.

(I think a lot of grown-ups musn't actually remember what it was like to be six. Or sixteen, for that matter.)

Anyway, I remember being mildly irritated every time I got the question, because I knew that the interest implied by the asking of the question was in fact a lie. A mild lie, but a lie nonetheless. But I answered, because I wanted someone to actually share my enthusiasm for the giant feathered ancestor-of-birds I was naming, and maybe this time this grown-up wasn't asking under false pretenses. Also, at that age, praise from grown-ups is nice, even if it comes in pathetic dribs and drabs and for all the wrong reasons such that it also leaves you feeling a little squicked.

Which is not to say that I was traumatized for life by these interactions. Just that I remember them quite well. Grown-ups ask small children questions, small children think it means the adult is actually interested in what they have to say, small children discover grown-ups' questions were actually a formalized construction of "Dance, monkey, dance." Age six is a terrible time to expect anyone to take you seriously.

So what I want to express my appreciation for is this: Parents who did take me seriously. The archeopteryx thing might have been an unfortunate example of the "dance, monkey, dance" phenomenon, but when they asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and I said, "A writer," they listened.

Actually, my first answer to that question was, "An artist." I was always scribbling, doodling, drawing things--unicorns, mostly--and I enjoyed it so much I figured I'd keep on doing it. I'd eventually have paintings on display in museums and galleries. I'd get hired to illustrate picture books and paint novel covers.

And my parents' response to this was to present me with sketch notebooks, canvases, acrylics, cray-pas, charcoals. Painting lessons. This was not all at or before age six, of course; as long as I evinced interest in using these tools, they supplied me with them.

But age six was the approximate time when I discovered writing.

At Metairie Park Country Day, elementary school--or "Lower School" as it's called there, which I understand is not the typical terminology--is divided into a series of homerooms. Kindergarten, first, and second grades are in the six classrooms that comprise the first floor of the Atrium. Upstairs are four homerooms of third and fourth graders, and four more of fifth and sixth graders. That, at least, was the arrangement when I was passing through, roughly between 1981 and 1988. During my first three years there, I was in Mrs. Waters's homeroom, room 6.

At the beginning of first grade, Mrs. Waters walked the six or seven of us around the room to show us the new privileges and responsibilities we'd get now that we'd graduated out of kindergarten. We'd have actual class times, math and vocabulary and so on, each in different areas of the big homeroom. We'd have actual homework. (Actual homework! Like the big kids had! Wow!) And over here, on the desk positioned between two class areas and near the play-with-blocks area, was a cardboard stand with hanging files in it, and each of us had a hanging file with our name on it, and in our file was a spiral notebook.

In this spiral notebook, each of us was expected to write one page per day.

"Write what?" Anything we wanted.

I approached this daily task grudgingly at first. What was I supposed to write about? The sky is blue and I had instant oatmeal for breakfast. Maple and brown sugar flavor. I wish it wasn't so hot out. Tonight we are going to a movie.

But somewhere during that first semester I began to use the introductory phrase Once upon a time. After which, Story happened. I started writing fiction. Wish-fulfillment stories about the kid I had a crush on. Fantastic stories about my imaginary friends. Moralistic tales about a horse foal who turned into a unicorn overnight and got shunned by the other barnyard animals until he ran away from home, and then they all missed him and wanted him to come back. Weird dream-like tales about getting taken to the land of the unicorns where they eat rainbows and sleep half-submerged in hot springs. (Unicorns were rather a theme.)

Suddenly, a single page stopped being enough room to write in. I started ending my daily pages with "To be continued." I heard Mrs. Waters tell my mom, once, at one of the periodic parent-teacher meetings, "She's writing these multi-part serials now. I have to wait until the next day to find out what happens next."

But the light didn't really go on until we were all given a holiday poem-writing assignment--Easter, I think it was--and the next day I walked into the classroom to see my poem on display. (Was this age six, really, or am I remembering 3rd grade now?) My poem, written in wide-tip marker on the huge lined cardstock pages taller than we were. Wow. Apparently I didn't just enjoy writing; I was writing things that someone else enjoyed reading.

I think that, whether it was the Easter poem in first grade or the get-well-soon poem to a classmate in third, whichever it was, that was when my answer changed.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

"A writer."

And my parents never said, "But what will you do to earn money?" And they didn't just say, "That's nice," and then tell their friends how cute it was that Niki thought she wanted to be a writer. No. Instead, Mom brought me home a Fisher-Price typewriter. It had a red plastic body and white plastic keys, and it looked like a toy but it was perfectly functional. I soon learned to put two pages in at once to protect the platen, how to insert the pages so they came out even and not crooked, and not to touch the ribbon if I didn't want to get ink all over my fingers. I didn't learn to touch-type, not yet, but I got pretty comfortable hunting and pecking my way through more stories about unicorns, classmates I liked, pop stars I adored, and more unicorns. I caught Mom reading some of them aloud on the phone to relatives. It made me embarrassed--and proud.

So that's my first appreciation: Parents who took my writing seriously even before I know it could be taken seriously, and teachers who encouraged me to discover exactly how seriously I wanted to take it. You have to enjoy writing for its own sake, I think, to make writing your life, but sometimes it takes a reader's overt act of positive feedback to make you realize you can be a writer.

I didn't realize how fortunate I was back then. A lot of kids did get told, "It's nice to dream, dear, but... what will you do for a real job?" or, heavens forfend, "Erm, well, try not to show off. Boys don't like girls who are smarter than them." I got told, instead, "A writer, huh? Great! Here's some tools and here are classes and by the way did you write today?" I was lucky. Heck, I was lucky, and had no idea how lucky, just to have a simple, unremarkable childhood in a functional family with loving parents, a roof over our heads, and food regularly on the table. It's scary how many kids don't get even that, growing up. To have that and to have unquestioning parental support for whatever answer I gave to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Breathtaking.

Which makes it sort of silly to complain the archeopteryx thing, doesn't it? And I'm not. I'm not complaining. I'm just remembering it, and remembering how I felt about it. There were lots of things I said at six, or at sixteen, that didn't get taken seriously, which often left me frustrated. But "I'm going to be a writer when I grow up" was not one of them.

You know Barbara Sher's Wishcraft? How she encourages you to answer honestly questions like, "Were you treated as though you had a unique kind of genius that was loved and respected?" and "Were you told that you could do and be anything you wanted—and that you’d be loved and admired no matter what it was?" By page 20 or so I was in tears of gratitude, because my answer to most of the questions in chapter 2 was Yes.

I often wish I could meet my biological parents and tell them, "The people who adopted little infant me? Awesome people. You made a good choice. I have no idea what would have happened if you'd chosen otherwise, but given what you did choose, everything worked out great." Because it did. Everything that really mattered did.

I think I know a little how Charles Dickens felt. At least insofar as to do with publishing a novel serially.

Today I finally finished the retype of the chapter where Melissa finds the upstairs room of the castle. That's one more chapter safely written, one more ready to be delivered to its audience. Its audience of one.

Both my husband's birthday and our latest anniversary have passed us by, so I'm not finishing the novel retype in time for either of those. And I've given up on using my code from winning NaNoWriMo 2009 for a free proof copy from CreateSpace, because the deadline for that is at the end of this month, and I don't want to do a rush job. Besides, Amazon is pretty much dead to me these days.

So instead, on the evening of our anniversary, I read the prologue and first chapter aloud to an audience of one: the man I've been happily married to for twelve years. Because he's so amazingly supportive of me and my crazy idea to be a writer when I grow up. And because this is his book.

Now I just have to stay at least two or three chapters ahead in the type-in as we continue reading our way through this work-in-progress. This may be the deadline that finally gets me to move! If not, my "editor" is bound to be more forgiving of my lapse than I will be.

The aforementioned irrepressible Frank Wu took his Hugo for a walk today. He was one of the scheduled Stars for the final installation of Strolling With The Stars, and he arrived in the mist and rain with rocket ship in tow. And he says to fellow Strolling Star, Stephen Segal (Best Semiprozine, Weird Tales), "Why didn't you bring yours?"

We paused for the daily group photo, and Frank let everyone who wanted a closer look get a closer look. It's worth a closer look--it's an object of great beauty. The rocket ship is just taking off from an asteroid, and if you look close you can see the launch flames are in fact a collection of iridescent maple leaves. I got a very close look. I got to hold it. And what they say about this year's Hugo is true: It's frickin' heavy! It's a frickin' rock!

(Many thanks to Peter Flynn, who came all the way from Ireland, for taking pictures with his cell phone and emailing them to me. If you want to see more pictures, all the group shots will be posted sometime soon on the Anticipation '09 Facebook or LJ or somewhere. 'Twas Stu Segal who took them.)

Now, to sleep, to wake early tomorrow and toss my stuff into its respective containers and boogie down to the train station for a 9:30 AM departure. I missed the dead dog party tonight due to spending lots of lovely time with fellow Viable Paradise X alumni Barbara and Evelyn, but I will be attending the "carrying away the dead dog's corpse" party (as I continue to find it amusing to call it) in the cafe car on Amtrak's "Adirondack" on which several of us Making Light regulars will be riding together.

Back to normal now, with a side-order of "WTF?!". Null has no broken ribs and was probably never blind in the first place. All we know for sure is, he had a scary respiratory attack which responded well to oxygen therapy.

Apparently the vet at Alpine discovered, after allowing Null out of the oxygen cage for good, that he was in no pain at all. Even allowing for the dosage kitty pain-killers he'd been given, there should have been some sort of "owie" response when touching the injured area. Null simply wasn't acting at all consistent with the theory that he had broken bones.

Another look at X-rays revealed that the fractures were old. Apparently he got broken ribs and a fractured sternum some earlier time in his life without our having a clue. Which doesn't make John and I feel like particularly good kitty parents, I can tell you. Maybe he acquired them in the weeks of his kittenhood before we acquired him? Unknown.

The vet at Alpine continued to wonder about his vision. We had seen him staring out car windows on the ride over, but he apparently acted in otherwise in the oxygen cage. But when the vet took him out in the afternoon, she and the nurses tested his responses thoroughly and satisfied themselves that, yes, he could see. Maybe he just reacts oddly while high pain-killers, and ignores visual stimuli very thoroughly when in distress. He's obviously visual now, making eye-contact with me and yowling plaintively for attention.

So now the vet suggests that possible scenarios include an asthma attack, a sudden allergic reaction to catnip, or getting the wind knocked out of him in a fall (which would be consistent with the raised levels of kidney enzyme ALT I think it was). John's worried there may be something neurological going on we don't know about. I'm just very confused. Both of us are worried that it might happen again.

But we're both happy to have our Null-bit back to normal, at least for now, and in no sort of delicate condition. What a relief!

{{Picks Null up and gets face thoroughly licked}}

Because Twitter sucks as a medium for Getting The Whole Story.

Day 1, by the way, was spent in barely holding ourselves together. So this is Day 2. And here's the story. It has nothing to do with writing, by the way, except possibly why it may be hard to get much of it done this week.

John and I spent much of yesterday at the Estes Park Wool Market. When we left at 9:00 AM, both cats were fine. When we got home around 4:00 PM, Uno was wandering around like normal but Null was in a terrible state. He was lying on his left side, limp, unresponsive, and clearly having difficulty breathing. It was regular but sounded painful, and made a rasping noise like a purr gone wrong.

Predictive chaos and panic ensue. For future reference, if you keep pets, go to the phone book or internet right now and find the number of the emergency vet nearest you. Put that number in your cell phone. Or tack it up on the wall. Whatever. Make sure it is easily found. Because let me tell you, the phone book is not easy to use while you're conscious of your beloved animal apparently fighting for his life. The brain just shuts down. The name of the emergency clinic goes right out of the head. Go. Do it now. This blog will wait.

Done? Good. Continuing now.

Five minutes later John was walking in at the Boulder Emergency Pet Clinic, bearing Null on the cushion of the armchair on which we found him, while I was finding a parking space. Within a minute after that, they had the poor kitty on oxygen therapy and were running all the likely diagnostics. Meanwhile we were frantically cataloguing the contents of our home, wondering if he'd ingested toxins, chewed on a plant, got strangled, what?

Periodically the doctor would come in and tell us what they'd found now. Vitals good, aside from difficulties breathing. Blood-work normal except for raised levels of an enzyme associated with blunt trauma to the kidney. Oh, by the way, did you know he's blind? No "menace response" (he didn't startle at sudden hand motions very near his face). Pupils dilated, but symmetrical, thank goodness.

Finally the X-rays came out. The right lung looked dented. There's no other way to put it. And the indentation corresponded with about four ribs that weren't lying correctly at all.

This is the point at which everyone on Twitter goes, "How the hell did he break ribs? Why was he blind?" and I tweet over and over, "We don't know. We don't know. We weren't home when it happened." But here's my theory.

Null and Uno "get into it" a lot--one will pick a fight with the other, and they'll chase each other around the house, wrestle, yowl, etc. Typically Uno will get tired of it first. Null, however, will persist, being stubborn and dumb. The typical end of the episode is Uno jumping up onto the kitchen counter, the bedroom dresser, the entertainment center, or another raised surface, often knocking down breakables in the process. (On one memorable occasion he attempted to leap into the glassware cabinet in the kitchen which I'd unfortunately left open.) Null will sometimes try to follow him. If he succeeds, he'll usually be convinced to jump down again in a hurry. But with Uno snapping at his front paws as he tries to scramble up, he'll more often just fall backwards down onto the floor again.

Imagine that happening with, say, the coffee table breaking Null's fall, so that his head thwacked the glass and the edge of the table bashed him in the ribs.

The really heartbreaking thing is imagining him dragging himself, blinded and in pain, to the comfort of his armchair.

So he stayed at the emergency clinic all night, super-oxygenated and doped up on pain-killers. Periodic calls revealed he was becoming more alert, aware, and comfortable as the evening progressed, but he still hadn't regained his sight.

The clinic we chose (due to its proximity and having brought Uno there once for an eye injury) only keeps nights and weekend hours, so we knew we'd have to return in the morning to check him out and either bring him home or transfer him to a conventional vet. (This would be why I'm late getting to the farm this morning.) Well, when we got there, they told us he was much improved. He was walking around, complaining, trying to "ooze" off the exam table, all the normal Null-bit stuff. He was breathing normally, none of that alarming open-mouthed raspy stuff. They told us he'd been purring, in that dumb, touching way that he does, sitting around and purring at mere continuity of existence. And just to top it off, he could see again!

They brought him out to us in one of their carriers. He was pacing inside, yowling now and again, clearly wanting out. When we pet him, he head-butted our hands. His pupils were still alarmingly huge, but not so much as before. No lingering effects of head trauma either. In short, he was acting like himself. Except he wasn't yowling very often, and during his ride over to Alpine Vet Clinic, where he will spend the day being weaned off the oxygen therapy and being closely observed, he stared out the windows of the car, clearly more curious than scared. We suspect that's a combination of him being to some extent conscience of having temporarily lost his sight and regained it, so that he was enjoying the heck out of just having vision; and being high as a kite on pain-killers.

So he'll probably come home tonight around 5 or 5:30, and I'll stay home and watch him carefully, and he'll need to be isolated from Uno and kept from jumping up into high places for about 6 weeks. Which will be a pain in the butt, but obviously totally worth it.

And now you know the rest of the story.

Thanks to everyone for their concern and caring and thoughts and prayers and magical energy and etc. We love you all.

Now we'll see whether anyone reads my blog I don't know about. Because I'm rather guilty of telling nobody in the area--including, with one exception, family--that my next stop after Chicago would be New Orleans.

Yes. Sneaky stealth French Quarter stay. John and I had a week with Interval International to use up, and John was out of vacation days, so it was up to me. I plugged a likely looking week into The Quarter House and called it an extended writing retreat. (It just happened to line up well with the annual Chicago crawfish outing.) Also a preview homecoming, given that I'm hell-bent on moving back to New Orleans someday, at least part-time. I mean, it's home, dangit. I ought to spend more time actually living there.

So why haven't I told anyone about it? Because... well, a week and a half can go by really quick if it fills up with visiting obligations and other unforeseen restrictions. And I just want this week and a half to myself, right? I'm allowed, right? Right?

So. If I get a phone call tomorrow afternoon with disappointed family members scolding me for this (or even saying "hey, it's all right, enjoy your vacation, just promise to visit next time"), that will be an interesting and possibly scary way to find out that Mom and Dad (or friends of theirs, or other family members) are reading my blog. If they are, I must beg them not to get mad at my brother, who mixed me this lovely, lovely Bloody Mary I am drinking. I swore him to secrecy on pain of pain. Blame me, not him! I'm the older one, right? I'm a bad influence, clearly!

OK, well, you can blame him for any typos. He mixes a non-trivially strong Bloody Mary. Vodka makes me insanely uncoordinated as far as fine motor control goes. I'm fixing the fat-finger fuxxups as I go, but I may miss a few.

Don't worry, gross motor control should remain trouble-free. This is important. I'm on my bike. Woo, Riverbend to French Quarter. Woo, past midnight.

This update is not turning out to be so quick. On with it.

1) Got here. Pleasant train ride. Interesting scenery, among which I will count the guy who was shouting at everyone who would listen that "They Blew The [17th Street Canal] Levee!!!" because "They" wanted to shut down the Lower Ninth Ward and needed a Cat. 5 Hurricane for cover. I think this particular theory has been around since before Camille, actually. Most of the times I hear it, it's attached to, I dunno, a canal with less proximity to multi-million-dollar neighborhoods like Lakeview. But whatever. He says he heard a BOOM, and Gods know there's nothing but dynamite can cause a boom, right? Like I said - interesting scenery on my train.

1)b. No free wi-fi in the W, and I refuse to pay when any number of fine establishments like Z'otz and Bruno's will give me what I want. Also the Royal Cafe, if I'm not feeling all that "woo" about biking to the Riverbend and I'd rather just walk about 4 blocks instead.

2) Nibbled at the short story WIP. Really, only nibbled. And not until I got into town and was having dinner at this little Vietnamese place two doors down from Camillia Grill. My nibbling gave me an ending, and it gave me an unforeseen backstory complication. I'm so proud of my little 650-word story! It's developing a back-story!

3) Will probably do more nibbling tomorrow, as well as a visit to the Williams Research Center for microfiche reading to buttress the verisimilitude of "A Surfeit of Turnips" (which will probably get a new title before it goes out again). Hey, when Gumbo Ya-Ya tantalizingly mentions a 1930 story in the New Orleans Item Tribune referencing the most bizarre ghost story I have ever heard, who am I to resist?

4) Will probably have lunch here (via both Neilhimself and docbrite).

And that's it for now. Laters!

Hello, and a belated Happy Winter Solstice to everyone! Days are growing longer now, and sunrises will come earlier every day. I can't begin to tell you how cheerful that makes me.

We had our usual Solstice Vigil/Open House, Saturday night. The basic plan goes like this: Light the Yule Log at dusk, make sure it stays lit all night long, and, at sunup, go to sleep. Or, if there's interest, carpool down to Red Rocks Amphitheater for the Drumming Up of the Sun. Then come home and go to sleep. This year, I just went to sleep. But it looks like someone posted some lovely footage of the event!

Our Yule Log this year was a hunk of cottonwood reclaimed from a tree chopped down outside the climbing gym. I biked it home and left it out on the porch to age and dry. I had a really dramatic hollowed-out wedge of last year's log to start the fire with, along with some grocery store firewood bundles and a couple of wax-coated pine cones Avedan gave us. We lit it, drank a toast to it, and cheered in on into the night.

I cook a lot more than is reasonable on Solstice Eve, especially considering there's no guarantee we'll have guests at all. We had one this year; a neighbor from downstairs came up and chatted with me straight until dawn. She wasn't very hungry, however. I am drowning pleasantly in leftovers. Mostly I did the "traditional" dishes, the ones I do every year (although in some cases the "tradition" only started last year). Tomato and Orange Juice Soup, from The Wicca Cookbook. Teresa Nielsen Hayden's A Savory Pie for the First Day of Winter. Tree's ultra-thick-n-fluffy eggnog. But then I also had a bit of extra Napa cabbage in the fridge brought home from my most recent volunteer shift at Abbondanza, so I brought home a game hen and did a crock-pot sized version of Whole Chicken and Chinese Cabbage Soup, a la Kenneth Lo's Top One Hundred Chinese Dishes. And satsumas had just come into season, so I put out a bowl of them on the table.

And Avedan made empenadas - lovely little pastry tarts filled with apples, raisins, cinnamon, and further yummies I cannot recall to enumerate here. And our neighbor brought us a little tin of sweets. And another neighbor had earlier brought us a basket of cookies as a thank you for our occasional cat-sitting services, which I swear we thought well repaid by his own sitting upon our cats. And there was my fruitcake, too, as you'll remember. Which turned out divine. We were overflowing in goodies.

Since then, I've been snacking on cold slices of pie followed by satsuma chasers, and the other leftovers are looking at me like commmmme eeeeeat meeeee naaaaaaooooooo. 'Tis not the season for watching one's waistline, I fear. But it's a good season for breaking bread together, for keeping each other company, for making music, for reading books and poetry aloud together, for knitting in front of TV and radio with friends.

Whether you celebrated the season Sunday morning, during the darkest night of the year; or celebrated it Sunday evening and will continue to for a total of eight commemorative days; or will celebrate it Thursday morning with presents around a tree; whether you prefer to wait until the Kings come marching in on January 6th, with or without the eponymous Cake; or whatever way you do celebrate, as I do not have encyclopediac knowledge of all winter festivals... or perhaps you celebrate simply by getting up in the morning, like you do every morning, and saying "yes" to life in your own way... my wish for you is the same: Love, light, warmth, and hope to comfort and delight you during the cold darkness of winter, and to see you through to Spring. And may all good things come to you during our planet's next good lap around the Sun.

From the Department of Putting Folk Wisdom and Traditional Aphorisms to Real World Tests, March has officially come in like a lamb. Saturday the 1st was short-sleeves warm; I got sunburned biking home from work. (I had to work. Long story. Emergency involving a Juliet Brailler and a bunch of pie charts.) Most of able-bodied Boulder were out wearing Spandex and clogging the bike paths. Or clinging to mountainsides; I had the rock climbing gym practically all to myself due to all the real climbers being out climbing real rocks. It was a beautiful day.

And Sunday it snowed. That's Colorado for you. John and I looked out the window around 8:00 at all the frozen precipitation, and he said, "It's opaque outside."

So it's March. You'll notice the whole "Thing-a-Day" thing sort of trailed off around here mid-February. I was in the middle of another couple of last-minute deadline cycles--only, due to some extreme suckiness on my part, the cycle consisted of my saying "I'll have it finished in a couple of days," spending the next couple days beating myself up over about 2,500 per day, and then saying "but I'll have it finished the next couple of days for sure." Thus the eleventh hour mentality stretched itself out over most of the month. Most of my meals included a side of stomach lining with adrenaline dressing.

I do not recommend spending one's February this way.

So, partially because I'm swearing never to do that to myself again (and I really mean it this time) but mostly because my editor has said that the next project really truly does have to be turned in on time, I've logged said next project in the database. I can't say much about it, since my contract includes a confidentiality agreement, but I can say I've got a project and am up to this many words. 25,000 of them are due on March 15. It's like NaNoWriMo, but with research. And instead of saying vague things like "Oh, it's coming along" when anyone asks, I can point here and say, "X amount of words! With X days left to go!"

I'm slightly behind because of not really starting the writing part until March 1 and then taking yesterday off. But yesterday was sort of full of weekend things. (Long story involving a lot of friends, several Torchwood episodes, Vietnamese take-out, and a game of "Munchkin.") Now it is Monday, and Mondays are for working.

Meanwhile, you might be asking, what about fiction and poetry and stuff? What about the writing with actual soul? What about the writing I meant when I was seven years old and said "I want to be a writer when I grow up?" (You mean you weren't asking? Huh. Shows how much you care. I was asking.) Well, this great thing happens when I only owe my paying, deadlined project some 2,000 words a day. I have time to spare. And it's not all going to be spend on Puzzle Pirates. Promise!

As I might have mentioned, I'm going to the World Horror Convention at the end of this month. (John's coming with! Yay!) So are a significant handful of my fellow '06 Borderlands Boot Camp alumni. I can't bear the thought of showing up in front of them and not being able to tell them that I've finally sent off a beautifully rewritten "Seeds of Our Future" (ne… "Putting Down Roots") as one of our instructors notoriously told me I ought to do. That's my fiction project this month. And you can hold me to it, too.

Yay! Back to using this blog as a public flogging place! Just like old times!