author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

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!

I think this novel, unlike last year's, will actually wrap up in 50K or shortly thereafter. I know this because today, in between 24K and 28K, I reached the midbook climax.

This scene is definitely not one of the boring bits. Not to me. It's one of the scenes that I go over and over again in my head when thinking about writing the novel. This, in terms of Joseph Campbell's oft-quoted thesis, is the "refusal of the call" scene. This is where the not-so-imaginary friend gets far too real, and the MC has to repudiate it/him/her. It/him/her is effectively banished now, but it/etc./etc. has already managed to impart a portion of the deadly gift it needs to bestow. The supernatural powers which the MC has inherited from her mother are now available to her; the knowledge of them, alas, not yet. Which is an accident waiting to happen. Which is the next not-boring-bit in the plot. Which, unfortunately, can't happen for at least 10K and 3 months of story time, or else the pacing goes all to hell.

Appropriately enough, today's Real Author Pep-Talk was exactly about this.

Explanation: This year, Chris Baty asked a handful of published authors to write pep-talks for all us NaNoWriMo participants. These pep-talks are being emailed out at strategic intervals, their topics coinciding with the time of the month. We received a pep-talk from Tom Robbins on Nov 1, and it was all about the excitement of starting the novel. On Nov 6, we got one from Naomi Novik, and it was full of strategies for keeping up the daily writing routine even after the Day 1 excitement fades. Sue Grafton's pep-talk was about beating back those creeping insecurities that appear in the vacuum left when that excitement does fade.

Today, we got Sara Gruen's pep-talk about how to get that excitement back: by writing the fun bits first.

It's a strategy that's really made me appreciate novel outlining in general and Spacejock Software's yWriter in particular. Not that you can't skip to the fun bits without an outline or a software application that encourages creating each scene before writing it, of course. But if you do take the time to outline or to create chapter and scene files in yWriter, you'll end up knowing where all the fun bits are--as well as all the "and then something unspecified happens and takes up a month of plot time" bits. (Knowing where those are is also good. It enables you to figure out what that unspecified something actually is.)

The other nice thing about Writing The Fun Bits is, those bits are fun. Duh. Sorry. What I mean is, them being fun to write has another nice effect besides getting the writer unstuck. They also tend to result in the writer writing a lot. I meant just to get to 25K and stop today. As you can see, I went about 3K longer. Whoo! All caught up and stock-piled for the future!

Of course, the bits that are fun to write accrue extra words because we linger over them. About 1,500 words are probably going to get edited out of that scene. It needs to not go on so long or be so very repetitively explicit. But editing doesn't happen in November. I wrote those words. That's all that matters.