author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Chez LeBoeuf-Little has acquired a pet snail. Have I told you this story yet? Briefly, we were washing two pounds of fresh spinach and a snail floated to the top. Now we have a pet snail.

It's thriving like nobody's business. Its shell has grown by half a whorl since we first found the wee beastie, and if it doesn't get a nice thumb-sized bit of vegetation to munch on every evening, it gets uppity. And whatever you feed it, it will eat it all up. Not a trace remains the next morning. It's a ravenous eating machine!

Here's the thing, though: its mouth is small. Way small. And it doesn't have teeth. All it can do is put its mouth around the next three millimeters of veg and rasp at it with its little sandpapery tongue. Give a snail enough time, though, and this process will suffice to consume leafs of lettuce three times its size and carrot slices five inches long--the latter remarkably like slucking up a spaghetto in slow motion.

Nibble nibble, bit by bit, "she ate that whale, because she said she would!"

Which puts me uneasily in mind of any writing project that's ever seemed so huge that the only reasonable course of action was to procrastinate the hell of out of it.

Nibble by nibble. Bit by bit. 500 words by 800 words. Scene by sentence by word.

Patient and persistent as a snail.

Which is the quasipoetic way of saying that I haven't finished or even really started my short story rewrite yet--and John and I are getting on that train tomorrow. So you know what I'll be nibbling away at today, in between laundry and housecleaning and all the other things that fill the day before travel. The first nibble in the queue will be a new scene wherein Daphne meets one of the extraterrestrial "Ambassadors" face-to-face and shakes its (for want of a better word) hand. Which starts two separate event-wheels in motion, both deadly in the extreme.

I copped out of describing the aliens before; Daphne merely observed that they didn't respond well to cameras, that something about the way light hit them, or missed them, gave the viewer an impression of a vague gray blob with too many limbs. One of the Borderlands instructors read that sentence out loud and then gave me a look. And I said, "Yeah, I admit it. Cop out." It's coming clearer now. The "too many limbs" are thread-like pseudopodia, root-like even, some carrying the being across the ground like centipede legs, some raised up to manipulate matter like hands at the end of arms, and some giving the impression of a wild shock of hair like dandelion down. The light seems to pass between these threads rather than hit them straight on, so that if they're moving they're hard to catch sight of. If you're very observant and don't blink, you can see the sparkle and shimmer of them passing by.

Nibble nibble nibble.

As usual, I fell behind on my intended work schedule. Thus, 9,000 words to go between now and Deadline. That's OK; there's a lot of today left in today.

I'm going to go ahead and announce for all to hear that the current project will go THUNK in my editor's inbox by 5:00 AM MDT on March 15. (Hey, it's daylight savings time already! Is this actually helping us save on oil and electricity?) This is because I firmly intend to start some Serious Goofing Off right about then. My crewbies on the Viridian Ocean are planning to hunt the sea monsters of Atlantis at noon GMT, and I want to be there! Yarr!

Wait! It's daylight savings time! That means 6:00 AM MDT. Well then!

Don't worry, I won't go into a month of downtime over this. Sunday's writing time is earmarked for rewriting "Seeds of Our Future" or whatever I may end up renaming the short story currently known as "Putting Down Roots." Hopefully it won't take me more than a few hard-working days. If I run into the person I want to submit it to at the World Horror Convention at the end of this month, I want there to be a chance that she's actually already received it.

Also? Next week, the bathroom and kitchen get cleaned within an inch of their life. I really hate the way we can tell how long I've been working to a deadline by the depth of the grime layer on the fixtures.

So this week has been a nibbly sort of week. Each day I've been sort of nibbling away at the March 15th project, and then running off to do something social and fun (cf. Melanie and Steve Rasnick Tem's book launch for The Man In The Ceiling, the rock climbing gym's free Intro To Lead Belay class, dinner with friends, etc). Where I'm at now, I'm looking at about 2100 words a day from here on out. However, tomorrow's Thursday, and Thursday is a nothing but writing day. "I know," you say; "Promises, promises!" OK, well, I have some housecleaning to do. But other than that, nothing but writing.

Meanwhile, as regards fiction rewrites, I'm starting to experience some percolation. Nothing written down yet, nothing to report in detail, but... I got me some plans. They're at that bubbly stage. I expect to see the bubbles begin to splatter all over the page before the week is out.

So, y'know. Stuff. It's going on.

Which is not to say that you should not visit the polls tomorrow. Not at all. You should totally go to the polls and VOTE. Really, few things are as depressing in this so-called democratic republic than the concept that a 20% turnout is considered high. Go vote! However, I will continue to whine about how much life will suck for me as I work the 14-hour day involved in running my home precinct's polling place. During a general election. With poll watchers telling me how to do my job.

And no laptop.

I am not allowed to bring my laptop! It is electronic. It has ports. It could potentially be used to hack into the electronic voting booth that I'll be running. So it's not allowed on the premises.

And for once I have nothing ready to knit.

*cry*

So given that work on the Nano-novel tomorrow will be a no-go, I prioritized it today. I brainstormed about how to throw pointier rocks at Gwen, who is up the tree of Being In Charge Of A Bookstore No One Will Shop At Because Of Suspicions Of Past Criminal Activity. She thinks she knows how to handle this. She is wrong! So wrong! Give me an hour, and I'll figure out why she's wrong. Something to do with digging up copies of her own books and discovering one of the missing children in it, I think. Also, I decided that the scene with 7-yr-old Gwen meeting the Bookwyrm, which I've written before, will be rewritten from the point of view of the talemouse, who will be amazed at seeing a story character travel to the place between stories.

Meanwhile, I plan to bring the short story along with me in hard copy tomorrow: critiqued copies, print-out of current work, and spiral notebook. Perhaps by the end of the day I'll have something ready to type up. I am so very sick of dragging this revision out.

I hate writing science fiction! It has to make sense! I am sitting here with pen and paper trying to decide what the timeline is for the plant virus to take effect, and how exactly Daphne catches it, and how--if she only contracts it once she gets to Lac Des Allemands--she and Aaron don't hear about it on TV what with people contracting it directly from the source before they even leave Kenner. Gahhh!

On second thought, that sort of logical mechanics isn't just a province of science fiction... I hate writing fiction! Fiction has to make sense! Why can't it all just be striking turns of phrase and smooth dialogue and stunning imagery? I hate having to make it make sense!

*sigh*

As for the other on-going project, I'm still behind schedule. About 20 words per day behind schedule. Which, multiplied by 26 remaining days, isn't so bad. But I have this sense of dread following me around, because I haven't done very much more than rewrite from memory things I've already written here and there in past years. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do when I use up that material and have to figure out exactly how the rest of the novel goes.

Maybe this weekend I can spend some time plotting and outlining. I still haven't played with yWriter's nifty Outliner machinery yet. Maybe I'll do that.

Simplifying what I said yesterday: The difference between Procrastination and Soup-making is the difference between thinking about the project and not thinking about the project. And the "must" moment is never totally lost, although the contents of the soup may need to be reheated.

I say this now because I did a lot of soup-making last night and today. Falling asleep, I saw in my head the near-invisible Ambassadors holding their tentacle-like limbs into the air in front of the Saint Louis Cathedral for the small birds to perch on. I re-worded the very ending of the story. Aaron's two moments of realization came clear to me.

And then, instead of writing the scenes down, I played video games. I read blogs. I looked at the clock and said, "Oh, crap! Only an hour left to Novemeber 3! Must log some words so that my bar chart doesn't lose a bar!"

And so I opened up The Bookwyrm's Hoard instead and wrote about how Gwen became a writer.

There is probably a special procrastination hell for writers who pretend to be writing by writing stories whose protagonists are writers. I promise, once again, that Gwen will not become a Mary Sue! I promise!

In any case, the piece of scene I wrote is something I've written before, but rewriting it from memory allowed it to be influenced by my more recent understanding of the character since writing the first draft of Right Off The Page.

OK. Now, I really shall work on the short story. I think part of my problem is, I'm not totally clear on how to rewrite Daphne's banana reverie. I think instead tonight I shall rewrite the ending scene. Actual words bubbled up in the soup this afternoon; I should get them down before the soup cools off.

If you don't recognize the manuscript stats at left, that's because I changed the title. "Putting Down Roots" is now "Seeds Of Our Future." I don't guarantee the new title's longevity, but it'll do for now.

There's this thing that I do. It looks a lot like procrastination if you're not me, if you're watching me from outside my head. Even inside my head they look a lot alike. But there's a huge difference in productivity, trust me.

Procrastination goes like this: I know I have to do something. Rewrite a story, clean the bathroom, whatever. But every time I think about doing it, my brain slides right off. It's like trying to grab a frictionless surface and not even noticing that I failed to take hold. At most, I'll think, "Sorry, I can't work on that story yet; I still have this freelance gig to finish up!" And I'll think I'm thinking, "I can't wait to have the freelance stuff done so I can go back to working on fiction," but in reality I'm all like, "Good thing I'm under another deadline, or I'd have to actually work on that story!"

But this other thing. This composting, soup-making, spell-casting thing. It's different. The key difference is, my brain gets a good grip on that slippery mental object and doesn't let go until it's done. In the case of cleaning the bathroom, I start to see myself doing it, I start visualizing myself hard at work at the task, and the visualization sort of accumulates weight until critical mass is reached and I must get up and do it. In the case of rewriting a story--this story, in fact--the story takes shape in my head until it must be put onto paper.

This isn't waiting for the Muse to visit. This is putting Her to work right now and not letting Her clock out until She's done.

Monday I finally finished compiling all the Borderlands critiques. By that time, I'd made some notes both mental and in ink towards plot shifts. Since enough people thought that the aliens were a red herring, I wrote down the question, "Remember why you put them there in the first place?" I thought back to the rough draft and the original plot logic, before I'd ever posited The Locusts of Gaia or any other plausible reason why our two main characters were suspected in the Ambassadors' disappearance. Another note I wrote down: "Notes towards a new opening--" and then the different places that different critiques had suggested starting: "sermon, falls asleep too quickly, supplies are running low." And so forth.

Over the next 48 hours, the new opening scene along with new configurations of, say, the fried perch argument or the banana reverie, underwent a slow congealing at the back of my head. Each time I consciously thought about them, there was something new in place, and it had all the weight of "That's how it happened." (You know that weight, right? When the comments came in and many of them said, "you don't need this fake sci-fi element, just make it about Daphne and Aaron and the pure horror/erotica plant thing," my mental reaction was, "No, you don't understand, the Ambassadors were there. It happened. Like 9/11 and the Challenger disaster and, and, my high school graduation all happened.")

So this morning at last I began to write the new opening scene. The "must" moment had arrived.

Now, don't be fooled. It's possible to squander the "must" moment, to not sit down and write when critical mass is reached but to put it off and put it off some more. A spring can't hold tension forever; it'll break or stretch under the strain. So the story can lose its push, weaken its hold, and then I'm just procrastinating again. I have to start the ignition countdown over again--and with what? I've already reread the old version and compiled critiques. What more can I do? Doubtless I'll come up with something, sometime, but not this and not now.

But I didn't squander the moment. I wrote. And now I've emailed the opening scene to the Super-Sekrit VPX Gmail Address so that my classmates can, if they wanna, tell me if it generates enough "gotta" to keep a reader interested. And I'll be going back to the rest of the rewrite in just a little while.

But first I need to let the next scene come together--it isn't quite soup yet. And while my back-burners simmer it along, I'll get another thousand words done on this year's November novel.

And that'll be the rest of my evening.

Revision Status: "Putting Down Roots" will probably not hit the mail today. (And why is that, Niki?) Because the darn thing has almost completely rewritten itself in my head on a plot level. Like, where the virus comes from, and why the aliens are on Earth, and all that. The plot is twisting itself back into its original shape, but it's taking a lot of its recent developments with it, with the result that I'm not working on the... [counts on fingers] ...6th draft of this story so much as writing a new one with the same characters, climax, and ending. So I haven't gotten anywhere near completion since last blog post. Dammit. Working on that will take priority; I don't mind being a little behind on NaNoWriMo in the meantime.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo: Have reset the word count on "The Bookwyrm's Hoard"--those 7.5K or so came from summing together all the words from all the snippets I've drafted through the years, any of which I'll end up rewriting from memory this month if the novel still wants them in it. This morning, after the clock hit midnight and the calendar hit November, I broke the first thousand, but it was all very clumsy. I'm not entirely sure where the novel's going beyond the plot premises of Gwen taking over the bookstore and children vanishing into her books.

Last night's This morning's NaNoWriMo kick-off was very well attended, and the people who showed up all had a productive session. One of 'em even crossed the 2K mark. Then things devolved into mere socialization and cat stories until about 4 AM. It was fun. And I am paying the price today. But, having slept until about 3:00 PM, I think I'm recovered enough to get on with things. Like, rewriting short stories. And cleaning up in the kitchen.

Going way, way back to the Borderlands Press Writers' Boot Camp experience... why? Because I finally sat down with all 30+ copies of my story that the instructors and other students returned to me, and I read all their comments tonight. I'm sorta subconsciously compiling a coherent impression of What Needs Doing. Meanwhile, I have some Thoughts.

Thought the First: Names Are Important. If you, dear reader, should ever take part in a big group workshop in which you will be one among many commenting on a single story, please, for the love of Whomever You Hold Dear, put your effing name on your copy! Especially if you're one of the Instructors! It's not been so long that I can't still put a name to a face, and I can sorta put the tenor of a set of comments to the memory of a particular break-out session, but memory isn't infallible, and it would sure be nice to know who thought what.

[Note to self: Alternately, I could write the critiquer's name at the top of the copy when he or she hands it back to me. Y'know. Rather than, for example, having an attack of workshopping nerves, tucking it away face down under my notebook, and pretending it doesn't exist for the rest of the day.]

Thought the Second: Paper-clips don't work so good en masse. Acquisitions editors and slush readers famously despise the staple. Paper-clips come off and go back on easily, which staples do not do. But if you take 30+ copies of a 15-page story, all paper-clipped together, and put them in a stack and shove the stack in your bookbag to shlep around town, those paper-clips become very indiscriminate as to what paper they clip.

Thought the Third: There can be too much of a good thing. The way the Boot Camp was set up, there were four classrooms and four two-hour sessions throughout the Big Saturday. Each of the four instructors presided over a classroom, leading a critique session consisting of five or six students and their stories. Thus each student got critiqued by each instructor and, theoretically, each student. Unfortunately, the students were divided into sections such that some of us saw each other twice but others not at all, so we didn't actually get face-to-face critiques with every other student. But we were all supposed to read and critique everyone else's stories regardless--and, oddly enough, I don't feel like 30+ critiques gives me any better of a spectrum than the 5 or 6 I get from my fellow attendees at Melanie Tem's twice-monthly classes.

In fact, I'm starting to get confused. Five people thought the opening was too slow; two more thought it was perfect. One person was totally confused about the plot, another said maybe I was too subtle, another two said they liked the way the plot snuck up on them. Several people thought the space aliens were unnecessary, nothing more than a red herring intended to articially wedge the story into the science fiction genre; several other people thought the aliens were totally cool. Triangulation is a bitch.

Not that I'm really complaining. Like most writers, I consider every beta reader to be a blessing. (And the ones that said things like, "Your story made me sick to my stomach, but in a good way," really made my night! Yay!) But there is such thing as an embarrassment of riches. Stephen Wright once quipped, "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" I'm currently trying to figure out where to put it all.

The issue of the four sessions is something I wish I'd put on my feedback questionaire at the end of the workshop. What I think Borderlands Press should have done was either only have us read the stories of students we'd share a session with (which is what Viable Paradise did), or else try to divide us into sections so that everyone got face-time with everyone. The usefulness of a particular comment is greatly amplified by remembering the student who brought it up in class and the brief discussion that led to. By the same token, a manuscript copy full of lots of underlining without further comment, no name, and no memory of how those underlined passages were discussed... I just don't know what to do with that.

[Note in the interest of accuracy: According to fellow student William D. Zeranski, who is a meticulous record-keeper to be trusted in these matters, there were Twenty-Two Students. So my constant reference to "30+ copies" is probably an exaggeration. So, OK, I got 20+ copies. Still! My point stands, dammit!]

Thought the Fourth: My, That's A Well-Vacuumed Cat. My procrastination tendencies are TEH SUXX0R. However, my high score in Worldwinner's version of hard-level Luxor since the addition of the 5-minute time limit is now somewhere around 192K. I will totally rock the competition ladder. Ph34r my l337 ski11z.

...And that's all I got. It's 3:18 AM in Boulder. I have the IHOP to walk home from and a lot to think about on the way. Tomorrow and Tuesday I will be trying to put those thoughts to work. And Wednesday I'll have this sucker in the mail.

Hurrah! In addition to being a newly minted Viable Paradise graduate, I have also survived the journey home. All the trains were hyper-fast this time around, so I ended up puttering around stations a lot (when I wasn't hiking around downtown Chicago). And I got home just in time to catch the winter's first snow on the valley floor.

Me, during the ride home: "Wow, look at all those low-lying gray clouds over the mountains. Think it might snow today?"

John: "Maybe."

Me, some 4 hours later: "Definitely."

I have mixed feelings about coming home to snow. I was pretty much done with appreciating the mystic beauty of snow since March '00. Since then my attitude ranges between tedium ("Oh, Gods, more snow") and guilt ("Don't bad-mouth it, we need the moisture"). But at least I wasn't somewhere warm like Maui or New Orleans this time, for the climate contrast to really rub in that vacation is over. New England was pretty blustery; the instructors, particulary Jim Macdonald and Teresa, were commenting on this being the coldest VP yet.

So I have a lot of work to do this week. I have the final (for now) StyleCareer.com eGuide to complete and turn in; I have comments on The Drowning Boy to compile and compost; and I have a revision of "Putting Down Roots" that really has to happen, like, now. MacAllister has threatened me with dire abuses should I fail to send a copy to Ellen Datlow by November. And Mac knows her stuff. Do not cross that lady.

But right now I am enjoying being back in my own house, napping in my own bed, and having a long, guilt-free soak in the bathtub. Work can happen later on tonight. Thththbbbp.