author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Almost didn't post this evening. It's been a long and busy day in which the only times available to work on Drowning Boy were this morning (had I woken up two hours earlier, which I didn't) and right now. And if the IHOP was too uncomfortably public for composing a sex scene, imagine trying to write Hot 'N Steamy from the cramped seat of a crowded westbound #B bus.

Work today involved not only database input, web page modifications, and attempts to script a self-updating potcast feed, but also a lot of driving and a 3,000-foot change of altitude. And then it was a mad scramble to catch the westbound #S. And on the bus I had a story to critique and homework to complete for my writing class. Not that I get graded. Homework in this class is completely optional. But so many good ideas are born from homework exercises that I hate not to do them.

So here I am on the bus with a headache (cf. altitude change) and very reluctant to start on the novel. I'm thinking, "4 hours, all right, I mean 6 hours tomorrow. No, eight! Just--not tonight, OK?"

But wait just a moment there. I did my homework. If that's not writing, what is?

Hence the new manuscript title at upper left. The Bookwyrm's Horde is a metafictonal novel--rather, a transfictional novel--concerning an author who inherits a magically labrynthine bookstore after which the novel is named and who writes stories that children just fall right into. Literally. Also, the Bookwrym? He's real. He's big and purple and wears horn-rimmed glasses and, occasionally, eats people.

Over the past few years I've babbled out bite-sized bits of that novel at random intervals. The word count you see up there sums up all those vignettes. And I've only just realized that this, this here, is the real first book of my "book detective " series (the one that I hope won't get flagged as a Jasper Fforde rip-off; I swear I've been working on it, mentally at least, since before I ever heard of The Well Of Lost Plots.) So this realization puts much of the next novel--which involves a missing main character--into perspective. It also upsets my previous ideas about how Bookwyrm was going to shape up. But that's why story-writing is so fun, right? You never know what'll happen next.

So, just to prove I wasn't a complete bum today--well, as regards writing; I have been very busy otherwise, and yesterday too, just not so much with writing--here's what resulted from my homework assignment. The prompt was this: Take the phrase "message in a bottle" and reinterpret it. No desert islands, no literal bottles. Here goes.

Every day that she could steal a few minutes, she went to the library. She went like a fugitive, on frightened feet, staring about with haunted eyes. She would wait at the juncture in the path until a moment when no one could see which direction she chose. And she'd hide her face from the librarian at the information desk.

But if you were to follow her, if you were, say, a small brown mouse with peppercorn eyes and quiet, quiet toes, you'd see her sneak over to the middle-grade shelves. You'd see her picking her terrified way past the voices of children some five years her junior, flashing that hunted look up and down each aisle before venturing into its narrow confines. You'd know when she got close to her target by the way she began to allow her eyes to rest on book titles.

It wouldn't take her long to choose. Five minutes at the outside, and she'd have a book down in her hands, flipping madly through it. If you didn't know better, you'd think she just wanted to reread her favorite scene. And you'd be confused by the fear in her hands.

And when she found just the right page, she'd reach quick-quick into her back jeans pocket, whip out a piece of paper, and in one motion slip it into the book and the book back onto the shelf.

Then she'd run.

And if you happened to have seen her do it, you might have gone back to that book and searched it for her contribution. You wouldn't find it any other way; she chose books that never got checked out much. But if you were, say, just a little sandy mouse with clever paws and claims to literacy, you might have seen which book she chose, and you might have been able to open it up to the right page, and you might have been able to read...

"Page 168-and-a-half: Then, while Alison was still practicing her BROODING face at the window, she saw a little girl come running down the street. The little girl looked so distressed that Alison opened the window wide and leaned out and said, 'Hi! What's wrong?' And the little girl said, 'Please help me, I'm stuck in the real world and I have to get out, can I be in your book please?' And Alison said, 'Of course you can be in my book.'"

If you knew where to look--but of course you wouldn't--you could find almost ninety-nine notes like this one in almost ninety-nine books, and they'd all show a little girl meeting one of the characters and asking for permission to enter the story.

But since you're not a mousey-brown mouse with well-traveled feet, you don't know a thing about it until one day the newspapers report a missing child and quote woeful parents with tears running down their cheeks, and you just shake your head over the tragedy of a world in which even little girls aren't safe from evil. And you go on to put your coffee mug in the sink and kiss the cats goodbye, and you lock the door and you head into the office for another day of depressing sales calls.

But there's a lot more to know than what you know, and the thing about this little girl is, she was the first.

Some time ago, I made a one-item-long wish list. Since then, although the letter of my wish (that the Tea Spot were open 24 hours) has not been granted, the Powers That Be have apparently heard the spirit of my lament. They moved heaven and earth, or at least that part of heaven and earth concerned with national diner chains, and transformed the Boulder IHOP into a free wifi hotspot.

I may never go home again.

Actually, I'm headed home pretty soon. Tomorrow's a long day, so I'd better get some sleep. I'm also thinking that this wasn't the smartest point in my novel to tackle in public. There are several reasons why sex scenes are best written in private, and one of them is the window right behind my head and the way it feeds my natural reading-over-my-shoulder paranoia. (I'd list other reasons, but most of them are TMI.) In any case, tonight's hour was slow going.

Just an hour. Just one frickin' hour. Look, today was loooooong. Today was very long and it involved plumbing. No, not that kind of plumbing. Dude, just because the novel's reached a plot-obligatory sex scene doesn't mean you have to take everything I say as a double entendre. I'm talking about replacing both the kitchen faucet and the bathroom faucet, which involved biking out to the hardware shop for new water supply hoses since the new valves installed this morning were 3/8" quarter-turner ball-joints in place of the old 1/2" screw-types. (Huh-huh. She said "screw". For cryin' out loud...). And then I had to deal with two obstinately leaking P-traps, which involved a lot of swearing and moaning and griping and sore thumbs. (From tightening the nuts, of course. Gutter-brain.) They're still leaking now.

I had expected this adventure in consumer installation to take a few hours. Maybe half a day. Definitely to be over by lunch. But oh no. I had just barely gotten around to feeding the cats and slipping into a well deserved hot bath when John got home from work. It was 5:15.

Got a bit more spinning done before I headed out to the IHOP. The blue-and-white is safely plied, skeined, washed, and dried, so today and yesterday (yesterday was a day off, by the way) belonged to a different project. That one time I went to the Estes Park Wool Market a couple of years ago, I picked up a fair bit of silk and a ziplock bag full of sparkly mylar. These are both rather tricky fibers to spin. Well, try mixing them up and spinning them. That's really tricky. But the result is fun. Ply together one strand pure silk and one strand silk/mylar, and you get this fingering-weight glitzy stuff suitable for creating whatever fashion accessory you'd like to turn heads with. I'm thinking, maybe a purse. I don't really own a purse, so it might be nice to make one. Maybe make one with beads on, just for added glitter.

(I'll upload some pictures as soon as I get ahold of a digital camera. John's got lost at GenCon, and the only other digital picture-taking implement in the house is his T-Mobile Sidekick II, which, being his cell phone, doesn't get loaned out often. Keeping in tune with the family tradition of low-end photo hardware, I've special-ordered the $99 Kodak C300 from Circuit City; I'd have it in my hands right now, only, I'm not the first to think that a hundred bucks for 3.2 megapixels is a good deal, and they're out of stock.)

Anyway, time to head home. Hard to pull myself away, but I've been nursing this pot of coffee way too long, and tomorrow's looking uncomfortably near. G'night, all.

Gods bless throw-away lines of dialogue. Chapter 9 has its momentum back, and the key to regaining it was, indeed, Amy's "How am I supposed to marry a fish" quip.

It's amazing how often the babbling I do when I'm blocked turns out to be useful. Yay Muse!

Not a lot to report today. It's Saturday, a day for which I had a lot of good intentions that all got shoved aside in order to reread Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix. Now, at last, I am ready to start on Half-Blood Prince. Which is good, because I'm sure John will be eager to read it as soon as I'm done hogging it.

Got a little ways into Chapter 9 today, which began not at all like I expected. See, I had this lovely, romantic vision for the segue between chapters. At the end of 8, they fall in the water and Brian discovers he can breathe down there. He smiles up at Amy through the water, and, after a moment of shock on Amy's part, they kiss at the opening of 9. This, of course, leads to happy sexy stuff happening for most of the chapter.

Only they didn't want to do it that way. Instead, Amy decided that Brian must be drowning--you know, the kind of conclusion a normal person would come to--and ended up trying to drag him back to shore. This would be more than just "a moment of shock." This would be fully sustained minute-long panic. But, hell, it's not like Amy knows she's in a fantasy novel.

She does eventually realize what's going on, and she engages in a fun little spot of dialogue with Brian, but now the momentum is wrecked. So I'm left trying to figure out how to get my bewildered but happily bantering characters to hit the next plot point.

There's some great lines, though. There's the bit where Brian says, "Put me back in," reminding me delightfully of MacDonald's The Light Princess (coincidentally also Chapter 9). And then there's the bit where Amy says, "OK, but how am I supposed to marry a fish?" Damn good question, if you ask me.

And so to bed, and, with luck, dreams that will make things clear. But first, a couple of chapters of Harry Potter 6. W00t.

First, boot up your word processor and open the novel in progress. Find where you left of yesterday. Now open up some music-playing software and load up Enya's Watermark album.

Close your eyes and breathe.

Breathe in; focus on your third eye/brow chakra (a spot between and above your eyes, just do it, OK?) as you do. It glows brighter and brighter as your belly expands with air. Pretend you're actually inhaling through your brow chakra rather than through your nose. Now hold onto that breath. Feel your brow chakra pulsing with warmth and light.

Just before you begin to feel tense from holding your breath, begin to let it out slowly. Shift your focus to your heart chakra (a spot in the center of your chest). Pretend you are exhaling out of your heart chakra, and feel it glow brighter and brighter. When you are empty of air, hold onto that emptiness for a little while before inhaling again.

Continue to do this, eyes closed and thinking only of the breath, until the title track of "Watermark" comes to an end.

Now, as the next track, "Cursum Perficio," begins to play, pick up some wool and start carding it. The motion of the combs goes well with the pulse of the song. Stay conscious of your breath. By the end of the song, you'll have a whole bunch of wool ready to spin, so go ahead and spin it. Take your time and enjoy the calm motion of the spinning wheel. Don't rush yourself to feed out the fiber. How slowly can you work the treadles?

Don't try to think about anything. Just trust that as the spinning wheel imposes order on the wool, so will the process impose clarity on the thoughts you are not yet thinking.

Continue spinning until the album is done. Now return to your laptop. You left off yesterday at the beginning of the Chapter 8 rewrite. Go back through what you have written already, cleaning up the narration and smoothing out the dialogue. Now write the rest of the chapter. Wind the tension tighter and tighter until it at last, at the end, it breaks--

and the main character has learned to breathe.

In case anyone's keeping score (hi John!), yes. I did indeed work on the novel today. In fact, I finally finished the Chapter 7 rewrite and plowed right on into Chapter 8. Now, I am going to sleep.

So John's all GenConning right now, which means it's just me and the cats in the house. Boring. Quiet. A little lonely. But, you know, keeping busy. For instance, right after I got home from bringing him to the airport, I went back to the spinning wheel.

I got the wheel a few years ago when I finally succumbed to the temptation of Shuttles's store-wide 10% while-in-class discount. I was taking the Beginning Wheel-Spinning class at the time, which was super cool in that every student got to actually borrow a wheel for the whole week between classes. This gave me a chance to fall head over heels in love with the Schact double treadle. (My Gods, I'd forgotten how expensive it was. Damn good thing we were a two-income household at the time.) So I succumbed, and the wheel came home with me for good, along with a bottle of oil, a threading hook, and a Lazy Kate.

What also came home with me was a whole big mess of white wool, which it had been my homework to wash and card, and a smaller mess of variegated blue wool, which we'd all dyed together on the last day of class. And I am here to tell you that I still haven't spun it all. I started, and I also started in on some two-ply fingering weight yarn made from "The Beast" (that gray-brown-white wool of no particular lineage which Shuttles sells for something like $.49/lb) which I am proud to say has made it into two thirds of a lacy sock. But after a few months I kinda slacked off.

So now I'm trying to finish off these unfinished projects. Today I carded and spun a whole bunch of the blue stuff, and once it's all spun up I'll ply it together with the white stuff, which will look super goofy and'll probably make a nice pom-pom hat someday. After that, I'll have to figure out how to deal with the whole heel/toe reinforcement thread issue so I can finish the sock. Maybe I'll just skip it. Anyway, I have to finish knitting the darn thing so I can finally get The Beast off my fourth bobbin.

Right. So, lots of time spinning. And spinning is a mindless activity. Keep the treadles moving in a nice, even rhythm; keep the fiber coming in nice, consistent draws. Stop now and again to move the thread onto the next hook of the flyer. Mindless. You would think, with all that mind freed up, a writer could totally use that time to brainstorm her novel.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I don't know, maybe it's like meditation. You have to practice that kind of thing. As it is, when I knit or crochet I think math, and when I spin, I think not at all. Well, maybe I think, "Ugh, this blue dye is getting all over my fingers," or, "Yuck, all this lanolin is starting to gross me out." Or, "Damn, this yarn is over-spun. Good thing I'm going to ply it."

But that's all. I try to start myself thinking things like, "OK, here it is--Amy and Todd having a bit of a heart-to-heart, and Russ comes in and starts being an ass. How's that dialogue going to go?" And then I stop thinking. It's like I'm trying to turn the ignition and get the car to go, but all I'm hearing is whirr-whirr-whirr and no vroom. I'm gonna have to push this sucker uphill, 'cause that engine just ain't starting.

And yet, I put off writing and hit the spinning wheel, or the knitting needles, telling myself I'll think about the story while I'm fibercrafting. I'm priming the engine, I'm brainstorming, I'm getting ready to write.

Really!

Maybe it just has to be learned.

Heycheckitoutgadgets!

The screenshot you are now looking at comes to you courtesy of Sinner Computing. The programs name sounds a lot like an intentional double entendre, considering the name of the company and all, but a glance at the other programs in their line-up seems to indicate that it's just a happy coincidence which does not represent their normal naming conventions. Too bad, really. But that's not the point!

The point is, it counts seconds. Then it stops counting seconds, if you've told it when to do so. Then, it makes noises.

Which, of course, is very, very useful. It means I can press "Start," ALT-TAB over to WordPerfect 5.1 (in its itty-bitty DOS window, cho kawaii), then write and write and write resisting the urge to look at the clock until an hour or two later when a pop-up window pops up saying "Finished!" and Gaelic Storm's version of "Nancy Whiskey" starts playing out of my laptop speakers.

Which is what I did today. And I only ALT-TABbed over to check where the count-down was at once.

OK, maybe twice.

(Oh. Yeah. About Sunday and Monday. I took Sunday off. That was on purpose. And Monday, I came home from the office with a headache but nevertheless got all interested in my spinning wheel, which I hadn't really touched for something like a year. Decided it was about time I finally plied together those two bobbins of dyed angora that had been languishing neglected all this time. Then went on to make a grossly overspun single ply out of our anime night host's puppy-doggy's combed-out undercoat (the collecting of which Saturday night we can blame for the sudden reawakening of interest in home-spun yarn). It knitted up a lot like mohair, oddly enough. I'd tell you what breed of doggy it is, if only I could remember. It's one of them husky-wolfie-looking things. Anyway, by the time I was done, my headache had gotten all worse-like and I went to bed early. Which only proves, once again, that writing has to come before other pursuits, just in case of migraine.)

So... yeah. It's anime night. Anime night means that John and I and some of John's coworkers and gaming friends all get together for pot-luck and DVD viewing. It happens about once every other week, Saturday nights. We started the year with Gazuraki (if you're curious about Gazuraki, my advice is don't), we continued with Read Or Dream: The TV (to reward ourselves for suffering through Gazuraki), and last time we watched a couple of disks of Full Metal Panic (which was also much better than Gazuraki).

(Look, it really is that bad. You just wait until the "clearance from the U.N." scene. It's bad.)

Today: Fushigi Yugi ("The Mystery Play"), Disk 1.

(Yes, I know they translate it "Mysterious Play." They're wrong. I'm allowed to call them wrong. On the first episode, a teacher asked a student to translate "El libro está en el biblioteca," and the English subtitle on the Spanish phrase had nothing in it about libraries, books, or location.)

Fushigi Yugi is pretty darn classic, as anime goes. Lots of chibi stuff, lots of preadolescent crush drama, lots of sweat drops and gluttony, lots of scenes where everything freezes, the heroine is pictured against a starry sky, and internal monologue occurs in abundance.

I'm, er, not a fan.

The story is great! Don't get me wrong! But I've just never been fond of these weird motifs that anime fans feel entitled to get when they sit down for another feature. I mean, I was convinced I hated anime until I saw Lain: Serial Experiments. Lain represents adult-level anime with total lack of childish tropes. Love it love it. (It also involves classic adult anime themes, such as cyberpunk, characters who might have been made-not-born, and total brain-breaking upfuckédness.) Other non-juvenile anime features I like: Cowboy Bebop. Wolf's Rain. R.O.D., both the movie and the TV. Oh, and FLCL, which John will tell you he absolutely has not seen, nope, didn't see a thing, the abomination never happened. But, FLCL notwithstanding, if I never again see another cartoon character develop a feline split lip to indicate how pleased he or she is with him- or herself, you know, that's just fine with me.

Still, looking forward to next fortnight's installation.

Meanwhile, over at the WIP, the current spate of dialogue progressed another 400 words, and another character made an entrance. The pieces, slowly, are being put into place. Mwa-ha-ha-haaa.

At Conor's again. The Indulgers are playing tonight. John just arrived. Wednesday I had a date with my writing; tonight I have a date with my husband. Woot! More later...

OK, it's later. The band have finally started. We probably won't stay for the full set, having been here for at least an hour already, but it's been fun thus far. They're sounding good, but unfortunately the balance isn't quite surviving the transition to the back room. We're mostly getting the bass and the fiddle.

Not much to say about the novel today, beyond that the current scene advanced some 400 words, technically, and by leaps and bounds, conceptually. Sometimes you just need to spend a few minutes with the cats, a lint brush, and an itty bitty spindle to spin the cats' nondescript tabby fur on, to make the next few pages of dialogue come clear in your mind.

Hey look! They just dimmed the lights. I'm bliiiiiind!

(Half the drunken forum posting on the Internet, I'm convinced, comes of installing wiFi in Irish pubs. I mean, what were they thinking? Oh, don't look at me--I've barely half-drunk my own pint. I'm just doing my best impression of drunken posting. I live to amuse.)