author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Lookie me! I'm a Metroblogger!

I've also been convinced, for the sake of reading others' friends-only blog entries, to join LiveJournal. Don't look for a hell of a lot of blogging from me there, though. I mean, I'm here instead. And at Denver Metblogs, for when I have nothing to say about writing but plenty to say about my locale.

(I also have a Blogger account, for the sake of mouthing off in the comments sections of others' blogs, but I haven't set up a blog there. I may do, just for the sake of putting up that same "Redirection" post as I've got at LJ.)

So. To everyone coming here from those two places (I'm being optimistic about that), Hi there!

Today: Another hour of birds-eye read-through on what I like to call "the unicorn novel." I had forgotten how hella cool the scene in which Diane burns Danny's note rather than give it to her teacher is. "You want it, huh? Well, take it!" And how heartachey is the scene in which she finally comes to him as the unicorn. But there are oh-so-many theme-ish threads to tie through them and into them. My Gods I've got a job ahead of me. I keep taking notes on the page and in WordPerfect, and I have no idea how I'll make use of them when I'm done the read-through. I mean, it'll be just a mess of "Oh, yeah, and another thing..." Maybe I'll have to take notes on the notes first, organize them into scenes on index cards, shuffle them about. Something like that.

I am convinced that this is going to be a good book, though. Depending on how I count (Completed drafts only, or completed drafts plus the ongoing whenever-I-come-up-with-a-scene Stormsinger Saga), it's either my third or my fourth, so theoretically that means it's quite possibly potentially publishable, right? It's not the manuscript that Hemingway recommended tossing into the ocean, right? I'm determined that this is going to be a good book, because, dammit, I care.

Um. So there!

It probably says something unflattering about me that one of my passtimes is reading ancient USENET flame wars. I can say that thus far I have not actually given in to temptation and posted responses to five-year-old posts. But it's been a near thing.

[Begin anecdote] ##Trust me, this is going somewhere.

There was this post at the AbsoluteWrite.com forums which I can't seem to find anymore, sorry, but it linked to this thread here. (Don't click the link! It will eat your soul!) The "discussion" has an all star cast and one very clueless, rude would-be author suffering from Golden Word syndrome. (Don't be tempted!) It probably wouldn't have been nearly as long a thread as it became were it not for a spectacularly stunning exchange between the would-be author and one of the shining stars in that all-star cast. She gave his awful novel excerpt a detailed critique, lovely in its thoroughness and more generous than he deserved. He dismissed it as petty. She said she was therefore puzzled as to what he expected in a critique. His response? "If you've ever written a real book... you'd know. :)"

(Yes, that was a smiley on the end there. As in, "I've just been breathtakingly rude but don't take offense because I tacked a smiley onto the end of it!")

They say that on the Internet no one can hear you scream, but even over that distance of five years I could hear the distinct sound of a convention full of authors' and editors' jaws dropping.

(But really, don't read it! There but for your forebearance will go weeks of your productive life!)

So shortly after that happened, another star in that cast picked up the gauntlet and began a new thread in which he gave this would-be author's excerpt an even more detailed page-by-page critique. For which everyone else in the thread was grateful, except of course for the one person who had been specifically asked to killfile it. He didn't, so there was more juicy flamage, With The Result That...

[End anecdote]

[Do getToThePoint]

##Told you this was going somewhere!

...he found himself used as the example in a fascinating discussion about the banality of evil.

While reading Gene's latest excesses, with increasing horror, I also noted quietly that this is an interesting way to introduce a villain into a trusting community. The back of my head considered that, as there aren't many vicious pathological liars around in most people's lives, thanks be, I may be reading other people's versions of Gene Steinberg as Dark Lord for years to come.

The discussion that followed held examples of real live evil, which is rarely as flashy as Darth Vador or flamboyant as The Joker. Real pathological evil is hard to recognize, because most of us tell ourselves it doesn't exist, certainly not in our circle of friends. Pathologically evil people take advantage of our tendency to assume motives of goodwill in all. How many times have I myself quoted the Author's Creed For Creating Three-Dimensional Antagonists: "No one is the villain in their autobiography"?

It's true. I cling to my faith that the Creed is true. However, do not underestimate an antagonist's ability to reframe their villainy in their internal narrative. In real life, it isn't always helpful to tell yourself that they just want the best for everyone and are misguided as to what the best is. They may actually want the worst for you--but are convinced that desiring the worst for you is reasonable.

Not going to go into details about it, not going to name names, but... my husband and I are recently on the rebound from someone who fits the description. And the sad thing is, that someone probably has legitimate historical reasons for being broken in her particular ways. But she absolutely did not want the best for anyone; she merely was convinced that some of us were evil and out to get her and needed to be destroyed. Once you finally realize--and it can take a long time to realize--that this person expects her friends to make her the center of their lives, prioritized higher than preexisting friendships, than family, than marriage; and that her more obnoxious behavior, far from being unconscious, comprises active attempts to break up those preexisting relationships by which she feels threatened; that wrecks every pattern you have for interaction. You can no longer assume goodwill as a motive. You can no longer take for granted a beneficient common ground.

The point here is not "poor pitiful me, I have seen Evil." The point here is, realistic evil--or a damn good facsimile thereof--comes in all different flavors. A villain needn't be a misguided philanthropist or a self-described benevolent dictator to be three-dimensional. Sometimes the villain has an unjustified persecution complex, or an overdeveloped sense of vigilante-ism. And whatever the flavor, it's valuable to recognize a villain when it shows up in your life. Not just because you're better off wasting less time and energy on people like that (really; the self-defense mechanisms by which we manage them in our lives can be actively bad for the soul), but also because once you recognize it, you, for certain writerly values of the word "you," can use it.

'Cause when you're a writer, and you find yourself losing at the games of life, that's your consolation prize.

So I've got bad guys in The Golden Bridle. I've got a high school clique leader who's downright nasty. I've got the protagonist's boyfriend who uses the protagonist in all the worst ways. I've even got the protagonist herself, who starts off the novel in her guise as Bad-Ass Cool Chick, a guise she's build out of self-defense over the years. None of these people are motivated by wanting the best for everyone. They want the best for themselves, and they treat others poorly, and they rationalize their poor treatment of others as being the only way to give themselves the best, which of course they're convinced they deserve.

And when I stopped to think about it, I realize that many of the examples raised in the USENET thread I'm linking you to here, as well as the example I mention from my own life, they've got threads of behavior and rationalization that make sense in the context of my bad guys. And I thought, damn. These people are so right.

So I'm passing on the link as a public service to writers everywhere. Enjoy.

But don't, for the love of the Gods, read that first thread. Or, if you do, limit yourself to the "Cooking for Writers Who Forget To Eat" subthread. Recipes are very cool. And the posts where people invent whole fictional accountings for the rude would-be writer's mental state, that's kind of interesting and heart-warming. And--

[do slapSelfSilly]

Look, it's not worth it!

Quick shout-out going to Keith and Deric in Chicago, Illinois, who rang me up this afternoon on my cell phone and said not much more than, "Can we speak to Nicole? Hi, this is Keith. Deric is on the line, too," before hanging up on me. Hi y'all! Call back anytime y'all have more to say.

At last count, I have two contacts in the Chicago area. One's a gal I met there at World Horror Con '02, and I owe her email. Or she owes me email. I forget. The other's one of my bestest oldest childhood friends; she and her husband moved there after Katrina wrecked their brand-new New Orleans area home. Neither of these good people are named Keith or Deric. But I have known folks by those names, and for all I know, they could be in Chicago now. So, hey, you guys? If I should have recognized you, sorry I didn't!

(In the interest of accuracy, the call came from a 312 area code, which is Chicago, but the callers might have been elsewhere. That's the magic of cell phones.)

Meanwhile, I note that the NaNoPubYe.org goal for Month Three is 30 hours of editing, or one hour per day. As you've probably guessed, that's not going to happen before January is over. However, what with my plans to submit The Golden Bridle to Delacorte, there isn't a lot of other editor/agent researching necessary at this stage, so Month Four can be mainly a Month Three extension. Well, OK, it wouldn't hurt to research up a Plan B list, sure, just so I know where I'll be going afterwards on the off-chance that Delacorte doesn't heap glowing accolades upon my head, but it's not as urgent as it would be if I hadn't any idea of what Plan A was, I think.

OK, OK, I'm just justifying my being behind schedule. Fine. I admit it. Happy?!

The undatabasable WIP? It is done. Watch this space for details.

By the way. It is, for the record, rather freaky when you're busy researching data points for your work in progress, and one of the top three Google hits you get is the page that's waiting for the finished work in progress.

Now. If you'll excuse me, I'll be over in that corner, collapsed and unconscious.

Hello. I'm pulling an all-nighter. Trust me when I say it's writing-related, just not a WIP I am at liberty to database and blue-box. (In case of style sheet change, read that as "[whatevercolor]-box," depending.) I'm on dinner break, or midnight snack break, or whatever, and wanted to report in.

Firstly, I have now in my possession the Averatec 3360 I was drooling over. Warranty Corp finally responded last week to the second round of buy-out approval, and Computer Renaissance finally received a new, salable machine to sell me Saturday. (They were in fact waiting on the restore disks that apparently don't come with these computers anymore, because the machine currently in their possession had been empty of OS. A brand new unit came in faster than the disks. (Well, brand new to them, anyway. These are refurbished machines.) They're still waiting on the disks. I hear that Averatec themselves are not very fun to deal with. Good thing for them that they sell such nice computers. Good thing for me I have someone else to deal with when I need service.)

Thus far, my impressions are positive. It's teeny tiny! I like teeny tiny! I have teeny tiny fingers, and I could do with less weight hanging off my shoulders. So. Four and a half pounds, 12.1" screen. The hard drive's an 80 gigger, as I said, although some 17 of those gigs are a recovery partition, which annoys me a little, but maybe when I get ahold of some recovery disks I can do a rebuild. If the recovery disks allow a rebuild that doesn't break off a 17 gig recovery partition. What else? OK. Centrino 1.6 thingie. I hear the Athlon in the 2250 would have been more powerful, but for my purposes, I can't tell the difference, and the Centrino's efficiency is good. I wanted to try it out at SkillJam, but for some stupid reason my account has been temporarily suspended and I can't. But preliminary tests with Bejewelled 2 at PopCap and Jewel Quest at Yahoo! demonstrate competitive refresh rates. Yay!

Centrino notwithstanding, I saw that many people online were unimpressed with this machine's battery life; I concur, and as soon as I finish with the thing I'm currently working on I'll devote some energy towards dealing with that. I hear that there are battery calibration techniques you can proceed through and power management applications you can install. Meanwhile, meh. No big deal. The world is full of electrical outlets. Some of them are even on Amtrak trains.

So my only real complaints have to do with the layout. First, there's the way they fit all the keyboard buttons on the smaller footprint. They opted not to shrink the keys, making this doubtless a more popular computer than the Compaq Aero Contura was among those with bigger hands. However, this meant they had to be clever about fitting the keys together. And what they did was, they moved the arrow keys inwards, and put the shift key and the backslash/pipe key outside of them. Sounds minor until you start typing with it. I keep putting my pinkie on the right-arrow when I'm going for the down-arrow.

Um. Probably a picture would help. I don't have time to deal with pictures at the moment. Later, then.

Second, the volume dial is on the front edge of the laptop. This means that when I lay on my back and prop the computer up on my knees, anytime I shift my butt a little I'm likely to move the dial with my belly and end up muting the music. Or blasting it.

It's kind of nice the way that there are no outlets and connectors on the back edge, though. Convenient. Still, having the USB ports all on the near end of the right edge means things can be a little awkward in right-handed mouse land.

Oh. Back on the positive end, this sucker's wireless capabilities are very impressive. I wrote my husband an instant message from the bus stop across 30th street from our home this afternoon. I was able to do this, because there was wireless signal at that bus stop. Wireless signal whose SSID looked very familiar. Wireless signal from our router, in fact. That's--what?--about 50 yards away? At least another twenty yards past our parking space, where I sometimes, sometimes not, got signal on the 5110H upon getting home from a long drive during which I was using my laptop for tunes. Yeah. Wow.

So, that much for the computer. Now for the mushrooms.

Take you a couple portabellas that are threatening to go bad unless you eat them, like, now. Wash 'em. Slice 'em up however you like.

Heat up a pan with a couple t'bls walnut oil, olive oil, whatever, something that can take a medium high heat. Throw in some minced garlic. After about a minute, take the garlic out. You want your oil garlic-flavored, not burnt-garlic-flavored.

Toss in the shrooms. Pile 'em in. Toss the garlic bits on top, so they'll steam instead of burn. Drizzle a little more oil on top.

Cover. Go away for about ten minutes.

Come back and splash some sherry on top. Cover again and go away. Five minutes or so.

Now for some fun. Sprinkle on a little flour, a little thyme, a little salt and white pepper. Stir 'em about until the flour's dissolved and you can smell the thyme nicely. Now, splash in a little heavy cream. Stir about some more and then let 'em simmer (low heat) for a few.

Voila! It's like cream of mushroom soup, without the soup!

Garnish with parmesan and serve alongside some veggies.

Eat up.

Now. Get back to work!

...if words like "somehow", "something," and "vague" show up at regular intervals: "Diane woke up on the doorstep at 4:30 AM with a vague recollection of her father having stepped over her to let himself in."

Look, I know I should actually write a scene or make a decision here, but I have no idea what kind of relationship these two characters have yet. I'll come back to it. Onward!

...if characters occasionally set off into town with no other intention than "to see what the day will bring." Bonus points if those characters then start describing what they see in town in great, wordy detail.

I'm stuck. I haven't a clue what happens next. Maybe if I send my main character on a mapping expedition, they'll bump into some plot before they're through.

...if, immediately upon introducing a new secondary character, the narration pauses while the main character reminisces about how the two of them met and what has been going on in both their lives between then and now.

Gods. Infodump. Not that this info doesn't belong in the book, but.... Look, I'll weave it into the story more gracefully on the rewrite, OK?

Which is, of course, the point. All the infelicities introduced by a 50K-in-30-days regimen will be smoothed away when it comes time to revise the novel. O ye of little faith! A publishable book will emerge! Just you wait.

(Besides, if I hadn't been under pressure to hit 50K by November 30th, you know what would be there instead of the infodump on page 49 where Diane Lenner tells us all about her mutual history with Danny Wodemeier? That's right. Nothing. I'd probably still be working on the first draft, one perfect sentence at a time. And that ain't no pace at which to begin a novelist's career.)

The essay has been sent. Nevermind that it's three-quarters-past-midnight on the 16th; I have at last finished and submitted my "geek" essay. With any luck the editors will let the extra 45 minutes slide and they'll read it anyway.

I'm not as happy with it as I might be, but the ending made my nose prickle and my eyes water, so I guess the right chords get hit by the end. I'm not entirely sure my Mom would be as happy with it as I'd want her to, either; hopefully she'll take it in the spirit with which it's intendend.

And yes, yes I know, I had misspelled Jane Austen's name in my previous entry. All better now, see?

There. Now. On to other things with deadlines.

So, what, I figure a Jane Austen riff in an anthology about female geeks makes for a delightful, how-shall-we-say, frisson, a lovely little anachronistic twinge of humorous irony. Or just humor. Or maybe it just makes me sound like a pompous ass but, y'know, I'm willing to take that chance.

I'm having fun.

The problem with autobiographical essays is figuring out what the hell's so special about me of all people that anyone should bother publishing a polished up piece of my life in their pages. For money, even. Once I get past that problem--once I convince myself I actually have lived a story worth telling--the next pitfall for me is the tendency towards self-aggrandizement. A tendency which you just might have noticed in these very pages, in fact.

With this piece, though, I think I might just manage to come over both of those hurdles unscathed. The subject is something that needs saying, can't be said enough, and places all the praise on someone not the author.

This piece is going to be a 3,500 word "thank you" to my mother.

(Hi mom!)

The nutshell is, where some daughters have been told--where some, amazingly enough in this day and age, continue to get told--that if they don't play dumb they'll risk dying unwed and unloved, oh heck, oh horrors, my Mom gave me some remarkably sane advice: Better not to marry at all, than to marry a guy who's insecure around your brain. (I think it's safe to say that I took her advice). But this isn't just about marriage. Looking back over my growing-up years, I can see a long line of encouragements and priorities that stem from the same values of which Mom's advice was an apt expression: Don't suffer fools who won't suffer you to be who you are. Don't let anyone drag you down.

As parental values go, those are some good ones. And I think they may just be responsible for the weird variety of interests and pursuits I've ended up pursuing. Knitting and aviation and spinning wheels and MySQL/PHP widgets--what the hell, why not describe it in a she-geek essay wrapped up in a Jane Austen-style frame. Damn appropriate, I think.

This puppy should see submission tomorrow, one day ahead of the deadline. Thank goodness for email. But, since acceptance is never a guarantee, I'm going to just pause here and say, without need for prior editorial review:

Mom, ya done raised a geek, and for that she's eternally grateful. Love always.

Hey look! No word count increase. I was working on something else today, but as that something else is still in the brainstorming phases, it hasn't even got a line in the database, much less a title or a wordcount. Sorry. More tomorrow, maybe. I've also been fielding potential interviews for the work-for-hire project.

These Things Take Time.

But I have answered myself some questions about Selby's backstory. Yay, backstory! Got there in this weird sort of roundabout way: Realized that Selby sounded, thus far, an awful lot like Gwen in Right Off The Page, and both of them sound an awful lot like me. That is one depressing realization. I've been at this how long now, and I still haven't managed to come up with first person narratives that don't just sound like me writing an email? Ga-jeeez.

(Just between me and y'all, all my RPG characters sound a lot like me, too. Perhaps I should game more. Ah, well, Sunday's upcoming In Nomine session ought to result in a little more practice under ye olde belt.)

So I decided I'd have to work at giving Selby a distinctive not-me voice. I decided that Selby would be British. Ta-da! Seriously: when I started hearing her narrate with a hopefully-not-too-stereotypical British accent, she started using different words in my head, and before long she didn't sound so much like me as all that. Which is very good.

Something that's also very good is, now I have a little backstory. The story takes place in the U.S., ending up somewhere in the Arbuckle Mountain Range in Oklahoma. Which means that Selby had to have moved from England to the U.S. at some point. Why? Well, that has something to do with whatever dream she was chasing. Like what? OK, how about college? She thought she'd put her oddball psychic talents to work as an archeologist or paleontologist, so she'd go to some university or other known for having a good program and get herself degreed. Only she finds that her talent gives her problems. It's hard to work within a traditional degreed program when you're randomly getting hallucinations based on whatever fossil or artefact they've got you studying on. So she's doing badly. So she drops out to follow her boyfriend across the country, and then gets stranded by him in wherever the story takes place, and she finds a job at a museum whose curator isn't so worried about her lack of degree.

Yay! Backstory. So the renewal of the dream will be when she discovers an outlet for her interest in digging up and sleuthing out prehistorical thingies, one that doesn't get messed up by her occasional psychic discoveries. And what exactly is that? I ain't saying, 'cause that would be a spoiler. But it isn't at any Heirophant-lovin' University, I can tell you that much.

So. Onward and first-draft-ward.

Also? Changed the title. Why? It just sounded better, that's all. Plus I think I had the wrong word before. Dictionary.com isn't backing me up on this, but I think a threnody focuses on mourning the deceased ("we are sad that you are gone") while an elegy focuses on honoring the deceased ("we were glad to have had you"). So. Elegy it is.

As you may or may not know, I like to get my Tarot deck involved in my writing. Sometimes I'm determined to create new material, but I have no idea what to write about. Sometimes I'm just stuck on a story. In any case, I shuffle a few times, draw, and start babbling onto a blank page about what I see.

Typically I use the Vertigo Tarot. At times I'll cross-reference the Rider-Waite deck, which I keep in numeric order specifically for that reason, but it's Dave McKean's imagery that speaks to me much more than Pamela Colman-Smiths; and even if I get a little impatient with Rachel Pollack's interpretations from time to time, I find them more comfortably Jungian and modern than Waite's.

Which is all to explain why I got the impression that my Tarot deck was being singularly uncooperative the other day.

In the "Trilobite" story, Selby Oldham is a psychometrist. That's someone who gets psychic impressions from touching objects. You've probably seen a TV drama or read a book concerning a psychic working for the police, right? He or she touches the murder weapon and objects at the scene of the crime and gets flashes of how the killing occurred? Right. Well, Selby's like that, only less of the crime forensics and more stuff like paleontology and anthropology. Fossils and ancient artefacts.

She has, by the time of the story, lost hope in her dreams. She's living an eventless, unfulfilling life, working as a curator's assistant in a natural science museum. By the end of the story, she will have found inspiration to pursue her ambitions again. Only trouble was, I had no idea what her ambitions actually were.

So, hello Tarot! Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, "What are Selby's dreams?" shuffleshuffle, shuffle. And I drew...

The Heirophant. Reversed.

Again, recall, Vertigo Tarot. Which DC/Vertigo character did they choose for that particular Major Arcana card? That's right. Dream of the Endless. The Sandman. Morpheus His-Own-Self. And I drew him reversed.

That's right. In answer to "What dreams did Selby give up on?" I got, "She gave up on her dreams."

Imagine you asked your friend, "What plans do you have for Friday?" and your friend said, "Yeah, Friday..." and wandered off. That's about the impression I got.

And this ain't the first time it's said that kind of thing to me, either.

Of course, consulting the Rider-Waite's more traditional Heirophant (not to mention consulting a friend who actually supplements her paycheck by reading Tarot during the summertime) helped put things in perspective. "Oh, yes, tradition and passed-down wisdom and heirarchy and such. Maybe Selby was trying to climb a corporate ladder, or pursue a traditional education at a university, and it wasn't right for her for some reason." But still.

There was once a time when I stopped doing my freewriting exercises for a long time. When I started up again months later, and I used the Tarot deck as a prompt, shuffling just as thoroughly as ever, it gave me the same darn card it had given me all that time ago. Ten of Pentacles, it was: it shows a face with ten pentacle-coins stacked neatly atop his head; the tenth coin completely blocks his mouth. (I suppose one could read that the face is actually speaking the pentacle, but I see it stopping up his mouth and silencing him. Especially considering I drew it reversed.) It's a card I personally associate with the kind of writer's block that comes of too much intellectualizing and perfection-seeking.

"You know, that thing you were working on last year? Right. Well, you never quite finished dealing with that."

Yeah. I know. Smart-ass cards.