“[L]ife is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.”
Neil Gaiman

author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

actually writing blog

Bedtime Stories, Redux
Thu 2006-04-06 23:51:18 (single post)

A huge black crow swept across the sky accompanied, half a mile below, by its shadow on the forest of apartment building roofs. For half a second the distance between the two birds grew and then shrank again as the crow's shadow passed over a clearing, a small square of soil between the buildings. The bird's wing blocked the sun and flickered in a woman's eye. She blinked and cast above her for the source of the irregularity, squinting against the sun's rays, but the crow had gone, well on its way towards whatever it is crows seek.

Nothing grew on this patch of soil. It had been years since the woman had tried. Now she simply sat there for half an hour out of this day or that, imagining herself a flower that tried to grow in the barren would-be garden. She saw herself a green shoot that sprang up from the half-buried seed, saw her questing tip put forth leaves and then a bud--but she couldn't get the bud to open into blossom. She could not see herself bloom.

Yes, but why?

Because it provides context. It provides a frame. If one writes bedtime stories last thing before sleep and then wakes to make more stories out of what dreams one remembers, these activities form a sort of contextual bracket around the day. It becomes a day in the life of a writer, and not merely a day in which one writes.

That's why.

And so, that settled, good-night.

Bedtime Stories
Thu 2006-04-06 01:21:13 (single post)

All fictional activity between last blog post and this one consists entirely of freewriting stints that may or may not become full stories. Nothing worth titling and entering into the manuscript database at this time. Some of the resulting chunks of babble form a sort of cohesive narrative, but whether it's the acorn of a novel or just me expanding on an abstract theme is not yet clear.

Outside, the city was on fire. This was not the first time, and many citizens continued throughout their day the way you would were your neigborhood undergoing construction. They picked their way around the embers, noted that downtown was not a good place to drive today, and, in ways both small and large, got on with their lives. The city burned and its citizens counted it an inconvenience.

...It was not a city of attached people. Like Zen monks, they took the loss of family heirlooms, homes, and inheritances in stride. It was going to pass someday. Today is merely sooner than not. But unlike Zen monks, they had attachments to other things: getting to work on time, doing what they wanted to be doing. They were philosophical about losing their homes but downright pissed off about getting off schedule.

You wouldn't want to visit.

...There used to be flowers out in front of my house. There used to be a house. It had a red roof, I think, that terra-cotta red they do with shingles and clay corners. But I don't recall the color of the door or even the shape of the door handle. In any case, it's gone now. The fire took it. And what scares me is, I never mourned. My first thought was, "I hope my car's OK. I need to go to Greenwood tomorrow night." And why did I have to go? To buy paint. To paint the living room walls.

The living room walls that are no longer there.

Data insufficient. General failure reading disk. (A)bort? (R)etry? (F)ail? (K)eep writing?

I've been avoiding getting back to work on Drowning Boy. I admit it. I am suffering from, or inflicting upon myself, that classic writer's malaise of being unable to bring myself to start. It's what makes most of my deadlined projects an unmitigated hell during the last few days of the timeline, and what makes so many of my short stories unfinished. I suspect it's a habit I'll have all my life.

In the meantime, in absence of a cure, the only effective workaround seems for me to be to sidle up on a project, catch it unawares. Open up the document and read through it and let myself naturally start editing the bits that need it, maybe. Open up a blank WordPerfect page and start typing, telling myself it doesn't matter. Lie back with the laptop on my knees and type myself a bedtime story.

Did you ever do that? Make yourself up bedtime stories and tell them to yourself at night? It used to take me forever to go to sleep when I was, oh, maybe eight or nine. Took me until darn near the teenage years to outgrow a kid's basic fear of the dark and the slight creaking sounds of a house at night. By the time I was in fifth grade or so, I'd finally gotten to where I didn't need one of my Neil Diamond tapes (usually Longfellow Seranade and Tap Root Manuscript) to drown out the silence, but it still took me an awful long time to get my senses to shut down and drop me off into unconsciousness. So I made up stories to pass the time. Sometimes I'd even whisper them out loud--whispering can tire you out real quick. Usually I just thought them. Pictured them. Tried to dream them. They were almost always a pre-teen's Mary Sue adventures in which she and either her schoolyard crush or her pop-star idols team up to save the world from evil.

(Hey, I grew up watching Scooby Doo. Remember all those celebrity cameos? Of course it seemed reasonable to imagine myself, too, solving mysteries and fighting crime alongside my favorite musicians and actors.)

Anyway. Technology having progressed to the point of internet-enabled word processors small enough to take to bed with you, the bedtime story habit isn't a bad one to revisit. And a surprising number of those mental Mary Sues have redeemable elements, if I can bring myself to remember them.

But tonight's tale, or worldbuilding exercise, or whatever, has nothing to do with those embarrassing old wish-fulfillment fantasies. It's more of a theme that came out of a dream I had some three years ago...

A man shows up after John and I wake up, and he says, "Did you hear about the fires in the night?" I say, "I thought I smelled a fire yesterday morning when I woke so early."
...and what I wrote about it after I recorded it for posterity.
He came into my room quietly, his bedside manner spotless. I was just waking up, moving slowly out of the realms of unconsciousness and into the fields he knew. He let me gather the shreds of myself into a more-or-less coherent handful before gently placing a bomb in my lap. This kind of bomb: "There were fires in the night. You heard?"

Of course I haven't heard, I wanted to say. I've been asleep, you idiot. But I don't say things like that, or so I'm told. All I really said was, "No."

"They were contained quickly, but they did a lot of damage even so." He glanced up at me, as though reading in my face how much more it was safe to tell. Then he returned to studying his hand. I pulled my hand out from under his. "Where?"

He began drumming his fingers, very slowly. First he lifted his index finger and put it down again. Then his middle finger. Then I got impatient. "Where--"

"Several places. Pretty much simultaneously. One - out in the open space. The yucca's still smoking. One in the south, took a few farms. One - one in the northwest of town." He stopped, left his fingers still on the bedsheets. Took a deep breath as though expecting a blow. "In your neighborhood."

"Oh." I found myself mourning more the blue heron nests than my house and what it held. You can't take it with you, they say. How convenient to have it burned up so you can't regret not being able to take it with you. "Oh," I said again, not sure what else to say. Oh good?

"I checked. You insurance policy is good, up to date, they'll pay you--"

"It's all right," I said. "What would I do with the money, anyway?" I guestured at the hospital room surrounding us, with its beeping machines and its dripping IV towers. "I suspected I wouldn't be going home again, this time."

He looked horrified. "Don't talk like that," he pleaded, but I already wasn't really hearing him.

I have no idea where the terminal illness angle came from. Stuff occurs. I follow it. Stories happen. Or at least babbledraft happens, and maybe it could become stories, someday.

And blog posts happen, freakin' long blog posts, posts chronicling very little useful writing in the previous day and acting like a smoke screen obscuring the shame of another day full of procrastination.

And other things. Lots of weird things today. Things I don't plan to go into here because they are either (a) boring, or (b) personal. Today was full of 'em.

But mostly it was full of procrastination.

Facts.
Tue 2006-04-04 22:37:23 (single post)

Yes! I am still here.

No! I have not been abducted by space-faring pirates and made to listen to Vogon poetry.

Yes! I still have non-fiction deadlines.

No! I am not going to be a procrastinatory lazy ass about them.

Yes! Something fictitious will happen between now and next blog entry, which is to say, by tomorrow night.

The Reasons Behind The Silence
Sat 2006-03-18 22:30:54 (single post)

Or, "Why I haven't been blogging lately":

  1. Fiction's on hold due to non-fiction deadlines. Once I'm back on top of schedules that will allow me to meet my deadlines with a minimum of pain, I'll hit the novels again.
  2. Application to VP is on hold until I know whether I'm allowed to be out of town for that week. (I might be returning to the nine-to-five world of corporate web design in the near future.)
So there you go.
I don't even remember.
Mon 2006-03-13 22:57:00 (single post)
  • 58,909 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 124.25 hrs. revised

Thought maybe I'd get back to the beast after spending an hour with it at sunrise and then going off to the dentist. Didn't. Now I can't seem to remember what the heck was going on. It's been a day, and I'm tired, and there is less gum tissue and more soreness in my mouth now than there was at 7:15 AM.

Oh yeah. More flashbacks. Conversations to navigate. Beers to drink and half-remembered dreams to squirm at the remembering of. Less being more being a bloody pain in the rear.

Whatever. I have absolutely nothing of interest to say today. Some days, there's really nothing more to report than "I put in my hour."

(Oh, and someone else apparently both reads this blog and Ambrose Bierce. Hoorah!)

The Slaughter of the Darlings
Sat 2006-03-11 19:15:17 (single post)
  • 58,816 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 123.25 hrs. revised

And what I want to know is, if I refer to several months of a character's memory, whose veracity the character has begun to question, as "nothing more than an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," will the average reader know what the hell I'm talking about?

I'm guessing not.

But I've killed enough darlings tonight and I'd rather like to keep this one, if only for the sake of economy. I mean, I could say, "a dream in which significant amounts of time seem to pass during the instant you start to lose consciousness in the middle of a traumatic event, like drowning, or being hanged by the neck during the Civil War, or having your bed's headboard fall on your neck." Or I could use a tidy little seven-word phrase and imply on top of that that my protagonist is very well read.

Economy, see? Cleverness! Yes!

(And I will keep telling myself that, thank you.)

Bleargh.
Fri 2006-03-10 06:18:46 (single post)
  • 58,627 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 121.25 hrs. revised

This has not been one of my most productive weeks.

Well, not novel-wise, anyway. In other ways, it's been quite fast-paced. For instance, I've got myself all signed up for the World Horror Convention, including the Editor's Workshop (topic: "Professional Help," ha ha ha *groan*). I've gotten initial hold of everyone I want to interview for my latest work-for-hire gig. I have even gotten interviewed for a possible new web development job (no! no! don't wanna! can't make me! ...well, OK) with a follow-up interview next week.

But the novel? Er. Eek?

I've decided on just the first three chapters, since that's a better place, storywise, to break off. The application guidelines say up to 10,000 words, not exactly 10,000 words, after all. And I've only just started on the chapter three line-by-line. If I had to get through Chapter 4, too, I'd never get this dang thing in on time.

Today's headache: Flashbacks.

That's all. No long, drawn-out explanation. Just: Flashbacks. Flashbacks, and the segue between past perfect and simple past. Ew, I say. Ewwwwwww.

Mostly About Train Accomodations
Thu 2006-03-02 19:15:00 (single post)
  • 58,644 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 119.25 hrs. revised

Approaching Omaha, Nebraska. All roads lead there. This track goes there, in any case. I'm going to bed, having finally gotten myself out of chapter two and into Mike's gold corvette at the beginning of chapter three.

One of these days I'll actually get through the whole damn book. And then I shall hobble out to the bus, being too old to safely drive, and limp into the post office, and say, "What new-fangled devices do you have for sending two hundred and fifty page manuscripts to publishers? Back in my day, we used cardboard boxes. Do you have some sort of instantaneous matter transport for this now? Because," and here I shall flip my long white hair most fetchingly, "I didn't get to the age of one hundred and seventy just to keep on using cardboard boxes!" Because that is how old I shall be when this damn book is finally ready for prime time.

Meh. Back on the train. I upgraded to a sleeper because, y'know, I could, and I was curious, and I liked the idea of complimentary dinner in the diner and a room/closet of my own with privacy and a bed.

I got a lot of writing done. There is an outlet in the room (it says "razors only" but I don't think they actually mean that anymore), so I could keep my laptop charged without worrying about the cafe lounge steward asking me, "Did you take the duct tape off that outlet?" all accusatory-like. And since I'm not in the cafe lounge, I am not constantly being asked "So is that schoolwork? What are you studying?" and being told, "Writing, huh? I wrote a few things myself," and being invited to play spades with a trio headed for Greenwood, Mississippi, and being asked where the outlet is, and all. And I've been playing my music without headphones, and singing along, and everything.

On the other hand, all of the above are reasons why riding coach is great for socializing. I had a lot of fun playing spades last night, and I got into all sorts of neat conversations that started with someone asking me what I was studying, and I was able to find Laura at The Corner Bakery because my cell phone conversation with her was overheard by someone with a map. On this leg of the trip, the only socializing I've really done has been over dinner--but whoa, boy, did some socializing get done. (Hi, Jason! You're supposed to be writing, remember? Go on! Meh-heh-heh-heh.) And I've only been in the cafe lounge twice. The first time was to acquire a cup of hot water for my tea (the steward was all like, "No," and "Where did you get that cup?!" and then, "Oh, sleeper? OK," and then he filled it up with hot water finally. Apparently the cups by the coffee machine in sleeper are distinctive and arouse suspicion in the lounge car). The second time was to contiune the conversation begun over dinner when the dining car stewards asked us to leave so they could clean up.

So I suppose the summary is, riding coach is like staying in a mobile youth hostel, while riding sleeper is like being on a cruise ship. The lack of privacy in coach leads to meeting a lot of people, unless it leads to covering your face with your jacket and your ears with your headphones, which it does for just about everyone at night because the aisle lighting and general movement about the car can lead to insomnia. The availability of privacy in the sleepers leads to much enjoyment of said privacy, which includes the ability to turn off all the lights and sleep in whatever state of undress you please. And, y'know, I'm OK with that. Once in a while. When I have the extra $$ to spend on it.

Tomorrow: Breakfast, another hour or two of novel revision (that would be Brian's abortive road trip and much flashback of his conversation with Todd the night before), and arrival in Denver. And finally getting to post these blog posts I haven't been able to yet. Beware Of Backdating.

Now THIS is what a train station ought to look like.
Stupidity Abounds!
Thu 2006-03-02 07:00:00 (single post)
  • 58,387 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 117.75 hrs. revised

Still slogging along with the mother-son phone call. Stupid phone call. Amtrak's City of New Orleans is just getting into Chicago. It's running an hour late because we have a freight train crawling along ahead of us. Stupid freight train. The two girls behind me are having a conversation that alternates between teenage-style boy gossip and five-year-old-style whining about what a waste of time this trip is and how they'll never take the train again and they want their money back. Stupid whiny boy-crazy girls.

Will have about a four-hour layover at Union Station before catching the California Zephyr for Denver at 1:50 PM. Will probably find some wi-fi there to post this, after finding links to spruce things up with. Meanwhile I'm meeting an old friend for lunch at the Corner Bakery. That means I probably won't be hoofing it to the public library, since that's about a mile and a half in the opposite direction. It's to the southwest of Union Station, I think; the Corner Bakery is to the northeast. That's OK. I like seeing a different bit of Chicago each time I come through.

Once on the westbound train, I shall continue the slog. Wish me luck.

P.S. The attached picture is the part of Chicago's Union Station that actually looks like a train station ought. You have to come in from the correct entrance to see it, though. Either end of the Canal Street side of the building will do; the central entrance, though, will send you right down into the bit that resembles a modern airport and is therefore boring.

P.P.S. Did not manage to find myself wi-fi in Chicago. Just lots of pay-per-use wi-fi: tmobile courtesy of Starbucks, and SurfAndSip courtesy of Cosi. Stupid pay-per-use wi-fi. This post will have to wait until Denver and get backdated accordingly.

The Making Of A Monster, Redux
Sun 2006-02-26 06:41:20 (single post)
  • 57,923 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 116.00 hrs. revised

If fictional people were as psychotic as real people, readers would refuse to believe in them. At the very least, their psychoses have to make some sort of sense before they look like more than contrived conveniences for the sake of the plot. Thus, having Mrs. Windlow refer to Amy as "Mike's widow" when Amy has clearly engaged herself to Brian is just a wee little bit over the top. For all that Mrs. Windlow might actually have say this sort of thing as a real live person, as a fictional character she looks cartoonish saying it.

Cartoonish. Like little Lisa Rental in Sheep In The Big City, convinced that Sheep is a "doggie." Or the appallingly two-dimensional villain in Dean Koontz's From The Corner Of His Eye, convinced on the flimsiest of evidence that his female victims are actually in love with him. Delusions on that scale do happen in real life, but in fiction, in general, they're amusing at best and annoying at worst. They're rarely done well enough to be taken seriously. They scream "plot device" and "author's excuse." They don't inspire the creepishness that Koontz probably wanted and that Mo Willems probably couldn't care less about. (Lisa Rental is supposed to be both amusing and annoying. Koontz's villain probably wasn't.)

Now, having Mrs. Windlow aware of Amy's stated devotions but convinced that they're just little white lies meant to disguise pity for the pathetic baby brother--that's more plausible. A sane person might actually come to that conclusion, too. Except a sane person would dismiss that conclusion the first time he saw Amy and Brian together, whereas a psychotic person prone to seeing ulterior motives would dismiss exactly the evidence that would cause a sane person to dismiss the evidence for the ulterior motive.

Wait. That was convoluted and made no sense. What I mean is, there are enough red herrings in the characters' back story that Mrs. Windlow's opinion would make sense to a third party, if that third party didn't actually know Amy and Brian and had instead only heard Mrs. Windlow talk about them. She's being choosy about the evidence presented her; she's not making evidence up of thin air.

That may have made more sense.

People are subtle. They get broken, and their broken bits express themselves in all sorts of interesting ways. If you go far enough back with an omniscient enough eye, you can find the decision point at which the broken person, through his or her particular psychosis, began the spiral into paranoia and unreal expectations. And that decision point makes sense. And it provides that single premise that leads the broken person to come to a lifetime of mistaken conclusions: "All women are evil," maybe, or "my younger son never does anything without meaning me harm." There's always that one point in time where the choice seem reasonable, where the thought processes seem inevitable, and after which everything is chaos.

Pretty scary, if you think about it. Are you at one of those decision points now? Am I?

Eek.

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