author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Just got the email back yesterday afternoon from Fictitious Force. They will not be publishing "Turbulence" after all. Deep *sigh*. The email said something that made me smile, though: "Your story made our second round, but we ultimately decided not to publish it." Oooh! My story was not an immediate "we don't think so"! That's kinda cool.

Meanwhile, I just got done attending the first session of Nancy Kilpatrick's Editing Workshop at the World Horror Convention. I passed out copies of "Still Life In June", which I brought up to something like presentable over the last couple days. Tomorrow we're all going to read our stories aloud, as we have a three hour session and Nancy has figured that all the reading will take 67 minutes total. (One minute per page.) A really exciting thing, besides the excitement of having my work put in front of Nancy herself, is that Stephen Jones will be sitting in on tomorrow's session too. That's just too cool.

A lot of things are cool today.

Now I'm going to take a nap, because one of the things that is uncool is my raging sore throat. I'm hoping to feel well enough to enter the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest tonight... which involves reading aloud. Quickly. Yeesh.

Yes! I have entered this contest right here. In order to make the story acceptable for that contest, it not only had to be totally rewritten from its beginnings as a high school writing assignment (it burns! it burns! the awful bad teenage writing burnsss us!), but then the result of rewriting it had to be slashed down from 4,500 words to 2,500. Oh ouch. Oh, owie wowie. I, er, didn't actually need that left arm, did I?

In other news, I am sitting in the lobby of the Green Tortoise Hostel in San Francisco. Tomorrow sometime before 10 I have to get to the hotel that's hosting the World Horror Convention. I am hoping that the transit hurts less than the walk from the Ferry Building to the hostel. "Oh, it's just a couple blocks up to Broadway and then like another block to the left. You can't miss it." If those were two blocks to Broadway, they were looooong blocks. And then it was at least six blocks up Broadway to the hostel. Up as in uphill. Uphill as in San Francisco Bay Area uphill. With luggage. Owwwwww.

So I'm going to sleep now. Tomorrow starts bright and early, and I'm beat.

...of allowing someone else to read my novel in progress.

No, no, the submission of the first three chapters of The Drowning Boy doesn't count. The first time, it was a submission to a Faceless Editorial Entity that would decide Yea or Nay without much feedback. The second time, it was a submission as application to a workshop; until and unless those folks say Yea, I won't have to worry about other people reading my novel. If they say Nay, once again the Nay will probably come back without feedback.

No, that didn't count. It's not anything at all like submitting the first two chapters of The Golden Bridle to the Critters.org queue.

If you who happen to be reading this happen to be someone whose story I once happened to critique, and who happened to have said to me, "Thanks, and let me know when you've got something in the queue so I can return the favor," then the week you're looking for, provided I can keep my crit ratio up, is June 7. No pressure; I'm just passing along the info. Do or do not. There is no guilt.

Oh. My. Gods. People are actually going to read it and tell me what they thought. Nervous!

Time to go work on something else just to get my mind off it!

Hit my deadline. Got paid. The world continues to turn.

Now... back to life as usual.

More later. Right now, running backups. Have you backed up your writing recently? You better! Go on--it'll give you something to do while I figure out how best to dance for everybody's amusement.

Hello all. Just entering minute-to-midnight deadline mode again. Deadlines which have paychecks and external pressures attached get priority in my schedule, even if they have nothing to do with novels and short stories. Such is life.

Will try to make time tomorrow for things not work-for-hire related, such as blogging about my birthday weekend (I'm 30! Hello, multiple-of-ten angst! ...OK, I'm over it) on Denver Metblogs (hello, Denver Metblogs! Did you miss me? ...No?), critiquing others' fiction as well as my own (hello, Golden Bridle! I know you've missed me), and creating new stories for publication and not (hello... ah, well, that would be telling).

And, um, paying the bills. Hello, the evil, evil bills. They sit in an evil pile on top the piano and they taunt me.

But nevermind that. Tomorrow is Ben & Jerry's Free Cone Day! We need a plan, you 'n me, a cunning plan to go and get us some! I suspect it will involve some strategic queuing up and waiting around on the Pearl Street Mall. In the snow. In the snow. Gods damn it.

Maybe they'll offer us in the Rockies a free mug of hot chocolate instead.

Well, sometimes fan fiction is bad for the brain, or at least is accompanied by a lack of a brain, as is evidenced by the case of Lori Jareo. Lori wrote a Star Wars fanfic, cranked it through a POD-machine, and then put it up for sale on Amazon. Despite trying to make a buck off of it in Bezos's backyard, she thinks she'll dodge the impending copyright/trademark violation cease-and-desist with the claim that she only did it for friends and family and that no one knows it exists. John "Whatever" Scalzi begs to differ.

But I digress. In its place, fan fiction can be good for the soul. It can be a playground in which the blocked writer lets the creative self play and play out from under the thumb of the editor-ego. And that's what I've been up to this week.

My dabblings in that arena have been few and, aside from one story that was turned in as an assignment in high-school English (a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale set in the world of Rush's 2112), largely unread. But every once in awhile I get this Idea. It tends to be the sort of Idea that sticks around for awhile.

Here's one of 'em.

I just got done feeding my annual craving to reread Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. If you've only ever seen the movie (and if, Gods forfend, you've suffered through the abomination that is the second movie), then you owe it to yourself right now to go get this book and read it. But if you've seen the movie, you'll remember how this disembodied narrator voice comes out of nowhere in the last minute of the movie and says something like, "Bastian made many more wishes and had many, many adventures. But that's another story." In the book, the narrative does that all the time. Some chapter will come to an end, and a secondary character will wave goodbye, and the narrative will hint at what will become of the character but then break off with, "But that's the beginning of another story that will be told at another time."

Ever since I first read this book, I've wanted to write a cycle of short stories, each one inspired by one of these "another story" teases. So this week I started playing around with one of the first prompts. It involves Cairon, the black zebra-striped centaur physician who assigns Atreyu his quest, whose "destiny was to lead him over very different and unexpected pathways" after he successfully delivers his message and nearly dies of the effort.

I have no illusions that the results will be publishable, not without seeking all the right permissions and of course rewriting and revising and rewriting again. But it's fun to dabble. It's a good thing to work on when I've just finished one project and can't seem to get started on another. And who knows? Maybe it will have a destiny upon unexpected pathways itself, ones beyond gathering cyber-dust at the bottom of my writing archive zip disk.

(And come to think of it, the Rapunzel story might in fact become publishable if the fanfic element remains oblique enough. Someone's looking for retold fairy tales.)

Quoth Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

Want to strike a blow against scam agents? Link to the 20 Worst Agents list. While you're at it, link to Writer Beware and Preditors and Editors. You could even link to Everything you wanted to know about literary agents and On the getting of agents. But the 20 Worst Agents list—that's the important one.

Remember, friends, the wisdom of Yog Sysop: "Money Flows Towards The Author." Remember that a literary agent who is paid out of your advance and royalties has an economic incentive to sell your book, and a so-called "agent" who is paid from up-front fees, editing charges, and annual "retainers" has no such incentive. Remember that an advance against royalties is a both the publisher's estimate of how much a book will sell and a publisher's investment in getting that book to sell; realize what that implies about a $1 advance. Remember that an agent who makes a big deal about being "first-time author friendly" or a publisher who claims to "give your book the chance it deserves" isn't interested in your career; s/he's interested in your naivety.

Follow the links above and innoculate yourself against scams.

So those three chapters got another round of polishing, and the synopsis got whittled down to 900 words. And every one of those words was wanted, let me tell you.

Let me tell you something else. FedEx Kinkos charges $0.49 per page on their black-and-white printer. Fifty cents! For one sheet! One crappy cover letter: Fifty cents! One crappy 900 word synopsis: Two bucks! I'm damn glad I printed out the 9,100 word three-chapter writing sample on a friend's laser printer instead. That one was almost twenty bucks long. Next time, I'm-a goin' price-shopping. There's another copy center 'cross the street from the Kinkos; they might offer more reasonable prices.

Or I might just get my printer nozzle cleaned out and print from home like I used to.

Never, never, never-never never feed your Canon i450 generic-compatible ink. Hold out for genuine Canon ink. Or you'll get drop-shadows and blurs in your printouts and boy will you be sorry.

So, yeah. Application to VP going into the mail mañana.

...oh wait. I have.

I'll say it again anyway: Synopsis writing suuuuuucks.

On the good side, I did get through the three pages of narrative summary without ever quite giving in to the little voice in my head that is quick to tell me what an awful, awful book this is, how pervected and gratuitous and wrong. I wrote through the paragraphs describing each of the scenes that woke that voice up, nodded peacefully at said voice until it went away, and pretended not to care every time that voice came back.

Thus I reached the end. It's 1,682 words long, just under three pages single-spaced, and it will need a thorough revision later on this evening. With any luck I will put the darn thing in the mail tomorrow morning on my way to work.

More later.

Aaaaaand another one goes back out into the world.

Have I ever linked to The Black Hole? Black Hole good. It's a database of paying F/SH/H markets and their minimum/maximum/average submission response times. It also contains relatively up-to-date guideline and masthead information. It's toothsome, low-fat, and high in fiber. Go nibble on it yourself.

Now. Now I have so badly got to write a synopsis for Drowning Boy. More later. Probably after sunrise.