author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hullo. Not dead. The short story's on hold for a few days, though--dangit--so I can meet a paying deadline. So I'm going to unload a few links on you. Look sharp, here they come--

Charles Stross on the writer's lifestyle (Via By The Way)

Firstly, forget the romance of the writer's lifestyle and the aesthetic beauty of having a Vocation that calls you to create High Art and lends you total creative control. That's all guff. Any depiction of the way novelists live and work that you see in the popular media is wrong. It's romanticized clap-trap. Here's the skinny:

You are a self-employed business-person. Occasionally you may be half of a partnership — I know a few husband-and-wife teams — but in general novelists are solitary creatures. You work in a service industry where output is proportional to hours spent working per person, and where it is very difficult to subcontract work out to hirelings unless you are rich, famous, and have had thirty years of seniority in which to build up a loyal customer base. So you eat or starve on the basis of your ability to put your bum in a chair and write. BIC or die, that's the first rule.

The Tightrope Walker blog on writing what you love (via retterson)

But I've seen other writers, just as excellent, back away because -- although they're clearly packed taut with talent -- they think there's some bar there, some Berlin Wall of the mind -- basically, a big sign at the end of a nowhere road that says, "Anything you try to write will be lifeless. Boring. A canteen of sand in the desert. Don't even try."

To them I say: potato chips.

Hmm. I may have linked that latter one before. It feels familiar. ...Oh, well. Enjoy.

Also, for those of y'all subscribed to my RSS feed via LiveJournal (you would do that by adding nicolejleboeuf to your Friends list) yes, yes I know that there's something fishy about the timestamps coming off my Metroblogging posts. There's a six- or seven-hour diff between the time on the post itself to the time on the post summary that shows up on LJ. At some point, probably after Monday, I'll look into that. 'Til then, pretend it's an exciting adventure in time travel. Yay!

If you happen to live at 4335 Lake Villa Drive in Metairie, Louisiana, I promise this isn't personal. The fictional kids in my fictional story just happen to live on your nonfictional block, that's all. I just popped addresses into Google Maps until I got sort of the house I was envisioning, et voila.

I didn't want to set the story on the street where I grew up. That seemed too easy. Plus I've done it before. So I hit on using the piece of Lake Pontchartrain I'm next most familiar with: the area by the Suburban Canal. I rode my bike down there countless times as a teenager, sometimes hanging out under the gazebo with my writing notebook and my headphones, sometimes just tossing french fries to the seagulls. I guess I could have had my two fictional kids hanging out on the sea wall by the Bonnabel Boat Launch, but it's too late now. I've worked on the story long enough that, dammit, they live where they live, and trying to pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

Sometimes pieces of a story get ossified like that; they're no longer up for debate because that's the way it happened. What began as fiction sort of calcifies into, if not exactly reality, than an idea that my thought processes treat as reality. Katrina happened in '05, the New Orleans Saints won their Divisional Championship in '06, and Louise and Jimbo live on the first block of Lake Villa south of West Esplanade. I know one of those things isn't true, but my thoughts make room for it just as though it were no less factual than the other two.

Anyway... If you happen to live in the area, dear reader, I wouldn't mind knowing how your neighborhood fared. The story is set during November/December '05, and I want to be at least semi-faithful to what really happened. Was it like my parents' block, where all the damage came from holes in roofs, not flood? Was the street pretty empty during the months following, or did people come home fairly quickly? I didn't see too much full-body devastation last time I took a bike ride up Lake Villa from the pumping station to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, but then that was December '06 and all sorts of restoration could have happened since. And when did all that construction at the pumping station start? It's not the safe-house I'm talking about; that's done. It's all the cranes digging up huge chunks of levee that I mean. And when was that sea wall built in front of the mouth of the canal? I know it wasn't there when I was in high school some 15 years ago. How do you even begin Googling for that kind of information? Think the Jefferson Parish Library can help? They can certainly tell me about branch closures and reopenings after the storm, at least. Maybe I should check the NOLA.com message boards, or ask around the comment sections at Metroblogging New Orleans.

If you have info and feel like sharing, the email link is at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Yes, it's a pop-up web form. I'm sorry. Deal with it.

This just in: The deadline for submissions to Shimmer's "Pirate" issue has been extended a whole 'nother month! (Well, a little less than a whole month, what with the next month being February and all, but anyway...) So saith the Slush God!

This means I can procrastinate that sucker right up until Feb 26 and submit roughly the same quality I would have tomorrow!

...but I won't. I did a good solid 500 words on the new draft Monday/yesterday (haven't been to bed yet, all confused about how to define "tomorrow" and "today" and such), and I expect to do no less every day until the draft is finished. No breaks! I'm just allowed to be slower, that's all.

(I'm also allowed to prioritize my Feb 12 freelance deadline. Which is a relief, 'cause it would be nice to get that in on time, get paid on time, and pay my credit card bill on time. Yay for promptitude!.)

I have too much fiction lined up behind this story waiting to be finished and sent off; another month spent dawdling would not be a good idea.

On a not entirely unrelated tangent: Over at AbsoluteWrite.com, the regulars are asking each other this timeless question: What's the difference between a writer and a wanna-be? I have been avoiding that thread because Certain People make me all Huffy about it, and I have a tendency to get a bit Snarky. But I can tell you the difference. Yes, I can. The difference is this: a writer writes. A wanna-be only thinks about writing.

Here's the big secret, though: Being one doesn't mean you can't also be the other. You can be both. On alternating days, maybe. Or months. A wanna-be in January and a writer in February and then, as soon as the story's done, you're a wanna-be again for a few days until you jump back in the ring and become a writer writing a brand new story.

In Spanish, there are two verbs that mean "to be." Estar is for temporary and locational conditions (death, oddly, being one of them, which may bespeak an tacit cultural belief in reincarnation, or zombies, or more likely looking for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come etc. etc. but that's beside the point); ser is for more permanent, defining characteristics. I think the description "wanna-be" probably takes estar.

Just a quickie this morning before I get to work. I reread Peter Pan last week. Memory is fallible, and I wanted to have the canonical text fresh in my head. Specifically, I couldn't remember what the Lost Boys wore exactly. Turns out their wore bear skins.

Other things I discovered:

• I had unwittingly given the baby brother the same first name as Captain Hook--must address so as not to make this look like a cutsy authorial fiat.
• There is a lot of violence on Neverland. I'd remembered that. I hadn't remembered exactly how very much of a lot of violence, and how callous the children are about it.
• Dude! Siblings as surrogate mothers! Duh.

That's all. Off to finish the draft now. Ta.

Writing a story, we are told, is like sculpting an elephant: you start with a marble block and you remove the bits that aren't elephant. Except it's more like sculpting a chimerical beastie no one has ever seen before except you, just once, in a dream after a late night consuming too much tequila and not enough orange juice. You're not exactly sure what you saw, come to think of it. But it was cool.

This makes it a little difficult to figure out which bits of the marble block to remove.

And then there's the other big difference between writing a story and sculpting an elephant. Writing a story means you have to make the marble yourself. This is a point Chris Baty drove home in a pep-talk from his No Plot? No Problem! Writing Kit. When you write your first draft of the story or novel you'll later sculpt into something beautiful, you're actually conjuring up the raw material. Out of thin air. Poof.

I began writing this short story rather like I write a NaNoWriMo novel. I sort of just splortched out a series of babbled scene wanna-bes, filtered not at all for quality or connectivity, jumped around the timeline, deleted nothing, inserted whatever crossed my mind. The result is a hodge-podge that hasn't, in fact, coelesced into draft one. Apparently I'm fairly good at making mediocre marble. All my writing of late has been like that. Splortchy. And then when I try to revise one of my other stories, long or short, I end up stuck on paragraph two.

I've been in a slump.

I've been telling people that my slump is really just that temporary valley of despair a writer ends up in after a particularly intense learning experience. It's the paralysis that results from realizing that ye Gods, I really do suck, I have so much still to learn, I have insurmountable buttloads of stupid in my story, I am ashamed of even trying to write. It's not just me. A few other VPX alumni have copped to it, too--having a hard time jumping back in, wondering whether they were actually meant to be writers at all. But if you are going to be a writer, then you have to get out of the slump again. You gotta pick yourself up and get back to writing. If you do, lo and behold, you discover you can still do this, and even better than before, because you've begun incorporating all the lessons you just learned. And then suddenly it's easy and fun or at least rewarding again.

Getting out of the slump doesn't happen by itself. A writer has to put forth that effort. I've been procrastinating instead, and I'm running out of plausible excuses.

I've had several people suggest to me that outlining might be the best way to dig myself out. All this workshopping of late has got me fixated on details but has lost me the sight of the big picture. Whatever stage a given story is at, I need to make sure I have at least a rough field guide for identifying the chimera in the marble.

That's mostly what I've done today. Outlining. Asking myself questions: What's the theme? What's the plot? Who are these characters? And which bits of the splortched excuse for a rough draft have absolutely nothing to do with any of it? Do I need to quarry more marble?

And why am I stopping to blog this when all I've done towards answering these questions is fifteen minutes of thinking on paper?

...Right. I gotta go.

Did very little today but write, for a change. Only it wasn't the short story I'm meant to be working on. It was the "trunk novel," the one that will probably never see another reader's eyes. It doesn't even have a working title or a slot in my manuscript database. What it is, is a bedtime story I've been telling myself at night and embroidering on for at least fifteen years. When I get to where I'm feeling like a total impostor, like writing is totally beyond me, like all the recent workshop experiences taught me is that I'm talentless and lazy, like I can't finish a new story and the older ones suck too much to burden yet another editor's slush pile with, I work on this one. Because it reminds me that writing is fun.

I'm convinced it's the only way to successfully beat writer's block: make writing fun again. Write something that doesn't matter to anyone but you, or practice the bits you find easiest whether that's dialogue or description or journaling or gawdawful purple prose. There's a reason you decided to do this words-on-paper thing. Go rediscover it.

Addendum: On writing from the place where writing is what you love. Via retterson, via beth-bernobich.

And maybe the trunk novel might see print someday if I manage to excise the Mary Sue factor. It's already loads better than it was in my head, when the main character was explicitly me and the leading man was whoever I had a crush on at the time. They're now both actual characters, which is nice, and makes me blush less when I reread it. But she's still a gosh-darned Mary Sue, so you're not reading it yet. So there.

Tomorrow there will be work on the short story. But after the boat gets a hole, you gotta bail the boat and patch it before you can point it in the right direction again. Today was for bailing. Tomorrow's for getting back on track.

So from Dec 22 to Jan 2, I was on vacation; John and I were visiting the New Orleans-area family for the holidays. Which sort of explains that. And since our return I have been sick as the proverbial dog. Now, you'd think that lying in bed all day would present a perfect opportunity for writing, but there's still that being sick thing. Stronger, more determined wordsmiths than I have no doubt prevailed against such circumstances. I, personally, can't even seem to think straight at the moment. Sorry.

I think I'm at last on the upswing today, though. More later if I manage it.

By the way, thanks to the magic of BitTorrent, John and I are all caught up with our friends across the pond in watching all Doctor Who related things. Chez LeBoeuf-Little is no longer a spoiler-free zone. Yay!

We apologize for the inconvenience, but there was no Actual Writing to report on all week. Today Actual Writing has occurred and so our Actual Writing Coverage can continue. Thank you for your patience.

The first draft of the story is not done, but the shape is a lot clearer, especially now that the main character has decided that everything that happens is in fact her fault. She might be right, too, but I couldn't say. I wasn't there. I'll have to defer to her judgment on this.

Also. Long walks home from downtown Boulder, knitting needles busily in hand, are very good for brainstorming. You should try it. And then you'll be as sore about the shins and knees and elbows as I am, too. And it'll be good for you.

Today I could have easily been overtaken even by a very out-of-shape Muse. I found me a Yule Log lying alongside the Boulder Creek Path, and I strapped it to my bike (cf. illo). The rest of my ride home was slow, careful, containing as few sharp turns as possible, and punctuated by cheers and thumbs-up from random passers-by. As far as bicycling machismo goes, I have nothing to prove.

Also, yWriter. Can it be used for short fiction as well as for novels? Why, yes it can. But why would you? Possibly because you have some scenes in your head just waiting to be written down, but you're not sure what order they go in or what other scenes to use as glue in between. Watch out for that NaNoWriMo mindset, though. You know the one. That's where you just have your characters totally babble because you've got a word quota to meet, dammit! Well, you don't. You just need to end up with a draft of a short story, is all.

I do not yet have a draft of a short story. But I've got almost all my scenes in place. I hope to get it to Full First Draft tomorrow, maybe even upload it to my fellow VPXmen. I want this guy out the door early.

I really really meant to come home from work today and get 2,000 words closer to THE END of The Bookwyrm's Hoard. Only I got tackled by a new story on my way home. While I was biking. I didn't know the Muse could run that fast.

The logical progression went something like this: I was reading Making Light, like I do. Specifically this thread about odd new so-called security measures at the US/Canada border. The bit about gunboats on the Great Lakes turned this-a-way. Which made me think about these time-sensitive submission guidelines.

Oh, go on. Follow the links. Let them open in new windows/tabs. It won't kill you.

Anyway, what do I know from pirates? Or the Great Lakes? But, y'know, I do know a fair bit about life on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. And while real-life piracy is a subject opaque to me, there are some famous specimens of the fantasy realms to be explored.

And by the time I got home I had a rough idea of the beginning and the end, along with which harmless bits of my childhood should be wedged in at which strategic points in the plot. Such as the building and subsequent demise of the neighborhood fishing pier, the question of where the cars on the Causeway go after they cross the horizon, and the miracle of actually catching an edible fish off the back of the Bonnabel Pumping Station.

Several hours later, I've got the edges slotted into place. Next: a handful of identical-looking blue sky pieces and identical-looking green-tree pieces that need to be placed experimentally side by side by side.

More tomorrow, no doubt. The nice thing about this particular subject is, it has a deadline. This time I mean to hit it.