“The writer’s job is to write--the rest is just paperwork.”
Christie Yant

author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

actually writing blog

Ooh! I Distract You With New Fiction!
Mon 2008-04-07 16:54:35 (single post)
  • 405 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 2,148 words (if poetry, lines) long

Because writing new stories is always easier than editing rough drafts, isn't it? Yeah, I know. I know. But--hey! New story!

First off, this story is not a Jumper rip-off. Promise.

While I was at the World Horror Convention the other weekend, I had a momentary conversation in the elevator with a man who had just arrived that afternoon. His morning had been spent teaching math at a local high-school. He could only come to the Con after he got off work. He found it amusing, how different the two environments were: a Salt Lake City high school, the World Horror Convention. Indeed.

So I got out the elevator on Floor 3 and moseyed over to the suite in which the film series was showing. The movie scheduled for that two-hour block was Poltergeist, which I'd last seen on HBO in, like, 1983. I hadn't watched it since, mainly because it scared the pants off me (I was six) but partly also because on the third night after watching it Mom told me, "If you really feel the need to sleep in here with us again, you just can't watch that movie anymore." So I didn't. In many ways I was a mindlessly obedient child. (Hey, I still feel like I'm doing something forbidden when I go looking for something in my parents' walk-in attic. I wasn't allowed in there as a kid.)

All of which is beside the point, which is that the casual elevator conversation sort of transmogrified itself in my head during the movie until it became something around which the short story began to take shape. The conversation instead took place at an office party somewhere in the U.S., and the main character was listening with half an ear to a man from London talk about how he used to teach in high school. "Teach what?" she asks, making conversation. "Maths," he says. And she sort of drifts off, thinking about how plurals are even more plural in London, except that Sports sort of become singular, and there are a lot more "U"s to go around, and then as she continues daydreaming about what it must be like across the Atlantic she literally drifts off--vanishes out of the boring office party and finds herself in a classroom in London. She has a rather hard time getting home.

At first I thought she'd be stuck there permanently for some reason, like maybe she was meant to be in London and had to find out why, but I couldn't really get interested in taking the story in that direction. All the fantastic would sort of stop at that point. Besides, it was too much like playing a tabletop role-playing game in which an inept gamemaster clumsily assembles the party by authorial fiat. "OK, so, you're in the middle of whatever you're doing when this mysterious guy appears and says 'You are needed elsewhere.' Then suddenly, like, whoa! You're standing in the woods and there's four people there looking at you--OK, everyone describe your characters to each other."

So instead of making her unable to teleport again, I thought about the other extreme. What would happen if the ability to teleport came so easily to her that she started doing it accidentally? If it was as easy as imagining a place, any place, real or fictional? If it was as easy as thinking--and as hard not to do?

Ever had someone distract you from your hiccups by telling you not to think of purple foxes?

So that's my excuse for not having worked on anything in my editing queue today. I got clobbered by a new story instead. Not that I've left my editing queue entirely untouched, understand - the other day I rewrote "The Witness" from scratch and from memory. That's the story I read for the Twilight Tales Flash Fiction Contest at World Horror 2007. (You can read the winning stories from that year at the Twilight Tales website. Start here with the 1st place story and follow the links back to 2nd and 3rd.) I think I know how to make it better now. I think some of what will make it better is in the new version I wrote the other day. Maybe tomorrow I'll take both versions out, side by side, and - I dunno - synthesize them or something.

Oh, and Poltergeist still scares the pants off me. SRSLY.

Snail eating a long slice of carrot
The Parable of the Snail
Tue 2008-03-25 10:52:29 (single post)
  • 5,248 words (if poetry, lines) long

Chez LeBoeuf-Little has acquired a pet snail. Have I told you this story yet? Briefly, we were washing two pounds of fresh spinach and a snail floated to the top. Now we have a pet snail.

It's thriving like nobody's business. Its shell has grown by half a whorl since we first found the wee beastie, and if it doesn't get a nice thumb-sized bit of vegetation to munch on every evening, it gets uppity. And whatever you feed it, it will eat it all up. Not a trace remains the next morning. It's a ravenous eating machine!

Here's the thing, though: its mouth is small. Way small. And it doesn't have teeth. All it can do is put its mouth around the next three millimeters of veg and rasp at it with its little sandpapery tongue. Give a snail enough time, though, and this process will suffice to consume leafs of lettuce three times its size and carrot slices five inches long--the latter remarkably like slucking up a spaghetto in slow motion.

Nibble nibble, bit by bit, "she ate that whale, because she said she would!"

Which puts me uneasily in mind of any writing project that's ever seemed so huge that the only reasonable course of action was to procrastinate the hell of out of it.

Nibble by nibble. Bit by bit. 500 words by 800 words. Scene by sentence by word.

Patient and persistent as a snail.

Which is the quasipoetic way of saying that I haven't finished or even really started my short story rewrite yet--and John and I are getting on that train tomorrow. So you know what I'll be nibbling away at today, in between laundry and housecleaning and all the other things that fill the day before travel. The first nibble in the queue will be a new scene wherein Daphne meets one of the extraterrestrial "Ambassadors" face-to-face and shakes its (for want of a better word) hand. Which starts two separate event-wheels in motion, both deadly in the extreme.

I copped out of describing the aliens before; Daphne merely observed that they didn't respond well to cameras, that something about the way light hit them, or missed them, gave the viewer an impression of a vague gray blob with too many limbs. One of the Borderlands instructors read that sentence out loud and then gave me a look. And I said, "Yeah, I admit it. Cop out." It's coming clearer now. The "too many limbs" are thread-like pseudopodia, root-like even, some carrying the being across the ground like centipede legs, some raised up to manipulate matter like hands at the end of arms, and some giving the impression of a wild shock of hair like dandelion down. The light seems to pass between these threads rather than hit them straight on, so that if they're moving they're hard to catch sight of. If you're very observant and don't blink, you can see the sparkle and shimmer of them passing by.

Nibble nibble nibble.

Declaration of THUNK
Sat 2008-03-15 21:13:07 (single post)
  • 26,284 words (if poetry, lines) long

You know what that means. Only, minus the "much-extended" part and plus 10,000 words. I was a good girl this month.

If anyone needs me, I'll be on the Viridian Ocean terrorizing the natives. (Yarrr.)

Tomorrow, John and I are going to go to the gym and try to test positive for lead belay. (Tuesday morning we were deferred--the proctor wanted to see us improve at cutting each other slack. Er, giving each other slack. Y'know.) After that, I intend, as promised, to do some rewriting stuffs. Only I've got chores too. Grr. WHY DO THINGS NEVER STOP???

Declaration of Wimpiness
Sat 2008-03-15 01:30:02 (single post)
  • 22,156 words (if poetry, lines) long

OK, not 6:00 AM, maybe closer to noon, because I am officially declaring my intent to have a couple hours' nap-time. Thththbbbp.

That's me: still last minute-ish. Only, the last minute is an overnight and no longer a month long. This is an improvement.

Declaration of Intent: Goofing Off Saturday, Rewriting Sunday
Fri 2008-03-14 11:22:53 (single post)
  • 16,033 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 5,248 words (if poetry, lines) long

As usual, I fell behind on my intended work schedule. Thus, 9,000 words to go between now and Deadline. That's OK; there's a lot of today left in today.

I'm going to go ahead and announce for all to hear that the current project will go THUNK in my editor's inbox by 5:00 AM MDT on March 15. (Hey, it's daylight savings time already! Is this actually helping us save on oil and electricity?) This is because I firmly intend to start some Serious Goofing Off right about then. My crewbies on the Viridian Ocean are planning to hunt the sea monsters of Atlantis at noon GMT, and I want to be there! Yarr!

Wait! It's daylight savings time! That means 6:00 AM MDT. Well then!

Don't worry, I won't go into a month of downtime over this. Sunday's writing time is earmarked for rewriting "Seeds of Our Future" or whatever I may end up renaming the short story currently known as "Putting Down Roots." Hopefully it won't take me more than a few hard-working days. If I run into the person I want to submit it to at the World Horror Convention at the end of this month, I want there to be a chance that she's actually already received it.

Also? Next week, the bathroom and kitchen get cleaned within an inch of their life. I really hate the way we can tell how long I've been working to a deadline by the depth of the grime layer on the fixtures.

Slow, Steady, an' Social
Wed 2008-03-05 17:30:59 (single post)
  • 4,202 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 5,248 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 459 words (if poetry, lines) long

So this week has been a nibbly sort of week. Each day I've been sort of nibbling away at the March 15th project, and then running off to do something social and fun (cf. Melanie and Steve Rasnick Tem's book launch for The Man In The Ceiling, the rock climbing gym's free Intro To Lead Belay class, dinner with friends, etc). Where I'm at now, I'm looking at about 2100 words a day from here on out. However, tomorrow's Thursday, and Thursday is a nothing but writing day. "I know," you say; "Promises, promises!" OK, well, I have some housecleaning to do. But other than that, nothing but writing.

Meanwhile, as regards fiction rewrites, I'm starting to experience some percolation. Nothing written down yet, nothing to report in detail, but... I got me some plans. They're at that bubbly stage. I expect to see the bubbles begin to splatter all over the page before the week is out.

So, y'know. Stuff. It's going on.

And Now For SomeTHING Completely Different
Mon 2008-03-03 07:27:23 (single post)
  • 2,234 words (if poetry, lines) long

From the Department of Putting Folk Wisdom and Traditional Aphorisms to Real World Tests, March has officially come in like a lamb. Saturday the 1st was short-sleeves warm; I got sunburned biking home from work. (I had to work. Long story. Emergency involving a Juliet Brailler and a bunch of pie charts.) Most of able-bodied Boulder were out wearing Spandex and clogging the bike paths. Or clinging to mountainsides; I had the rock climbing gym practically all to myself due to all the real climbers being out climbing real rocks. It was a beautiful day.

And Sunday it snowed. That's Colorado for you. John and I looked out the window around 8:00 at all the frozen precipitation, and he said, "It's opaque outside."

So it's March. You'll notice the whole "Thing-a-Day" thing sort of trailed off around here mid-February. I was in the middle of another couple of last-minute deadline cycles--only, due to some extreme suckiness on my part, the cycle consisted of my saying "I'll have it finished in a couple of days," spending the next couple days beating myself up over about 2,500 per day, and then saying "but I'll have it finished the next couple of days for sure." Thus the eleventh hour mentality stretched itself out over most of the month. Most of my meals included a side of stomach lining with adrenaline dressing.

I do not recommend spending one's February this way.

So, partially because I'm swearing never to do that to myself again (and I really mean it this time) but mostly because my editor has said that the next project really truly does have to be turned in on time, I've logged said next project in the database. I can't say much about it, since my contract includes a confidentiality agreement, but I can say I've got a project and am up to this many words. 25,000 of them are due on March 15. It's like NaNoWriMo, but with research. And instead of saying vague things like "Oh, it's coming along" when anyone asks, I can point here and say, "X amount of words! With X days left to go!"

I'm slightly behind because of not really starting the writing part until March 1 and then taking yesterday off. But yesterday was sort of full of weekend things. (Long story involving a lot of friends, several Torchwood episodes, Vietnamese take-out, and a game of "Munchkin.") Now it is Monday, and Mondays are for working.

Meanwhile, you might be asking, what about fiction and poetry and stuff? What about the writing with actual soul? What about the writing I meant when I was seven years old and said "I want to be a writer when I grow up?" (You mean you weren't asking? Huh. Shows how much you care. I was asking.) Well, this great thing happens when I only owe my paying, deadlined project some 2,000 words a day. I have time to spare. And it's not all going to be spend on Puzzle Pirates. Promise!

As I might have mentioned, I'm going to the World Horror Convention at the end of this month. (John's coming with! Yay!) So are a significant handful of my fellow '06 Borderlands Boot Camp alumni. I can't bear the thought of showing up in front of them and not being able to tell them that I've finally sent off a beautifully rewritten "Seeds of Our Future" (ne… "Putting Down Roots") as one of our instructors notoriously told me I ought to do. That's my fiction project this month. And you can hold me to it, too.

Yay! Back to using this blog as a public flogging place! Just like old times!

No Thing
Tue 2008-02-12 23:04:31 (single post)

Because I'm tired. And I'm still not done. With the stuff I've been doing all freakin' day.

(Look! I made a nothing! Whoo! ...that trick'll only work once.)

Late Half-Baked Song Lyric Thing
Mon 2008-02-11 23:05:24 (single post)

Coming up tomorrow: Something that's somewhat less whiny. Or else maybe the second verse. Dunno.

It's gone midnight
Clock's still ticking
Pour me another cup of tea

You'd think, wouldn't you
Time would just stop--
Sure seems fair to me

Five past midnight
World keeps turning
Half-moon's going down

Ten past midnight
Sleep's just a stranger
And friends don't seem to come round

CHORUS:
Miles to go
(i got) Miles to go
Take 'em slow
(got) Miles to go
Hell, maybe tomorrow I'll come up with a tune.
Another Poem-like Thing (a long time coming)
Sun 2008-02-10 22:07:29 (single post)

When I was much younger and I read Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time for the very first time, several points in the novel stuck with me hard. One of them was the period of time during which the main character, Meg, convalesced in the care of an alien species who were blind. They had long delicate fingers, they talked to the stars and each other via telepathy, and they had no eyes. At one point, Meg complained of the darkness on the planet--I think it must have been too far from the sun to have a proper day, although how it stayed warm enough for life I forget. (Note to self: Reread the Time Trilogy sometime soon.) Anyway, she complained that it was dark.

"What is dark?" said her caretaker.

"It's when there's no light."

"What is light?"

"Well, it's what allows you to see."

"But what do you mean, see?"

Meg couldn't answer. How do you explain vision, light, color, to someone without eyes? I wonder whether there is a similar disconnect between most of us humans who can see and those who are blind from birth--only, humans who have never experienced vision do nevertheless live among people who do, and speak languages with many vision-based metaphors ("Let me see" for let me think about it; "Look it up" for research it; "True colors" for true nature; "Vamos a ver"/"We'll see" for vamos a descubrir/we'll find out; etc). They have at least been vicariously exposed to the experience. Without even those metaphors surrounding them in daily speech, how can a species of sightless sentient beings comprehend what vision is like to a human? Are there any words we could use that would convey the concept?

How would another sort of animal with seven senses explain to us six-sensed humans their additional mode of perceiving the world? How would they describe an eighth color?

it is how those without voice speak to you
it's how you know they're there

now believe me when I tell you
that there are different degrees of thereness
we call them colors

how do you imagine a tree?

when you touch the bark
it snags on your skin
it leaves tears of sap
(how the pine-blood smells? we call that amber)

when it is in full leaf
it causes a cool place beneath its
well-clad branches
(that coolness is known as green)

it is so tall, its topmost branches
you can never touch
and when the wind hasn't yet arrived
you cannot hear the leaves whisper
and when the winter's overstayed its welcome
the branches give no shade

you ask me how I know they are there
their thereness is thin
and gray

I don't think my answer would have satisfied Aunt Beast either.

email