author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Friends who know me in meat-space (as the kids these days do call it, or the kids from some days or other, maybe not these days, what days have you got?) LIKE I WAS SAYING they know I have a tendency to... vocalize. Think out loud. Talk to myself. A lot.

And as those know who have been present for my feeding of the cats or my diapering of the one cat, interaction with cats tends to exacerbate this behavior. (I plead that this is not unique and has been documented amongst the population in general.)

I have in fact been heard to make up whole nursery rhyme ditties to croon to the one cat as he suffers the indignity of being Pampered. "Oh, dear, what can the matter be / My poor Null-bit can't use the lavat'ry / Wears a diaper Sunday through Saturday / Oh what a tragic affair."

It should be remarked that my husband finds my attempts at Filking trying at best (even though I think they're hilarious, especially "For Lease/Fur Elise" and also a verse of "Be Our Guest" repurposed for a friend's first-timer guest-of-member free day pass at the rock climbing gym), even when I'm performing them with intent to amuse. That he has not signed me into an Institution because of spontaneously Filking at the cats is Commendable.

But sometimes even I think I've hit the deep end.

It was time to make the bed. The bed was full of cats, both of them confused that Mommy had suddenly robbed them of her cuddly body warmth and was now standing over them with intent to Make Them Move. I can only point again at XKCD's fish-shaped graph to excuse what came out of my mouth next.

"Sorry, kitties, but it's time to Make The Bed! I'm-a gonna grab me some two-by-fours..." (straightening the mattress and pillows on the left) "...and some nails, and make me a bed..." (ditto on the right) "...and then I'm-a gonna get me some marshmallows and make me a mattress..." (realigning the sheets) "...and then, 'cause marshmallows tend to be sticky, I'm-a gonna get y'all to shed me some cat hair..." (laying out the big furry blanket) "...and then, 'cause cat hair tends to get up one's nose, I'm-a gonna get me some bedsheets..." (laying out the afghan) "...and then I'm-a gonna MAKE THE BED!" (ta-daaa)

And then I thought, I've totally got to blog this shit. Erm. You're welcome?

You know, the nice thing about deep ends? They make these ladders, you can climb right out again. And then they make these diving boards, you can dive right back in...

The earth shifted upon its axis that day.
I did not know. I could not tell.
The news was slow to reach my ears that day.

You could say, "four inches," measure it in the way
That is custom in my country, or "ten centimetres" if not.
The earth shifted upon its axis that day.

Measurements are meaningless and soon forgot.
What can the mere motion of tectonic plates accomplish
That the loosing of so many souls cannot?

It's March. That means, if I've got my ass in gear, that it's National Novel Editing Month and I'm doing it. I got two hours in today on the revision of Deaths in a Dream (working title, may change) which was what I wrote back in November; that's the good news. The bad news is, I've only got three hours in total and the goal is fifty. Hee hee?

(The low word count refers to the rewrite. I'm taking the rough draft side-by-side with a new outline and notes on each scene, and I'm rewriting the novel into a new yWriter project.)

Doing a bit of procrastination today, I went back to an old standby, Randy Ingermanson's "Snowflake Method" for writing a novel. His method involves starting with a single sentence, then fleshing it out to a paragraph, then writing out a page of summary for each character, and so forth until you've expanded your single ice crystal of an idea into a snowflake of a novel full of all the detailed pointy bits you'd expect. It's a sort of fill-in-the-blank that gets you to write the shape of the blanks out first. It's a neat idea, but I don't think I've ever really found an occasion to use it. I go into a rough draft with a rough outline, but nowhere near the level of planning Ingermanson suggests, mainly because I write the rough draft to find out what the hell it is I'm writing. And now that I've got a rough draft and a much better idea of what the final should look like, I'm not sure his method goes the way my brain goes. Maybe I'll try bits of it here and there. The character page summaries seem useful; I seem to have less of a grip today on the character of Lia than I did back in November.

I've also discovered I... don't really like Ingermanson's writing style. I'm sorry! But I don't. He keeps inserting jolly comedic bombast that, as a joke, gets old quick. In my opinion. It's not so bad in Snowflake, where he mostly gets it out of the way in the first couple paragraphs and then gets down to business. But I clicked over to his other free article, "Writing the Perfect Scene," and the bombast was something like 40% of the content.

This may seem obvious, but by the end of this article, I hope to convince you that it's terribly profound. If you then want to fling large quantities of cash at me in gratitude, please don't. I'd really rather have a check. With plenty of zeroes.

He's also got a little problem with sexist language:

Your reader is reading your fiction because you provide him or her with a powerful emotional experience. If you're writing a romance, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is falling in love herself. If you're writing a thriller, you must create in your reader the illusion that he is in mortal danger and has only the tiniest chance of saving his life (and all of humanity). If you're writing a fantasy, you must create in your reader the illusion that she is actually in another world where all is different and wonderful and magical. And so on for all the other genres.

It's a small thing, but it does bug me. Put it together with a tendency to overload every new section with a fresh shmear of LOOKIT ME IN UR ARTICLE BEIN FUNNY before getting around to making actual informative points, and I fall right off the page.

OK so well but anyway he recommends this book, says he's stealing all his scene-building ideas from it. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain. This is where he gets MRUs, or "motivation-reaction units" ("such an absurdly ridiculous term that I'm going to keep it, just to prove that Mr. Swain was not perfect") from. "If you don't have this book," Ingermanson says, "you are robbing yourself blind." All right, already. I go look at the Amazon page.

Would you like to know why I will not be buying this book, robbing myself blind though I might be? Would you like to know? My problem with Swain, let me show you it. Let me rip it straight from Amazon's "Look Inside The Book" feature and show you it:

And each authority is dangerous to the very degree that he's correct, because that's also the degree to which he distorts the actual picture. Put four such specialists to work as a group, designing a woman, and she might well turn out like the nightmare of a surrealistic fetishist, all hair and derrière and breasts and high French heels.

So . . . no magic key. No universal formula. No mystic secret. No Supersonic Plot Computer.

It's enough to plunge a man to the depths of despair.

This is, perhaps, not entirely unusual given the book was published in 1965. Except no, wait, here are a bunch of other books published in 1965. Some of them are on my shelf. Many of them have caused me less pain, cover to cover, than these few paragraphs did. Swain! More sexist than many of his contemporaries, and possibly proud of it!

According to reviewer T. Velasquez from Beaverton, Oregon, this is no simple unfortunate exception. He goes on like this throughout the book. Says Velasquez,

On the downside, the very dated presentation in the book can made for hard reading to the modern PC crowd. Swain writes very clearly from the POV that his readers are male. He never says that women can't write books but he mentions only one female author and she is used in a negative example. Swain uses the terms 'man/men' interchangeably for people. Of course, Swain was a product of his times but his style of writing borders on the unintentionally insulting.

He refers to a black woman as a 'negress' at one point and his examples portray all wives (and women since this is the only thing he can allow women to be in his examples) as cheating on their husbands the moment that their husband's backs are turned: The understanding being that women are weak and mindless submissive creatures that are easily influenced by other men and must be constantly supervised.

...queen of the love pulps thirty years ago.... Old and tired now, she turns out just enough confessions to support herself.

"Modern PC crowd," nothing; Swain's book is painful for me to read as a woman. As one of those female writers that don't exist in Swain's world. As one of those terrible bad-advice-giving female writers who is probably cheating on her husband if he isn't nailing her fins to the floor. And is causing surrealist fetishists nightmares or something, I dunno. Clearly, if Swain were still with us today, I would be causing him nightmares just by existing. And writing. And publishing.

I should note that out of all the reviews on Amazon, most of which are 5 star and say "The writing Bible!" and "Should be required reading for all writers!" (because, Gods know, if women find Swain's writing painful they should just suck it up in the name of Becoming A Writer), Velasquez's review is the only one that mentions Swain's problem with slightly more than half the human species.

Anyway, valuable lesson learned. If a writer with an unfortunate tendency to fall into unconscious sexist language from time to time recommends a book about writing, and recommends it very very strongly as the book he got all his best ideas from, it is not unlikely that the recommended book will be full of a lot more sexist language that's a lot less unconscious. If your mentor is mouthing nasty bigoted stuff about women, or about people of color for that matter, and you learn a lot about writing from that mentor, well, it's hard to come away without having unconsciously internalized some of the nasty stuff.

Choose your mentors carefully to the extent you have a choice, right?

That said: If someone has taken Swain's good ideas, such as still apply today (Velasquez says he has a lot of ideas that don't pertain to today's publishing industry either), and has repackaged them within a writing style that, I dunno, acknowledges women as human beings who might have something worthwhile to say, maybe? then I'm all ears. I have a list, it is currently one author long, that author is Ingermanson. I should like the list to be longer. Suggestions?

I think finishing a story's final revision and converting it for email submission not only before noon but also from a medical waiting room is kind of bad-ass. Don't you? I do. And then submitting it from the diner down the road, over a plate of The Best Tamales In Town, IMHO (In My Humble Opinion).

Brief note about that: The Moonlight Diner is what I do if I have to go to the airport and there is time to wait around. Their staff are friendly and pleased to see me, they keep the coffee coming, and their wi-fi is reliable; but their food is on the whole not worth it. Pick up Popeye's on I-270 and eat it on the way over. But the Parkway Diner off 47th in Boulder is what I do by choice. It's what I do to treat myself after spending the morning at a medical appointment nearby. It's delicious and just as friendly, if not even more so, and if its wi-fi is less reliable, well, today it's working fine.

Anyway. Scene X got a total rewrite, as did the end of Scene XIII. And I changed the title from "The Only Moving Thing" to a line from Stanza VIII, "The Blackbird Is Involved in What I Know." I think that's a better summary of the story. The former was too coy, or cute, or something.

Got an email from my friend late last night announcing that his rewrite was also finished. I really like this submitting in tandem thing, but I bet we could both have done with finishing up about a week earlier than this. Morning of Deadline Day is... stressy.

But it's really hard to rush the composting process. Aside from meditating at the spinning wheel, I have no strategies for speeding things up. I'm not saying I have to wait until I'm inspired to write--I do have the ideal of showing up at the page every day--but it seems that particular stories have to wait until I'm inspired.

Again, it's like compost. Compost proceeds at its own pace; you can't rush the microbes. You can encourage faster composting by tweaking the envirnoment, of course--3 parts "brown" to 1 part "green," maintain proper moisture levels, turn the pile every few days--but none of this will get you instant potting soil on demand.

Just so with stories. I can do my daily free-writing exercises, I can think about the story all day and try to dream about it at night, but until it comes together it won't come together.

I'm just glad this one came together in time for the THUNK of manuscript hitting slush pile to happen on Deadline Day and not after.

Also, the THUNK of a work of fiction doesn't signal the same sort of THUD of imminent author collapse as does the THUNK of, say, all those 15K-word StyleCareer eGuides. I may actually get other work done today. Or at least I'm going to play real hard. Fiction is refreshing!

All for now. Battery failing. Until later!

So Friday I produced a new finished draft, mostly at the Moonlight Diner again. Friday night I emailed it to a good friend who's also working on a story for submission to the same anthology. Got some great comments back from him over the weekend, which I mostly fed to the composting brain to work on while I took the weekend off. The biggest thing is that Scene X isn't quite yet there. I figured. It's close, but it's (in my opinion) too much with the clue-by-four to the head between the characters' role-reversal and the backstory exposition, and (in my friend's wise opinion) structurally awkward because of all the "you"s you get when you combine 2nd person narration with dialogue. So I've been idly thinking about that, this weekend.

I also reciprocated with the story critique, which required me to finally learn how to use Google Docs. Google Docs is spooky. It'll tell you if someone you've shared a document is viewing it at the same time you are. It'll let you watch them edit it. This little pink cursor shows up right where the other person has it, so you can tell exactly which of your line-by-line comments they're looking at. And that's where I get all self-conscious and close the browser window. (My friend points out that this means we could have real-time chat in the margins of a manuscript. I admit this sounds useful.)

Tonight I'm working on a final revision. It's not going to be done while tonight is still tonight. My aim is to submit this thing tomorrow morning, which just happens to be deadline day for the anthology. (My friend is on roughly the same timeline.) I know what I'm going to do for Scene X--it's going to have the same goal-role-reversal, but will hopefully be a bit more subtle and a lot shorter. It'll have a lot less exposition because, really, we don't need to know as much backstory as I have personally figured out, does it? And I caught a bunch of typos, repeating words, and other infelicities to fix.

And I realized all over again that serious work on finishable fiction is one of the few things guaranteed to leave me feeling good at the end of a day. So. More of that, yes? Yes. And maybe not just on weekdays.

Wait, I've got it! I've got it I've got it I've--

Pause. OK. At Moonlight Diner again, having dropped Cate off at the airport and waiting for John to tell me he's ready to be picked up from work. Trying to finish this dang draft like NOW. (Also eating the Smothered Fries, which are Smothered in cheese and green chili. The dish is not terrific, but it's redeemable and filling. I swear, it's like I could start a whole new blog just about working my way through their menu while spending 3-hour stints writing at their 4-top behind the bar-side register station.)

So. Struggling my way through the rewrite of Scene VI. ("Icicles filled the long window / With barbaric glass. / The shadow of the blackbird / Crossed it, to and fro.") It's no longer a psychologist telling the narrator that fear obscures our clear vision until we see demons where there are only mundane difficulties. Now it's the narrator's lover, pissed off at having their romantic evening interrupted by another fit of novel revision, saying that the narrator needs to adjust some priorities. (While the narrator gazes out the window at starlings crossing behind ice and in front of the sun.) And the narrator's like, "Oops, sorry, demon's waking up again, I gotta go; also, you left your oven on and the demon is thinking about burning you up in a house fire. Don't let that happen, kthxbai."

About halfway through writing that scene, I got good and stuck trying to make the phone conversation work. Also, a large family gathering eating at the next table had begun to emit exceedingly distressing noises. Look, people: What did I do to deserve your kid's screaming tantrum? I mean, really? Thank goodness for headphones and Kate Bush's The Dreaming. Turned up quite loud.

Anyway, got through that. Then got through the next couple scenes in which the writer/demon relationship becomes sort of writer/demonic Muse ("But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know"). The pacing of that arc seemed to slightly shift as I got through Scenes VIII and IX. I started to like what I was seeing.

Then in was time for Scene X, originally another psych session. The narrator had decided to tell the shrink about the first time the demon became apparent, expecting to finally break through that professional skeptism ("Even the bawds of euphony / Would cry out sharply") and get some real help. Naturally, I'll be replacing that with another phone call with the lover. Or ex. Their relationship is a little bit of both now.

And I realized--their roles are reversed! Now it's the narrator who is looking forward to the demon's voice, because it tells her how the write--and finish, uh-oh--the book... and it's the lover who is now convinced that there's something weird going on. "You were right--the oven was on. How did you know? Is there really something to this? Oh my God, you must not finish that book!"

You want Process? I WILL GIVE YOU PROCESS.

(Wow, it's a good thing that burbling about The Process doesn't jinx The Process. Yay.)

HAY YOU! Yeah, you know who you are. You will have email REAL SOON NOW.

Still not done. Still not done. This story isn't easy. It ought to have been easy. Why is it not easy?

So I read it aloud to my writing class last night. And I got some great feedback. I also got a big honkin' case of Doubt and Uncertainty. Like you do.

I mean, look. The narrator's back-story with the monster at the end of the book. Did it actually do something before, and if so, how'd it get reigned in again? Or did it just threaten really loudly, and if so, how, in the absence of some tragedy to remind the narrator that This Could Happen Again And It Will Be Your Fault, do I raise the stakes? Why is every option flawed? Why does every single idea fail to satisfy? Also, everyone's right--the shrink character is one character too many. Maybe replace scenes 6 and 10 with phone calls between the narrator and the lover. When in doubt, condense characters. But what does that make the scenes do now?

The last story I wrote was easy and it came out beautifully and it sold on its first time in the slush. Why can't this one be easy?

Excuse me, I'll just be over here whining.

(In better news, my writing classmates agreed that the connection to the Stevens poem isn't glaringly obvious, not even to those who are familiar with the poem. And they suggested a line from stanza 1 for a title: "The Only Moving Thing." I think it works.)

Finished a draft yesterday. Still don't know quite what this story is, other than bloated; don't really know what its title wants to be, other than "not that." To fix the one, I'm doing a "quick" (ha!) revision pass this afternoon before emailing it to, or reading it to, friends and colleagues. To fix the latter, I plan on throwing this piece on the mercy of said friends and colleagues.

In case anyone's interested, Open Office Writer will open WordPerfect 5.1 documents remarkably well. However, the conversion is not without its flaws. All table structures in my WP51 document get visible borders that then have to be removed...

1. Right-click inside table
2. Select "Table..."
3. Under "Borders" tab, in the Line/Style section, choose "None"

...and all tabs need to be reinserted, which is most easily done using RegEx Find & Replace. Which isn't simple. Open Office Writer's implementation of Regular Expressions is... non-standard. The expression "\n" means "paragraph mark" in the Replace With field, but "newline" in the Search Field. Or something. So apparently the thing to do is search for the first character of each line and prepend a tab:

Search For: ^(.)
Replace With: \t$1

And you should definitely not click "Replace All." This ends in tears. Have patience and perform the replacement one at a time; when it finds a new line that should not begin with a tab, press the "Find" button to skip this instance and move on to the next.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a novel-length document. Probably refrain from using WP51 for my draft revisions, I guess. Just export RTF from yWriter and open the RTF with Open Office. Which is fine for novels written in yWriter; not so fine for novels written in WP51.

This is one of those "bridges" you only "cross" upon arrival, so I hear.

Which is about it. Neither the story nor the scarf are finished. However, significant progress was made on both.

Most of the progress on the story happened at the Moonlight Diner, a sort of 50s/retro-themed greasy spoon on Tower Road near Denver International Airport. Their food is... OK. Well, it's either acceptable or abysmal depending on what you order. Steak and eggs ordered "eggs over easy and steak as rare as you're allowed" became eggs over medium/hard and a steak that had only hints of pink in the center and was dry and tough like leather. On the other hand, the taco potato skins are absolutely loaded and yummy. And they play a mix of oldies and 80s on their stereo, which is fun, but--what's up with 80s music being the new oldies? I'm only 34, I'm too young to feel old, stop trying to make me feel old!

Anyway, the quality of the food was of no import yesterday. I had already treated myself to Popeye's Fried Chicken for lunch. (New Orleans homesickness ahoy!) All I wanted never-ending coffee and a place to work on my story for three hours. Also wi-fi to check on the status of Southwest Airlines flight 502. I was there to pick up the marvelous Cate Hirshbiel, of course. Have you met Cate? Blog, re-meet Cate. She continues to be awesome.

So by the time her plane was due, I'd written the first five scenes. Of 13, of course. And by the time she called to say she'd got her luggage and was ready for pick-up, I'd spent the last fifteen minutes just gabbing with the waiter about, oh, stuff. Y'know. Driving in the snow, how video games can prepare you for real life situations, how people get very confused about tipping etiquette because it's so hush-hush in polite conversation, how airport security constantly strives to surprise us with more stupid where you'd have thought they couldn't possibly fit more stupid, how trains can be nice if you like trains.

As for the scarf, I knit on that at the Spin-In until my hands were done with knitting and I was ready for bed. Then I went home and crashed, hard.

Today I have until about 3:30 to work on the story some more. We'll see how far we get. The scarf has a new deadline of next Spin-In, when we'll leave our projects at the store to make a big show-off presentation for customers to ooh and aah at.

And tonight it's All You Can Eat Sushi at Japango with John and Cate and Avedan! Yayyyy!

Today's the day. Today's the day I get a full draft of the new story complete. Today's also the day I come up with a good title for it--"The Monster at the End of the Book" is cute, the way it nods comfortably at Grover in the Sesame Street Golden Books story of the same name, but it's not at all right for this story.

Yesterday was the day I think I figured it out. Also the day I remembered how my spinning wheel makes a great platform for Meditation For Inspiration. Remember that? I hadn't.

But I remembered I had to finish spinning my portion of the group project fleece if I wanted to have a project to show off to the group tonight. Last year, the spinners who meet monthly at Shuttles Spindles Skeins decided to do a group project. So a representative went to the Estes Park Wool Market and bought three fleeces, and at the next monthly spin-in we all paid her back for our pounds, or half pounds, of the fleece. The idea was for each of us to bring finished projects to the January spin-in and Rock Day potluck. As most people weren't finished, we get another chance at tonight's spin-in.

So yesterday I hauled the spinning wheel over beside my desk and spun the last of the singles. And, because I had the poem tacked up over my desk, I meditated on a different stanza for every rolag I spun. (Rolag: a roll of hand-carded fiber. A possible unit work in spinning.)

Read next stanza. Begin to spin. Repeat the stanza out loud. Think about its possible connections to the story, letting "blackbird" equal "demon." Think about more connections, letting "blackbird" equal "Muse." Think about the theme of the stanza and mentally sketch out a scene demonstrating it in the story.

Then, for no better reason than opportunity, recite the whole poem up to that stanza. I mean, why not memorize poetry?

I had exactly enough wool left to get through stanza 12. (I'd already memorized Stanza 13 because it so very perfectly described the weather we'd been having lately. "It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing, / And it was going to snow.") And I had exactly enough time left in the day that the newly spun singles could sit awhile before plying in the evening and washing the wool.

And now I know what I'm doing. Excellent. Presenting the Schacht Matchless as a Literary Composting Accelerator!

And now I've got to do it.

Hopefully I can blog again tonight or tomorrow morning, happily announcing a new first draft and a newly cast-off and sewn-up hooded scarf. Completing projects: good for the ego! I recommend it!