author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Today I got to wield the hula hoe for my first time this season. Yay?

*pant* *pant* *wheeze*

The hula hoe invariably goes with hot, sunny weather. It comes out when the weeds pop up and the ground is dry and flaky. For me, it also usually means an aching back and blistered fingers, because I still haven't gotten this right. I must be getting better at it, though, because each year the back aches less and there are fewer blisters.

And fewer unfortunate casualties on the field.

To reiterate: The business end of a hula hoe is a sharp loop of steel that slices just beneath the soil through the roots of weeds both seen and unseen. It lets you deal with weeds faster than if you were picking them by hand. It won't help you with the weeds that are using the wanted crop as a sort of human shield, so to speak, but you can get very close to the line of the crop without missing a beat. If you're clever, that is. And strong. And skilled at maneuvering the tool through the dirt.

There are so many failure modes with this thing. You can be careless at recognizing which plant is the plant you want to keep, and scythe right through friend and foe alike. It's an easy mistake to make if the crop is very young and hard to spot, like just-sprouted onions, shallots, or other alliums. It's also easy if the plant you're trying to keep (burdock) looks, at least from one's standing-up vantage point, remarkably like the weeds you're trying to knock back (lamb's quarter). Then you can be clumsy with the hoe itself and let it slip into the crop line while giving it a particularly vigorous tug--this happens more often than not because I've given it a particularly vigorous tug, possibly because I'm fighting with the tool instead of working with it or because I'm trying to go too deep and I'm meeting too much soil resistance. Or maybe it's because I've just hit a rock.

Or it could be because I'm getting tired and hot and thirsty, and suddenly a five-foot pole with a piece of steel on the end feels terribly heavy, and both my back and my thighs are killing me so there's really no ideal posture left for the job anymore.

Yes, yes. Whine, whine, whine. Actually, today was not so bad. It was murderously hot and sunny, but I was wearing my Full Armor of Sun Protection while hydrating faithfully. And I wasn't at it for more than an hour at a time--an hour before lunch and an hour after. Behold! In the remainder of my day there was knitting, and bicycling, and going out with new friends, and no napping at all! Pretty good considering I didn't sleep well last night and then got up at 6:30. So despite my whining, the physical labor did not in fact kill me for the afternoon.

But even with as many seasons under my belt as I've got, I still get very insecure. I mean, at any moment the hoe could slip and I could kill a significant sample of the crop population! And I know I severed at least one burdock seedling today. Realistically, one is a fairly acceptable margin of error, but it's always sobering when it happens.

Look out, here comes your writing metaphor for the week.

Similarly, despite long experience with writing and revising, I still get scared I'm going to kill the story I'm rewriting. I'll go into the editing process certain that the thing I think needs to go was in fact the story's saving grace, or that in the process of tightening things up I'll remove everything that made the prose live on the page. Even now, I find I don't wholly trust my ear for Story. I don't entirely credit myself with the ability to tell the manuscript's good from bad. If improving a piece requires the fiction-writing equivalent of a sense of pitch, on some level, I'm sure I'm actually tone deaf.

This is very timely, because revising a draft is what I'm going to be doing this week. And I know that even a very clumsy, ham-handed draft has the potential to be killed on the page.

I have to keep reminding myself, "You've been doing this for years. You've sold stories for publication! Give yourself credit for learning a thing or two. If nothing else, give the editors who bought your stories credit for knowing good stuff when they read it." Or even, "Well, regardless, you have to try, because the thing isn't publishable in its current form."

When I start feeling insecure about my ability to wield the hula hoe without causing collateral damage, I don't just put down the tool and run away. What do I do? I guess I slow down. I slow way down. I make shorter strokes and shallower ones, so that I'm more in control of where the sharp end of the tool goes. Sometimes, if I'm not sure I've spotted the crop among the weeds, I do put the tool down--but only for the time it takes me to kneel in the dirt and pull out some bindweed by hand.

There's a parallel for that in writing. Go slower. Take a closer look at particular aspects of the story. Make a bunch of smaller changes rather than one big sweeping one. If my confidence in my "sense of pitch" is low, I can remind myself that I am capable of recognizing a tune sung on key--I can go re-read a favorite book, noting as I do those elements that make it work so well. (Or go re-read a fun but flawed book, noting the blunders and missed opportunities.) When it's someone else's writing that I'm reading, I never lose faith in my ability to tell writing I like from writing I don't like. I can use the act of analyzing others' writing as a sort of jump-start.

At least my editing mistakes are more reversible than my farming ones. There is no CTRL-Z for a severed seedling.

My goal was to finish this draft of "Caroline's Wake" by the end of the working week, i.e. Friday evening. I'm pleased to say I have achieved my goal. It involved less stress than anticipated, too. I got to the end of the scene that was driving me nuts yesterday; the final scene fell into place today easily and naturally, as a denouement should. Ta-da!

To be painstakingly honest, I did not meet my entire goal, which was the have the draft done and ready for critique. As I worked on it yesterday and today, as I babbled to myself about it in today's edition of the Morning Pages, I discovered some small slight issues I'd like to clean up before letting other people's eyes take a gander. The "hot and heavy" part of the seduction scene needs some cleaning up, as the same energy that made it effective and effortless to write has undoubtedly also weighted it a little on the self-indulgent side. (Please feel free to insert whatever innuendo you want there. Far be it from me to spoil your fun and tell you to get your mind out of the gutter. You're obviously having a lot of fun down there.) And given that the story plays around the edges of some taboo/squick boundaries, it's important that the reader realize, or at least suspect, that the main characters are Goddesses. I need to make the hints about that a lot less subtle. Oh, it sounds unsubtle here on the blog where I'm all THIS IS A PERSEPHONE AND DEMETER STORY, GET IT, GET IT? But things are more ambiguous on the page. Which means that certain things a reader would kind of let fly because Oh, We're In Mythology Headspace, It's OK might instead make the reader go What? No. Just NO.

So there's still a lot of "get it right" work to do next week. But that's OK, because the "get it written" part is solidly done. And that's a huge relief.

Meanwhile--hooray weekend! And it's a weekend with no roller derby practice, because the league observes Father's Day as a holiday. Much as I love derby, it's nice to get a Sunday off and relax. But it will not be an entirely non-skating weekend, because I'll be rolling around during the G'Knight Ride festivities. Wanna come eat good food, drink a beer, jam to some great local music, and watch a roller derby mini-bout? It'll be in Roosevelt Park, in Longmont, 900 Longs Peak Avenue. The demo bout will be at 4 PM, Saturday the 14th, on the Roosevelt Pavillion. See you there!

Well, that was easy. All I had to do was have Andy wash some dishes.

That's a little glib, admittedly. There's a bit more to it than that. What it really came down to was remembering that he's a character, not a stereotype. And, despite my best intentions, I was alternately writing him as a stereotypically sloppy drunk or a stereotypically sleazy pick-up artist. But the initial detail I changed that turned him from a stereotype back into a character, was having Demi come back upstairs and find him not lounging around suggestively on the couch but instead cleaning up the mess left from the party. Hey, he genuinely wants to help. He's got entitlement complexes out the wazoo which have led him to do something very horrible indeed, but his conscience won't let him leave Demi to clean up dirty dishes and broken glass alone. Characters are complex, y'all.

This required rewriting all the stage directions in the beginning of that scene. In doing so, I realized another mistake I'd been making. In the second scene, Bobbie Mae gets drunk and climbs up on the kitchen counter, which results in a lot of broken glass and punch on the ground. In this scene, all that debris... has just disappeared? I certainly never mentioned it again, despite Demi surely having to walk through it to prepare their late-night dinner. Whoops. So now they're cleaning up that stuff together like a comfortable, domestic couple. Awww.

A comfortable, domestic couple who are, separately and simultaneously, playing very deeply in the Land of Creepy and Problematic Consent Issues, but still. Just for those five minutes of story time, before things get morally icky again, we can say "awww."

Once again, two problems in search of the same solution. Nothing there "just because." Previously unrelated things becoming related. Story getting tighter. My short story theory is invincible!

So this time through the draft I hit the steam-powered locomotive tipping point where it becomes effortless to type through to the end of the scene because now I know how to get there. It'll need some tightening up, but that's OK. I can do that tomorrow, after I write the final scene, which will be easy a hell of a lot easier than this scene was. Yayyyy.

Exit author, in the direction of beer and popcorn and that pint of mango chili margarita sorbet from Glacier.

This scene. This story. Ye Gods. Did I say I was generally good at writing dialog? Did I say it's usually easy and enjoyable? Bwa-ha. The universe is laughing at me and my dialog hubris. Because the dialog I'm writing for this scene, or at least this part of the scene, sounds like it belongs in a cheesy porno. You know what I'm talking about? When the only point of the contrived "plot" and stilted conversation is to get the leading actors to the bit with the sex in it? This is kind of like that, only without the sex.

I mean, yes, it's a seduction scene, but no, sex isn't going to actually happen. At least, not like the characters expect it to. Or maybe not at all. I haven't decided. That makes it so, so much worse. It's like someone took the actual sex out of a bad porno and left in the cheesy seduction talk. I think I'm going to go hide in a hole now.

The problem is, I have a checklist of Things That Must Happen, and I simply haven't figured out a natural way to get those Things to Happen. So every piece of blocking and every line of dialog pushes the characters around like a cattle prod and makes a dull, heavy thud when it lands.

Progress has been made this week, don't get me wrong. The problem of the scene feeling rushed came unstuck when Demi decided she had time to whip up a quick bearnaise sauce to go with the seared venison. And the idiot plot problem got a plausible solution when Andy broke his glass tumbler and sent shards all over the carpet. So maybe I can hope the problem of the seduction scene being all bad-porno-awkward will fix itself tomorrow.

It really is amazing what fixes itself when I just sit down and start typing--just trust the things that I already know to lead me to the solutions I need. I already knew that Andy was being morose and pissed off by turns, "pity me" with one sentence and "dammit" with the next; I also knew he needed to be the reason that Demi would lose track of a thing she really ought not to lose track of. So I let him unload. And in the course of his unloading, he rage-smashed his glass. Picking up after that mess--"No, no, it's OK, you sit tight and I'll clean this up"--turns out to be a really effective distraction.

I have this theory about short stories: Most logical problems in them come from needlessly multiplying entities. Short stories work best when they're tightly constructed, every element in them doing two or three jobs at once. It's amazing how many problems I end up solving by collapsing two characters into one, condensing two scenes into a single scene, or drawing extra connections between seemingly unrelated details. It's a good theory. The evidence seems to support it. The problem is, I usually don't remember it until after it's happened.

But, see, I remember it now. So maybe I can use it. Ask myself, "What details wound up in this scene arbitrarily, purely because I had to think something up and that's what I thought up? Can I make those details work harder at justifying their existence?"

Nothing comes to mind immediately. It may have to wait until I next sit down to write.

I don't like how long it's taking me to finish this story.

Well, I don't like how long it takes me to finish any story, but--one thing at a time.

I'm poking at this story at a rate of a half hour here, an hour there, measuring my progress by the clock rather than by completion, checking off the ticky-box for "Yes, I beat my head against a brick wall for the prescribed amount of time today" and getting very little for my pain. Something has got to change.

By the way, if this dissatisfaction in the face of my slow pace now sounds contradictory to my stoic resignation to said slow pace then, well, then, I contradict myself. I am vast; I contain multitudes. It is a human being's 100% prerogative to change one's mind, and I am changing mine about this.

Here's the thing that occurred to me: Practice makes permanent. You've heard that before, right? It's a thing my guitar teacher used to say back when I took lessons during my high school years. "Practice makes permanent. Not perfect. Permanent." Meaning, the outcome of your practice depends on what you practice, and how. You can erase your mistakes or you can entrench them. I fear that right now I am entrenching the frustrating and entirely unhelpful mistake of not finishing the damn story. I would very much like to practice finishing stories, please and thank you.

I'm going to lay it on the line here: This draft will be done, and ready to email to friends offering critiques, by the weekend. That's my goal, that's my intention, and that's my solemn promise that I'm making to myself. It's a scary promise to make, because what if I fail? But I don't think I will fail. It seems like an eminently reasonable goal. Hell, if I can't finish a draft in a week, what am I doing with my time? Seriously.

I'm not sure what that means on a day-to-day basis other than a lot of stress on Friday. But it'll come to me. Something'll come to me, anyway.

I hope it will be a useful and encouraging something.

As of June 1, my volunteer shift at McCauley's starts at 7:00 AM. There are all sorts of theoretical good things about that. Getting a goodly chunk of outdoor work done before the morning really heats up, that's one of them. Getting more work in before we break for lunch, that's good too.

Getting me out of bed an hour earlier is probably good? Maybe? In the long run?

Only that's not what happened today. What happened today is, my alarm went off at 6:00. I hit snooze, with the intention of getting up when it went off again at 6:15. Next thing I knew, I was looking at the clock and it said 6:30.

So much for doing Morning Pages before my farm shift.

Anyway, I rolled in about fifteen minutes late, which is about on par for me. It turned out to be no big deal (which is about on par for them). The staff still needed to have a meeting to figure out what their plan of action was. So they handed me a pair of snips and turned me loose on five flats of 200 tulsi basil seedlings each: "Just cut off the flowers and put those aside. We'll dry them for tea." When they weren't quite out of their meeting by the time I was done with that, they traded me a forked digging tool for the snips and sent me over to weed the berm, or, more accurately, the flagstone steps going up the berm. (In this case "berm" means "the slope of the hill that encloses the south side of the pond.")

Eventually the meeting broke up and they went over to the east garden for more weeding. Very particular weeding: I was only to pull up the thistle. They had planned on using hula-hoes to weed pretty much everything, but the ground was too wet for that after yesterday's thunderstorm. A hula-hoe is called that because its business end is a rectangular loop of sharp metal ribbon. It's supposed to slice cleanly through the top couple inches of soil, severing all the tiny weeds from their roots without unduly disturbing the crop bed. But when the soil is wet and clumpy, the crop bed will get disturbed. So we pulled thistles today, perfecting the art of loosening the soil enough to let the single thick root slide right out but not so much as to damage the herbs and flowers.

After I'd tossed enough thistles into the furrow to dry down and die, I worked on perfecting my own art of sitting down in the furrow without sitting on prickles.

I've been volunteering with one particular farmer, Rich, for years now. I started working for him at Abbondanza when their home farm was on Oxford Road. Then, when they had to leave that land, I followed Rich to McCauley's, where he had moved some of his operations. The upshot of this is, there's a lot of basic farm procedure that I know pretty well now. I no longer worry, the way I used to worry, that my very presence there added to everyone's workload--that the hassle of training me on every task outweighed the help of me doing the task. A lot of tasks, I don't need training on anymore. Where I do need training, the training can be brief, given in terms of the concepts I'm already in good command of.

This means that if I arrive in the middle of a staff meeting, they can put me right to work--often on a somewhat overdue side project that it's hard to make time for, day to day--with a minimum of pause for instructions. Hence the tobacco thinning a couple weeks ago, or the harvesting of tulsi basil flowers this morning. And after lunch it was easy for me to jump right back into the thistle-pulling without waiting for others to come along and tell me where to do it. I wasn't entirely sure, but I figured I couldn't go too wrong if I just looked for thistles to pull.

I'm kind of proud and pleased about that, having learned over the years to be useful without fuss. And I'm kind of touched and honored that they trust me with it. I realized today that, because they trust me, I've come to trust myself, too. I don't worry anymore that I'll run the whole crop with some newbie mistake while I'm thinning or transplanting or weeding.

These are good folks to volunteer for. They're patient, laid-back, and calm. I know that they must be under considerable stress, given the constrictions of time and money and materials and weather, but they've never handed that stress on to me. And their easy trust helped relax me out of my high maintenance, insecure beginnings, making it possible for me to acquire confidence along with experience.

So that's just something I've started to realize recently, and I wanted to voice my appreciation.

Observation #1: I rely a little too heavily on external pressures for maintaining day-to-day habits. Those external pressures work great--until they aren't there. When my husband gets up to take his 8:30 a.m. meeting-over-the-phone, I get up and do my morning pages. If my husband is not feeling well and takes a day off from work, when he turns off the alarm and goes back to sleep, so, apparently, do I.

Observation #1, addendum (a): I can do my morning pages in as little as 20 minutes, if hastily made lunch plans with a friend require it.

Observation #2: It is quite possible to achieve a 5-hour writing day and still not manage to touch the short story that so painfully requires work if one gets super-perfectionist with one's content writing. "But I need to put together a slideshow! Examiner is offering a slideshow incentive! And it can't just be screenshots from the game--that's boring--I need to mark it up with borders and circles and areas of artificial brightness and side-by-side compare/contrasts, and, oooh, an imaginative collage illustrating that humorous bit at the end!"

Observation #2, addendum (a): If the homebrew RSS is bootched, the Examiner articles stop re-broadcasting to Facebook and Twitter, which rather makes the "incentive for slideshows that receive X-amount of social media visits" moot.

Observation #2, addendum (b): It's kind of cheating to count time spent troubleshooting the bootched RSS toward the day's writing hours, isn't it?

Observation #3: Playing Puzzle Pirates while reading shows for AINC can be done! But how efficient it is depends on what kind of activities the pirate indulges in. If it's a long solo pillage from Marlowe to Nunataq, and the reading is in Spanish, well, 30 minutes of reading can take something like two hours.

Observation #3, addendum (a): It's past 11:00 PM? When did that happen? Crap-buckets! And I have to be up early tomorrow--

One of the earliest pieces of advice a new writer often gets is, "Finish it first. Then edit." There's a good reason for that. It's a corrective for the writer who can't seem to finish anything. If you keep revising Chapter 1 and never get to Chapter 3, or if you've never actually reached THE END on anything longer than a 500-word flash story, then that advice is probably what you need to hear. Alternately: "Don't worry about getting it right, just get it written."

I have benefited from that advice. When I was just starting out with short stories, and then later when I was getting over my twenty-year delusion that "I just don't have novel-length ideas," it was exactly the right advice for me.

Today it was absolutely worthless.

Well. Not exactly. But today I finally admitted it wasn't the right strategy for where I'm at in "Caroline's Wake." I've been trying to use that strategy to get to the end of the current draft, but it's only getting me to the next potential answer to the question "Why is it crappy and can I make it stop?" This is not a bad place to get to! But I can't keep going forward from there. Instead, I have to stop and apply the newly discovered answer to the place where it goes. Then I have to micro-revise everything forward from the place where it went to the place where I left off. And then I can go forward, at least until I stumble upon the next anti-crappiness antidote I need to apply to some other bit I thought I was done with.

That probably didn't make sense. Trying again.

Here is how I would much rather create the current draft: "Thing [A] happens, which leads to thing [B], then embarrassingly terrible dialog [C] that no one will ever read if I can help it, and then other thing [D] happening, also more awful words spoken by two-dimensional characters [X] and [Y], and then the big thing happens." If I could do it that way, why then I would reach THE END. Also drafting and revision would be easily separable tasks, discrete items on a checklist I can check off. I like checking items off checklists.

But here instead is what's happening: "Thing [A] happens, which leads to thing [B], then embarrassingly terrible dia-- Hey! This dialog wouldn't be nearly as embarrassingly terrible if it could take into account that thing [A] happened in a slightly different way from how I've got it. Awesome! OK. So. Thing [A] happens in a slightly different way, which leads to thing [B] happening in a somewhat improved way, and the there's some less embarrassingly terrible dialog [C] that might someday be worth putting in front of an audience, and then other thing [D] happens but wait a moment, if I can also incorporate improvement [xyz] into thing [B]..."

That probably didn't make sense either, but I'm going to leave it there. In any case, I know what I mean. And what I mean is, it's a slow damn way to work--too bad right now it seems to be the only way to work.

Two inches forward, one inch back.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

On the plus side, what with all that lathering and rinsing, I can at least look forward to a clean draft. Get it? Ha-ha? Ha.

I have no critters to report on today. Oh, well, there was a bee in the house--clearly, the bees are still getting in; they have not been replaced with bats in the style of traditional cumulative narratives, e.g. "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly." Alas, for bats are way cooler to encounter up close, and, rabies notwithstanding, far less scary. They don't have stingers. Barbed stingers that keep actively pumping venom into you after being detached from the dying bee. And randomly finding dead bees around the house? Not much better! I suffer from a low-grade constant background-noise-level fear that I will step barefoot on a bee that got into the house and died. I seriously got stung that way once. This was back when we lived in Oregon, more than a decade ago. The memory remains fresh.

That said, it's probably the bat (and attendant rabies concerns) that will get our homeowners' association management to take seriously my complaints that the roof isn't critter-tight. Bats are a Big Deal, while bees are seen as just a fact of life--despite the fact that more people die or require emergency care from bee stings in a year (thanks to allergies which John and I fortunately do not have) than have been known to contract rabies in the past twenty.

I have this to report: The story persists in not being easy. Remember how I said I was just going to have to slap some awful dialog on the page and see where it takes me? It is horrible dialog. It's cringingly bad. It makes me not want to look at it ever again. It makes me question myself: if I'm having such a hard time having a character believably say certain things and want to do other certain things, is it possible that maybe the plot I've come up with is just stupid? Generally I get good results when I trust my dreams and turn them into stories, but maybe I'm being too faithful in this case?

There's nothing for it but to keep splatting words on the page. As an act of faith, if need be. And to resist the temptation to go haring off after the latest story idea that showed up, accompanied by electricity! and excitement! and NRE!, in my daily freewriting exercises.

I always knew it was hard, this writing gig. But why does it have to be painful?

Argh.

I slept poorly last night, and I'm going to blame it on the bat.

Not, mind you, on the mug of strong tea I had at 9:30 because "It's too early for me to be this sleepy." Not on a session of Puzzle Pirates that went until 1:30 AM because I couldn't resist just one more battle on my way back to port from the site of the looted shipwreck. Neither of these would have been a problem once I finally turned off the lights, lay down, and actually tried to sleep. (Trying to sleep is a thing. It involves actively directing my mind in useful, sleep-promoting places, rather than lying there resentful about the way it races here and there.)

But when a bat gets into your bedroom, well, that'll do it every time.

We still have gigantic holes in our ceiling from shortly after September's storm. Bureaucratic movements towards interior repairs have been detected, but it wouldn't do to get too excited yet. Meantime, it's becoming clear that the roof is not as critter-tight as one might hope. Several days in a row the other week, we were getting bees in the house, despite the windows being closed. They'd show up on the living room window, either crawling around on the inside of the screens or lying dead in the panel track. Our suspicion was, they were getting into the roof and then exiting the roof space via the hole in our living room ceiling. This was no great feat of deduction. It was like seeing rain and suspecting it came from the sky.

That the bat came in from the roof was even more obvious. We could hear it vocalizing from the bedroom ceiling.

Have you ever heard a bat vocalize at close range? It's not a sound you're likely to forget in a hurry. One afternoon a few years ago, we came across a bat clinging to the rim of a step in the apartment stairwell. It obviously wasn't feeling at its most chipper, given that it just hung there stoically as we carefully stepped over it to get to our door. I donned some gloves and gently coaxed that poor, tired, confused thing into our largest plastic leftovers container--the big rectangular one I use for soup--and then I coaxed it back out onto a support strut in the open air parking structure, where it could safely rest until it decided to fly away. It wasn't until it was safely installed in its new location that it took a close look at me (I was taking a very close look at it) and decided it didn't like what it saw. It uttered a series of high-pitched, loud, piercing shrieks that caused me to recoil like a snake just struck at me.

That was when I realized that what I took for "these weird birds that chirp in the middle of the night during the summer" were in fact not birds at all. I've been told that this vocalization is social in nature, rather than having anything to do with their echolocation hat-trick.

Anyway, that sound started going off at 2:30 AM and I sat straight up in bed. "Sounds like a bat in distress," I said, and went to the window. From that vantage point it was clear that the sound was coming from above me, not from outside. "It's a bat in our ceiling." And lo, the elbow bend of a bat's wing briefly jutted into view.

We tried to coax it out--naively, I thought I could get it into that soup container again and take it outside--but it was having none of it. It scrambled back into the tight space between insulation and ceiling until we had no hope of seeing it, much less reaching it.

There didn't seem to be anything we could do. We tried to go back to bed. But that bat kept making noise. It chirped a little more, and then it just--scrabbled. Now, knowing that the scrabbling noise coming from the ceiling is a bat moving around is kind of comforting. It's a lot better than wondering if it's a cockroach, for instance. (Not really a Colorado problem. More of a Louisiana problem.) But it is impossible to get to sleep if part of your brain is constantly listening for it.

But I almost managed it. Right up until the bat was flying circles around our bedroom.

Bats are really, really quiet. It's the most uncanny thing. When a songbird gets into the house, it makes a hell of a lot of noise, not only with its voice but with the very motion of its wings on the air. Feathers are noisy. Furry leather, not so much. It was so contrary to my expectations as to give me the weird impression that I was watching something flying in the far distance, despite knowing it was in the same room with me. Which of course made it all the more startling when the bat's desperate attempts to find a way out brought it suddenly close to my face.

There was no question of trying to get it into a plastic container. This wasn't a tired daylight bat. This was a healthy nighttime bat. It wasn't going to stop for anything. So I opened all the window screens, knelt on the living room floor, and waited. It was kind of awesome in a close encounters kind of way--I could feel the breeze from its wings on my face!--but it was also kind of sad in a trapped bird kind of way. Unlike a bird, it knew exactly where the windows were. But, like a bird, it didn't seem to realize that Here Be Out. It swooped right up to the open windows again and again only to swoop away once more. Every once in a while it alighted on a piece of wall or ceiling to rest for a second. Then it was off again, flying in clueless circles.

Finally it disappeared, not through a window but up into the hole in the living room ceiling. It found the space where the insulation had been removed from the roof awning that jutted out some four feet beyond the window, and it vanished back there completely. I heard a little more scrabbling, and then nothing. It was probably 3:30 AM by then.

I have no idea whether it escaped out whatever hole the bees have been getting into, or if it's still up there. I suppose I'll find out if it starts flying around the house again tonight.

Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll sleep right through it. Like I said, bats are super quiet when they're not shrieking at the top of their lungs. And I am going to be super tired, guaranteed.