author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

At the farm, I spent my first hour and some-odd there harvesting garlic scapes--the flowering stalk of the garlic bulb. I spent nearly the rest of the my working time there tying up bundles of garlic scapes and hanging them in the barn to dry so that they might eventually be turned into garlic powder. And when we took a break for lunch, we ate eggs scrambled with garlic flowers.

This sort of thing has an effect. I have showered and scrubbed virtuously, but the smell of garlic is still following me around.

I mean, I like the smell of garlic as much as the next garlic-loving person. But the smell of garlic itself is one thing; the smell of a person who smells of garlic is an entire 'nother kettle of aromatherapy.

Today was not a good day to be around me, is what I'm saying. Thankfully, I wasn't around anyone else post-farm other than my husband, and he is very tolerant of a smelly wife. As you can see:

Minutes after the BCB Bombshells vs. South Side Derby Dames bout ends, Fleur de Beast hug-tackles Worldnamer on the bleachers.

Worldnamer: "Good job, sweetie! Congrats! Er... you kinda smell."

Fleur: "I know! I smell like derby! Isn't it glorious?"

Worldnamer: "It's... strong!"

OK. But he didn't seem to mind my sitting behind him for pretty much the entirety of the BCB All Stars vs. DRD Bruising Altitude bout.

In other news, I've been slowly making my way through various Hugo-nominated works so as to cast my ballot. And I'll be honest with you: I don't always finish all the works in the category before I cast my ballot. Like slush readers and bookstore customers, I have a tendency to form an opinion before I read the whole thing, and sometimes that opinion is a form of "I've seen enough. Next?"

This is a subject that's been a titch contentious this season. I'm not going into the whole thing here (it would take too long, and besides, others have gotten there first); I'm just going to point vaguely at the part of the kerfluffle where a small contingent of bigots and bigot-enablers have been challenging "lefties" to honestly evaluate each nominated piece "on its own merits" rather than on assumptions about the authors' politics. Then I'm going to point at what they're holding behind their backs, which is the slate of works they campaigned for getting nominated purely based on those authors' politics.

Which is the long way of saying that, by declining to abstain from a ballot just because I haven't read each work start to finish, I am undoubtedly Doing Hugo Voting Wrong by some people's lights. And if it means enough to them to take up a significant portion of their brain with disapproving of me (and others) for it, that's cool. It's no more my business how they use their brains than it's their business how I use my vote. But I'm not going to change how I use my vote in response to how they use their brains, so.

That said: Here are some things that can make a work a work, shall we say, smell of garlic to my nose long before I've reached the end of the piece.

• Dialect so thick as to transform Character into Caricature, especially a racist and classist caricature.
• Persistently maintaining that thickly-spread stereotype of a dialect despite logical reasons not to, i.e. having a character painfully sound out the words on a page yet flawlessly transliterate those words into dialect as they go.
• Distracting me from the story by committing glaring factual error in the narration.
• Failing, after five chapters, and despite ample opportunity, to introduce any female characters who aren't A. objects of male desire, or B. secretaries.

These are just a few examples taken from what I've read so far. There will be more. There have already been more. These are just the ones that jump immediately to mind.

Lastly, not so much in the "smelling of garlic" as in the "just not getting my vote" category: In-jokes, cute Tuckerizations, scatological humor, and other flavors of funny that destroy my sense of wow. There were laugh-out-loud moments in works that I am voting at the top of my preferential ballot, but they were more ilke human-to-human humor, if that makes any sense. A self-deprecating turn of narrative, dialogue that's heart-warming as well as clever, absurd situations for the characters to navigate, wry observations of human foible that I can relate to--I don't know. Both humor and wow are very subjective senses. I'm sorry. It's not you, it's me.

I suspect I shall continue Doing Hugos Wrong for the foreseeable future, or at least for the better part of the next month. But I shall only smell of garlic until my next shower. I hope.

Today it's back to the print-out and the scribbling. Just the scribbling for now--no need for a rush job. The call for submissions ends July 1, Tuesday as it turns out, so I can finish up the revision Tuesday morning and email it then.

See, it's not that I'm putting things off until the last minute. It's that I'm taking advantage of all the time that remains. That sounds plausible, doesn't it?

Things I need to fix in the current draft include...

1. Overuse of the words "sudden" and "suddenly." There are other ways to communicate this adverbial property. Try a few.
2. Overuse of throat-clearing constructions: "begins to," "manages to," "allows [her/him]self to." Make each instance justify its existence, then cut it out anyway until each only happens once in the story.
3. Dilution of key plot elements and themes.

That last is tricky. I was looking for opportunities to make it more clear that the object in the wooden box is actually, literally Caroline's heart, because this is a thing that needs to be known throughout the story rather than alluded to obliquely until revealed dramatically. So of course I started noticing the word "heart" popping up everywhere. Hearts breaking, the heart of the matter, heart-stopping shocks. Too many heart metaphors, too many metaphorical references to Demi's heart, and I run the risk of diluting the actual plot element I'm trying to work with. So I crossed them out when I found them and scribbled alternate phrasings.

Which led to noticing other dilutions. Like, an unnecessary reference to Diana the Huntress, muddying the waters in which I want the Demeter/Persephone theme to shine clear. Like too many gun-related turns of phrase that aren't consciously put there to echo the gunshot that kicked off the plot. And then there's mentions of fire/heat/warmth/flames, which need to point clearly at either the literal fire in the hearth and the *ahem* fire down below, and not get thrown in every time the English language tries to build a fire metaphor. And now I'm looking askance at the multiple incidences of breaking glass...

It's possible I'm taking this "don't dilute stuff" thing a little too far. (Maybe both incidences of breaking glass can point profitably at each other.) Argh.

Good thing I've got all weekend. Well, not really--I've got the roller derby bout on Saturday and the WFTDA reassessments on Sunday. And Monday-farm-day doesn't generally make a good work day.

Well.

Good thing I've still got Tuesday morning.

Oh hey there. Blog white-outs are fun, aren't they? Apparently my code isn't quite PHP 5.4 ready, so I've scrolled things back to PHP 5.3 for now. If you can read this, it probably worked. (It's also possible that you're a visitor from far in the future, that being when I'll likely next have the time and patience to try to update my blog code. How are things? Who's president, and have we got flying cars yet?)

I got some feedback on my story today, and it got me thinking not just about this story but also about my writing tendencies in general. That's the best kind of feedback--the kind that doesn't just address the work at hand but also makes me a better writer. Or at least provides me with the opportunity to become a better writer. If I fail to avail myself of that opportunity, it isn't the critiquer's fault. He tried!

The thought goes something like this.

There's a "rule" in writing speculative fiction--and I use scare-quotes advisedly here--that you can get away with one, and only one, impossible thing. Two things and you lose the reader's suspension of disbelief. Now, this is a ridiculously simplistic "rule," but, like most "rules' of writing, it points in the direction of a truth: You have to earn and keep the reader's trust. The reader will trust you when you give them impossible things to believe if, and only if, you continue to be trustworthy when it comes to things they actually have experience with. Your characters have to behave like real people. Your portrait of a real life city needs to ring true for someone who's been there or lives there. Your portrayal of specialized areas of knowledge--guns, archery, horses, astronomy, whatever--needs to withstand at least a cursory fact-check. Basically, "this is a fantasy novel" can account for the flight of dragons that strafes Shreveport, Louisiana, but it can't account for the dragons having set aflame the county clerk & recorder's office in that town (given that Louisiana doesn't have counties), nor the crescent moon on the eastern horizon as the sun sets over the destruction (given that a crescent moon rises around dawn). And if you then have your main characters stand there looking up information about dragons on their smartphones when there are people trapped in the burning building across the street, either you've just lost your reader's patience and good will entirely, or you're one of the authors of the Left Behind novels. Neither is a situation worth celebrating.

Anyway. "You get one impossible thing." And I think there is another "rule" in the same vein, which goes like this: "You get one dramatic reveal."

Again, simplistic, but it points in a direction I apparently need to aim my mind. Because I seem to err on the side of the coy and the subtle these days, understating all the unusual or fantastical things that are going on in the story. This is possibly because my point-of-view character knows all those things quite well, and so it would be out of character for them to narrate about them too explicitly. Still, the result is undesirable. If everything is held close to the chest and revealed only subtly or at the end of the story, the reader has no certainty to stand on.

So I sort of have to decide which one of my unusual facts is the one to be revealed only at the climax of the story. The rest should be stated in a more up-front way, thus to do the work of world-building, scene-setting, and attention-grabbing.

As with the other rule, "one" is a simplistic way to put it. Sometimes "one" means "this handful of things that are all related." The main gist is, the reader has to be able to cling to something in order to make it to the end for the dramatic reveal. That is why not everything can be the dramatic reveal. Choose your dramatic reveal carefully, and put everything else in service to getting the reader there.

And now I am going to lose consciousness in 0.2 seconds, because I am that tired. Zonk

And yet more biking! This is getting to be a regular habit. It helps that today was Bike to Work Day. It was a warm ride from home to downtown, but I stopped frequently to sample the snacks and drinks offered at the various breakfast stations. Now if I can just avoid getting rained on while I bike home, I'll be in good shape... to go to roller derby tonight and really work out.

I tweaked the story a little more today (yes, after refreshing my memory concerning "The Red-Head Song"--Bobbie Mae might now be plausibly considered to be singing it to meter, if not on key). Mostly I'm just poking at it. A weekend away from it has not created sufficient distance across which to look at it with fresh eyes, alas, but at least I'm catching the odd clunky turn of phrase.

It's OK though. The heavy lifting happened in the previous weeks. All I really ask right now is that what I submit on Friday be a better manuscript than what I've got Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. I think that's reasonable.

I've begun expanding my day-to-day content writing options again. I mean, the ones that actually pay something vaguely reasonable. I have a lot of fun with Examiner, but "fun" is mostly all it is. I'd like to be able to make at least a little regular and reliable income, fiction sales being neither. So. Demand Media Studios, where in the past I've been able to earn between $15 and $30 for a 500-word article, is oddly devoid of titles in my approved channel at this moment, so there goes that idea. I'm investigating what it would take to apply for another. In the meantime, there's Textbroker, which doesn't pay a hell of a lot but is easy--most of its clients want blog posts written around random phrases they got off Quora.

If I exerted a little more effort I could probably find freelance assignments that pay better and might even be a credit to my byline, but I'm wary of putting too much focus in that direction. I'm very protective of my fiction-writing time right now. Getting to the point of actually finishing and submitting stories regularly, and staying there, has taken no small amount of effort. I'm not eager to make it harder on myself. (On that note--the space glue apocalypse story came back from its latest outing, bearing a form rejection letter. I shooed it out the door again.)

So... that's the state of the Niki, I guess. Um. How are you?

Despite all the whining yesterday, I seem to have bicycled almost ten miles today. About half of it was a sustained uphill journey of varying intensities. I'm not entirely sure why I chose to bike after the exertions of the previous few days. It was probably a mixture of vague guilt ("Really, how can I justify taking the car anywhere within city limits on such a lovely summer's day?") and an irrational pleasure in the picture of me pulling up to the ballot drop-off location on my bike. (Today's the deadline for the Democratic primary election in Boulder. There were only two contested seats. John and I voted anyway, because that's how we roll.)

I'm pleased to say that unlike last time, my copy of Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood was actually on the NoBo Corner Library's hold shelf where the email said it would be. After that bike ride, I'd have been rather irked if things were otherwise. (Public Service Announcement: The hold shelf is not for random browsing! If it is on the hold shelf, you must not take it unless that little slip of paper sticking out of it has your name on it! If you are checking out a book at the self-checkout kiosk, please notice if the kiosk tells you "You can't check this out! It is on hold for another patron!" Seriously, people.)

Anyway. Spent much of today's working time in submissions procedures. I got a rejection email yesterday, so today I responded as the freelance fictioneer is wont to do: sent that piece to another market, sent that market another piece. Then I considered the six drabbles that SpeckLit did not select for publication and chose five of them to send to another purveyor of microfiction.

Meanwhile, there's this other story, the one I'm contemplating submitting to Athena's Daughters II before the week is out. It's with friends for critique, all of whom I have, I hope, convincingly assured that they need not hurry to return their feedback before then. As I said before, either AD2 rejects it and I include my friends' feedback for next submission, or AD2 accepts it and I include my friends' feedback in a post-acceptance revision. It's all good.

But in the meantime, there's the small matter of AD2 desiring submissions to be PG13. That is,

Stories must conform to the “Indiana Jones” rule of thumb regarding, sex, violence, language, drug use, etc. We try to keep things here appropriate for most audiences, so if it’s something you’d conceivably see in an Indiana Jones story, it should be fine (i.e., melting faces are okay, F-bombs, in general, are not).

I'd like to register deep disapproval over the pathological idea that fatal violence is acceptable for "most audiences" while strong language and sexual references are not. But said pathological idea didn't exactly originate with the editors of AD2. They're already trying to push through another of the pathological idea sets in our society, that being that the one that says that female protagonists aren't interesting and female authors aren't important. One has to pick one's battles.

So today I did a FIND on every instance of the f-bomb and replaced it with, in most places, other forms of reference to the sex act. Except for the one where Bobbie Mae was re-bawdifying the lyrics to "The Red-Head Song." Now she is being just as coy as the original lyrics, only louder and with more floral variation. And who doesn't like more flowers? I hear that the two red-headed lasses famed in story and song like best of all to get... flowers.

Ow. Ow, ow-ow-ow ow, and also ow.

My back is sore. My legs are sore. Everything is sore.

It has a lot to do with roller derby, true. But, oddly, not so much to do with playing the actual game. Saturday morning I helped lead the Phase 1 class, in which I apparently attempted to assert my powers of mind control over the new skaters. That is, I spent a lot of time demonstrating a good, low, stable derby stance ("Bend those knees! Torsos upright! Get lower!") not just to be a good role model but also out of an irrational and mostly subconscious conviction that I could actually cause the training skaters to get lower if I just got lower myself. Wouldn't that be nice? For both them and me? As it turns out, I do not have mind control powers. But my thighs and lower back got a great workout.

And then Sunday we started off team practice with a 20 minute session of rotating off-skates fitness stations. This made all of the things hurt, y'all. That means I'm getting stronger, right? I hope?

So that was my weekend. Then Monday happened.

Mondays are farm days! And it's planting time. They're trying to get just as many seedlings into the ground as they can during the "summer solstice plateau," which is to say, the period between the summer solstice and the fourth of July. You can probably imagine the amount of bending/kneeling/squatting involved in working one's way down the row, troweling open the earth to drop seedling plugs in every 7 to 14 inches. But what you're probably not imagining is all the hula hoe and rake work that happens before we get to pick up the trowel. We had to "scratch" the beds, using the hula hoe to break the crust of the dry surface, soften up the soil a bit, and move the soil around to help reinforce the shape of the beds. Then we had to rake the clods off into the furrows. Only then did we get to put the seedlings into the ground.

There is probably a writing metaphor there--something about having to prepare the metaphorical ground before you can plant the seedling ideas and encourage them to grow into stories--but I'm too sore and tired to think about it right now.

Ow.

So, this story. This story that I began trying to write seriously since at least midway through 2011. This story that began with a dream from some undocumented time long before that, at least as early as May 2004. (At least, that's the date on the story's oldest draft.) This story that has been through multiple false starts and aborted attempts over the years to achieve a publishable revision of that original dream-scribble. This Gods-damned story.

It's finally finished.

That is, a respectable draft of sufficient quality to put before other readers' eyes--in this case, a small handful of friends who have been kind enough to volunteer to read it--is finished and has been sent off for their critique.

I will probably have another "Oh my Gods it's finally done!" moment when I finish the (probably post-critique) draft and submit the story to a market, mind you. (And that will probably be next week.) But just getting it to this point is huge. Once a story reaches the critique-ready stage, anything is possible.

(Just shut up about all the stories that have been through one or more critiques and still haven't reached the submittable stage. I'm getting to those, OK?)

So, huzzah and hallelujah! Io evohe and stuff! And also thunk. (That's the sound of me falling over in triumphant exhaustion. But you knew that.)

See you after the weekend.

The revision is going pretty well. I'm actually enjoying it. Shock! Apparently, once I have a print-out with scribbles on it, I lose that aimless and panicky feeling of Oh crap now what do I do and I just start following the instructions on the page. Doesn't matter that I'm the one who wrote the instructions. I just follow them. It's like magic. "Rephrase this as a statement." You mean like this? This is what you mean. "Make his voice more casual, distinct from that of the narrator." Sure thing, yup. "Simplify stage blocking in this passage." OK. "Omit this bit; it's redundant." Zap

I guess the workaround for my revisophobia is just that simple. Print it out and I can't help scribbling on it; scribble on it and I can't help doing what the scribbles say. That just leaves the first problem: Getting me to sit down to a revision session in the first place. I have no simple magic solutions to that one, although starting the timer on Focusbooster helps. Timer's running--better get to work.

I'm pleased that this draft is going to wrap up soon. An even more perfect market for the story than Sword & Sorceress has turned up, that being the sequel to an anthology I was bummed to have missed the first time around, that being Athena's Daughters II. The deadline for the submissions call is July 1. The maximum word count is 6,000, which conveniently aligns with my intention to reduce the story's word count by about ten percent.

And while I can't reasonably expect any of my critique friends to have time to read it--I mean, I can ask, but this is super short notice to request a critique--I can make the story the best I can, submit it, and either apply the results of friends' critiques to a revision before its next outing should the story get rejected, or to a post-acceptance edit should the story get accepted. In any case, the story will be A. better than it was, and B. finished. And it's about time.

Tomorrow we will return you to your regularly scheduled whining about the revision process. Today, we take a break for the happy dance.

About three months ago, I started writing drabbles so I could submit some to the all drabble, all the time market SpeckLit. For about two weeks or so, that's what I did during the half hour that I normally allotted to freewriting. It was a lot like freewriting--I used a prompt (usually the previous day's string-of-ten) to come up with an idea, and I ran with that idea for 25 minutes. Only difference was, I added a bit of whittling down and polishing up, so that when I was done I had a fresh new 100-word short story.

After those few weeks, I had a portfolio of eight that I was pleased with, and I submitted them.

Early this morning, the editor responded to my submission with an offer to publish two of them in the upcoming third quarter of the year, and a contract for me to sign should my answer be Yes. Why, yes!

When I know more--like, precisely when they'll go up, for instance, and whether the editor would prefer me not announce the titles before SpeckLit does--I will tell you more.

I do love acceptance letters. I love them all the more when they have the compassionate timing to arrive alongside rejection letters (yesterday I crossed another potential market for "Blackbird" off my list, and I intend to send it on a looooooong journey tomorrow). I love them any time they choose to pay me a visit. They should visit me more often.

(I wouldn't have whined very much. Today's revision session was actually rather enjoyable.)

I printed out the story, all 28 pages of it in standard manuscript format. (How did it get to be 28 pages long? How did it reach 6,500 words?) I always self-edit better from paper than from the computer screen. It's how I read others' manuscripts for critique, too. Put a double-spaced, 12-point story in front of me and a brightly colored pen in my hand, and it's like flipping the "editor" switch on in my head. The manuscript will be full of scribbles by the time I'm done. (I always worry that the sheer number of scribbles will alarm the author whose manuscript I just defaced. I have thoughts, I think them on the page, I think them in quantity and with great verbosity.) It doesn't matter if the story is mine or someone else's; the resulting forest of scribble is just as profuse.

Trying to take my own advice, I went into tonight's read-through trying to focus on one thing only, and nothing but that one thing. On this pass, that thing was making the house more of a quasi-sentient character. Basically, there's a bit at the beginning of the wake scene, where Demi remembers someone commenting...

that the house was "too big," that two women and one small child rattled around in it like the last three beans in the bin. Demi had protested mildly and with perfect accuracy, "It's everything we need."

Which, in my head, meant that the house provides everything they need, up to and including extra rooms for parties or a nursery for when Caroline is newborn. The house is almost a fourth Deity in this small, self-contained pantheon. But I never really followed through on that thought in this draft, other than having the fire in the fireplace responding to Demi's moods--and that could just be part of the way the weather outside responds to the fact that she's grieving Caroline's death. (Or it could be mistaken for a rip-off of Howl's Moving Castle, which would be unfortunate.)

So I went through today intending only to look for places where I could mention the house's supernatural responsiveness: the refrigerator always having the ingredients Demi wants to cook with, the wine cellar never being too small for Bobbi Mae's growing collection of home brewed beverages, the door reluctant to open when bad news comes knocking. My hope is that this sort of helps move the narrative into Mythology Headspace.

But the editor in my head cannot stand to let a thought go unscribbled. There is no way to get her to understand that, yes, that phrase there may well need tightening up, the stage blocking here does need to be simplified, the story needs to be shortened by about 750 words, yes, this is all true, but we'll talk about that later, OK? We are only concentrating on one thing today, right? Right? Hey, come back here! Where do you think you're going with that pen?

This is why the read-through took about two hours. And why the first round of revision type-ins can wait for tomorrow.