author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK, so, since the last time I ended a blog post with vague promises about "tomorrow," a lot of tomorrows happened, to nobody's surprise.

So what did the intervening undocumented tomorrows consist of? Well, some of them involved me driving down to New Orleans for my 30th high school reunion! It was great! Turns out, the people I grew up with are all stellar human beings and I like hanging out with them! I was in town a few days on either side of the big event, visiting friends and family, writing a little, skating a little, eating a lot of good food--all pretty much expected features of a visit home.

Then, on the Wednesday morning I was packing the car to drive away, Dad tested positive for COVID-19 and I realized I had a sore throat and a runny nose myself. Yup. I done got it again. Thankfully, the spread seems to have been limited to myself, my dad, and my brother when we had dinner together Monday night. No one else I visited that day or the day before reported symptoms. So it seems unlikely that I encountered the bug among, or introduced the bug to, the Alumni Weekend/Class of '94 Reunion crowds on Friday and Saturday.

This has been a mild case, as covid goes. And a good thing too, since I still needed to drive the 20-hour return trip to Boulder. Thank goodness for cough drops and hand sanitizer.

For my two previous bouts with covid back in 2021, I isolated in the office/second bedroom. But this time around required a more ironclad plan. John's about to host a small private gaming convention, and he needs to present zero risk to his guests. So we agreed that, after passing by the house for a brief non-contact exchange of goods, I'd check myself into a nearby hotel to isolate.

Annnnnnnnd I'm still here. Still testing positive a week later. I DON'T LIKE IT. But over the past couple days I've regained enough energy and physical well-being to sit up and play games on the computer and even write! Yes! Today's been especially good. Got a full "morning shift" in, took a guilt-free nap, and now here I am writing a blog post like I haven't done since February.

Now, at the end of that previous blog post, I suggested I might get back to talking about actually writing. AND SO I SHALL. Sort of. Here we go:

Barbara Baig's How to Be a Writer
(Being a Rather Grumpy Book Review)

So I recently had occasion to install Google Play Books, and it turns out that when you install Google Play Books, you get a bunch of freebies. Well, I did, anyway. Almost all of them were writing books:

• Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Write That Book Already!
• Les Edgerton, Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go
• Barbara Baig, How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play
• Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Story Structure Architect
• Theodore Cheney, Getting the Words Right
• Marilyn Ross and Sue Collier, The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing
• Writers Digest Books, The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing

And then there was The Oera Linda Book, which purports to be a Thirteenth-century manuscript but is in fact widely held to be a Nineteenth-century hoax or forgery. From 1922 on, it got really popular among the Nazis. Why Google included that, I dunno.

But anyway, here I am at Isolation Station with lots of time on my hands, trying to discipline myself into using that time for writing, and I figure, why not dive into this selection and see what we find? I started with the one by Baig, because it sounded like it might freshen up my Morning Pages and freewriting practice with a little extra playfulness.

I'm 23% of the way in, and I don't think I'll be finishing it.

How to Be a Writer is basically an introduction to writing-as-practice and the value of freewriting. These are concepts I'm already extremely familiar with. Which is fine. I knew going in that I was not going to be the primary audience. But I did hope that it might offer a few new-to-me insights. Or at least be enjoyable to read?

Turns out, not so much.

Put it this way: Imagine someone said, "Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron were very good for their time, but their hits were 40 and 30 years ago. It's time to repackage their tools for a new generation. And while we're at it, maybe remove all that inconvenient spirituality. We don't want to scare anyone off..." Well, then, you might get something like How to Be a Writer... if you also had a very poor opinion of the new generation's reading comprehension.

Look. It is fine to devote a few early paragraphs to how writing is a skill just like baseball is a skill, and, like baseball, it benefits from regular practice. That is a perfectly cromulent beginner-level truth. It is, in fact, the argument for this book's entire existence. But, having stated it in the introduction, and then having expanded on this thesis throughout Chapter 1, why continue trying to convince us through Chapter 2? We are now already convinced. We do not need the point belabored further. We certainly don't need to introduce Chapter 3 with a paragraph-long quote from Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans about how baseball players make it look easy because they have been practicing. But all right, fine, include that long quote if you must. But then for heaven's sake don't continue for two further paragraphs that do nothing but paraphrase that quote! We read the quote already! We don't need it explained to us!

At this point I'm beginning to wonder whether she thinks her readers are not just beginners at writing, but also at thinking, that a concept this simple should need to be developed painfully, slowly, and with great repetition and as many sportsball comparisons as possible, over nearly a quarter of the book's page-count. Or perhaps there was an assigned minimum word count that had to be reached?

These are, admittedly, not kind things for me think about an author. But I am not best disposed toward an author who seems to assume I can't keep a thought in my head for five minutes at a time.

(To be scrupulously fair, Goldberg compares writing to running at least as often as Baig compares writing to baseball. But then, Goldberg herself is a runner. There's no hypothetical "when we see a runner in a marathon, we are seeing the result of months of daily practice" here. It is her own running practice, and her own writing practice, too, that she puts on the page. She is writing in specific detail from her lived experience, and not from an abstract course syllabus in her head.)

All right. Fine. Shifting from Goldberg to Cameron here: Let's say this book is deliberately meant to be something like The Artist's Way but for the two-thousand-teens. Why, then, having reached the 23% mark, have I noticed no quotations--neither the chapter-heading epigraphs or the "like so-and-so said" anecdotes--that aren't old enough to have been included in The Artist's Way in the first place? In fact, I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them were included. I think that's why I recognize so many of them. (Well, the McCarver quote dates to 1999. It would have had to wait for the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Artist's Way.) Do you think no writers have said anything quotable more recently than that? And why are all the writers you're quoting--not to put too fine a point on it--men?

(And why, for the love of little green crickets, is one of those men Woody effin' Allen? I mean, it's a quote about the importance of having a daily routine. I'm pretty sure other writers with less objectionable histories had daily routines in 2012 and would have been happy to talk about them!)

Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe later on in the book there are really nice quotes from Ursula K Le Guin and Nnedi Okorafor. Maybe there will also be insights unique to this author and to the decade in which she's writing. I'll never know, because what I have read so far has not inclined me toward continuing.

So, yeah, I'm sitting here in a hotel room, eating tonight's DoorDash delivery, and getting very homesick for my physical library with its well-thumbed copies of much better books. (I am also homesick for my husband, and for my bunny, and for the ability to cook myself a meal from scratch...) But I'll be there Sunday morning at the very latest. Until then, there's always the public library's online catalog.

By golly, there is going to be a blog post today.

Problem is, being all out of the habit of regular blog posts, I'm also out of the habit of regularly coming up with stuff to blog about. And it's no good asking myself, "Why did I start keeping a blog in the first place, some twenty years ago?" I remember exactly why I started blogging. It was a form of external accountability: if I blogged that day, it meant I had written that day, and I would blog about what I had written. So on a day like today, when I in fact have not written in any meaningful way, it feels like there's really nothing to say at all.

So that sucks. But--what the heck. Let's pretend today was worth blogging about. What all did I do today?

7:00 AM - My alarm went off and I got up. That wasn't fun. It never is. Getting up early is painful, like, literally full of actual pain. Nothing localized to a particular body part, aside from the daily soreness/stiffness attendant on having slept (approaching one's 50s apparently means one can hurt oneself sleeping); just the sense that being conscious at all hurts, and can I please not? Please? But I've managed it all week and I'm not breaking my streak yet, so, up I get.

There are consolations. I got out of bed, stepped over the pet gate that keeps our bunny Holland out of the bedroom, and encountered Holland beside the sofa, where he usually is at that time of the morning, waiting for signs of movement from his humans. He came bounding over to me and lowered his chin to the carpet, presenting his nose and forehead to be petted, please. I obliged. The look of bliss on his little furry face at such times will never not melt my heart.

After a few minutes, I went over to the office, set up my thermos for tea, and filled up and started the electric kettle. (Tea, also, is a consolation.) While that came to a boil, I did the bunny breakfast chores (gave him his food pellets, topped off his hay and water, portioned out his day's treats) then went to brush my teeth and hair. I transferred my laptop to the office. I put tea bags in the thermos and filled it up with just-boiled water. Morning routine: complete!

7:30 AM - Time to join my scheduled FocusMate session. My partner informs me she'll be off-camera doing her morning routine; I tell her I'll be doing my Morning Pages as usual. We each do those things. I fill up three pages with messy handwriting, using my Platinum Curidas retractable fountain pen and some lovely green ink. Then I review what I've written, especially in the margins, and from this extract a to-do list for the day. That goes in my Day Planner, which, under better circumstances, I would refer to throughout the day--but today I would set it aside and never touch it again, alas. Anyway, 7:55 rolls around, my partner and I unmute our microphones and report to each other how our session went, wish each other a lovely day, and log off.

8:30 AM - And here is where I lose my momentum. Already? Yes. Because I did not have the luxury today of moving directly into my actual writing. I had to go run an unpleasant errand. And while I treated myself to a delicious breakfast burrito to make up for the unpleasantness, and I was actually kind of cheerful about being awake and out of the house early on a lovely day, I got home exhausted and pretty much went back to bed. Until noon.

So much for my morning.

I won't chronicle the rest of the day, but suffice to say, writing didn't happen. I got up, futzed around, and never wrote at all. (Exception: this blog post.) But I did get a lot of work done on my new LibriVox project, so I can't really call it a wasted day. It just wasn't, properly speaking, the writing day I'd intended it to be.

But there's always tomorrow. (Unless there isn't. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that there is.) And tomorrow's errand doesn't have to happen early in the morning. So I'll be able to proceed from my FocusMate session and my Morning Pages directly into actual writing. Hooray!

Hello! Happy New Year! Happy new blog post! [Insert ritual self-deprecating quip about not having posted in seventh months, assume appropriate New Year's resolution as read.]

Things I did in 2023:

• Had two new poems published in Eternal Haunted Summer: "Fiat Nox" and "The Curious Incident of the Black Dog of the Night"
• Had a previously published poem designated a Rhysling Award Finalist (but not, ultimately, winner)
• Skated a hell of a lot of roller derby with the BCRD's "Flatirons Phoenixes" (A team) and "Boulder Bolters" (B team)
• Also skated in a mix-up bout in Salt Lake City and was awarded MVP Blocker
• Learned how to cook biryani
• Completed two solo LibriVox audiobooks: Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees), What Dreams May Come (Gertrude Atherton)
• Uploaded a whole bunch of Friday Fictionettes (but not, alas, as many as I should - I'm still behind schedule)

Things I would like to do in 2024:

• All of the above, only moreso; where applicable, on time
• Attend my 30-year high school reunion
• Attend WorldCon in Glasgow
• Blog! Here! Regularly!
• (Maybe make this blog look more attractive? Ye Gods, this post looks like ass)

To those ends, I will:

• Renew my intention to get up on time, that being 7:00, every weekday (thanks, Focusmate!)
• Renew my intention to write every day (and not just my daily freewriting and fictionette work either)
• Renew my passport

That's it. That's the blog post.

There should be another tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Good afternoon! Yesterday's episode of Story Hour went very well. I'm pretty sure I only mispronounced two words, maybe three. I read my short story "Survival, After," which wound up pairing very well with Brian Hugenbruch's heartwarming "An Elicitation of Thursdays" in that both stories just pile on the weirdness paragraph by paragraph until you just give up and say, "OK, fine, jerky is nocturnal and puke can have great handwriting, whatever, everything about this is perfectly normal."

If you missed it, never fear, the recording will live on for as long as Facebook endures, and you don't need a login to watch it.

So. Thing the really Second. Referring to two Things of great potential stress I had accomplished on a day in late March. One of them was getting my laptop ready to ship for repairs. The other thing was this:

I had finally decided it was time I stepped away from my volunteer gig with the Audio Information Network of Colorado.

I had been reading for them since... oh, I forget. A good few years before they changed their name from Radio Reading Service of the Rockies to what it is now. A few years yet before I quit my day job with Wall Street On Demand. So... 2002? 2003? A good long while, in any case. Long enough that, as much as I still believed in and supported their mission, the only reason I was still doing it was because I had been doing it so long. Twenty-years-ago-me had decided to do it, and present-day-me hadn't really reevaluated that decision.

It was time to move on. With fondness and some regret, I emailed my resignation... and gave some thought to where present-day-me might like to spend those eight-to-ten hours a week.

First off, the easy answer: More writing! I'm not going to tell anyone else that they should write every day, but, notwithstanding my recent rant about YES WRITERS GET WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS OFF DAMMIT, it turns out I really shouldn't. If I don't write every day, it messes me up. I lose my rhythm. If I take the weekend off, I tend to lose Monday too, just trying to get back into the swing of things, and then Thursday comes too soon--so much for a productive week!

So maybe I don't want to take Fridays and Sundays off. Maybe I can use those newly freed-up morning hours for at least an abbreviated version of my Morning Shift.

And. Well. Have I? Um. Sometimes. New habits are hard, y'all. But more often than not, yes, yes I have, and it's a good thing.

Secondly, there's something else I've been meaning to do for a very long time. Something else at the crossroads of "volunteer" and "read aloud." And that something is LibreVox.

Turns out, I like reading aloud, but I want to focus on narrating fiction, both for my own enjoyment and to strengthen my resume in this regard. So about ten years ago, I formed the intention of volunteering for LibreVox. I even made a post on their forum introducing myself and everything. And then, what with one thing and another, the years went by. I never even recorded a one-minute test file, which is the very first step volunteers are supposed to take.

So I guess now I stand a better chance of finding time to do that. Good luck me!

Next time: Hell, I don't know. Probably some whining about how writing new poetry is hard. Because it is. Stay tuned.

I have some more leftover thoughts from last week. They regard an incident I've already regaled y'all with before, but that blog post was more than three years ago, and besides, it turned into such a tangent during the initial draft of last week's "here's my schedule" post that I can only conclude that it's important that I get it off my chest. Again.

If you followed that first link, the one to the post from November 2018, you probably see what I mean. If not, 's OK, you don't have to. I'm going to rehash it here.

So, last week, while delineating the Afternoon Shift part of my Monday through Thursday schedule, my first instinct was to describe those tasks as "real writing." You know, as opposed to the stuff I do during the Morning Shift that doesn't really count as writing and I only do it anyway because I'm a wannabe-writer loser who's constantly Wasting This Precious Gift of Time and playing around instead of working. Well, I corrected myself and said "career writing" instead. But even that phrase is a problem. It contains a tacit admission that what I do with my Morning Shift is orthogonal, irrelevant, to my writing career. As though the elements of my writing process that support and enable the creation of publishable works, but are not themselves directly involved with creating those publishable works, aren't part and parcel of my writing career.

This is not an original metaphor, but: As well tell a professional football player that nothing other than the actual game counts as part of their career. Not stretching before and after practice, not cross-training, not sports nutrition, nothing. As well tell a musician that scales and arpeggios and practicing specific techniques are wastes of time. Unless they are practicing the piece they are going to perform, or actually performing it, or maybe writing a piece they intend to perform or record, then they're not really making music.

I know this. I feel it. Yet every time I mention morning pages or my daily freewriting or even the Friday Fictionette project, I hear those condescending voices in my head saying, "But, Niki, after all that, what time is left for you to actually write?" And feel obliged to justify why morning pages, why freewriting, why this weekly self-publishing project that I'm constantly behind schedule on and stressing myself out over, when I could be taking all that time to write and sell more short stories and maybe finally a novel.

Why? Because those daily and weekly exercises are part of my creative process. They are part of my practice. They make the publishable works possible and they are non-negotiable. And I need to stop giving in to the guilt and shame I feel when I tell my co-writing colleagues that I'll be working on one of those things during our next sprint. I'm going to feel guilty and ashamed, sure, because brain's gonna brain and what can you do, but I don't need to act like it.

(I mean, yes, I'd like to begin getting up a little earlier so that I can do my morning pages before co-writing rather than during, but only because that would mean two sprints available for that day's Friday Fictionette efforts rather than just one.)

Hell with it. I'm going to Own My Damn Process and spend a few blog posts talking about why these exercises are valuable to me. And yes, I've blogged tiresomely on that precise subject before. But it's a new year, and I have new thoughts about them. Or new ways to word the old thoughts. Something like that. It's worth taking a look and seeing what's filed under those categories in my head right now.

On a maybe related note, I'm rethinking what days I can blog on. I got so very much stuff done yesterday, just this amazing amount of stuff, not a moment of time wasted whatsoever, and yet I didn't get to the "daily" blog post before it was time to get ready for roller derby. I guess that means there really is no room in a Tuesday for blogging. So maybe blogging happens on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays? Or maybe just Wednesdays and Saturdays because Friday is a day off? Except I'd really like to post more than twice a week? Which I haven't in a really long time?

Argh. Look, I'm gonna feel it out and see what works. Stay tuned.

So yesterday I laid out my schedule for Monday through Thursday. What about Friday, you may ask? Well, Friday is a day off. I started to jot that down in yesterday's post, but it soon became clear that I have a whole 'nother post in me purely on the philosophy of "Yes, I do get to have days off" and I should probably save that tangent for tomorrow.

Welp, now it's tomorrow.

Here's the thing about Friday: It's full of things. It starts off bright and early with recording a couple shows for AINC, the Spanish-language programming this time. One of 'em has to be uploaded for noon, but I will not be at home for noon, because I've got my Boulder Food Rescue shift from about 10:45 AM until 1:00 PM or so. And then there's whatever groceries need getting at whatever stores. And then I am tired, so by the time I'm home and have put all the groceries away, it's nap time, like seriously, and I am not very good at getting up from a nap and being productive. Pretty much the whole day is shot for further productivity.

This is a thing which has given me angst and guilt over the past few years. I've whittled down my Friday expectations from a full day to a half day to just 25 minutes of freewriting, come one, can't I at least do that? No? Well, then, I guess I'm just a lazy good-for-nothing so-n-so who isn't really a writer.

In fact, no. Obviously what I need to do is just stop expecting writing to happen on Fridays.

It sounds obvious, yes, but deciding that is sort of kind of a breakthrough. And it flies in the face of the internalized Wise Writing Mentor voice that says, "Being a writer means having homework every day for the rest of your life. Being a writer means you don't get weekends and holidays." And whoever thought those were reasonable things to say?

(I honestly don't remember. I want to pin it on that panel at World Horror Convention 2002 that was Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe in conversation, but it doesn't sound like the kind of thing Neil Gaiman would say or co-sign. My impression of him has always been that he's far too kind to do the "You must do X to be a real writer" schtick. It might have been one of my instructors at Viable Paradise in 2006, maybe Jim Macdonald, but if so, only after he emphatically reminded us that "Under the right circumstances anything I tell you can be wrong." Because, again, I don't see Uncle Jim as insisting on Only One Right Way to Be a Writer, no matter how strongly he feels that a short story is a key lime pie.)

Anyway, I damn well get Fridays off. I also get Sundays off, because they, too, start with 1. AINC reading (the Sunday edition of the Employment Opportunity News this time), 2. roller derby practice, and then 3. a very hard nap. They may also, depending on schedules, transition into Quality Family Time. But despite the lovely writing date that SFWA schedules for every Sunday afternoon with rotating author and editor hosts, Sundays very rarely involve writing.

And accepting that no writing will meaningfully get done on Friday or Sunday, and therefore not guilting myself over that writing not getting done, is part of my Write Happier in 2022 initiative.

But what about the Friday Fictionette? You may well ask. And I will tell you. Here's the plan: I upload that sucker by Thursday, and I schedule it to automatically go live on Friday at 8:00 AM. No actual work on Friday required. Ta-daaa!

But what, you may then ask, what about Weekend Warrior, whose prompt goes live on Friday and whose deadline is Sunday night? If you take Friday and Sunday off, when will you write your Weekend Warrior stories? ...Well, I guess that's what Saturday's for, isn't it?! Sheesh.

I thought I'd talk a little about my schedule today, because it seems like a January sort of thing to do--not quite a New Year's Resolution, just part of evaluating in concrete terms what works and what doesn't--and besides, all the big kids are doing it. So here's the Monday through Thursday routine I've sort-of kind-of settled into for 2022, which seems to work so far:

8:15 to 9:15 AM, ish - Get out of bed and do the morning chores. Give Holland (the bunny) his breakfast pellets, check his water and hay and daily treat box for if they want topping off. Water the plants if they need it. Take care of myself, too, which can be hard to remember, especially if I'm rolling out of bed closer to 9:15 than to 8:15.

I am the least useful hybrid of night owl and morning bird. I stay up until 1:00 AM, I have a very hard time getting out of bed at any time, but if I don't get to work in the morning, work won't happen. I re-learn this lesson every time I sleep in and then utterly fail my intention to write in the afternoon. Besides, there are afternoons that don't happen because reasons. So I've got to get up and bank some writing time before noon, just in case.

Looking at John Scalzi's blog post, I find it fascinating that he takes a little time before he starts writing to check email, blog comments, and other social media. I have a hard time tearing myself away from those sorts of things with any promptness. Hours will seep away without my noticing. So I don't touch them until my day requires it. I will, however, click around a little bit on whatever clicky games I'm currently unhealthily obsessed with (right now the big one is Harvest Land, and if you want, you can shoot me a friend request via code ffp4zphx. I'll accept pretty much any friend request so long as your avatar isn't awful and your name isn't obviously a way to get away with something toxic).

9:30 to 11:30 AM or so - The Morning Shift. I've sung the praises of Cat Rambo's community co-writing sessions before, and I probably will many times again before I'm through. The morning co-writing session starts at 9:30 my time, so I log on to Zoom and get to work with everyone else. The structure is three 30-minute work sprints on mute bracketed by brief check-ins: sharing with each other how the last sprint went and what we plan to do during the next one. Generally, I'll use the morning sprints for my "dailies and weeklies," like this:

1. Morning Pages,
2. Idea generation (freewriting to a prompt), and
3. Work on the current Friday Fictionette.

But sometimes I'll put those off until the afternoon because I'm playing catch-up with some tasks I wasn't able to get to the day before. Like today! I really meant to write this blog post yesterday, but what with yesterday being a catch-up day too, I didn't. So I'm working on it now.

Noonish to 2:45 PM - Lunch break? Yeah. Get a bit of something to eat. I am very bad about breakfast, so by now I'm probably HONGRY. I'll also have some non-writing work waiting for me, like my physical therapy homework--I have a much better record of getting that done if I do it during my lunch break. Wednesdays I've got a show to record for AINC (the Employment Opportunity News: job ads from all over Colorado). And if it's January (hey, look! It is!) I'm probably participating in the annual Weekend Warrior contest on Codex, so now's a good time to read, score, and comment on a few more of this week's entries.

Now's also when I finally get to my email. And also play a little more on the clicky-games, because it's lunch break, right?

3:00 to 5:00 PM or so - The Afternoon Shift. There's an afternoon co-writing session at 3:00 PM my time, so if I can, which is not always the case, I log in and join the crew. For these three sprints, generally I'll try to work on what I think of as "career writing"--writing and revising stories and poems for commercial publication. Also submitting same, and tracking the results of said submissions. I'll also try to get a blog post in, like this one, but that is proving tricky to fit into the afternoon shift along with the rest. As you can no doubt see by the extreme occasionalness of this blog. It's a work in progress.

After 5:00: I Have A Life. I'm trying very hard to say that, at this point, the work day is over. And some days, it really has to be. Like on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I have roller derby practice (and yes, we are back to that after the aforementioned saga), I have to make time to get ready to go to practice (pack up my gear! change my wheels? have some dinner, dang it!), and I have to accept that no work is happening after practice.

In reality, on days that don't end in derby, I feel like I have to pull a third shift, an Overtime Shift as it were, to finish up whatever didn't fit into the first two. Or get to whatever chores I didn't manage over lunch. Or, or, or...

Here's the thing: there's always more stuff I want to do than there are hours in the day to do them in. I am instinctively uneasy with free time. So I'm trying to practice saying, "Today's work day is over. You have put in your hours. Now you have left the office. Rest, play, and do whatever it is tomorrow."

That, too, is a work in progress.

Well, Happy New Year, everybody. How was yours? I hope like heck it did not involve RAGING WILDFIRES. Because I have it on good authority that those suck.

(In case you were wondering and/or were worried, John and I are fine. We're a few miles north of the areas that were evacuated for the Marshall Fire, so our home was never in any concrete danger. THIS TIME. It had been so dry this winter, with very little measurable snowfall right up to the end of the year, that any spark could ignite the next catastrophe. We were fortunate to be spared this time around. We are also extremely aware that fortune today doesn't guarantee fortune tomorrow. It's kinda sobering to think about.)

I have a bunch of things to blog about over the next few days. Today I think I'm going to blog about New Year's Non-Resolutions.

I don't really make New Year's Resolutions. They strike me mostly as an opportunity to set myself up to fail. So much of the tradition seems to involve enumerating all the ways I suck, scolding myself for them, and attempting to be a person who sucks less. This is perhaps an ungenerous way of looking at the New Year's Resolution tradition. It is nevertheless representative of the tradition's historical role in my life.

But I do have some small changes to make to my day-to-day routine and to my self-expectations that, I hope, will make me, if not a less sucky person, then a happier person, someone who approaches the daily work without so much dread and self-recrimination.

I'm making some small changes to my schedule. I'll be expecting less from myself on those days when I know I'll have less to give. I'll be reserving more time for those goals that have gotten shortchanged in that respect of late. And I'll be reevaluating my relationship with writing with a focus on why I write.

This blog post by Chuck Wendig brought that into sharp relief for me: "Writer's Resolution, 2022: The Necessary Act Of Selfishly Seeking Joy"

I think we get caught up in the process, in the product, and we forget to identify and embrace those parts of writing that bring us true satisfaction and happiness. We started writing for some reason or another, and it's easy to lose a hold on that reason.

It's been a good long while since I read Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, but one of the bits that stands out fresh and sharp in my memory is the image of the author leaping out of bed in his eagerness to start the day's writing. And wow do I envy that. It's more common for me to wake up in a state of dread, knowing that all those things I blithely planned the day before have now come due, and I'm not ready. I'm just not ready.

I've often blogged about, complained about, lamented and griped about, my constant struggle with avoidance--with the difficulty of simply sitting down and getting started. And I have several strategies that can help with that, depending on the day. Co-writing sessions and their pressure to be punctual and productive. The "I'll just" method of replacing the Big Scary Task with a smaller, less threatening task ("Instead of revising the story, I'll just open the file and reread the current draft."). Letting external and internal deadlines convince me that I gotta do the thing regardless of whether I wanna.

But I wanna wanna. That's the whole point. Strategies for convincing myself to do the thing that I don't wanna do, they all sort of ignore that the whole root of the problem is that very don't wanna in the first place.

Instead of looking forward to writing, I'm dreading it. What a sad place for one's lifetime ambition to live!

I would like 2022 to be the year of remembering, in specific and sensory detail, all the reasons why I originally decided to be a writer. Why I wanted to write. Why making up stories and playing with words made me excited and happy. I'd like to recognize the moments when I do genuinely look forward to writing, and pay attention to how that feels, and why I'm feeling it, and see if there's some sort of anchor or trigger for that feeling that I can deploy at will.

And I want to explore the reasons for the dread, too. Like, what am I really dreading? Not writing itself, surely. What experience am I afraid of having? What unpleasantness am I assuming will be part of the writing process that maybe doesn't have to be?

I don't expect to 100% solve the problem of avoidance this way. But I'm hoping to mitigate it. I think that's reasonable.

Whatever I figure out, or even whatever I'm trying to figure out, you'll no doubt hear about it here. So, er, buckle up, I guess?

Hell yeah! "More tomorrow" actually happened! It probably wouldn't have happened if a friends date hadn't fallen through, leaving me at loose ends for the evening, but the evening I can't make lemonade out of those lemons is the evening when THE LEMONS WERE A LIE anyway.

(When and why did we decide "lemon" was slang for "a bad deal"? Lemons are tasty! They smell nice too! A bit of lemon juice in my water bottle before roller derby practice and my hydration improves significantly!)

So, briefly, to report on the Recalibrated Catch-Up Project: I'm still on track. For the November 19 release, Step 2 ("the real draft") was not finished on Day 2, but I did finish it up on Day 3. It's getting uploaded tonight or at the very latest tomorrow morning, and then it goes live on Friday.

Sometimes a story doesn't come together easily at all. Doesn't matter how long or short the story; anything from flash to 6K has the potential to be either a breeze or an ordeal. The November 19 Friday Fictionette was an ordeal, though not as "ordeally" as November 12 was. (No surprises there. November 12 was a novel-length idea I was trying to compress down to flash. Which: No.) And the difference between an ordeal and a breeze is in the answer to the question "Can I write a full draft in a single setting?" Or, for longer stories, "Can I go the entire session without hitting the 'I don't know what to write next' wall?"

I have a Process. It goes like this:

1. Think about the story.
2. Write the story.
3. Stop thinking about the story.
4. Write more of the story.
5. Return to Step 1.

That's kind of glib and not precisely accurate. It's more like, I have two active modes, which are "thinking about the story" and "writing the story," and I switch between the two when I get to the end of the progress I can make via the one I'm on.

Frustratingly, through, sometimes I can't make progress in either mode. That's when the passive mode, Step 3 above, comes into play. Go do something else. Think about something else. Better yet, go to sleep. Stop thinking about the story and let the story think about itself for a while.

This is what makes a compressed schedule for Friday Fictionettes such a challenge. If I'm trying to get one finished in three days or less, well, there's only two sleeps it can benefit from.

I tried to account for that these past few days by scheduling myself two specific sessions per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. (Monday and today, it worked well. Yesterday was trickier because I had roller derby practice, but I was able to turn the 20-minute drive into an active "thinking about the story" session, which got me a plan for this morning's "writing the story" session.) And today I got the last bit untangled during a sort of mix of thinking and not thinking--I mean, I planned to go for a walk and actively think about the story, but mostly I just thought about the crows and the hawk that I saw.

tl;dr - If I've only got three days to work on a story, my best bet is to turn each day into two or three mini-days. It worked this time, anyway.

Speaking of derby, I have derby news! We are hosting a public bout on January 8. You can find all the details on Facebook: Preps vs. Goths! January 8! Doors at 5 PM, First Whistle at 6!. "Preps vs. Goths" is the theme for the adult bout, but there will also be a JUNIORS bout (theme: Freaks vs. Geeks) and we couldn't be more proud!

Here is the online ticket sales page. Extra special hint from me to you: Using the discount code "Fleur" (as in, the short form of my derby name) to get $2 off the price of your ticket! (Discount code is caps-sensitive. Upper-case "F", lower-case "leur".)

(Do go read the FB event page; you don't have to have a Facebook log-in to read it, and that's where the most up-to-date COVID protocols for the event can be found. Those details will most likely be evolving between now and bout day, so keep an eye on it.)

It's already midway through December and I owe y'all a Friday Fictionette round-up post. But first, a report on the Great Big Catch-up Project.

There was slippage. There was significant slippage. There was sufficient slippage that I had to recalculate my schedule and my expectations. At this point, returning to my three-day/step process (1. babble draft, 2. real draft, 3. compile/produce/upload), I will be All Caught Up by the end of the month. Which is to say, by the end of the year. Which still gets 2022 started off right, but does mean a couple more weeks of this accelerated pace and prioritizing the Friday Fictionette project over all else.

Nevertheless, I did manage to submit two poems at the end of last month, log their rejections yesterday, and submit a story today. And also make this post! (Finally.) So my writing life isn't being entirely monopolized by the catch-up initiative. Only maybe like 98%.

So here's the Friday Fictionette Round-up for October 2021!

October 1: "Transplant" (ebook, audio) In which we flourish and thrive. She'd stopped being able to move her right arm at all a couple days ago.

October 8: "One Oracle, Two Swords, and a Thief" (ebook, audio) In which we're only following orders. He wondered whose death the Hex Queen had bound to such a banal purpose.

October 15: "The Old Weaver Retires" (ebook, audio) In which someone other than the usual suspects sets off on an adventure. She'd never enjoyed weaving. It was why she'd run away to the Palace in the first place.

October 22: "Revisions" (ebook, audio) In which time travelers micromanage your life. At times you grow tired of your advisers from the future.

The Fictionette Freebie for October 2021 is "The Old Weaver Retires". You can follow the links above to read it in the ebook format of your choice (available in epub, mobi, and pdf) and/or download the audio version (narrated by the author) regardless of your subscription status/pledge tier or lack thereof.

All for now. Probably more tomorrow. Until then!