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.

So several things have happened between last post and this one--most excitingly, a couple roller derby bouts; most disappointingly, an abject failure to keep to my morning routine--but today I want to talk about/document/gripe about my poor flip phone.

Flip phones are rugged little things. I've had this NUU F4L for, ooh, at least since before the pandemic I'm pretty sure, I'm honestly not sure how to check. In any case, I've dropped it countless times, gotten it lightly splashed, kept it in my pocket during scrimmage, and otherwise treated it roughly. Through it all, it kept on chugging. But last night at roller derby practice it finally met its match. As I was sneaking glances at a web text in between drills, I wanted the browser to stay on and open to that page, so I left the phone open. On the floor. Next to my water bottle. Also next to the track boundary. During a drill involving extreme footwork.

Yep. Poor thing got under someone's wheels. And the interior display got borked.

Happily, it is a flip phone. It is not expensive. A new NUU F4L plus its activation fee comes to less than $150. Also, after opting for the insurance plan, my monthly bill is still going to be less than $35. We're talking a lot less headache than when John has to replace his Android. Also a lot less set-up on the new phone, since there are no apps to download. Just swap in my SIM card and the 64gb mini-SD where my tunes and playlists live, and I'll be good to go.

...except I'm not actually certain that my text messages live on that SIM card. I hope they do. I have a few conversations I want to hold onto, for sentimental purposes, but there is no option to save the whole thread or forward a collection of messages. All I can do is forward single messages to myself at my email address. And I'd rather not have to do that. Also, I spent a significant amount of today combing through text logs for people I hadn't added to my Contacts yet, and also for any photo attachments I wanted to keep (again, just in case text messages don't transfer over with the SIM card). Photo attachments to texts don't automatically save themselves anywhere useful. You have to highlight the message, long press the big central button, then choose "download attachment" from the menu. And if you're me and you're using this particular device, you do this multiple times per photo, because the phone has a bad case of button-lag such that it isn't always convinced I'm doing a long press, but thinks I'm just selecting the message instead, and then I have to hit the Back button, which, again, sometimes the phone just ignores.

With all this button-lag, this "I swear I am trying to push the button, I'm PUSHING the damn BUTTON, noooooo I only wanted to push it once" factor, it was, honestly, about time I replaced this unit. I'm just glad I didn't pull that trigger and then let the phone get crushed under someone's roller skates.

But now I am ALL BACKED UP. Text photo attachments downloaded. Photos from Downloads and Gallery moved over to my computer. Phone contact list updated and exported. Everything's ready to go.

FedEx tracking estimates the new phone will be delivered Thursday, which means realistically I'll probably get it Friday, which means that, by the weekend, I'll be able to see the corners of my screen once more, and small text on the web browser will be legible again, and maybe I'll get a few years without button-lag, which will be nice.

All the above complaints aside, I don't regret my decision to continue sticking with the flip phone. Not only is it inexpensive and rugged, not only is it of a size to fit easily in my jeans pockets, not only does its battery charge last several days to a week (depending on wi-fi and bluetooth use), but also it is not eating my soul.

Which: no shade on anyone with a smart phone who interacts with it most of their waking moments! But I just don't want that to be me. It's already kind of me, what with my constant laptop use; but the laptop introduces just enough friction that sometimes, when I'm out and about, or when the laptop's in another room, it's easier to just... not. So instead I end up knitting at the pub after practice with friends, or reading a physical book over a quick brunch at a local restaurant.

(Or, admittedly, reading something on my phone's web browser that I Saved For Offline Reading. I'm not made of stone, and Project Gutenberg is right there.)

One day, I suppose, Credo Mobile will stop offering a flip phone option--or more society infrastructure will require use of apps and QR codes such that I can no longer get by with Bluestacks, I suppose that's possible--and I'll have to upgrade to a smart phone and a real data plan. Until that day, I'll just keep toodling along in the low-tech slow lane, a loyal member of Team Flip phone, texting like molasses via KT9 and occasionally grumbling "I said H, I pressed H, why will you not---no, only one H, dang it--"

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!

Heyyyy, it's another blog post. Two in two days! Go me. Only I am here to report that no, I did not manage to adhere tightly to any sort of schedule on this tightly scheduled Thursday, so, y'know, booo.

I have some Excuses. Actually, I have one main excuse. You know how when something has gone wrong, you can say to yourself, "I will deal with it later tonight," but the Wrongness continues scritching and scratching at the back of your head anyway, this awful persistent distraction that just won't let you concentrate on anything else? Yes, well, I was distracted with getting my blog back.

(This is also why, if I don't manage to do anything else writing-wise today, I'm damn well posting this blog post. Because I need to gripe.)

I didn't realize anything was wrong until I went to post last night's entry. I'd composed it in 4thewords, no problem, copied it into Scrivener, yup, compiled to HTML for proofreading in Firefox, awesome, pasted it into my homebrew blog-editing web-interface, so far so good, and finally hit PUBLISH. If that sounds complicated, well, I complicate everything. It's my brand. The upshot is, the only part of nicolejleboeuf.com I've touched thus far is the private directory with the server-side password prompt protecting all the controls whereby nobody but me gets to post, edit, or otherwise fuck things up.

But someone else had already fucked things up, as I would shortly find out.

After I hit PUBLISH, the next order of business is to rebroadcast the post on social media. I have an RSS feed, hand-coded in PHP from MySQL just like everything else on this website, which dlvr.it scans for new material to auto-post to Twitter. But it doesn't auto-post to Facebook anymore because Facebook took away their ability to auto-post to personal pages years ago, and I'm just not dedicated enough to set up a Totes Professional Facebook Author Page. Sorry. My Facebook presence is just me under all my hats, ink-stained writer cap and roller derby helmet and witch's hat and whatever else looks must-have to my questionable fashion sense.

So I do the Facebook rebroadcast by hand. I head over to the nicolejleboeuf.com home page, incidentally making sure the new post shows up on the RSS round-up without weird errors (I need to fix something in the encoding, but until then I just avoid quotes and ampersands in the blog post titles), to snag the link so I can paste it into a Facebook status update. Once I do that, I'll note the URL and date in that post's custom metadata on Scrivener, and then I'm done.

Well. I headed over to the home page, and damn if it didn't say "Sorry, no RSS for you. Can't read the data. Sucks, dunnit?" Well, not in those words, of course.

So of course I panic. Not only did I hand-code this blog and the related manuscripts-and-submissions database interface (which continues to be incomplete, because I suck, which is why I still have to do a lot of submissions logging directly into MyPHPAdmin), but most of the code I haven't touched since, oh, 2003. And every once in a while my domain host upgrades the default PHP install, some bit of code or other becomes depreciated, and my website breaks. So I was like, argh, it's 10 PM, I do not have the wherewithal to play hide-and-seek with depreciated code bits. I'll deal with it tomorrow. And then I promise I will proactively comb through my code for anything that's depreciated by PHP 7.0, and then I will upgrade from 5.6 to 7.0, and I will be FUTURE PROOF. For some small segment of future, anyway.

Well. Tomorrow comes around. I get up. I do the bunny chores. I make myself tea. I do a couple writing tasks that absolutely have to be done First Thing in the Morning. (One of these is a short story critique that I promised a friend the other day. If I accomplish nothing else, I can now feel virtuous about keeping that promise.) Finally I pull up EditPlus and tell it to Open Remote via FTP so I can get some debugging done. There follows a period of 20 minutes or so during which the FTP won't connect and neither will my email and the domain host's server status page isn't even resolving but we won't go into that because eventually everything does connect and I find out the problem is both bigger and smaller than I'd thought. To wit:

The whole public blog folder, nicolejleboeuf.com/journal, is kaput. 500 Internal Server Error. Even on index.html, which has no php code whatsoever. It's not my code. It's something in the file structure.

A bit more poking around and dredging my technical memory for "how did I used to deal with this back when I was actually fluent in Programming?" and I figure it out. But because I do not assume you are fluent in Programming, it'll take some explaining. (If you don't need the explanation, you can just skip to the next dramatically single-sentence paragraph.)

So, remember that directory that's private? Where I do that first bit of blog uploading? That I have to enter a password into my web browser to get into? OK, so, that's enabled by a special file called .htaccess that lives in the folder and specifies stuff like who's on the guest list and what password they need to use to prove it. It can specify other stuff, like that index.php is your default web page and not index.html, that sort of thing, but it's the password protection stuff that's important for this story, because that's what was kaputting my blog.

The private directory's .htaccess file had been copied into the public /journal directory.

Very specifically that .htaccess file. I know because it said AuthName "Niki's Weblog: Staging Area" and everything. And I really must emphasize that I did not do this. I don't know how it happened, and I've got a support ticket in to my domain host to see if they know, because this sort of thing can leave a web developer feeling distinctly uneasy.

But the good news was, the solution was super simple. Delete the offending file, and I've got myself a blog again. And an RSS feed. And a blog round-up widget on my front page. And everything.

And then suddenly it was time to go pick up this week's veggie share at 63rd Street Farm, and then come home with the veg and put it away, and make myself some food, and putter away at nothing in particular, because I am now in the two-hour window between the farm and the roller derby during which nothing gets done.

Well. This blog post got done, anyway. Which is more than I can usually say for the Thursday PM doldrums.

If I am very good and do not join my leaguemates for beers after practice (wistful sigh), I may actually get the rest of the writing done. Which is to say, I might manage about 15 minutes on each of the three tasks I had hoped to get done. Which would be better than not doing them at all.

Here's hoping.

Today isn't happening. There comes a time when I have to admit that today, as a productive writing work day, isn't happening. That time probably should have been somewhat sooner than ten-thirty at night, but here we are. But I said I was gonna do the Friday Fictionette round-up for February 2021, drat it all, and I'm gonna. So here we go.

February 5, 2021: "The Talk of the Town" (ebook, audio) In which one might say, "Be careful what you wish for," but really, how was he to know? "Perhaps something can be arranged. It's been a mammoth's age since I've attended a really good party."

February 12, 2021: "Out of His Heart, There Grew a Rose" (ebook, audio) In which the brambly variants growing on top of a couple of graves is the beginning and not the end of the story. Thorn had suffered all his life from a sense that the world was broken.

February 19, 2021: "Stranger at the Gates" (ebook, audio) In which we show hospitality and question local traditions. She couldn't just leave him to be the next ritual victim.

February 26, 2021: "What Came Out of the Forest" (ebook, audio) In which we reap the benefits of another spring thaw. "The wood's never sent us aught of harm before."

"Stranger at the Gates" is the Fictionette Freebie for February 2021, so you can download it in whatever format you like for free.

So the reason today didn't happen--it's not really a good enough reason, but it's the only reason I've got--is that the day started off with a physical therapy appointment that left me exhausted enough to go back to bed, where I stayed for entirely too long. After that, I never found the momentum to get back up to speed. I'm not happy about that and would like to do better.

However, I did contribute to bunny-proofing the bedroom sufficiently to let Holland be a little more free-range. He's been zooming around all this unaccustomed new space and poking his nose into strange corners. Imagine, if you will, a rabbit sticking his nose into a corner that's full of cobwebs. Imagine the state of his whiskers. Now imagine him cleaning those whiskers off with his front paws. Adorable.

I really want to tempt him up on top the bed with me. I have treats for him and everything. I don't expect him to make the jump from the floor, although I'm sure he's capable of it. Instead, I've moved his three-story cardboard house right up against the foot of the bed. All he has to do is climb up onto the top of the cardboard house and hop over to the bed from there. But the most he's done so far is stick his head up over the parapet, look at me, then sink down again. Ah, well. He'll get there eventually.

Here's hoping that tomorrow happens. It ought to. I can't see why it shouldn't.

So, my brain's a mess. It's a mess for a lot of reasons. At least one of them has made the national news--though I am fortunate to be only indirectly affected, which is to say, I live in Boulder, so it hit close to home, but I wasn't in or near the store at the time, and the only person who was there with whom I am acquainted got out unharmed. (Physically, at least. "Shaken up" doesn't begin to describe their state of mind.) So... I've been able to slowly piece my brain back together over the course of the week, enough to at least pretend to be an adult.

Part the brain-mess is more personal; I've had several medical appointments this week and they haven't yielded the uniform lack of news I'd been expected. There were several small unpleasant surprises I won't go into here. There was also one big discovery that has simultaneously shaken my concept of self and also explains quite a lot, which is this: my hips are out to get me. They have been plotting against me all my life, but the signs of their scheming only became impossible to ignore this week. (Honestly, the thing where my adductors were screaming at the end of roller derby practice late in 2019 was probably related. But I was led to believe by an unfortunately dismissive physical therapist that I just needed to do more leg lifts.)

Anyway. You know how we say "temporarily able-bodied"? Yeah, well, the end of that temporary period is suddenly looking a lot more real and tangible. It's still a ways off, but to keep it that way as much as possible I've got a new prescription to pick up and a new series of physical therapy to begin. (Not with the unfortunately dismissive PT, thank you very much. I want someone who'll take my aspirations to remain competitively athletic seriously, and not tell me, "Well, you are getting older, you have to realize it's normal to start losing some of your physical ability and mobility range..." The orthopedist I saw yesterday was very much not about that; nor, he assured me, are any of the PTs at the center he referred me to. He also told me to stop calling myself "an older athlete.")

Anyway, so, this week has been a mess and my brain has been a mess. Just as I started piecing my thoughts back together and wrestling myself through the motions, I had the ortho consult Wednesday and got super despondent about this whole deteriorating hips thing. Today's been OK. Slow, but OK. Still, it was important to remember that "write every day" isn't an ironclad rule, and for many of us isn't even a healthy aspiration.

My brain is also spattered with guilt over having submitted nothing whatsoever to Nightmare Magazine. After that defiant declaration last week, too! (That's the problem with keeping an actually writing blog for the sake of accountability. Sometimes I tell the world "I will do X!" and then I have to come back and tell the world, "I, er, didn't do X after all.")

I'd like to say it was because I looked soberly at my progress thus far and said to myself, "Self, if you're going to submit something to the Big Leagues, you need to be happy with where it's at, and you ain't happy about where these two pieces are at yet." I probably would have come to that conclusion, had I sat down to work on them Saturday. But I did not. I sat down to work on them Sunday afternoon instead, and discovered the point was moot because the submission period had closed at 12:01 AM.

Lesson learned: If you're going to work right up to the moment of deadline, it's vitally important to know when that moment is.

And, well, that's pretty much all I came here to say. This week has sucked on every level, and I am not feeling very accomplished. BUT. I have gotten some writing accomplished this week. It's not nothing. I am going to focus on that.

Also I have my first physical therapy appointment tomorrow morning bright and early, and that's almost sure to cheer me up. I mean, injuries both acute and chronic suck, but having an active role to play in the healing (or, in this case, the slowing of the inevitable deterioration) can feel remarkably empowering. So I'm looking forward to that.

Food content in today's blog post is going to be minimal because I'm in the middle of revisions, and revisions are hard, and I'm going to whine about that.

Also there isn't much to say about the food, beyond that 1. if you're going to substitute oysters for shrimp in this recipe, you probably need to account for the oysters being rather smaller than your average prawn to begin with and then shrinking as you fry them. Which is not to say they weren't delicious. I would happily eat a meal of nothing but those oysters in that fry prep and sauce, noodles optional. But that would be rather labor intensive what with the shucking and all, and I have kimchi plans for the rest of these oysters.

AND ALSO 2. if you are going to put the oyster brine into the dish, you have to subtract an equivalent amount of liquid from the recipe, or else you get a slightly soupier result. Unless you just cook it longer, in which case you might end up with overcooked noodles. One or the other. (Next time I think I'd sub the brine for the 2 tbl water in the cornstarch slurry.)

It was tasty, though. I ate it all. And that's all I have to say about that.

So. Revisions! I'm simultaneously revising two things, a poem and a short story, both of which I want to submit to Nightmare Magazine before their current open submission window closes on Sunday. And the work is going remarkably slowly.

In the case of the poem, it's mainly that I've got an image I am telling a very short story about in verse... and that's pretty much all I know. The rest is the problem of UNLIMITED CHOICE, and I'm having the darndest time deciding anything concrete. So I keep throwing words and phrases at the page, hoping that something will stick. There's a lot of uncertainty here. Today's session felt a bit more successful to the extent that I reduced the amount of uncertainty more than in previous sessions. Hooray. But sometimes poems come easily and sometimes they just suck, and this poem is definitely not an example of the former.

As for the story--ye gods, this story. It's got a major pacing problem. The tension tightens and tightens like a good horror story do, and then all of a sudden we end up at the end without having hit the anticipated turning-point-of-no-return. I've suspected it will take a new scene to fix it, but without any clue what that scene will look like or where it should go. So I've been putting that decision off, or, to put it more generously, laying the groundwork for making that decision, by doing line-level edits to the rest of the story. And it's working! I have a much better idea of what the new scene will look like! It will look like several new scenes.

Did I mention this thing needs to be submitted by Sunday? Argh.

I console myself with the indisputable fact that I have managed to find time and energy for revision sessions four whole days in a row. Four! And each of those sessions has brought non-trivial improvements to the story. So while it's easy to think I've spent all this week circling around the real problem without actually landing--because I'm a writer, right, and writers are by and large very good at talking smack about ourselves, and devaluing our own accomplishments, and catastrophizing about what we perceive as our failures--in truth, I really have been making progress.

But progress is happening so slowly.

Look, I'm going to submit something by Sunday, OK? One poem, one story. But I might keep revising them afterward, right? Because odds are they're going to get rejected so I can submit them again. That's not self-smack-talk! That's just sheer numeric probability, given how prestigious the market is, how few open slots they've got, and the skill and talent and artistry of the authors competing for those slots. Hell, even if I am fortunate enough to make a sale here, there will likely be a revisions phase. So basically, what I'm saying is, deadlines happen but the work continues.

For how long? Until I've decided it's enough, dang it. At which point, back to the reprint rewrite. Woo.

Ha. So remember that "long and deeply satisfying skating session" last week? Well, it turns out that when I kick my own butt skating for three hours straight, including over less than hospitable terrain (the sidewalks! OMG, the sidewalks on the east side of 28th Street! Whyyyyy?), and then the very next day I take part in an exceedingly ambitious 40-minute HIIT workshop that's heavy on the same muscles I wore out skating the day before, the result is several days of being pretty much good for nothing but whining.

I have been a little more cautious in my daily workout since.

I mean, I'm still trying to have a daily workout. That has been my goal for March. A year of no roller derby has meant fewer hours of physical activity per week, and lower-quality exercise when I do exercise because I'm not a particularly strict self-coach. My endurance has suffered, and so has my strength, both in terms of both ability and muscle mass/definition. I am a pathetic noodle during the league's Thursday night Zoom workouts. I've put on weight, and though weight is a number that never meant much to me before, it says something when that number's the highest it's ever been in my adult life. (I've never paid much attention to BMI either, except to note that it, like one's credit score, is a metric that is notorious for being misused, with malice aforethought, to make people's lives measurably worse. But realizing that my current BMI might qualify me for the COVID vaccine a little earlier than I had hitherto expected is just weird.) And my blood pressure, which metric does mean quite a lot to me, has been up a titch. So! Daily exercise is my current goal.

Yesterday's exercise was going to be skating, but I left it for too late, and now it's going to be snowing through the weekend. Yuck. So yesterday's exercise was an extremely modest amount of squats, sit-ups, crunches, knee-lifts, and leg-lifts. Like, fifteen minutes, all told. Not an impressive session. Enough to say there was a non-zero amount of exercise in the day, which is the main thing. Today will be similar. Then tomorrow, being a Thursday, will kick my butt again, but because I won't come to Thursday's workout with a pre-kicked butt, I should be functional the next day.

Which is all very much the long way of saying "No, I haven't gotten back to the revision of 'Lambing Season' yet, sorry." I'm going to put that sucker to the side for now, though, because I would very much like to have a horror original to send to Nightmare Magazine when it opens to all demographics for the week of the 14th. And I know just the story. I think I can get it revised in time, but I need to start today.

(Oh, look! They'll take poetry that week, too!)

Meanwhile, I promised you a recipe. Or a method. Or a something involving chicken, mushrooms, asparagus, and cream. Here, then, is that something.

Step One: Read this. Then put it away. We're not so much following a recipe as improvising on an idea. This recipe is the idea. Also preheat the oven to 350.

Step Two: The big cast-iron pan. Bacon in little chunks. Medium heat until greasy.

Step Three: Chicken breasts, liberally coated on both sides in LOTS of fresh ground pepper (seriously, this makes the dish) and a little salt, on top of the bacon. While they sear, sliced onions and mushrooms on top of that. Eventually, when that first side has cooked enough, flip the chicken, let the other side cook a bit. Then slice it into slices. Introduce those slices more thoroughly to the onions and mushrooms and also the heat.

Step Four: Now what? You want to boil some pasta, but your chicken onion mushroom mess is taking up the burner you want to use! Guess you'd better just shove that whole cast iron pan into the oven along with the crawfish bread. (The crawfish bread was why we preheated the oven in the first place.) Problem solved! Now boil up that pasta.

Step Five: While the pasta's cooking, check on the pan in the oven. Add some cream to the liquid being released from the mushrooms. It'll look a bit like cream of mushroom soup. That's fine. Let it boil down. When convenient, return the pan to the stovetop and the heat to medium-high. Add more cream if you want. It's sort of a balancing act between "is it thick enough" (no? cook it longer) and "is it creamy enough" (no? add cream). The flow chart also includes "can you wait any longer?" (no? eat it).

We are not worrying about the chicken. The chicken isn't getting overcooked or dry in this mess. The chicken is getting braised.

Step Six: So the sauce is the right consistency, the pasta is waiting to be introduced to it, you're ready to eat. BUT WAIT! There's asparagus! Toss it into the sauce and leave it on the heat only as much longer as it takes to get the asparagus cooked to your taste. Then: remove from heat, sprinkle with parmesan, and toss it all about so the parmesan gets melty.

And now it's done. Serve it over that pasta. Eat it all. Lick the bowl. And save a little bread to mop up the pan. The sauce is really tasty.

Today's post is going to be a whining post. Be warned now. Or be happy, I dunno. I get a lot of comfort out of reading the whining of experienced and successful writers; it tells me that even they have off-days with avoidance issues and difficulty getting the butt in the chair. Which means my having days or even weeks like that doesn't mean I'll never be an experienced and successful writer myself. Indeed, I am now a somewhat experienced writer who is at least more successful than she was two years ago, so you may wish to take my whining in that spirit yourself.

Here is the whine: lately I've been having trouble getting up on time to make the morning co-writing session, or indeed getting any writing done in the morning at all. The lure of hot tea and a Morning Pages session with a backdrop of Rewarded Play usage points, it seems, can't compete with the temptation of staying in bed just a little longer, especially now that I've actually reached a state of solid sleep and technicolor dreams (which I often don't reach nearly as soon as I ought). So I wind up failing to drag my butt to the home office until something like noon.

This is a problem in so many ways.

It throws me off my routine, for one thing. You'd think it wouldn't matter--that no matter what time I get up, all I have to do is hit START on the established process. But no. The later I get up, the more slowly I move through the next steps, and the more time I lose.

And by then I've already lost the prime morning hours when writing comes more easily. Rachel Aaron, in her book 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, talks about the importance of figuring out when and where you're most productive--she is all about tracking your data and looking for patterns--and it turns out I am most productive in the morning at my desk in the home office. It also turns out I am the laziest night owl ever to attempt to pose as a morning bird.

So now I'm relying on the afternoon to get my writing started at all, which is never a safe bet. And I'll be relying on the evening to finish up the day's tasks. And that's even more of a problem, because by evening time I'm tired, I'd rather play, and, pandemic notwithstanding, I might just have something scheduled for the evening. Tonight, for example, was BCB Workout night. Whipsie Daisy led us in yoga, which was awesome! Convincing myself to complete the last items on my to-do list after I'd worn myself out with surprisingly difficult balance-and-strength poses was less awesome. And I've still got a half hour of reading to record for AINC before I sleep.

Eventually I wind up with this dilemma: fail to get certain things done, or stay up late getting them done? Staying up late is going to happen anyway, it turns out, which then makes getting up on time the next morning more difficult. And so the cycle is complete, the snake is biting its own tail, the downward spiral continues another round down the turning screw, etc., etc.,

All of which is quite sad and also pathetic. But there is one more stupidity hiding in this morass of foolishness, and that has to do with how I find myself approaching the afternoon co-writing session.

The afternoon co-writing session is great. (I may have mentioned.) It may in fact be a write-saver. For as long as I've separated my writing day into the Morning Shift and the Afternoon Shift, I've found it extremely difficult to come off of lunch break and get started on the Afternoon Shift. Knowing that I damn well have to get started right at 2:00 PM because that's when the co-writing session starts--that's been fantastic motivation.

But today, while I was considering the day's schedule, I found myself reasoning thusly: "Oh, dear. Once again I'll be pulling my first shift of the day during afternoon co-writing. When it's my turn to share with the group what I'm working on, do I really want to say, 'freewriting and fictionette' again? Maybe I should reverse the order of operations. It'll sound a lot more impressive to say 'I'm working on a brand new poem which I think I'll be able to submit tonight.'"

Now, there are valid reasons to reverse my usual order of operations. But wanting to sound more impressive to my co-writing colleagues isn't one of them.

(This, by the way, would be reason #375 that Morning Pages are good for me. I'm more likely to catch my really specious reasoning and correct it if I take the time to consciously discover it lurking in my brain.)

So, yeah. This failure to get out of bed on time is a problem. I have some ideas out of which I might cobble a solution, but those will be the subject of a different blog post.

A different blog post also full of whining.

You have been warned.

Welp, all that crowing about the Zoom co-writing structure-and-motivation for the day, and what happens? I utterly fail this week to 1. get to bed on time, 2. get up on time, 3. make the morning co-writing session. Alas! Counterpoint: A. "This week" refers to two whole days, let's not panic here; B. I've still gotten a metric ton of stuff done, because after the afternoon co-writing session ends there's still a lot of afternoon and evening left. So it's all cool.

But that is not what I came to blog about. I came to blog about winning at dinner. Yes, again. I get very excited about this sort of thing. This is nominally a blog about actually writing, but it is also a stealth foodie blog. (You're welcome.)

A friend of mine tweeted approvingly about this recipe here, Caramelized Shallot Pasta, and I got all interested. I mean, I like anchovies. I like pasta. I like absolutely everything about what I see here. Let's try it.

What follows are step-by-step instructions to wind up with precisely, or more or less, what I wound up with for dinner on Lundi Gras (and lots of leftovers for Mardi Gras).

One. About three business days before you want to do this, maybe five days if catastrophic winter storms are forecast for the weekend, order you a 3-pack of crawfish bread. Yes, it's expensive, but if you can budget for it once a year, I say go for it. Mardi Gras is a great time of year for this, but so is your birthday, or in fact any of your 364 unbirthdays. (Obviously you should only do this if crawfish, cheese, and bread of the gluten variety are things you eat. And if you like spicy things. This is a spicy thing.)

Two. About two and a half hours before you want to eat, start you thawing a loaf of the crawfish bread, if crawfish bread you are doing. I only allowed two hours, and it wasn't quite enough. Also, start defrosting a pound of boneless chicken breasts.

Three. Go get that pasta recipe and follow Steps 1 through 3, ending with the bit where you squirrel away half of the resulting paste for future enjoyment. I did not use a dutch oven, but rather my largest cast-iron pan. That turned out to be pretty much ideal.

Around now is a good time to preheat the oven to 350 F.

Four. This is where the multitasking starts. I got the pasta started in the usual stainless steel pot on the front burner on the left. I returned the cast-iron pan to the front burner on the right, removed the anchovy-shallot-tomato paste to a plate (to which I added another big teaspoon of hot pepper flakes because YOLO), and started the now empty-ish pan going over medium-high. Into the goodness remaining from the pan's previous activities I tossed two diced tomatoes as a sort of deglazing agent and also the chicken breasts. Salt and pepper on the chicken breasts to your taste; if you're me, that's a few twists on a salt grinder and about a tablespoon of black peppercorns rough-ground in a mortar and pestle. Pan fry the chicken until it is almost but not quite done through, slicing it up into strips whenever convenient.

Somewhere around here is when you shove the crawfish bread into the oven.

Five. Pick up again with Step 4 of the pasta recipe: Add the cup of pasta water, the very al dente pasta, and the anchovy-shallot-tomato paste to chicken and tomatoes in the pan, and let 'em thicken and coat just like the directions say. The chicken will finish cooking during this stage; so will the pasta. Follow through with Step 5 and the garlic-parsley mixture. By the time all this is done, the crawfish bread should also be fully heated, though you may still have to wait for it to cool a few minutes so you're not slicing into lava.

Plate it all up, optionally serving with a bottle of Abita's Mardi Gras Bock or other favorite carbonated beverage. Either resist the urge to have seconds or resign yourself to groaning and gently rolling uselessly around the house for the rest of the night.

And that is the process that led to this picture I tweeted. You're welcome!