author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK so it turns out that firstly, the NUU F4L does not by default save text messages to the SIM card.

But that secondly, there is a setting by which you can tell it to.

And also, thirdly, the long-press menu for every individual text message includes the commnad "Save to SIM card."

However, and fourthly, attempts to do so result in the error message "Save unsucsseful. SIM card full." (This would explain why, despite telling the new phone to save SMS to the SIM card and then having a lengthy conversation with the out-of-town friend I was kitty-sitting for, there continued to be no SMS saved to the SIM card.)

I am not sure what could possibly be filling up my SIM card, because, fifthly, as far as I can tell, it brought nothing from my old phone over to my new except my telephone number and whatever other esoteric identifying data a new phone needs to be given, that it should successfully replace an old phone.

Ergo, I conclude that the SIM card which Credo assigned me has absolutely zero capacity for extraneous data, which is sad. Though I could test this conclusion by taking that new SIM card that came with the new unit, which I am otherwise not using, and popping it into the old phone, and attempting to save my sentimental value texts to it, but I'm not particularly hopeful about the results of that experiment.

Anyway, sentimental value texts aside, I am successfully transferred onto my new phone. Contacts imported. SD card full of music transfered. Shortcuts reassigned. Mobile data turned OFF before I could accidentally run myself into an overage charge (I have a grandparented-in data plan that's limited to 25mb but is SUPER CHEAP). And while it is exactly the same as the old phone, meaning its calendar interface sucks rocks and its playlist-creating interface is mysterious (where does it save them? Not the SIM card!) and the photos it takes are somewhat low-res, it is also brand new rather than 4+ years old, which means that when I press a button, the phone damn well knows it got pressed, making the act of composing a text about 98% less painful than it had been going on a year or so now.

Also the new unit arrived on Thursday rather than Friday, and early on Thursday at that, so, hooray! I was up and running relatively quickly. And I sprang for the insurance this time, so should I be as foolish with this one as I was when I doomed the previous unit last week, replacing it should be even more painless.

So! Thus for the saga of the NUU F4L. I sholud probably get back to talking about actually writing.

...tomorrow.

Hello and happy 4th of July! No big plans at our household, just eating good food, being lazy, spoiling the bunny, and trying to tune out the random party noises from next door. Also the random explosions (fireworks) that, oddly enough, don't seem to bother the aforementioned bunny. Let's start off with a picture of Mister Captain Holland Fuzzy Bunderpants, why don't we, so you can see for yourself just how unflappable that guy is.

It's a day off from roller derby, and I'm taking advantage of the extra evening writing time to do a blog post. For once! When did I last post here--May? Seriously? OK then. Here's the round-up of Stuff What I Been Up To Since May.

When last we left off with the blog's intrepid hero, she was about to drive off to Salt Lake City for a couple of roller derby bouts. (Two, not three; one of our opponents had to withdraw at the last minute because of a COVID outbreak within their league. It's still out there, y'all. Mask up and be safe.) Well, we won the sanctioned game by a decent amount and we lost the regulation game by not much at all, doing our rankings no harm thereby.

The games were fun, and so were the team's various excursions around the city. Team dinner was at The Bayou, where I had something they called "alligator cheesecake." It was more like a souffle, except with a graham cracker crust, and I will have to take their word that there was actual alligator sausage in there. Tasty, in any case. There was also a smaller lunch outing to Mark of the Beastro, address 666 S. State Street. A+, would dine on vegan omelets with Satan again.

But dearest to me was the morning after everything was over, after I had checked out of the hotel, when I met one of my oldest and closest friends for a walk around the park before hitting the highway for home. There we are in the photo gallery, all big smiles with tulips in the background. Love you bunches, Cat--let's try not to take so long about seeing each other again! Give your doggos lots of love from me, and all the best to your family.

After Salt Lake, our next engagement was a home bout (sanctioned) against No Coast Roller Derby on June 24. The visiting team won that one, but a number of them assured me that we did not make it easy. It was a very hard fought game. As for the afterparty, I honestly couldn't say who won that one. Both teams showed up in strength and numbers and with great appetite. There was an after afterparty down the street at a sandwich shop and bar for those still hungry after the first location's kitchen closed, but I was tired and did not go. Whoever won the afterparty, it was not me. I am at peace with that.

Next up, this Saturday will find us hosting a double header, two mix-up bouts featuring first the Boulder County Devils (our junior league) and the BCRD adults second. After that, the league will take a well-deserved four-week break!

In writing news, I have a brand new poem out in Eternal Haunted Summer, in their Summer Solstice 2023 issue. It's called Fiat Nox, and it's a sort of Miltonian call-out, I guess. Big thanks to the editor for picking a lovely illustration to pair with the poem!

Big thanks also to my teammate and that night's carpool partner who responded to my whining ("argh, tonight's the deadline, I wanted to send in a poem but I don't have one yet and I'm going to be tired after tonight's scrimmage") with the exhortation to GO! WRITE IT! IT'S NOT TOO LATE YET! YOU CAN DO IT! The fact that the poem got written at all, let alone submitted in time for the editor to consider it, is something like 90% her doing.

Meanwhile, I can attest that the whole Rhysling Finalist thing actually happened, because while I may have imagined many things, I am certain I didn't hallucinate the proof copy of the 2023 Rhysling Anthology that was sent my way. You can order this attractive volume for yourself at that link. Whether in print or PDF, I guarantee it's chock full of excellent poetry.

Oh and hey! Fibercraft news. I'm knitting a new pair of socks! They're all rainbow and they're not nearly tall enough yet.

All for now - more soon, I hope. I really do intend to do this once a week thing. Will I manage it? ONLY NEXT WEEK KNOWS.

Well, hi. So it turns out I have this blog. Let's brush the rust off the controls and do a round-up post of Stuff What I Been Up To Since January.

In roller derby news, which I'll start with because that's always a thing, my league, Boulder County Roller Derby (nee Boulder County Bombers), is thoroughly renamed and rebranded. We have jerseys with our new logo on the way and everything is very exciting. Meanwhile, our travel team program is up and running and so are WFTDA rankings. Sanctioned games are a thing again, and we have now played three of them: one against the Denver Standbys here at home, and two in the Taos-based Rumble on the Rio tournament a couple weekends ago. We won all three.

This weekend we're going to Salt Lake City to participate in Wasatch Roller Derby's Galactic Brawl tournmant. We'll be playing three games, two of which will be sanctioned. If there is live streaming of those games--and I don't know that there will be, but if there is--you'll hear about it via the host league's Facebook page (see the "Galactic Brawl" link).

In mundane life news, we lost a car and gained a car. The black 2013 Chevy Volt got totaled thanks to Some Dude rear-ending John, thereby causing a five-car pile-up on eastbound Arapahoe Road approaching 95th Street. Happy to report that there were no injuries! But, like I said, the Volt didn't make it. There followed a couple of weeks during which we were in far closer and more frequent contact with our insurance company than we generally like to be, meanwhile gaining a certain category of life experience we'd have been just fine never having to experience, thanks awfully.

And then we went looking for another used plug-in hybrid to replace the Volt with, and, wouldn't you know it, Boulder Hybrids had a red 2013 Chevy Volt with a price tag of not unreasonably much more than the settlement pay-out on the totaled Volt. Indeed, what with the replacement Volt being a Premium rather than an LT and having 10K fewer miles on its odometer, it was a damn good deal. And we drove that sucker to Taos for the aforementioned Rumble on the Rio tournament. And the 10-years-out-of-date onboard navigation system was entirely adequate to get us there (freeing up John's smartphone for very important business by which of course we mean VIDEO GAMES). So that all worked out.

In writing news: My poem, "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland", published in the Summer Solstice 2022 edition of Eternal Haunted Summer, made the Rhysling Award long list. The Rhysling Award is given each year by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, whose members each get to nominate one work in each of the poetry categories, long and short. There were slightly more than 100 preliminary nominees in the short poem category, which is quite a lot, but I got to be one of them, and that's pretty darn spiffy!

That was announced back in February. Fast forward to just now, when I went Googling about to see when the finalists would be announced, so I could mention that date here. Surprise, surprise--turns out, the finalists have been announced. While I'm still not seeing anything in SFPA's official communications, I found several blogs and poetry publications congratulating the finalists. For instance, here's File770.

There are 50 finalists in the short poem category, and my poem appears to be one of them. Eep!

An anthology of the finalists will be put together and mailed out soon, and the SFPA membership will begin voting in July to determine the eventual 2023 award recipients..

So... yeah. That's my news for the year so far. Happy Beltane!

At least one post per week: Check. I have not been uniformly On The Ball since last post, but this much I can do.

This week's post will be my "what I had published last year" roundup. It will be fairly short, because 2022 was not a great year for writing new things or submitting regularly. But there were some things published:

New poetry: "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland," Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer Solstice 2022 (theme: Other-Than-Human Realms).

In fairy folklore, there's a story that turns up now and again involving a human who gets invited into Fairyland to perform some necessary function, and has to have magic ointment applied to their eyes in order that they might see true while they're there. Much later, after their return home, a fairy looks them up in their day-to-day and asks them, "Which eye is it you see me out of?" Turns out they did an imperfect job of removing the magic ointment, which means they've got a loose end to tidy up. Can't be having random humans going around able to see fairies clearly! So the human answers, "The left eye," and the fairy says "Cool, thanks," and immediately puts out the human's left eye. As opposed to dunking them in a handy ditch to just, y'know, wash the ointment out. Because fairies are cruel and capricious and, above all, dramatic.

Anyway, I wanted to play with that trope, such that the "eye" that had to be put out was the photographer's camera (the photographer's services having been engaged for an important fairy wedding). The fairy would smash the camera, and maybe even blind the photographer (see above: cruel and capricious), but of course the photographer still has the negatives, which they would pass down to future generations along with the story of the photographer's adventures.

One day I will actually write that poem. Or story. It could be a story. In any case, it wasn't what I wrote in time for this submission deadline. I wrote this other thing instead.

Reprint poem: "Reasonable Accommodations," The Future Fire issue 2022.62

My poor little corporate weredeer first appeared in Departure Mirror Quarterly Issue 2 (Winter 2021). You can still download that issue, but you'll have to do it from the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine," because the publication sadly had to close its doors before Issue 4 came out. In which issue, incidentally, another poem of mine they'd solicited had been set to appear. Alas. That poem remains unpublished, and not for want of my sending it out. Maybe 2023 will be its year.

Reprint story: "Survival, After," Apex Magazine 2021 (or via Weightless Books)

Originally published and podcast by Apex Magazine in August 2021, this story was included, along with every other story they published in 2021, in the magazine's yearly anthology. I understand it's their biggest table of contents yet! There's lots of amazing stuff in there that quite frankly blows my little tale out of the water, so it's well worth the price. Yes, you could just go read all the stories for free on the website, but the print anthology, in addition to being extremely convenient in providing all the content in one handy codex (no need to click all over the place! Just turn the pages!), is a truly gorgeous artifact. It would look beautiful on your bookshelf or your coffee table.

Reprint story: "First Breath," penumbric speculative fiction mag vol vi issue 4 (December 2k22)

Originally published in Ellen Datlow's vampirism anthology Blood and Other Cravings (Tor Books, September 2011), this is my most reprinted work--less because of its classic staying power, I think, and more because it's the story I keep sending out in hopes of getting it reprinted. But this is its third outing (not counting its debut) so I guess editors like it. (Previous reprintings: Denver Horror Collective and the Tales to Terrify podcast.)

I'm saddened to discover the purchase pages for the original anthology are gone. But I suppose every anthology must go out of print sometime. You can still find copies via that online retailer named for a river in South America, because of course you can, but it's no longer available via Macmillan Publishing or Barnes & Noble that I can see. So instead I've linked the Publisher's Weekly write-up, which actually name-checks me (I was a "newcomer"! I arguably still am) so that's kinda cool.

I suppose that will be one of my 2023 goals: Get "First Breath" reprinted again.

Anyway, that's the 2022 Publications Roundup. As you run off to click the links and check them out, do check out the rest of the relevant issues (or the relevant year, in the case of Apex). There's some great stuff in those tables of contents, written by some enormously skilled wordsmiths, and you need to get your eyeballs on 'em STAT.

Until next week!

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.

Heh. "Tomorrow." But y'all know how that goes by now.

So the ephemera reading went really, really well! I was super nervous, of course, but that never changes. Still, I was grateful to be able to go first, so that I could give the other authors and artists the attention their lovely words deserved without being distracted by still being nervous.

How lovely was lovely? Very! Shimshon Obadia's poetry did that thing where every word they said caused me to reevaluate every previous they'd said, so that I was out of breath and mind blown by the time they were done. Stephen Granade's piece began in the wry, witty genre of list format fiction, completely failing to prepare me for that tiny snowball of understated emotion that brought an avalanche of "I'm not crying YOU'RE crying" down on everyone's head. And Ai Jiang's three flash pieces were masterfully haunting, turning simple images and innocent phrases ("Don't scratch, children") into gems of creepy loveliness, or lovely creepiness, that will stay with me for a long time.

(Above links go to @ephemeraseries's live-tweeting of each author/artist. Yes, there's a thread about my reading too. They said such nice things!)

Bonus: I got to treat everyone to BUNNY ZOOMBOMBING just before we went live. Holland saw me on the sofa and said "Oh, is it treat time?" and, well, yes. Because he asked so adorably, it was.

You can listen to the replay via ephemera's YouTube channel--click through to VIDEOS and it's Episode 28--or you can just click on this link here.

You'll next be able to hear me read live online during Story Hour on May 25. I don't yet know which author I'll be paired with, and I probably won't know which of us will go first until we're in the "green room" a few minutes before the show, but I can guarantee a good time for the whole hour long, because Story Hour is awesome like that.

So that's one bit of info I've been owing you. Here's another: the January Friday Fictionette Round-up. (I've also got the February round-up ready to go, but let's leave something for next blog post, right?)

Friday, January 7, 2022: "The Book People of Bloomsbury Falls" (ebook, audio) In which we find out who's best at identifying them, and what happens when we're right. Talking about them wasn't good for my temper.

Friday, January 14, 2022: "A Changed World" (ebook, audio) In which Sleeping Beauty wakes up and discovers who currently owns the world. "You know our law. Accept no gift without accepting the debt."

Friday, January 21, 2022: "One Last Spectacle" (ebook, audio) In which we know that whatever happens, however strange, must be the Magician's will. And we applaud. The automata were always unfailingly responsible and polite, which we all thought reflected well upon the Magician.

Friday, January 28, 2022: "Just Doing My Job" (ebook, audio) In which fairy dust is one hell of a drug. That's my job: to remind her that an ordinary life is worth living. One of my jobs, anyway.

Looks like I still haven't designated any of these the Fictionette Freebie for January. Let's make it "The Book People of Bloomsbury Falls." I'm particularly fond of it and would love to enable you to download it without worrying about a subscription.

In addition to the February round-up, I've also got more computer woes to gripe about. But I also have an impending poetry reprint to celebrate! And a bunch of hours in my week that are about to get freed up! So you can look forward to some of that news tomorrow.

Or, indeed, "tomorrow."

Hello the blog! I have an announcement for y'all: TOMORROW, March 16, I will be a guest reader on ephemera.

ephemera is a dreamy Toronto-based reading series (which has gone virtual for the same reason everything post-2020 has gone virtual) chaired by KT Bryski and Jen Albert. It's held the third Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. It typically features three guest author readings and a performance, all stitched together by the hosts' quirky continuity shenanigans. I have no idea what those shenanigans will consist of this time; the Twitter announcement says "BRING-YOUR-OWN-THEME" which could mean anything.

How this came about is, last year I worked with KT Bryski on the podcast of "Survival, After." I was, and am, immensely grateful to her for giving me the opportunity to narrate my story for that podcast, and grateful again that she remembered my work positively enough to invite me to be part of her show. And now that I've listened to a few older episodes and read the notes for a few more, I find myself gently wibbling to the tune of "Holy shit they've had some big name authors on this show!!! What the heck am I doing here?!" So it all feels very star-studded and amazing.

Anyways, I'll be reading a ten-minute miscellany of poems and flash fiction which aren't connected by any particular theme at all, except perhaps that they are all A. tiny, and B. hard-to-find: it's all stuff that either isn't online at all (due to being published in a print-only publication) or can only be found with the help of the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" (due to the online publications they were published in having been discontinued). The poems are relatively new. The flash stories are relatively old, but I'm still proud and fond of 'em.

Again, the show will be TOMORROW - Wednesday, March 16 - at 7:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM Mountain, and, as things currently stand, I'm scheduled to read first. You can tune in live or watch it later via the YouTube channel.

In other news: I'll be appearing on Story Hour again on May 25, and (keeping things vague until contracts are signed) I appear to have sold another poetry reprint. The technical issues I lamented last time appear to be all cleared up; Space Invader has been working perfectly since it returned home. And this week is tryouts week as my roller derby league prepares a roster for our first competitive game (i.e. versus another league, that league being Pikes Peak Derby Dames of Colorado Springs) since 2019.

Tomorrow: the Friday Fictionette round-up for January. As soon after that as possible: the Friday Fictionette round-up for February. (Have I mentioned I am very, very tired of being constantly behind schedule. Well. I will soon have more time in my week to deal with things--but about that, more later.)

So far, so good. So excellent.

We're on day 8 of November, and I have made 100% of my writing goals thus far. Morning Pages every day, freewriting every day, and sufficient daily work on the overdue Friday Fictionettes that I have indeed uploaded a pair of fictionette posts (one for the ebook, one for the audio) every third day. (If you visit my Patreon, count up the new posts, and come up short, remember that, from this point onward, they don't go live until the following first-through-fourth-Friday.)

My other goals are more like 98%. There were a couple days when I neither skated nor got to my physical therapy homework, but I definitely exercised, considering those days included Friday when I regularly handle heavy boxes of food and Saturday when I helped my roller derby league move into our new practice space.

And I've been more or less faithful to my sleep schedule goals; if I let midnight slip or snoozed a bit past 8:30, at least I wasn't up until three or in bed straight until noon. What's important is, I'm getting enough sleep and I'm getting up in time to start writing in the morning every morning. That's aided the push for dailiness tremendously.

Another thing that's helped is, I've gone back to regularly attending the co-writing sessions available to Cat Rambo's online community. The morning session is at 9:30 AM my time, and the afternoon one is at 3:00 PM. Each session comprises three 30-minute "sprints," before which attendees share what they intend to use the sprint for and after which we report on how it went. So on the days my schedule allows me to attend, I know exactly when my writing can and must happen, and for how long.

It's a schedule. I spent several months being severely allergic to schedules. I guess I'm not anymore. Brains are weird.

What I've not gone back to doing is keeping a timesheet. Turns out, tracking my hours isn't worth the inadvertent barrier to starting work that it turned into. I think about going back to it, and then I think about how nice it is to just open up the Scrivener project and dump words into it without ritual or rigmarole. How pleasant it is to just forgo all the bureaucratic rituals and throat-clearing exercises and just start.

At one time, that spreadsheet was useful to me because I needed to gather information about my writing process: what time of day is best for me to write at? How long do I go before I run out of oomph? How long does it take to produce a Friday Fictionette from a finished text? I think I have a pretty good idea of those things now, so I'm scheduling my days accordingly as much as possible. I may go back to timesheet-as-data-gathering after November, when my daily round will change significantly by, for instance, going back to my regular weekly submission procedures and hopefully making a dent in my story-revision queue. (Also attempting to post here daily. I take forever with these posts. Argh.) But for now my schedule is appropriate to my November list of Daily Required Items. Further data-gathering is not urgent at this time.

Now, shortly after I quit my day job to write full time with my husband's support, I used a spreadsheet to assuage my guilt. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't just taking a permanent vacation. I was still working, dammit! See? I put in my five hours today! Unfortunately, that had a tendency to lead to more guilt if I didn't make my five hours.

The timesheet has historically been useful, on and off through the years, in helping me end long, depressive non-writing slumps. But I'm finding that strategy less useful for that now, as the thought of setting up the daily timesheet has increased my avoidance rather than lessened it. So it's time to let the dratted thing go.

So what's working for me instead? A whole bunch of things mixed together, that's what.

There's what I think of as "imaginary external accountability," where I state my goals and intentions somewhere public, thus making myself feel obligated to live up to them so I don't disappoint the version of You, the Reader who lives in my head. Hence blog posts like this one.

Then there's actual external accountability, where I've shared my goals with my fellow writers in the aforementioned co-writing sessions, one of those goals being to regularly show up. I know they're expecting me and they might ask me how the big Patreon Catch-up Project is going. I want to be there and give them good news!

There will be, hopefully, the momentum I build up by following this schedule all through November. I'm hoping that my current routine will take on the force of habit and more or less perpetuate itself through December and beyond.

But probably the most important component is how pleased and proud I am at the end of a day where I met all my goals, checked off all my items, and am happy with the process I made. Look, if I can keep up this pace, I will be entirely caught up on the Friday Fictionette release schedule by December 17! I'm excited about that! I want to make that happen! And not being constantly behind schedule will open up so much time and energy for other stories, other projects, other goals, to which I can bring the same kind of energy and attention I've been putting toward this ficitonette-every-three-days initiative--now that I know I have that kind of energy and attention available.

And I'm just going to be happier with myself and less stressed out. Imagining that less-stressed and more optimistic version of Future Me is probably my biggest motivator to keep up this pace and meet my daily goals.

All right, maybe this is just Week One optimism. Everyone doing NaNoWriMo in the classic mode gets super-excited about their novels during Week One. But then comes the Week Two Slump. I'm hoping the non-noveling equivalent does not lie in wait for me. If I encounter a slump of my own... well, I'll reread this blog post to remind myself of reasons to be excited, that's what I'll do.

(Sometimes the Imaginary Reader on whom I'm basing my Imaginary External Accountability... is me.)

Today is the happy day! My story, "Survival, After", is now live on the website of Apex Magazine. The issue it's in debuted some weeks ago for subscribers to read in its entirety, but today my story became available for all and sundry, subscriber or not. You can read it here.

You can also listen to it at that link, too! Or via the page for Apex Podcast Episode #80. I'm thrilled beyond words not only for KT Bryski's brilliant production of the episode, but also for her giving me the opportunity to read the story. This is my first time doing fiction narration outside of my own Friday Fictionette Project--reading fiction on someone else's podcast, how about that?!--and I'm so grateful to be given the chance.

In other writing news, my most-reprinted story and first professional sale, "First Breath," will be reprinted again! But not for a little while yet. I've signed the contract, but the magazine has a lead time of a good handful of episodes. I'll give you more details as we get closer to release date.

And in writing process news.... this week is weird. Last week was weirder. The week before last sucked. Over the years, I have constructed this huge, detail-oriented edifice of rituals and routines in the service of Getting The Work Done, and it has, for the most part, worked--but sometimes, depending on how much avoidance and/or executive dysfunction I'm suffering, that edifice turns into a barrier. Like, "Oh, shit, it's almost 10 AM. I should be writing. But I'm going to have to do nothing BUT write, no distractions, for twenty-five minutes at a time, which sounds like an AWFUL act of penance. And also I need to set up my timesheet, and also before I can get to the Overdue Thing I have to do the Daily Things That Come First, with all the rest of the rigmarole and hoops to jump through, and--hey, how about I just play this stupid clicky game for another half hour? And another half hour after that..." And that's how the whole day goes, for days at a time. And that's what week before last was like.

Don't get me wrong--like I said, the edifice of routine and ritual usually works. It's structure, and I need structure. Without structure, my day tends to float away from me. But sometimes structure is itself the thing that avoidance accretes to, like barnacles on a sunken ship's hull. And when that happens, I can do one of two things: I can try to muscle through somehow, or I can say "to hell with timesheets! To hell with the daily order of operations!" and just, y'know, open the file of the Overdue Thing and start doing it, self-discipline optional.

So my timesheet is still on timeout. The order of operations has returned, sort of, but it's an informal checklist rather than a clock-scheduled list of tasks. And I'm allowed to just drift between the task at hand and the stupid clicky game if I want. Look, when some of the avoidance arises, stupid as it sounds, from "oh, no, getting started on the next writing task means putting away the mindless clicky game for twenty-five whole minutes," it's amazing how much of that avoidance simply evaporates if I give myself permission to keep messing with the mindless clicky game while doing the writing task. Write a few sentences, click a few things, write a few sentences more. Like that.

Like as not, the way it turns out, once I start the writing task, the writing accrues sufficient momentum of its own to make me totally forget about the mindless clicky game after all.

Brains! How do they even brain?! I dun geddit, y'all. But whatever. We work with what we've got, or we don't work at all. And the work has to get done somehow. So here we are.

And now it's time for another bowl of the crock-pot posole that's been happily simmering away since noon, and that has been on my mind ever since tonight's roller derby practice started. I tell you what, you want that happy warm emotional hug of "Somebody loves me!" when you walk in the door after a long and tiring day, you want to get yourself a crock-pot and a recipe for something long-simmering and hearty. It's a really lovely feeling.

Hello, the blog! Have I got some news for you! Today is July 6, and July 6 is release day for Apex Magazine #124. Check out that gorgeous cover art. Check out those contributor names! (How did I end up in such astounding company?)

So the way Apex does it is, the whole issue is available for purchase and to subscribers now. But if you wait long enough, the whole issue will be free on the website. My story, "Survival, After", will be released on August 3. Meanwhile, the first story that's been released on the website is "Eilam Is Forever" by Beth Dawkins. It is, in part, a story about things going spectacularly wrong on a generation ship. It's also, very poignantly, a story about loneliness. You should go read it right now. Go on. This blog post will still be here when you get back.

Excited yet? Need more hype? Author Leah Ning has livetweeted her way through the whole issue, and her mini-reviews are super hype. (I'm so very, very thrilled by what she said about my story! Hearts and flowers and rainbows!)

If after reading that thread you just! can't! wait! for the stories to all trickle their way onto the website, you can buy the issue, subscribe, or become a Patron to get instant access in varying shapes and sizes.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Apex Magazine's Kickstarter, launching on July 19, that will help support their continued existence through 2022 and, hopefully, beyond. Visit that link to be notified when the campaign goes live.

So that's what I've got for you today. Tomorrow I may have a certain amount of whining to do about my extremely inefficient writing process. But today I got nothing to make but happy noises. Hooray!