author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

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.

OK, so, this week's post is kind of a bummer. Also a bit of a reprise, since I posted about it Monday over on Patreon.

Here's the thing: I'm leaving Habitica.

I know! I've boosted it so many times over the years! It's helped me organize my life in so many really useful ways! The camaraderie, the accountability, the joy of clicking a thing and saying "I did it!" and getting imaginary gold and experience points for it--these have all been good things! (Mostly good things, anyway. About that, more in a moment.) So what happened that suddenly I'm canceling my subscription and deleting my account?

Well... this.

That link goes to a Reddit thread that describes, in some detail, the abominable treatment that Habitica's volunteer community moderators have received from Habitica's paid staff team. And because I rarely ventured outside my various Guilds' social spaces, I had no idea anything was going until sometime last week, when a Mastodon acquaintance, who turned out to be one of Habitica former moderators, mentioned it. Anyway, if you want the full story, follow both links; and, on the Reddit thread, scroll down for comments by former moderators.

A brief and thus very imperfect summary of what transpired might look like this: A longstanding company culture of treating the mods with very little care, respect, or gratitude for their unpaid labor of love for the Habitica community culminated in the staff firing all the volunteer moderators in early December 2022, then declaring any discussion of the situation in Habitica's public spaces off-limits and against the Terms of Service. The inciting incident for the first firing was this: After a heroic after-hours effort by the mod team to deal with a fast-moving crisis in the message boards, one of the mods suggested that maybe the staff might say "thank you" once in a while.

Again, this is a summary, not the complete story. I have left out the steps between "How about a thank you?" and "We are taking moderation in-house." And there are some pretty horrific codas. Basically, click through the links above and you'll know as much as I do. If the length of the Reddit page is daunting, I can specifically recommend these comments by former moderators MaybeSteveRodgers and ALittleYellowSpider (Alys). But I think the whole thread is worth your time.

Anyway, I was appalled. I immediately decided I could not support the app anymore. I put myself "in the Inn" indefinitely (i.e. paused damage so I could ignore the app without my character or those of my party being punished for it), exported my user data so as not to lose track of my task lists, and began the process of letting my various communities know why I'm leaving. This blog post is part of that.

This blog post is also me realizing that maybe I'm better off without Habitica after all.

Not long ago, author Elizabeth Bear wrote an article about how "Gamification might be bad, actually?" and it got me thinking. Well, to be fair, it got me resisting. I've been using Habitica so long, it's been such an integral part of my day--how dare you suggest it might be bad for me? But since pausing damage and thus freeing myself from the obligation to check in, check the boxes, complete my task lists OR ELSE, I've been thinking about Bear's article a lot.

Every time I catch myself thinking, "I didn't water the plants today - but if I do it first thing tomorrow, I can justify checking the 'Water the plants' Daily." Every time I felt bad because I didn't "Feel good about your writing - and yourself!" and thus couldn't honestly check off that task. Every time I thought, "OK, posting the Monday Muse is blogging, so it's OK if I check 'actually writing blog' today even though I didn't post to the actually writing blog." Every time I regretted failing to do my daily physical therapy or was too tired to brush my teeth, regretted not because skipping those routines isn't good for my physical well-being but purely because it meant I'd leave a daily task incomplete--

Every time, in fact, that I thought of the things I want to or need to do every day in terms of whether I got to check a box, it brought home all over again that maybe, just maybe, task list gamification might be bad for me.

I think I still need some sort of task list manager--it could be an app, it could just be me writing a list of "What do I need to do today?" in my Morning Pages--because without lists I lose track of the day's wants and needs and, like I've said before, I just drift. (I've done a lot of useless drifting this past week, despite my best intentions.) But what I don't need is any further excuse to punish myself for failing to complete a task. I do that enough just in my own head--I don't need an app telling me how many hit points each party member lost because of my failure. And I need to retain a sense of doing the thing for the sake of doing the thing, not for the sake of checking a box.

OK, but no, I'm not leaving 4thewords any time soon. For one thing, it's not nearly as useful a tool for punishing my failures. If I don't make my 444 words for the day, I have oh so many stempos stockpiled for repairing my streak. For another, it's fun. It's got great community and lots of new content regularly and actively maintained software and a culture of listening to and respecting each other and please don't disillusion me on this point I could not take it

Anyway, that's where things stand for now.

So, happy new year! I have res... um, goals. Goals and intentions. One of them is to blog here more regularly, which probably means shorter posts, each with only just one subject. It's the very long, complicated posts that make this daunting and also inappropriate for the brief couple hours between roller derby and bed. (Speaking of which: I am tired.) So let's make this a short post.

Like I said: Goals. Writing goals, mainly. They are as follows:

Make progress toward getting the Friday Fictionettes Project back on schedule, via a sustainable schedule. One that doesn't involve trying to do everything in one day, or even in one week. Recognize that I am a certain amount behind schedule, and that, just as I didn't get there all at once, I won't dig my way out of it overnight either. The plan is... well, I'm not going to describe my plan here, because that is how I jinx myself. But trust me. I've got a plan.

Receive 100 rejections in 2023. Which means submit my fiction and poetry at least 100 times. (Optimistically, not all of those will be rejections. The first year I attempted this goal was my most published year ever. Which, arguably, is the whole point of the exercise.) Not a new goal, not for me or anyone else, but one I've had for myself for several years running and which I failed spectacularly at last year. And not just because I didn't submit regularly, but also because I didn't...

Finish more stories and poems so that they can be submitted. One thing that really dampened my submission game was running out of pro-paying or near-pro-paying markets appropriate for the pieces I had to submit. Which can happen if one isn't constantly writing new things. So that's what I want to do: write new things, new things besides the Friday Fictionettes. Not that Friday Fictionettes can't become new things for commercial submission, mind you. It's happened before.

Post to this blog at least once a week. I mean, ideally three times a week, but one has to walk before one can run, and in this regard, metaphorically, I haven't even been upright. To expand that metaphor, one blog post per week seems like a reasonable equivalent to, say, getting out of bed and moving around the house a little, maybe cooking myself a simple but nutritious meal?

And, in service to all of those goals: Stick to a sustainable and productive daily schedule. I've developed one over the past few years, accruing a piece here, discarding a strategy there, until I'm pretty confident that I know what works for me, as long as I do it and don't lead myself off course by 1. screwing up my sleep schedule, or 2. getting lost in video games and social media. I have some real foibles in that area, such that Catherynne M. Valente's recent post about being a writer with ADHD resonated frighteningly. I am not diagnosed with ADHD, and I certainly don't feel qualified to diagnose myself, but wow a lot of failure states that writers with ADHD talk about sound familiar. The bit about, whatever I do first is the thing I'm going to do all day? And the other thing, the one about limited decision making capability, such that if it all gets used up early, there's none of it left for writing? Which is a problem, because writing is nothing but one decision after another? Yeah. Extremely familiar.

The coping strategies I hear about also sound familiar. Have I told you about all the lists? Everything is a list item. With a little box next to it for me to check it off when it's done, so that I can get a little wind back from the sheer delight of accomplishing a thing. Everything is in lists or else nothing gets done. Nothing but social media and video games. Because the lists focus my mind and make the things I have to do concrete. Without focus, without solidity, I'm just floating from distraction to distraction, and it's bad.

So I'm working on it. I have my schedule. I have my lists. I just have to stick to them, and everything will be fine. EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE.

Did I say "a short blog post"? Well, it's a single-subject blog post, anyway. A single subject broken into a whole bunch of parts about which I had a lot to say.

Welcome back to the Actually Writing Blog, everybody!

Right. Blogging. Wow I'm tired, and it's laaaaaate. But I am trying to get back to this Blogging Every Day thing, so.

As I expected yesterday, today's antigen test came up negative. That makes two tests spaced about 48 hours apart--plus no symptoms for like four days running--which means I'm free to roam about the county. And I did, by golly!

I may have in fact overdone it a little. I feel great, no trouble breathing, no persistent coughing, nothing like that, but... Wow. Tired.

So. What did I do on my first day out and about post-covid? Well...

A bunch of writing! Which, happily, didn't differentiate today from the latter half of my isolation period. As soon as I felt well enough to be upright and do productive things, I did get back into attending one or two co-writing sessions most days, and that resulted in getting a whole bunch of words down on paper and in pixels. Which, if one can swing it (which I can't always, but sometimes I can), is a great comfort and a triumph when one is sick and housebound and demoralized and only able to breathe freely because pseudoephedrine exists.

I mentioned Cat Rambo's writer community yesterday--of all the perks listed there, the co-writing sessions have been what I've found to have the greatest benefit to me personally. They start at particular scheduled times, even the unmoderated ones, and so there is an hour at which I need to be not only in front of my keyboard and working but also in front of my webcam saying hi to other people doing the same. Accountability! It's been very good for me.

(It also resulted in some very nice social time at WorldCon. I got to go have dinner with a co-writing regular one night. Because of all our hours spent together on Zoom, I kept forgetting that this was actually my first time hanging out with her in person.)

So today started at 9 AM with the usual morning co-writing session, and I hit some of my daily tasks there. I managed a bit of another task over lunch, too. And here I am blogging! So I'm feeling pretty virtuous about it all.

I finally had that date with myself at Waffle House, thus fulfilling that weird craving I'd developed during my housebound time. I don't think I've ever had a craving for Waffle House before, not once in my entire life. But something about the combination of this Twitter thread and knowing I wasn't allowed to go created a fierce longing for hashbrowns and coffee. Well, for lunch today, I damn well went to Waffle House #1072, and I had hashbrowns (with sausage and cheese) and coffee. And the waitress was exceedingly friendly and welcoming and complimented me on my facemask bling. And, like I said, I even got a little writing done despite there being neither A/C outlets nor power.

I went to not one but TWO craft group meet-ups. At 11:30 AM there was Casual Crochet in the Park with Andee Graves, an event associated with the Longmont Yarn Shoppe. It will inevitably move back out of the park and into the shop as we move into winter. Not yet, though. The weather today was absolutely gorgeous. Then, at 4:00 PM, there was Wine & Wool Wednesdays at Maverick Fiber Arts in Lafayette. (The "wine" part involves a visit to the bar at the Brewing Market next door. It's not absolutely required. No one will scoff if you get a coffee drink instead. I tend to get this beer.)

I don't think I've ever attended both groups in a single day before, but I was going to do everything, darn it, and see all the people, and work on something like four different projects spread out over three different fiber crafts, and...

Well, no wonder I'm tired. Which is why...

I had a nap! And it was glorious. But then I woke up and realized I hadn't blogged yet, and I wanted to blog, so I figured, let's see if there's just a little more words-on-paper-and-pixels left in me. And there was! Huzzah.

I was going to go on with this blog post and describe all the different knit, crochet, and tatting projects I've got going, but once again, this post is long enough already, so I might as well save it for tomorrow.

You know, at some point, I should make a post that's substantively about actually writing. As opposed to posts like this one, which only mention writing in a glancing sort of way. But, hey, I've got a lot of catching up to do, and there is more in my life, it turns out, than just writing. Hence posts like this one.

(But only a semblance, mind you. Life has been Full of Things, as we shall see here.)

Hello! Hi! Is this thing on? *tap tap tap* It would appear I am blogging again. Yay!

So anyway, what all has happened since June? Well.

I had some technical issues. There was a long, drawn-out oopsie with this website, where suddenly, starting in mid-April, I couldn't log into any private directories, and after lots of frustrating back-and-forth with my domain host's support--I mean, lots, like, MONTHS during which they tried to sell me SSL certificates, they lost track of the issue among all the different support technicians involved in the email chain and had to have it explained again, and failed to even investigate the problem as I reported it--but eventually someone finally did investigate--and it was revealed that my .htaccess files were pointing in the wrong direction. The pathway that was JUST FINE up until that point in mid-April suddenly became invalid. And why was that? Well, it couldn't possibly be because some process or other had deleted the relevant .htpasswd file from where it had lived for decades, could it? No, of course not!

All of which is to say that I'm low-key in search of a new domain host. I'd love it to be a small, woman-owned business, but I know that lightning like DrakNet can't be expected to strike twice. (My current host, a small orange, is the company to which the owner of DrakNet sold the business when she was ready to retire from it.) I'm having trouble even finding alternate webhosts at all--I mean, where webhosts means "the people who store your files on a server so that domain registration can point to it, and give you access to databases and scripting and certain out-of-the-box software you can use if you wish" rather than "someone who'll design your website for you and/or give you a limited template content management system because you don't actually know HTML or CSS, let alone PHP or mySQl."

And then searching for "woman-owned webhosts" on Google was even more fraught. That's how I stumbled upon an intriguing forum thread from 2007 in which answers to same question ranged from "Silly feminist, why do you care about the business owner's gender?" to "Women won't own webhosting companies until webhosting is made simple enough for their ladybrains to understand." In the 21st century, y'all. I guess this is the techbro version of "women don't write hard science fiction because they can't hack the science, lol."

Anyway. Anyone know anything about Earth Girl LLC?

I went to WorldCon! Incidentally, this involved taking my very first train trip since 2020. Amtrak has long since stopped requiring masks on board, more's the pity, but I traveled in sleeper so I could close the door on my own private roommette, and I had my meals brought to me in my roommette, and I wore a mask every time I left my roommette, so I felt pretty well protected.

WorldCon was in Chicago, where the sister of an online acquaintance of mine has a condo up the north end of the Magnificent Mile, and so the two of us stayed there without charge, which was really nice. It did mean a commute of a little under a mile between our lodgings and the convention, but whatever, that's why I brought my skates. I did a lot of skating in Chicago, not only to and from the Hyatt Regency but also up and down the Lakefront and the Riverwalk. It was great!

And it appears that, after all this time, I've finally reached that point in my con-going where I cobble together my schedule based less on what panels I want to see and more on the people I'd like to hang out with. Oh, I went to panels, sure, and a poetry workshop, and a craft circle too. And I did throw my name in the lottery for Table Talks with Big Names in the Industry. But more often I signed up for a Table Talk because "Hey, I know that person from Codex or Viable Paradise or from Cat Rambo's online community. It would be nice to spend some time chatting with them." And that was lovely.

This was my first time attending WorldCon since 2011, when it was in Reno. Turns out I still very much enjoy the experience and hope to do it again in two years when WorldCon goes to Glasgow. I also very much still enjoy taking the train--and I'll be doing that again Very Soon Now, because...

I'm going to World Fantasy in New Orleans! Got my attending membership some months ago. Finally got my hotel room yesterday. Today I had a chat with Dad about logistics for family-and-friends visiting before the con, and later today or maybe tomorrow I'll wrangle my Amtrak dates.

The idea behind visiting Dad and them before the con is so that I don't expose any high-risk loved ones to whatever I might have chanced to pick up during the con. World Fantasy has posted the same COVID-19 policy as WorldCon did--which is to say, must be vaccinated to attend, must wear masks properly at all times--but risk remains, so might as well be smart about this.

I'm very much looking forward to a convention in New Orleans. I'm looking forward to Halloween costumes and people-watching and good food. I'm looking forward to skating around the French Quarter! I'm looking forward to visiting the Royal Street Rouses to equip myself with snacks and beer. I'm looking forward to wandering between convention programming items with a bottle of Abita in my hand, because it's Louisiana, suckers. Although I suppose with public masking required I may have to plan my beers with somewhat more precision than I did during World Horror 2013.

Anyways, that's coming up, and I'm stoked.

I skated a whole heck of a lot of roller derby! We had our season closing event on September 17, pretty much right after I got back from WorldCon. We set up the venue Friday night and on Saturday there were three (3) bouts, two of which I personally skated in. I was sooooooore afterward, but very happy.

In the intraleague mixer, my team won by three points. That's a seriously close game! There was a point midway through the second half where it was tied at 150, and I had to bite my tongue because most of my teammates would prefer not to know the score actually, and I prefer to respect my teammates' needs for preserving their Game Mentality. (This is a subtweet.) But I did sidle over to one teammate I knew did like to know the score, to whisper "Eeeeeee it's tied it's tied it's tied!!!!" and she went "Eeeeeee!" back.

Eeeeeeee!

The last game of the night was us versus Denver's C team, who beat us authoritatively but told us at the afterparty that we'd made them work hard for it. We were pretty proud of the score we put up against them.

So. Turns out, that was my last roller derby experience to date, because right after that event...

I caught COVID. Alas! My two-and-a-half year record for avoiding the plague came to an end when I tested positive on September 22. I'm fairly certain of the how, when, and from whom of contracting the virus, but all I'll say here is that it was most likely not directly from skating on the 17th, but rather from a social outing later that weekend.

Obviously I hold no grudge whatsoever against the person I got it from. They didn't know they had it until two days after they passed it on to me, and I didn't know I had it until I'd had plenty of time to pass it on to John. Once I knew, I tried to isolate, but that was probably a futile endeavor from the start. He tested positive a couple days after I did.

We'd both just gotten the new booster, like, less than a week before we got the virus. So aside from not having the benefit of a full two weeks post-shot, we were fairly well protected. That's probably why our symptoms were no worse than those consistent with a really obnoxious cold. But I had that dreaded rebound--return of symptoms plus new positive test--that turned my Day 7 into a new Day Zero, so I'm only on the exit ramp now.

But I am on it. I will say that with certainty. It's Day 7 again, I've gone three days with no symptoms at all, and I tested negative yesterday. Hoping for another negative test tomorrow morning, and feeling pretty confident I'll be able to leave the house and go among the nice people again Real Soon Now. With a mask on, of course.

(Maybe then the dreams about "What am I doing out among people when I'm contagious? And why aren't I wearing a mask?!" will taper off. Because yeah, I got those. Multiple times. Thanks, brain.)

And those are the highlights. There's probably more, but this is a long enough post already, and I might as well save some for tomorrow. Because I am going to try to blog again tomorrow. And the day after that. So do please stand by.

Oh hi there. It's been more than a month since my last post, so maybe let's use this post to tie up some loose ends from that post.

Regarding the computer repair saga: Space Invader is finally whole and healthy. But it's been a ride. In between last post and this, the LCD was replaced no less than three times, as follows:

1. Went to repair depot after the self-destruction incident previously described. When it came home, it looked good out of the box, but when I turned the system on, there were weird horizontal lines across the middle of the screen. Troubleshooting with Dell over the phone confirmed that the LCD, not the graphics card or the Windows installation, was at fault.
2. On-site technician replaced LCD again. Everything seemed fine for the next 6 hours. Then more horizontal line visual defects manifested, this time across the bottom two inches of the screen. More troubleshooting confirmed that yes, it's still an LCD problem. Or at least it's not a graphics card or Windows problem.
3. Went to repair depot for full diagnosis and, as it turned out, yet another LCD replacement. I was skeptical. They reassured me that they'd discovered tiny cracks in the LCD and it really did need replacing.

And indeed, this time when the computer came home, everything was fine. And has remained fine. Also, I now have a new charging cable. While I lost touch with the original phone support technician who said he'd see if I could get it covered as a one-time exception, I did wind up including the cable with the laptop on its latest trip to the repair depot, so the techs saw that there were exposed wires and could not let that stand.

Yay! Hopefully I may now hope for more than six months of uninterrupted use before the next problem arises, whatever it may be.

Regarding the item known as "Thing the Second": Right. There was another saga I was going to tell you about. That was the saga of Medical Scheduling Tetris.

Basically, I scheduled all my regular annual check-ups around late March and early April. Like you do. But when you do that, all the follow-up happens rather all at once, too. Which meant there were several weeks in which I was doing very little except recovering from one thing and preparing for the next thing. Which is to say:

• "Hey, you're over 45 now. Time for you to get a colonoscopy screening." About which, the less said, the better. It is done and I don't have to do it again for another seven years. Hooray.
• "Hey, that mole we scraped off your face at your annual dermatology skin check? So very much melanoma. We're referring you to a specialist to have every bit of it excised ASAP or sooner."

So now I am a veteran of what they call "staged excision" or Mohs surgery. This means they take as little skin off of you as they think they can get away with, then examine it to see if they need to take more. (I had the "slow" version, in which the excised skin had to be sent away to an outside laboratory, rather than examined in-house then and there.) I wound up only needing two rounds of excisions before the lab said that the margins were clear and they could sew up the open wound that had been just hanging out on my left cheek all that time.

So that was easy. For certain values of easy. "Easy," as in, "an hour at a time of outpatient surgery under local anesthetic." That kind of so-called "easy."

Honestly, the worst part for me was not being allowed to play roller derby. From the moment they first cut my face open until a week and a half after getting sutured up--so, from April 12 until April 30--I wasn't allowed to skate. Or bike. Or jog. Or dance. Or jump up and down. Basically, no hard exercise, no heavy lifting, nothing to raise my heart rate and risk getting things bleeding again. My friends, I was climbing the walls. (Only not really, because that would be exercise.) I kept going to roller derby practice, soaking up the drills mentally if not physically, helping train the newer skaters to the extent that I could from my sneaker-feet, but I couldn't skate. And then I could skate, and I did, a lot, but for another week I still couldn't derby, because full-contact derby involves risking getting hit in the face, which the dermatology specialist didn't want happening while I was still in a vulnerable stage of healing. Not that they wanted it happening ever, but they absolutely forbade it happening until May 7.

And then May 7 came along, and I could do all the things again, including a very rough-and-tumble scrimmage in which I did in fact take an unexpected blow to the face, which just goes to show. I was so happy I could have cried. "I hit my friends! They hit me! It was great! And check out my new bad-ass scar!" Yep. We roller derby skaters are a special kind of weird.

All of which leads to...

A special roller derby announcement! This Friday, May 20, I will be skating with Boulder County Roller Derby against Pikes Peak Derby Dames in PPDD's home venue, the Xfinity Roller Sports Arena in Colorado Springs. Doors open at 6 PM, and first whistle will be at 7. (Mountain Time, naturally.) If you're in the area and can make it, AWESOME! Be there and say hi! Otherwise, they do say on the event and ticket sales page that livestreaming will be enabled by Roller Planet. (I know very little about Roller Planet beyond that they exist and there is a small monthly subscription fee involved.)

So that's happening. And now you know.

Next time: An upcoming author appearance! And other writing news! Including new and exciting schedule variations! Yay!

Oh hey how is it the 30th already? Welp.

No regrets, though. The month has gone more or less to plan. Well, other than my weekends having a tendency to disappear in a puff of roller derby. In my defense, it wasn't just regular practice but also holiday parties and trail skating and all the activities associated with moving into our new practice facility. This past week, we put down the Sport Court and then we taped a track outline and then we were all like, "Well, we know we said no practice Tuesday night because of Thanksgiving but hey, let's skate Tuesday night anyway because NEW FLOOR WHO DIS?" And yes, Tuesday is not a weekend day. What's your point?

Anyways, some writing time was lost here and there, and I am slightly behind on my big ambitious Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project upload schedule. But only a little! There is one, count it, (1) short-short story-like object that should have gone out by now that has not. That is an entirely surmountable bit of slippage. I can soak that. It'll go up and be released this Friday along with the other two that ought to be, and everything will be back on track for a December 17 ALL CAUGHT UP celebration. (A private celebration. That takes place in my head.) And there should be an October 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up post next week. JUST YOU WAIT.

What else? Well, tonight I am in Steamboat Springs, doing about the same thing I do with all my days except less roller derby, more writing, and a different subset of the Rocky Mountains out my window. To be entirely specific, I am currently sitting at a table in WildPlum Grocer (and coffee shop, and bar, and liquor store) enjoying the writing-at-a-cafe sensation I have so rarely experienced since March of last year. It's also nice to get out of the hotel room. It's mostly comfy and has a nice view, but my poor feet got sick of dangling. The only table or desk set-up in that place is sort of bar-stool, and I am a short person who can't even reach those tall chairs' support bars. And I needed a slight change of scenery from my change of scenery, I guess.

("What are you going to do in Steamboat?" we get asked. "Enjoying the opening week of skiing?" No, we don't ski. "Then... um... what exactly are you doing?" BEING HERE. Shut up.)

More news of note: Before we left Boulder for this little vacation-like activity, I bought a whole bunch of dried fruit and nuts. FRUITCAKE WILL HAPPEN THIS YEAR. And now you know.

Huh. So, the last time I blogged here, it was to say "Sorry, PT robbed me of productivity, but here's the latest Friday Fictionette round-up at least." Welp, same message, different month.

Physical therapy robbed me of less productivity today, though, because I've been scheduling my appointments for early afternoon rather than morning. Which means that, if I manage to get up on time, I can get a good two to three hours of writing in before the rest of my day's oomph gets used up in soft tissue manipulation, deep stretches, and strength-building exercises. That "if" there is doing a lot of work; I have not of late been very good at getting up on time. However, this week, the demolition phase of my neighborhood's Recoat Everyone's Back Patio Decks project started. When jackhammer-like noises in the service of stripping the old coating off the deck starts up at 8:20 in the morning, well, I ain't sleeping late, am I?

I still have a shit-ton of things that I need to do like yesterday, and knowing that can be paralyzing. If I'm working on one of those things, I'm not working on any of the ten others. Anxiety! Avoidance! Nothing getting done at all! So even though it's nearing 10:30 PM, I'm posting this post because, dang it, I'm going to do something.

Thus, without any further ado, the March 2021 Fictionette Round-up.

Friday, March 5, 2021: "Invasive Species" (ebook, audio) In which a stranger comes to town. "Just needed to go somewhere new. Anywhere's fine, so long as it's alive and fresh."

Friday, March 12, 2021: "A Separate World" (ebook, audio) In which realities diverge. "I think the joke's gone far enough, don't you?"

Friday, March 19, 2021: "Peaceable Kingdom" (ebook, audio) In which we are made welcome. They were trying to find a navigable pass through the mountains. They found something else.

Friday, March 26, 2021: "Misery Loves Company" (ebook, audio) In which our needs change over time. I became obsessed with escape. Wouldn't you?

The fictionette freebie for the month is "A Separate World," so you can follow the links above and view the HTML version, listen to the audio version, and/or download any of the three ebook versions, regardless of whether you're a subscriber.

I'm trying to get better about announcing each fictionette on Twitter and Facebook when each goes up, but I remain kinda reluctant to do that while I'm still a good 5 to 6 weeks behind schedule. I get all ashamed of it and stuff. I need to get over it. Also I mean to mention each release in a blog post here, but that would require actually blogging regularly again.

I'm gonna try to! I have things to tell you and more things coming down the pipeline! And between the morning construction and the early morning bunny zooms, I'm starting my work day On Time and having plenty of time to do All The Things--at least on the days when I don't get wiped out around 1:00 or 1:45 with physical therapy.

"Bunny zooms" does not refer to lagomorph teleconferencing, though Holland has done his share of appearing on Zoom. (Most notoriously, when I tune in to The Story Hour or join some friends for long-distance karaoke, I'm usually sitting on the floor with my back to the sofa, and Holland will jump up and beg treats over my shoulder.) No, I'm talking about when a rabbit's tiny body just can't contain a sudden excess of energy and joy, causing the beastie to run all over the house just as fast as it possibly can. Holland woke me up an hour before the construction did by starting his zoom flight path from on top of the actual bed. There's a bit of a kick when he takes off.

Ah, yes. Last blog post, almost a month ago, I was wistful hoping Holland would start jumping up on the bed now that he's been allowed free range of the bedroom. Not long after that, I carried him onto the bed and fed him treats until he forgave me for picking him up. And that was it. That was all it took. The association was firmly implanted: "On top of the bed is where yummy things happen." We've taken to keeping a little cup of grape-juice-soaked "pick-up sticks" on the headboard so that when he hops up to visit we can show him some hospitality. He won't stick around to cuddle or kick back--I think it feels too exposed an area for a wary prey animal such as himself--but when he shows up he is very determined that he is owed a treat. If one is not forthcoming, he will search them out.

And that's the latest. Hopefully more tomorrow.

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.

Hello, neglected blog! I haven't posted to you since, what, early November? And we've still got a pandemic on. Even with a vaccine just around the corner, we're gonna be in pandemic mode for a while. So let's talk a little about how this whole pandemic thing has changed winter in Chez LeBoeuf-Little.

The big change is, we don't get to host our annual Winter Solstice All-Night Open House & Yule Log Vigil. Which admittedly isn't the blow felt by, say, Average American Household not getting to hold Extended Family Christmas. But it's still a shame. I like cooking metric tons of seasonal food and then getting surprised by who winds up coming over at three in the morning. I like sharing my eclectic Pagan traditions with my friends and neighbors. I would have enjoyed the heck out of introducing Holland to our guests (although Holland may not have enjoyed it; he can be skittish around new people.) It's a sad thing. But it's a necessary thing. I accept the necessary sad thing.

And it's not like I can't fix myself midwinter pie, tomato-orange soup, and a pitcher of the world's best egg nog ("world's best" because my friend's recipe is amazing, not because I'm particularly good at making egg nog). But there'll be no one but me in the house to consume them (none of the above are to John's taste), so I'll have to make somewhat less than a metric ton.

On that note, there won't be a fruitcake this year. That, too, seemed like a lot of food to make for only myself to eat. Usually about half the cake gets sliced up and mailed to friends and family around the country and a couple outside the country, but again, pandemic. I'm just not sure about the wisdom of producing foodstuffs with my unverified and unprofessional bare hands to be sent out into the world for others to eat at this particular juncture. Maybe I'm overthinking it; there are no known cases of anyone catching the novel coronavirus via food. But wouldn't it suck to be the first? More realistically, shopping for bulk dried fruits and nuts is kind of fraught right now. Whole Foods shut down its bulk food zone and replaced it with an Amazon Prime delivery staging area. Lucky's North reopened their bulk aisle, and they made gloves and hand sanitizer available to shoppers in that aisle, and no one uses them but me. Possibly an exaggeration, but after the third time cheerfully chirping at a random fellow customer, "Oh, they want us to use gloves! They're over there," I get this strong impression.

So. No fruitcake. No party. But hey, no superspreader behavior, either, so ultimately it's a win.

One nice change was that John was able to come with me to Avon this year. Usually he can't; it would mean time off from work, and generally he's used up most of his vacation time with gaming conventions by now. But this year 1. no gaming conventions, and 2. he's working from home every day. So there was no reason he couldn't work out of our room at the Sheraton Mountain Vista.

So we went. We bundled ourselves into the moving bubble that is our Chevrolet Volt, we wore our masks and used hand sanitizer on our way to check into the hotel, we used sanitizer wipes to extra-special sterilize the luggage cart that hotel staff had probably already sterilized, and we brought enough food from home that we didn't need to visit the grocery but once late in the week. And then we proceeded to work and play more or less like we do at home, in isolation but with a different selection of scenic views.

It was great. We cooked each other meals and also explored our take-out and delivery options. We watched some good TV. We read some good books. I skated around Lake Nottingham a few times because the weather was amazing. Meanwhile, Avedan sent us pictures of Holland being adorable for her. (Avedan apparently does not count as new people. Holland was comfortable enough around her to entertain himself by giving her sass with both barrels. He was glad to see us when we got home, but I suspect he did not miss us.)

"But Niki," I hear you say, "this is the actually writing blog. After a hiatus of more than a month, aren't you going to blog about the actually writing?" Yes! I shall. Writing has been Actually Happening. It's glorious. But about that, more tomorrow. This post is long enough already!