author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So what with the Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project going so well, I guess I can post the Fictionette Round-Up for August 2021. Actually, I could have posted it... *checks notes* ...any old time in November, since the August 27 release went up on Nov 1. Welp, here they are now: links to, and teaser text from, the short story-like objects originally scheduled for the first four (and only four) Fridays in August:

Friday, August 6, 2021: "The New Undertaker" (ebook, audio) In which we have a changing of the guard, about which the old guard is ill-informed. This wasn't an apprentice. This was a usurper.

Friday, August 13, 2021: "When It Calls, You Have to Go" (ebook, audio) In which some parties withstand unearthly temptation, and others enthusiastically give in. Tom still hadn't come home.

Friday, August 20, 2021: "Who's Afraid of the Dark?" (ebook, audio) In which we visit lodgings with a most unusual innkeeper. Of course, you, dear reader, are too sophisticated to believe in vampires.

Friday, August 27, 2021: "King of All He Surveyed" (ebook, audio) In which revisit a beloved bedtime story. I'll tell it to you exactly the way I remember my mother telling it to me.

"Who's Afraid of the Dark?" is the Fictionette Freebie for the month. That's the one you can read and/or listen to without having to be a Patron at any tier. Check it out! I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope you do too.

So you remember how I described the three-day process for producing overdue fictionettes in a hurry? I said Day 1 was for the babble-draft, Day 2 was for the final draft, and Day 3 was for production? Yes, well, about that: it turns out the final draft stage is not the work of a single day. Typically it's been more like "extra practice drafts and eventually a final draft" and it's been creeping into Day 3. This has not, fortunately, thrown any wrenches in my schedule. Turns out since the production stage only takes about an hour and a half or so, I can fit some last minute drafting and polishing on Day 3. Heck, the one time I didn't finish production until the morning of the next fictionette's Day 1, there was still plenty of time left in the day for the scheduled babble-draft session.

(Besides, late uploads would be pretty much invisible from where y'all are standing, what with them not going live until the following Friday morning.)

What I've learned is, not only is this 3-day schedule working, but it's got some room for flex in it. So that's good. Especially since the one for September 24 is giving me trouble. So, you know how the Friday Fictionette for any given week is based on a freewriting session from the corresponding week in the previous month? (If not, now you do.) Well, sometimes I choose a freewriting session not because it would positively make a good fictionette, but because it is the least bad of my options from a week of slim pickings. "Future me is going to hate me for this," I'll mutter to myself as I copy it over.

GUESS WHAT. Past me was a jerk.

It's OK. After today's session of babbling on the page about it, I feel kinda almost secure about maybe attempting a real practice draft that might magically transform itself into a final draft beneath my very fingers. Maybe. I hope.

On a Friday.

Um. Well, there should be time in Saturday for whatever doesn't get done tomorrow. Theoretically.

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.)

Let's just write October off as non-existent. To heck with October. It's November now, and you know what that means.

No, I do not have a novel to work on. I have something much more pressing: the dratted Friday Fictionette release schedule. I haven't been on top of it since September of last year, and now I am now precisely two months behind. That is ridonkulous. So my NaNoWriMo will be about fixing that, in part if not in whole. Also about fixing my writing LIFE, because seriously.

So I have goals. Well, I have two overall goals: 1. get caught up on Friday Fictionettes, and 2. instill and strengthen habits for a more sustainable writing life. But in the service of those big overarching goals, I have this list of small, concrete daily goals, and they go like this:

• Get to bed on time by midnight
• Get up between 7:45 and 8:30
• Morning Pages every day, as soon after getting up as possible. (No computer nuthin' 'til they're done.)
• 1,000 words, ish, freewriting to a prompt every day.
• Significant progress on the current Friday Fictionette (see below).
• Some physical exercise: either skating or my physical therapy homework.

That's it. Those are the required daily items for November. I'm demoting submission procedures and the production of submittable materials to "Nice to Haves" for the month. That frees me up to let "significant progress" take however much time it needs.

So, what's "significant progress" on a fictionette? It's completing one of the three main steps in Friday Fictionette production. That phrase makes it sound so dang industrial, doesn't it? Ergh. Like a factory assembly line. Only it kinda is, and there are three stations in the factory.

1. Babble-draft. This is where I reread the freewriting session I've chosen as the current fictionette's base material, then flail about on the page in search of the story's final form. There will be a lot of disjointed questions, notes, ideas, etc. Babble. Usually includes some practice drafts as I try out different approaches. If I'm lucky, there's an "a-ha" moment where it all comes together. More often, layers of babble and practice draft and process eventually result in me having a solid plan for writing the final draft. Once I have that solid plan, this step is done.

2. Working and Final Draft. This part is basically plotter-style NaNoWriMo, or the process Rachel Aaron describes in her book and on her blog: I come to this writing session knowing what I'm going to write, and so I write it. A few more discoveries may yet be waiting along the way, but they're unlikely to change the fundamental structure of the story at this point. Then there's some final polishing and word-count reduction. Then I'm done. Except for the Author's Note, of course. Argh. What am I gonna put in the Author's Note this time? After some overthinking and stress, I come up with something, and then I argh all over again because titles, y'all. But then it's done.

3. Production. Narrating, recording, and producing the MP3 version. Creating the cover image. Compiling to PDF, ebook, and HTML. And finally throwing all those elements into a couple Patreon posts which, if I'm on top of things (ha! ha!) I will then schedule for publication at 8:00 AM on Friday. This all sounds like a lot, but it's the easiest bit, really. It's the most factory-like of the whole assembly line. Takes maybe an hour and a half.

So. "Significant progress" means doing one of those three things. Every day. Which theoretically means I could be All Caught Up in 3 X [Number of Overdue Fictionettes] days, right? Only there will inevitably be slippage, because I suck, or maybe it's just life that sucks sometimes. But! I fully intend to suck less in November. I'm off to a great start! 100% completion yesterday and today. Checked off every item on the above list. Yesterday, in fact, was a Working/Final Draft and Production day for the August 27 fictionette. And today, in addition to being Babble-Draft day for the Sept 3 release, also afforded time to work on a new poem which I hope to submit to Eternal Haunted Summer, and to do a small spot of submission procedures, too. And this blog post. While also holding down the fort waiting for an on-site computer repair technician who never actually showed. And then going to derby. Which was a footage watching party instead of actual skating, because weather, but hey, that's why I did my PT today.

All of which goes to say: NaNoWriMo Days 1 and 2 have been complete successes... so much so that I'm nervous about the inevitable crash. About waking up tomorrow and thinking, "Shit, now I have to live up to the level of production I achieved on Monday and Tuesday," and then just collapsing under the weight of self-expectation. Plus, tomorrow's Wednesday, and Wednesdays are infamous for failing to exist around here.

Except tomorrow's a Wednesday in November, and November is going to rock.

Because I said so.

So there.

Hullo! This blog is not dead. Furthermore, actual writing happened today. On a Wednesday, even! UNHEARD OF. Generally my Tuesdays are epic and my Wednesdays are nonexistent. But this week both Tuesday and Wednesday were productive--and on a human scale, which is much more sustainable.

I've been experimenting with different scheduling brain-hacks, trying to see how best to trick my brain into behaving itself. Today's experiment involved a "done by" rather than "start at" check-list. "Let's see. Task one is my Morning Pages, which I'm in the middle of now" (Morning Pages tends to be where I figure out the shape of my day) "and I should be done by 1:00 PM. Next I have to record the Wednesday show for AINC, which I ought to be able to get done by 3:00 PM. Then the daily freewriting--that usually takes 25 minutes, but let's say done by 4:00 PM..." And so forth.

The unexpected benefit of all this was, although I had an idea that one task's "done by" was really just code for the next task's "start by," if I missed that start-by time by a few minutes, I didn't suddenly feel like I'M LATE I MISSED THE START TIME WHAT'S THE POINT ANYMORE. I knew I could get it done by whatever done-by time I'd intended. If I got it done early, I could futz around with clicky-games for a bit. Or I could futz around with clicky-games while I did the task, so long as I still got it done by the done-by time.

So, basically, we're talking about One Weird Trick to lessen the pressure and anxiety miasma surrounding certain writing tasks. It reminded me of Havi Brooks's "code words" strategy, although perhaps not at the same level of mental role play as the example she gives in the linked blog post. Today it worked. Who knows if it'll work tomorrow--tomorrow I may have a very different brain on--but I'll try it and see.

So, having gotten all my work (give or take a checklist item) done by a reasonable time of the afternoon, I had time to make salsa.

It has been a good year for tomatoes. A very, very good year. Every week, 63rd St. Farm has been sending me home with some five to eight slicing tomatoes and a selection of heirloom tomatoes, saucing tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes. It sort of piles up. And then there's a bit on one of the really pretty heirloom tomatoes that's starting to look iffy if not downright moldy, and that's how you know it's high time to do something with these tomatoes, y'all.

The Conservatory Kitchen Presents: Improv Tomato-culling Salsa

1. Starting with the oldest, worst-looking tomato in the bunch and moving up from there, cut off the bad bits and see what's left. (The aforementioned heirloom with the moldy spot cleaned up surprisingly well!) Put the good bits on the kitchen scale until the kitchen scale says 2 lbs or thereabouts. Take these accumulated good bits, dice 'em and chop 'em and mangle 'em, and stick 'em in a big bowl. (Bigger than that. You need room to stir, OK?)
2. To this add about a quarter pound of diced onion--yeah, that half-an-onion that's sitting around in the crisper drawer (dear Gods, organic yellow onions are HUGE these days), that'll do--and maybe three green onions and five nice-sized garlic cloves and oh, hey, something hot. Five serrano peppers sounds about right. (Serrano peppers are another veggie I've been accumulating.)
3. Spices. Very simple. About a teaspoon dried oregano and about a half teaspoon ground cumin. Fresh ground peppercorns of all colors: black, white, pink. More than that. KEEP GRINDING. Maybe a teaspoon of salt? More? I dunno, the chips you're gonna dip in this mess are gonna be salty already, aren't they?
4. Stir stir stir. Taste. What do you think? Did I forget anything? No, I left out the cilantro on purpose. Can't stand the stuff. More for you, right? Hm. Maybe parsley. Maybe a diced peach if one's rolling around the fruit bowl.
5. Let sit in the fridge until party time. If no parties are in the offing, throw one for yourself. Show yourself a good time. You deserve it.

And there you go. Salsa. By the time I was done, I only had about 15 tomatoes left in the house and maybe 10 serrano peppers. SHUT UP, THAT'S PROGRESS.

Hey, you know what I haven't done in a while? ("Upload a blog post?") Quiet, you. I mean, a really long while. ("Um...") A Friday Fictionette Roundup, that's what!

Quick obligatory recap, given how long it's been: The Friday Fictionette Project is where I turn some of my daily freewriting into semi-presentable short-story-like objects four times monthly for your amusement, confusement, and (hopefully) delight. The ebook version of each is available to Patrons at the $1/month pledge tier, and those pledging $3/month additionally get the audiobook version, which I narrate. One out of four fictionettes I'll designate the Fictionette Freebie for that month and unlock its posts for public consumption.

As with everything in my life, I am behind schedule, but for the most part I have been uploading something every first through fourth Friday. (I don't know what happened last week, but I hope to make up for it with two uploads on Oct 1. They'll be the fictionettes originally scheduled for August 13 and 20. You see the problem.)

Having recently finished all four releases originally scheduled for July 2021, I shall round them up here for your convenience.

Friday, July 2, 2021: "Leveling Up" (ebook, audio) In which a hero receives his just reward. Or is that come-uppance? The traditional reward was half the kingdom and a royal heir's hand in marriage--but maybe that was thinking too small...

Friday, July 9, 2021: "Bride of the River" (ebook, audio) In which our protagonist was right all along about their creepy classmate's creepy family. Sort of. "Fine. But if they wind up slaughtering me for Sunday dinner, don't say I didn't warn you."

Friday, July 16, 2021: "Pilgrim's Voyage" (ebook, audio) Being a sort of New Passenger Orientation for a somewhat perilous journey (and its rather more perilous destination). Does something to you, coming under the Goddess's eye. Makes words seem a little, I dunno, noisy.

Friday, July 23, 2021: "Where the Streetlights Never Come On" (ebook, audio) In which we go for a Saturday morning drive that lasts all day and maybe forever. Uncle Garrick never took Harold's friends with them on their adventures. He only ever took Harold.

"Where the Streetlights Never Come On" is the Fictionette Freebie for July 2021, so feel free to click the links and go check it out regardless of whether you're a paying Patron.

("Hey, but what about the ones for May and June? The last round-up post you did was for the March fictionettes.") I said quiet, you.

And that's what I've got for you today. Dare I promise anything for tomorrow? I have to admit, my daily writing routine has been kind of crap lately. I mean, when it works out, when I stick to it, it's awesome. But I've been kind of crap about sticking to it. Weirdly, I tend to be best at Tuesdays and Thursdays, in spite of those being my roller derby practice days. More like "because of." Knowing that after 6:15 I will be good for nothing but skating and then maybe a beer brings that necessary urgency to my scheduling. If I want to get everything done, I have to stick to certain timelines. I stuck to them today, gosh darn it! Like GLUE!

Tomorrow? Eeesh. Not gonna think about tomorrow just yet.

This being the actually writing blog, I'm gonna blog about actually writing. Today I actually wrote. It's a good thing.

As I mentioned last time, I've been having trouble. My relationship with time-management has become fraught. More fraught than usual, I mean. I got to where the very act of planning my writing day, with a check-list and a schedule and everything, sent me fleeing into the wordless night. Things didn't get done. Things were bad.

So I gave myself permission for a few weeks to just sort of float along through the day, dabbling with whatever writing task came to mind, telling myself it was play and not work at all. It was safe to start writing because starting didn't commit me to continuing. It didn't require "clocking in" and it didn't require putting away the stupid clicky games because it didn't require Dedicated Butt-In-Chair time. I could write a sentence or two while running a rewarded ad in my stupid clicky game, for example. No pressure. Just play.

This was emotionally helpful, but not very pragmatic for a writer with several simultaneous projects and a handful of self-imposed deadlines. I got further behind on everything. Also, I discovered that the non-writing things I had scheduled in relation to scheduled writing tasks got forgotten half the time because the writing tasks were no longer scheduled. So that wasn't very sustainable.

So I've kinda-sorta gone back to having a schedule. It's a looser version of the schedule I got burnt out on. Instead of "Write X from exactly Y:00 to Y:25" it's more like "Start X sometime during the Y o'clock hour and go for as long as it takes to defeat a Knusha." (A Knusha is monster in 4thewords. It takes 1200 words to beat a Knusha, and you have 600 minutes to do it in. This is not hard.) Things get tighter when they have to, like when I've got a Tuesday full of appointments, but on a day like today when I don't have to leave the house, there's some float tolerance built in.

So this week I'm revisiting "Making Friends" and starting, slowly, tentatively, in a floating sort of way, to revise it. I hadn't touched it since sending it to my critique group about a year ago. Yesterday I got an idea for improving a scene where the pace had got bogged down, and though I never got to the keyboard about it, I did a bunch of working it out in my head during the drive to roller derby practice. That counted. I checked "Story Revision" off my to-do list for the day. Today I spent a few minutes typing up some concrete notes in the margins. That definitely counted. Tomorrow I'll make a first attempt at writing the new material. We'll get there.

I also wanted to actually get to this blog today, and now I have done that. Hooray! Another little victory for my collection.

Tomorrow will be one of those tightly scheduled days. My hope is that the loosely scheduled days like today will bolster me with enough positivity and achievement that I'll have the wherewithal to stick to a tight schedule on a day like tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. I'll report back and let you know. If not tomorrow, then at least sometime later in the week. Or at least sometime before another month has gone by. One blog post a month seems a little sparse.

Anyway, 'til then.

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.

Not so much whining today, as it turns out. What was that I said about external systems of structure and accountability? Today's external accountability mechanisms were my Boulder Food Rescue shift and my various curbside shopping errands, for getting me out of bed on time; and Cat Rambo's afternoon co-writing session, for getting me back to work by 2 PM rather than collapsing into a nap that would eat up the rest of my productive day.

(And what with having been up from early (for me) and not napped, maybe I'll sleep better tonight.)

Because today went so well, I can give you the January 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up on time, which is to say, no more than the same month I've been late for quite a few months now. Huzzah!

January 1: "My Sister Draws Things" (ebook, audio) In which sisters have each other's backs, and imagination is queen.

January 8: "What the Desert Dreams" (ebook, audio) In which creation and destruction walk hand in hand, no matter what any nearby creator gods have to say about it.

January 15: "How It Begins" (ebook, audio) In which pet sphinxes are a comfort to a lonely old woman.

January 22: "What Is Not Prohibited" (ebook, audio) In which we are not the first nor yet the cleverest to question the three laws of robotics.

The Fictionette Freebie for January 2021 is "My Sister Draws Things", so you can download and enjoy that one regardless of whether you're a paid subscriber.

Also, dinner tonight is pasta with sausage and cream, only I used penne instead of shells, ground breakfast sausage instead of sweet Italian, and a whole lot of fennel seeds, hot pepper flakes, white and pink peppercorns, and nutmeg.

And that is all.

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.

I actually feel good about posting to the actually writing blog today, because today I actually wrote. I got stuff done! I submitted a whole bunch of things! I wrote a whole bunch of words! I wrote down this morning's dreams, which were 1500 words of detail right there. I hit every item on today's timesheet, and that's not an everyday occurrence! ("It's OK, to-do lists are aspirational" is my latest affirmation.)

On top of all the good writing stuff that went on today, John and I succeeded in finishing off Holland's bi-monthly "bunny tune-up" checklist (which is not aspirational but obligatory). This involved John holding him while I cleaned out his scent folds, and, I tell you what, Holland is not nearly as cooperative as the bunny in this instructional video. Holland bore a bit of a grudge for, like, a whole hour, but after that he was back to bounding around the living room and nudging my ankle for treats.

I'm almost feeling too good. I'm a little suspicious of the feeling. So how about I sabotage it by making a shameful confession? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Well, OK, let's put this a bit more positively. Since I'm feeling so good, I've got a bit of resilience stored up, so now's a good time to confess to something that would normally make me feel a little ashamed of myself. Irrationally, I will add. Without provocation. But it's so easy to get down on oneself about so many things that, when you really get right down to it, don't matter in the least. Right, writers? Y'all know what I'm talking about here. But I've stored up a lot of Good Feels today, so let's reveal some of the shameful underbelly of the beast we call Niki's Process.

First, though, let's provide some context. As a writer, I live or die--well, write or don't write--by my mind-hacks. That's enough of a confession right there. As a Baby Writer, I heard enough Wise Elders proclaiming that if you need mind-hacks, you are obviously not a "real" writer. Real writers write because they just! can't! not! If it's ever hard to get started, if you ever find yourself in the throes of avoidance or so-called writer's block, such that you need to trick yourself to get the writing done--well, the Wise Elders said, that's a sign you should give up and go do something easier, like web programming or accountancy.

Thankfully, I've gotten very good at calling bullshit on that particular bit of gatekeeping nonsense. I suspect such Wise Elders as being akin to that Twitter Pundit who tweeted (and then de-tweeted) the following crock-o-feces: "HARSH WRITING ADVICE: Your writer friends are also your competition. Sorry." I'm happy to say that a bunch of my writer acquaintances, colleagues, and, yes, friends, pounced on this ill-informed bit of hogwash and turned it into fun and games, and also actual good advice.

Point is, I think it must be the sort of writer who sees other writers as primarily their competition who also thinks it must be a good thing to expose Baby Writers in their infancy. Y'know, so as to have fewer writers competing with them for eyeballs and dollars.

So! It is therefore decided: Mind-hacks are fine. Whatever it takes to get you writing and, hopefully, feeling good about yourself, hey, an it harm none, do what ye will.

Mur Lafferty talks about mind-hacks in her podcast I Should Be Writing. In Season 17, Episode 13, around about timestamp 7:25, she warms to the subject...

"There are lots and lots of tricks that you can do to fool your head into thinking it's enjoying itself.... The thing I'm learning about habits, and making new habits that you may not want to do, is, attach it to something you do like."

Which is great advice. She talks about eating an M&M candy for every 200 words, or how one of her listeners might use a visit to their horse as incentive to get some edits done. Heck, I did a thing today that's right along those lines--I got myself and my squad of Pikmin poised to descend to the next level of Hole of Heroes that I hadn't visited yet, then hit pause, telling myself, "You get to continue after you've done your freewriting and your Friday Fictionette work for the day." And so I did!

But there's another "attach it to something you do like" trick I do, darn near daily, which feels less defensible. I, er...

*ahem*

...I use Rewarded Play to earn Barnes & Nobles gift cards. And I use that as an incentive to do my Morning Pages.

Argh. It's so stupid! Just when I get less cringey about admitting that I do Morning Pages (from reading too many Wise Elder Writers poo-poo'ing The Artist's Way as so much woo, I suppose), now I get to confess that I have a hard time making myself do them sometimes (at which confession the Wise Elders pounce: "A-ha, that's because you know deep down that it's a stupid waste of time!" No, you jerk, it's because Morning Pages force me to confront the contents of my brain, and my brain is not always a happy place), and that I get around this by indulging in a petty exercise of "Yay I got free stuff I could have just paid for because it's not like we're not well-off enough to buy books."

I suppose it's not that weird. Some people like gambling in casinos; I like doing stupid clicky things to earn gift cards. I have a Swagbucks account, too. It's a meta-game, OK? It is possible this is an offshoot of the benign family tradition of Ha Ha I'm Clever I Got Away With Something. I don't know. But then you add Rewarded Play's daily streak bonus, and BOOM, you're just playing into my obsessive completist side that begins instinctively to treat making the daily 5K points as an obligation. Like, gotta do my Morning Pages, gotta do my freewriting, gotta make 5,000 points on Rewarded Play.

So at some point I got into the habit of running the app during Morning Pages. I start up one of the rewarded apps, set the timer on my flip-phone for 4 minutes, then scribble in my notebook until the timer goes off. Pause the scribbling. Close the app. Confirm that Rewarded Play awarded me my daily usage points. Then start the next app up and another 4-minute timer.

Lather, rinse, repeat until three pages of longhand scribbling are done.

The whole process sort of soothes that one particular set of brain weasels that's like MUST! ALWAYS! BE! MULTITASKING! Which, fair. Four minutes multiplied by twenty-three apps equals a lot of time; if I can get some of it done at the same as another must-do-daily thing, well, cool! And despite it being such a mechanical, brainless, non-essential task, it still results in a vague sense of accomplishment...

Which could be dangerous, actually. Non-essential playtime tasks that result in a sense of accomplishment run a real risk of checking off the mental "I got stuff done today!" to-do list. Like little cuckoo nestlings, they can eat up all the sense of urgency and obligation that ought to have pushed me to do my writing. But that's the other good reason for attaching fun things to the (hopefully also fun but not always) writing things. If I don't do the playtime thing before the writing thing, then I don't risk getting my daily done of sense-o-accomplishment exclusively off the playtime things.

So I wake up, and I don't wanna get out of bed, and I definitely don't wanna do Morning Pages. "But if you start Morning Pages, you get to start the Rewarded Play daily usage points too," Smart Me wheedles. "Also, you get your cup of tea. You want that cup of tea, don't you?"

Lazy Me allows as how yes, now that Smart Me mentions it, a cup of tea sounds very, very nice right now. A cup of tea might even make up for this whole worthless getting out of bed shinola.

"Splendid," says Smart Me. "Let's get to it."

And so we do.