author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This week's Friday Fictionette is called "Your Neighbor's Keeper." And it took me something like half an hour of staring at the screen to come up with that title, so you'd better appreciate it. Seriously, what is with me and titles? Sometimes I wonder whether having to come up with one every first through fourth Friday is using up some sort of non-renewable resource. Like, there's only so many title-length combinations of words in the world. One day I'm going to run out.

Anyway, like the author's note says, this particular short-short started from one of those tiny, mysterious moments that defy explanation, while being at the same time too mundane to be worth wondering about. But being a writer means I have carte blanche to wonder about stuff that isn't worth wondering about, right? That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I changed the building numbers to building letters, and I changed them from condos to apartments, but otherwise that happened right here on my block. Minus the destruction, of course.

The other aspect of the fictionette that's drawn from life is my own shameful inattention to the people around me. I don't know many of my neighbors. I don't attend the neighborly gatherings at the clubhouse. I've a terrible memory for names, and I tend to look at hands and skates and helmets rather than at faces. I don't remember what she looked like, the stranger who interrogated me in the cul-de-sac, and I don't remember the car she drove. All I remember is my bare feet on the sidewalk and my wondering why she then disappeared around the corner of the dog park at the retirement home.

You know, come to think of it, she was probably just visiting someone in the retirement home, or going on a volunteer or staff shift. There isn't much legitimate parking for those purposes. She was probably just making sure that the only witness to her parking job didn't live in the nearby buildings and thus have standing to get her car towed. (Not that it was in any danger of getting towed. As long as you don't park by the yellow curbs or in a covered spot you don't own, you're fine.)

Anyway, I did the final revisions on this fictionettes from a table at Blooming Beets across the street. The server-cum-host who showed me to a table noticed that I'd been working on my laptop while I waited for a table to open up; she pointed out that, as luck would have it, I got the table with electrical outlets. She seemed to be one of only two servers on duty during a rather busy night during First Bite Boulder, but neither of them rushed me nor made me feel weird for dining alone or working on the computer.

I splurged on the wine pairings, which turned out to be quite a lot of wine. I reassured the server that it was OK, I walking home. And that it was very silly that although the restaurant had been open a little while now so close to my house, it took an event like First Bite Boulder to get me to finally visit. She lit up and said she, too, lived just up the street. Check that out: We're neighbors. We gave each other our names and shook hands.

And I made sure, for once, to really look at her as we exchanged "pleased to meet you"s and "see you again soon"s. I still have a terrible memory for names and faces, even when I'm trying my best. But I made sure, for once, to try.

One of these days, I'll publish my Friday Fictionette somewhat earlier in the day. Like, maybe while it's still light out. This ten-at-night business is silly.

In any case, it's up now. You can read an excerpt right here on this blog, over at Wattpad, or in my Patreon activity stream. You can read the Fictionette in its entirety by becoming a Patron at the suggested minimum pledge level of $1/month. As a reminder, Patrons get to see a new one of these every first through fourth Friday, and one of those four will become free for non-Patrons to read at the end of the month.

"While the Sun Still Shines" went through almost as heavy a revision process as last week's Fictionette. I wanted to give it more shape than just "Oh, good Lord, Katie's whining again, make it stop." And I kind of wish I'd done this back when I was trying to get "The Impact of Snowflakes" out the door. I chose these characters to write a slice-of-life scene about in hopes that I'd get to know them better, but it wasn't until I revised the scene this week that I realized that, gosh, Ashley's kind of being a jerk here. It's not two patient, stoic characters against one whiny one; it's one patient character and one fun-loving character together against one easily irritated narrator throwing a bit of a tantrum.

This would have been a useful insight to have before submitting the short story. Well. Revisions may yet happen. The story's fate in its current slush pile has yet to be determined.

To create cover art for this Fictionette, I scoured Flickr for photos having to do with Mount Sanitas. Most of what I found were copyrighted, "all rights reserved." The few that were released under Creative Commons licenses also specified that commercial use was prohibited. That left one gorgeous photo of Boulder as taken from a Mt. Sanitas trail overlook--but it wasn't quite what I wanted.

Heck with that. I'm a capable person in possession of a functional camera. I went and took a photo myself.

Then I finished the brief walk up to the stone shelter on the cultural resource trail, and I sat inside the shelter in the cool of the stones and I did my morning pages. It was my first time visiting the structure in years. I wondered why that was. I think the previous time I was there, I climbed on top of the shelter (like you're not supposed to do) and watched a meteor shower--again, that was several years ago. It's a nice place. The hike to get there from 4th and Valley View Drive is short but steep, a pretty respectable workout for only 15 minutes.

I was surprised to see new residential lots marked out and new houses going up in an area centered on of 4th and Dewey. There's also a brand new stairway giving access to the trailhead from within what's now the construction zone.

Anyway--click the links, enjoy the view, see you on Monday!

I finished the exploratory draft of the new story today. It's still got no title, but that's OK. That'll come during revision. More troubling is that it clocks in at 3,380 words. That's more than double the cut-off called for in the submission guidelines. It's even more than double what the draft was at yesterday, when I figured I was about halfway through.

Such an occasion calls for introspection, or at least evaluation. Which is to say: Can this really be cut down to 1,400 words?

The part of my brain arguing for YES points out that there is, as I observed yesterday, a lot of cruft to be culled. Several things get said over and over again and also redundantly, and many things get said that need not be said at all. For instance: It is less important to remark on Rosalind's Sunday exception to her morning routine of reading the entire newspaper, back to front, than it is to mention that she no longer bothers reading the obituaries. It is less important (for the sake of the story, anyway) to voice Elaine's disapproval of the labels "homeless" or "transient," given her permanent residence under a particular tree in the park, than it is to capture the voice of her tree asking her to be its new dryad.

The theory that YES-brain espouses is this: Now that I've met all the characters in this story and gotten to know their backgrounds, I'm well equipped to trim their surrounding exposition down to those few phrases that best crystallize who they are and what's at stake for them.

NO-brain is more pessimistic, as you might expect. There's too much going on here, says NO-brain. This story needs at least 2,500 words for the reader to have any clue what's going on. Don't sell your characters short!

On the other hand, NO-brain is also bringing some optimism to the table. It points out that as easily as this story idea arose from my freewriting sessions, just as easily might another that's more apt for the submissions call. YES-brain concedes the point, but counters that, this being the case, there's no harm in making the revision attempt here. I've made such good progress while still nearly two weeks to deadline remain, that there will be time to pan for more gold in my Daily Idea .scrivx should this story remain stubbornly above the maximum word count. And then I'll have two brand new stories to shop around!

What strikes me here is how very natural it was to go from "The deadline's imminent and I've absolutely nothing to send!" to "Well, what came out of my timed writing sessions lately?" That didn't used to happen as readily. But now that I've begun the Friday Fictionettes offerings, it's happening every week at the very least. Every Friday, I'm looking at the past week's scribblings and deciding which of them I'll polish up, stick some cover art on, and upload to my creation stream during the corresponding week of the following month. It only makes sense that this mental process would fire up in response to the need for new story material in additional contexts.

This was one of my sneaky self-improvement goals with Friday Fictionettes. The headliner goals were, firstly, to get more of my stuff out where y'all could read it, and more frequently; and, secondly, to potentially earn a little spare change doing so. But behind the scenes I was also hoping to see some improvement in my larger Story Production Process. I wanted to get in some regular practice making that transition from "just a wisp of an idea that I'm noodling on" to "fully fledged and publishable story." I wanted to see that process go more smoothly and happen more often.

With the current story, I'm seeing evidence that this is happening. And I'm delighted.

The submission guidelines call for a maximum word length of 1400. I wrote 1557 words of rough draft today and I'm only halfway through. Not even halfway through. I'm a little worried, I won't lie. But I know that today's words were, well, wordy. It's exploratory draft that I'm writing, figuring out who my characters are by talking to myself about them. Most of these words will remain off-stage, as it were, in the final draft. So I'm not a lot worried about it. Just a little.

There's a central theme that's surfacing: the idea of deciding what means the most to you, what's worth fighting for even when it's easiest to move on and let go. What metaphorical hill you choose to metaphorically die on, and then following through with that decision. I like it when central themes arise. They give me a goal to steer by. But they also scare me half to death. Like, this story has literary aspirations. Do I really need this kind of pressure?

In other news: The handywork on the doors is done. What remains is all stuff John and I can do ourselves: take them down, stain them, install door pulls. And then of course there's the painting, cleaning, re-staining, and other improvements we needed to do, like, yesterday. Maybe some of it will get done tomorrow. I don't have derby tomorrow evening, so there's a whole bunch of time and energy free to put toward other causes.

I did have derby tonight. A mixed roster of All Stars and Bombshells (our league's A and B teams) went down to Denver to scrimmage against the Denver Roller Dolls' brand new C team, the Standbys. The idea was to help them practice and prepare for their bout this weekend, but they weren't the only ones who got a good workout, let me tell you. I'm so tired, I'm just empty. I used it all up, y'all. That was a damn good scrimmage.

It was also John's debut as a bench coach. Everyone seemed really glad to have him. Our team coach was especially glad because John's stepping up to the task freed her up to just be the team coach (the coach who faces the track and tells the skaters in play what to do) rather than try to be that and a bench coach (the coach who tells the skaters on the bench who's going to go out on the track next) at the same time. Which is a hell of a lot for a single coach to take on. I know this, because just doing the bench coach job had John as mentally exhausted as I was physically.

He described it to a friend thusly: "Yes, it was fun. It's the kind of fun you have when you almost crash into a ten-car pile-up, and you're all, YAY! I didn't crash!"

He was not so exhausted, mind you, that he didn't come home and immediately fire up an archived bout on WFTDA.tv to watch.

My friends, we have created a monster. And I'm so in love with this monster I can't even begin to tell you.

For the following post, and, well, pretty much forever, please of your kindness consider the phrase "Political correctness gone mad!" a non-starter with me. Thank you. Now, on with your regularly scheduled actually writing blog.

So today on the TV at the bar during lunch there was the preseason football game between the Cleveland Browns and the Washington team. It was being rerun from Monday. Apparently it drew the second-highest rating ever for an NFL preseason game. So sayeth NBC Sports. What NBC Sports is not sayeth-ing, at least not unless you count the post's tag, is the actual name of the Washington team. They didn't say the name of the Cleveland team, either, so I'm not sure whether it was a conscientious decision, like that of The Washington Post editorial board, or just a coincidence.

Anyway, John looked up and proclaimed it the Potatoskins Game. Which is awesome. Potatoes come with both brown skins and red skins. Also gold. Also purple. Green, too, if they're not ripe, but we don't see those in the supermarket.

"I want there to be a sports team called The Purpleskins," I told John. "Its mascot would be an all-organic fingerling potato. There would also be a sly rebuke therein to all those But-I'm-Not-A-Bigots who declare themselves so colorblind that they couldn't give a damn if you're 'black, white, or purple.'"

You know who doesn't stint at saying the racist slur that is the Washington team's name all the hell over the place? J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.

You know who actually submitted a story to Shimmer with that slur all the hell over the text? Me.

*dies of shame*

The problem is, I've got a story in which a main character is obsessed with both the original text and the Disney movie of Peter Pan. In both forms of that story, you've got racist stereotypes of Native Americans like woah. It doesn't exactly help that the fictitious sometime-allies, sometime-enemies of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys aren't meant at all to represent the people who lived on the North American continent before European invasion; in fact, that maybe makes it worse. It's one thing to reduce real people to stereotypes; it's yet another to erase real people in favor of the stereotypes.

All this is hardly arguable in this day and age, unless you're Washington's NFL team owner Dan Snyder, who will argue it into the ground because listening to people isn't his strong point. But. But but but that said, what the hell am I going to do with a story in which a six-year-old boy plays Let's Pretend in the imaginative playground of Neverland as Barrie wrote it?

How the heck do I remain non-complicit in the ongoing slur-flinging and stereotype-propagating without turning my other main character, the boy's thirteen-and-a-half year-old sister, into a caricature of a social justice spokesperson?

Argh.

No, I'm not asking for answers. I'll come up with something. Probably it'll occasion another iteration of the older sister and younger brother arguing over whether Neverland is real. Maybe it'll involve the older sister telling him, "Hey! What did we say about using the R word, Jimbo?" I'll figure it out.

For now, I'm just griping, and thereby exorcising my mortification that I submitted a story in Year of Our Common Era Two Thousand and godsdamned Seven that used "the R word" absolutely uncritically from page 5 through page 14.

*dies all over again*

Don't worry. I'll get over it. And the story will be better later for my abject embarrassment now. But abject embarrassment is... well, it's embarrassing, that's what it is.

I can't really complain about our accommodations. The hotel bed is super cozy. The desk in the window is comfortable and wide and well wired up, and there are AC outlets everywhere you look. And they feed you a complimentary hot breakfast every morning. That's complimentary as in "for free, no extra charge, all you gotta do is get down here before 9:00 and not mind that we're running a TV at you nonstop" and hot as in "scrambled eggs, a potato side, a meat side, and one more thing that's kinda fancy, I dunno, today it was egg sausage cheese muffins, tomorrow it might be quiche lorraine. Oh, and there's a waffle maker."

But there's something weird about our refrigerator.

Since construction on our home was going to take the better part of two weeks, we reserved an extended stay suite. The bedroom is separate from the living room, and there's a functional kitchenette. In the kitchenette is a full-sized refrigerator. And I really don't want to complain--see, when we first checked in, the fridge turned out to make a terrible high-pitched whining noise constantly. I mentioned this to the front desk, and they had maintenance out lickety-split to replace our unit with a better one. The maintenance worker was surprised we even had that old unit in the room at all; it was apparently outdated, small, lacked an ice maker. The one he replaced it with was slightly larger, equipped with an ice maker, and pretty much silent. No whine, just the usual background hum of large appliances.

Or so we thought. Until late in the night, we thought we heard someone knocking on the door. Tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, tap tap tap. But no one was there. Several hours later, we heard it again. It sounded so very like the way housekeeping knock on the door during the day, tap-tap-tap-tap with a key-card against the wood.

It's the ice maker. The ice maker is making knocking noises. We have no idea why. I shifted the bar to the OFF position, and still it happens every few hours or so. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap.

Don't get me wrong--it's nowhere near as bad as the whine of the previous unit. I'm certainly not going to bug anyone about replacing it. Now that I know what it is, I can ignore it, or listen with amusement, depending on my mood. But it's just weird. It's like a prank punch-line. "Hey, is your refrigerator running? Better catch it!" "Hey, is that your refrigerator knocking? Well, let it in already!"

Other than that, things are fairly peachy.

On the writing front:

The Patreon page is coming along, but as I hammer it out, I have second thoughts about what I'm going to be promising. Like, I watch myself type, "On each of the first four Fridays of the month, I'll..." and I think, am I insane? Why am I committing myself to another weekly obligation? I think it's just nerves, though. After all, the thing I'm thinking of doing is hardly unreasonable. I've been doing it anyway for months now anyway, just not where everyone could see.

The short story is not yet finished, but it is almost there. I don't need to go back and fiddle with the rest of the story any more. It's all in place. All the set-up is complete and right and as smooth as I can make it. Tomorrow, the ending is happening. At the very least, whatever shape the story is in by the time I have to go to derby, that's the shape in which it'll hit the slush. And I'm not feeling panicky about that, so I suppose it's acceptable.

And I've been keeping up fairly well with the CTC29 challenges--mainly because I already have time in four of the seven days of the week carved out for just such prompt-inspired timed writing. The last couple of days have been doozilicious, though. Yesterday, I read, "Write the first five pages of a story or novel such that they..." and I thought, That isn't a writing exercise. There is nothing "exercise" about it. That's a whole new story I'm supposed to start here. And then I thought, Yes. And? and I got to work on it. An engaging character in an interesting dilemma came out of it, as often happens. I hope I get the chance and the inspiration to go back and finish the story. If I don't, well, I have plenty of others to choose from, what with this daily timed writing exercise thing I'm doing.

Sometimes I worry about all the stories I start which I will never in my lifetime finish. I read The Neverending Story, y'all. I know what happens to people who don't finish all their stories. Generally the worry is followed swiftly by the thought, "That's silly. Having more story ideas than you'll ever need, that's not irresponsible. That's wealth." Nevertheless, the worry sits there at the back of my head, muttering, "Yeah, well, you just try telling AURYN that, see how well that excuse'll go over."

Hello, world. I am just back from watching Guardians of the Galaxy! It was a lot of fun. It was even more fun because of watching it at the Cinebarre, which is the new dinner-and-a-movie joint in Boulder County. Cinebarre's website says it's the Boulder location, but it's actually in Louisville where the Colony Square Cinema used to be. John and I decided that, compared to other dinner cinemas, it's not quite up to the standard of the Alamo Drafthouse, but there's a lot to be said for not having to drive an hour in terrible, soul-crushing traffic to get there. I always have a headache by the time we get home from the Alamo. The combination of beer and eye-strain and the hot drive there and the long drive back, it does a number on me.

By contrast, we walked to Cinabarre from our hotel. It was a lovely walk, especially on our way back. The sun had gone to bed, the night air was cool, and the waning gibbous moon was rising all orange and dramatic ahead of us. I still got a bit of a headache though. Even without the drive, beer and eyestrain remain. But it was a fun movie, and look! You still get a blog post outta me.

On the short story front, I'm still pecking away at the ending--and I only have until the 15th to finish this thing if I want to give it the chance I have in mind for it, so let's hurry up there, Muse, OK?--but I uncovered a whole new angle on an important flashback, so that's something. Also, today's CTC29 prompt got me thinking about the third-wheel character, Katie of the "he's totally into you, don't deny it" foolishness, in a different way. The assignment was to write a scene in which a Fool archetype utters some unexpected wisdom or otherwise shakes up the main character's perceptions. As things stand, Katie is a little shallow and immature. And she can be that, but she can't be just that. I think I need to let her show a little Foolish wisdom of her own, maybe notice something that the main character is missing and say something thoughtless and insightful about it. Look, I don't know what precisely. But it'll have that basic shape, if that makes any sense.

(As though this story didn't already have enough problems to fix by Friday. Like an entire missing ending.)

On the Patreon front, I'm working away on its text and details. I've mentioned a couple of times a plan to launch the page on September 1, yes? Well, I've created the first of the story-like objects that will launch with it. (To be fair, its rough draft was already written before I chose it as the launch date offering. That's the whole point. But about this, more later.) Preparing it turned out to be a much easier task than writing the page's main text. "Tell your patrons why they should pledge to you," the text field says. And my brain goes, "Well, if you put it that way..." Then it sort of wibbles uselessly in a corner. My brain is much less threatened by the text field's subtitle instructions, "Talk about what you do and how you'll be using your Patrons' support to keep creating interesting content."

As exciting and fun as that sounds, I'm only allowing myself some 25 minutes a day to work on it, at least until "Snowflakes" is safely in the mail. Because priorities!

Tomorrow has both a drive to the airport and roller derby practice in it. On top of that, it's a Wednesday, which means volunteer reading for AINC. I have no idea how I'll manage to also get a solid day of writing in. Probably the first step is a solid night's sleep. Which starts... now. Er. Good night?

Got a good hour in on the story today, despite my Wednesday exploding with a certain percentage of leftover Tuesday. But in between boxing things up and talking to insurance agents, I did manage to check in with "Snowflakes." Sad thing is, I've gone back to the beginning again. It still doesn't feel like wasted effort--I'm smoothing out more lumps and seeding a bit more foreshadowing--but I'm so sick of not having finished!

My main difficulty with the ending is how to portray Ashley's emotional reaction to The Big Reveal. It's tricky. First she gets news to which the natural reaction should be shock and grief. A breath later, she gets a revelation that provokes righteous indignant anger. This is a complex moment which is hard to faithfully render. It's too easy to let one thing overwhelm the other. If the anger overwhelms the grief, she looks callous. But the grief and shock can't overwhelm the anger, either. That was a huge problem with the previous draft: She was pretty much robbed of her agency, both in the present and retroactively over the course of her entire life, and she was fine with this. That's not her. What's more, that's not any character I ever want to write--especially, for obviously reasons, when they're women.

I'm leaning towards a partial solution of having the anger not so much overwhelm the grief and shock as redirect them. But finding the words is tricky.

Another change I'm making is that, unlike in the previous draft, where Josh tells her, "I chose you" (Ew. No), in this draft he says, "I recognized you." Which will additionally help to keep readers from attributing too much of the story to Josh's choices, I hope. There was a lot of confusion expressed on this account in critiques of the previous draft.

Gah. One reason I keep this blog is, I like sharing peeks behind the scenes. But it's tricky with short stories. There's "a backstage pass" and then there's "total spoiler before it's even in print! Nice going, stupid." Novels run the same risk, I suppose, but they have bigger backstages. You've got more room to explore, examine the costumes and the props, without prematurely running into a dramatic reveal or important plot twist.

Speaking of novels and peeks behind the scenes, here's another of my Codex colleagues on Patreon: William Hertling is creating science fiction novels.

William Hertling is the author of the Singularity series, comprising Avogadro Corp., A.I. Apocalypse, and The Last Firewall. He is currently at work on the fourth book in the series as well as an entirely separate stand-alone novel. He's using Patreon via the per-month model in order to raise funds towards the cost of producing a novel, like copyediting, cover design, layout, proof-reading, and also writing the darn thing.

I'm intrigued by the way Hertling fits the whole "backstage pass" idea into his pledge tiers rewards. The exclusive material offered as a thank-you to Patrons who pledge $1.50 a month (I was wrong--apparently pledges needn't be in whole dollar amounts) includes the occasional bonus unused scene, or bits of worldbuilding that never made it onto the page (I assume that's what "descriptions of future technology" means). That's really neat.

I would love to do something like that. But, again, it strikes me as easier to do with a larger work, be it a novel or a series of shorts in a shared world. When I'm working more persistently on Iron Wheels I could totally see myself creating bonus material out of all the thousands of words I spend talking to myself on the page about exactly how my Land of Faerie works, about other changeling/baby swaps and other jobs that Old Mack has been assigned over the centuries. But there's less potential for that when what I'm working on is a 6,000-word short about a summer solstice snowpocalypse. What little I can do in that arena, I already do right here at tiresome length, free for the world to read. See above. Still, it's something to think about.

Something else to think about: Should at least twenty Patrons pledge at the $10/month level, Hertling's gift to those Patrons will be a special bonus book, just for them, full of surprises. Maybe an anthology of short fiction, maybe a parallel work to the Singularity novels taking place in an alternate universe or featuring an alternate ending. "Whatever the final form," he writes, "it will be fun and unique, handcrafted for my biggest supporters as a thank you."

Now, when John and I talked about Patreon and its possibilities the other day, he put a lot of emphasis on using it to help create and deepen a connection between the creator and the supporters. "If, as an artist, all you're doing is selling a product," he said, "you're wasting your time. You should be building a relationship." This strikes me as exactly the sort of thing he was talking about. I'd love to be able to do something like that. Not, perhaps, to the scale of an entire book, considering how slow I am at putting out the ones I already want to write. But certainly something shorter might be possible. Flash fiction written to prompts of supporters' choosing, maybe. Again, stuff for me to think about.

I intend to keep highlighting Patreon pages this week as a sort of show-and-tell, sharing my discoveries as I explore and get excited about what's already being done. I hope you will visit their pages and consider supporting these authors. That would be cool. They're friends of mine, after all, so I want to see them do well. But, more importantly to y'all-out-there, they write some pretty amazing stuff that more people ought to read. I hope you'll take a look-see and then, if you like what you see, get your friends to take a look as well.

I'm pleased to announce that as of today you can read my drabble, "Priesthood Has Its Privileges," on SpeckLit. The other drabble that SpeckLit acquired will appear on the site in September, so stay tuned for that announcement then.

A drabble is a work of fiction that is exactly 100 words long. They are compact and easy to digest, a nutritious part of your daily breakfast. Bookmark SpeckLit to add a new drabble to your diet every other day.

I'm less than pleased to announce that today I was... not as respectful, shall we say, as one should be, of the sharpness of the edge of the scissors blade I was cleaning off. The result is merely a flesh-wound, but there is nothing "merely" about that when it's across your index fingertip and you're trying to type. You ever heard a typo referred to as a "fat finger" incident? Bandaged fingertips are literal fat fingers, hitting two keys where one will do and generally wrecking one's wpms.

Thankfully, this flesh-wound came after a solid session of story revision today. It was solid not only as measured by the formula "butt + chair x time," but also from the standpoint of story problems solved, or at least brought closer to solved. To wit:

1) Raise the stakes. The story has an "OMG shit just got real" moment about halfway through, but I think the draft my friends read suffered from a bit of stall-out after that. The narrator gets home from encountering the "OMG" moment--and almost immediately forgets about it, or at least stops mentioning it, while she listens to some voice mail from her chatty and insufficiently worried friend. So with this revision I'm trying to keep the tension high by correcting both of those oversights. If I've done my job right, I've corrected them both in a single edit to do with what's in the phone message and how the narrator reacts to it.

Wow. That paragraph is a great example of why talking about writing is sometimes not the greatest idea. Trying to discuss a particular edit in generalities rather than specific detail results in hella confusion cum circumlocution. Well, I'm-a leave it up there, let it fend for itself, 'cause I know what I mean, and one day, publishers willing and the markets don't flop, you will too.

2) Everyone's got a story. There is a character in this story more talked about than talking, and it finally occurred to me I have to give him something to do. He's away in a ski resort with the chatty friend, which is to say, they're in what's basically a fancy hotel suite. I visualize it as a kitchen/living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. That's it. Yet the chatty friend manages to leave our narrator phone messages that this other character in the room is not overhearing. How did I solve that problem in recent drafts? Well, apparently I had him taking a lot of naps. This... is not ideal. He is not meant to be the Amazing Hibernating Man. So with this draft I tried to figure out, well, what does he do while they're in the resort? Especially considering the special role he plays in the development of the plot? And how can I then reveal what he's doing such that it lays groundwork for later revelations?

So now he spends a lot of time sitting on the balcony out in the snow, oblivious to the cold, staring out into the storm. Which doesn't sound like much of an improvement, but in my head there is a reason. I just have to figure out how to make that reason more clear.

This blog post has been brought to you by a somewhat out of date bottle of New-Skin (R) Antiseptic Liquid Bandage. Protects small cuts without all that bandaged fingertip awkwardness! I think I'll go put on a second coat now. And buy a new, not-out-of-date bottle tomorrow.

My goal was to finish this draft of "Caroline's Wake" by the end of the working week, i.e. Friday evening. I'm pleased to say I have achieved my goal. It involved less stress than anticipated, too. I got to the end of the scene that was driving me nuts yesterday; the final scene fell into place today easily and naturally, as a denouement should. Ta-da!

To be painstakingly honest, I did not meet my entire goal, which was the have the draft done and ready for critique. As I worked on it yesterday and today, as I babbled to myself about it in today's edition of the Morning Pages, I discovered some small slight issues I'd like to clean up before letting other people's eyes take a gander. The "hot and heavy" part of the seduction scene needs some cleaning up, as the same energy that made it effective and effortless to write has undoubtedly also weighted it a little on the self-indulgent side. (Please feel free to insert whatever innuendo you want there. Far be it from me to spoil your fun and tell you to get your mind out of the gutter. You're obviously having a lot of fun down there.) And given that the story plays around the edges of some taboo/squick boundaries, it's important that the reader realize, or at least suspect, that the main characters are Goddesses. I need to make the hints about that a lot less subtle. Oh, it sounds unsubtle here on the blog where I'm all THIS IS A PERSEPHONE AND DEMETER STORY, GET IT, GET IT? But things are more ambiguous on the page. Which means that certain things a reader would kind of let fly because Oh, We're In Mythology Headspace, It's OK might instead make the reader go What? No. Just NO.

So there's still a lot of "get it right" work to do next week. But that's OK, because the "get it written" part is solidly done. And that's a huge relief.

Meanwhile--hooray weekend! And it's a weekend with no roller derby practice, because the league observes Father's Day as a holiday. Much as I love derby, it's nice to get a Sunday off and relax. But it will not be an entirely non-skating weekend, because I'll be rolling around during the G'Knight Ride festivities. Wanna come eat good food, drink a beer, jam to some great local music, and watch a roller derby mini-bout? It'll be in Roosevelt Park, in Longmont, 900 Longs Peak Avenue. The demo bout will be at 4 PM, Saturday the 14th, on the Roosevelt Pavillion. See you there!