author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So I made it into the New Orleans area Monday night. My flight was pleasant, comfortable, and uneventful. Even my pre-trip packing and last-minute chores parade wasn't so bad. Got everything done early and had time for dinner (and the first half of the Saints game) at the airport Rock Bottom in terminal C.

Turns out that Riedell's bottom-loading "gear pack" does indeed function as carry-on luggage. Fits right into the overhead bin. However, once you get your gear in there, forget about all those enticing home-office style pockets that make it look like you can pack your laptop and accessories and pens and pencils and stuff too. I mean, I did manage to get that in there, because that's me--determined, like--but it was a tight squeeze. Getting any single thing out again was a bit of a process.

The helmet does not fit in the gear pack. The helmet went clipped to an outside loop. I was prepared to offer to put the helmet on my head if they gave me any trouble taking it onto the plane. But they didn't, so I just unclipped it and shoved it under the seat in front of me.

That I had my roller derby gear as carry-on luggage made it very, very tempting to put my skates on at my arrival gate--it was a bit of a walk from there to baggage claim, and the aisle was uncarpeted and linoleumish the whole way. But I didn't. I didn't want to alarm any airport security, and, more to the point, I didn't want to go to the trouble of actually sitting down and changing my footwear when I could just keep walking.

I shoulda done, though. It's not like I've been able to skate at all since I've been here. STOP RAINING ALREADY JEEZ.

My first few days in town have been laid back. They have been divided up into vaguely scheduled chunks governed by "do I have access to Mom's car or not" and "am I hungry and what wonderful tasty thing will I put into my mouth." For example, Monday night/Tuesday morning (we got home from the airport around midnight) was all about Question 2 and the venison stew Dad had been cooking all day in the crock pot. Tuesday afternoon was all about Question 1 and driving myself to a coffee shop for a few hours of writing far away from my parents' Fox News habit. (Also for a bowl of the coffee house's corn-and-crab bisque.) Today the answer to Question 1 was "yes, but I want to take the bike to the shop" and the answer to Question 2 was "Mandarin House with Mom for lunch, then beignets at Morning Call while I wait for the bike shop to call." Also there have been random raw oysters, because Dad's friend picked up a sack and brought them over. And crawfish sushi because I was at the grocery Tuesday and it looked good. And more of the venison stew, and also the corn and sausage soup, and random Popeye's leftovers, because they were in the fridge and I was feeling snacky at late-o-clock at night.

I've begun assembling a photo album over on Facebook - I think it's totally public and you don't have to be logged in to see it - because I have this new camera, as you may remember. Here's a close-up of one of the photos. Apparently they have yellow caution signs for everything.

Oh, goodness. Today. Today got sabotaged. Weren't nobody's fault but mine, neither. OK, sure, I could say the cat shredded my homework, but I'd have to admit that the only cat here was me. Let me tell you all about it.

So, firstly, remember Late Night With Fruitcake? (This is what I should have called yesterday's blog post.) I was up even later than that. Turns out, after the fruitcake bakes for three and a quarter hours, then it wants to be removed from its tube pan half an hour after being removed from the oven. So I was actually up until three.

Which meant I didn't get up this morning until almost 10:30, and still didn't feel like I'd gotten enough sleep. So not only was I up late, but I was moving slow. My morning shift didn't happen, is what I'm saying.

Secondly, I had a few tasks to complete for my roller derby league. I'm part of the committee that makes home bouts happen, and my role within that committee is pretty much everything to do with tickets. And the thing about tickets is, nothing to do with them is a surprise. I had all the info I needed to get things done over the weekend. But did I? No. I procrastinated until suddenly everything had to be done today.

And there went my afternoon shift.

Most of the writing I got done today, I got done after we left for tonight's derby practice. John needed to be there super early, so I dropped him off and then ran away to a cafe in Gunbarrel for an hour. Then he had to be there super late, so I picked at this week's Friday Fictionette from one of the trackside spectator couches. "Write wherever you are" is a rule I usually have the luxury of ignoring, but today I really paid heed.

On the plus side, you can now buy tickets to our upcoming New Year Roll Out mix-up tournament! You can just come to watch, or you can register to skate in it. If that's your thing, I mean. I know a lot of people whose thing this definitely is. It's certainly my sort of thing. I will probably be skating in it.

In other news, it turns out I will not be spending Solstice Night on a train somewhere between Fort Morgan and Omaha. Amtrak coach fare was ridiculously expensive. Seems I waited too long and all the "saver" seats were sold out. As much as I love traveling by train, there is a limit to how much I'm willing to pay for the privilege; $450-ish each way is well beyond that limit. My next strategy would be to send my accumulated Amtrak Guest Reward points, but that was already a non-starter because of blackout dates.

So, feh. I'll be flying home on the 21st instead. If I have the energy, I'll even stay up all night and keep a fire burning through the longest night of the year; they do have a fireplace. It's out by the hot tub. It'll be a lonely Solstice vigil, but a comfy one.

I'll be flying back on the evening of the 31st. Which is neat, because I hear that Southwest give out a little free champagne on New Year's Eve. (Or is that only for overnight flights? Do they only do that at the stroke of midnight?) Also they have wifi on board for a nominal charge. So there's the possibility of a champagne toast and Puzzle Pirates at cruising altitude.

But that's not until the end of the month. Here's my plan for tomorrow: A lot fewer excuses and a lot more productive writing time. You can go ahead and hold me to it, too. For one thing, I'm going to bed on time tonight. For another, I already got my bout ticket duties done today. NOTHING WILL STAND IN MY WAY.

I'm going to be up pretty darn late tonight. I put the annual fruitcake into the oven at about 11:00 PM, and that thing needs to bake for three hours and fifteen minutes.

Speaking of fruitcake and all things Winter Solstice: I don't think I'll be hosting our traditional Winter Solstice Yule Log All Night Open House this year. If it were to happen, it should be on the actual Longest Night of the Year, the night before the dawn when Drumming Up the Sun happens. But I think I'm actually going to be on a train that night. According to my trusty online almanac, Winter Solstice will be December 21 at 9:49 PM Mountain Standard Time, and I'll be getting on board the California Zephyr that evening at around 7:00 PM MST.

Which means instead of unveiling the fruitcake here in Boulder on Solstice Night, I'll be taking it home to share with my family for Christmas (reserving, of course, sufficient slices to mail to certain long-distance friends). But perhaps I'll have a little slice on the train first, just to commemorate the longest night of the year.

I have already listed the fruitcake ingredients, but you may mentally add to the list dried pineapple, which I got today to remedy the 6.25 oz shortfall I discovered when I weighed everything out yesterday. Apparently I wasn't careful and undershopped. Didn't have quite a full 8 oz almonds, either, so had to pick up a few more of those.

I may have mentioned this before, but--dried strawberries are really, really annoying to slice up. I have a small blister at the base of my right index finger from slicing up dried strawberries. If I didn't love them so much, they'd go the way of the dried pineapple rings that I used once and never again. (Dried pineapple went back on the possibles list once I discovered I could buy it diced.)

The booze this year is Makers's Mark bourbon, because what else are we going to do with a bottle of Maker's Mark? Besides add it to the homemade eggnog, should I make some.

Meanwhile, if I'm actually going to get on the train, I'd better run off to another browser window and actually reserve my seat. And then there's all that other stuff I put off until last minute tonight. I guess it's a good thing I'll be up past 2:00 AM.

Talk to y'all tomorrow!

Rejoice! I have finally replaced my camera. I have also gone grocery shopping and returned home with, among other things, fruitcake fixings. Now I have combined BOTH bits of good news into ONE splendid photo, which you can see here.

Fruitcake! Will contain almonds, currants, green (golden) raisins, candied ginger, strawberries, and dates. I will decide on the booze tomorrow when I actually process everything and start it soaking. It will probably be scotch or bourbon, considering what's currently in the cabinet.

Camera! Currently contains date stamp. This will be adjusted shortly.

The camera is a Nikon Coolpix S3700. It was on sale at Target, and further marked down as a repackaged item. Now, I didn't go into Target thinking about cameras. I was shopping for strings of holiday lights to donate to my roller derby league's holiday parade float (Because we're going to skate in a local holiday parade, of course). But the holiday section was right next door to the electronics section, which reminded me that I'd been meaning to replace my previous camera, it being ten years old and furthermore having recently ceased to function.

So this new camera boasts 20.1 Megapixels, which is a revolution in comparison with my previous. Its view screen is breathtakingly sharp--again, comparing it with my old camera. It's zoom function seems darn near lossless. It has a function list longer than my arm, and--ooh!--an auto-extending lens. Look, I'm over the moon just because this camera doesn't need a rubberband to hold its battery case closed, OK? My standards are somewhat generous here.

Mainly I'm just pleased that my options for Friday Fictionette covers are no longer restricted to A. find Creative Commons (commercial use OK) or public domain images online, or B. take a really crappy photo with my flip phone.

So there's your happy technology content. As for writing content, well, soon as I'm done with this-here, I shall be logging the most recent adventures of "...Not With a Bang, But a Snicker" in the Submission Grinder and in my personal log as well. I got a response to its latest submission just this weekend, but I haven't even opened the email yet because I've been drowning in NaNoWriMo writing and NaNoWriMo catch-up. If it's a rejection, I'll be figuring out where to send that sucker yet. If it's not a rejection, expect some crowing. Next I'll be spending a little revision time with "Down Wind" to get it ready to to go and meet some very nice people itself. I think that's enough for a well-rounded late night, don't you?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone out there! I hope you're staying warm. Here in Boulder, temperatures "struggled to get out of the teens," to quote a winter weather advisory I read yesterday (and I thought, "Ah, struggling to get out of the teens. Sounds like most of my college career"). I woke up, saw the snow coming down, and promptly went back to sleep.

One of the things I am thankful for, speaking of Giving Thanks, is the opportunity to sleep in and do whatever I want all Thanksgiving Day long. I love my family and miss them, and I miss their traditional epic potlucks (oh, Gods, the shrimp-and-mirliton casserole), but I don't miss how the High Holy Days of Familial Obligation loomed over me and squashed me flat. It's so, so good to have a day off from everything.

Well, almost everything. Cat-sitting continues while our semi-next-door friends are out of town. Their cat is a beautiful, friendly, funny, and terribly needy kitty who will happily spend hours cuddling and nuzzling and dabbing a paw at your face if the quality of your petting is deemed inadequate. Learning how to get my writing done while making the kitty feel sufficiently loved has been an amusing challenge. He wants very much to drape himself over my forearms, and I am using those. But we manage.

Speaking of writing, that's another thing I don't get a day off from. Which is fine. Enjoyable, even. Which is sort of why I do this writing thing for an attempted living. A day with nothing to do but write? Heaven.

I'm about three-fourths the way through today's NaNoWriMo session, which I'll be returning to just as soon as I get done with this post. Today's session has been fueled by Plot Expansion Strategy #15: Promote a throwaway character to a secondary character. In other words, enlarge their role within the story.

The sometime-throwaway character I'm playing with is Perihelion Peculiar, of Perrie Peculiar's Private Peepers. Her original role, buried safely in the backstory, was in unearthing the main character's dad's cheating ways. Now the main character has contacted her again for help in figuring out what's up with the Director of the sleep research lab. He's scary, he's up to something, and he has begun showing up everywhere the main character goes. She's understandably freaked out about it.

I'm also making use of this strategy to flesh out the Director's own backstory. Apparently he's got an extensive criminal record, mostly white collar to be sure but with the occasional bloodstain. He's bad news. Stupid bad news. He's going to be bad news for everyone involved in this novel. If only I could figure out what, precisely, he wants.

Well, back to it for at least another 700 words.

It's as I suspected: This week's Friday Fictionette will show up on Saturday. While I suppose I could have gotten it done and published if I'd gotten right to work after checking into my motel at 9:30 PM, the reality is... Ten-hour drive, y'all. Ten. Hour. Drive. Solo. It just seemed a better use of my time to take a walk, find some dinner, and relax.

I'm staying in the vicinity of University and I-10, which is having a strange effect on my nostalgia circuits. On a lizard-brain gut instinct level, I'm absolutely certain I'm back in at the University of Washington and simultaneously about 15 minutes away from my parents' New Orleans-area home via the interstate. In any case, a ten-minute walk along University brought me within hearing range of electric guitars and a country-rock beat, which reeled me into a sports bar called The Game. I had a beer, ate far too much, and enjoyed the band's original tunes extravagantly.

The drive from Boulder to Las Cruces went fairly well. I did the three and a half hours to Raton easily, stopped for lunch at Pappa's Sweet Shop & Restaurant, then proceeded to drive the remaining six or so hours straight through. I'm not sure how that was possible, but I'm happy to attribute it to the coffee at Pappa's.

The only real shenanigans occurred just west of the little New Mexico town of Vaughn. That's where I missed my turn to remain on US Hwy 54 West/South and instead continued some five miles on along 285 North. Only I didn't know it, because for that stretch of highway, there were absolutely no signs whatsoever indicating what highway I was on. There weren't even speed limit signs. There was nothing but the back-sides of the ridiculously frequent WRONG WAY signs.

Then I got to the next little town and continued to have no clue whatsoever, because the main drag was merely labeled US HIGHWAY. Just that. No number, nothing. Thankfully, once I got just past that little town, there was a cluster of signs indicating I was on 285 and 60 (but not 54), so I got suspicious and turned around.

Encino, New Mexico! Where being lost isn't a bug; it's a feature!

Anyway, that was the only hitch. Otherwise, it was an easy drive and a gorgeous one, sunny and surprisingly warm for mid-November-- a huge contrast from the looming snow clouds I left behind in Colorado. And now I am likely to fall over, so please excuse me while I make sure the falling happens over something soft. Like a motel bed.

I remain woefully behind the NaNoWriMo curve. But today I found out how many words I can log in two dedicated hours of nanobabbling. As it turns out, that number is 4,865. Yes, I can type really fast! Also, the internal editor is turned entirely off, so it can't butt in and tell me, "You already explained that last scene, you don't need to have your character explain it again," or, "You realize that this bit of dialogue is just an excuse for you to figure out the backstory's timeline, right?" Internal editor doesn't get to say that stuff, so I just keep typing.

As usual, I'm not sure where the story's going to go tomorrow. But I jotted down some questions that occurred to me during today's session, and those will probably help get me pointed in the right direction.

In other news, my sprained wrist/thumb has not prevented me using the typewriter. Turns out, it's pretty painless. I don't even use my left thumb when I type. It just sits there and watches the right thumb do all the space-bar work. So I'm finally getting that October 2015 Fictionette Artifact done for them what's got one coming to 'em. Yay!

Typing on a manual typewriter is weird. It's not just because I've used the Dvorak layout for more than a decade now, and am no longer reliable to touch-type in Qwerty. I'm actually starting to get Qwerty back so long as I'm on the typewriter. It's a context thing. No, what makes the manual typewriter weird is the way I instinctively try to hit ALT-TAB on it when I switch between it and my laptop. You know. ALT-TAB. To get back to the typewriter "window." *facepalm*

In other other news, I organized our freezer. It's the sort that's one big below-fridge drawer in which everything gets dumped, which means it's hard to find stuff, especially if you keep a lot of ice-packs on hand to bring to roller derby practice just in case. So I pulled most everything out in order to put it all back following some semblance of logic. I discovered two things:

• There are still like five 1-lb packages of breakfast sausage down there. WHATEVER DID I DO TO DESERVE SUCH LARGESS O UNIVERSE I AM NOT WORTHY.
• There is way too much stuff in there that's been there for way too long and needs to either get used up or thrown away.

The following recipe/experiment arose from an attempt to use up some of that surplus.

Peach-Pepper Pie (muffin form)

1. Set one sheet of puff pastry out to defrost. I believe I acquired the puff pastry package when a friend moved out of state and I helped her re-home many of the edible contents of her kitchen. The box was still unopened when I pulled it out of the freezer tonight.
2. Put some peaches on to simmer over medium heat. Some years ago when I not only had a CSA share from Abbondanza Organic Seeds and Produce but also a fruit share add-on from Ela Family Farms, I found myself overrun with peaches. So I sliced up a bunch of them into sandwich bags, and I stuffed the sandwich bags into a gallon-sized freezer bag. This experiment used up one sandwich bag full of frozen peach slices. I was worried they might be freezer-burned after all this time, and it might indeed have been an issue if I was going to eat them plain. But instead...
3. Stir in a crap-ton of sugar. It came out to two heaping soup spoons of brown sugar and two of plain granulated sugar.
4. Stir in some pickled chili peppers. About one and a half heaping soup spoons of MMLocal's High Desert Peppers (mild).
5. Season with black and red pepper, then continue simmering until mixture is thick. I like pepper. I put a bunch in. Anyway, I let the whole mess simmer until the pastry was tolerably defrosted, about 40 minutes.
6. Remove from heat. Add 1 tbl butter, 1 egg, and some oatmeal. Stir. Four big soup-spoons of McCann's Quick Cooking Irish oatmeal (or whatever kind of quick-cook oatmeal you've got in your pantry), mainly to soak up any liquid that hadn't simmered away.
7. Apply cooking spray to a 6-hole muffin tin. Line bottom of each hole with pastry. I was going to do a small pie tin, but I was too impatient with the pastry. I tried to unfold it when it wasn't quite defrosted, and it cracked into three strips. So I cut those strips up into twelve squares that fit the muffin holes nicely.
8. Spoon in pie mixture. Not too much. You want your top crust and bottom crust to meet along the sides.
9. Layer a piece of roasted chili on top of pie mixture. I also had a sandwich bag of roasted mild pueblo chilis in the freezer, because while I love them on everything, I still never manage to eat a whole package of them before mold sets in. So I've learned to parcel out most of them into small freezer bags and defrost when ready.
10. Cover with another layer of pastry. Really smoosh it down. Don't be shy. Again, you want this top crust to meet up with the bottom so that the "muffin" doesn't fall apart too much when you go to eat it.
11. Bake at 400 degrees F for about 15-20 minutes or until tops are golden brown.

Let sit to cool for five or ten minutes, then carefully pry them out so you can devour them. Feeds one very greedy cook over the course of one two-hour NaNoWriMo session.

Ta-da!

Hi. Hello. So... didn't really get back into gear so smoothly after giving myself a Halloween holiday. Took a while to get the engines running. I think maybe taking time off so soon after starting a new routine might be contraindicated when fomenting new habits. Not that it would have been better to try to not take time off, not with everything else that was going on. But I suspect that time off didn't help.

Also, one of our skaters broke her leg Monday night during our scrimmage in Fort Collins. This is a thing that occasionally happens when you play a full-contact sport on skates. We prepare for it as best we can, and then we try not to think about it. We try to play like it's not even in the realm of possibility. And then, once in a while, it happens, and it sucks.

Pretty much everyone in the league who was at that scrimmage had a pretty shitty night after that. Not, of course, nearly as shitty as what the injured skater herself endured. But the league immediately began doing everything in its collective power to make things less shitty for her, from hospital visits to errand-running to plans for bringing her food to just plain sending all our love via the internet and phone and telepathy. That's what roller derby leagues do. It's kind of amazing.

So priorities changed, and the next few days got a little redirected. And that's life.

Today was a fairly solid writing day, if a little weird. I had a ticket to see the live Welcome to Night Vale show at the Paramount. So I took off by bus around midday for Denver with plans to work on my various writing tasks from maybe Leela European Cafe until showtime. And then I remembered that Union Station got significantly upgraded, and is no longer this cavernous hall with bad acoustics and tall penitent pews and an aura of despair. Instead, it is now a fancy hotel and a small shopping mall and a restaurant district. So I splurged a bit at Stoic & Genuine (well, kind of more than a bit) and then settled down at one of the lobby device-charging tables to plug in my laptop and make words happen on it. And words did happen.

The Welcome to Night Vale live show was amazing. Go see it if you can.

I'm writing this blog post on the bus back to Boulder. John will meet me at the station and drive me home, where I will have a bite to eat and then commence whatever the heck I wind up writing for NaNoWriMo.

Have I mentioned that I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year? Well, I am.

About that, more later.

I'm distracting you with a recipe again. Distracting you from what, you ask? Shush, I say. Distraction commences.

So the weather got rainy and chill lately, chill enough that we started turning our heater back on from time to time. But although temperatures didn't come back up to July-type heat, they did rise significantly whenever the sun came out. And the sun was out all day today.

So I thought, what the hell, maybe local crawfish season isn't entirely over yet. I hadn't attempted to take any since the first week of September, and I hated to think I might have missed my last chance.

Well, I brought home nine. Just nine. Honestly, it's probably not so much about the cooler weather as it is that I relied almost entirely on my homemade traps. Didn't really feel like I had the time to sit out there and line-fish this week.

Nine is enough to feel like it would be a waste to throw them back, but it's not exactly enough to make étouffée. Turns out, though, it's enough to give some good flavor to red lentil dahl. The following is my own from-scratch experiment, which I will now share with you.

Crawfish Dahl

• 1/2 lb live crawfish
• 1 C red lentils
• 2 C water or stock
• 1 tsp mustard oil
• 1 Tbl olive oil
• half an onion, chopped up
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 tsp tumeric
• 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 can (14 oz or so) light coconut milk

Boil and soak crawfish as per usual. With so few crawfish, I only used about a Tbl each powdered and liquid Cajun Land. Also a squirt of lemon. I figured I couldn't go too far wrong; if the crawfish were over- or under-spiced, I wouldn't notice it in a thick and creamy lentil soup.

Simmer lentils in water or stock for 15 minutes, covered. I used the crawfish stock I made recently. I'm trying to free up room in our freezer; turning two big bags of crawfish shells into two half-full bags of stock sort of helped with that.

While lentils are simmering, process crawfish. Peel and "de-vein" tails. Extract and reserve "fat" and any eggs found inside the heads. Set aside. You may have already noticed I am fairly non-squeamish about the gross-looking but tasty, tasty things you find inside a crawfish's head. I was raised to appreciate the good things in life.

When lentils are about 5 minutes from done, heat oils to medium high. Add onion and pinch of salt. Sauteé until onion is soft. You are unlikely to find mustard oil in a mainstream US grocery store, for reasons. Really, any cooking oil will do (maybe add a half tsp of mustard powder to the other spices). However, the first dahl recipe I tried called for it, so, after some research, I picked some up. It was on the shelf at a nearby Indian grocery, and it was labeled "for external use only" (as a massage oil). Nevertheless, an ingredient check said this was the stuff I wanted. I only ever use a little at a time because otherwise the burn goes right up my nose.

Pour coconut milk into fully cooked lentils and stir. It wasn't my original plan to add coconut milk, but after the 15 minute simmer, my lentils had pretty much drunk up all the stock. Adding coconut milk meant the dahl would have a consistency like soup rather than like porridge.

Add crawfish meat, crawfish "fat" and eggs, and all spices to the sautéed onions. Stir constantly for about a minute, until spice smell is strong and crawfish tails are well coated and tightly curled. Not that they won't mostly be curled already, mind you, but they really tightened up during the sautée. I put them in the soup whole, because they make me smile when I get one in my spoonful. But I chopped up the crawfish eggs fairly fine. Each crawfish egg is tiny, but in aggregate they form a solid lump (of deliciousness). The only lumps I wanted calling attention to themselves were the crawfish tails.

Stir onion-crawfish-spices mixture into cooked lentil mixture. Simmer a few more minutes, then remove from heat. Serve.

I think that's everything. It was delicious, and made enough to feed me twice. I was very good and put the second helping away in the fridge rather than devouring it all tonight.

It's Friday, and the fictionette for the first week in September is up! Its working title has become its actual title--"Still Life with Coyote"--and it's in the format of an interview. With a coyote. Just because.

Thing about being in a hotel room, even a very nice one with a small kitchen and a separate bedroom, is that there really isn't a lot of extra space to make into a recording studio. It's pretty much whatever room isn't occupied. So I'm going to wait until tomorrow morning early to record the MP3 edition, while John's still asleep in bed and I have the kitchen/living/dining room area to myself, because the kitchen table is oodles more comfortable for recording at. I'll update both excerpts to include the MP3 link at that time.

The past couple of days have been pretty relaxed. After John's daily phone meeting (working vacation, remember), we've been walking across the street over to Loaded Joe's for breakfast-with-computers. They have a pretty extensive menu these days; I had the brioche french toast yesterday and the philly steak burrito today. These were delicious. John had their fried eggs over medium both days. He reports they cook it perfectly.

And now for a brief culinary tangent: Your classic Philly Cheesesteak, that involves onions and green peppers, right? Green bell peppers? The philly steak burrito had mild jalapeños instead. Not a complaint! Just an observation.

Afternoon naps continue to be a necessity, helped along by the daily afternoon rain shower we've been getting. Tuesday and Wednesday were the only exceptions, so it was a good thing I went trail-skating Wednesday.

It's been an underwhelming week for writing. I've pretty much only gotten to my morning gotta-do tasks, and nothing else. I thought I'd get a whole bunch of work done on the short story revision, but as it turns out, I acted like I was on vacation or something. Funny thing about that.

Well. Next week is back-to-normal week. Let's see if I can locate an acceptable normal.