author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Have I mentioned Scrivener yet? I think I maybe have. Have I mentioned that I've gotten addicted to it, fast and hard like a fall off a hundred-foot cliff? No? Let's talk about that. At length.

(I have a handful of topics waiting for a day when the day's work doesn't lend itself much to blogging. That's how it is. Some days, it's all triumphant teapots and contest submissions; others, it's just the daily slog. The daily slog is itself a triumphant thing--showing up on the page every workday is beyond price--but it doesn't in and of itself make for entertaining reportage. So today, instead of anything precisely about today, you get the Scrivener post I've been meaning to write for a little while now.)

The experience of using Scrivener is surprisingly dissimilar to that of using yWriter. And while yWriter has a bunch of cool features, I found I didn't really avail myself of the ones that made it unique. Oh, I made character lists for my novels, entered deadlines into the project settings, occasionally used the daily word target report, but then I'd forget those features existed for months at a time. Mainly I used yWriter to create and edit related files which I organized into a project structure.

That's the feature that Scrivener excels at. Put that together with all the different ways you can then interact with those files, and you've got a compelling argument for never composing in any other text-editing program again.

("Says the author who's composing her blog post in EditPlus 3.31." Hush.)

Thing is, I'm using it for everything now. Almost everything. Because it's so damn flexible. In yWriter, you put scenes (RTF files) inside chapters (a nominal folder), and that was it. But in Scrivener you can do almost anything you like.

A blank project has three default items in its "Binder" (the file/folder system in the left-hand sidebar) which you may rename but not delete: the uberfolder "Draft," where the files that make up your manuscript will go; the resource folder "Research," where you can store your supporting documents; and the circular file otherwise known as "Trash". Inside the first two you can store files and folders in a sort of directory-tree style formation, with almost no restrictions on how you do it. You can put files inside folders, and folders inside folders; but you can also put folders inside files, and files inside files. And all of these, files and folders alike, are basically RTF documents that you edit within Scrivener's basic RTF editor.

You can edit each file separately, just as you would in yWriter. Or you can view a group of files as though they were a single continuous document ("scrivenings mode"), and edit them from that view. Or you can define a group of documents as a "collection", so that you'll deal with just the files that meet a certain criteria (scenes from a particular character's point of view, scenes that take place in Miami, documents that contain the word "quintessence") and temporarily hide all the others.

Then, you can add all sorts of meta-data and notes and toggles and things to each file. This is like but unlike yWriter in the sort of blanks it gives you to fill in and what you can do with that data once you've put it there. In Scrivener, each file is additionally represented by an index card with the file's title (the same title you see on the file in the Binder) and a synopsis displayed thereon. Then you can add document-specific notes, keywords, meta-data, even photos and other reference material. This is useful, among other things, for looking at a group of index cards together in "corkboard" view, or for searching for all files marked by a particular meta-data label.

And THEN when you're ready to produce your manuscript, Scrivener has a powerful "compile" feature that takes a customizable list of documents from the binder (the default being all the contents of the "Drafts" folder) and uses them as a blueprint to create a standard manuscript, a PDF, an ebook, a Microsoft Word file, or whatever it is you need, applying formatting of your specification to the raw data.

So. What am I using it for?

Novels. Scrivener was created to aid authors in the task of cobbling together novels. My first Scrivener project would be the rewrite of my 2013 NaNoWriMo draft, the YA faerie romance involving roller derby. Going off an online colleague's recommendation, I downloaded a Snowflake Method template for Scrivener and began snowflaking the hell out of Iron Wheels therein. (Funny how I need a 50,000-word draft before I can answer questions like "What's this character's general motivation? What is their goal?")

So far, this means I'm mainly interacting with a "Tasks" folder which contains a file for each of the 10 steps of the snowflake method. The instructions for each step are in the file's Document Notes for easy reference, and I follow the instructions in the editor for each file itself.

I've also started filling up the Research folder with helpful items, like a list of those rules of junior roller derby under the WFTDA which differ from the adult rules. I expect I'll soon be creating files in the Resources folder with notes about the Upper Court, Lower Court, Outer Court, and the Field. Also notes about the human town that Rage's high school is in.

I look forward to finally typing revisions from the yWriter project from November into the Scrivener project as files in the Drafts folder.

Short stories. On another Codexian's recommendation, I downloaded Jamie Todd Rubin's SFWA Short Fiction template so I could see how useful Scrivener might be for editing short stories. It's way useful. The Drafts folder (renamed "Short Story") contains not just a folder with the story itself in it--separate files for separate scenes or a single file for the whole story--but also a first page header file with your contact info and an automatically populated word count field (rounded to the nearest hundred). When you compile, this results in a document in standard manuscript format with a perfect page one.

That's super cool. Cooler still is what I'm doing with the template's "Critiques" folder: one file for every draft, each draft littered with notes toward its revision. When a story undergoes peer critique, I add each critic's comments to the draft as linked notes--a feature similar to that of the comments feature in MS Word--which are color-coded to distinguish between different critics' contributions.

Then, when I'm ready to type in the new draft, I split the editor and put the annotated draft below the split and the brand new draft above, making it easy to reference once while creating the other.

Daily exercises. I'd created a yWriter project called "Daily Idea," for my daily freewriting exercises. Each day's exercise was a scene file whose title reflected the day I wrote it and a short phrase describing the resulting vignette. They lived inside "chapters" named for the appropriate month. The first month of every new year got tagged as "begins a new section," which was expressed through boldface.

I transferred these over to Scrivener, dragging batches of RTF files from Windows Explorer over into a month folder that lived inside a year folder that lived inside the "Daily Ideas" uberfolder. The date of the exercise became the file's title, just like in yWriter, and the descriptive phrase went in the synopsis field on the index card. Anything I'd put in yWriter's description field for that file/scene, I copied into Document Notes.

Here's the fun part: As I brought these files over, any writing which I recognized as being part of the groundwork for an actual story got labeled with that story's title as a keyword. Now I can create a collection based on the results of a keyword search and easily find all these materials to help me draft or revise that story.

Lastly, there's the Prompt Pile folder, where I put blank untitled files whose synopses are those writing prompts that occur to me at odd times. If I should get to freewriting time and have no idea what to write, I'll drag one of those files out of Prompt Pile and into the current month's folder.

Content Writing Articles. This is just getting silly. But that DMS article I turned in yesterday? I wrote it in Scrivener too.

DMS articles are organized by sections. Generally there's a 50 to 75 word introduction, then there's three to five separate sections of text. I used to write these articles in EditPlus, starting each section with a TITLE ALL IN CAPS followed by a blank line. When it was time to paste this stuff into the DMS editor interface, there'd be a lot of tiresome scrolling and searching and clicking and highlighting by hand and trying not to grab the empty line after or before the text. I kept all the articles as separate text files in a Windows directory.

Now I have a Scrivener project for DMS articles. Each article is a file in the Drafts uberfolder, and that file acts as a folder in that it contains one file for each section of the article. Now, to copy a given section and paste it into the online editor, I simply click on the section file in the binder, then press CTRL-A to highlight the whole thing. Then I change its font from courier to arial for a final proofread before CTRL-Aing again, CTRL-Cing, and CTRL-Ving into the DMS editor interface.

The other nice thing about separating the sections into their own files is the way it reinforces the "bite at a time" approach to a dreaded task. Like I said, I have a mental block about DMS articles. But if I can convince the dreading part of my brain that "Look, all you have to do today is this little section here, just 75 words, that's not so hard," it's not as difficult to get myself to sit down and write those 75 words. Scrivener's file structure makes it easier to get that message through to my recalcitrant brain.

That just leaves my research. Sadly, you can't move or clone the default Research folder, and I don't want to store my article titles, article URLs and copied text all the way over there. So I just put all that in the containing file, the one named after the article itself. I may come up with an even more useful way to store that stuff later. Maybe as a "Research" folder inside the article, which then contains one file per reference document, and each file will have relevant quotes as well as the URL and the title formatted the way DMS likes 'em.

The moral of this story is that Scrivener flexible and highly addictive. It's not just that it's useful for just about any kind of writing that I do. There's also a pure pleasure derived from figuring out how to adapt this tool to each sort of project. It's as though the designer of Scrivener had people like me explicitly in mind: slightly OCD, entirely Type-A, people who get a sense of both puzzle-style entertainment and accomplishment/fulfillment from creating organizational structures and filing things away.

It's actually kind of genius. Scrivener takes a particular kind of procrastination to which I am susceptible, and positions it such that it leads directly to getting actual writing done. Genius.

I'm in awe. More importantly, I'm getting writing done. Which is the whole point of the exercise, isn't it?

Was totally worth it, and cheap at twice the price. But the electricians from Precision didn't want to overcharge me for what was really a stupidly simple operation--"I mean, you've done pretty much everything already, mounted the unit, all that"--plus they told me about a special Fridays! Only! coupon on the website, so... $50 all told.

And when I say "stupidly simple," I don't mean that I was stupid not to figure it out. When it comes to electricity, you gotta respect it, 'cause it ain't going to respect you. Better safe than electrocuted, right? But it turns out they just repurposed a bit of copper wire from the old range hood, used a purple termination cap to connect it safely to the aluminum grounding wire, and then ran the other end of the copper wire to the grounding screw. Piece of cake. And now I know.

Also, now I know one of the light bulbs I picked up yesterday was a dud, so I have that errand to run tomorrow. Oh well. The McGuckins return policy is generous and trusting, and I have a new coupon to use there too.

So now the fan is working (modulo that one light). The circuit breaker is back in the ON position. The lights are back on in the bedroom and kitchen, and random extension cords are no longer cluttering the area. The old range hood is no longer under the table, but in the trash (minus the rest of its copper wire and mysterious hex flanges and grounding tab, which are now in jars in our hardware closet) and the new range hood's box is also no longer under the table, being now in the recycling drop-off.

The stove is back in its alcove under the range hood. For now. Come Tuesday, that sucker is gone and a lovely new model will have taken its place. All four of whose burners will function. Also, how did we go 12 years without a freakin' light in the freakin' oven? Seriously? How old was this stove, that an oven light was not a standard feature? We will have an oven light, come Tuesday. In an oven with a pretty TARDIS-blue interior. And convection action.

Oh my.

We are in the midst of the Saga of the Range Hood Replacement. No, there are no Vikings in it, but I do think the term "Saga" is justified, because Loki has had his hand in every single step of the project.

Stanza 1: We decide that as long as we're replacing the stove, we might as well replace the dying overhead fan and light. We pick up a new range hood at the Home Depot on our way out from ordering the LG 30" convection oven and glass-top range. We drive home fantasizing about a fan motor that doesn't sound sick-unto-death and an attractive, easy-to-clean stainless steel finish with all the hard-to-clean angles and moving parts tactfully hidden away.

Stanza 1: I contemplate uninstalling the previous range hood. This is initially worrying until I find an instructional video online that makes it all look simple. It even shows me how to make a "screw template" by laying paper along the top of the range hood and poking holes through the places where the screws go. What it doesn't explain about is the wiring. That's is the worrying bit. Well, nothing ventured, right? I turn on the fan and go flip circuit breakers until I find the one that makes the fan shut up. Circuit deactivated! It is noon on Wednesday the 30th.

Stanza 2: The idea of "temporarily" taking the range hood down to see what the wiring connection to the wall looks like was a bad one; the keyhole openings are tiny and I can't get all four mounting screws to poke through at once. And my arms are getting tired. And there's no one home to help. And the door's locked so I can't yell for a neighbor. And my phone's in another room. And my arms are going to fall off. Finally I take the risk of letting the whole thing dangle from its wiring for about 30 seconds while I grab a stool.

Stanza 3: While the range hood sits on top of an upturned stool on top of the stove, I discover the wire-shielding panel. It is on the LEFT, which is an important plot point. The screws that hold it in are like the mounting screws that used to hold the range hood up, in that they are neither flat-headed nor Phillips-headed but rather this smooth-headed hex flange thing that probably requires an arcane ratchet forged by dwarves and blessed by the Aesir and ritually cleansed under a full moon conjunct Jupiter. I use the pliers on a Leatherman, which nips my fingers a few times but does the job. The shield comes down, exposing the wires: two white wires paired under a plastic terminator, two black wires ditto, and a thick-gauge wire with no sheathing that's looped under a grounding screw. I detach everything like the fearless bad-ass that I am. Then I wrestle the range hood off the mounting screws and stow that sucker under the table.

Please notice, because this is a plot point too: The wires exit the wall via a ragged hole on the LEFT.

Interlude A: The Leatherman was a bad idea. A crescent wrench works better at brute-force removal of mysterious hex flanges.

Stanza 4: I make a screw template, just like the video said. I tape it up to the cabinet bottom. I unpack the 1/2" mounting screws that came with the new range hood. I go get the electric drill. WHERE IS THE ELECTRIC DRILL?! As it turns out, it's still with the friend we loaned it out to several months ago. Not their fault! We just keep forgetting to reclaim it. Happily, John's over there right now and will bring the drill home just as soon as he's done over there.

Interlude B: It is now dark. You know what else is on the same circuit with the range hood? All the kitchen and dining area lights. Also all the nearby AC outlets. (Our electric drill is not cordless.) Hooray for extension cords and upright lamps.

Stanza 5: The mounting screws that came with the range hood are too short. The manufacturer imagined, not unreasonably, that the range hood would lie flush against the cabinet bottom. The manufacturer did not count upon whoever remodeled our kitchen extending the cabinet border panel facade thing a quarter inch below the cabinet bottom. Sinking the mounting screws deep enough for sturdy support makes it impossible to mount the range hood, because that quarter inch of wood panel is in the way. John and I confirm this by attempting to mount the range hood. One screw head can't get below the metal lip at all, and one of the remaining ones is wobbly. (But at least they're all pretty much in the right place. Yay screw template!) I briefly consider sanding down or hacking off that quarter inch. Then I sigh and resign myself to a McGuckins run in the morning.

Interlude C: You know what else is on the same circuit with the range hood? The entire bedroom. WHYYYYYY.

Stanza 6: It is now the morning of Thursday, January 31. Home from McGuckins, armed with 3/4" mounting screws, I pull out the stove for the (3rd? 4th?) time and position extension cord, upright lamp, and electric drill in convenient places. I set the screws. I mount the range hood on them, which is not difficult because A) standing under is easier than reaching over the stove, B) the new range hood is lighter than the old, and C) the much larger keyhole openings make pinpointing all four screws at once much easier. I can just look through the holes the way I used to look through the hole in a vinyl record to sight it on the turntable spindle. (I discover the rear screws are too far back after all, despite the screw template. I reposition them and remount the range hood.) And then I take the range hood down again in order to thread the 120 volt AC wiring through the hole in the back.

The hole in the back of the new range hood is on the RIGHT. The wire block, also, is in the RIGHT half of the range hood. Clearly the previous installers did not foresee this eventuality, because they cut the wires to a length perfect for attaching to corresponding wires attached to the LEFT of a range hood fan.

The grounding wire is too short.

The grounding wire is too short.

Stanza 7: Having hit my DIY wall and bounced off hard enough to bruise myself, I call up an electrician. The electrician will come tomorrow afternoon (Friday, February 1) to extend the grounding wire and make sure nothing else will go wrong with the range hood installation. Originally, the earliest appointment the receptionist could get me was Thursday, February 7; I allowed myself to be scheduled for that time slot, and made assurances that should I find another electrician who could visit sooner, I'd call back to cancel. Possibly the thought of losing a potential customer to a competitor with a less-busy schedule was enough to inspire someone to pull a magic parcel of time out of their back pocket, because they called me back in under 10 minutes with the offer of Friday the 1st.

Which means only 24 more hours without kitchen and dining room lights, bedroom lights, or bedroom electricity. Or convenient alarm clock, cell phone chargers, lights to read in bed by, plugged-in laptop to play or read on until I'm ready to drop off into sleep. Not to mention 24 more hours wallowing in the mess of an ongoing home improvement project under, on top of, and around the kitchen table. I suppose if I had to wait a whole week, I'd figure out how to safely cap the live wires so I could turn the circuit back on, and I'd do a more complete job of tidying up the project-in-progress. So it wouldn't be horrible. And, really, "horrible" is an exaggeration. It's just bloody damn inconvenient, is all.

But I was so proud of myself for taking on the range hood installation project! I felt so competent, so capable! I really, really hate not being able to finish something I started.

And that's one way in which writing is better than DIY home improvements. With writing, I can always finish what I start. Guaranteed. Without fear of electrocuting the household.

Meanwhile, I have mopped up the truly disgusting patch of floor that was hiding under the stove. Because that, at least, I could do something about. When the Home Depot techs get here to deliver our new stove and haul away the old on Tuesday, I will not, at least, be embarrassed by under-stove filthiness.

So today was kinda worthless on the writing front. This was mostly because Sunday was roller derby from early morning 'til night, and Monday was a pretty awesomely productive but exhausting volunteering-at-the-farm morning, so Tuesday was "I get to sleep in and be worthless guilt-free for once" day.

(You'd think that leaving the farm at lunch and napping in the afternoon would count towards the sleep-in-and-be-worthless-guilt-free requirement. Except the nap in the afternoon is never long enough nor uninterrupted. And it's never guilt-free. I can't entirely forget that the guys who work on the farm as their actual jobs not only start two hours earlier than I do in the mornings, they also don't get the afternoons off. So I'm a lazy wimp who if I really wanted to be helpful would stay until sundown just like everyone else... I never said the voices in my head were helpful or rational, but they're there and they're loud.)

I think that weekends, rather than always occurring on Saturday and Sunday, should be invoked as needed. I'm declaring Tuesday to have been my honorary Saturday.

Meanwhile, last week I Got Stuff Done.

I did indeed submit the one about the space glue snow apocalypse (now with Brand! New! Title!) to The First Line on deadline day. It required a stupid amount of wrestling with Microsoft Word over formatting styles it insisted on applying to my imported WordPerfect 5.1 DOS document. How did it know to apply "Normal (Web)" to all my paragraphs? I do not know. I mean, yes, I composed the story in HTML code and copied the web output into Word, I'll admit to that, but then I saved as WP51, opened it in WP51, and resaved it in WP51. WP51 format doesn't save Word or RTF formatting styles. To my knowledge, WordPerfect doesn't even know about formatting styles until you get into the WYSIWYG versions for Windows and Mac. Version 5.1 is a DOS program. Plus, look -- if you hit F11 to "Reveal Codes," you can see there's absolutely nothing but the usual hard line break plus tab at every new paragraph. Look! This file is clean! So when I then freshly boot up Word to open this WP51 document, how can Word still detect the former presence of HMTL paragraph tags? How? HOW?! THIS IS NOT HOW THINGS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK!!!

Yeah, I'm a little bitter about this. Also about the way I couldn't change the style of the biography paragraph at the end without changing the style of the entire manuscript. WTF, Word?

Thereafter followed a lot of cursing and brute-forcing and frustration, but eventually everything looked acceptable and I sent the dang thing off. Immediately enough to possibly be an auto-reply, I got an email confirming receipt of my submission. So I guess that was a success.

I also finally got my butt in gear and submitted "First Breath" to a reprint anthology on almost the last day of their reading period. Go me. And frankly I'll be shocked if they accept it. I'm not anywhere near certain that it's a good fit for the anthology, or, if it is a good fit, whether it's good enough.

But I keep reminding myself of two things. First, this is a story that was already published at professional rates. Clearly it's "good enough" for some value of the term. Secondly, even if I'm not certain it's a good fit, I'm not certain that it isn't, which puts the dilemma squarely in the category of Don't Reject Yourself; There Are Editors To Do That For You.

So I sent it.

Next on my plate is "It's For You," a.k.a. the one about the phone that isn't there. My plan is to get that revised over the next few days and submitted over the weekend. Because the next few days are not about sleeping in and being worthless. They are about Getting Stuff Done. DO NOT SCOFF AT MY OPTIMISM BECAUSE IT IS INVINCIBLE.

Stop poking it with pointy sticks! Do not test the invincibility!

NO, REALLY. INVINCIBLE.

(Ouch!)

Up and writing earlier than I intended. Birds start to tweet around 4:45 or so, and then it's no use trying to sleep. I tried anyway, shuffling and rewriting the mental index cards for the new story, until the sentences assembled themselves into WRITE ME DOWN fashion and I got up and went to the computer.

Thinking I was just jotting down notes, I actually blasted through an entire draft composed as minimal HTML in EditPlus. That's another weird thing about the way I work; sometimes I get unstuck when I change writing medium. The phone story shook loose when I went from yWriter to WordPerfect 5.1. "First Breath" came tumbling out when I unearthed my typewriter. This morning, the new story got a real first draft when I took the text editor I use for making grocery lists, writing blog posts, and editing PHP/MySQL, and I pretended I wasn't actually writing a draft.

It worked, I think, for two reasons. For one, I can see more of the text at a time composing single-spaced in a text editor than I can double-spaced in the little blue WP51 window. For another, the stripped-down text-editor environment made it easy to write simply. No long flashbacks about the protagonist's railroad-flattened nickel or philosophical maunderings about mingling guilt with fascination with a sense of power. Just simple sentences describing a select few key details adding up to the story I was trying to tell. And no more bogging-down.

As far as I know, I'm OK so long as I submit this thing while it's still August 1 wherever the editors of The First Line reside, or maybe as long as my email is time-stapmed August 1. So I think what I'm going to do this afternoon is take this draft for revisions to the place I've set the story: the Madison Street Diner, on Madison Street just south of Colfax. OK, well, the real Madison Street isn't an all-night diner, it's only open from 4 PM until 10 tonight, but why not, right? Then I'll come up with a real title (I hope), submit the story, and drive back to Boulder in time to meet friends for take-out food and a game of Dread.

Until then, though, I'm going to try to get some sleep. At least for a few hours.

As promised, this post is about writing. Actually Writing Blog: Does What It Says On The Tin. And I want you to appreciate this, because I'm on my way back from a fantastic roller derby event that I want to blog about So! Very! Much! But I will defer that pleasure for now, because I said my next post would be about writing. And so it shall be.

But it's not such a sacrifice as all that, because a mere three weeks or so before this I was at a fantastic writing event which I kept meaning to blog about. So now I get to do that.

Back in June, several of us from the Codex online writing group got together and had a writing retreat here in the Denver area. For me, this was a hugely needed thing. Like I've been saying, roller derby has been eating my life all up, bones and all. Stealing a week out of its hungry jaws and feeding those seven days to the poor starved writing beast was a matter of self-defense. It was a great big shove on the pendulum to encourage an eventual swing toward equilibrium.

Can I sorta-but-not-really interrupt myself here (of course you can, Niki; it's your blog) to mention that I now have proof positive that one can be a novelist and skate roller derby all in the same life? It's true! Exhibit A: Pamela Ribon, author of Going in Circles. Premise as I understand it, not having read it yet, is that a recently divorced woman joins a roller derby league to find and reinvent herself. I need to read it. Point is, Ribon is writing from life here. In second "Big Idea" guest post at John Scalzi's Whatever concerning her more recent novel You Take It From Here, she says she received the phone call that kicked off the new novel while she was sitting on the bleachers healing up from a derby injury.

I find Ribon's example immensely reassuring. It means my ongoing attempt to balance derby and writing isn't doomed to failure.

Anyway. Interruption over. Returning now to the writing retreat: A week in a house in remote Centennial. Surrounded by writers. Who are writing.

It wasn't just writing. All work and no play etc. There was also going out to eat (where we mostly talked about writing) and playing games (Dixit and Arkham Horror, both in their own ways appropriate for spec fic writers). But mostly it was writing, in the house or out at coffee shops. And critiquing each other's writing. And enjoying the very great privilege that was an afternoon's chat with local literary agent Sara Megibow. Mega awesome.

(Sorry about that.)

(Well, no, apparently I'm not, as I don't seem to be going back and erasing it.)

(I pun. Deal with it.)

The concrete good that I got out of this week of almost nothing but writing was to finally finish a draft of the current short story in progress. This required, as it turned out, not only the writing retreat environment but also finally getting WordPerfect 5.1 up and running on my computer again for the first time since Dell's customer service techs needlessly reinstalled Windows 7 on this machine. (I told them it was a hardware issue. They didn't believe me. They have a Process. But I told y'all this tale already.) Once I had the story up in WP51, it stopped feeling like a solid wall. I could think my way into the crevices and cracks where editing could take place. It was like magic. I swear, should WP51 ever get taken away from me for good and all, there'll be nothing for it but to customize my replacement word processor with a yellow system font on a blue background.

Anyway, the story is called "It's For You". It involves a phone that rings at odd hours from a mystery location, such that the protagonist is helpless to answer it; and a next-door neighbor with a more assertive outlook on life. Everyone at the retreat who critiqued it proclaimed it "surreal" and I suppose they're right. Anyway, this is now my main project: another rewrite followed by submitting it somewhere before the month is out.

This goal is complicated somewhat by a recent tendency for any random freewriting exercise to turn into a brand new story draft, complete with beginning, middle, and end. Which is... good? I think? One of the effects I was hoping the retreat would have on me? Probably? In any case, I now have enough new stories to keep me busy for the rest of the summer. (As though I didn't have enough older stories waiting for me to please revise and submit them, too.)

This ideas business. It's like, feast or famine all the time. But I guess that's what happens when you shove the pendulum writingward. I guess the real goal now is to take another stab at that "writing like it's my day job" thing. Because it is. Right? Right. Writer by day, Fleur de Beast on eight wheels by night. Then perhaps instead of feast or famine it'll be three well-balanced meals a day. With a modest roller derby dessert.

But I've only just gotten off a train in Denver and unpacked my suitcase in Boulder and done my Wednesday AINC reading shift. Now I gotta go view the video footage from our last home bout tonight with the rest of the Daisy Nukes. Then it's serious fun quality time with John, who misses me. And then there's the rest of the weekend, which involves scrimmage Thursday night, a mix-up bout on Friday, and the rematch home bout against the Shrap Nellies on Saturday.

I guess normality and sober dailiness will have to wait for next week.

Well, that was easy. Apparently I just had the entire Manuscript class set not to pull certain data from the database unless I was in my staging directory. In other words, at some point in the past I clearly didn't want to deal with things, so I applied brute force.

The criteria for having an excerpt page and for showing notes about a given manuscript are now more intelligent. If I'm in staging, I get to see 'em. If I'm not, they only show up if the database entry includes a TRUE value for the brand-spankin-new "shownotes" field. Woot.

The upshot is, if you click on the title of the story in the little blue box here, you'll get the usual list of blog entries to do with that story. But you should also see a small description of the story and a link to read more. Click that link, and you'll get to read maybe the full story, or maybe an excerpt, maybe some just notes about writing it and where it got published.

In the case of "Last Week's Rhododendron," it'll be all of the above (or everything but the publication credit, until I fill in the publication credit. Which I'll do later on tonight. My brain hurts now). Enjoy!

So my plan this morning was to make "Last Week's Rhododendron" available for y'all to read, along with a bunch of other high school and college era publications. My plan was to say, "Hay you guyz! Lookit! First story I ever published, right here! LOLLERSKATES." It was going to be a very simple change to the website. Very. Simple.

Except I appear to be lost in a maze of twisty PHP includes, all alike. Or not alike, and there's the problem.

I was so clever when I built this website. I was going to do it right. I was going to learn object-oriented PHP properly... and here we'll pause for the Java developers in the audience to get all that snickering out of their system; yes, yes, I know, putting "object-oriented PHP" and "properly" in the same sentence is hilarious, yes, please do enjoy the joke... but anyway that's what I was going to do. Objects for handling blog entries, objects for handling manuscript data, objects for handling the both of them as different species of data entities. Objects for determining whether the viewer was me, and thus eligible to manipulate data, or not me, and thus eligible only for viewing. And all these class declarations filed away in their own include files, and each include file having a copy in staging and a copy that was live.

Then I didn't touch the code for some years. And I forgot how everything worked.

So what I've got is a page for displaying manuscript excerpts that works beautifully in the staging directory, but comes up almost entirely blank on the public version. I know why I did that in the first place -- I didn't want to expose the notes I'd written on each of my stories. Originally I wrote them for my own eyes only. I need to go through and make sure they're ready for prime time before I let y'all see 'em. So today I figured I was going to make an exception to that code specifically for "Rhododendron." BUT I CAN'T REMEMBER HOW THE CODE WORKS.

So I'll just be over here today, grumbling while my eyes glaze over trying to track Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of code that Past Me created specifically to confuse Present Me.

Past Me was such a jerk. I'm this close to hoping she gets eaten by a minotaur.

Just a quick note regarding "Right Door, Wrong Time" -- I still haven't found a place to reprint it yet, drat me. (Really. It's embarrassing how long ago I said, "I should send it to Brain Harvest." Have I done so? Well, have I? *ahem* Not as such...) However! Thanks to the magic of the Wayback Machine, you can still read it online! Twilight Tales may be gone, but the snapshot lives on, here:

"Right Door, Wrong Time" by Nicole J. LeBoeuf, appearing for the first time in print at TwilightTales.com in July of 2006.

This note brought to you by the question "Where can people read your stuff online?" and the realization that I am struggling to come up with three titles that meet the criteria. In addition to slushing the reprint of "Door," I suppose I should put some of my older stories up on this site like I've been promising to for years...

Question: Can I call my college-era and high-school-era writing "juvenilia" yet? Or is that only something I get to do once I'm a lot more published and a good deal older?

It was around 5:30 PM on Tuesday when I spoke to Dell Technical Support about my non-functioning speakers.

It was around 8:00 AM on Wednesday when the technician who'd visited me Tuesday called up and offered to return between 10 and 11 that very day. And so he did. And though he did not need to install the replacement speakers after all (as expected and hoped), he did indeed have them with him, freshly overnighted from Dell HQ.

Does your math tell you what my math tells me? My math tells me this is barely more than 12-hour turn-around time. I'm not sure how this is physically possible, even under the rubric of "overnight delivery." What I'm trying to say is, I should like to borrow Dell's TARDIS, please.

So, yes, when the tech installed the new motherboard on Tuesday (which continues to perform splendidly, thanks), he'd just managed not to securely plug my external speakers into it. On Wednesday, he opened up the computer again to correct this. It was a matter of five to ten minutes.

"Awesome," was my take on it. "As mistakes go, this one's a lot easier to fix than the one that results in yet another flawed motherboard."

"Well, that one would be easy, too," he said. "I'd just install another motherboard."

"Yeah, but -- how depressing would that be? Another flawed motherboard. Ew. I'm glad it wasn't that."

He pointed out that maybe his employer wouldn't feel the same way. A flawed motherboard would mean someone else had made the mistake, someone that employer didn't have to answer for. I guess field warranty support contractors expect their techs to be perfect. But that's silly -- not to mention deeply unfair. It's not perfection that's obtainable but rather the striving for perfection. Any company policy that expects employers not to make mistakes is a policy that expects employers not to be human. Seems much more practical, more effective, and more humane to focus instead on how to respond to the inevitable mistake that does crop up. And I've got no complaints whatsoever in that department. No one dragged their feet, no one tried to weasel out of the warranty, no one tried to evade responsibility. Everyone concerned had the same goal: me with a functional laptop. I'm happy to say that goal has been achieved. Hooray!

Tangent: While the speaker fix was simple, the tech's visit was a bit longer than planned because an unrelated part of the motherboard decided to give him problems. If you've ever taken apart a Dell Inspiron 1564 -- and why should you? But if you have -- you'll be familiar with the ribbon cable that attaches the power button to the motherboard such that pushing it actually has an effect. It's teeny and fiddly, and so is the plastic clamp that secures it in place. When that plastic clamp pops off, it can be very tricky to pop it back on. He had to use his entire set of pliers and my own pair of needle-nosers AND the tweezers from my Swiss Army pocketknife, in various combinations, before the thing finally decided to cooperate. Then he cloth-taped that sucker into place so there'd be no more of that nonsense.

So now my laptop is stable, functional, and ready for me to move both my working life and my playtime back in. I can now go on with my life.

(Yes, I'm aware of how pathetic that is. Possibly my life needs an overhaul if a broken laptop can bring it to a screeching halt. First world problems ahoy! Still.)

In other posts I've mused on how stress is habit forming. It totally is. And there are different flavors of stress. Right now, I find I'm in the habit of stressing out over the possibility that my laptop will crash if I pick it up, adjust the angle of its monitor, or just shove it farther away from me on the desk. It's downright Pavlovian. Either a week with John's perfectly stable Inspiron 1440 wasn't enough to put me at ease, or being back at the keyboard of my 1564 is evoking stress once more. My guess? A bit of each. Give me time; I'll get back into the habit of taking functionality for granted eventually.

On the other hand, I managed to get almost two years of productivity out of a cracked motherboard. Go me!