author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This is a blog post written in hope. Currently my blog isn't coming up at all--not the entries, not the composition form, nada. I'm not happy about this, but at 11:30 PM after double derby scrimmage I have no brain left for HTML/PHP troubleshooting. So I'm just going to write this post, because I saved time and energy for the writing of this post despite double derby scrimmage. I'll just hope that by the time I'm done, or maybe by the time I wake up, everything will be back to normal. Why shouldn't it? I didn't do anything to break my blog. With any luck I won't need to do anything to fix it.

I'm going to reference Rachel Aaron's 2K to 10K book again. I read it very recently, so it is the new shiny thing in my head. This time what I'd like to talk about is one of the sides of her "triangle" metric: Time. Aaron writes,

I started keeping records. Every day I sat down to write, I would note the time I started, the time I stopped, how many words I wrote, and where I was writing on a spreadsheet (to see an example, check out the bonus section at the end of this chapter). I did this for two months, and then I sat down with my data to look for patterns.

By studying this data, Aaron discovered that certain circumstances--times of day, locations, computing environments--consistently correlated with higher output. Thereafter she set about recreating those circumstances for her daily writing sessions. Lo and behold, her word counts went up.

There's a lot in common here with what Havi Brooks calls The Book of You. The practice is simple: Observe yourself. Take notes. What contributes to a good work/play session? What makes it easier to be happy? What makes for a sense of safety? What sabotages that sense of safety?

It makes perfect sense, and I can't bring myself to do it. I mean, in either context. I have so many excuses for this. For instance, I tell myself, I already keep a spreadsheet where I log my hours, and I already do Morning Pages; any further note-taking would be redundant, right? Except, of course, the point isn't so much the note-taking as the data analysis. Excuse: Neither timesheet nor Morning Pages are optimized for data analysis! How would I even begin?

Well, I did mention that I've been slowly rereading my Pages from January.

So, yesterday, I got home and keeled over. I'd meant to use my free evening to Get Shit Done, including all the shit I should have done by that time of the day but hadn't. Instead, due to being profoundly exhausted, I just slept until about 9:30 that night.

Some time after that I decided to salvage as much left of the evening as possible by reading a days' worth of Morning Pages and taking notes. January 7. And right there, on the page: a complaint that I'd meant to get work done that afternoon, but around 3 PM I got so sleepy, I had to nap.

PLUS CA CHANGE Y'ALL.

First I thought, "Self, this afternoon napping thing is a problem. Cut it out!" But that isn't practical or compassionate. Afternoon naps happen when, despite my best intentions, I get so tired that it becomes literally painful to remain upright. Telling myself "just stop napping" would be like telling myself "just work, all right?" on a Thursday night after three hours of roller derby practice and scrimmage. That's not "discipline." That's self-torture. That's an attempt to deny the body its physical needs. That doesn't work.

So my second thought was, "Self, afternoon exhaustion is a Thing That Happens. Accept it and work around it." How to work around it? "Damn well do your morning shift of writing, self!"

Because that's within the realm of the actually doable. The unfortunate habits of oversleeping and dragging through the morning don't come from the same sense of physical fatigue; they come more from a mental place of not wanting to face the day's work. And that's a place where this so-called "discipline" can actually be helpful rather than destructive. "Self, I know how much you don't want to get to work. I sympathize. But I promise you'll feel better about yourself if you do the work. You'll feel proud of yourself instead of guilty and unhappy. So just go ahead and set that timer... there you go! ...and start writing."

So even though the data analysis hasn't been comprehensive or formal, I did analyze enough data to come up with these conclusions:

• Because I sometime lose afternoons to crippling exhaustion, I must protect my morning work session from interference. It may be the only work session I get.

• Successfully working my morning session makes me feel proud and happy. This in turn makes it more likely I'll feel energized and eager to work my afternoon session.

• Morning sessions are in danger from sleeping late and from taking too long of a break between each task. Thus: Get up on time, and work to a strict schedule.

• Oversleeping stems in part from hitting snooze too many times (because "just fifteen more minutes" never feels like enough!), and then from a depressed feeling that I've wasted so much morning there's no point in getting up anymore. The latter feeling can be addressed by halting the initial snooze cycle. I can halt that cycle by arranging two alarms: one for the time I actually want to get up, and one for about an hour or so earlier, which is a long enough snooze cycle to feel sufficiently restful that I'll be ready to get up when the later alarm goes off.

I based this morning's wake-up routine and work session around those conclusions, and, lo and behold, I worked a righteous morning session. And a righteous afternoon session. And, during lunch and during my afternoon writing session, I got stuff done that had been hanging over my head for weeks.

Thus my hypotheses are supported by experimentation. Hooray!

Of course, even knowing that I'd gotten so very much good stuff done today, I still caught myself feeling stressed out at derby scrimmage because of all the stuff I just knew I still had to get done after I got home. Being stressed out can become a habit. It's going to take some work--which is to say, more successful days like this one--to break that habit.

Onward.

Would you look at the size of those carrots? This is the last week of veggie shares from my CSA, and those are finale-sized carrots. I dug up the potatoes I'd planted this year in hopes of matching those carrots in a soup, but all I seem to have grown are potatoes the size of kidney beans. Large kidney beans, like you'd make red beans & rice with, but still. Even smaller than the potatoes you might see sold as "pee wees." Will nothing match those carrots for grandiosity? Perhaps I should go buy some parsnips. And a huuuuuuuge daikon radish.

Speaking of retrospectives (I kind of was, if you squint a little), I've reached the point in The Artist's Way where Julia Cameron tells you to reread your Morning Pages. I've been doing so, but slowly, because even only going back to the beginning of the year, even given that I've only been doing them on weekdays, that's a lot of pages and there are other things I'd like to do with my waking time after all. I'm taking along for the ride a brand new blank notebook that I bought in New Orleans at the Tremé Fall Festival in which I'm jotting down any insights which arise.

it's interesting, and sometimes disheartening, to see what problems remain an unchanged part of my life, and most of them my own doing, too, like "Mustn't get distracted and try to multitask other activities during Morning Pages" or "Mustn't let the day leak away through the cracks in the hours." It's refreshing to see, from what I wrote in anticipation of my very first All Stars practice as a just-made-it A/B crossover skater, that I no longer have the insecurities and self-esteem issues I had back then. (I still have insecurities in that area, but they're different insecurities.) It's surprising to see turns of phrase striking the page like sudden lightning with no indication I thought twice about them at the time I wrote them. ("Pin the blame on the donkey"--ouch. "Morning Pages as a devotional practice"--really? Wow, yes, really.) There's a dream back in early January that I don't think I paid much attention to the morning I jotted it down, even though I'd just come back from a family visit, undoubtedly because I was dealing with more dramatic emotional upheaval fresh from Christmas afternoon, still too blindsided by that to notice the chronic low-level background unease that the dream was pointing out. ("I have brand new arrows. Dad borrows them. He says he has to prep the arrows for use. He does this by breaking them about 6 inches behind the arrowhead. He doesn't understand why I'm angry, nor will he promise to stop doing it, so I have to hide the remaining unbroken arrows in the attic behind a loose board in the wall." SHIT THAT'S UNCOMFORTABLY REAL.)

I'm taking notes and hoping to learn from them. And flinching sometimes. *flinch* It's cool. It's just the contents of my head from ten months ago. No big deal. The contents of my head are often thorny.

In other news, "It's For You" came back last week with a rejection letter and went back out again today with fresh reserves of hope. This is its twelfth time out in the slush mines. I know very well that, in this business, twelve isn't that high of a number, nowhere near high enough to mean I should give up on a story, but it's sometimes hard to remember that. I just keep telling myself, "Remember how that other editor loved it and passed it on to the second round? This is a good story! Someone will buy it!" But what would really make me feel better is having a brand new story to send out to meet the nice people. Only one way to make that happen, though. *cracks knuckles, surveys revision queue*

First order of business: I have finally posted the Friday Fictionette for October 21. It is "Shoulda Been a Wizard" (for subscribers, here are full text links for the ebook and audiobook editions). It's about this guy who wants to relive his past and get it right this time. He actually knows just enough magic to do it, too. All he needs is a volunteer.

I was having trouble coming up with a title, so I went back and riffed off of one of my writing prompts, which were the song titles "Boot Scootin' Boogie" and "Shoulda Been a Cowboy." Virtual Writers has been doing a lot with song titles and song lyrics for their writers' dash prompts lately, which is, oddly, doing very little for me.

Which leads to my second order of business here, which is this: I am bored of the whole Virtual Writers plus Watchout4Snakes plus Tarot Card writing prompt spread. I think this is why I am having a damn hard time forcing myself to do my daily freewriting.

Trying to freshen things up, I did a Google search for "silly writing prompts" and I got Scholastic's "Story Starters" which are awesome. It's a lot like Gabriela Pereira's "Writer Igniter" with its four-column slot machine design, only you get to choose from four genre or genre-like categories first. Also the Scholastic version is aimed at kids, which is perfect given that I want to inject some playfulness into my daily freewriting.

I tried out the Fantasy category and got "Write about a magical event with a lionhearted elder who brews a love potion." I had a lot of fun with that. The results might even turn into November's Week 3 Fictionette.

Third order of business: I'm hungry and, thanks to my very dear friend in Salt Lake City, I have tamales in the freezer. Also I have green tomatillo salsa in the freezer thanks to my CSA. Also I have a microwave with a defrost function. DINNER HERE I COME.

I was wrong--today was not a day with no appointments. Thankfully I remembered before it was too late. Tuesday! Tuesdays mean farm share! So I went and picked that up around 1:00 PM. There were sweet bell peppers and hot poblano peppers and another little half pound baggie of tomatillos and a lovely bunch of carrots and some tasty green chard. Dinner was peppers stuffed with a mixture of sausage, rice, and kale. The leftover stuffing mixture will get rolled up in those chard leaves. The fridge is full of tasty veg and life is good.

I was moving unaccountably slow today and also trying to do all the chores along with my writing, so I didn't quite get to everything I wanted to accomplish. But the daily gotta-dos got done, and "It's For You" went back out on submission. It joins the one I sent out last week (a drabble newly retitled "A Few Words Before We Begin") in the field. I'm sending stories out, y'all! That's what a writer does! (Also the laundry and the dishes are clean, and tomorrow I might just vacuum. RUN AWAY.)

I bought an ebook copy of Rachel Aaron's 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love and have been reading it this afternoon. I wasn't sure at first whether it would hit the spot with me; my problem isn't lack of word count when I'm generating draft, but rather lack of progress when I'm revising. Still, I'm finding many things she says apply. Or might apply, anyway.

I'm thinking very hard about her theory of not-writing, which is to say, writing avoidance--put simply, she says it's because you don't like what you're writing. That can be either because the story is boring, or you're off on the wrong track, or the scene you're working on doesn't actually belong in the book, or you've got the wrong main character; something, in any case, is wrong. Once you put it right, she says, the writing will be enjoyable again and you won't avoid it anymore because you'll want to do it.

Like I said, I'm thinking very hard about it. It makes sense in terms of the short story I'm having such a hard time revising, but its applicability is less obvious as regards my difficulty starting the work day in the first place. Maybe the answer is "You're bored with the routine of doing morning pages and then freewriting and then a half hour on the week's fictionette." Maybe I need to shake up the daily task list, reorder it, put in the number one slot whatever seems the most fun. Maybe the daily freewriting would be more fun if... something. If I changed it up somehow. I mean, it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be playtime. Maybe I'm just bored with the current crop of writing prompts and I need something more silly and playful.

Anyway, Part II has a chapter called "Editing for People Who Hate Editing," which sounds like it just might be something I need to read. I'm looking forward to it, anyway.

Ahoy, I got yer Friday Fictionette right here. The one I was supposed to have out on the 14th. It's called "In the Infinite Shadows of Eden" and it's the inevitable Adam-and-Eve pastiche. Don't most writers eventually write one? (Please don't tell me otherwise.) Mine features a reluctant Eve and a mission-driven Adam. It also includes a brief but significant cameo by Lilith. (Subscriber links: ebook | audiobook)

Today went to plan in that, hey look, the overdue Fictionette has arrived, and I got to have dinner-anna-movie with John. Not one or the other! Both. Today did not go to plan, however, in that I missed my usual bus to Longmont (bad), ran into an old friend at a cafe (good), very much did not enjoy the movie (bad), and wound up ranting with John about how bad the movie was and how good it could have been (fun).

(The movie was Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. I expected a mediocre book adaptation mitigated by that fantastic Burtonesque surreality to which I had been accustomed since a childhood viewing of Beetlejuice. I honestly did not expect an all-around painfully bad movie that failed on every single point you might name. I want to reread the books now. They were better. You say, "Of course the books were better," but frankly, as books go, they weren't particularly stunning. Still, they were better.)

Tomorrow involves no appointments and no buses. No doctor's offices. No work being done on the car. Just me, here at home, doing the writing thing. Just that until go-time for Tuesday roller derby practice. A NORMAL TUESDAY, Y'ALL. *hugs the normal* I expect good things.

I'll be getting on a train in about three hours (as of the time of starting this blog post), so I'm blogging now rather than later. Today's topic: My cunning plan to accomplish all my fiction goals, both long and short.

I have for many years now considered myself a novelist as well as a short story writer. Even so, I still haven't finished a novel to the point of commercial viability. Some may say this means I don't get to call myself a novelist; I am not going to waste time arguing with them, as there's no profit in it for them nor me. I'm more concerned with problems that actually need solving, to wit, (1) there are only so many hours in the day, and (2) I have not historically excelled at time management.

In short: Until something about problems (1) or (2) changes--say, the Earth's rotation slows down to afford us extra hours in a day, or, possibly more likely, I start using my available hours more effectively--it's simply not realistic to expect myself to make progress on both the short and the long fiction goals in a single work day.

So I'm looking at the space of a year instead.

The inspiration for this obvious-in-hindsight idea was episode 11.33 of the podcast Writing Excuses: Crossover Fiction with Victoria Schwab. Schwab writes across the age spectrum of audiences, from middle grade to YA to adult. She writes one novel in each of those three categories every year. What caught my ear was the way she does it--and I'm having trouble finding the exact quote, but what I remember is, she designates a particular season of each year to each to each of those projects. Which struck me as an absolute genius solution to my own problem. If I were to designate certain months of the year for short fiction and others for novels, then I'm not responsible for making time for both in every single day. Instead, I'm only responsible for making daily time for fiction, period. And that is a reasonable goal.

While I don't want to try to plan the whole year out from here--there are probably factors I'm forgetting to take into account, like travel and appointments and the rhythms of the 2017 roller derby season--it's a no-brainer to reserve November for novel work. Which means this month, October, I'm buckling down to get several short stories newly ready to go. That way, during novel-writing months, all I have to do with short stories--all I am allowed to do with them--is submit and resubmit them.

Which means this month I'm going to get a little antsy about days without a short fiction work session. My hope is that yesterday will have been the last of those. Shouldn't be too hard to bank today toward the goal, since I'll be getting on a train in about two hours (as of the time of uploading this blog post)....

Today is Friday, August 5th, 2016. The Friday Fictionette for August 5 is up on time, y'all. Please do not drop unconscious in shock or, from sheer surprise, behave in any untoward manner. The apocalypse is not upon us. Do not panic. Please leave the panicking and prediction of events of an apocalyptic nature to the characters in "Something Wicked." They are professionals and they know what they are doing.

With this blog post, I have indeed reached the 5-hour mark, which is great, but most of my writing hours were taken up with getting today's Fictionette ready to go. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to get Audacity and Equalizer APO to do what I wanted them to do (pre-amplifying and noise reduction), then trying to get GIMP to do what I wanted it to do (set text along a circular path in the correct orientation and position, dammit), then trying to get Sigil to do what I wanted it to do with Scrivener's epub output (make the fonts look marginally less amateur, pretty please?). Some of those were one-time things, and some were just-this-time things. As for the rest--well, if I get better about sticking to my plan of putting in a half hour on that week's Fictionette every day, I won't have so very much left to do Friday, will I? This "perfect day" thing really is its own reward. Or it will be. I am DETERMINED that it will be.

("DETERMINED" is the word for the week. All in caps, just like that.)

So unfortunately I didn't have time to do a couple other things I wanted to do today: finish typing up and illustrating and mailing the Fictionette Artifacts, for one, and, for my next trick, submit a recently returned short story to a new-to-it paying market. Yes! It's like I have other writing things to do besides Friday Fictionettes! I know, it's kind of hard to tell from what pops up in my blog. I tend to get preoccupied with whatever I'm TWO TO FOUR WEEKS LATE with.

Would you believe I have yet more overdue things to catch up on? Why yes. They just aren't writing things. (Well, one of them is, but it's not a writing fiction thing.) So I try not to babble about them too much here. Unless they're interesting, of course. But things like doctor appointments and meeting minutes aren't all that interesting.

On that note, I am off to spend the last hour of my night on other uninteresting yet terribly vital activities. See you Monday. (Or tomorrow, I suppose, when I post the weekly Puzzle Pirates blockade report. Whether that is interesting is up to you.)

It's Tuesday. Tuesday is CSA day. CSA day used to be Monday, but then Monday became a chiro day and that was just too many errands in one day without guaranteed use of the car. So now it is Tuesday.

Accompanying this post is a picture of the fresh, delicious things that came home with me from The Diaz Farm. The vegetables (rainbow chard, Italian kale, carrots, kohlrabi, a cucumber and a couple of green tomatoes for frying; there was also garlic but I have enough right now) correspond to a small-size share. The bread is an add-on I signed up for, and is delicious. The free-range mixed-flock eggs I buy on an as-needed basis for $5.50. You can also buy duck eggs for a little bit more (the rear six eggs in the picture are duck eggs). They are huge and delicious but a little harder to crack into and I am not always in the mood.

Here is how Tuesday is supposed to go:

• 9:00-9:30 AM: Writing (morning pages)
• 9:30-10:00 AM: Breakfast, brush teeth, water plants
• 10:00 AM-12:00 PM: Writing (freewriting, fictionette, submission proceedures)
• 12:00-2:00 PM: Bike up to farm for CSA pick-up, make myself some lunch, eat, goof off
• 2:00-4:00 PM: Writing (current story or novel project)
• 4:00-5:30 PM: Email and other communications. Dinner. Also pack gear and get dressed for derby
• 5:30-10:00 PM: All Stars practice (6:30-9:30) and associated travel time
• 10:00-11:30 PM: Foam roller and at-home traction session
• 11:30 PM-12:00 AM: Writing (blog post)
• 12:00-1:00 AM: Goof off a bit, read, whatever. Also get ready for bed.
• 1:00 AM: Go to sleep.

Hm. Written out like that, it sounds like a mercilessly busy schedule... except for the, y'know, 5-hour work day with the 2-hour lunch break. OK, it actually sounds like a really cushy job. AND I STILL CAN'T SEEM TO STICK TO THE SCHEDULE.

Problem the first: It really requires that I get up on time. That did not happen this morning. Possibly because I was unable to get to sleep until about 3:00 AM; my upper back was giving me grief again.

Problem the second: Once things start getting late, it's almost impossible to steal time from the rest of the schedule. If the morning writing shift gets cut short by an hour, then I just end my lunch break at 1:00 instead of 2:00, right? Except I cannot whittle "bike up to farm for CSA pick-up, make myself lunch, eat" down to one hour, even if I excise the "goofing off" part. Which for some reason I find myself practically unable to do. At least I wound up making my lunch so filling (big salad featuring today's veg and last week's mixed greens; far too much French toast made with heel of last week's bread) that I would up not needing dinner, so I could write right up to 5:00 PM. Cooking and eating takes up time, y'all.

Problem the third: There is a reason I only expect half an hour of writing after derby. If I lose some of my writing time to, er, "activity creep," well, it's going to be damn hard to extract that work out of myself after three hours of skating hard and turning left. Not to mention plyometric conditioning. The body has sucked all the carbs out of the system and the brain has no fuel to go on. Also I'm now a little sore from the foam roller and traction stuff.

(At-home traction involves lying on the ground with my neck supported by a triangular plastic device that looks a lot like a hands-free book holder. The head is allowed to loll back, creating the curve which we are trying to train the spine to achieve. The first sessions are short, but one increases the time as one grows accustomed to the experience. Ice on the neck and upper back after the session is recommended.)

But I am determined to see how far into August I can get with a perfect record of "perfect days," which is to say, days on which I've successfully checked off every item on my Dailies list in Habitica. And so, having only done three hours of writing rather than four and a half before derby, I return to my desk, determined to reach my goal no matter how tired I am. DETERMINED.

So. When this blog post is done, I'm going back to the embarrassingly belated July 22 Friday Fictionette. It's almost ready. The text is all done and the Audiofictionette is recorded. I just need to create the cover art, compile the .pdf and .epub, put the teaser excerpt together for release on Patreon and on this-here blog, and put everything up where you can see it. I expect I'll get some way into some of that tonight and, if I am very fortunate, publish the whole shebang tomorrow.

However, tomorrow is full of things--obligations as well as options--and I'm a little worried about getting everything done.

I can at least solve one problem by GETTING UP ON TIME, DRAT YOU. Do it!

I am late with all the things. All the Fictionette things, certainly. The astute and observant will have noticed that the July 22 edition still hasn't been posted, and as for the Fictionette Artifacts, I'm afraid the June mailings will just have to be sent in the same envelope as those for July. I'm dreadfully sorry. Hopefully this will be the week that I manage to get everything under control.

Which would be great, because over the past few weeks I have been having a hard time finding both time and energy to get stuff done.

I really thought I was going to have more time and energy to spare. My derby schedule has changed; as of the results of mid-year tryouts a couple weeks ago, I'm a full A-team member rather than being an A/B crossover, so I'm only attending one team's practices rather than two. That theoretically gives me back Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons.

Except, for one thing, I've been sticking around after All Stars practice on Sundays anyway. The first week it was because Papa Whiskey stuck around to help the Bombshells coach during their practice from 1 to 4; it was just simplest from a transportation perspective for me to stick around too. (I fetched us lunch and then volunteered my services as a non-skating official during B/C scrimmage. HOW DO JAM TIMERS MAKE IT LOOK SO EASY?!) The second week it was because I'd signed up to participate in our presentation at the Boulder County Fair, where we demonstrated Roller Derby As She Is Played These Days to curious fairgoers. (I wound up holding the microphone and explaining Derby 101 to the audience multiple times.)

These were both very fun things! But they were, nonetheless, things.

Meanwhile, I've also been spending a good deal of time at Cafe of Life. Turns out my back problems have a lot to do with the proper curve which my spine has not got. In an attempt to train it to have one, I'm undergoing adjustments and traction sessions thrice weekly. It's only about half an hour each visit, but it's also about a 40-minute commute each way by bus and bike, and it's a non-trivial interruption of my work-a-day schedule. And while the chiro sessions are having immediate positive effects (less pain all day! easier getting to sleep!), they are also having immediate exhausting effects, such that I come home ready for a nap.

And then there's the foam roller. I've been reintroducing the foam roller to my life. I ought never to have let it fall out of my life. The foam roller does wonders for the knee twinges, muscle cramps, and stiff ankles to which an athletic lifestyle is prone. It also runs away with another half hour from my evenings.

It's the same problem as always: Getting the writing done requires consciously devising, then sticking to, a specific schedule in which to do it. Which I had! Only now I have to change it to accommodate all these other changes. Gah.

It can be done! I hope to have good things to report tomorrow. And also a criminally belated Friday Fictionette to post. Again, sorry.

Hey! So. All the things are late. What I'm mostly trying to do is keep the late things from making the not-yet-late things late. Thus, today I put in my ''pom'' on this week's Friday Fictionette, then at least two on last week's. It's possible that they'll both go up at the same time. Mainly what I don't want is for any of this to bleed over into July's Week Five, because I cherish my Week Fives. I'd rather use Week Five to get a head start on August. I'd actually rather take Week Five off, but it never really works out that way.

Speaking of "poms," I've swapped Pomodoro timers. Since moving to the Windows 10 machine, I have this whole Windows Store full of free "universal" apps to choose from, all of which work natively on my computer and don't drag every other function down to a speed resembling molasses in January. This is, alas, a thing that both the Android emulators I've made use of, Bluestacks and Windroye, do. Firefox is of course affected, because Firefox is the biggest resource hog I can't seem to quit using, but Libre Office and Scrivener are also prone to waving the "(Not Responding)" flag when Bluestacks is in session.

Why this matters is, Productivity Challenge Timer (formerly Pomodoro Challenge Timer) is not available in the Windows Store, and Pomodoro Tool is. Now, Pomodoro Tool says it won't run in the background, but I am actually not seeing that; it keeps counting down happily while I type away in Scrivener, so that's good.

Also, it's just so much more cheerful than Productivity Challenge Timer. So much more encouraging! When sessions end, it says "Time to get some fresh air! :)" With a smiley at the end, just like that. When breaks end, it says, "A new session to do lots of things. :)" See? Encouraging! So much less hostile than that snide "Does putting off work make you feel good?" or whatever. And it doesn't repeatedly blast whistles at me if I don't come back and click the button immediately. Yes, I was initially happy about the Coach Makes You Work factor, but there's no way to tell the coach that OK, seriously, I'm done for the day. In contrast, Pomodoro Tool has a Stop button. Pomodoro Tool has a Pause button, even. And Pomodoro Tool does not have an exceedingly male-centric cast of generic characters, subtly reinforcing the commonly held idea that the default of "human" is man. So, really, the only thing Productivity Challenge Time has that's of interest is day-by-day data tracking, which I'm honestly no more than idly curious about. I'm already tracking my day-by-day in my timesheet spreadsheets, so. All in all, I'm happy to make the switch.

I still need to log a little work on the short story tonight, so I'm going to end this here, maybe get to the tale of the Saturn's Ride Home on another day. Maybe not. I mean, the short version is, "More stuff turned out to be broken, but we got home and got it fixed. The end." Is the long version worth telling? Eh. We'll see. If it looks like fun at the time.