author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

As mentioned before, I'm in Avon, Colorado for the week. This is a little town just down the highway from Vail, in Eagle County. Given its nature as a ski resort/mountain town, it has certain peculiarities which I feel moved to mention at this time.

First off there is no straight line path to anywhere. Even if you can see the building you want to get to, there's no "as the crow flies" route from where you're standing. All the streets curve, and many of them have large traffic circles at their intersections. I'm pretty sure I've unnecessarily doubled the length of my trip between points A and B, for any given points A and B, by choosing to walk the long way around intermediary landmark C when it looked like it would be the short way around. It's very hard to gauge these things, especially when what looks like a direct route turns out to involve a six-foot drop or a near-insurmountable pile of snow.

And speaking of snow: Every day since I arrived has been sunny and warm, or at least sunny and warmer than you'd expect from a prediction of highs in the low 40s. I looked at the forecast before I left Boulder, and I thought, "Sunny and warm-ish, at least until mid-week. I'll bring my skates." But the problem with street skating in Avon in early December is this: it may not be snowing now, but it has snowed. And that previous snow is still hanging around, melting. And depositing mud and truly malicious gravel at every cross road.

Which is the long way of saying that my trip home from the library yesterday was--uncharacteristically, given how much I love skating--not particularly fun. But I did get a good toe-stop workout out of it. And I only fell once. Go me!

Meanwhile, have some pictures of the place where I'm staying. I'm at the Christie Lodge, which is unusual, but there was nothing available at the Sheraton Mountain Vista that I could take advantage of, so here I am. The Christie Lodge is much more convenient to Loaded Joe's, which I'm sure I'll appreciate on karaoke night when I will no doubt stumble back to my room late, tired and tipsy. It's also closer to the grocery store, which I have already had occasion to appreciate.

On the other hand, its layout is weird. It feels a little bit like staying in a long, narrow shopping mall made to look a little bit like an outdoor retail village. And it is built on a slope. This is obvious at all times. There is only one set of elevators at the center of the arc, near the lobby, and unless you are very lucky your trek from the elevator to your second-floor room at any distance down the east or west concourse will involve a half-flight of stairs. Maybe two. This is no fun at check-in.

Even some of the first floor rooms are inaccessible to wheelchairs. There are ramps for getting from one level of first-floor concourse to the next, but then you get to your room and there's a four-step rise to the door. It just looks like the architects, designers, somebody wasn't wearing their best thinking cap when attempting to solve the problem of building on a slope. Or maybe their target demographic is exclusively able-bodied enjoyers of snow sports, I don't know.

On the positive side, here is one of the things that the odd layout makes almost too convenient: Pho 20, their newest in-resort restaurant. It's practically right below me. I am no judge of how authentic a particular restaurant's pho is, but I can tell you that it was yummy and warm and filling, and the spring rolls were tasty too. I have been very, very good about eating most of my meals in the room--salads, instant noodle bowls in the microwave, omelets in the electric skillet--but Pho 20 is right there, beckoning.

Maybe tomorrow.

I'm so lucky. I could have been assigned a room on the Subway Sandwiches end of the resort.

Lately my writing process, if not my writing itself, has been suffering from a feeling of futility. There's the guilt of still having not revised "Caroline's Wake" and a sinking feeling that I'll never get it revised ever. There's the sense that this rediscovery draft of Iron Wheels will not only not reach 50K by the end of November--my first non-winning NaNoWriMo ever! Say it ain't so!--but also isn't taking me anywhere useful. There's a creeping suspicion that the Friday Fictionettes project is just a cargo cult exercise, a needless new obligation I've imposed upon myself that, although it has the basic shape of finishing and publishing stories, is actually just a waste of time that could have been spent more profitably.

These are not rational feelings. They're not at all justified. But they hang around, stifling my workdays with this general "why bother?" malaise.

Then someone reminded me that a market I've had my eye on would close to fiction submissions on December 1, and I thought, I need to send them something now.

And then I thought, Could the reason I feel like I'm not getting anywhere be that I haven't submitted anything for publication since September?

So I've just emailed "Down Wind" off to that market. And you know what? I feel much better now.

It is so very cold along the Front Range this week. It tempted us to light a fire in the fireplace yesterday, which was lovely and cozy and bright and romantic and all--but now the whole house smells like woodsmoke. Also we turned the heater up a notch last night and forgot to readjust it before bed. I woke up overheated, dehydrated, and with a sore throat. I also woke up late, and didn't really get moving until later. This may have something to do with my only reaching 3K and change rather than the hoped for 5K on the Iron Wheels "rediscovery draft."

After my 1,000 words, I gave in to nap temptation and allowed myself to fall asleep reading the 2013 draft. I have to say, the story in the 2013 draft--at least in the first half--isn't all that bad. It's missing huge gaps, but the overall arc is strong. Why can't it just magic itself into shape without my having to do all this work? That's what I want to know.

But enough complaining. My new skate boots arrived yesterday! They are heat-moldable Bonts. So tomorrow I will put them in the oven (at the recommended temperature) and then stick my feet in them and lace them up (after the recommended cooling-off period), and hopefully the results of doing this once or twice will be skate boots that fit skin-tight, like rock climbing boots do. And then I can have them mounted onto my Avenger plates, and then I can skate without worrying that my equipment is about to fall apart. How cool is that?! It is so cool.

It's still snowing. It was snowing yesterday and it's still snowing today. WTF, sky? You have the worst dandruff. It's all freezing cold and it clogs up my windshield. It also clogs up my brain. I watch it out the window and all I want to do is curl up in bed and go back to sleep.

I didn't even want to go out in it at all but apparently I made today MMLocal Pick-Up Day for myself, so off I went. Their Boulder base for share pick-ups this time around is the Avery Tap-House, so at least I got to order a beer while I was there. And also devour the most amazing pork belly small plate.

And now there are 24 jars of various delicious and wholesome things in my house. Two of those jars are only half-full now, because you can count on me to yield to temptation where food is concerned, pretty much every time. The holiday beets and the bread-and-butter zuke pickles were just there, taunting me; they were all, "Oh, too bad you're full from dinner, because we are yummy..." and I was like, "Too right you are! Get in my mouth." So.

Meanwhile I continue to have trouble setting words to page on Iron Wheels. Rewrites and me, right? Gahhh. This is why the word count is now set to 0, rather than 51K and change. Because zero is how many words I have logged on this rewrite.

See, I have four characters in that first scene whose interests/motivations/goals/story-arcs need to be moved or at least hinted at, and I do have good ideas about how to do that, but they are ideas that will be expressed mid-scene. Meanwhile the first words of the scene escape me. I just know that the moment I start writing it, it will all be wrong. Argh.

So my freewriting these last few days has comprised attempts at approaching the story by way of worldbuilding and backstory. Which probably doesn't help, but it lets me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile.

Coming tomorrow: Me effin' well sitting down and doing it. Damn it. Even if the snow does persist in coming down. Which it will.

Yesterday was one of those mornings where I needed that first cup of tea just to be functional enough to do my morning pages. And that's unusual. Usually it's the morning pages themselves that get me functional: that slow, constant, low-level effort over three pages of handwriting tends to sort of sneak me into awake mode, so that even if I begin with squinting, sleepy eyes and a groggy brain, I get to the end of them fully woken up and possibly even excited about the day ahead. But yesterday, not so much. Yesterday, all I was capable of at first was just drinking that first steeping of milk oolong and staring at the comments of an old blog post that I'd fallen asleep reading the night before. Also waiting for the headache to go away. It's winter, our building has baseboard radiant heating, I wake up dry and dehydrated and with a headache. And really, really homesick for the humidity and mild winters of New Orleans.

Today was better, but not by a lot. I thought it was going to be a lot better! I got up on time, did my pages, put a coat of stain down on a stripped and sanded half of a bi-fold door, and went off to have a delicious lunch with good company. But the afternoon got away from me, the early energy seemed to just seep away, my body suprised me with digestive issues after lunch (I don't even know), and, what's worse, the second half of the bi-fold door that I'd been sanding in fits and starts on the balcony got rained on. (It is now in the bathroom, having been towel-dried, and is awaiting the soothing warmth of the heater. Which will undoubtedly give me a headache in the morning.)

And I didn't post this week's Friday Fictionette. I have missed my first Friday. Oh, I'll get it up there tomorrow, no fear. But it hurts to break what has been up until now a flawless record.

This week, y'all. I don't even know what kind of a week it's been, it's been that kind of week.

I'm slowly realizing that I have days where I'm slow to start and maybe never really get moving, and days where I'm energetic and Do All The Things. Sometimes low-energy days come disguised as high-energy days by front-loading all their energy, but they're still low-energy days. And this is probably biochemical, at least in part. And while I can develop strategies for coping with low-energy days (do your morning pages! create a definite list of things to do! give yourself the gift of staying home tonight!), I can't reasonably expect myself to magically turn low-energy days into energetic days. And it makes no sense to punish myself for it, you know? It only hurts me and annoys the pig.

...You know. The pig that was hanging out in some other metaphor and got dragged into this one for no reason whatsoever. I'd be annoyed too, if I was that pig.

I apologize. This kind of whiny introspection isn't what you come to this blog for, is it? Well, I don't know--maybe it is what you come here for. I mean, if you come here. Maybe you don't read this blog at all. (Hey, who are you people, anyway?)

Quick! I distract you with someone being awesome! Mur Lafferty is doing NaNoWriMo, and if you support her on Patreon, you'll get a message from her every day, and an exclusive daily podcast--just for the month of November--that only Patrons get to listen to! Go! Support Mur on Patreon! There will be more interesting things here when you get back. Like, say, next week.

So this is my life right now. There is an area of the living room that's been taken over by painting, staining, and finishing projects for about a month now, and that ain't going to stop for a little while to come. I do not entirely regret this! This is where we stained and finished our brand new bedroom closet sliding doors and our brand new bedroom-to-shower-access bi-fold door. Those are happy results.

But now it's time to do the living room closet bi-folds.

There are four bi-folds in the living room. They started out as two-footers, but whoever installed them had to plane each panel down about half an inch in order to make them fit the oddly sized space. I forget what it came out to be. Ninety-three inches maybe? It was not the full eight feet. Anyway, this is why "Just buy new plain pine bi-folds and stain them" isn't the solution. Also, a new plain pine bi-fold is something like $80. And while time is money, we'd still have to stain them and finish them. So, no.

Instead, we're stripping the "curdled cream" paint off of them. And sanding through the layer of stain that's waiting under the paint. And, theoretically, staining and finishing them with the same color we used for our bedroom closet doors and shower room access door.

Paint stripping is a process. I'm not sure I have it down yet. What you see here is the first of the four bi-folds. After two days of work.

Great excuse to go to McGuckin Hardware and get all the things. Like, a whole 'nother gallon of that Zip-Strip stuff. Cheap natural bristle brushes. A proper scraping tool. Professional grade steel wool. Adhesive-backed sandpaper for that 3M sanding block. All! The! Things!

One day we will have lovely refinished closet doors in our living room. One day we will also have our living room back. And I will actually be able to put in a five-hour writing day, and maybe even think about the requested revision on "Caroline's Wake." (I have been assured there is no deadline. But it would be nice to turn it in while the current senior editor, the one who requested the revision, is still there to receive it.) One day we will actually be able to list this condo unit for sale, and move into something more house-like and roomy and well laid out and on the ground floor. One day.

Alas, that day is not today. It's not tomorrow, either.

I'm beginning to wonder if it will even be this year.

I may have mentioned that John and I are trying to sell our third-floor condo unit. The goal is to move into something that's a little more like a house, but that isn't too far from where we are now. And now that the roof has been replaced and last year's storm damage has been addressed, we're trying to get all of our home improvement assignments done so we can list the place. We've been moving so slowly, like, "OK, today we did the three polycrylic finish coats on the front side of new sliding closet door number two. Woot! Tomorrow, we'll stain the back side of sliding closet door number three." At this rate, there'd be no question of selling during the beautiful fall weather. At this rate, we wouldn't be able to list until spring.

And even at this lackadaisical pace, I've begun to doubt whether writing and home improvement projects can coexist.

Well, today they could not, not least because we resolved to step up the pace. Today we went to McGuckin Hardware and brought home everything we'll need for everything we still have to do. Well, most of everything, anyway. I detached a kitchen cabinet door and brought it to McGuckin so we could find the right color stain to touch up the below-sink cabinets whose finish was pretty destroyed. We bought grout cleaner, door pulls, more white paint for the kitchen and the shower room, more pre-stain and stain and polycrylic and poly-foam brushes. And then we came home and we did finish clear-coating the front side of new sliding closet door number two. And I just about almost finished spackling the gap around the air conditioner unit so that it isn't floating in a wall-hole lined with black foam insulation. And I cleaned up all the glass from when I broke my quarters jar this morning while getting ready to do some laundry. (Yes, I also did laundry.)

And I finally resolved the phone jack situation. This is the phone jack situation: The phone conduit boxes that live behind the drywall in the bedroom and in the office have their screw holes on the diagonal. But the nice brass wall plates we wish to install over them have a vertical pair of screw holes. All the parts that come with the new nice brass wall plates assume a vertical pair of screw holes. I'm specifically thinking about the steel ring to which is attached the actual phone jack--the module that the telephone plug goes in the front side of, and the four wires that emerge from the wall connect to the back side of it.

(This is difficult to describe because I don't know the proper terms for everything. Please to see attached photos.)

In the bedroom, this is not a problem, because the steel ring for mounting the phone jack has taken care of everything. Instead of being a small ring the size of the phone jack with vertical extensions, it's a wide ring with three pairs of holes: one pair at the diagonal for mounting onto the conduit box, and two pairs on the vertical for attaching the phone jack and the wall plate. It is perfect. The picture of it is not perfect; it is blurry. But the actual implement is exactly what we needed.

So we brought it to McGuckin and said, "Another one like this, please," and they said "We have never seen anything like that before ever. What is that?"

We stumped McGuckin, y'all.

So we're left with the vertical-install jack that comes with the brass plate, and the round steel ring that came with the crappy and unnecessary dual-port jack in the office. That steel ring is almost like the perfect one in the bedroom, only--and this is key--it only has holes for mounting the phone jack to the steel ring. It has no holes for screwing the wall plate onto the ring. Now that I think about it, it's probably meant for an entirely different kind of wall plate. Possibly, now that I think about it, a round one. That's probably where that perfect steel ring came from in the first place. A round modular phone jack. Which we probably could have bought and used. *facepalm*

But here's what I did. I used a pair of long screws to attach the phone jack to the vertical mounting ring to the diagonal mounting ring, all through the same pair of holes. So now I had the diagonal holes on the big wide ring ready to attach it to the conduit box, and the vertical holes on the vertically-extended ring for attaching the wall plate. And this whole unholy cross-wise chimera, which you can see in the third photo, I made flush with the wall by cutting out chunks of drywall with an X-Acto knife.

Spackle is my very best friend.

Anyway, I won the battle! But I lost the war--I'm now entirely out of juice. I didn't even make it to roller derby practice, because all these processes went longer than expected and utterly exhausted me. So I had to declare the productive part of my day over. Damn you, Tuesday! Why have you not more hours and also more energy for me to use?

Dear Wednesday: I have put all my hope in you. Please do not let me down! Yes, yes, I know I'm having lunch down at Cherry Creek with visiting family members. I don't care. I am being optimistic about you, Wednesday. You can do it!

It's not a secret because no one tells it, mind you. Everyone tells it, to every writer who ever contemplates quitting their day job. No, it's a secret because it is rarely believed until it is experienced. To put it broadly, it is the secret no one can know until they learn it for themselves. And then, if they're me, they need to relearn it countless times.

Here is that secret: The phrase "I've got plenty of time" is a lie.

It makes sense. It seems obvious. But somehow I keep falling for the lie. I say to myself, "Look at this long beautiful Tuesday stretching out in front of me, with nowhere to be and nothing to do except my own things!" I tell myself, "I'll have a pleasantly lazy working day. Plenty of time to get all my tasks done, even if I take long breaks between them. Plenty of time, even if I sleep late. Plenty of time!"

It's such a seductive lie. How nice it would be, a work day with no urgency to it! Why, it wouldn't even feel like work. It would make the work feel like play. No stress, just playing with words at a leisurely pace all the day long.

But the very lack of urgency has a tendency to result in no work at all.

This is why it's so important for me to make a schedule at the beginning of the day, and affix the scheduled items to scheduled times--or at the very least, work out how long each item will take. "Plenty of time" is in fact a finite amount of time. Remaining aware of that helps put the urgency back into the work day.

Also, I'm not allowed to read books early in the morning anymore. I have a distressing tendency not to put a book down until I've finished reading it, even if it contains real howlers about my hometown.

I did manage to spend a half hour polishing up this week's planned Friday Fictionette release. I'm really rather pleased with it. Tickled, even. When I first approached the writing prompt that it sprang from, I groaned, thinking, "This is twee and embarrassing and likely to be No Fun At All." Then I did it anyway, and, surprise! it was exceedingly fun.

And that's the secret to writing prompts, which, again, no one may know until they learn it for themselves (and they may need to relearn it on occasion): The greater the resistance, the greater the potential. There is fun and interesting stuff on the other side of the "Do I have to?" wall. Go get them.

It's only my second week into this project, but I'm already running into difficulties with Friday Fictionettes. They aren't insurmountable, nor are they unforeseen, but they sure are noticeable. And prompt!

The obvious one is the temptation to spend my entire working day on them. And, well, that might be reasonable if I had oodles of patrons pledging me gob-tons of money. For gob-tons of money I would happily treat Friday Fictionettes like my entire day job. As things stand, however, they are merely one of a number of regular writing tasks on my daily agenda.

To keep them in their place, I've been allotting them only one half-hour per day. Friday's the exception. Friday, all bets are off. (Friday I'm in love! Wait.) Since they gotta go up on Friday, they get to take up all the Friday they need to get publishable. But every other day of the week, they get one pom, one 25-minute session on the timer plus another five to wrap things up.

The other difficulty is related to the first. It's why I find it so tempting to spend all day on them. I'm not spending hours and hours fiddling with the craptastic cover art. No, it's the text itself that's giving me trouble. This week especially I am convinced that the piece I chose for Friday's offering simply sucks.

Yes, I know. I'm doing a fantastic job of selling my product here. "If you pledge me a buck per month, you get to read some really sucky writing!" OK, OK, it's not that bad. But I'm not as fond of this one. When I wrote it back in August, spinning off of four random words from one of Gabriela Pereira's CTC29 prompts, it started off vague, ran off in a non-promising direction, then, by the end of the timed writing session, found itself in the opposite direction from which it was going. And in the process of cleaning it up this week I've discovered a third development that wasn't there last month, and that is not compatible with either of the first two story ideas. So I'm spending my daily half hour in serious revisions.

And the whole point is that these fictionettes are supposed to be raw. Not so raw as to be terrible, not Draft Zero raw--they should definitely be presentable--but they're supposed to be a glimpse at the writer's daily process. They're supposed to resemble the practice from which they sprung. That's why, when I select the fictionette for next month's Week 2, I limit my choices to those timed writing sessions produced within this month's Week 2. If I don't like any of them, tough. Friday Fictionettes are about what happened when I showed up on the page.

That this fictionette isn't quite ready for prime time is supposed to be a feature, is what I'm saying.

Still, every morning that I look at it, it keeps failing the test of "Would I be embarrassed if people read this?" So I keep revising it. What's the worst that can happen? I might wind up with something that's actually good. Something I'll regret not submitting to a professional market. But that's OK. That's the other whole point of this exercise: Story ideas aren't so precious that I can't give a few away. Another one will be coming along tomorrow, after all.

At least this one's craptastic cover art is already finished.

It had been three weeks since I'd been to the farm, thanks to being sick two weeks ago and being given the day off last week. And I probably won't make it in next week due to a late Sunday night in Colorado Springs. Circumstances today seemed intent on making up for all of that absence, though, because today was the start of the Big Beet Harvest of '14. Four beds full, with one still in the ground when I left. Three different varieties: Red Ace, Touchstone Gold, and Chioggia with the candy stripes inside. Pulling 'em and clipping off their greens and washing 'em and sorting 'em by size. Baskets and baskets of beeeeeeeets.

Also beets for lunch, and a jar of farm-pickled tarragon beets for everyone to taste, and a bag of beets for me to take home and enjoy.

Personal notes for next time: When clipping the greens off, don't struggle so hard with the snips. That way lies frustration and also very sore hands. Ow. We had vague plans to do some painting around the house today, but working a paintbrush seemed a little daunting after working the beet set. So that's been put off for tomorrow.

And that's all that I've got to report today.