author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Well, I got the first scene written today. That was the easy part. Look, I have attempted this story so many times, the first scene is now pretty much a final draft based on about four different preliminary drafts. Tomorrow's task is to get the second scene down, and *that* one has more moving parts and less drafts to work from. Argh.

In other news, we painted another wall today. Now, for the first time in about ten years, the entryway matches most of the rest of the house. Or it will once we paint the crown molding gold. That, also, is tomorrow's task.

Tomorrow's tasks will be upon us sooner than one might think, because I'm about to collapse for the night. Because roller derby. Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Ouch.

And I don't want to be tired. Certainly not while I'm in New Orleans. I want to save up all my tired and spend it during the train ride Monday and Tuesday, when I'll have nothing better to do than sleep. Well, and write, of course. But it is an utter waste of opportunity to be tired while I'm here.

Although I suppose I have reason. My agenda while I'm staying with my parents tends to look something like this:

1. Wake up at 7 AM. Drink coffee¹. Do Morning Pages. Visit with Mom and Dad, and also Mom's friend who comes to swim in the mornings, before everyone leaves for work.
   
2. Go to all the places! Run all the errands! Often by bike!
   
3. Eat all the things! (Today, all the things involved shrimp. It's a Friday in Lent.)
   
4. Weather permitting, do a little skating. "A little" today meant "about a mile and a half along the Lakefront Trail from the Bonnabel Pumping Station to the Bucktown Marsh and back, and also do it NOW before the rain blows in."
   
5. More visiting. More eating. More drinking.
   
6. Fall over exhausted around 9:00 PM.

Tonight's visiting involved accompanying my Dad on his weekly dinner and Bourré session (with house rules for ante and bourré penalty) with his sisters and their families. They kept me up way past my bedtime.

Anyway, that's why Niki's so tired.

¹Dad makes coffee every morning. When I'm in town he makes enough for two. Also, at least once or twice during my visit he ends up buying me a beer or mixing me a martini. Dad getting me drinks is one of those weird Signs You're Now a Grown-up that I haven't gotten used to yet and probably never will. (Another is encouragement to call parents' friends and some aunts and uncles by their first names without the accustomed Mr/Miss/Aunt/Uncle honorific.) (back)

Writing did not happen today.

You know what did happen? TAX PREPARATION.

So now you know.

I had such high hopes for today. Too high, perhaps. My intent was to prioritize two household tasks that were long overdue, and then jump back into the writing.

I did not expect these tasks to take me until past 2:30 PM.

It wasn't just that "Do the books; pay all bills" is already a large task (which it is). But it was larger than it should be because I'd let some of the bills go overdue. There were more of them than there should be, and none of them could wait. And so this task took 'til past ten, and so you see why I avoid this task on a regular basis. Why, hello there, vicious circle! I am in you, attempting to escape...

Additionally, The Box of The Book (the box where all the papers I'm to deal with when I "do the books" go) had ceased to fit in a box years ago. It's been more of pile the bottom third of which I have not touched since before it outgrew the box. Theoretically this means I should be able to just throw it away and never miss it. But you never know when things like the original kitchen appliance manuals or the amortization schedule might come in handy or, indeed, in vital. So. My optimistic quest has been to stick a chunk of that pile in my clever folded-cardboard inbox hanging off the nails in the wood of that bare wall in the office... and then deal with that chunk until it is gone. Everything dealt with and either filed away or disposed of. So that chunk took a while to deal with, too.

I won't bother to go into the other task on my "immediately after Morning Pages" to-do list. Transferring a mail order prescription to our new provider was easy cheese. It took two phone calls, neither taking longer than five minutes. This was not the task that pushed writing out of the picture.

No, that honor went to the task I did not realize I had to do, the really overdue bill I had forgotten about for maybe three months now: Renewing my car license registration.

I have a vague memory of the bill arriving. I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in the Box of the Book (of Doom). That memory dates back to either late December or early January. It's been sitting quietly in a corner, making no fuss, letting me pretend it's not there, ever since.

And then I looked down at the stickers on my plate while balancing some boxes on my knee to negotiate the trunk latch, and I saw a 1 and a 14, as in my registration expired in January, and I thought, "Oh, shit. Guess I'm going to visit the County Clerk and Recorder building today."

Whose motor vehicle technicians looked me up in their system and said, "Did you know you also are due for emissions testing?" This after the usual fifteen to twenty minute wait to be helped out at Desk 18.

So they gave me a temporary plate to affix to my rear window, for which they charged me about $6.00 on top of the $30.00ish late fee. So I removed my permanent plate and stick it in the trunk, just like they told me to ("An officer might give you trouble for the outdated stickers"). So I drove over to spend a goodly while at emissions testing. So I got my test results (a clean bill of health for my '97 Saturn) and paid my $25.00. So I returned to the County Clerk and Recorder building to wait another twenty or more minutes for number R503 to be helped at Desk 11, so I could now pay about $76.00 for the actual real true permanent (until next year) registration renewal and a shiny new pair of stickers that said 3 and 15.

And so, upward of $130 later, I went home. And it was almost 3:00 PM.

Now, admittedly, an hour of this day was spent having lunch at BRU Handbuilt Ales & Eats right after the first County Clerk/DMV visit. I had a phenomenal bowl of shrimp and grits and a lovely pint of coffee stout (I believe it was called the "Osito Stout," after local coffee roasters Ozo). And I didn't do any writing at all, despite having the chance.

Scratch that--I didn't do any workday writing, but I did write. Embellishing and proofreading the morning's dream recall into something I could post on the LD4all.com forums is absolutely writing. It involves words and the craft of words. It's just not writing that fits on my daily timesheet nor accomplishes my current set of writing goals.

It may well be writing laid up against future goals. I have many reasons for recording my dreams with a thoroughness; among them is that it replenishes the well from which springs story. I believe this, despite any obvious direct connection between the dream in question and the stories I'm currently working on. I believe this even when the dreams aren't handing me new stories on a silver platter. I believe that no writing is ever wasted.

That includes this, by the way.

Tomorrow will be better; that's another belief my ability to get from day to day utterly hinges on. Tomorrow will be better, or if not, the next day for sure. And who knows what I'll dream tomorrow morning?

If nothing else, tomorrow will be better than today simply by virtue of dawning with no overdue bills outstanding.

Overdue library books, now, that's another story. And travel plans that should have been cemented and paid for months ago, there's that too.

Argh.

I think--and I hope I'm not jinxing myself by saying this--I think I'm not sick anymore. I'm still coughing, but it seems to be the post-cold "clearing the pipes out" cough. The viral infection has moved out, but its physical effects remain as a nasty reminder of the unwanted guest's unwelcome and lengthy stay. Said effects include irritated respiratorial apparatus and also phlegm the consistency of glue.

Times like this, we pause to observe how work habits built carefully and maintained over the space of almost two weeks go all to hell after one week of sick leave. Dammit. But it's a new Monday, the start of a new week, a week during which I am no longer sick. I might just get some work done.

In any case, there was no sleeping late this morning. Today the roof work got underway in earnest. Hammering, sawing, and machinery of undetermined description have provided a constant soundtrack. The workers have removed the foam layers that comprised the old, leaky roof, causing the last bit of water trapped therein to drip through in unexpected places. A fine dusting of sawdust, rotten wood particles, and dirt keeps drifting down from the areas where my ceiling's boards are bare, making it inadvisable to sit on the sofa or work at the desk. For a little while there I could see the sky (and occasionally the workers' boot soles) through places where the frequent leaks and small mold colonies had eaten away at the edges of the wood panels.

I kind of want to take a walk down to Pekoe or bike on over to Fuse. Home is not currently conducive to getting work done, not with all these alarming noises coming from above. But I kind of want to stay, because they're fascinating noises. How often do you get to watch your roof get replaced, after all? The signs of progress are endlessly intriguing. I wanted to take a picture of the aforementioned hole where I could see the sky, but in between taking one with flash and one without, the workers evidently laid down a brand new layer of something. Insulation, possibly. The first picture shows bright light shining through; the second shows a pinkish filter. Since then, they must have laid down something more opaque, because now light isn't getting through at all.

(The evergreen branches are a leftover winter solstice decoration. We wanted to have something more seasonal and warm to look at than the bare beams.)

Well. Just because I didn't sleep late doesn't mean I didn't lie around reading and feeling all bleah. But I have at last treated myself to a shower and some strong tea, so I'm feeling a lot more lively. Having nowhere to be tonight, thank goodness, I have no obstacle to simply timeshifting my day into the afternoon and evening. Theoretically, anyway.

All for now. More tomorrow.

Today was a raging success. Behold:

Finished, had critiqued, revised, and submitted my 243-word entry to String-of-10. My friend and colleague Julie was also entering the contest, and suggested we exchange critiques. We spent some time on the phone tonight helping each other revise, and then we also navigated Flash Fiction Chronicles's Submittable interface together. "What do you suppose they want in that text field?" "I don't know, but my best guess is..." "Oh, OK, that sounds plausible."

We're a team!

Also researched, finished, proofed and submitted my first Demand Media Studios article since November. I have this stupid mental block about working for DMS. Logically, I know that I should be milking the heck out of this gig. I somehow got approved to write articles for LIVESTRONG despite my absolute lack of any fitness or nutrition background at the time--which is weird, considering I have a friend who makes his living as, among other things, a fitness coach, but his application got rejected. WTF, DMS?!--so now I get to write minimally researched 500-word articles for $30 each. This is easy money. I should take better advantage of it.

But somehow my soul sort of rolls over and dies when it contemplates working on an article. Even a softball topic (for me) like "The Crossover Technique on Roller Skates" puts me in a mindless procrastination trance for a week.

Well, the dang thing was due today, so finally around 8:00 p.m. I knuckled into it. I'd already pulled up some useful Derbylife articles and a fantastic tutorial video from Naomi Grigg (a.k.a. The Neutrino, rostered with the Rat City Rollergirls team "Sockit Wrenches") the week before, so really I just had to do exactly what I did last time I led Phase 1 training: Explain the crossover.

I submitted the article towards the end of the 10:00 hour. 11:30, I was perplexed that it wasn't showing on my Work Desk under "recently submitted." This turned out to be because it had already been accepted. That's got to be the shortest amount of time an article of mine ever spent on an editor's desk at DMS. (The editor left very nice comments for me, too.)

Today also featured "finally got around to it" accomplishments enabled in part by McGuckin Hardware. The tube of E6000 epoxy restored the handle to the lovely little Japanese teapot that Avedan gave me some years back. The tip of a bamboo skewer dipped into a tube of gold acrylic paint added just the lightest touch of color to the job, kintsugi style. (Very, very light. These are not actually the right materials for kintsugi, and I didn't want to risk diluting the epoxy too much.) The Elmer's Glue-All finally got me to complete a long-planned project of whimsy and childhood nostalgia: converting an old miniature dry-erase board into a black felt storyboard. I also replaced the roll of gold duct tape that needs to live in my skate bag.

Lastly, I finally processed about a half-inch of the Pile Of Papers That Need Dealing With. Those things that required more than filing--bills to pay and stuff like that--got put in my brand-new wall-mounted inbox for dealing with on the morrow. My brand-new wall-mounted inbox is, very simply, a bit of folded and taped cardboard that I impaled on some of the nails coming through the naked wall in the office.

I'm just resourceful like that.

Thus, today was awesome. And now today is over. Tomorrow looms. It seems dreadfully unfair not to get a little time off between making today awesome and being expected to make tomorrow awesome. I shall have to file a bug report about that.

John informed me that his current employer, being a big established company and not a new startup, includes Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in its list of official holidays. "I get the day off!" says he.

"Well then! So do I!" says me. "Let's spend some of it together."

And so we did. We spent a great deal of our three-day weekend together, and it has been glorious.

(Nota bene: When I say "three-day weekend," I am indeed referring to Saturday through Monday. I got a respectable amount of work on both novl and short story done on Friday; I just forgot to blog, is all. *shamefaced*)

We played four or five games of Tigris & Euphrates, a board game simulating four "dynasties" vying for primacy within their expanding river kingdoms. Avedan and John, having played it Friday evening, introduced me to it on Saturday, and then John and I played it all weekend long. So far, other than quibbling over their use of the term "dynasty" (I don't think that's the best word for "nation-states with their own leaders existing at the same time and competing for power"), I have no complaints. Though its theme puts one in mind of Agricola and Stone Age, it's not actually a resource allocation game. It's more of a positional and regional conflict game. Like Risk, I suppose, only with constantly moving boundaries and a more complex conflict-resolution mechanism.

John spent a good many hours, including those usually reserved for sleeping, playing The Last of Us on the PS3. As I am usually not up for witnessing games that are also emotionally traumatic movies, I spent those hours mostly holed up in the bedroom playing Puzzle Pirates. I'm pleased to say I impressed one of my senior officers with my whirlpool-navigating skills. Go me!

We also spent a little time together watching videos of stand-up comedian Matt Braunger, who's like everybody's hilarious drinking buddy who tells the best stories. He also passes my privilege dynamic test with flying colors. That's where I answer questions like, "Do I have to brace myself for getting punched in the face every time his stories involve women?" No. He did not punch me in the face. I laughed myself to tears, and nothing hurt. So we watched his Comedy Central appearance, and now we've ordered his two albums on 12-inch vinyl. Also I now follow him on twitter, where he continues be Good People.

Yes, there was also roller derby. The 2014 schedule involves 3-hour practices for all three travel teams on Sunday, with the Bombshells and the Shrap Nellies (B and C teams, respectively) overlapping for an hour and a half of scrimmage. Only we're not doing that for a couple weeks yet, so practice was only two hours long yesterday. Given how beat up I feel today, I'm beginning to worry about the full three hours.

You know what else I did this weekend?

I missed writing.

No, I mean, I missed it. Like, "Aw, it's a weekend. No writing today."

I'm not talking about a conscious complaint or a serious disappointment. It's more like, after four days straight of actually doing what I should, I was experiencing this weird sort of background-level happy expectation of returning to the works in progress. It's kind of like being in the habit of stress, like continuing to suffer from a constant involuntary feeling of "Oh, shit, I have so much work to do" even after the big scary project has been turned in. Only this would be the opposite of that. The enjoyable version of it.

I'm so very glad there is an enjoyable version of that.

Hey! Guess what?

Tomorrow I get to write!

As far as implementing my Diabolically Cunning New Workday Plan goes, today has been a success. (We will not speak of yesterday.) Today I did all the things, and then some. Not in any particular order, nor with any particular speed or urgency, but I did them. So there.

What helped a lot was, I set up a to-do list template in a new Open Office spreadsheet. For each writing task, I logged start time, end time, and duration. Then, at the bottom, just because productivity tracking is fun, I added up each task's duration to determine how many hours I'd spent writing or performing writing-related tasks. Today's total was about 6 hours, which made me feel very accomplished.

Oh, by the way, speaking of productivity tracking, check out how science fiction author Jamie Todd Rubin does it. And here is how he works. Neat, huh? Now I no longer feel alone in usefully overthinking things. Although I'm beginning to feel defensive about my video game time.

I separated it out into sections:

1. Woke Up At: If I log this, I'll probably stop sleeping in, just out of sheer embarrassment. So far, so good: today it was 8:30 AM. The category should more usefully be Morning Pages with time stats logged just like for the other tasks. The start time is functionally the same as the Woke Up At time, or ought to be. Morning pages takes me about half an hour immediately upon waking up, but can go to an hour and a half if I put them off until later. Just-woke-up-brain spends less time going "What now? What do I write now?" Just-woke-up-brain just freakin' writes.
   
2. Fiction: The four tasks here are Freewriting, Short Fiction, Novel, and Submission Procedures. I spent about an hour and a half on annotating the recently critiqued draft of "It's For You" in a new Scrivener project, and about a half hour on everything else. That means it did in fact take a full half hour to submit "Blackbird" to a new market, and another full half hour to take Iron Wheels through Step One of the Snowflake Method. (Step One: "Write a single sentence synopsis of your novel." To be fair, Randy Ingermanson suggests a full hour for this.) Spending only 3 hours on fiction is admittedly on the brief side, but that won't stop me patting myself on the back. (pat pat pat)
   
3. Content Writing: Boulder Writing Examiner, Puzzle Pirates Examiner, Demand Media Studios. Didn't do any of 'em today. Not too worried about it. I'll see about easing content writing back into my life after I'm reliably getting fiction done every day.
   
4. Other: Here's where I logged the time spent reading and critiquing those manuscripts slated for tonight's writing group, and the time spent attending said writing group. I feel a lot better about the brevity of today's "Fiction" category knowing that most days I'll have at least two and a half more hours to spend there.
   
5. Blogging: That would be this. Hi!
   

So here's Tuesday's Breathtakingly Obvious Epiphany: Going to writing group counts as writing. Right? It is not a biweekly obligation that gets in the way of writing. It is part of the writing. It is a thing that writers in fact do.

I'm very fortunate to be in a group again, and to have friends who pushed beyond "Wouldn't it be great if we got together and formed a writing group?" until it actually happened. There's six of us, all of us in Boulder or Gunbarrel. We write on a wide spectrum from speculative fiction to mainstream/literary, serious and satire, prose and poetry both. Everyone has really insightful things to say, and our critiquing styles seem to mesh well.

I'm embarrassed to admit that they critiqued "It's For You" back in September, and I'm only now working on the revision. I'm even more embarrassed to admit that the 4-month delay is an improvement. The draft my current group critiqued was revised from the first draft based on feedback from the Denver-Area Codex Writing Retreat in July 2012.

Fie on embarrassment. Improvements! Improvements are good! Today has been a success. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Our closest circle of Boulder friends have a tendency to come up with cute names for our abodes. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's a gamer nerd thing. Maybe it's like the way families develop unique terminology based on things various members said when they were very young. In any case, we don't just say this house or that apartment. Our homes have developed names.

For instance, there's "The Caboodle," an apartment so named because one of the people living there is named Kit. Obviously.

Then there's "The White House," which is the apartment inhabited by the trio one of whom has a cat named Richard Nixon. Really, it all makes perfect sense.

Our place? Well, John informed me that "Chez LeBoeuf-Little" wasn't cool enough for prime time. One of the White House denizens came up with the winning replacement nickname: "The Observatory."

Why? Because you can see the sky through the holes in the roof.

Not really. But there are certainly holes where the rain gets in, having the expected effects on the minds of everyone inside. That's been the case since we moved in. We know this because there was a stain in the area of the ceiling that started leaking water some years later. Up until then, we'd thought it had been a past problem adequately handled by previous owners who simply failed to follow up with the interior damage. Oh, how wrong we were!

The saga of our leaking roof has been a constant source of pain and stress to us ever since. Maybe not as intimate as living with a bad back or arthritis, granted, but just as constant, and just as much a source of uncertainty: Are we going to make it through this spring without having to tell the homeowner association manager we need another patch job, and argue with the homeowner association board that really, really, this time, isn't it obvious the patches aren't sufficient? Really?

I'm not going to go into the sequel saga involving several changes of management, one of whom finally put the leaking roof problem on the board's TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY radar, and the installation of an HOA board who actually seem to care, just in time for the Storm of the Century to make the roof leak utterly unignorable, followed by a lot of very slow moving meetings and consultations and then realizing that we needed a competent management company if we were going to get anything done--

But I'll tell you this. Today, a notice appeared on the corkboard of our stairwell advising residents not to park in the circled section of the map and if they didn't move their cars they would be towed and the HOA will not be responsible for any breakable items falling off walls or shelves so be prepared, y'all, 'cause NEW ROOF CONSTRUCTION BEGINS JANUARY 13 WOOT!

Come February, we're going to need a new nerd name for our condo unit. Or else we're going to need a telescope to justify it. (Hey, wait, I've got one back in Metairie!)

It's a new year. I'm thinking optimistic thoughts. You know the sort: New year's resolutions, making a fresh start, and all that general gung-ho go-get-'em population of the mental nation known as The First Day of the Rest of Your Life.

Unfortunately, Life sometimes has minor upsets that mess with planning The Rest of. Seems like John and I both picked up head colds when we were in New Orleans--and how much of that is due to our insisting on spending a rainy Saturday in the French Quarter, I couldn't say--so our new year has been off to a slow start.

John's been staying more or less active throughout. I'm not sure how he does it. Me, I spent Thursday in bed. Friday I started getting better, Saturday better still--then Sunday I had my first roller derby practice since A) being sick and B) returning from sea level, which landed me back in bed most of the daylight hours of today while my lungs threatened to go on strike. But I made it to the Rock Day Spin-In and Potluck at Shuttles tonight, having baked banana bread for my contribution during the afternoon. I'll mark my small triumphs where I find them.

Tomorrow, I hope, I'll be able to put my new year's optimism to work pursuing my newly determined daily work schedule (about which, more tomorrow). There are distractions in the near future: preparations for out-of-town guests, then the actual activities involving the out-of-town guests, not to mention sharing the house with said guests between Wednesday the 8th and I think Monday the 13th. But if I waited until my life was distraction free to really settle into a daily work schedule, it might be New Year's Day 2015 before anything got done. So I guess one of my new year's resolutions should be to stop using distractions as an excuse.

Another resolution is, once again, to get back to blogging here daily or at least five days a week. We'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of one of our neighbors. He came around the side of our building while we were chatting, then headed across the street to spend some time in the Atrium's loading dock. John followed him with a camera, for which exercise he graciously posed. Happy New Year!