author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK so it's technically Saturday now, but I haven't gone to bed yet, so it's morally still Friday. Or philosophically. Or something like that. Something like that is my story and I'm sticking to it, whatever it is.

Your Friday Fictionette for June 17, the third Friday of this month, is "Happy Birthday, Dear Bob." It's one of those funny horror stories that I sometimes write, which I then have trouble convincing people is actually funny. It is not a spoiler to state that Bob is emphatically not having a very good birthday. Bob needs to learn to stick up for himself! It's hard.

I succeeded at getting up on time! Last night wasn't as bad as Wednesday night, but it was still pretty bad, how long it took me to get to sleep. Nevertheless, I got up to see John out the door to work, and then I stayed up. I am considering this a victory despite how slowly I moved through the day and how late I got done with the day's work. I'm running on not quite enough sleep; moving slow is expected behavior.

(One of the exercises in The Artist's Way is to list ten ways in which you're mean to yourself. One way I've been mean to myself is dismissing small victories for not being good enough, or for not being the victory I really want. I'm practicing congratulating myself on small victories. This is me, practicing. Yay, me! Good job getting out of bed and staying out of bed!)

I will need to finish next week's fictionette early. My fourth Friday in June will be spent driving to Salt Lake City--that's about eight hours away--for Wasatch Roller Derby's Great Salt Skate. The BCB All Stars will compete in three bouts. I'm going to be skating in all of them. I'm also going to get to see a very dear friend, someone I met at the same summer camp where I met John (she was my roomie!). I last saw her just once several years ago for about three whole hours, and one weekend several years before that, and so forth back through the years until we wind up back in those first three weeks during the summer of 1992. But I'm going to see her the weekend of June 25--and she's going to get to see me skate! I really hope she gets to see me skate well and not make a fool of myself... (That would be the nerves talking. I am a bundle of nerves.)

Anyway, it will be terribly exciting, but it means I have to get the weekly tasks done somewhat earlier than the last wee hours of Friday, technically or philosophically speaking. So it's a good thing I intend to continue getting up on time between now and then, every day, no exceptions. And hopefully sleep better at night and function at 100% during the day. Right? Right.

My sleep cycle is all messed up. (Yes, this will be a complaining, lamenting, and whining sort of post. It happens.) I'm having trouble getting to sleep at all, is the problem. It's kind of a big problem.

There are any number of causes, or rather factors, all working together in a horrible tag-teaming conspiracy. There's the constant tension in my shoulders that makes it hard to get comfortable and relax. There's the irritating need to visit the bathroom every half hour despite having consumed no liquids since toothbrush-o-clock. Also despite having a heroic daytime capacity to go without a trip to the toilet for hours. Even during roller derby scrimmage hours. But the moment I try to go to sleep, bam, it's constant potty emergency. It's uncanny. It's ridiculous. And of course that's when our neighbors on the other side of the bedroom wall will decide it's time to crank the stereo. Or the mysterious Two O' Clock Overhead Furniture Moving Or Whatever The Hell The Banging Is will commence. (Seriously, I have no idea what it is or where it's coming from. Our upstairs neighbor is an elderly lady whom I just can't see dragging large objects around the house late at night.) Oh, and then the brain weasels will start their little dance. "Hey! Hey! So that dream you had last night, the one you're thinking about now, did you notice that one person in it played a big part in your Worst Memory of 2015? Let's rerun that classic, K? Let's rerun it a lot."

The result is no sleep until two o'clock, three o'clock, or even bat o'clock, whenever the hell that is. I don't know because by then I refuse to look at the clock. Bat o'clock is loud. Those little critters have piercing voices. One of them likes to swoop right in close along the back side of the building. But worse than bat o'clock is bird o'clock. I typically love the sound of birds outside my window, but when I hear them at the first glimmerings of dawn it is the sound of despair. It means there's only some three hours before my alarm clock goes off.

So of course I don't get up when my alarm goes off. I go back to sleep, telling myself it's just a couple more hours. But of course it winds up being eleven, noon, or later before I manage to get up. If it's the only solid sleep I'm going to get, I'd better get it. I'm going to roller derby that evening. I can't afford to coast on fumes. Lack of sleep is bad for sports performance. Poor sports performance, at this level of play, in this sport (on wheels!), can actually mean injury. I do not want to get injured, so when I fail to sleep through the night, I allow myself to sleep right through til noon.

So my usable hours of the day shrink to something like noon until five-thirty, and it's not like writing's the only thing I need to stuff in there. And it's not like I'm going to get any work done after roller derby (blog posts like this one excepted). By then I have no brain remaining to write with and no body remaining to be upright in. So I think, hell with it, I'm going to sleep early. And I go to bed early, yes, but then I stare at the inside of my eyelids for hours. And then I sleep very late the next morning, which does not help get the message across to my body that I want it relaxed and unconscious between the hours of midnight and eight thirty.

Tomorrow, thankfully, I have a night off. No roller derby, no nothing. Theoretically I should be able to afford to drag myself out of bed at eight thirty regardless of how well I sleep tonight. Which is what I intend to do. Just reset the daily sleep cycle. If I only get three hours sleep, well, that should make it easier to get to sleep tomorrow night, right? Just get more exhausted, that'll do it, right?

I'm pretty exhausted right now. Scrimmage was absurdly successful--this whole week of roller derby practice has been fantastic; I feel like I leveled up--but it was the usual amount of hard work with the usual allotment of physical blows (I owe y'all a picture of my arms, they are multicolored) and an unusual amount of brain-melting heat. I should have no trouble getting sleepy, right? Plus I have avoided caffeine since about five this afternoon. I have taken the foam roller to the tense spots in my back. I took a couple Tylenol in hopes of reducing the background level of soreness. I am even drinking chamomile tea. I do not like chamomile tea, but I am drinking it.

Wish me luck.

Well, not necessarily Monday, but definitely on Monday. Monday's when I have time to get dirty deeds done (dirt cheap). For instance, I've been meaning to fix my bike's flat tire for more than a week, and I finally installed the new tube today. That is an exceedingly dirty deed, and woe betide the amateur bike mechanic who doesn't have a bottle of that magical gritty orange soap on hand. I do not. I used dish liquid. It wasn't ideal, but it at least got me to the point where I wasn't ashamed to handle fresh veg at CSA pick-up.

I poked around along Four Mile Creek on my way up to the farm. I think I've found a new crawfishing hole. There's crawfish there for sure--saw 'em with my own eyes and poked at 'em a little with a stick. (Not a lot! Just enough to see 'em raise their little claws all menacingly.) Question is whether there's enough good-sized critters there for me to go home with a pound or two once in a while. More research is required.

Planted some new additions to my crowded container garden. One of my teammates tends plants at her job, and she planted extra to bring to our practice space for a league fund-raiser. Take a plant, leave a couple bucks in the envelope. Thanks to her my garden includes three very healthy tomato plants, a thriving butternut squash, and, just since Sunday, a bit of lettuce and spinach and kale. Those last three I separated (gently) in order to plant some on the back porch where it's sunny and some on the front patio where it's shady and cool. It's an experiment!

I would take a picture only it's dark now. Maybe tomorrow.

Having a functional bike again at last, I took myself out to dinner and then grocery shopping. Couldn't resist picking up a couple more plant starts while at the store. A burly and bushy little pot of thyme so I can put a few sprigs in the greens gumbo I'm planning, and a wispy but hopeful pot of dill that might one day get big enough to flavor my egg salad. (That day is not today, nor is it likely to arrive for several weeks, so I also bought a packet of dill off the fresh herbs racks in the produce section.) Turns out that in addition to being quite stylish, my Boulder County Bombers sleeveless hoodie is also absolutely perfect for transporting small potted herbs by bicycle, one plant safe and snug in each of the side pockets.

In other news, I'm still sifting compost. I finished the first round of sifting a while back, so there's no longer a pile sitting on a tarp on the back porch. But the second round, where I take the results of the first round and sift it through a kitchen colander, that's still going on. Maybe it's about two-thirds done. Last week I took some of the resulting finer compost/soil, microwave-pasteurized it, let it cool, and then used it to repot my mysteriously dying spaths. Jury's still out on whether they'll survive--I'm still pruning yellow leaves off them--but at least they're no longer rootbound nor hurting for nutrients. I suppose the rest of it will get spread around the other household plants. Whatever doesn't go through the colander has been going back into the compost bucket with the fresh kitchen scraps and handfuls of dry leaves.

So that's the state of dirty deeds around here.

I was actually of two minds about posting to the blog today. I wasn't sure I had anything worth reporting in the normal run of things, and then I heard the news out of Orlando and I really felt like there was no point. But in the end I came here and babbled anyway, mainly because I'm supposed to post something every Monday through Friday and I've been pretty bad about that lately and I'd like to get better about it--begin as you mean to go on, sort of thing--but also because aggressively asserting normality is a valid coping mechanism. So this is me aggressively asserting normality.

Tomorrow will be an aggressively normal Tuesday. There will be writing and there will be roller derby. Both of those are aggressive and normal, each to their own degree.

(There may also be a visit to the possible crawfishing hole. Maybe.)

No, I am not going to start calling them "Saturday Fictionettes." For one thing, if I did that, I'd probably wind up posting them no sooner than the following Monday, knowing me. Anyway, here's yesterday's offering, bite-sized and a day late. It's called "Maggie, Queen of Darkness," and it comes with a content note for death-by-fire and suicide. Things got dark in this one, OK? It happens. Although, now that I think of it, it would fit seamlessly into the tradition of superhero origin stories, posthumous (cf. Spawn). But that's a novel waiting to happen. For now all you get is a scene.

Last week I had a valid, if vague, excuse for being late and generally unproductive. This week I got nothing. Bad habits come back quick; good habits take a lot of work. I'm working on it.

Well, possibly there's the fact that this week was more exhausting than most on the roller derby front. I was in four, count 'em, four interleague scrimmages between Tuesday and Thursday, and I was kind of fighting with a deeply bruised hip since Sunday. There is, I'm afraid, no good story behind the deeply bruised hip. I hit a patch of dust on the track, wiped out, and landed hard, instantly raising a thick lump of owie and also causing apparent sciatic nerve panic along the entire length of my left leg. I took myself out of practice and limped the rest of the weekend. I also limped most of Friday since I fell on it several times Thursday evening, thanks to RMRG's fantastic offensive blocking. Also my crappy luck--it didn't seem to matter where or how or in what direction I got hit, I still fell smack on the owie part. It's like owie parts have magnets in them that draw them with great force toward the nearest convenient object of blunt force trauma, i.e. the ground. Owie parts are in cahoots with gravity. I am outnumbered. Unfair.

Now, the bruises like leopard spots covering both upper arms, those probably have good stories. Problem is, I can't remember which one came from which hit, or indeed individual hits at all. Some of the bruises are probably from my teammates' fingers. We hold on tight to each other in our defensive walls.

Thing is, though, I don't like making that my excuse for not getting writing done. Down that path, derby eats writing all up. I am convinced, I insist, I demand that my derby life and my writing life coexist. I mean, yes, I volunteer for an athletic beat-down three nights a week and twice on Sundays, but I'm not the only one, and if some of my league-mates manage all that and some combination of full time employment, school, and child care, you'd think I could pull off a measly 20 hours of writing each week. Especially considering I needn't leave the house nor even the bed to do said writing, right?

Right, so. It's gone midnight and I should be in bed. Tomorrow's my day for double beat-downs and the schedule starts early. Rock on with your bad selves and see you on Monday. (And I mean it this time.)

Happy day! Today is the first day of the 2016 CSA Season at the Diaz Farm. I biked up there and picked up spinach, chard, kale, and my weekly loaf of bread. Bought a dozen eggs, too. Then I biked home and consumed one of the bundles of kale in a huge bowl of udon soup. It went something like this:

1. In about 4 cups water, bring dry udon noodles to a boil. Cook until tender. Then pour out all but about a cup and a half of the water and dissolve bouillon of your choice in what remains. Add a little kimchi juice.
2. While noodles are boiling, cook about a half of an onion and a couple cloves garlic in some oil.
3. When onion and garlic are soft, chop up and add kale as well as the stems of a bok choi.
4. When these are soft, add the rest of the bok choi, a couple green onions, a handful of snap peas, and two links Chinese sausage, all chopped up bite-size.
5. Combine stir-fried vegetables with noodles in broth. Eat with chopsticks and a spoon.

I think I'll have some of the spinach with my breakfast eggs and toast tomorrow.

The tournament over the weekend went well. That is, we didn't win any of our games, but we fought hard, learned a lot, and our team did not suffer any injuries. (The tournament was not, sadly, injury-free; one jammer sustained a dislocated finger, another a concussion, and, unusually, a referee went home with a hairline fracture in her arm.) I played in only one game, the Friday morning bout against Denver. My big embarrassing moment--there's always one--was taking an unnecessary extra lap on my first penalty because I forgot where the penalty box was. But I had more good moments than embarrassing ones.

Despite only skating one bout, I was exhausted by the end of the weekends. Something about spending all the livelong hours of three days straight in a large venue full of people, it wears on a body. I can't even imagine how worn out the skaters on our main roster were, not to mention all the coaches and referees.

It possibly also didn't help things that John and I were super self-indulgent when it came time to read another chapter of Ancillary Justice aloud Saturday night. "More, please," John said after the one chapter was over, and again after the next chapter, and the next... Hell, we finished the book. Then, at home, late Sunday night, we got through fully half of the sequel Ancillary Sword. This was not the smartest thing we've ever done, I have to admit, but it was exceedingly pleasant.

Anyway, it's back to life-as-normal for now, with another regular work-week already in progress. Tomorrow: Lots of writing! All the writing! And also probably a bit of Puzzle Pirates, because there will be time.

OK! All right. I appear to be at a restaurant in the Belmar shopping center. Village. The Belmar metropolis. If anyone says to you, "Oh, it's in Belmar, you can't miss it" (as someone once said to me in reference to the location of a roller derby afterparty) do not be satisfied with this. Ask for more precise directions. Ask for a progressive taxi.

We had Google Maps. It was fine. We are now enjoying garlic mozzarella sticks and the anticipation of cheese pizza and shrimp pasta. We are also enjoying great music and really fast wi-fi, both of which we will not get at our hotel unless we get it ourselves. So current plans are to hang out at the restaurant until it closes, or until our batteries run out, or until our consciences wake up and tell us we really should get to bed, whichever comes first.

Since we want to be at the tournament venue at 7:30 AM tomorrow morning, it'll probably be our consciences that get first say.

In any case, today has been a success. Papa Whiskey got to the captains' meeting on time--early, in fact--and is going to tell the team all about it through the proper channels. I cleaned both my sets of bearings and wheels, and I extracted the yuck from my skate axles. (There was a lot of yuck to extract.) I did all the laundry, including all my derby wear, all of which I packed because, hey, potentially three days of derby. I recorded both of my volunteer reading shows that are due Saturday morning, so there will be no awkwardness about getting those done in a hotel room where people are trying to sleep.

And I posted tomorrow's Friday Fictionette today! If that isn't success, I don't know what is. Success comes with another very long title: "Objectivity and the Art of the Documentary." It is yet another Nine of Pentacles tale: A woman, a house, a bird. Haven't we been here before? The bird is, once again, a magpie. But this magpie isn't stealing anything. Just borrowing.

That announced, I have fulfilled the last of my responsibilities for the night--I mean, aside from things like brushing my teeth and whatnot. Whatnot is not what you're here for. Aside from the whatnot, I'm done, I'm outta here, I commend my soul to the Goddesses of Roller Derby, I'll see you on Monday.

(Oh, hey, my pasta's here!)

So last week was not such a good week, writing-wise. But I think this is an improvement? Sort of? Used to be, if I had one good day, I ended up paying for it by having an emphatically not-good day the next day. Well, the week of the 2nd was a damn good week and I paid for it with a crappy week of the 9th.

This week is firmly in the so-so middle, leaning ever so slightly toward awesome.

Anyway, the greatly belated Friday Fictionette for May 13 went up yesterday, under the greatly elongated title "A Week in the Life of a Simple Houseplant." It's about what the word "botanize" should mean, rather than what it disappointingly does.

(Hey! Hey Brassica! That's one of your tomato babies in the cover art! It's the Sungold cherry! It went into the planter today and enjoyed the sunshine! Yayyyy!)

The Friday Fictionette for May 20 will go up a day early, and not just because I want to make up for all the latenesses. No, it's going up early because Friday the 20th is Day 1 of Besterns, a three-day roller derby tournament in south Denver that the Boulder County Bombers All Stars are participating in. I do not expect any writing to get done that day, and wouldn't even if I were guaranteed to remain in the spectator role. I know this because my very first live contact with roller derby was during NaNoWriMo 2011, and I attempted to get some of my 1667 daily words logged from the stands. It did not work very well at all, except to get me noticed by someone else who also writes and skates derby, and now we are friends on Facebook. Yay!

But as things turn out, our team has been whittled to the bone by circumstance and injury such that all the able-bodied crossovers but two have been rostered for the tournament outright, and the remaining two crossovers (I'm one of them) have been rostered as alternates, both of whom will almost definitely be called upon to skate in at least one of the games. Oh, and the early Friday morning bout will be against Denver Roller Derby's Mile High Club who are ranked 8 in the world. But no pressure. All Stars gonna do what All Stars do. Always proud to be part of that, whether on the track or screaming my head off from the stands.

So tomorrow night, Fleur de Beast and Papa Whiskey (that's me and John) check into some hotel somewhere in the vicinity of the tournament venue. While he's at the coach-and-captain's meeting, I'll put up a blog post here announcing the May 20 fictionette and blathering on about whatever else is on my mind. Then we're going to get a very good night's sleep before turning our lives over to ALL DERBY ALL THE TIME for three days. And then I say hi on Monday to tell y'all how everything went.

And that's the plan.

Let's pretend it's still Friday the 6th. (I'll make it easy by editing the datestamp on this post. No one'll notice a thing.) *ahem* LOOK! It's the first fictionette of May: "The Spindle's Spell." If you guessed it's a riff on Sleeping Beauty, you're right! I've never run across a retelling that concerned itself with what the sleeping princess dreamed during her enchanted sleep. (I've also never heard anyone comment on whether she snored.)

Everything wound up late today mainly because of my knee. My knee has been giving me trouble for no good reason. I mean, yes, we had scrimmage last night, yes, I had some awkward and or dramatic falls. I took a wheel (maybe my own) to the inside right ankle bone, which made a lot of necessary maneuvers painful, which made me a klutz. But I don't recall any single incident involving my right knee.

You'd think there'd have been something, given the way it kept me up all night complaining at me. When I went to bed, it was sore, but just a little, just in this area about the size of my fingertip on the left side of the joint. A few hours after I'd been asleep, it woke me up yelling that it was stiff and in pain and if I dared bend it just wrong it would scream. And then there was just no good position to try to get back to sleep in.

We think it's nothing serious, just a deep bruise. We're keeping an eye on it. Meanwhile, the plans I had made to run some errands by bicycle were scuttled. Seemed safer to just walk and bus. More conducive to putting the knee through its regular paces under very close observation. But this in turn meant more time walking in the hot sun, which meant I was even more tired when I was done, which meant very long afternoon nap. Good news is, the knee was not noticeably worse after the nap. And it was already noticeably better for walking the stiffness out of it. So that's OK.

So the knee problem led to the walking/bussing rather than biking, and both of them led to an unfortunate encounter at the bus stop. Dude walks up, wheeling his bike, and proceeds to be that aggressively friendly asshole who treats everyone in his vicinity as owing him their attention on demand. He started with the man sitting to my left, grilling him about his shirt and whether it was "tribal" and whether he belonged to a tribe. I think the man said "yes" just to shut him up. Then, upon noticing me massaging my knee, "Hey, hey, is your knee OK? You gonna be OK? I can show you some pressure points that'll help it, it's like acupressure or acupuncture, let me show you--"

"I didn't ask," I tried to shut him up with.

It's never that easy. "Hey, I wasn't suggesting anything sexual, I wasn't going to touch you, I wasn't even flirting, I just want to show you something that will help you, I wouldn't have to touch you to do that, I could just show you on my knee--"

"I want you to leave me completely alone," was my second and final try.

"Ooh, are you going to mace me? Come on, do it! Mace me!"

And so forth while I stared fixedly down the street and away from him. By now I was unfortunately alone with him at the bus stop. I had planned to spend my bus-waiting time on my laptop or darning socks, but at this point I didn't want to give him anything else to comment on. So I just sat there and stared at the approaching traffic and tried to tune dude out. This, by the way, is why we can't have nice things.

Eventually he stopped haranguing me directly and started making up a song on the spot. "I just wanna be friends," he crooned. And then, inexplicably, "Oh, speaking of sabotage, thanks for reminding me--" Sabotage? What?

Anyway, he got on his phone and--it's not like I try to overhear these things, but dude was loud--got into negotiations with someone about a package he's expecting that's addressed in his name but to a place where he no longer works (I wonder why, she said sarcastically). It was a long call, and he was still on the phone when the BOLT showed up and he boarded...

...without his bike.

He just left his bike there, leaning against the side of the bus shelter, not locked up or anything. I think he meant to take it with him on the bus, but between his phone call and his NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO WITHHOLD ATTENTION FROM MEEEEE harassment campaign, he just... forgot it.

I could not make this up. I mean, I could, but the first manuscript critique it got would suggest that the instant karma aspect was just a little too pat, you know? A little too smug. Dude harasses woman who just wants to be left alone; dude loses his bike. This Story Has a Moral! Don't Miss the Moral of the Story!

I do still kinda want to come up with an explanation for "sabotage." There might be some fiction fodder there. I mean, what the heck was in that package he was expecting?

All right, already. It's up. Finally. The Friday Fictionette for April 22 is up. It's called "The Queen of Carnival," and it's about a Faerie abductee who, having fought her way back to New Orleans, then has to fight a battle of a different sort for the right to call it her home again.

I'll be playing Friday Fictionette catch-up all week, thanks to the previous couple weeks' absolute failure to stay on top of things. You can expect the Fictonette Freebie for April to be released tomorrow, I think, and then I'll be working on the Fictionette Artifacts for my $5/month Patrons over the rest of the week. Meanwhile I'm already dreading working on the fictionette for May 6 because it is so very vaguely formed at the present time. Well, that's why I get a week to work on it, right? While I work on this other stuff.

In case you are wondering, the tournament in Eagle went splendidly. We lost our first bout against 10th Mountain, which we knew was probable, but we lost it by a lot less than we might have. We made up a lot of points in the second half and finished strong. We went on to win our second bout against Durango, which it turns out we were predicted to have only a 5% chance of doing, so, hooray! I think we're all a little disappointed by the way we lost so much of our lead, but, despite a penalty-plagued ten minutes or so in the second half, we held onto that lead after all.

I have so many bruises on my right side. I'm proud of every one of them. I played in the A position, which is to say, right up against the inside line, and a lot of jammers engaged our wall by slamming straight into my right hip and shoulder. I'm proud to say those initial hits didn't knock me down once. Oh, later in the jam I got knocked down plenty, but never from that first impact, even when I was blocking fully side-on. I'm really pleased about that; it's something I've been working on for a while.

My next bout will be on May 28th here in Boulder County. If you're local and interested, I suggest you clear your calendar for the day. It's gonna be awesome.

Argh! Argh, argh, argh. It's not like I've never been late with Friday Fictionettes before, but I try to at least get them all out in the right month. But the very belated April 22 edition will not be out tonight, and probably won't be out tomorrow.

I am at this moment in a hotel in Eagle, Colorado, preparing for tomorrow's roller derby tournament. It's 10:07 PM. Skater check-in is at 10:00 AM. I am told that getting plenty of rest between now and then is desirable. Thus, not staying up all night. Sorry-not-sorry? It is possible that I might surprise myself and get the fictionette up tomorrow morning before we head over to the tournament venue. Possible. Not terribly probable. If it happens, I'll crow all about it right here. Just... don't hold your breath.

I have no excuse. I was not very good with time management this month, and especially these last two weeks.

Let me at least tell you about the previous fictionette, the one for April 15, which was late but did in fact go up. It's called "The Day the Storefront Let Jen Bledsoe In," and it's about the new norms in business partnership after an event the characters refer to as The Great Awakening. Of the buildings, that is. It's the buildings that woke up. Which means that opening a retail storefront takes a bit more cooperation than some might be used to. Some people adapted to this change more quickly than others, of course.

I'll probably write more fiction in this setting. Not sure whether it'll be related fictionettes to release on Patreon or full-fledged stories to send out for publication, but it'll be something. This one was just too much fun to write.

The current one? The one I'm continuing to be late with? It ought to be fun. I mean, it's not not fun--writing is fun. But some stories come more effortlessly than others. This one would be one of the others.

Anyway, more later. I can say that much for sure. Just don't ask me how much later. As little later as I can humanly manage, OK? Because the first fictionette for May will need to happen too.