author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hello! This blog post is coming from you live and entire from the new new Asus, the celebrated X544, which I have named Phenix-Segundus. The old new Asus, the X540, never got a name while I had it, but I'm retroactively calling it Phenix-Primus. I am considering them to be two incarnations of the same firebird which has lifted the whole of my computing life out of the impending ashes of the old old Asus. That one hasn't died yet, thankfully, but every day it sounds like it's gonna. It's that fan, or maybe its hard drive: clack-a-clack-a-clack-a-whirrrrrrrrrr-thunk!-tickticktickticktick....

Also completed on Phenix-Segundus: A brand new Friday Fictionette! On time? Hoo-howdy, that thing was early. As in out before dark! (Its mama told it always to be home before the streetlights came on.) Right so, it's called "All Dolled Up," and it's about blind dates with no expectations, a fine friendship cemented in espresso and alcohol, and a sleazy pick-up artist with a... well. That would be telling. It ain't playing fair, is what it is. (Subscriber links ahoy: ebook, audiobook.)

In other Fictionette-related news, it turns out that outdated sectional aeronautical charts make very attractive stationery.

So this week I achieved a great accomplishment! I bought new jeans. Not only that, I bought 'em without waiting for the old ones to start to shred. The old ones, which more or less fit me when I bought them, are now falling off my hips. I freakin' lost weight, y'all. Like, fifteen pounds since February. Don't congratulate me--I wasn't trying to lose weight, and I'm honestly not sure it's a good thing. I've been about the same weight most of my post-college life, OK, and that includes the years spent playing roller derby other than this one. It wasn't going up, it wasn't going down--near twenty years of the same weight, you start to figure, OK, that's just me. A change that big and that sudden prompts a bit of an identity crisis.

It might have something to do with going on medication to control my blood pressure, although my blood pressure was fine until late 2014 or so. More likely, I guess, it had to do with six months of practicing with not one but two travel teams under coaches who bring serious strength conditioning and cardio to each table. Look at it that way, it kind makes sense. Does that mean I'll put the pounds back on again now that I'm only practicing with one team? Maybe that would be a good thing? I feel like, when I'm on the track, I need all the mass I can bring to bear, you know?

The BMI, of course, has an opinion about this. But the BMI can go dunk its head in the nearest lake for all I care. The BMI is not the boss of me.

Main thing is, I bought new jeans, and they fit. Huzzah! That, at least, is inarguably a good thing.

Ah-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! And other varieties of triumphant laughter. The Friday Fictionette for September 2 is out, published, posted, uploaded, on Friday, September 2! The month is off to a great start. Also, turns out I can do the whole thing, from "Which freewriting session was going to be the basis for this week's Fictionette again?" to "DONE! Mwahahahahaaaa!" in a single day, so there. It would not be a day in which I got much of anything else done, writing-wise, but it's clearly possible.

Anyway, it's "By Moonlight, a Dream of Vengeance," which started out farcical but wound up sort of tragic and sweet. And, um, it kinda made me cry while narrating the audiobook edition. I cry easily at fiction in general, so it's not that much of a surprise and certainly not a brag. When it's my own stuff, I generally take it as a sign that I'm done, this is the final draft, stop messing with it and let it go out into the world. When it's someone else's stuff and I'm reading aloud to John, I don't worry about it; he understands this sort of thing. But when I'm trying to record an audiobook, it's a nuisance. I am sure that somewhere out there, as part of a larger guide to recording audiobooks, someone has written tips on how to reclaim control of your voice when that happens. (Without Googling, I'm almost willing to bet real money that if this exists, it's written by Mary Robinette Kowal. OK, maybe not as part of that linked guide, but I just about bet she's written something about it somewhere.)

Best I can figure: Hit PAUSE, take a few deep breaths into the diaphragm, take a few deep but narrow breaths that you can feel going up and down the windpipe, then take one more deep diaphragm breath, UNPAUSE, and, as you read the next sentence on the exhale of that breath, gently tighten your core. Also, be willing to take your time. If you have to say the sentence over and over until it has no meaning for you anymore and thus stops triggering the crying process, that's fine too.

OK, enough about that. I've also released the Fictionette Freebie for August 2016. As has become habit lately, I settled on the one with the largest word count. It's "Dr. Green Ascends to the Nether World," which may be freely and fully accessed by all in audio, ebook, and HTML formats. I hope you enjoy it!

All right! Here is last Friday's fictionette, the one for August 26: "How the Drought Was Ended" (...and at what price). There's a touch of political satire in there, if you're looking for it. It's not a big thing. It was just, given the premise, how could I resist a little poke? Anyway, you can read the teaser excerpt via the link above (here it is again!). For subscribers, there is the ebook (pdf and epub) and the audio (mp3). The latter is useful if you want to know how I pronounce the name of the Royal Hero. (You, of course, may pronounce it any way you like.)

I suspect I'll wait until Friday to release the Fictionette Freebie for August 2016. Yes, that means waiting until September 2, but it also means I can roll that announcement out with that of the first Friday Fictionette of September. Presuming I upload the thing on time. I darn well intend to. I am tired of this always-being-late nonsense!

In the meantime, I get to breathe a little. I am officially off from All Stars practice until September 20th. It's nice to have a few weeks during which I'm not working my butt off three nights a week. And, weird though it is to see my arms utterly bare of bruises, it's very nice to have a few weeks during which I'm not getting voluntarily beat up for the love of roller derby--this, in fact, is the stated purpose of having a month off; we're supposed to take this time to heal. But I miss being on skates!

Today I did a little something about that, going for a bit of an evening trail skate with my good friend and ex-next-door-neighbor Seven of Grind. (Not ex-neighbor. A five-minute walk means we remain neighbors. But before we moved, it was a 5-second walk barefoot and, if necessary, in a bathrobe.) I think we were on skates for the better part of an hour, and there were uphills and downhills and bumpy bits to toe-stop-walk over. A bit more agility and cardio than going to the Wagon Wheel would have required (we were planning on going, but not enough people RSVP'd to justify holding the adult skate session this time around), but also a bit less endurance over time, so it evens out.

Then there was yummy food and tasty beverages at the Rayback Collective, Boulder's newest... well, I don't know what to call it. Food truck park and microbrew oasis? Community space? Permanent street party? It's very Boulder, is what it is. I've had a good time hanging out there in the past for some quality playtime on my laptop. Its location right on Elmer's Two Mile Creek Greenway makes it a great place to meet friends, gear up, and start skating, which is essentially what we did.

I could see myself doing this, or something like this, once a week during my "roller derby vacation." Possibly more. Taking the time to heal is good, but there's no call to let the skating muscles get entirely out of condition.

Oh! Almost forgot: Attached please find the weekly Still Life With CSA Vegetables photo. It features:

• The weekly loaf of sourdough bread,
• garlic,
• tomatoes (including a Green Zebra - yes, it's ripe),
• collard greens,
• kale,
• radishes,
• and a bag of young salad greens.

Here is what I've been doing with the collard greens: I have been shredding some four or so leaves into a mixture of grated potato, grated turnip, and minced garlic, all bound up with a couple beaten eggs and seasoned with garlic salt and both black and red pepper, the resulting hash/fritter/omelet/pancake fried in canola oil until thoroughly cooked and crispy on both sides. Spread apple sauce on top, and breakfast is a time of great joy.

Ta-da!

So here's last week's Friday Fictionette, "Making Friends," which could as well be called "Baking Friends" without really spoiling anything. It's about a lonely little girl who knows just how fortunate she is and is always glad to help her benefactor to whom she is very grateful. It's also about witchcraft, because what would a Fictionette be without that speculative element?

It's a week late, and this week's will be a few days late, because I have been unexpectedly slow at getting back to any sort of regular working routine since playoffs. Your patience is, as always, appreciated. My hope, however, is that September will run like clockwork. With playoffs behind us, my roller derby team is now officially in our off-season, and we're taking a little time off to rest and recuperate. I won't be entirely off the hook for league stuff, but I won't be practicing 9 hours a week either. I'm going to try to put that time toward getting the writing work day back on track.

("Was it ever on track in the first place?" "Hush.")

Speaking of playoffs, I intend to post a big round-up of archived game footage, photo albums by various derby photographers, and text coverage of each of the games we played at D2 Wichita. I've been meaning to do that all week, but, well, see above. I still mean to do that, despite that we are now a full day into D2 Lansing. Late or not, it'll be useful to have a repository of links that isn't a bunch of open Facebook tabs I've got to preserve in my browser forever. (Facebook kind of sucks for searching for things. It's great at searching for people, but if there's a particular two-week-old post you're trying to find, forget it.)

Stay tuned through the weekend for updates on both the Fictionette and roller derby situations.

OK, so, I'm not sending "Late Registration" anywhere tonight. It needs more than a quick once-over in order for me to feel happy with it out there bearing my by-line. But! I did finally post the Friday Ficitonette for August 12. Revel in it! It's called "Dr. Green Ascends to the Nether World" and that is not a typo. It's about BEING A SCIENTIST even when that means breaking through barbed wire fences and climbing sheer cliffsides to FIGURE SHIT OUT.

Here's the thing I never count on when I say "I'll be able to get so much done Saturday afternoon!" Getting sick. It starts with post nasal drip and that itchy, raw spot high up at the back of the throat, and next think I know I'm in bed, sniffling and miserable, and then I'm in the bathroom pawing through the medicine supplies and saying things like "I don't care if the doctor says it'll raise my blood pressure--pseudoephedrine is necessary for me to function. What do you mean I only have five more of the 4-hour tablets left? And how did we wind up with an odd number? We better not have dropped one on the floor. This stuff is gold." Sudafed is a modern day miracle. It makes the difference between 1. flat in bed wishing for unconsciousness, and 2. upright at the desk getting things done.

But the things I get done are still only getting done slowly. And not with a heck of a lot of concentration. So after I got the Fictionette up today--which took most of the day because I couldn't wrangle enough concentration to work straight through it (and also because I took a brief walk to the drug store to get more pseudoephedrine, the 12-hour kind this time)--I kept getting distracted by stuff rather than moving on to the short story. Besides, I really doubt I'd have any better chance of getting it ready had I started at 6 PM as opposed to 10 PM.

My initial thought was, "It's an anthology that pays only token rates. I can send it something from the college file. I mean, I'll need to polish off the obvious infelicities and maybe update some references, give the main character a cell phone, that kind of thing..." Then I settled down to work on it, and I had a second thought. "I don't care how little the market pays. It's going to have my name on it! It had better be perfect." And, well, maybe perfect is the wrong word, but... I have standards. And it was going to take more than just a handful of hours to bring this old story up to those standards.

On the other hand, hearing about the anthology did get me to dig this story up and reread it. And, having read it, I've decided I really do want to rehabilitate it and get it into the submissions cycle. It's a good little story. It's got characters I'd like to reacquaint myself with. I mean, hell, back in the day I had the idea of doing a series of related stories starring these characters. It's good to be reminded of these old goals that once fell by the wayside. I can pick them back up, brush the dust off, and breathe a little life back into them.

So even though I didn't end up submitting to the anthology I had in mind, a great deal of good came out of considering submitting to it. Neat.

Two big good things accomplished today: Finished preparing the June and July Fictionette Artifacts for mailing out to my very patient $5/month Patrons and submitted "It's for You" to the next pro-paying market I would like to introduce it to. As I get slowly caught up on All The Things, I'm beginning once more to feel like I can manage to continue pursuing a career in commercial fiction and running a four-times-monthly self-publishing gig simultaneously.

Tomorrow's task in short fiction: Review, and probably revise, an old, old short story of mine (circa 1995) and see if it's appropriate to submit to an anthology I just now today heard about. This temporarily displaces a couple other short fiction tasks because the anthology has a submission deadline of Aug 15.

I might have got even more done today had I not slept in. Last night's practice was exceedingly effortful. (Also exceedingly bruising, but nothing new there. It makes me weirdly happy to look in the mirror and see bruises polka-dotting my shoulders and upper arms. Like ink-stains on my fingers after doing my Morning Pages with a fountain pen, it's proof that I Showed Up.) Last night's sleep was also exceedingly interrupted--like, four visits to the bathroom, something ridiculous like that. And I woke from it with that stuffy almost-headache that I used to get constantly before I went on blood pressure medication, probably because I forgot to take my blood pressure medication last night. Gah. Stop reminding me that I'm getting older, body!

As usually happens when I sleep in, I had vivid dreams. My remembered dreams have possibly been extra vivid and also more numerous due to rereading Jeremy Taylor's book Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill. I have a sizable library of books about dreaming, lucid dreaming, and astral projection. Rereading them tends to have an immediate effect on my dream recall. I value my dream diaries; they go back to my elementary school days and have been the inspiration for a lot of my fiction.

What was unusual was that I continued the same dream from where it had left off each time I went back to sleep. I honestly can't remember ever managing to do that before. Gods alone know why I would want to; it was a terribly frustrating and anxious dream about scrambling to get my things packed up to check out of a hotel room on time. Well, late. In the dream, it was already something like two hours past check-out time when I realized I had a hotel room to check out of, and my car was at the wrong end of the hotel, and the hotel was long and winding and rambly like a monster shopping mall, and as I packed up things I kept finding more things that needed packing up (hiding not only in drawers and stacked on tables but also under the covers of an impeccably made bed) that I couldn't believe actually all fit in my luggage in the first place. And as I frantically grabbed things and stuffed them into containers, two housekeeping staff members stood patiently watching me, waiting to clean up the room when I was done. One was a small woman with a cheerful demeanor who kept telling me "It's OK, no pressure." The other was a tall, solidly-built man who loomed over the proceedings, clearly there in the role of Unspoken Muscular Threat.

I don't think I was actually trying to get back into the dream each time I hit SNOOZE. I think I was just trying to cement it in memory, because I wasn't ready to get up and write it down. But every time I went back to sleep, there I was again, wondering how all these snack items ever fit into one snack bag, or why I thought I'd manage to work on all of these many quilting, needlework, and knitting projects over an 8-hour drive and weekend stay.

I think the dream had us in Wichita, but I don't think it was WFTDA D2 anxiety so much as other anxieties using the next trip I have planned as their setting. This is actually a recurring subset of a recurring category of anxiety nightmare--I had almost exactly the same dream last month, only in that dream, I raced back to my hotel room only to discover it empty because a member of the hotel's maintenance staff had a policy of confiscating anything left in the room after check-out time.

Since I just this week moved all my data back over to an aging laptop with a noisy sub-performing fan, my immediate interpretation is that I'm anxious about getting all my data backed up NOW before it gets "confiscated" at "check-out time," i.e. before the old Asus tanks and takes my files with it. I've already burned the most immediately necessary writing projects to R/W DVD, along with my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles, but it feels like a drop in the bucket. Another option that occurs to me is the lifelong anxiety about needing to get all the stories in my head written and published NOW NOW NOW because you never know when you're gonna DIE. This is a thought that regularly inspires me to close my eyes, cover my ears, and sing LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

The nice thing about both those anxieties is, there's positive action I can take to ease them. I can't get everything done in a day, but I can do a little bit to address each issue daily. I can, say, finally activate my Dropbox account tomorrow, archive the next chunk of data to disk, and, as mentioned above, get the next story ready to submit for publication.

If there is a moral to this story, that's about it: Don't panic because you can't get everything done at once. Just try to do a little every day. Not very deep, I grant you, not exactly innovative, but it's surprising how practical a cliche can be. (I guess there's a reason they're cliches.)

Another Tuesday, another pile of gorgeous edibles coming home with me from the farm. We have cucumber, zucchini, garlic, kohlrabi, rainbow chard, rainbow carrots, mixed salad greens, and bread. I'm thinking tomorrow I'm finally going to try the kohlrabi carrot fritters recipe I came across the other day.

Heavy duty cooking was out of the question today. Today I had to use my lunch break to package the Asus X540 and bring it to FedEx for shipping. That was fun. And by "fun," I mean unnecessarily worrying. I was filling out the checklist, writing up a description of the problem, and I thought, "Hey, let's just double-check that it's still happening." AND IT WASN'T. I had the laptop unplugged and sitting next to the box I was going to put it in, and just for fun I pressed the power button, AND THE DAMN THING STARTED RIGHT UP. Stayed on, too, until I shut it down some forty-five minutes later. Didn't matter what I did--opened and closed the lid, picked it up and swung it around, tilted it this end up or that end up, carried it around the house--the dratted thing acted like it had never had a battery problem in its life. Like it had never refused to turn on while I was at lunch with no AC power. Like it had never crashed and died upon my unplugging it for travel, then cheerfully reported a 98% charge when I next plugged it in and turned it on.

I wrote up an addendum. "Problem is sporadic. Please investigate battery stability regardless of whether problem replicates." Also, "Problem may be with battery incorrectly reporting a full charge. After notebook had been plugged in for several days, I was unable to recreate the problem."

Then I biked the package to FedEx and sent it on its way. Then I spent an hour or so illustrating Fictionette Artifacts over pho and spring rolls. Almost done, y'all!

I still haven't submitted the story I've been meaning to submit, which feels kind of stupid. I should do it tonight, except I'm a little worried about my ability to assemble a respectable submission in Standard Manuscript Format with post-derby brain. Maybe I should just keep typing up and illustrating that last Artifact. Only, again, there's the post-derby brain problem. Typos! And there's only so much you can do with correction ribbon, especially when you've been back and forth over that ribbon about four times. (I really should order a new typewriter ribbon.)

Things are mostly on track. It hasn't exactly been the Tuesday I was planning on, but, y'know, close enough for horseshoes and rock 'n roll.

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.)

This is a story about perfectionism, and how it is the enemy of all that is good and healthy in a writer's life. Well, this writer here anyway.

BUT FIRST! Attached please find a picture of the prophesied TYPEWRITER FRENZY. See? See how close the June and July Fictionette Artifacts are to being ready to mail? SO CLOSE.

*ahem* Yes. Right. Perfectionism. This is a story about perfectionism. Also about hardware failure under warranty.

See, my brand new Asus laptop--well, brand new as of April--it developed a problem. At first it was just a couple of times that the computer shut down when I knew I'd told it to hibernate. Then it was the computer failing to turn on the first time I pushed the button. Then it was the computer utterly dying when I unplugged it from AC power, and refusing to turn on at all until I plugged it in again.

The battery is, for some reason, not powering the system. Its icon indicates it's at a near-full charge, but the computer won't pull power from it at all. Alas. Remember me griping about spending a week just moving all my files from the old Asus to the new? Guess what I've got to do now before I ship the machine back for warranty service?

*Sigh.*

So I went to Goodfellas in Longmont for a working lunch after my chiro appointment, but alas, they could not seat me near a plug. So no work got done during lunch. Instead, I pulled out The Artist's Way and read the next chapter I was due to work on.

I have been doing a very slow and thorough reread of The Artist's Way. Instead of doing one chapter a week, as the book is designed, I'm sticking with each chapter for however long it takes me to do all of its exercises.

The chapter I was moving on to was Chapter 7: "Recovering a Sense of Connection." In it, Julia Cameron addresses the problem of perfectionism. She writes, "Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right... Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead." This is very wise and also relevant to my interests because last night, regardless of my DETERMINATION, I failed to log a perfect day in Habitica.

It hurt, y'all. It hurt and it was embarrassing. "Let's see how far into August I can keep this perfect day streak going!" Two days. That's how far. Two days. Defeated before I'd hardly begun! But no matter how determined I was not to lose, no matter how much I bragged in yesterday's blog post that I CAN DO THIS, my brain had devolved into mush and I could do nothing further with it.

This is where the topic of perfectionism comes in. Perfectionism says, "Ha, you failed your goal three days into the month. You're done! Loser." As though the rest of August didn't matter. As though I might as well not try to get my work done faithfully for the rest of the month because I had already failed to be perfect for the whole month.

This is actually a problem I had when I began using Habitica, then called HabitRPG. Every time I failed to complete any one of my dailies, the self-destructive voice in my brain said, "Well, you failed to get a perfect day again. Game over." And I'd find it hard to push myself to complete the rest of the dailies. Not going to be able to log five hours writing? Guess there's no point in posting to the blog, brushing my teeth, or checking my email. Sounds stupid, I know, but the self-destructive voice can be very convincing.

So of course now it's trying to convince me that I might as well consider August a failure and a loss.

Here is what I'm telling it: Game over, indeed. You know what that means? Start a new game! The object of the new game is, How many "perfect days" can I log in August, total?

Answer: At least three! Because by the time I'm done with this blog post, I do believe I'll have logged five hours of writing today. And that's despite having started the tedious and time-consuming procedure of invoking my warranty with Asus and prepping the new laptop for shipping.

Let's see if I can log a fourth tomorrow.

At last! The Friday Fictionette for July 22 is up. It's a cheerful little vignette by the name of "Survivor's Guilt." (That "cheerful" bit was me being sarcastic.) The cover art features, among other things, my very first use of GIMP's Perspective tool so that I could make the fictionette's title look like it was printed on the side of the bus. I was very excited about that.

I have also released the Fictionette Freebie for July 2016. I decided to go with "The Revolution of the Flies" because it really was cheerful, or at least cheerfully satirical. It was as close to upbeat as I got this month, OK? I don't know why it happens. It just happens. Anyway, the whole world is now free to download it as an ebook or audiobook. Go on, give it a try, see what you think.

It's going to be another late night. It was another long day. There was chiro and there was driving John to the airport and there was the usual Wednesday volunteer reading and there was a surprise adventure involving locking my keys in the car and having to beg access to a neighbor's patio to get into my house and then try to remember where the heck I put the extra car key which I haven't seen since we moved. (I found it. It was in the nightstand drawer. Everything's fine.) And there was skating with friends at the rink. Not derby. Just skating. I don't get to do that very often. I knew it would imperil what was left of my working day, but I chose to do it anyway. Sometimes you just gotta have fun, right?

Now I am home. I'm tired. BUT I AM DETERMINED and we know how that goes. It goes... surprisingly well, actually. Last night I successfully logged my requisite five hours of writing and only had to stay up an hour later than usual to do it. So it can be done.

Tomorrow there shall be a flurry of typewriter action! Stay tuned.