author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

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

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

Here is how Tuesday is supposed to go:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, so, last week's Fictionette is live! Yayyyyy. It is called "The Revolution of the Flies." It bears a certain similarity to Rush's "The Trees," which was not at first intentional but which I came to embrace by the end.

Below the Friday Fictionette cover, you may also notice pictures of pretty sunflowers! The very spindly one and its buddies (not pictured here) sprouted from seeds I pulled out of a bag of wild bird food. The big burly one that isn't blooming yet is out near a bus stop I use to get to Longmont for my Cafe of Life appointments. I wanted to put them side-by-side for comparison. Hopefully I'll get to see the big burly one bloom. It's going to be amazing.

There's a story that goes along with that sunflower photo. That story is called "Men Act Entitled To My Attention And/Or Gratitude On Public Transportation, Chapter 3,852." (You may recall the previous chapter in this series? OK good.)

So I took that photo today while I was waiting for the pedestrian light to change in my favor. It's a long light, so I had plenty of time for sightseeing. What I want you to know is, I was standing there with my bike for quite some time before I crossed the street and settled down at the bus stop.

At the bus stop there was a man, also with bike. He was listening to music over some speakers he had tucked away somewhere about his person. I was happy to leave him to it. I wasn't feeling social. My plans did not include social interaction. I was going to knit until the bus came, and then I was going get on the bus, open up my laptop, and write until we got to my stop in Longmont.

However, Dude is feeling social. And what he says to me is, "You took a picture of that weed, huh?"

Men? People presenting as male who happen to read this blog? I want you to know, if you don't already know, how that is likely to come across to a woman traveling by herself on public transportation. He may well have meant to communicate that he had taken an friendly interest in me and would welcome a conversation. Well and good, but I didn't want him taking an interest in me, I didn't want any conversation, and what I heard was, "I've been watching you for the last five minutes or more. Just so's you know."

Now, even if his first overture had not been so creepy, I still would not have welcomed conversation. I wanted to be left alone. But I really didn't want anything to do with this guy now. "That's my business, not yours," is what I said.

Rude? Maybe. But here's the thing: No one is obliged to give you their time or attention just because you talked to them. Anyone may refuse the invitation to interact. And if you're a guy approaching a gal before getting on the same bus as her, you gotta realize--she cannot physically get away from you without upsetting her travel plans. She has no escape other than the one you grant her by accepting rejection gracefully.

Turn it around; imagine if you were obliged to engage in conversation with every single person who, at no cost to themselves, decided to aim words at you. Sounds exhausting, doesn't it? At this point I invite you to Google the term "emotional labor." Or better yet, "men act entitled to women's emotional labor."

Men like to act as if commanding women’s attention is their birthright, their natural due, and they are rarely contradicted. It’s a radical act to refuse them that attention.

In any case, I've learned that "rude" is a lot more effective at getting guys to leave me alone on public transit than is contriving to make my "no" sound acceptably polite. Or, Gods forfend, than a lack of "no" at all. You know. The polite but non-inviting response? "Yes. I was." (silence) In my experience, guys who are invested in gaining women's attention will read an invitation into any attention, no matter how negative. I mean, they're after attention. If you give them any, they win. And those kinds of guys tend to define "rude" as "a woman saying no to me in a way I can't pretend to ignore."

Since my very desire to be left alone reads as "rude" to Some Dudes, I have learned to stop worrying about politeness in these situations.

Anyway, he didn't get violent, thank goodness. I have been lucky; I have not yet encountered men who get violent when women tell them no. I damn well know women who have. And I know of some women who have, and who aren't around to tell you the story anymore except by being a statistic. "Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them." This is not exaggeration. This is our world. I have been exceptionally lucky.

No, he just got petulant. "I'm just trying to be nice and have a conversation," he said. "Some people are nice in this world."

That sound you just heard? That was me running all out of fucks to give.

"I was just trying to be nice," said with that resentful tone of voice, is always a lie. No one who says that is trying to be nice. They're trying to oblige the unwilling recipient of their so-called attempt at niceness to render them tribute in the form of affirmation, gratitude, and attention. They're trying to get rewarded for Making a Grand Gesture of Niceness. What they're not doing is concerning themselves with whether their "niceness" is needed or wanted, or even experienced as pleasant.

This is much like the pissy retort, "I was just trying to help!" in response to the helpee informing the "helper" that their attempts to help aren't helping. Doesn't matter if the helpee is polite enough for tea with the Queen; the very fact that they aren't rendering the "helper" sufficient gratitude is enough to condemn them in the "helper's" eyes. "Helper" in scare-quotes, again, because such people aren't concerned with whether their target is actually helped.

Anyway, he got one more dig in when we boarded the bus, about how he didn't want to deal with "aggressive people." Funny how we can define "aggressive" in such different ways. I consider it "aggressive" to refuse to respect someone else's wish not to engage. But whatever. He didn't say boo to me the rest of the trip, and I for one appreciate it. (There's the gratitude you were looking for, Dude.)

So those of you reading this who want to do better, here's your takeaway for the evening.

• Don't be creepy. Telling me you've been monitoring my behavior is creepy.
• Having a conversation, like having sex, requires consent from both parties. Respect my "no."
• When there's no physical "out" available, respecting my "no" becomes even more important.
• "Nice," like "help," is in the eye of the recipient.
• You aren't entitled to anyone else's time, attention, or gratitude, unless you're paying them for it. And sometimes not even then.

So that's my story. Guaranteed there will be others as I continue being a woman in public.

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

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

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

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

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

Efficiency strikes again, and not lateness at all! In fact, the Friday Fictionette for July 8 went up on time from a charging station in Denver International Airport. It's just that I'm only blogging about it today. And I only just uploaded the excerpt today. And I only just now released the Fictionette Freebie for June today--that certainly counts as late. I'll cop to that.

Anyway, the Friday Fictionette for July 8, 2016, is "Singing in the Shower," which starts out being exceedingly wasteful of water and winds up being somewhat wasteful of roommates. But isn't that a pretty picture of a dragonfly on a rock in Wonderland Creek? (For the subscribers: ebook here, in PDF and epub formats; audiobook over there in good ol' MP3.)

The Fictionette Freebie for the month of June 2016 is "Happy Birthday, Dear Bob." At 1509 words, it's the longest fictionette I've turned out in a while, so considered as cents per word it's a pretty good deal. In any case, it's a cost-free way to see if my idea of "grimly humorous quasi-horror" is compatible with your idea of "a good read." (Again, PDF and epub here, MP3 audiobook there.)

And the YPP weekend blockade schedule for the weekend of July 9-10 is right here in front of your nose, and you should scroll down (or click here) for all the details. There aren't all that many of them. If more get posted at the last minute, I'll try to give you an update.

Also, the Seal o' Piracy requirements for July 2016 is to complete 12 parlor game sessions.

And the Christmas in July Grand Frig Pilly for 2016 was super fun, though I didn't get to be in it for quite as long as I'd like. I won a prize! It was a wooden coffin. You may think that underwhelming, but remember, you can only get them in Black Boxes at a probability of 1.2%. Actually, less than that; 1.2% is your chance of getting a piece of vampiric furniture, and there are four pieces of vampiric furniture possible. Also they have twelve different positioning options, which is kind of cool. Nensieuisge put it in her back yard with the lid off. So hooray and thank you, Pegasiswolf!

Standard reminders: Schedule is given in Pirate Time, or U.S. Pacific. Player flags link to Yoweb information pages; Brigand King Flags link to Yppedia Brigand King pages. BK amassed power given in parenthetical numbers, like so: (14). For more info about jobbing contacts, jobber pay, and Event Blockade battle board configuration, check the Blockade tab of your ocean's Notice Board. To get hired, apply under the Voyages tab.

Doubloon Ocean Blockades

*** Saturday, July 9 ***

11:56 a.m. - Marlowe Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Coming In Hot
Attacker: Fleet of his Imperial Scaled Highness (2)

11:56 a.m. - Gallows Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Burn Them Down
Attacker: Fleet of his Imperial Scaled Highness (2)

12:11 p.m. - Duat Island, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Black Veil (3)
Attacker: The Good Cheese Company

5:24 p.m. - Ventress Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Black Veil (2)
Attacker: Black Flag

Hi, y'all. It's stupid-o-clock in the morning and I have to be out of here by 9:30 am, so here we go: The Friday Fictionette for July 1 is "Partners in Crime," which is sort of like Romeo and Juliet except it's more like Romeo and Horatio and it's not a love story. Well, you can read a love story into it if you like. I'm agnostic as to whether there's romance involved. I haven't written about it. Doesn't mean it's not there. But by goshawks and grackles, there's damn well magic involved.

Those of you who are Patrons at the $1/month level and up will notice a difference this time around: The ebook post is now available for download in PDF and .epub formats. I know that many people prefer not to read ebooks as PDFs, and they've got darn good reasons for it. So here you go. I need to go back and clean up the fonts, because Scrivener goes a little overboard with its CSS when you export as-is, and before I can add a .mobi version to the mix I need to figure out why my attempts to convert result in Kindle Previewer losing chunks of text at its soft page breaks, but this is what you get for now.

I think it's pretty snazzy. It has, however, kept me up later than anticipated. (Why? Why won't you stop adding like three blank pages after the cover art? I swear I have removed all the page-break-after crap, where are you getting this from? Is this a calibre thing? Do I need to look at it in Nook for Windows?)

I'll release the Fictionette Freebie for June sometime over the weekend, most likely late Sunday. I'm putting off everything until late Sunday, because on Sunday I will be spending 15 hours on a train passing through gorgeous scenery and I will finally have time to do stuff like that. This would also be why I still haven't blogged about Salt Lake City, Part 1: BCB vs. The World, and the Tragedy of the Saturn's Last Stand

Don't worry, the Saturn gets brought back to life in the sequel. At least, so I was told, over the phone, by a very nice mechanic in Salt Lake City. We will find out for sure during Salt Lake City, Part 2: Independence Day Resurrection. Hence taking the train on Sunday.

In the meantime, I have got to get to sleep. (Can I sleep now? Please? Pretty please? But why not? Too bad, I am going to sleep anyway. Pththbbbp.)

Y'all, I am exhausted. I have had a day. I have had several days packed into a single day. A tow truck was involved. It was that kind of a day.

Thanks to the tow truck, we did get to our hotel in Salt Lake City. That's where I'm at, and I'm about to turn in for the night--but first I wanted to announce that the Friday Fictionette for June 24 is "What They Found in the Attic." Given the nature of attics, it could be anything. Excerpt is up at the link; links to full text in PDF and MP3 for subscription-only access are available from the excerpt. Click!

I was going to tell y'all about today, only, like I said, exhausted. Thus details must wait for another blog post. Good night, all.

I think I have managed to do all the things.

The car has received needed maintenance. My back has received needed maintenance. I have completed all of this week's fictionette that couldn't be done on the drive or in the hotel, which means finishing the text, recording the audio, and rough-assembling the cover art. That just leaves the mechanical assembly of the PDF, and the publishing of the ebook and audio posts to Patreon. I have even managed a good hour on "Stand By"--I will call it a "good" hour, despite that the hour didn't quite see me finished typing in edits to the first scene.

I've packed my clothes and my bout uniform. I've washed my wheels and bearings. I've reassembled the kneepads that I washed yesterday. I made a start on the AINC reading. All the plants that need to be have been moved to the front patio so a friend can come over and water them midway through the week. Several containers, watering plants, for use of, have been filled and staged.

I've picked up healthy snacks for nibbling in the car. We'll pick up a little more on the way. I've emptied the ice maker tray into another container in the freezer so that the ice maker tray will fill up again, so we can have more ice in the ice chest when we leave. I've mapped our route so I can print out key elements--from our home to our teammate's address for carpool pick-up, from Boulder to Salt Lake, all permutations of hotel to/from friend's house to/from bout venue. (Sorry, still no smart phone for me. I navigated by homemade TripTiks. Remember when TripTiks were customized flip books you picked up from your local AAA office? Now apparently TripTik is a web application.)

What's left? Finishing and uploading my AINC reading. Finishing and uploading this blog post. Reassembling my skate wheels and bearings once everything's dry.

Oh, and sleep. Can't forget that.

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.

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.)