author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Compared to my usual eleventh hour stunts, this week's Fictionette got done ridiculously early. Par for this week's course, happily. I got up early to see John off--he hit the road for New Mexicon--and then I got right to work so that I'd be able to go to a convention myself. MileHiCon's programming started at 2:00 PM, and I planned to be there.

So, yeah, I pretty much did my morning shift right away and straight through, and when I was done, "I Didn't Ask for Champagne" was up at Patreon and it had only gone twenty past noon. Go me!

But I still didn't make it to the con in time to catch the two o'clock panel. This is because, in the parking lot of Redstone Meadery, just when I'd finished purchasing gifts for a friend and was ready to make the hour-long drive to the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center, the car died. The engine simply died before I'd even put the car in reverse, and it would not start again. It was 1:00 PM.

What followed was a long call to AAA from the tasting room of Redstone Meadery, and a short wait therein, which was followed by my car being towed to its usual mechanic and myself at the wheel of a Mitsubishi Mirage rented from the nearby Hertz. When I at last began my drive out of Boulder, it was 2:30 PM. Pretty slick, I have to admit. What could have wrecked my weekend plans was reduced to mere inconvenience, and not even that much expense. Gods of travel, bless the Triple A.

(Not that much expense so far. The rental was under $35 for the whole weekend, but we'll see what the bill comes to when the Saturn gets diagnosed.)

The next hour was taken up with construction traffic on Highway 36 which began very early on the Foothills on-ramp. The hour after that, with normal traffic on I-25. But I had Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap to keep me company, so I laughed a lot instead of raging at the road.

Then I finally made it to the hotel around 4:30 PM and was in the audience by 5:00 to hear Kevin and Ursula live--Ursula Vernon is the artist guest of honor, and Kevin Sonney was not shy about contributing to her GoH hour, to everyone's enjoyment. Connie Willis took over at 6:00 to talk to us about foreshadowing and which movies do it well (or poorly), opening ceremonies were at 7:00, dinner was overpriced but delicious salmon at the hotel restaurant, and at 9:00 Carrie Vaughn interviewed Kevin Hearne in the style of her series heroine's "Midnight Hour" radio show on KNOB. There was ranting about conspiracy theorists and speculation about Bigfoot. Everything was splendid. We lived happily after ever. The end.

Oh, except I still had two more hours of workday to live up to, and a short story to line-edit. Well. I'm finishing that up now, aren't I?

The story has not yet been submitted, despite my hopes. That's OK. It wasn't for lack of working on it. Line edits are simply taking longer than expected. My bad for expecting them to be so quick! This is the stage where I do get to bring out my inner perfectionist and let her try to get every sentence in every paragraph right. Within reason, anyway. I expect I'll be all, "That's FINE, let it GO, just SUBMIT the dang thing" by about Wednesday.

Tomorrow: Breakfast off-site! And then at 9:30 AM I will have a dilemma: Do I go to the SFWA business meeting, or do I throw in my lot with a Wreckin' Roller Rebels skater who's giving the kids a sock-footed lesson in roller derby? THIS IS A HARD CHOICE no, I'm serious, it actually is. I mean it. Don't laugh!

I have been meaning for some time to blog about the Olympian Class Sloop that was available for shipyard purchase in July and August. But I keep trying to do this on Sunday, and the problem with Sunday is that it starts with roller derby practice, and I don't generally manage much that's productive after roller derby practice. Generally I wind up flat in bed for the rest of the day. (That especially goes for Sunday practices where I manage to roll my ankle and inflame some sort of tendon in my foot. Stoopid foot.) Next thing I know, it's Monday morning, and I missed another Sunday, and the sloop I want to blog about came out three months ago, and when am I going to blog about this month's limited edition sloop (the Undead Class Sloop, available through November 1), huh?

So, whatever, here's a Puzzle Pirates blog post on Monday morning. You can pretend it's still Sunday if you want to.

Olympian Class Sloop: Gorgeous and Terribly Inconvenient

It is shiny and pretty in every way. But I have discovered that I'm less than happy with its layout.

Puzzle Pirates has many good things going for it, but movement around a scene is not one of them. Which is usually OK. Almost all of the action takes place in chat and in mini-games, after all. Your pirate avatar mostly serves the purpose of playing dress-up and showing off the results. So it's understandable that, of all the things the game designers could focus on, the user experience of walking around isn't a high priority.

It only becomes a problem in two areas. One of those is walking around a large, uninhabited island; since you can't "teleport" to various areas via the buildings on the Dock map, you really do have to walk in order to find the horde of monsters waiting to be defeated or the island creator's inscription or whatever. And walking is nail-bitingly, knuckle-whiteningly slow. You click where you want to go, and then you wait for your pirate to get there, and then you right-click to shift the camera to the new area, and then you wait for the camera motion to finish, then you do it all over again. And again. And again.

The other problem area is walking around a ship, especially one with a lot of stairs and extraneous scenes. And in order to reach the booty chest an Olympian Class Sloop, you must navigate both.

Assuming that you've been performing the duty navigation puzzle (I always do), you start at the navigation wheel, up top the aft platform of the main deck. So first you've got to come down the stairs. I hate in-scene stairs. If you're already standing on the yellow arrow, you'll have to walk off it and walk back. And sometimes even then it doesn't work--instead of going down the stairs, your pirate simply stops at the top of the stairs. At this point, I'd usually click the other downstairs arrow--but on the Olympian Class Sloop there is only one set of stairs between the aft deck and the main deck. Arrgh! So I have to walk off the arrow and try it again.

Or I just skip the damn stairs. Right-clicking moves the camera over and brings the hatch into view. So I click on its little yellow arrow, and go downstairs into the main hold. Arrows that change scenes don't seem to fail at the rate that arrows for descending/ascending in-scene stairs do.

So now you are in the main hold, which is where most sloops keep the booty. But not this sloop. Oh, no. You must go down another level into the "Gorgon Den". And then you have to walk all the way to the other side of the Den, because the scene is too long to reach it by shifting the camera.

Now you can divide the booty. Finally. But then you'll have to go back up to the main hold if you want to then access the money and goods now aboard the ship. Arrrgh.

It's a cute narrative premise: The booty chest is buried deep in a stone labyrinth and watched over by the head of Medusa. Thus would-be thieves either get lost or turned to stone. Honestly, if the developers had seen fit to bring this narrative to life in a game-affecting way--say, giving the ship a modest functional bonus against gem thieves and the like--I'd complain less. But as things stand, it's purely a cosmetic thing which affects game play only by making booty divisions more of a pain in my butt.

Honestly, I'd prefer it if you could get to a ship's hold and booty via commands on the sidebar, just like you already do with the port/deport and sail/turn about buttons. But if they must be dependent on interacting with "physical" stations, can't those stations be made less inconvenient to get to?

It's not just the officer in command who has to deal with it. The Gorgon Den also houses the ship's two bilge stations and one of its carpentry/patching stations. So if you're a jobber switching from sails to something else, you risk getting yelled at to "station up, lazer!" when you're genuinely trying to do just that. If you're an officer moving your swabbies about, you have a long wait during which you might wonder if the swabbie will restation at all.

Pretty as it is, I'd as soon do away with the Olympian Class Sloop's main hold entirely--it's not particularly functional--and replace it with the Gorgon Den. Or just move all the functional parts of the Gorgon Den up onto the main hold, so that the room that's the hardest to get to is also the room that you need the least. Compare with the Red Room on the Dream Class Sloop. Clever hidden rooms and sub-basements are fun to look at and maybe throw parties in, but let's keep them strictly optional, yeah?

So there you go. It's a beautiful ship with a clever story behind it, and PixelPixie of the Cerulean Ocean deserves all the kudos for their contest-winning design. But the game developers have made it enough of a pain to interact with that I'd rather just leave ported at some island with an active market and just use it for executing shore trade.

So that's my rant. Meanwhile, I have just bought this month's Undead Class Sloop, which again is only available through November 1. Hopefully it turns out to be both really cool-looking and a pleasure to sail.

Lo, 'tis a Friday. Have a new Friday Fictionette. "A Word in Your Ear" deals with a Princess coming of age and discovering a larger world, at the cost of the security she know in her own smaller one. Which is typically what happens when a child becomes an adult, but things are always more earth-shattering for Princesses.

The Fictionette springs in part from a Tarot card drawn for a writing prompt, and it reaches back in continuity to one of the first Friday Fictionettes ever released. The second, in fact. Ever. So there is quite probably a novel hiding in the intersection between the third week of October 2015 and the first of September 2014. Which is one of the expected results of the project. Create a new story idea every day, cultivate four of them per month into a publishable story-like object, reap presentable stories come harvest time. Not like I'm exactly hurting for story ideas, mind you. The problem has more to do with the time needed to do them justice. Nevertheless--winning!

In other news, John and I have been exceptionally good citizens. We took our mail-in ballots out to lunch and completed them. Note the date: Usually we put this task off until about two days before election day, necessitating a trip to the County Clerk and Recorder's Office to drop the ballots off by hand. But we have dropped them off in our home mailbox's outgoing slot with first-class postage attached, because two and a half weeks is plenty time for the U.S. Post to deliver them. Winning.

In yet other news, John takes his duties as assistant coach to the Boulder County Bombers very seriously. He is researching workouts--power workouts, strength workouts, endurance workouts, metabolic workouts, plyometric workouts--and I, lucky soul, get to be his guinea pig. To be fair, he too is doing workouts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but--"I want to see how this workout affects an athletically trained person," he says, "unlike me." So off I got to do Haydens and ski-jumps and depth jumps and plank hops for half an hour. And, dang it, I say "thank you" when we're done, because I know it's making me a stronger, more powerful skater.

And now I am sitting in the tub, sweating and soaking out the aches of a full roller derby week made fuller by having homework.

Winning!

Unexpected things are unexpected. Unexpected things are the reason why a writer's gotta do the right thing.

For instance, when I don't get up on time, I lose a couple viable working hours from my day. And when the day happens to not only be scrimmage Thursday, but a particular Thursday in which it turns out we need to get to the practice space two hours early, well, it turns out I kind of needed those morning hours I denied myself by sleeping late.

(It's not that I didn't know we needed to get to the practice space early. It's that I didn't know how early we'd need to get there. Taping the 10-foot marks takes longer than I would have expected. Also the track was needed for a returning skater's assessment before scrimmage, too. Two hours was not enough time, turns out.)

But here I am, at the IHOP in Boulder after Thursday scrimmage, feeling unusually virtuous and ready to get my work done! I had a plan for my work day, darn it, and I'm going to stick to it! I'm gonna write that Boulder Writing Examiner article I've been meaning to write, right, the one about a particular new local Meetup group that's kind of exciting, OK?

Then I login at Examiner.com and discover I don't have the ability to publish articles anymore. I just have the ability to "Become an Examiner." I think I let too much time go by without publishing, and they canceled me.

I suppose I could re-apply. But--why? If I'm going to take up precious writing time with a content writing gig, maybe I should hold out for a content writing gig that pays better. At least somewhat. And if I'm going to take up writing time with blog posts about being a writer in Boulder, well, why not just keep it here on the actually writing blog (since it's actually about writing) where I'm the one in charge of how I go about it?

So, anyway, that was an unexpected thing too.

I have no idea what to blog about tonight, so I'm going to cheat and blog about Puzzle Pirates. It's not that much of a cheat; it's what I would have posted yesterday, had not yesterday's roller derby practice utterly kicked my butt and temporarily jacked up my shoulder, such that I went to bed at four in the afternoon and more or less stayed there until this morning.

So. The October 2015 Seal o' Piracy! How to get it? By...

Completing two (2) actions to add to yer explorer reputation!

Sounds pretty simple, right? For the most part, it is. But I ran into a bit of a catch.

According to Yppedia, you can add to your Explorer Reputation in the following ways:

...visiting the Atlantis citadels, visiting the Cursed Isles, visiting the Haunted Seas ship graveyards, visiting the Kraken, completing expeditions, and traveling around the ocean.

So first thing I did was take all my main pirates a-sailing, because "traveling around the ocean" is the easiest thing you can do. Lazing aboard a navy ship is the easiest way to do it, but also the most boring. Mostly I took my main pirates on trading voyages while I did other things (like, say, writing--writing very very slowly, but writing nonetheless). I made sure to keep this up until each pirate's Explorer Reputation moved upwards. (It generally doesn't take many leagues.)

Then I took Oshun pillaging in hopes of scoring an Expedition. And, why, yes, I did! I scored a Brigand King sighting. So I engaged Admiral Finius in battle, won the swordfight melee, won some small amount of PoE and ship supplies and also a pearl pocketwatch inscribed in honor of my victory. Like you do.

What I didn't win was my Seal o' Piracy. I didn't win that until completing the Buried Treasure expedition that I acquired a couple of battles later.

So something's not particularly straightforward here. I'm guessing it's either that "traveling around the ocean" doesn't count toward one's Seal o' Piracy for October 2015, because it's too easy; or that BK expeditions don't actually count toward Explorer Reputation after all, since they already count toward Conqueror Reputation. Or that maybe the BK didn't move my Explorer Reputation enough to trigger the trophy, and that the Buried Treasure expo pushed it over the top?

That's as much as I know so far, which admittedly isn't much. I'll tell you more next weekend if I figure more out. But until then, this blog is returning to actual writing coverage. (Hence the name.)

I have no idea what to blog about tonight, so I'm going to cheat and blog about Puzzle Pirates. It's not that much of a cheat; it's what I would have posted yesterday, had not yesterday's roller derby practice utterly kicked my butt and temporarily jacked up my shoulder, such that I went to bed at four in the afternoon and more or less stayed there until this morning.

So. The October 2015 Seal o' Piracy! How to get it? By...

Completing two (2) actions to add to yer explorer reputation!

Sounds pretty simple, right? For the most part, it is. But I ran into a bit of a catch.

According to Yppedia, you can add to your Explorer Reputation in the following ways:

...visiting the Atlantis citadels, visiting the Cursed Isles, visiting the Haunted Seas ship graveyards, visiting the Kraken, completing expeditions, and traveling around the ocean.

So first thing I did was take all my main pirates a-sailing, because "traveling around the ocean" is the easiest thing you can do. Lazing aboard a navy ship is the easiest way to do it, but also the most boring. Mostly I took my main pirates on trading voyages while I did other things (like, say, writing--writing very very slowly, but writing nonetheless). I made sure to keep this up until each pirate's Explorer Reputation moved upwards. (It generally doesn't take many leagues.)

Then I took Oshun pillaging in hopes of scoring an Expedition. And, why, yes, I did! I scored a Brigand King sighting. So I engaged Admiral Finius in battle, won the swordfight melee, won some small amount of PoE and ship supplies and also a pearl pocketwatch inscribed in honor of my victory. Like you do.

What I didn't win was my Seal o' Piracy. I didn't win that until completing the Buried Treasure expedition that I acquired a couple of battles later.

So something's not particularly straightforward here. I'm guessing it's either that "traveling around the ocean" doesn't count toward one's Seal o' Piracy for October 2015, because it's too easy; or that BK expeditions don't actually count toward Explorer Reputation after all, since they already count toward Conqueror Reputation. Or that maybe the BK didn't move my Explorer Reputation enough to trigger the trophy, and that the Buried Treasure expo pushed it over the top?

That's as much as I know so far, which admittedly isn't much. I'll tell you more next weekend if I figure more out. But until then, this blog is returning to actual writing coverage. (Hence the name.)

The first Friday Fictionette for October is a small folk tale retelling, or a folk tale fanfic if you will. It's called "How the Lassie Didn't Go East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and it posits a lot more communication and common sense than is the norm in folk tales. I mean, seriously, a girl's got more senses than just her sight. If her mother imagines that her daughter needs a candle to tell whether the guy she's sharing her bed isn't a Troll, her mother has a very innocent idea of what goes on in bed. That's all I'm saying.

I was astounded to discover that all of Kay Nielson's gorgeous watercolor illustrations for the folk tale collection East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North are as much in the public domain as the text itself--or at least they are covered by "no known copyright restrictions." I incorporated one of these illustrations for the Fictionette cover art, because it's lovely and because it helps make clear exactly what folk tale I'm playing with.

I've also released a Fictionette Freebie for September, and it's "The Celebrated Frog Forger of Clackamas County." The PDF chapbook and the MP3 audiofictionette are now both available for free to subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. Enjoy!

And with that we head into the weekend. If you're in the neighborhood and want to hang out, I'll be among the crowd helping local brewery (and Boulder County Bombers sponsor!) 300 Suns celebrate their Grand Re-Opening on Saturday afternoon. Bring a game to play, buy some beer, and enjoy their new menu! That's what I'm gonna do. (My, that Lushious Belgian Ale with the ginger and lavender sounds tasty...)

So I didn't get it done Sunday. And I didn't get it done Monday. I got it done yesterday, and today you get the blog post about it:

"The Celebrated Frog Forger of Clackamas County" is your Friday Fictionette for September 18, 2015. So there. Why a frog? Because apparently I was on a talking frog kick last month, and went there on the least provocation. Why Clackamas County? I dunno; it scans right, I guess. And I lived in Oregon for a little while, so what the heck.

It was actually Josephine County that I lived in for the last couple years of the '90s. During that time, my mail kept getting randomly sent up to Marion County because multiple people saw envelopes and packages addressed to Selma, OR and "helpfully" corrected the obvious misspelling to Salem.

My goal is to have tomorrow's fictionette done on time. My goal is always to have them done on time, of course--at least, right up until the time I give up on it because I fail again. But this time I know ahead of time that my Friday the 25th will be packed with time-consuming things, so I have done a good bit of work on it early.

It will be about deer. Maybe talking deer. Deer that are capable of spray-painting graffiti slogans in English, anyway. I guess I've just been on a talking animal kick. This post-Spreading Sentience Syndrome setting may wind up in a pro-publishable story one of these days, seeing as how it keeps working its way into the fictionettes.

Anyway, here it is. And also, sorry for the long silence. I promise it's not because I got broken in Saturday's tournament. Nobody got broken! I just got bruised, and some of those bruises were from delivering righteous hits. But I did need more time to recover than I thought I would. Apparently, recovery involved two days spent more or less flat on my back with books. Or maybe it's just that I need days-in-bed-with-books from time to time, and derby recovery was a good excuse.

What I've been rereading is Sheri S. Tepper's True Game series, which is kind of like a cross between Xanth and Pern in its world-building, but its squick derives from aggressive pro-eugenics politicizing rather than from sexist rapey crap. I'm... not exactly selling it here, am I? Rereading Tepper is always a guilty pleasure. Her worldbuilding and her protagonists' development are fantastic. And even if I can't quite buy into the chess-like framework for the duels in The True Game, I kind of dig the attempt. But her politics are monstrous, the sort of stuff that gives feminism and environmentalism a bad name. She seems to think the solution to all societal problems is to have aliens or gods or sentient trees or whatnot kill off most of the population. It comes up in most of her novels. In the True Game books, she explicitly posits that physical "deformity" leads to moral deficiency because, what, living in a crippled/deformed/stunted body that's constantly in pain squeezes the soul out of shape? Somebody please find me a way to read the whole "Dupey" encounter in a more generous light? Because I can't. And it gets worse, because there are characters called Midwives (capitalized to indicate magical Talent), whom all good characters want at their side during childbirth (refusing a Midwife is an indication that you're corrupt and evil and selfish), whose future vision allows them to see which newborns will never "grow a soul" and therefore may be exterminated. Put those two bits together, and, well, way to tell a good portion of your readers that, due to whatever condition they were born with, they're congenitally evil and you'd prefer they'd never been born. And that's before we get into her conveniently subjecting two of her villains to misadventure resulting in dramatic facial wounds that make our sensitive protagonist want to throw up every time he lays eyes on them, but at the same time condemns these characters for vanity because they tried to magically hide their scars (shock!)... Argh. This is not your go-to author for handling disabilities and issues of physical appearance with compassion, is what I'm saying. And her villains tend to be two-dimensional strawmen, and half the time I think she uses a thesaurus written in baby-speak to come up with names for people and places, and she uses way too many exclamation marks.

...And I still turn to her novels for comfort reading. Some of them, anyway. (Any of the ones I read before throwing The Fresco at the wall, anyway. I stopped seeking out new stuff of hers to read after that.)

I seem to have gone off in a rant. Well, I'm now well into rereading the fifth book of the novena, so it's been building up. Remember, though, I'm choosing to reread them, so they've got to have something going for them, right? But they are decidedly not for everyone.

Well and so but anyway, see you tomorrow with a new Fictionette. Promise. (Double dog promise! Pinky swear!)

Sorry, y'all. The Friday Fictionette will have to come out on Sunday. Most of this work week got nibbled away by various preparations for tomorrow's tournament--extra practices, yes, but also repairing gear, printing signs, cleaning wheels and bearings, setting up the venue--and I'm still not quite done.

Please feel entirely welcome to come to the tournament specifically to chastise me. Or to watch four fantastic Colorado roller derby teams skate their hearts out. Whatever floats your boat!

I've bemoaned this before: I have "on" days and "off" days. On my "on" days, I'm so on. I have energy and boundless well-being and I Get Stuff Done. On my "off" days I'm lucky if I can get out of bed. I get whatever day I get--I don't get a say, they just happen to me.

Except that's not quite the case. Careful observation yields useful discoveries.

Such as: If I get some serious writing time in, if I just do it even I don't feel up to it (even if it's shaping up to be an "off" day), I'll have a reason to feel good about myself. I might feel sick and lethargic, but I won't also be feeling ashamed.

Such as: If I get my morning cup of strong Assam tea, it not only wards off withdrawal headaches (hello, mild caffeine addiction), but it makes me feel pampered and cared for. In conjunction with the rest of my wake-up ritual--morning pages scribbled at the front patio table--it makes me feel like "someone thinks I'm worth it." That someone is me, but that counts.

Such as: If I get some exercise early in the day, sometimes I stay energized for a long time afterwards.

Such as: Skating just makes me happy.

As to that last--it's a roller derby thing. Or it may be more accurate to say, roller derby (and, presumably, other roller sports) attracts people who find that, no matter how bad the day has been so far, strapping on skates makes everything at least a little better. Like, I'm on eight wheels now, I'm flying, how bad can it be?

I had cause to reflect on this Saturday. It was a very "on" day, Saturday. And there was every reason for it to have been an "off" day. It was stuffed to the gills with scheduling, it started stupid-early in the morning, and I didn't get to sleep until 2:00 AM the night before. And what sleep I got wasn't solid. And yet I had that boundless well-being and do-stuff energy and I just felt good.

The reason I had to get up early was, I had to be in Longmont for 9:00 AM and in my skate gear at the rendezvous point for 9:15. I'd volunteered to skate in a parade. I got up at 7:00 AM, managed to drag through my Saturday morning stuff in time to leave the house by 8:45, drove all squinty-eyed with sleepiness up the Diagonal Highway, found a parking spot near the parade route in downtown Longmont, sat on the car's back bumper and tugged on my skate gear, launched myself down Terry toward 5th Street...

...and suddenly realized I was feeling good. Awake. Vibrant. Cheerful and optimistic. Pain-free. Energetic. Spirits lifted. Just physically and emotionally well.

The feeling lasted all day. And this despite adding a surprise trip to the car mechanic to my already overflowing agenda. I just kept feeling good all day.

So I thought, maybe "on" days are a thing I can cause to happen. On purpose!

Today I got up and had my morning ritual of tea and scribbles out on the patio. Then I put on my skate gear and I rolled around the neighborhood for about fifteen minutes.

Then I came back to the house, had breakfast, and just dove into the work day. Bam. Got a bunch of stuff I'd been putting off for a while done, too.

Morning skate. Huh. Might have to make a habit of this.