author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

[insert tapping noise and cliched quip about microphone testing here]

Er. Hi. So... writing! How about it? I hear this blog is supposed to be all about actually doing that thing.

Haven't touched the new short story in some time. It keeps falling off the back of the priority list while Other Things take over. I've been thinking about it, though--and while they say (and they say true) that "thinking about writing isn't writing," thinking can help prepare the way for the writing. Hopefully when I finally get to finishing the draft (this week! Maybe?) some of that thinking will show up on the page.

I did get last week's Friday Fictionette out on time, more or less. It's called "How Fetches Become Real" and it's sort of like the first act of The Unlikely Ones (Mary Brown) meets the last act of The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams). So that's fine. What I'm embarrassed about is how late I am at getting the Fictionette Artifacts ("fictionettes in your mailbox, typewritten and illustrated by me!") into the mail. This is something that matters to exactly two people in the world so far; to them, my apologies. Tomorrow! The mail will go out... tomorrow, betcher bottom dollar that tomorrow... there'll be mail... *ahem*

So, with very little to report on the writing front, how about a book review? Semi-review? A book report, maybe? I just finished reading T. Kingfisher's The Raven and the Reindeer. In fact, I've been on a bit of a T. Kingfisher binge, because why haven't I read everything by her yet? Well, get on that! So I am. It is now my absolute favorite retelling of "The Snow Queen," and it had Kelly Link's "Travels with the Snow Queen" ("Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales are hard on the feet?") to contend with for that title. So very much is right about it. From the start, Gerta is introduced as a young girl with a crush on her oldest friend, with all the uncertainties and squirming insides and embarrassment and worry that comes with. Not to mention that naive blindness to Kay's faults, the willingness to explain away the ways he's careless with her feelings because he is everything she always wanted and without wanting him who would she be? My heart went out to her and stayed with her the whole way through.

Kingfisher's treatment of the robber girl, here named Janna, was superb. I can't get over how much depth and complexity she's given. Plus she and the protagonist are my OTP, y'all, I have shipped them in my little fannish heart forever, and here Kingfisher has put their romance right on the page, growing from tiny seeds of discovery into an engine of courage that drives both characters to suffer any hardship necessary out of love for each other. (Speaking of which--there is no nonsense on these pages about Gerta's greatest strength being her "purity" and "innocent heart", thank you very much Hans Christian Andersen. What a burden of expectation to put on a child! Kingfisher's Gerta is no angelic paragon, thank goodness. She's a teenage girl full of emotions and insecurities and desires, some of which desires are unashamedly sexual.

Gerta's journey has the explicit purpose of rescuing Kay, but that's not the most important thing it accomplishes. Gerta's journey is about Gerta growing up and discovering who she might choose to be.

And then there's the titular raven and reindeer, and what the latter gives to Gerta, and lessons learned about death and life, and there's a whole troupe of otters who are utterly adorable, and and and everything is fantastic. And I was having a tough day, the day I finished reading it, and the book made me cry happy tears at the end, which is always a good remedy for a day that involved crying not-happy tears. It sort of transmutes the weepiness into beauty, detaches the tears from the hurtful experience and reattaches them to a transcendently enjoyable one.

TL;DR: I really liked this book and heartily recommend it.

OMG a Friday Fictionette released on an actual Friday what is the world COMING TO. Also, consider yourself warned that "The Call Is Coming From Inside the Building" get out of there.

So this new work schedule of John's is having a salutary effect on my own. Unless I have a very convincing reason to stay in bed (like, say, the morning after skating in two epic back-to-back interleague scrimmages that left me sore and gloriously multicolored, just for instance), I get up when he does, whereupon we have breakfast together before he heads over to the office. And then I actually get a full day of writing done according to the master plan for world domination through workerlike fiction production. And life is magical.

The quest for breakfast also sent me about half a mile up the road on my bike to a nearby farm whose sign in their driveway advertising Fresh Eggs has been catching my eye every time I head up to roller derby practice. This would be The Diaz Farm, which, it turns out, in addition to selling farm-fresh eggs daily for $5.50 the dozen, is accepting CSA sign-ups for the 2016 season. I am all over that. 2016 will be the year of eating super locally, with pork sausage from the pig farmer who skates on our B team and rents us our practice space (her derby name is Baconator, naturally, and everything about her is made of awesome), and chicken from McCauley Family Farm where I used to volunteer (and may again someday, who knows), and now fresh veg from The Diaz Farm which is literally in my neighborhood considering I can darn well get there on my bike, rain or shine, in under 10 minutes. Given their extreme proximity, which is convenient given my lack of daytime access to a car, I asked them if they were taking volunteers. The answer was, not yet but we'll let you know. They are a very small operation.

Yesterday I turned one of those McCauley chickens into one of my very most favorite recipes from Kenneth Lo's The Top One Hundred Chinese Dishes, "Whole Chicken Soup with Chinese Cabbage (Bai Cai Ji Tang)." This sent me on another bicycle quest, this time for Napa cabbage. The little international grocery at Valmont and 28th can always be counted on to have that. Also fresh okra at any old time of the year. Also, and I was entirely unprepared to discover this, mirleton (aka "chayote"). I suspect my next chicken dish will be chicken and andouille gumbo on a stewed okra base with a side helping of shrimp and mirleton casserole.

You know what else you can get at international groceries? CDM coffee. Truly, New Orleans is another country.

Things are getting back on track around here, and not a moment too soon. Daily writing things got done throughout the weekend and right up through today. I'm getting ready to send all the recently rejected short stories right back out into the fray, and I'm wrapping up the end-of-month fictionette tasks. On that note, I've designated "It's That Little Something Extra" as the Fictionette Freebie for the month of February 2016; follow that link to the full text in HTML, and follow links you will find there for the PDF and MP3 options. (I make one fictionette free for everyone at the end of every month, but it's subscribers only who get to download all four per month the moment each comes out. And now you know.)

On that note, I've spent much of today's afternoon shift typing up two of the February fictionettes on my typewriter, getting them ready to mail to my two Patrons at the fictionettes-in-your-mailbox level, and I have to say that there's nothing like manually typing up a piece of fiction to become painfully aware of all the "favorite words" (continue, achieve... what else? I forget now) and the places where I probably could have phrased things more compactly. And then there's the times where I misanticipate the next phrase and end up just going with it because I don't want to spend time and corrective tape fixing it. All of which just goes to show that these typewritten Fictionette Artifacts are entirely limited edition specimens with unique typographical features all their own. *ahem*

In other news, I finally read The Interior Life by Katherine Blake (Dorothy Heydt). It was my first Perk purchase--which is to say, I redeemed Perk (née Viggle) points for a gift card, and I used the gift card to buy the book. Winning! But that's not the point. The point is that this is a dang good book. It's a book the likes of which you don't see every day. Jo Walton wrote a lovely review of it at Tor.com about six years ago, about the way it's really two stories that move along side-by-side, and one of those stories is entirely in the domestic "housewife" domain--Painting the walls! Doing laundry! Trying out recipes in advance of hosting parties!--and that is honored just as much as the other story's domain of adventure, sorcery, warfare, and derring-do.

When the fantasy quest story cuts into the narrative, it's signaled by a change of font so subtle that the author herself had trouble distinguishing it in the published copy. I noticed it--at least, I got the impression that the type had gotten more compact and slightly "pointy" in the way of serifed calligraphy, but I kept questioning whether I'd really seen it. (A comparison of the letter "e" dispelled any doubts.) Thing is, I love that. The subtlety feels right, echoing the main character's having slid from household chores into a fantasy life without realizing it for maybe a page and a half before she goes "Woah, where did that come from?"

Anyway, I love this book with all my heart. Also, reading it made me suddenly quite eager to clean the frickin' house already. Which is convenient. John started his new job this week, such that instead of working from home as he has for the past couple years, he'll now be working from an office nearby in Boulder. Which means the division of household chores will shift a bit towards me, since he won't be able to do a bit here and a bit there between day job tasks anymore. But I was home and I did do a bit here and a bit there between my work-a-day tasks, and now laundry is done and the compost has been taken out and so have the recyclables and I also did large portion of the weekend dishes.

I am bad-ass, y'all.

Also I will be rereading The Interior Life all over again shortly because I need to fortify myself against spring cleaning.

(Spring! Can we call it spring yet? Is it safe to call it spring? Pleeeeeeease? It's March!)

And now we are all caught up. Again. For as long as that lasts. In any case, "Weird Quantum Science" is the Friday Fictionette for, er, yesterday, and "The Touch of Iron" is the much belated fictionette for the Friday before that. Which makes four for February. Ta-da!

Why I keep getting behind on this stuff is very simple. In theory, I'm to spend a little time every day working on the next one that's due. Simple. Perfectly achievable. Leaves plenty of room for other writing tasks, like the production of publishable short stories and all that. But in practice, something happens most days per week to keep me getting to my daily fictionette-prep session. And then Friday comes and the thing isn't even drafted, much less exported to PDF and paired with some sort of cover art and also recorded to mp3. And Friday has whatever it's got waiting in the wings or hovering over my evening or sabotaging my afternoon, and there's no way I'm putting in all three or four hours it's going to take.

It's just like NaNoWriMo, right? You do your 1,667 every day, or your 3,333 every other day, whatever--or you do a 10K marathon at the last minute. Or worse. And I hate marathons. I'm much better at daily sprints.

So there's my confession for the week: I've kind of been sucking at this time management thing. But a new week starts now! A new month starts next week! New leaves: I am turning them over at a rapid pace! Watch them fly!

Do I perchance hear someone snickering in the peanut gallery? Do I? Surely not! Oh, wait... it's me. Because I do this every week. Every evening. "I give up. I'm done. I'm going to sleep. But tomorrow will be better!"

Well, and tomorrow will be better. Just... in small increments. But small increments do add up.

I've been lapse in my actually writing updates, and I'm gonna get lapser; this is not an actually writing update. This is your weekend Puzzle Pirates blockades roundup. Why? Because it's Saturday, and time and tide (and the blockade schedule) wait for no pirate.

Absolutely nothing seems to be scheduled for Cerulean. That's unusual. As though to make up for it, the Emerald and Meridian Oceans are hoppin'. They got multi-drops, Brigand King scuffles, and, in the case of Emerald, a whole bunch of max pay offers for the noon blockades.

Chapter Three would like you to know a little bit more about their attack on Raven's Roost (Meridian)...

Our JC/LA is out of town and will be sending in a few ships just for fun to see what Corteezism is made of! See you there. Pay starting at 69 poe per seg.

And Bite the Pillow have this to say about their Admiral Island operations (Emerald)

Come join us and help save Shigby's cat. Pay as crazy as it can be and good luck to both sides.

I'm not sure about the cat (more details might be available in their intent video, linked from the forum post), but pay is very much over the top. Well, the game won't let you go over the top. It's right at the top, 9,999 Pieces of Eight per segment (PoE/seg).

An actually writing update will probably be coming later on today. The preview summary is this: The week 3 Friday Fictionette for February did indeed go out on--I think it was Tuesday of this past week; the week 4 Friday Fictionette is a touch late but will probably be out later today. I hope so, anyway. There's no good reason it shouldn't be. But then again, when have I needed a good reason to slack off? *le sigh* Well, here's to optimism. Please stand by....

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, February 27 ***

10:34 a.m. - Hubbles Auge, Opal Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Alianca da Aguia
Attacker: Chthonische Horden (1)

12:14 p.m. - Admiral Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: This Means War
Attacker: Bite the Pillow
Undeclared: Keep the Peace

12:14 p.m. - Scrimshaw Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: Bite the Pillow
Attacker: This Means War

12:35 p.m. - Gallows Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: Rebound
Attacker: The Crazy Department

12:36 p.m. - Paihia Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: Rebound
Attacker: The Crazy Department

12:37 p.m. - Iocane Island, Emerald Ocean
Defender: Rebound
Attacker: The Crazy Department

1:13 p.m. - Isla Spaniel, Jade Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: La Llama que todo lo consume (1)
Attacker: CORSARIOS DE POSEIDÓN

1:39 p.m. - Lilac Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Knockout
Attacker: Necessary Roughness

1:40 p.m. - Duat Island, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Knockout
Attacker: Necessary Roughness

2:00 p.m. - Zuyua Mist, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Coming Soon
Attacker: The All-Consuming Flame (3)

4:00 p.m. - Raven's Roost, Meridian Ocean
Defender: Chapter Three
Attacker: Corteezism

6:00 p.m. - The Lowland Hundred, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Illuminatti
Attacker: Jinx (3)

*** Sunday, February 28 ***

11:37 a.m. - Aimuari Island, Emerald Ocean
Brigand King holds the island!
Defender: Fleet of his Imperial Scaled Highness (6)
Attacker: Keep the Peace

12:00 p.m. - Napi Peak, Meridian Ocean
Brigand King attack!
Defender: Imperial Coalition
Attacker: Chthonic Horde (13)

Please excuse the radio silence. It was bout weekend. (No, we didn't win, but we gave 'em a darn good fight. We also picked up some good experience to help us prepare for our next bout in 6 weeks.)

Anyway, despite not blogging about it on Friday night, I did get last week's Friday Fictionette out on time. Barely. It's "Day-to-Day Invasions," and while it looks a bit like "The Magpie's Big Heist" only with a different type of bird, it's not, OK?

Meanwhile, there's the new short story to write. The freewriting session I chose as its source material is worryingly slight. I mean, there's a tree that turns into a man, and a woman who's turned into a bit of a hermit, and they absolutely positively do not fall in love at all. I've got that much. That's... not a lot to got, honestly. It's enough to make my resolve to Write A New Thing waver like the air over a hot road. I kind of want to run screaming back to my revision queue where I know all the stories back to front even if I'm not sure how to make them right.

When did "writing a new thing" become the scary part of this gig?

Anyway, I spent some time today babbling to myself about the possible plot points, thematic aspirations, potential pitfalls, and obvious literary allusions. There's actually a good deal of material available in that initial freewriting session, but it's like a collection of random jigsaw puzzle pieces which number somewhat less than the 2500 that the box promised and include too few edge pieces to be of use. Most of what I've got are middle pieces depicting things like blue sky and undifferentiated masses of tree leaves.

If this was actually a jigsaw puzzle, I'd probably throw it away. But the thing about writing, which is not a thing about jigsaw puzzles, is, you get to make up the missing pieces. Just invent them, out of your own head. No photo-printed cardboard nor scroll saws required!

So that's the rest of my week taken up. I hope yours is off to at least an equally good start.

Saturday is once again the new Friday, because I cannot seem to keep my eyes open. All I have to do is create the cover art and upload the various permutations of the Friday Fictionette, but even that is so far beyond my current energy level, I can't even.

Which is a real disappointment given that February was going to be the month of All Caught Up and On Time!

I also haven't put the Fictionette Artifacts in the mail, mainly for lack of time to get to the post office. Both of these lacks will be rectified tomorrow.

On the bright side, "can't keep my eyes open" probably translates to a very good night of sound sleep starting very shortly. And given that the status was precipitated by several nights of not very good sleep at all and the last stand of a persistent head cold and going to all my roller derby activities since Wednesday night despite the sick and the sleep deprivation (practice on Wednesday, a late-night scrimmage Thursday up in Fort Collins against our good friends FoCo Girls Gone Derby--thanks for having us! Y'all rock!--and tonight's somewhat boozy and crowded fundraiser at sponsoring taphouse 300 Suns) well, this is kind of a "reaping what I sow" situation.

I keep hoping, every time I approach a weekend, that this time I'll hit the reset button, and everything will be awesome after that. I'm beginning to think that the very idea of a reset button is nothing more than a mirage.

Well. Blah. Tomorrow, the usual Puzzle Pirates Weekend Blockade round up at 1:00 PM or so, then, later that afternoon, I devoutly hope, all things Friday Fictionette for February Week 1.

But for now, in possibly less than a half hour, blessed unconsciousness.

This weekend started out awesome. I celebrated being all caught up by taking myself out Saturday to the Bohemian Biergarten for beef stroganoff, beer, and several hours of uninterrupted and guilt-free Puzzle Pirates fun. It was excellent. After all the scrambling to get on top of things throughout the week, it was entirely what the doctor ordered.

But then after I got home that evening I started developing this cough, and a post-nasal-drip-type sore throat, and next morning the cough was worse and accompanied by that "cold inhale" feeling at the back of my throat that I associate with running a low-grade fever, and I had to admit I'd come down sick. I'd been looking forward to practice, but as it turned out, spending most of Sunday and Monday in bed were also what the doctor ordered.

However! I am feeling much better now. I put in a full work day today, consisting of the daily "gottas" and what remained of the end-of-month Friday Fictionette stuff. By the way, the Fictionette Freebie for January 2016 is "The Wine Cellar That Wished" (PDF | MP3). I personally think it's kind of funny, but I'll admit its humor is on the grim side. That's what makes it a good free sample, though. Anyone who decides to subscribe based on that will know what they're sometimes going to be in for. (See also "The Metamorphosis of Anita Chaplain", which I also maintain is funny. Yes, there is probably something wrong with me.) So, yeah, a full work day, up and at it before noon, and an actual change of shirt which is more than I managed all weekend I am sorry to tell you. And now I'm having that peculiar run of sneezes that's my body's way of getting the last of everything yucky out of its system.

A derby friend stopped by with chicken and dumplings, and herbal tea, and an orange. She was not the only derby friend to offer sustenance and comfort upon hearing I was sick. I kind of wanted to yell "It's just a cold, jeez y'all, I'll be fine," but that's because we are typically not trained to accept kindness well. Roller derby leagues are made of kindness. There's also a formal meal train going on to help out a teammate who just got out of surgery, and less formal gestures of love and support go on all the time. There are a lot of things we don't seem to get trained in, from accepting kindness to accepting our bodies, from viewing our geeky never-done-sports selves as athletes to viewing other women as potential friends. Roller derby counteracts these toxic omissions. At least, with the right league--but I've never yet encountered a league that was wrong for this. I'm sure there are some out there somewhere, because leagues are made of people and people sometimes fail. But in my limited experience, roller derby is remedial training in self-esteem for, and interpersonal support among, women.

[And now, a brief pause to make two-handed "heart" gestures and to mutter about how dusty it suddenly got in here.]

Meanwhile! Writing things I didn't get to today but certainly will tomorrow, assuming I feel this well or better: Figuring out where to resubmitting the handful of stories that came back from their latest outings with encouraging rejection letters. Figuring out which piece of potentially salable fiction will be my next afternoon shift project. Figuring out how to figure things out. ARGH DECISIONS

Oh look! Herbal tea with orange peel. It's going to be all right.

As promised--as hoped--here's the fourth Friday Fictionette for January, which was to have gone up on the 22nd but instead I present to you today: "Doors Do Swing Both Ways." It's got dragon puppies in it, so you know you want to read it. That link goes to the teaser excerpt; subscribers may read or listen to the whole thing (905 words) in PDF or MP3 formats depending on their pledge tier.

So that's it for new material in January! Over the weekend I'll release the Fictionette Freebie for January, then early next week I'll mail out the Fictionette Artifacts to the $5/month Patrons (you know who you are and I wuv you THIS MUCH), and then I'll be all caught up! ... until the first Friday in February. BUT I DO NOT INTEND TO GET BEHIND IN FEBRUARY.

Speaking of all things Friday Fictionette: 'Tis the season for authors to publish lists of their 2015 publications! Most of them, admittedly, do this because it's awards nomination season, and it's helpful to know what's eligible for 2015 awards. I am not going there in the slightest. I have not even bought the map to there. However, it seems like it might be useful to provide a hyperlinked list of all the Fictionette Freebies released in 2015, just to have them all in one place for your reading convenience. Thus:

• January: "The Metamorphosis of Anita Chaplain"
• February: "If on a Winter's Night Two Travellers..."
• March: "Please To Confirm Your Appointment with BRIGHT SMILES!"
• April: "The Hole in the Middle of the Block" (audio)
• May: "Because You Weren't There" (audio)
• June: "You Could Go a Long Way in Shoes Like Those" (audio)
• July: "And Did You Bring Enough for Everyone?" (audio)
• August: "How Featherkind Got Its Song" (audio)
• September: "The Celebrated Frog Forger of Clackamas County" (audio)
• October: "How the Lassie Didn't Go East of the Sun and West of the Moon" (audio)
• November: "In the Shadow of Next Tuesday" (audio)
• December: "The Thing with Feathers" (audio)

(In case you're wondering why there's no audio edition for January through March, well, I never managed to start producing them until April 2015. Eventually I will record MP3s for all the earlier fictionettes. For now, you got what you got.)

There! I'm more or less proud of them all. If you wind up reading them and enjoying them, great! And if you decide they're your kind of thing and you'd like four times as many of that sort of thing in your year, you know what to do.

This has been my shameless plug for the year.

In other news, I just discovered that the Whole Foods on Pearl Street will shuck you your choice of oysters on the half shell at a buck fifty per, and sometimes they run a buck-a-shuck special. Lunch today was amazing.

So January hasn't been going so well. Mentally and emotionally, I mean. Well, and also schedule-wise. Truth is, the stuff that went bad on Christmas Day, that stuck with me. It stuck with me hard. It struck resonances all up and down my family history, and that kind of thing is hard to shake. I've been doing a lot of sleeping late, either because the bad stuff's been keeping me up late, or because I'm so tired of having the bad stuff jangling around in my head that it's sometimes easier to just stay unconscious.

And then, as you know, I've been doing a reread and rework of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which has exercises in it like "Describe three 'monsters' who had a detrimental effect on your creativity or self-esteem" and "Write a 'letter to the editor' in your defense regarding one of those monsters." Which dovetails a little too closely with the lingering bad stuff.

Now, sometimes writing the bad stuff down exorcises it, if only temporarily. But sometimes it just sticks a knife in the scar tissue and rips the old wound wide open again. I never know which way it's going to be until it's had its way with my brain, you know?

I've been trying to counter the re-wounding effect by following up the exercises with a ten-minute session of Headspace, an app for doing meditation. It's helping, but slowly, because slowly is how I learn new things. "Let the thoughts be there, but be at peace with them being there. Don't get caught up in either trying to stop them or chasing after them. Just let them be." That kind of stuff takes practice. Meanwhile, the bad stuff comes and goes in waves and sometimes I still go under.

The other night, trying to go to sleep, I thought about a dream I've had on-and-off throughout my life. In it, I would find myself exploring the walk-in attics on the upper floor of my parents' house. As a child I was always forbidden to play in there, so of course I did. I loved exploring, I wasn't unaffected by the allure of the forbidden, and I loved also that I could hide away up there and no one could find me. I even outfitted a little room in one hard-to-reach corner, with pillows and blankets and a bead curtain and candles. I figured no one would ever find it. And no one did, not until I was in my 30s at least.

But here's the thing in the dream: Sometimes I would find a little slit or hole in the pink insulation, just a little tiny claustrophobic tunnel which, if I was brave, I could crawl through it (spun glass not being a problem in dreams) and follow it down to where it turned to the right and opened up into a tiny little cave, just my size. And I could hide there for as long as I needed to until I felt safe coming out. It was my mousehole and no one could hurt me there.

Thinking about this the other night, I thought, "No one actually wants to go 'back to the womb,' not really. What one wants is a womb of one's own."

That's not the epiphany. That's just a bad Virginia Woolf pun.

Besides, it's of limited usefulness. Because trying to envision myself crawling into my little imaginary mousehole, telling myself "the tunnel is so narrow, it scrapes your memories right off, so you can hide from them too," somehow it just put me ears-deep in the bad stuff again. The walk-in attics of my parents' house were too much associated with all things family and all the painful things that the bad stuff woke up. I didn't get to sleep for hours, and I hardly managed to stay asleep for more than a couple hours at a time. (The bad stuff was conspiring with my bladder on that one. I swear, my body seems to think its main function while I'm asleep is making pee. The late thirties appear to be one prolonged battle between waking up dehydrated in the morning or waking up to pee all night long.)

The next night is when the epiphany happened. I had just finished rereading Diane Duane's The Wizard's Dilemma. Like most of the Young Wizard books, it ends with a scene in what's known as Timeheart. That's kind of like a non-stagnant Heaven, or a version of Narnia's "further up and further in" without the nasty implications in the ending of The Last Battle. What's loved lives on there in cityscapes and natural vistas of perfection that go on and on as far as the eye can see and the heart desires to explore. In a lesser author's hands, this might have given rise to some sort of hokey Moral of the Story ending. Duane is not a lesser author. The scene provides emotional closure, but it doesn't pretend there are easy answers. It just reassures the characters (and the reader) that their sacrifices were worthwhile, and that there's hope.

And I closed the book and thought, "I want to walk out into a big bright new day like that. So much better than hiding away in my mousehole. I'm tired of making myself small."

And that's what the epiphany was. Unpacked, it goes something like this:

Pain makes us small. Pain makes us make ourselves small. We make ourselves small so we can hide away from the pain, hide away from the rest of the world when we're in pain. An animal in pain hides. It makes itself small.

But making yourself small doesn't make the pain go away. So now you're so much smaller than you were born to be, and still in pain on top of it all. That sucks.

Worse, pain makes our desires small. It makes us want small things. When we're in pain, we bargain: "Just take the pain away, that's all I ask."

But we're not born to want small! We're born to want everything--love and long life and happiness and fulfillment and friends and comfort and safety and meaningful work and the ability to change the world for the better. Wanting big isn't a glitch or vice or something to be ashamed of. It's our goddamned birthright!

So I'm not going to make myself small in my head anymore. In my head, I'm going to make myself too big for the pain. It might still be there, it might still hurt, but it's not going to be my world, because my world is so much bigger than that. And I'm allowed to want it all.

So that was my epiphany the other night. Cheesy, huh? But it helps me keep the mental bad stuff at bay while I'm trying to sleep, so that's something. And eventually this thing will run its course and I'll be fine again.

Oh, and the belated January 22 fictionette is coming along nicely. It has dragons in it. Puppy dragons. Three of them. They are the best.