author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So I'm in the bath right now. This is the sort of thing you find out about me when you read my blog. Sometimes, when I'm too cold, too tired, too reluctant or too neurotic--tonight it's the "too tired" case because of roller derby scrimmage--in order to write anything at all, I need a tub full of hot water and a selection of cold beverages. (Tonight it's a mango Waterloo and an Abita "Andygator".) As this is a habit of many years, I've perfected the process. I have a pressboard plank that sits across the tub and acts as my desk. On that desk are a wireless keyboard, a wireless mouse, and my drink de jour (de nuit?). My laptop sits on a tall stool near enough that I can read it without squinting. Oddly, no candles or beauty concoctions are involved. Sometimes a cup or two of Epsom salts, because derby, but that's it.

And eventually I do the damn writing. Something about sweating my brain out my ears in water that's just as hot as I can stand shakes something loose. Also, after so many years, the association is well and truly built up; I might as well use it.

Today was a good Doing All The Things day. Yesterday was not. Yesterday I was running on too little sleep and too many errands. Today went a lot better:

• I revised a very short poem and sent it somewhere that particularly likes short things (compressed things, in fact). (It is not actually 10 words long. It is 10 lines long. I still need to write the if/then case into the manuscript stat box so that it says "lines" instead of "words" if the manuscript is a poem.)
• During my freewriting session, thanks to the Writer Igniter prompt generator, I got very invested in a retelling of the folk tale known as Aarne-Thompson type 706 ("The Armless Maiden") involving an apprentice tattoo artist. It's going in the revisions queue, which means one day this millennium I might actually finish it.
• I didn't finish the draft of this week's Friday Fictionette, but I finally figured out how to finish it.
• I typed up the first page of the second of the November Fictionette Artifacts I want to put in the mail by the end of the week.
• And I did this blog post. Ta-da.

Obligatory running submissions tally in handy tabulated form (copied from the source of the handy PHP page I wrote to pull up these stats from my database):

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	2019
Submissions:	0	0	3	10	23	10	46
Rejections:	1	0	0	3	13	10	27
Acceptances:	0	0	0	0	0	1	1

Aren't you glad you asked?

Today I want to talk about short story revision. But first: check it out, two days in a row of successful adulting! That's a surprise. Usually, after a day as successful as yesterday, I crash and burn; the pressure of having to live up to the previous day just does me in. But I seem to have evaded that trap today. Once again, I got everything other than this blog post done by 5:00 PM. And because tonight did not feature any roller derby practice, I finally found myself with time to thoroughly clean that gross covering of several years' dust off the magazine rack in the hall. I've been wanting to do that for months.

But. Story revision! Story revision and creation, actually; the story I'm working doesn't really have a finished draft to revise. It has the babble draft that came out of a freewriting session in a diner in Eagle, Colorado on the night before a roller derby tournament. And that's the trouble, really. I've already done the babble draft, so I have this innate sense that I'm not allowed to babble at it anymore. What I'm supposed to do now is create a draft that is shining and perfect, the story that is everything the babble draft dreams of being. All at once. Right now.

Not going to happen, obviously, but try telling my emotions/instincts/editor-brain/gut that.

This is what I meant yesterday about being unable to drag myself away from the procrastination method du jour when short story revision is the next thing on my to-do list. That nearly happened again today. With Merge Dragons being the procrastination method and everything. The only thing that saved me was knowing I said I'd get started at three, I was supposed to get started at three, it's three-oh-seven already, would I damn well get started already? Also, the next task after that needed to be done by 5:00 PM and would easily take up the full hour and a half I'd alloted it. So please let's not make with the holdups, OK?

Note to self: this particular brain hack has now worked multiple, repeated times on this particular brain. Continue with the hacking, please.

So I got started. But I fully expected to just spend half an hour futzing around with the opening three paragraphs again. I knew, plotwise, what would happen over the course of the story, but how to write those scenes down in a graceful, artistic, and compelling manner, that was a doozy. Hell with it, said I, just write it down any old how. So I did. And in doing so I tripped over a detail I had not hitherto considered, and wound up babbling some 500 words of backstory that turned the work in progress into a very different place.

Obviously all that babble will have to be ruthlessly whittled down--more revising! revising is hard!--but it's made the rough shape of the finished story just a little clearer and future revision sessions just a little less difficult. So that's something.

The thing is--and I keep going back to this point, I know--allowing myself to just put down terrible unreadable babble is a skill I'm learning from the Friday Fictionette project. When the story is due at the end of the week, there's no time to sit there staring at the page under the mistaken impression that if I just think about the story long enough it'll come together perfectly in my head. All I can do is throw words at the wall now and trust that something will stick.

The story I'm working on right now has no particular deadline. True, it's at the head of a very long queue of short stories that need work before they can be submitted to paying markets, so there is pressure to finish it sooner rather than later, but it's all internally applied. So it doesn't have its own supply of anti-procrastination jet fuel. It was sort of strange and wonderful watching it borrow fuel from my Friday Fictionettes practice.

It would appear that I have learned a lot more than I consciously realized from writing four new stories a month for almost five years.

Today I rediscovered why I keep plugging away at the Friday Fictionette project.

There've been times when I've wondered exactly that. The project has certainly been an additional source of stress, especially when I get behind schedule (and some aspects of it are still very, very far behind schedule). It has taken time away from other writing I could be doing. Hell, I've only just now got anywhere close to a workable, sustainable daily process that accommodates both the Friday Fictionette project and my commercial freelance goals, not to mention keeping up with this blog. And I mean just now, like, in the past week.

But every once in a while a reason to persist shines up brightly out of the mess of my day-to-day like an encouraging beacon that says "Keep it up! You're going the right way!" Or maybe it's more accurate to say it blinds me with its obviousness. WHATEVER.

Oh, there are the official reasons. It gives me practice meeting regular deadlines. It forces me to write a new thing with a beginning, middle, and end four times a month. It's motivation to meet myself on the page every day. But these are the medicine reasons, the bran flakes and lima beans reasons. The half hour of strength and endurance conditioning at the end of each roller derby practice. "Eat it up. Drink it down. Struggle through. It's good for you." I tell myself those reasons all the time, and I only kinda sorta believe them.

But there was that time last year when a Friday Fictionette release went on to be included in the Toasted Cake podcast. Nothing like listening to Tina Connolly read my little story to make me think, "I'm so glad I'm still doing this!"

And then there was that time yesterday when I realized that the fictionette I was just finishing up, three days late and counting, was a perfect fit for the themed submission call I'd been contemplating with a certain amount of despair. I kept looking sadly at the submission guidelines and lamenting, "I don't think I have anything suitable..." Well. Now I do. It just needs a bit more of a polish and a trim is all.

And would I have written it at all without the Friday Fictionette project to maintain? Well, yes. Like all fictionettes, it began with a daily freewriting session. But would I have remembered that particular freewriting session in time to write a submittable draft if I hadn't had this four-times-a-week assembly line demanding to be fed on the regular? Probably not!

To be clear, not every flash fiction market accepts reprints. And among those that do, very few accept reprints of self-published material. And then you've got the audio markets who don't care if it's been printed before or where, but if it's ever been broadcast in audio, they can't take it. So it's not like there's a lot of places I can send my short-shorts that began life as a Friday Fictionette.

So you can see I'm very pleased to find one that does, and for whose themed call my most recent release is a more or less perfect fit. And even more pleased that I've continued the Friday Fictionette project these past nearly five years.

More details later--after the submission resolves itself one way or another!

I got a rejection letter today! That makes four of the one hundred I want to acquire in 2019, and the first in response to the avalanche of daily manuscript submissions I began sending out mid-April. It's working, it's working!

Meanwhile, Hi. I'm in a hotel room in Eagle, Colorado. Tomorrow I skate with the Boulder County Bombers "All Stars" in the Melee in the Mountains tournament. Our first game, against the Chicago Outfit, will be at noon. And I am super tired and ready for bed.

It doesn't help that I just walked down to the Park 'n Ride to retrieve my car from where I left it charging at the free public charging station, only to discover when I got there that I'd left my car keys in the hotel room. So I decided the car can just stay there until tomorrow morning. I'm not unhappy that I went for the extra walk, though. Walks are nice.

But now I'm really tired. Therefore the rest of today's writing update will be super fast and super brief.

Ahem.

• Still way behind on the Friday Fictionettes, but I got a decent nibble in just now on the one for April 19.
• I kept up my daily submitting streak. Over lunch, I sent "First Breath," with its Colorado ski-town setting, to a Denver-centric anthology that might reprint it.
• Over meatloaf at the Eagle Diner, I managed a brief talk-to-myself session on the current short story revision.
• Also at the diner, I did some similarly brief freewriting, resulting in what looks like a solid "zero draft" for a brand new short story.

To be painfully honest, I have to admit to overestimating my submission streak the other day. At the time, Habitica reported a 9-day streak on that particular daily task, but it's very generous in preserving my streak so long as I use my Rogue powers of stealth to avoid damage from uncompleted dailies. Looking at the Submission Grinder, I see that today's submission brings me up to seven days of daily manuscript submissions, one each weekday from April 18-26 inclusive. Also I did one April 16. So it's not like the ongoing achievement loses any impressiveness after the correction. I'm still pretty damn pleased.

So. Today I did a Boulder Food Rescue shift, packed for a weekend trip, and drove three hours from Boulder to Eagle, and I still managed to do all my weekday writing things. That's pretty darn cool. Here's hoping I can do the same Monday despite Saturday's tournament, Sunday's drive home, and Monday's much-needed recovery activities.

I am contemplating a short story rewrite.

I originally wrote the story in response to a specific prompt in the submission guidelines of a themed quarterly publication. I submitted it; they rejected it; we move on. I rewrote it before submitting it elsewhere so that it wouldn't look so obviously like a story written to some other publication's prompt and theme, but, looking at it now, I'm forced to admit, the thing's still pretty darn skeletal. And incoherent. And obviously written to a prompt.

(I feel like a lot of things I write these days are skeletal. It's like I suddenly don't have the stamina needed for writing the actual story, so instead I write a really verbose story outline and call it a story. I'm a little worried about this.)

So I need to revise the story again. But I hardly know where to start. I've been staring at the draft and jotting down questions to myself in the margins: "Does this scene really serve the story? How?" "What's this story really about?" and "How does the homing device/angels/aliens thing interact with the lives-you-wished-you'd-lived theme?"

I have not jotted down any answers yet. I've taken fountain pen and spiral notebook and babbled out a series of possible directions in which I might choose to take the story. I have yet failed to choose any of them. I kind of suck at making decisions sometimes.

So... yeah. Short story rewrites are hard. In other news, water is wet and ice is cold. Good night.

It's been almost a week since I've said hi. Hi, blog! Stuff has been happening.

I came home from Omaha on Monday! I got sick! Now I'm getting better! I had a massage and a day off from practice on Tuesday, then I had classic sinusy crap on Wednesday, and then by Thursday I was feeling better enough to go to scrimmage.

That may not have been smart. I got more worn out and beat up than at either of our Continental Cup games! It being my first time back on the track in the Mile High area after spending a weekend playing derby at an elevation of only 1,090 feet might be a factor. Being sick, yeah, that was a factor too. Also relevant: we only had five skaters per bench. We played four-on-four so that everyone could get a chance to sit one jam in five, and everyone was in the jammer rotation. (You know what's fun? And by "fun" I mean "hell"? TWO-MINUTE JAMS. It is not always good news when the other jammer gets a penalty. Sometimes it just means now NOBODY has lead jammer status, and life for the next minute and a half will suuuuuuuuuck.) Then, at halftime, someone on one team had to leave. One of our skaters who had NSO'd the first half geared up to replace them. For reasons that were never entirely explained, the replacement skater was assigned to the other bench, so the second period of play featured a team of four versus a team of six. GUESS WHICH TEAM I WAS ON. Deathmarch scrim FTW! Did I mention that everybody jammed? And now nobody gets to sit out any? Woo. We got extra-long line-up time between jams, probably 45 seconds or a minute instead of the usual 30 seconds; it was just enough time for me to get just enough wind back to be able to swallow a small sip of water and then rush back out to the track.

In other derby news, archival footage is up from our games in Omaha! Here's Friday's game; here's Saturday. Archives are always free to watch. Have fun!

In still more derby news, my season would appear not to be over! I will be skating with the Bombshells in the B-team tournament bracket at the Thin Air Throwdown, which we are co-hosting at the Boulder County Fairgrounds on September 14-16. Tickets are available, and I recommend you get right on that, because in addition to the B-team tournament, there will be a round-robin exhibition of three of the highest ranked teams in the world. How often do you get to see Rose versus VRDL without leaving the state, let alone the county? So. MAKE PLANS.

Also I wrote! And finished stuff! And submitted stuff too! It's been a good week.

On Wedensday, I finally put up the Friday Fictionette for August 24. It's called "Change'll Do You Good." What kind of change? Any kind you like. Change of scenery. Change of career. Change in your social circle. Shape-changing, too, let's not forget that one. Anyway, it's about 1300 words long and available to subscribers in ebook and audio formats on Patreon.

Then I had to hurry up (as much as I could while subsisting on pseudoephedrine, Mucinex, and tea) and revise some older fictionettes for reprint submission for a deadline of TODAY. (I mean "today" as in August 31. I am aware it is has not been August 31 for a couple hours now. Shh.) I put them into the email about two hours ago and am feeling very proud of myself now. I'm actually quite pleased with how they turned out. Should they come home from today's excursions with rejections, I think they're worth the "til Hell won't have 'em" treatment. (When I finished my week at Viable Paradise in 2006, I swore the VP Graduate's Oath, which is to write, to finish what I write, to submit what I write, to paying markets, until Hell won't have 'em.) There aren't that many places that I know of that A. take reprints B. at flash length, and C. don't mind if their only previous appearance was on Patreon or by other self-publishing means, but I intend to find them all.

What with the traveling and the sick and the playing catch-up and the other, more implacable deadlines, I have not yet released the Fictionette Freebie for August. I intend to do that this weekend. I haven't selected one yet, but it probably won't be "Change'll Do You Good." Because it's only been out a few days, that's why. It would feel silly to have published it only Wednesday and then suddenly revisit it to change its "Who Can See This Post" option. Might as well have just pushed it up full public in the first place.

Look, I don't claim to make logical sense here. I'm not sure I even claim to make sense, period. But this is the sense of it I've got and I'm sticking with it until further notice.

Also scheduled for this weekend: More anti-moth activities. Yay? I finished putting the portion of the office I'd last cleaned back together last week Wednesday--which involved, you might remember, vacuuming every single book and vinegar-rinsing every single item that wasn't made out of paper--just in time to leave for Omaha. My next step will be the brick-and-board bookshelf in the bedroom, which I am now 98% sure houses its own infestation. We've been keeping doors closed so the moths don't migrate, and the bedroom's almost the only place I've seen moths all week. ALMOST. One crossed my path in the office the other day and I just about wept. I'm hoping it stumbled in after taking a tour of the house during a time when the bedroom door was left open. BUT WE'LL SEE.

Wow, that was a long post. Maybe my posts wouldn't be so stupidly long if I blogged more than once a week. More research on the subject is needed.

OMG there is a PLOT HOLE in my story. This is not a typo; this is an honest-to-goodness LOGIC ERROR. Which was present when the story went out on submission the first time. SHAME.

So... the protagonist is only home because of taking a semester off from college. Also their little brother is in school. Also it is quite hot out BECAUSE IT IS JULY. All right, there are circumstances under which this would not be a plot hole, fine, cool, but I'm not going to try to build one of them into the story because DISTRACTION.

Nobody panic. I can fix this.

But why the crud do I have such trouble with SEASONS and CALENDARS? This is not the first time I've made a goof along those lines. Also why does every single "simple" editing pass turn out to be all complex and stuff? Why can't it ever be easy?

*grumps off back to the keyboard, muttering*

Yesterday I got to everything but the blogging, so today I'm starting with the blogging. This my occasional strategy for making sure I do all of the writing things--start with whatever didn't happen yesterday, to make sure it happens today. I am very clever that way. *pats self on head*

Among the things I did do yesterday was a solid editing pass on "Survival, After." It came back from Shimmer with rejection in hand; I'm getting it ready for its next outing. Mainly I just need it to be about 350 words shorter, so I'm going over the manuscript with a Scalpel of -10% (two-handed weapon, imbued with curse: Perfectionist). But yesterday's pass also uncovered a lot of typos, cut-and-paste artifacts, and gerunds that ought to have been changed to simple present tense when the sentence got restructured. And vice versa. All of which were there on the story's last outing. So Much Embarrassment. This is the sort of thing that happens when it's a rush job to squeak it in under deadline. Go forth and do not likewise.

Anyway, I hope to finish this edit today so I can resubmit the story.

I'm back in Boulder now, back to the normal weekly schedule of writing and roller derby. There's still a touch of travel journaling for me to wrap up. Here it goes:

Thursday, July 19, 2018: I get out of town. My timing sucks.

Travel anxiety got me out of bed early, which meant plenty of time for a shower, laundry, packing, and last-minute printouts. I'd gotten as far as the shower and was starting on the laundry when Dad got up from the computer and shared the bad news: One of his oldest friends--the one whose garden had produced the tomatoes we had in yesterday's sauce piquante and also the cucumbers and squash we used in the kimchi, had just died that morning. He'd been less than two weeks out from receiving an artificial heart, but his all-natural original just wasn't able to wait that long despite all the day-to-day medical support he was receiving. Dad had volunteered to email mutual friends, seeing as how his friend's widow was obviously not in a space where she could handle that right now. I'm not sure really how able Dad was to handle it, but he muddled through.

So that was deeply sad. And it seemed like adding insult to injury that it happened the same morning I was leaving town, so that I was abandoning Dad right when he'd suffered an unexpected additional blow. But we made space in that morning's itinerary for extra hugs and a few stories about Dad's friend.

I headed out about two hours in advance of my train, leaving myself time to top up the rental car's fuel tank, return the rental car, and walk from the Hertz office to the train station. I could have had them shuttle me over, but if I had, I couldn't have stopped at Cochon Butcher for a sandwich and beer to go. Now, the smart plan would have been to ask Hertz to hold my luggage, walked down to Cochon for to-go, walk back to Hertz, then let them shuttle me down. Because after Cochon there were about six very long blocks to walk, and six blocks of New Orleans in July is a lot. Because I was not as smart as I could be, I arrived at the train station a lot sweatier and dehydrated than I might have. But my beer was refreshing and the sandwich was worth waiting for.

There was wifi on the City of New Orleans. I made a good-faith effort to get the Friday Fictionette done while I was still able to upload it; nevertheless, it would not go up until Saturday evening. It was "Mardel's Salamander" (ebook, audiobook), an irreverent romp through a fantasy future in which computer programming is magic and magic has consequences. I also got my Saturday morning AINC reading done later that night. Audacity's noise reduction filter worked astonishingly well; you could hardly tell from the finished MP3s that I was on a train. Given how well I could hear my next-door neighbor's phone call, though, I was probably not my next-door neighbor's favorite neighbor. I tried to keep my volume down, but you never know.

I could not possibly have been my next-door neighbor's least favorite neighbor. That prize had to go to the room across the aisle from me in which two pre-teen boys were roundly enjoying their mobile sleepover. They boarded the train at, I think, Jackson, Mississippi, and the shrieking, squealing, shouting, and roughhousing began almost immediately. Their parental units were just down the hall and sometimes poked heads in to adjudicate some point of sibling rivalry (not sure they actually were brothers, but you see what I mean), but never, so far as I could tell, to tell them KEEP YOUR VOICES DOWN AND STOP USING THE HALLWAY AND SLEEPER DOOR AS YOUR PERSONAL PLAYGROUND. Thankfully they fell asleep early and didn't rise until late. And I actually slept pretty well that night.

Friday, July 20, 2018: A little work, a little play, and once again we're on our way.

We got into Chicago Union Station more or less on time. I made my way to the sleeper lounge and staked out a spot at the workstation counter downstairs. Here I could sit at an actual desk with my computer and work or play comfortably. Also I did not have to listen to the ubiquitous televisions because here they were silent; if you wanted to listen, you connected your smart phone to a particular "Hearing Hotspot" wifi network and downloaded an app. That was useful intel. The official Amtrak Wifi network wouldn't let me connect to game servers, but the Hearing Hotspot did. So after I uploaded that day's blog post I got to play Spiral Knights until it was time to board my train.

The rest of the ride was much like the previous leg of the journey, only minus the disruptive pre-teen boy sleepover element. And no wifi, of course. I continued work on the fictionette, cleaned out my email spam folder, solved jigsaw sudoku, and read ebooks. I also even got a small amount of physical conditioning to make up for spending the whole day on my butt and Saturday's crossfit (which I would because tired). See, there are these vertical bars in the bathrooms for you to hold onto when the ride gets bumpy, and it's possible to use them for a sort of assisted squat/pull-up exercise, and then do a set of ten each time one is obliged to visit the facilities.

So things were productive and peaceful. And on Saturday morning I woke up in Colorado.

The end.

Food talley for the remainder of the trip:

• 2018-07-19, 12:00 - Pork belly sandwich with mint and cucumber on white bread (Cochon Butcher)
• A bunch of Amtrak meals that were adequate or even tasty but not particularly worth reporting

I have done it. I have submitted "Survival, After" to Shimmer for my very last submission to their very final issue.

Operation NO REGRETS has been successful.

I'm still not sure that the pacing is right. I spent so much time this week (meaning, mostly, today) trying to get the new material for the first half written that I can't help but feel the second half is slight by comparison. Like, maybe the first half should only be the first third, and there should be more scenes about the protagonist's journey after the protagonist resigns themselves to having to make that journey. I don't know. I can't be sure until I've let enough time go by that neither half feels fresher than the other.

And, well, I didn't have that kind of time left. I barely had another hour left before the deadline--always assuming that "midnight, July 14" means exactly and technically that, 00:00 2018-07-14, and not 23:59 2018-07-14 as I'd halfway hoped. Always better to assume the earlier deadline than the later one. ZERO REGRETS IS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE OUTCOME. So. It's in, just under, presumably, the wire.

Tomorrow morning I wake up at 5:15, at which point I get dressed, affix my horns to my helmet, prepare my bookbag for the morning, and get geared up in time to skate out the door at 6:00, thus to be at the Sugar Mill for 6:30, thus to be staged for Bull Release o'Clock which is 8:00 AM. That's an early dang morning. It follows a long and effortful Friday in which not only did I write and revise and line-edit and submit a brand new story but I also skated between a round-trip between the Sugar Mill and the far end of the Marigny. And now it's midnight.

So... the volunteer reading due on AINC's servers on Saturday at 11:00 AM isn't getting done. I'm sorry. My bad.

And (you guessed it) the Friday Fictionette for July 13th will not go up until later on this weekend. More apologies.

But I submitted that damn story, I did. And whatever happens with that submission, I got a brand new story ready for submission. My story stable is that much deeper and I am feeling like a successful writer tonight.

With that happy thought, I now go *thud.*

Blogging after a period of not blogging shares a problem with revising a short story after a period of not revising the short story: It's hard to pick up where I left off. It's hard to remember where I left off. At least with blogging I can say, "To hell with 'where I left off.' Where am I now?"

So. Where am I now? Here's a quick tally.

Friday Fictionettes - All caught up except for, as usual, the Fictionette Artifacts. Of those, I'm still typing up the ones for April. Thank goodness I have very patient $5-tier Patrons. But I'm up to date on the main attraction, which is to say the ebooks and audiobooks for the four Fictionettes released in June. It took me well into Week 5 to finish that fourth one, but it's out now. Here's the June round-up:

• June 1: "Encore" (ebook, audiobook) - in which a retired magician is pestered for "just one more trick." This is the Fictionette Freebie for June 2018!
• June 8: "The Fairy Volkswagon" (ebook, audiobook) - in which an auto repair shop takes on a strange commission.
• June 15: "Language Barrier" (ebook, audiobook) - in which we are reduced to the Universes of our eyes and ears.
• June 22: "To Whom It May Concern" (ebook, audiobook) - in which we leave the Guild of Couriers the same way we arrived.

You may notice I have not got links to the HTML teaser excerpt. That's because I am no longer doing those. I began doing them so that people could get enough of a taste of the sort of things I write to be able to make an informed choice about subscribing. Except I started this project almost four years ago. I've released one Fictionette Freebie per month ever since August 2014. That's a lot of material. That's certainly enough of a free sample for prospective Patrons to decide whether getting three more of them per month is sufficient entertainment value for their dollar (or three dollars if they want the audiobook). And since I seem to fall over into Lateville on a dime, I might as well make my weekly job no bigger than it has to be.

In addition to unlocking one Friday Fictionette per month at the end of the month, I'll also continue putting the Fictionette Freebies up on my blog, on 4thewords, and on my Wattpad (admittedly, my Wattpad is a bit behind the times). But instead of posting a teaser excerpt to all those places, I'll just include the complete text in the HTML portion of each Friday's Patron-locked ebook release. It'll either be that month's Freebie or it won't.

...eh, looks like I still need to do the blog, HTML-on-Patreon, and Wattpad versions of the June Freebie. IT'S COMING REAL SOON NOW, OK?

And as for those delayed Artifacts, I'll be devoting one 25-minute session of each workday until I'm all caught up again. It's a solid plan. And those 25 minutes go real far now that this Dvorak-head can almost touch-type in Qwerty again! Here in Chez LeBoeuf-Little, we celebrate the manual typewriter.

Short Story Revisions

Last week I finally got back to revisions on "Survival, After," which, because of the aforementioned dry period, meant I had to spend at least one session just rereading what I had and remembering what my next intentions were. Right now, I'm working on a new scene in which the protagonist searches for news of her brother. I don't know what I was thinking in the first place, but I had the protagonist just up and leave town without knowing their family's status, alive or dead or other. That seems... callous? I was probably thinking something like, "I've only 750 words, I think we can assume they're dead, OK?" In the expanded and rewritten version, we don't get to assume stuff like that. We gotta show it.

I can't afford to miss a day now, not if I want to submit it to Shimmer. SHIMMER IS CLOSING ITS DOORS FOREVER AND I AM INCONSOLABLE. Their last issue comes out November 2018, and they are only accepting submissions through July 14. So. I have a really hard deadline here.

Roller Derby

Well, we're practicing again. We've rented time at a skating rink several nights a week for our WFTDA level practices. Our Phases have been going to an outdoor roller hockey rink. Various other leagues have invited us to drop in with them for practices and scrimmages, many of them at discounted drop-in rates. And a neighborhood crossfit gym has donated time for my teammate, who's a regular there, to lead sessions for us.

I just went to her crossfit session tonight. It wasn't so bad! I could do all of the things, if at a reduced weight capacity compared to some of my amazing teammates. But I'm in a little bit of pain now. There were a lot of squats. Air squats, back squats, goblet squats, and of course the squat you do for proper form in throwing the medicine ball against the wall ("wall balls"). My adductors are not happy with me right now. The left is especially grumpy. And that's before we talk about how V-ups hate me (they really, really hate me). But after several weeks of only skating once a week, I needed tonight's workout.

I also really needed the post-workout outing to Ras Kassa's with a couple of teammates. I hadn't been to Ras Kassa's since they moved out of Boulder. Hell, I wasn't acutely aware that they had moved. Far as I knew, they were just gone, and I was sad. Well, no need to be sad anymore! They're right around the corner from the crossfit gym. I can see them becoming a regular post-workout ritual. And it was so good to spend extra time with my teammates! After the barn burned, a dearth of practice locations meant seeing my teammates a lot less frequently than I'm used to. That's pretty much 99% of my social life! I'm a confirmed introvert, so my needs in terms of social life are simple and few, but what few they are are needs. Our practice schedule is still much reduced, but tonight at least was pure balm on that wound, so, yay.

Dailiness

Did kinda so-so today. Let's see how tomorrow goes.