author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Well, hallelujah. It's a fictionette. This is the one that should have gone up on January 15. It's about as late as a fictionette's ever been. It's called "The Artist's Apprentice" (that's the teaser; subscribers click here for the whole thing in PDF and/or MP3) and it's a reinterpretation of the fairy tale "The Goosegirl." Now that I think of it, I sort of blundered in naming the characters. I forgot that the titular Goosegirl is in fact the genuine princess; it's her role in her betrothed's kingdom while her maid is pretending to be her. The impostor herself was never a goosegirl at all. But oh well. These things happen. I don't think the fictionette much suffers for it.

In fact, I'm kind of pleased with it. Which is surprising, given how much at a loss I was to even begin, back on the day when it was due. The original freewriting session turned out only a very verbose outline of the way the story should go, and not a single rough draft scene I could start from. I have a bad habit of babbling to myself about story ideas during half my freewriting time, like I'm trying to talk myself into finally diving in. It's not a bad way to get started on a larger project. It's a great way to make me cuss out my past self when it's time to start the week's fictionette.

Anyway, my hope is to have the belated January 22 fictionette out by the end of this week. I'd love to have it out tomorrow, but I know better than to make a rash promise like that, especially on a Wednesday. I'll be starting the thing from scratch, from the freewriting session output I selected to be the fictionette's bare bones. If I have it out by the month's fifth Friday, that'll be fantastic. Then I'll do all the end-of-month stuff over the weekend. And then I can start February fresh and new and perfectly on time.

That's the goal, anyway. We'll see how long it lasts.

Stay tuned for Wednesday night's blog post, which will be full of whining and excuses but also, quite probably, epiphanies. (I had a lightbulb moment last night which I'm sitting on until it can get a blog post of its very own.)

OK, so, I am behind in everything. Let's just get that out of the way right now. I'm behind on doing the books and paying the bills, I'm overdue several non-skating tasks for my roller derby league, I can't seem to get five hours of writing in during a work day, and I can't remember the last time I managed to spend quality time with my foam roller. I have been waking up with very stiff calf-muscles. I haven't read nearly as many books and stories that were published in 2015 as I'd have liked to have been able to consider for Hugo award nominations (I'll still cast a ballot - it just won't be as complete as I'd hoped). I'm even behind on my playtime. I've barely made a start on earning my January 2016 Seal o' Piracy, and I can't seem to get all seven daily jigsaw sudoku completed in a week.

Oh, and, hey, the Friday Fictionette for January 15 still isn't even fully drafted. Good news is, January 2016 is a month with five Fridays. Even if I'm not able to post the Jan. 22 fictionette on time, I have a whole 'nother week to get all caught up before the first fictionette in February is due.

So, much as it pains me, I'm letting Friday Fictionettes fall to a slightly lesser priority until some of the other stuff gets done. OK, well, not the Puzzle Pirates stuff. But the bill-paying and the league responsibilities and that sort of thing. Until they're done, fictionette catch-up will be happening at something less than a breakneck pace.

My problem was a weekend with not enough sleep, too much stress, and two back-to-back team practices on Sunday. I was exhausted. Whenever I didn't actually have to be anywhere, my system sort of just shut down all weekend long and yesterday too. Which meant I got behind on everything. More behind, I mean. Which meant I got stressed. (More stressed.) Which meant I went into self-defense shut-down again. It's sort of a feedback loop.

That I got anything done today was kind of a triumph. I did it by pretending that I had no deadlines at all, that nothing was overdue, and that I had all the time in the world to do things so long as I actually did them. I wonder if this is what that study is all about, the one that purports to demonstrate that people who lie to themselves a little are happier? Because "I have all the time in the world" and "there are no deadlines, nothing's over due" are totally bald-faced lies. But pretending to believe them lightened the stress enough to keep from wasting yet another day in oh-shit I-can't-handle-this shut-down mode.

So while nothing quite got finished today, progress was made on all fronts. More progress will be made tomorrow, assuming I'm able to drag myself out of bed on time.

Well. Sorry that all you get today is a navel-gazey introspective post. The actually writing blog is all about the writing process, and sometimes process ain't pretty. Sometimes the writing process depends on other processes. Well, it always does, right? The key to a productive writing life is structuring life so that there's room in it for writing. And, well, sometimes I manage to misplace that key. And then it's all, "Where did you last see it?" and "Retrace your steps," and "It's always in the last place you look..." And sometimes you just have to have a whole new key made because that first key, it's gone. You can't waste the rest of your week trying to find it. Just replace it and get on with your life.

That's about where I'm at.

Today all I have to report is that yes, I did manage to submit "Down Wind" to the market with the January 15 deadline on its current submission window. I have done little else of use today, but, darn it, I did that.

It's weird. While there were still some three weeks to go, my thoughts on that story were along the lines of "it sucks it sucks there's too much to fix I can't fix it all I can't even begin to fix it" and I had to calm myself down. But this week, with the deadline looming, I caught myself thinking, "You know, it doesn't actually need that much work. It just needs a once-over and a read-aloud."

The truth was somewhere in between. It took me only about an hour today to finish it up, but the edits weren't all just sentence-sounds-better tweaks. Some edits were ruthless deletions because that sentence isn't adding anything to the story, and that other one is just a rehash of something that's already made clear here. On the print-out, there's a big slash-mark over half a paragraph in the first scene, with a note in the margin saying "Angst! Woe! Cut." One has to trust that the angst and woe will come across without the author plonking the reader on the head with an angst-and-woe stick.

Now I have to figure out what to do next. I have ever so many ideas for new stories from doing my daily freewriting--but I also have a few more stories to dig out of revision hell. We'll see which project successfully auditions for my attention next week.

And over the weekend... all the things I didn't do this week (ahem ahem late fictionette). That's the plan, anyway. Without something big like a roller derby bout to beat me up on Saturday, I should have no problems, right? All I've got is six hours of practice on Sunday. No big deal, right? Riiiiiight.

Oh, for goodness's sake. Being four days late with each week's Friday Fictionette is not the way to woo new subscribers. Well, here's the nominal January 8 fictionette, anyway: "The Magpie's Big Heist." Everyone knows magpies will compulsively steal shiny things, right? Except, as it turns out, they don't. Well, there goes one more piece of cherished folklore. And of course I didn't fact-check the legend until after I'd written and published the fictionette. Too bad. If knowing this doesn't ruin that early plot point in Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum for you, then you can suspend disbelief for this little story-like object too.

Also I released the Fictionette Freebie for December 2015. It's "The Thing With Feathers" from December 4. That's the link to the PDF; audio is here. Both formats are now free for anyone to download and read or listen. I chose that one because I just really like it. It felt good to write. I hope y'all like it too.

I was so sure I could have all the fictionette things done at least by Sunday evening. No big deal, right? I was taking the day off from derby anyway, right? Except the whole reason I needed the day off from roller derby was also the reason I couldn't get the fictionette done, nor yet anything else that would have been halfway useful: I was pretty much dead for the day. I am always pretty much dead the day after a bout. Why do I forget these things? Success at getting things done goes hand in hand with awareness of how things don't get done. My awareness is sometimes not so good.

And the problem with lateness is, it begets lateness. I am now also running up hard against this Friday's deadline to submit "Down Wind" where I want it to go; prioritizing it might impact my chances of getting the January 15 fictionette out on time.

Well, my friends, I shall do my best.

Today I'm also starting my 2016 re-read and work-through of The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron's 12-week course in creativity. It's not for everyone, but it helps me. I work through it every few years as a sort of wellness check-up. I'm not in the same place that I was in the first time I read the book, nor even the fifth time, so I'm getting new insights out of the exercises. Revisiting the chapter on Basic Tools helped me re-focus my daily Morning Pages practice--why I do it, how best to do it, what I can hope to get out of it. And the Week 1 emphasis on converting nasty, discouraging, near-involuntary brain-blurts ("There's no way I'll get through all the stuff I have to do, I'll let everyone down, it's hopeless") into positive affirmations ("I am capable. I am reliable. I am relaxed and confident. I have all the time I need to accomplish all my goals") is really useful right now. I have a lot of brain-blurts that need converting.

Perhaps later on this week I'll have more coherent thoughts to share about the process. For now I'm just trying to find time to do the process.

The blood pressure thing is going well. Like, super-well. The bottle my meds came in is labeled Nifedipine, fancy specialized terminology that basically translates to miracle juice and magic powder. I started taking it Saturday, and every day since then my morning readings have gotten lower and lower, and today they were downright normal. A normal blood pressure reading for the first time in more than a year! Modern medical science, y'all. It works. Also I got my echocardiogram scheduled at last, so that's nice.

Really, the week's off to a great start. It's just been a slow start and I don't like slow.

Now it is time to once more put myself to bed and hope the derby aches and pains go away enough to do more derby tomorrow. I'm told one eventually adjusts. Wouldn't that be nice?

OK! So. First off, I've finally posted the Friday Fictionette for January 1. It's called "The Wine Cellar That Wished" and it's sort of kind of an Edgar Allan Poe fanfic don't judge me. It's also sort of humor and sort of kind of horror. Hey, I believe in truth in advertising.

Secondly: Today really was a proper Tuesday. Yesterday was a Monday during which nothing much got done and the dirty dishes were really compelling, but today I got to work. Woke up in time to do Morning Pages before the dentist appointment (which went well, thank you). Got home in time to have breakfast and start my morning shift at 10:00 AM. Took care of some necessary household administration tasks during my lunch break. Started my afternoon shift around 2:00 PM. Left for roller derby practice around 5:15 PM with the satisfaction of knowing I had logged five hours and had left no writing task undone other than this blog post right here, which I am writing now.

Basically, I got my butt into gear and I worked like a writer who writes for a living. Then I survived my first A team practice of the 2016 season. Writing and roller derby. That's pretty much how my days go. How they're supposed to go, anyway.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow going about the same. Only instead of the dentist I've got volunteer reading, instead of A team practice I have B team practice, and instead of spending the majority of my work day on fictionette catch-up I'll spend the majority of my afternoon shift revising "Down Wind." It's almost ready to submit, y'all! And still ten days until the submission deadline!

So this week is off to a fantastic start, is all I really have to say.

(I'd say "this year," but I don't want to jinx it.)

A thousand apologies, but all things fictionette will be late again. Nothing bad happened; I just got to work on things too late, and now it's nearly midnight. Expect fulfillment this weekend or, at the latest, Monday.

Probably I should have just excused myself from both this one and last one, seeing as how they're both on holidays. And of course I've been on vacation. I only just got back late last night. (It was a very nice homecoming. John brought me home from the airport and then immediately began pressing me to stuff my face with his homemade bread, and homemade chocolate chip cookies, and homemade spaghetti sauce. Best homecoming ever.) One of these days I really must stop overestimating the amount of work I can get done while on vacation, or at a roller derby tournament, or at a convention. One of these days.

Vacation is over, though, and it's back to everyday things, chief among them writing and roller derby. ("What have you been up to lately?" "Oh, writing. Roller derby. Video games. And more writing. And more roller derby." This is my life.)

On the skating front, three of us were at the practice space in below-freezing weather just because we love being on wheels. John, in his derby persona of Head Coach Papa Whiskey, gave us some agility drills to try and helped us improve our hockey stops. Then we're all having a party tomorrow night to celebrate the end of one season and the beginning of another. Then we have our last off-season Sunday morning practice. Team practices begin this week, and I'll be going to all the All Stars and Bombshells practices that I can manage, because the results of the latest travel team try-outs is that I'm an A/B crossover again. Woot!

On the writing front, my immediate goal is getting "Down Wind" ready for submission. The response to my submission of "Caroline's Wake" to that market was, indeed, a rejection, but such a complimentary one! Such lovely things they had to say! I sent it along to somewhere else, a prestigious market that's always been a long shot--but if any story of mine was worth a long-shot chance, this one's it. Anyway, that means I'm free to send something new to the market that rejected it. But I've only got until January 15, so I'll have to get to work right away.

(I did not work on any short fiction other than fictionettes in New Orleans. Vacation!)

I am also having thoughts of rereading, and reworking, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, because it's been a few years since I've done that. I think it might be time to do it again. But about that, more later.

Oh, hey--happy new year!

Again, apologies for the belated Christmas Fictionette. Well, it's not really anything to do with Christmas. It's set more in the fall, I think, round about harvest time, though I've just realized there's a tiny, insignificant, yet unsightly plot hole concerning this detail. There is an impending birth, and I suppose it's technically a virgin birth, but that's just a coincidence of species. In any case, no midwinter festivals were harmed in the making of this fictionette, which is called "Premature Labor."

This brings my first full year of Friday Fictionettes to a close. New Year's Day will be the first Friday in 2016, and I intend to begin another full year of 'em at that time. (That fictionette probably won't have anything intentional to do with its holiday, either.) It's not that I find the sheer number of Patrons a compelling case for continuing the Patreon campaign. But I do continue to find value in the weekly routine. It's good for my work ethic. It's good exercise for my writing muscles. And it's just plain good fun. So! Roll on 2016, with another 52 fictionettes in store.

The visit home continues at a leisurely, unpressured pace. I thought I might head into the city over the weekend, but in fact I never quite crossed the parish line until today, when I took my freewriting and my fictionette work over to Rue de la Course. This was followed by lunch at Pho Bistreaux (shrimp spring rolls and Vinh's special) and a little window-shopping up and down Oak Street.

That doesn't mean I didn't get out of the house all weekend. Did some biking Saturday (and had the Pasta Carmella at Bistro Orleans). Skated over to Bucktown on Sunday (and wound up watching part of that very enjoyable Saints game at Melius Bar over a couple of Abitas and a chili cheese hot-dog).

Tomorrow all depends. If my cousin and her family wind up doing fun things in town, I may wind up tagging along. If not, I'll probably end up combining the skating thing with the writing at a public establishment thing, as it's the last day of my trip that's forecast to be at all dry and sunny, or at least dry and overcast. In any case, it would be a shame to waste it indoors.

The Friday Fictionette for December 18 is up! After some angsty deliberation (I hate coming up with titles), I called it "What Your Name is Worth," because that's pretty much what it's about. It's sort of Weird West, which isn't generally my thing; I just went where the writing prompt pointed. You know how it goes.

The link above goes to a brief excerpt hosted on Patreon. These links go to the full-length PDF and MP3 editions, which may be downloaded by subscribers at the $1 and $3 per month pledge tiers respectively. All the details about the Friday Fictionettes project are over here.

Once I got that published, I thought, "Hey, how about I post another excerpt to Wattpad?" I've been so very, very behind in posting the fictionette excerpts to Wattpad. I've been catching up, one excerpt at a time, as and when I have time. And supposedly anything that goes up on a Friday has a much better chance of being "discovered" than stuff that goes up most other days of the week, so, OK, I posted "...Champagne." That's the one from October 23, so I'm getting close to caught up at least.

And then I thought, "I have time, why not get a little more caught up in back-filling the meta-data from the earlier fictionettes?" Which is to say, the Scrivener fields in which I jot down the URLs of the PDF, MP3, and fictionette excerpt on Patreon, and the corresponding excerpt on Wattpad, and the corresponding excerpt on my blog. Not to mention title and date and wordcount and the date of the freewriting session the fictionette is based on, because I want to keep track of stuff like that. Some of these fields got added late in the game, so they were blank for many of the earlier fictionettes. Some of these fields I just forgot to fill in once in a while.

Much of the data I needed in order to back-fill the meta-data fields could only be retrieved by combing back... and back... and back through the Patreon and Wattpad archives. Both of them work like this: You go to the "Works" or "Posts" page, which loads the most recent handful of items. You page all the way to the bottom of the screen. If it's Patreon, it detects you've scrolled all the way down and says, "Loading more posts..." for a few seconds. If it's Wattpad, you click "show more," and you also wait for a few seconds. After waiting for a few seconds, it loads the next handful of items. And then you scroll down to the bottom of the page and you do it again. And again. And again.

And then I thought, "This is such a pain! Why don't I just get all caught up on meta-data right now so that I never, ever, ever have to go through this again?"

And that, dear readers, is why fictionette procedures took about four hours today.

A mostly unscheduled weekend looms. Saturday, for once, I've got nothing on the calendar at all--well, a couple of very brief errands, no big deal, but no events, you know?--so I'm going to hang out with my loving, lovable, and miraculously supportive husband. Sunday would usually be roller derby practice, but this Sunday is the third and final allotted session for travel team tryout skills evaluations, and I've already done mine. Besides, this being the final tryout session, John will probably wind up in a coaches' meeting long into the afternoon to finalize travel team rosters. I'd just be awkwardly trying to avoid overhearing confidential things while waiting impatiently to go home. So instead I'm just going to stay home in the first place. Glorious.

Then on Monday evening I fly to New Orleans for the holidays. So I suppose I'll spend Monday in a state of pre-travel stress. Yay? Yay.

It's ridiculously late, but it's out now: "Mala's Desert Muse," your Friday Fictionette for the second week of December 2015. That link will take you to a brief excerpt of the fictionette, followed by links to download the full-length piece if you're already a subscriber, and links to become a subscriber if you're not one yet and would like to be.

The weekend was extremely full of roller derby, what with the two-day clinic down at the Glitterdome. I learned a lot! It was awesome! And I had no energy for just about anything else all weekend except visiting some friends on the way home from Denver. They were nice visits. They are very nice friends who don't mind me arriving somewhat sweaty and also vague from exhaustion.

I took advantage of the long-ish drive to begin listening to an audiobook of Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Then I just sort of kept listening through my post-derby bath and on my way to sleep. I'm midway through Chapter 15 as of last night. The Overdrive download chops it up into "parts" that don't actually correspond with chapter headings; I've listened through Part 7. I have had people describe this book to me as "another take on Beauty and the Beast," which I suppose is accurate insofar as it goes. It doesn't go nearly far enough. I'm also hearing very strong echoes of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (Goethe, not Disney--or, if Disney, Fantasia, not Nicolas Cage) only not so much the plot thereof as the premise and emotional conflict therein. But there's a lot more going on in Novik's novel than in either tale. I am hooked. I'm desperately looking forward to Part 8 tonight at bedtime.

I downloaded the audiobook, by the way, from the Viggle Store. It is the second thing I've purchased from Viggle, the first being an ebook of Dreams of Shreds and Tatters. (I'm about two-thirds through reading it. It's OK. It could be better. But I do appreciate me some King in Yellow fan fiction.) I've finally gotten the hang of using Viggle efficiently. It involves clicking on bonus ads during my writing stints, playing the Viggle Football game, and using the resources made available by this web site here. (Ssh! Don't tell.) By the time I've listened through all of Uprooted I will probably have enough points to purchase some other wonderful thing. In fact I'm only about 2,000 points away from downloading this wonderful thing, the link to which I include mainly to remind me that I'm interested in purchasing it.

This is another one of those unfortunate weeks where the Friday Fictionette will have to be a Weekend Fictionette. I could blame yesterday's scrimmage, which was fantastic but left me exhausted enough to use "roller derby recovery" as an excuse to sleep late the next day. I could blame that, but I won't, because that's not the problem. The problem was, when I finally got up, I rolled over, grabbed my library copy of The Bone Clocks, and didn't put it down again until I'd reached the end.

My problem is, I have very little self-discipline around books.

Now, this weekend is a weekend containing no less than eight hours of roller derby doings and a good friend's birthday party, so I'm going to have to be clever about eking out enough time to get the fictionette up while we can still sort of kind of call it December: Week 2. Clever and also somewhat strict with myself. (Alas. It is no fun whatsoever to be strict with myself.) But not so strict that I don't let myself get enough sleep, because, well, roller derby. Athletes need sleep!

But at least I finished the library book, so that temptation is behind me.

The Bone Clocks is by David Mitchell, who also wrote that Cloud Atlas whose movie adaptation everyone was raving about not so long ago. In this book, he's created a huge sort of puzzle box that solves itself for you slowly, piece by piece, over the course of one woman's lifetime. In many ways it felt like a more mature and nuanced version of what Sheri Tepper was trying to do with Beauty. It's got a very similar story structure--at least, superficially so--and it voices very similar concerns. But it strikes a much more convincing balance between "Some things are just wrong, mmkay?" and "It's always more complicated than you think." And when it was over I not only cried a little at the end, but I found myself more prone to crying over other things, both happy and sad, for some time after I'd closed the book. It was as though the book stayed not so much in my conscious thoughts as in my emotional circuitry, magnifying everything else I felt for the rest of the afternoon.

It's either science fiction or fantasy depending on your point of view. Maybe a little of both. It has a science fictional tendency towards exploring future outcomes of present day action. It has a fantastical approach to psionic powers, reincarnation, and the afterlife. It has a terribly realistic viewpoint on disasters both past and present, but it never quite robs the reader of hope. It dangles what feel like hundreds of loose threads over the course of the story, and all but I think two of them get woven back into a satisfying resulotion. (One of those unresolved threads is a real humdinger, though, I gotta say. [ROT13]Pevfcva'f zheqre jnf fhccbfrq gb znxr gur cbrzf trg angvbany nggragvba, ohg gurl ner va snpg arire zragvbarq ntnva.[/ROT13] This bugs. But by the end of the book I wasn't thinking about that. I didn't actually think about it until hours after I'd finished, because everything else about the book was so good.)

It wouldn't be fair to give me all of the blame for my unfortunate binge-reading. I think Mitchell has to shoulder some of the responsibility. He wrote a book that was very, very hard to put down. I'm going to have to wait some time before checking out Cloud Atlas. Purely out of self-defense, you understand. Can't afford to have days like this every day.