author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Oh, goodness. Today. Today got sabotaged. Weren't nobody's fault but mine, neither. OK, sure, I could say the cat shredded my homework, but I'd have to admit that the only cat here was me. Let me tell you all about it.

So, firstly, remember Late Night With Fruitcake? (This is what I should have called yesterday's blog post.) I was up even later than that. Turns out, after the fruitcake bakes for three and a quarter hours, then it wants to be removed from its tube pan half an hour after being removed from the oven. So I was actually up until three.

Which meant I didn't get up this morning until almost 10:30, and still didn't feel like I'd gotten enough sleep. So not only was I up late, but I was moving slow. My morning shift didn't happen, is what I'm saying.

Secondly, I had a few tasks to complete for my roller derby league. I'm part of the committee that makes home bouts happen, and my role within that committee is pretty much everything to do with tickets. And the thing about tickets is, nothing to do with them is a surprise. I had all the info I needed to get things done over the weekend. But did I? No. I procrastinated until suddenly everything had to be done today.

And there went my afternoon shift.

Most of the writing I got done today, I got done after we left for tonight's derby practice. John needed to be there super early, so I dropped him off and then ran away to a cafe in Gunbarrel for an hour. Then he had to be there super late, so I picked at this week's Friday Fictionette from one of the trackside spectator couches. "Write wherever you are" is a rule I usually have the luxury of ignoring, but today I really paid heed.

On the plus side, you can now buy tickets to our upcoming New Year Roll Out mix-up tournament! You can just come to watch, or you can register to skate in it. If that's your thing, I mean. I know a lot of people whose thing this definitely is. It's certainly my sort of thing. I will probably be skating in it.

In other news, it turns out I will not be spending Solstice Night on a train somewhere between Fort Morgan and Omaha. Amtrak coach fare was ridiculously expensive. Seems I waited too long and all the "saver" seats were sold out. As much as I love traveling by train, there is a limit to how much I'm willing to pay for the privilege; $450-ish each way is well beyond that limit. My next strategy would be to send my accumulated Amtrak Guest Reward points, but that was already a non-starter because of blackout dates.

So, feh. I'll be flying home on the 21st instead. If I have the energy, I'll even stay up all night and keep a fire burning through the longest night of the year; they do have a fireplace. It's out by the hot tub. It'll be a lonely Solstice vigil, but a comfy one.

I'll be flying back on the evening of the 31st. Which is neat, because I hear that Southwest give out a little free champagne on New Year's Eve. (Or is that only for overnight flights? Do they only do that at the stroke of midnight?) Also they have wifi on board for a nominal charge. So there's the possibility of a champagne toast and Puzzle Pirates at cruising altitude.

But that's not until the end of the month. Here's my plan for tomorrow: A lot fewer excuses and a lot more productive writing time. You can go ahead and hold me to it, too. For one thing, I'm going to bed on time tonight. For another, I already got my bout ticket duties done today. NOTHING WILL STAND IN MY WAY.

Lo, another Friday has arrived--well, to be honest, it has just about come and gone; I got to the writing things quite late, but the bills are all paid and the kitchen is really clean. Anyway, I've posted this week's Friday Fictionette. It's "The Thing with Feathers," which as we all know is Hope.

The piece is oddly literary in flavor. The speculative element is more magic realism that urban fantasy. And I had to rerecord the last paragraph for the MP3 because I, er, got a funny sort of cough and maybe something in my eye the first time around. You know what I mean. It would not be the first time something I wrote made me tear up a little at the end, but generally it's the longer stories that do that, longer both in terms of word count and hours spent in revision, and the effect is partially just "Finally I got it right, hallelujah, what a relief." It's a little weird for something as short and quick as a fictionette to do that to me.

So now I'm wondering, maybe I should have saved this one to develop into something I could submit somewhere pro? And I'm reminding myself that the Friday Fictionettes project is partly about teaching myself to let go. Story ideas are plentiful. I don't have to hoard them. There's enough of them to go around.

Meanwhile, the alien space glue apocalypse story did indeed receive a rejection, and has already been sent out to meet more nice people.

Other fiction projects have been put off for next week. Just you wait.

Rejoice! I have finally replaced my camera. I have also gone grocery shopping and returned home with, among other things, fruitcake fixings. Now I have combined BOTH bits of good news into ONE splendid photo, which you can see here.

Fruitcake! Will contain almonds, currants, green (golden) raisins, candied ginger, strawberries, and dates. I will decide on the booze tomorrow when I actually process everything and start it soaking. It will probably be scotch or bourbon, considering what's currently in the cabinet.

Camera! Currently contains date stamp. This will be adjusted shortly.

The camera is a Nikon Coolpix S3700. It was on sale at Target, and further marked down as a repackaged item. Now, I didn't go into Target thinking about cameras. I was shopping for strings of holiday lights to donate to my roller derby league's holiday parade float (Because we're going to skate in a local holiday parade, of course). But the holiday section was right next door to the electronics section, which reminded me that I'd been meaning to replace my previous camera, it being ten years old and furthermore having recently ceased to function.

So this new camera boasts 20.1 Megapixels, which is a revolution in comparison with my previous. Its view screen is breathtakingly sharp--again, comparing it with my old camera. It's zoom function seems darn near lossless. It has a function list longer than my arm, and--ooh!--an auto-extending lens. Look, I'm over the moon just because this camera doesn't need a rubberband to hold its battery case closed, OK? My standards are somewhat generous here.

Mainly I'm just pleased that my options for Friday Fictionette covers are no longer restricted to A. find Creative Commons (commercial use OK) or public domain images online, or B. take a really crappy photo with my flip phone.

So there's your happy technology content. As for writing content, well, soon as I'm done with this-here, I shall be logging the most recent adventures of "...Not With a Bang, But a Snicker" in the Submission Grinder and in my personal log as well. I got a response to its latest submission just this weekend, but I haven't even opened the email yet because I've been drowning in NaNoWriMo writing and NaNoWriMo catch-up. If it's a rejection, I'll be figuring out where to send that sucker yet. If it's not a rejection, expect some crowing. Next I'll be spending a little revision time with "Down Wind" to get it ready to to go and meet some very nice people itself. I think that's enough for a well-rounded late night, don't you?

Did I publish a Friday Fictionette today? Why, yes, I did! Hard to remember that was actually today, it happened such a while back--I posted it by about 11:30 AM. Once again, I gotta tip my imaginary hat to the brilliant idea of getting up on time.

Anyway, "The Oracle Takes You Back" this week to the days when Saturday mornings were magic and you knew all the tricks because, after all, Trix are for Kids. That's your excerpt link, which itself has links to the full-length PDF and MP3 versions which are accessible by Patrons at the per-month pledge tiers of $1 and $3 respectively. If you are not a Patron and would like to become one, follow any of those links, as they all include instructions on how to make it so.

Meanwhile, watch for one of this month's Fictionettes to go free to one and all on Monday. Which one? I don't know yet! I'm sure I'll figure it out by the end of the weekend.

Meanwhile in NaNoWriMo land, Perrie P. Peculiar so much enjoyed the prospect of being a full-on secondary character that she developed aspirations to protagonist status. And with a name like that, why the heck didn't she try to take over the novel sooner? Today's writing session, still underway, produced a scene entirely from her point of view. I think she's in danger. I think she's going to pull off a heist. I think it's all going to turn out OK, but not right away, because some serious suspense and conflict has to happen first.

I've got about 1,600 more words to write in order to meet today's goal of 3,466. I think I can do that in about an hour. Off I go--

It's as I suspected: This week's Friday Fictionette will show up on Saturday. While I suppose I could have gotten it done and published if I'd gotten right to work after checking into my motel at 9:30 PM, the reality is... Ten-hour drive, y'all. Ten. Hour. Drive. Solo. It just seemed a better use of my time to take a walk, find some dinner, and relax.

I'm staying in the vicinity of University and I-10, which is having a strange effect on my nostalgia circuits. On a lizard-brain gut instinct level, I'm absolutely certain I'm back in at the University of Washington and simultaneously about 15 minutes away from my parents' New Orleans-area home via the interstate. In any case, a ten-minute walk along University brought me within hearing range of electric guitars and a country-rock beat, which reeled me into a sports bar called The Game. I had a beer, ate far too much, and enjoyed the band's original tunes extravagantly.

The drive from Boulder to Las Cruces went fairly well. I did the three and a half hours to Raton easily, stopped for lunch at Pappa's Sweet Shop & Restaurant, then proceeded to drive the remaining six or so hours straight through. I'm not sure how that was possible, but I'm happy to attribute it to the coffee at Pappa's.

The only real shenanigans occurred just west of the little New Mexico town of Vaughn. That's where I missed my turn to remain on US Hwy 54 West/South and instead continued some five miles on along 285 North. Only I didn't know it, because for that stretch of highway, there were absolutely no signs whatsoever indicating what highway I was on. There weren't even speed limit signs. There was nothing but the back-sides of the ridiculously frequent WRONG WAY signs.

Then I got to the next little town and continued to have no clue whatsoever, because the main drag was merely labeled US HIGHWAY. Just that. No number, nothing. Thankfully, once I got just past that little town, there was a cluster of signs indicating I was on 285 and 60 (but not 54), so I got suspicious and turned around.

Encino, New Mexico! Where being lost isn't a bug; it's a feature!

Anyway, that was the only hitch. Otherwise, it was an easy drive and a gorgeous one, sunny and surprisingly warm for mid-November-- a huge contrast from the looming snow clouds I left behind in Colorado. And now I am likely to fall over, so please excuse me while I make sure the falling happens over something soft. Like a motel bed.

Today's two hours of NaNoWriMo progress netted me 4,151 words, a good few hundred less than yesterday because of the fits and starts. It's not that I had much more sense of where the story was going yesterday that I did today. It's more that yesterday I was able to babble on despite not knowing what came next, whereas today the not-knowing stumped me a bit more. Also I probably put a couple hundred words that didn't get counted in Scrivener's "Document Notes" box, just talking to myself about what might happen next.

I feel like yesterday and today combined to make a great plot twist. Yesterday, the main character realized that a particular secondary character was really her only friend right now, and her only ally in the conflict situation. Today, experimenting with a scene including an antagonist I just made up today, I realized that it was likely the antagonist would cause that secondary character to be eliminated for a good chunk of the book. And because this would be right and proper and a fitting adherence to good conflict-escalation procedure (Allen Guthrie's Infamous Writing Tips, No. 20: "Torture your protagonist. It’s not enough for him to be stuck up a tree. You must throw rocks at him while he figures out how to get down"), I went with it.

The antagonist, the director of the sleep clinic where the protagonist's mother has been going, just came on stage today, and he's chillingly similar to creepy bureaucrat John Wither from That Hideous Strength. So it would appear that the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments is running the psychiatric research lab from The Lathe of Heaven. I did not foresee this happening. The moment a disembodied head shows up, I am out.

Tomorrow will of necessity be a short writing day. I'm undertaking a ten-hour road trip on my lonesome for the sake of a roller derby clinic in Las Cruces. It is going to be awesome, but it does mean I'm not going to be at the computer much. I'll try to finish up tomorrow's Friday Fictionette during those times when I take a break from driving, like at lunch and tea time (I get tea time, y'all, I have decreed it), but there is a possibility it won't actually be released until Saturday morning.

Just so's you know!

It's Friday, so I've got a fictionette for y'all. "Future's So Bright," in which the curse of psychic powers messes with one's social life and also one's optical prescription, is available in both ebook and audiobook form for those who wish to chuck a buck or three at the Friday Fictionettes project. The usual excerpt is also available--try before you buy! Patrons get access to a brand new one of these things every first through fourth Friday; everyone else gets one of 'em on the last day of each month. Any of the links in this paragraph will take you to a page where you can subscribe if you so desire.

I discovered this week that it's a lot easier to get a Friday Fictionette up on time if I've been faithfully putting in my 25 minutes a day on it every single day. The fictionette itself was drafted by Tuesday, the cover art done on Wednesday, the draft polished up on Thursday, and the MP3 and PDF produced on Friday along with the usual excerpts.

NaNoWriMo is also easier to accomplish if I put in my scheduled time each time a scheduled time comes round. Unfortunately, I slipped up a bit with it this week. Once again, I've been moving slowly through my days, leaving too much to do for the evenings when I have no energy to do them. So I didn't move the novel's word count at all yesterday, and have only made it through about a thousand words so far today.

It is unlikely that I will make significant progress tomorrow, as I will be in Castle Rock all day participating in that league's annual Fall Down Mix-Up rolller derby tournament. But I will bring my backpack with its usual contents, and if there is time between bouts I might jot down a few sentences. A non-zero amount of words is winning the day!

Matter of fact, I was working on NaNoWriMo at my very first roller derby experience. I was sitting in the audience at the 2011 championships, laptop open and accumulating words during halftime. It'll be just like old times, y'all.

Now, considering that I'll need to leave Boulder at 7:30 in order to get to the Fairgrounds by 9:00, I should probably wrap this up and go to bed. Enjoy your weekend, and if you're around, come watch us skate in Castle Rock tomorrow!

First things first. Today is a first Friday; you get a Fictionette. "In the Shadow of Next Tuesday" is its title. It's kind of fun and silly, and it's also kind of bittersweet. And I totally want to pet the stilt-o-dile.

In other Fictionette news, the Fictionette Freebie for October 2015 turned out to be "How the Lassie Didn't Go East of the Sun and West of the Moon". Turned out--I say that like it just happened, all on its ownsome, like I didn't have a vote. OK. I decided to go with the Friday Fictionette for October 2. In any case, the complete text is now available to one and all as a slick little PDF you can print or just load up in your favorite reader, and as a bite-sized MP3 of me reading the fictionette to you as a bedtime story or during rush hour traffic.

So that's your Fictionette news. Now, about that National Novel Writing Month...

So last year I abstained for the first time in more than a decade. I'd just retired from precisely a decade of being Boulder's NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison, and I had a short story revision I was excited to work on, and, well, "because it would be a shame to break my twelve-year streak" seemed insufficient reason to stress myself out. So I took last year off. Well, this year I finally got that short story revision done, and I decided I'd do NaNoWriMo to celebrate that. Yay, a whole month of nothing but glorious fun wild delirious discovery draft! A whole month during which two hours of each writing day may be spent exploring a brand new story and holding myself to absolutely no standards of quality!

Well, today's Day 6 and I haven't logged a single word yet.

Drat.

It's OK, though! I had already planned on... let's see, 50K divided by 16 workdays in November... I'd already planned on writing 3,125 words per session; I just have to work some of those sessions on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. Which is fine. I'll be meeting an old NaNoWriMo friend (who is also now a roller derby friend--the Venn diagram overlap of my writing circle and my derby circle is of surprisingly significant size) for a late lunch and writing date tomorrow, so even if I get nothing logged tonight I'll be off to a great start this weekend.

It will all be just fine.

Despite an original cunning plan to spend the last days of October in productive plot-brainstorming mode, I never quite figured out what I was going to write. Then on November 1 my freewriting session resulted in a sort of cross between Ursula K. LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven (dreams that rewrite the world) and the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life" (if you don't keep the godlet happy, he'll send you to the cornfield). I am mildly concerned that this idea will last me for roughly 5,000 words before dumping me in the proverbial cornfield. But that's the risk one takes. If I have to describe the protagonist's breakfast like it was Dónal and Mórag's wedding feast, then I will do that. That is, after all, how NaNoWriMo goes. Like the founder of the annual shindig says, No Plot? No Problem!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winning!