author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

In some ways, today rocked. In others, it was made of fail. Guess which one all things writing-related fell into?

This week's Friday Fictionette, as well as the blog post of substance that should accompany it, will appear tomorrow. Today, I'm turning in early. Sorry, y'all.

G'night.

It was just a regular cleaning. There was no anesthetic involved, no surgery, no deep probing beneath the gums. It was just a regular dental cleaning.

Nevertheless, dear reader, it kicked me in the teeth.

After the dental hygienist was done with me, I managed enough energy to stop for groceries on my way home and put them away when I got there. Then I visited the creek to bring home the crawfish traps I hadn't been up to bringing home yesterday. (With the exception of a very juvenile specimen, small enough to resemble a centipede with pincers, they were empty.) Then I began to contemplate the work ahead of me today, and got as far as starting the electric kettle for tea before I realized two things:

First, that my gums were sore. I mean, really sore. Like, that background noise in my body that won't stop that I'm just noticing and now that I've noticed I'm not going to be able to stop noticing? That's my mouth. Hurting. All over.

And secondly, I was so sleepy that the thought of remaining upright and doing productive things with pen and paper and/or computer keyboard was physically painful. Apparently, getting up at 7:15 a.m. combined with an hour of enduring uncomfortable and sometimes painful manipulations of the mouth results in exhaustion.

So that's why my homework's late, Teach. Basically I took a half day off for sicksies. (Also, I spent a few minutes just leaning against the walkway wall and staring at the deer that was just hanging out, chillin' on the front lawn under a shade tree. Deer here is a regular occurrence, but that doesn't mean I'm about to get over it.)

But enough whining. Here's what's up for the week:

Revision efforts have brought the current draft of "Caroline's Wake" right up to the bit where Demi gets to talking with Andy, and not quite to the bit where Bobbie Mae starts dancing on the table. My assignment is to not lose the overall sense and desired pacing of the scene, while cutting about 200 words that I had thought helped the scene achieve that sense and pacing but in fact don't. So the play-by-play of the song and dance has to go, but Demi and Andy's conversation which partially reacts to the song and dance needs to stay, and to somehow imply that things are still going on and time is passing all around that conversation, while taking up a lot less space on the page. Did I mention that revisions are hard? Revisions are hard.

Content writing needs to get a bit more balanced. I've been blogging the weekend blockade round-up for Puzzle PiratesExaminer, along with monthly limited edition things (got a post planned about the limited edition Olympian Class Sloop, which I have purchased and am happily sailing around the Lacerta Archipelago), but my posts for Boulder Writing Examiner have been few and far between. And I'm out of practice finding content for that column. So I'll be working to come up with two posts a week. If nothing else, I'll post reviews of work that's eligible for the 2016 Hugos, thus doing my bit to help encourage people to nominate for next year.

Fictionettes -- do you know, I am really, really sick of being behind on the Wattpad excerpts? And of not having even a little musical accompaniment or other sound effects for the audiofictionettes? I know I keep saying this, but I'm going to really make an effort to push through that backlog.

Submissions procedures have slowed down, mainly because I haven't received any preternaturally fast rejections in the past couple weeks. Before that, it seemed like I'd on Tuesday I'd submit a story and log the submission, then on Wednesday I'd be logging its rejection and figuring out where to send it next. Quick responses can be cool--goodness knows authors complain enough about the wait time between submission and response--but they also have a cumulative effect of making me insecure about sending that piece out again. "Everyone keeps rejecting it! Every day, a new rejection! Is this story really ready for prime time after all?" Which is silly, because plenty of stories gather twenty or fifty rejections before finally finding a home. But insecurities don't have to be rational to be emotionally effective. Now that the cycle's slowed down a bit, the insecurities surrounding it are attacking with a bit less intensity. Which is good. But I haven't properly taken advantage of that lull, which is not good. So this week I want to get a few more stories into the slush, so I can be insecure about more stuff at a time.

So those are my aspirations for the week. I hope to look back on them from Friday's scenic lookout and say, "Yes, I did good this week." At least I'll have the advantage of not starting tomorrow with a sore mouth.

Hola! So it's Friday again. A fictionette appears! In this corner, chthonic beasts from the darkest depths of the earth. Opposing them: a quartet of careless picnickers and their unfortunate army of disposable gladiators and household staff. It's called "A Fine Day for a Picnic," and it's unabashedly a satire of E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy.

Now, to be fair, I enjoy rereading those books. But they always hit a sour note when the children, piqued that one of the servants is fed up with their bad behavior and is threatening to bring such to the attention of their mother, will threaten their politically powerless serf with something or other that will undoubtedly lead to them getting sacked. Or they'll play horrible pranks on them. Or they'll take them away on their magic carpet and dump them on a desert island, and leave them there, and say, "Good, serves Cook right for being so horrible to us." I'm really not sure where Nesbit stood on social injustice, but she doesn't exactly go out of her way to show that the children are wrong to do this. In fact, it might be argued that since the Cook wound up queen of the savages (CW: racism) and happily married, it was good for the kids to carelessly strand her on that island. Argh.

So I sort of indulged in this short-short story about a nice afternoon outing with a high body count. Enjoy, I guess?

(The Word Dash writing prompts for that day, by the way, were "jugular" and "junket.")

So there's a fictionette out and a blog post done before 8:30 p.m. on a Friday, just for a change. Success! But on a less successful note, right after declaring war on my short story revision, I sort of knuckled under. I have no good excuse. All I can do is extend the mission to next week and keep working at it. I will get there eventually...

But, however, not tonight. Tonight I'm about to drive down to Denver, put on my skates, and do some ROLLing around. So now I will finish scarfing down my leftover gumbo, print out my electronically signed waiver, throw on something roughly similar to what I used to wear in high school, and get the heck outta here.

Ha! I pun. This Friday's Fictionette is called "The Once and Future Hot Potato." Get it? "Don't get caught..." *Grooooan.*

It's about a kids' game, of course, but also about nostalgia and memory and divergent timelines. As always you can read the excerpt by following the link... and scrolling down to the text below the huuuuuge photo. (That's the original photo I used in this week's cover art, taken with my flip-phone at its highest quality photo setting. It's kind of blurry and very, very big.) If you want to read the whole thing, you should follow the links at the bottom of the excerpt to the PDF and the MP3. (Or just click them here.) If you are not already a subscriber to Friday Fictionettes, those pages will provide you with everything you need to become one with minimal fuss.

Meanwhile, over at my main writing gig, which is the writing and attempted selling of short fiction...

So I got a rejection letter today. This is not a surprise; I've been sending out a submission almost every day (yay!), and some of those markets are very quick to eliminate whatever it is they don't want. This particular market took about a day. They're the kind of place you send everything first, because if they say Yes you get a not-insignificant per-word pay rate in a prestigious professional magazine, and if they say No you won't be waiting long to find out.

No, the surprise was the paragraph added to the usual familiar form email, the paragraph reminding me to please in future use Standard Manuscript Format.

How embarrassing. I have been sending out manuscripts in Standard Manuscript Format for over twenty years now. I do not, by this time of my career, need to review an example. I'm more likely to err on the side of old-school Standard Manuscript Format by forgetting to change my underlines to italics or my Courier New to Times New Roman where a market specifically requests it. I was mortified to see that paragraph. Good Gods, what a newbie I must have looked.

Then I opened up the file I'd sent them, and was further mortified.

It was a mess, y'all. Both headers, the first-page header and the all-subsequent-pages header, were on the first page. Which was otherwise blank. Which was followed by nine other pages that were blank except for the all-subsequent-pages header. Which was followed by a page that was almost just as blank, but with the title. The next page had my byline. Then another blank page. Then, a page with just the first paragraph of the story.

Things didn't look normal until page 15, where the second paragraph of the story appeared and was followed by the third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs, and so forth, continuing as normal until the end of both story and document. But of course, by then, the damage was done. I'm amazed they read it at all (I am reasonably certain that they did).

Of course I looked like a newbie. What a total newbie mistake--to send along a manuscript file sight unseen.

So this is your Public Service Announcement, friends and colleagues: Before you hit SUBMIT, always open up the file and make sure the Manuscript is acceptably Formatted according to Standards.

(Also maybe don't make any changes in Open Office. Make all changes in Scrivener and recompile. Open Office is apparently notorious for terrible RTF support.)

Once again, I got last week's Friday Fictionette done on time, but, due to evening plans (watching roller derby at the Fillmore and supporting my Boulder County Bombers All Stars!), never managed to get a blog post up. Please pretend this is that blog post, at least for a few paragraphs.

Anyway, the Friday Fictionette for August 7 is "Mucking Out the Kelpie." It name-checks Maureen Johnson's short story "The Children of the Revolution" in the author's notes, but as far as its fantasy subgenre goes (the care and feeding of magical creatures), it's really got more in common with Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven and Carrie Vaughn's short story "The Temptation of Robin Green." It's about having to do a dangerous, terrifying job whose mundane dailiness has made it just plain tedious. And also kind of gross. I mean, kelpie shit. Ew.

In other fictionette news, I'm slowly catching up on posting excerpts to Wattpad, at which point I will begin to be able to think about such things as filling out the audiofictionette archives and maybe composing a few simple piano ditties to include in the recordings.

Since today was Monday, I got to spend much of it playing Puzzle Pirates (getting my Seal o' Piracy trophy for August! woot!), sitting on the couch watching John play Skyrim, crawfishing down at the creek, and cooking and eating my catch. I caught an even 40 and settled for a very simple crawfish boil for one out on the patio. Then I made stock with the shells. I had a couple bags of shells from previous adventures stowed away in the fridge, but as it turns out I don't actually have a pot sufficiently sized for four pounds shells and eight quarts water. So I did a half-batch. By the time that was done, I declined to do a second half-batch, because it was 11:30 and I was tired. (I only began crawfish boiling operations around 8:00, just to put that late hour in context.)

I am now sipping a warm, savory cup of crawfish stock and contemplating another Puzzle Pirates session.

Tomorrow, being Tuesday, means back to work with a seriousness. Hopefully there will be interesting writing-related things to report at that time. Til then, I'm clinging to my last shred of weekend and you can't take it away from me!

It's the last day of the month. Accordingly, one of this month's Friday Fictionettes, "And Did You Bring Enough For Everyone?", has gone free, free as in beer, free for everyone to download as an attractive PDF or to listen to as an MP3 narrated in the dulcet tones of Yours Truly.

It is a fifth Friday, so there is no new Fictionette today. However, I do have one of the July Fictionettes ready to hit the mail tomorrow, right on time, as a quirky typewritten artifact with rudimentary watercolored illustrations and lots of typos corrected by white-out ribbon. Lookit! I took a picture before I stuffed it in the envelope. This is totally a collector's item, y'all. You should sign up to get you some of that while supplies last. Make me type more! Typing is fun!

Speaking of which, I'm pleased to report that the replacement ribbon from Ribbons Unlimited came in earlier this week. It works like a charm. I am no longer typing on a twenty-year-old ribbon, which is kind of important. Maybe not as important as you're thinking; since I only used the typewriter once every two to five years, the ribbon's usable life spanned the two decades fairly well. However, black text was getting unmistakably fainter, and the white corrective ribbon had become all but useless and had ripped in several places. So it's a relief to be able to change it out.

While I was waiting for it to get here, I tried using the ill-fitting universal black-and-red. For some reason, it sagged in the mechanism, so that I'd lose the tops of my letters. Eventually I just turned it over and flipped the type-color switch since red was now on the top and black on the bottom. This worked OK, but I'm glad to have a proper solution at last instead of a kludge. I'm also glad to have a black-and-white/corrective ribbon (whose white half covers all my typos!) instead of black-and-red (whose red half I was going to use... when?).

In other news, I exercised great restraint and did not catch more crawfsh today. I did, however, take my Morning Pages out to the creek. I have the mosquito bites to show for it!

I miss my patio. I can't wait for the building re-painting project to be done so that I can put the furniture back out full time. And my squash, tomato, herbs, pepper plants, and John's sunflower too would really like to be back out on the balcony in full sun...

We're back to wrapping up the Friday Fictionette at stupid o'clock at night, I'm afraid. In addition to my usual bad time management, there was the problem that this fictionette, despite my having worked on it every day all week long, was still giving me revision trouble. I was three hours in today before I was finally happy with the text. And even now I'm not so sure. I don't think my attempt at Nesbit's prose style is entirely convincing, nor am I at all confident that I got the UK-specific education terms right. And I'm doubtful as to whether the timeline adds up--can an Edwardian-era child have an email-era grandson? Maybe? But not likely as their oldest grandchild, I don't think?

Look, I'm just not going to worry about it. Plot-holes and inaccuracies are part of the acceptable roughness of a fictionette. They come part and parcel with idea generation and early draft revision. They are part of the process, we shall deal.

Anyway. "And Did You Bring Enough for Everyone?" is my first attempt at E. Nesbit fanfic. It is unlikely to be my last.

As for the rest of this week, it featured sparse blogging and sparse short-story work. Indeed. Right after bragging about working on the short story every work day, I wound up failing to work on it at all. The problem is my usual bad time management on days when roller derby eats my evenings. I get my "morning shift" done, then somehow I never get to my "afternoon shift." I tell myself it's OK, I'll do it after practice. Then I come home from practice and I collapse for the night. This is not how work gets done!

I know I've said this before, but it's going to be an iron-clad rule now: No leaving any writing work for after derby! There is no brain or body left to do it with, so I am not to go fooling myself about it! Which means I need to decide on a specific time at which the afternoon shift must start in order to get it done before derby on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And then I have to actually start at that time. No excuses.

If I can successfully get that habit dug in--and, seriously, there's no reason why I shouldn't--then Friday Fictionettes should wind up getting posted actually on Friday, too. As opposed to the wee hours of Saturday morning, which right now happens to be (the datestamp on the blog post is a lie, of course).

But now that's up and this blog post is up, and I can start heading to bed... in time to catch a few hours' sleep before I get up, do my Saturday morning AINC reading, and then meet some friends in East Boulder for trail skating at 9:00 AM. Whee?

The expansion on the drabble is coming along, but it's coming along rough. I have to continuously remind myself that it's OK, because this really is more of a first draft than a revision. I mean, yes, I'm building off of an already-written 100-word version of the story, but this new version is, for all intents and purposes, all new. The character now has a name, an age, a sister, a mother, a geographical location, a job. The story will have at least five scenes, including the one that got vaguely nodded at by the original drabble. The pacing is different, and the climax will be better developed. It's a whole new story. Of course its first draft will be rough.

At least it is coming along. Getting to spend some time on it every work day feels like getting away with something.

Today also involved some Fictionette work, as usual. The one for this weekend is shaping up to be something like E. Nesbit fanfic from two generations' remove. I'm trying to keep a Nesbit-like voice while firmly setting the story in the era of email. I've also taken some time to begin typing up one of the June fictionettes for my appropriately-tiered Patron (didn't get to it as quickly after the May edition as I'd hoped, but oh well, I'm getting to it now), and I discovered that the task gets ever so much easier when the typewriter ribbon is wound correctly. Who knew? Also, the instructions are not lying when they say that the supply spool goes on the right-hand side; however, it does not mention the existence of a manual ribbon reverse switch, and I had it switched to the reverse direction, so. At this point I'll probably have to retype the first page. It's OK if it's a little messy, but all that fighting with the ribbon resulted in a silly amount of mess.

It is probably time to order a new ribbon, if a ribbon fitting a Sears Tower "Quiet Tabulator" portable can be found. I have a spare "universal" in my desk drawer, but I also have a memory of discovering it to be the wrong width or something. I found a site that sells typewriter ribbon by model number, and discovered that my typewriter's model number is partially hidden under the platen assembly. You can just make it out if you open up the rear enclosure as though to access the tabulator stops, and tilt the hinged bit at just the right angle: 871.600, which seems to match these products. The price for a black-and-white ribbon seems reasonable enough.

I had a lot of fun watercoloring on the typewritten fictionette for May, all the more for doing it outside on the patio. But once again I forgot to take a picture. Maybe I'll remember when I'm illustrating the June artifact.

Not on the patio today, alas. Power-wash operations were underway, in preparation for a new coat of paint on our building. Everything on the balcony out back and the patio out front had to come in. Our entryway looks like a jungle, all crowded with lush spath leaves, and you can barely reach the blinds over the sliding glass door what with all of the containers of tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers getting in the way. It's totally a nightshade paradise over there. All we need are eggplants. And then there are the herbs.

Meanwhile, the birds are so confused. The bird feeders had to come inside, too. There's a young female grackle who keeps perching on the balcony rail and eying the place where the feeder's supposed to hang, as though to say, "Mama told me this is where food comes from! Where did the food go? There is supposed to be food! If I wait here, maybe food will appear?" A couple of sparrows actually flew up there as though under the impression that the feeder had simply turned invisible. I feel sort of bad for them.

Just wait 'til the end of the week, little buddies! 'Til then I'm sure you're capable of finding your own grub. Your mama must have taught you about more than just suet cakes!

I swear I got the Friday Fictionette done on time! Early, in fact. It's called "Protective Coloration" and it's got more fairy-like creatures in the corner of the protagonist's eye. It only took about two hours to proof, publish, and record the PDF and MP3. I wasn't up until stupid o'clock getting it done, either, which was way cool.

But then I ran off to skate at ROLL and was up until stupid o'clock for that reason.

Honestly, I thought I'd only stay until maybe 11:00 PM. That would give me a good two hours of fun, and an exit for when the track got crowded and the crowd got drunk. I'm also, admittedly, not a fan of the DJ. I don't understand why you'd have a Thunderdome-themed skate party and never actually play "We Don't Need Another Hero," or an '80s-themed skate party and then mash up the classic anthems of the decade you are supposedly celebrating such that there's no melody line left to sing along to. But being on skates makes everything wonderful, at least for a little while. So I go, I have fun, and when I stop having fun, I leave. I figured that after about two hours I'd run off to a diner to write up a blog post and get a couple other things done.

But I surprised myself by not actually stopping having fun. As it happened, I didn't leave until they kicked everyone out of Tracks at 2:00 AM. So that was a thing.

It helped that I had friends with me--a couple of gals from my roller derby league met me there, and we hung out. It also helped that we spent Peak Crowded Drunken Hour in the karaoke lounge. (It is possible that the skate floor DJ played "We Don't Need Another Hero" while I was in the karaoke lounge. I would not bet on it, however.) And the singers and their supporters were friendly, and the songs chosen ran the gamut from metal to hip-hop to blues to Broadway. When the karaoke DJ shut it down, we went back out to the main floor for the last 15 minutes of the party, and we discovered it was practically deserted. Plenty of room to try fun dance moves or just skate fast. "I didn't know ROLL shut down with a speed skate," I said.

Anyway, that's why I didn't finish my homework on Friday.

Pictured here is my second-hand typewriter, a Sears Tower which appears to be identical to the 1950s-era portable Smith-Corona Sterling. I bought it from a co-worker back in the late '90s. Then, upon my lamenting that it had features I'd no idea how to use, I was sent a copy of the Sterling's owners' manual by a Usenet acquaintance who guessed my typewriter was largely the same as his. (This was before it was trivial to find PDFs of owners' manuals of just about everything online--though, admittedly, I haven't found the exact document my friend sent me. This is the closest match I've located. My typewriter doesn't have those CL and SET buttons on the right.) That gift empowered me to use the ingenious Page Gage (sic) feature to get consistent bottom margins every time. It's a seriously clever thing.

Five years ago, this typewriter was instrumental in drafting the first recognizable version of "First Breath." This week it'll be key in fulfilling some long overdue Patreon pledge rewards. I owe two, soon to be three "fictionettes in your mailbox" to my $5+ tier patron. This is where, at the end of the month, I type out one of the month's fictionettes, correct some of the typos with white-out, watercolor and scribble and sketch on it, and send it off with my thanks.

At the moment, I am offering this thank-you to the first ten $5+ patrons. That may have been overly optimistic. I am thinking of lowering that maximum to five. A thousand words feels a lot longer on a typewriter than on a laptop. Accordingly, I find myself sometimes revising on the fly and cutting out phrases that no longer seem absolutely necessary. Or rearranging phrases because I got ahead of myself and I am not going back to correct it.

Also, mastering the Dvorak keyboard layout seems to have come at the expense of being able to touch-type in Qwerty. So I do a lot of looking up and looking down between the computer screen and the typewriter keys and the typewriter output, and losing my place in the original document, and shit there went the 1-inch marker on the Page Gage about two lines ago, I guess the bottom margin is going to be a little smaller than planned...

I'm not really complaining. I'm just griping. The difference is, complaints are meant to be actionable but griping is only recreational. I don't seriously want not to do this. I'm enjoying the exercise--reacquainting myself with the typewriter, producing a literary artifact, enjoying the messy elegance of the results (it's not the most precise instrument, this Tower), and creating a physical object as a token of my appreciation. And sending it in the mail! Having an excuse to mail physical letters is wonderful. It's inconvenient and outmoded and I love it. I'm in love with the written word in all its forms. Look, I do my morning pages with a fountain pen. Of course I love the typewriter and the U.S. Post.

Anyway, I intend to finish the May mailable tonight and maybe produce tomorrow the one that was due at the end of June. That'll will put me back on track in time to type up the July mailable at the end of the month. Huzzah! Getting caught up is the best!