author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So apparently it takes me another, what, three hours? THREE HOURS to get what ought to have been a simple Hugo Awards 101 blog post done. Seriously, it is not worth it. I need to be able to prioritize, and, when priorities are low, turn the exhaustive perfectionist dial wayyyyy down.

But speaking of priorities, I have modified my must-dos for the workday mornings. To date, I've required of myself three things to start each workday:

• Morning Pages (mental morning hygiene)
• 25 minutes of freewriting (scales and arpeggios)
• and 25 minutes working on the next Friday Fictionette (getting it done a little at a time, rather than all at the last minute).

Recently I looked at my timesheet template and realized that there was one line I was consistently failing to visit: "Submissions Procedures." Also, I had a rejection letter in my email that I still needed to log a month after I received it. So I've added...

• 25 minutes of Submissions Procedures

...to my morning gottas.

What do I do with that session?

Log submissions and responses. If I send off a manuscript, if I receive a response to a submission, I've got to log that. I keep such records in a personal database that's hosted at this domain (it feeds the "Recently Published" block on the front page and the "Works Progressing" list here on the blog). I also make note of them in the Diabolical Plots Submission Grinder, which does a lot more with my data than I've programmed my own database to do. It does things with my data that benefit other writers, too, mostly to do with market statistics. Anyway, communications regarding submitted manuscripts go there.

Query long-delayed submissions. This is what I did next after I logged that pending rejection email. I had a couple submissions out since early 2014 with no response logged. I sent emails to both markets asking after those submissions' statuses, and, when one of them got back to me (and resent the rejection letter I'd missed in my spam last year), I logged that too.

Resubmit rejected manuscripts to new markets. I did this Friday! "It's For You" had returned with a rejection letter back in December. It was about time I sent it out again. Off it went to meet the staff of a different magazine, hopeful and full of energy!

Research markets for future submissions. Here's where being on the clock becomes absolutely essential. I can spend hours doing this--reading the stories published by professional markets, deciding whether any of my existing stories would fit well in a table of contents with them, reading my colleagues' reported experiences with those markets, plugging the stats for my unpublished stories into the Submission Grinder search form to find even more markets, reading all their submission guidelines... But because I'm on a 25-minute timer, I try to stay focused.

Today I spent my Submission Procedures session pruning a handful of browser tabs open to various submission guidelines. With one exception, I discarded non-paying markets. Then I discarded the ones I'm honestly unlikely to come up with suitable material for any time soon. Of the ones that remained, I chose two whose current submission period ended on or about July 31 and decided what I was going to send them. In both cases, I chose unpublished drabbles that could be expanded into flash or full-length short stories this week and next. Then I made note of a couple other tabs open to markets whose next submission period opens in August. I've existing pieces I could send them as-is with a clean conscience.

Making this a daily ritual has got me back in the game. I mean, I've sent off a piece to a pro-paying market! For the first time in months! That's huge! But it's also valuable as a regular reminder of what I'm supposed to be doing in the first place. Things like Friday Fictionettes and Examiner blog posts can feel like such an accomplishment when I finish them that it's easy to forget that they're not my main gig. My main gig is writing fiction for love and getting it published for money. So now, every workday, I take time on the clock to plan or enact the next step required to play that gig.

That way, even if I don't manage to spend the bulk of the working day on fiction for professional publication, even if I throw most of my hours down the black hole of FIND ALL THE PERFECT LINKS FOR THIS BLOG POST, I've at least spent half an hour with my head in the right game, so I don't forget which game I'm supposed to be playing.

Oh my goodness, two on-time fictionettes in a row. It's like she's finally got her act together, folks. And here it is: "Ill Met by Moonlight," a Friday Fictionette whose title aptly demonstrates the value of serif fonts. It's about long nights spent talking to yourself and being startled when something answers back.

As I mention in the author's note, the original freewriting session resulted not so much in a plot as a plot template. I used for writing prompts the two words assigned to the morning and evening "dashes" over at Virtual Writers' World; for June 12 they were "blench" and "angle". I had no idea what to do with that. Also, I was terribly distracted. That was the Friday I spent in the car driving to Lincoln, Nebraska for a roller derby bout on Saturday, and the car was full of people being fascinating and entertaining pretty much nonstop.

But I tried! I took the two words and I recast them and I made a sentence: "He looked at it from a different angle, and went pale with horror at what he saw." I mistook "blench" for "blanch" there. I'd have looked up the definition online via John's smartphone's wifi tether, but we were passing through a dead zone at the time. If you like, you can rewrite the sentence to say "flinched with horror" and get the same results.

After a few minutes I got frustrated with just staring at the screen and/or rephrasing the basic premise ("Main character discovers the horrific underbelly of his daily life! Which will never be the same again!") and gave myself an assignment that would force me to get specific. You may of course borrow this assignment for your own use, should it look useful.

Basically, the assignment was to make four arbitrary decisions. Decide on the REALM, REALITY, FACADE, and METHOD involved.

REALM: In other words, the context in which the character makes a discovery. I mentally flipped a coin/rolled some dice/threw a dart and got "Corporate office."

REALITY: What's the secret the character discovers? What's the true nature of reality that they've hitherto been been unaware of? "The corporation is sitting on an exclusive trading gateway with Faerie."

FACADE: What's the nature of the deception? How is the REALITY covered up from everyday eyes? "Import of cheap goods for distribution to dollar stores."

METHOD: Whereas REALITY was the secret fact about the character's world, METHOD is the action being taken which is premised upon that reality. So. Given a corporation secretly sitting on a gateway to Faerie for economic exploit, how does that corporation in fact exploit their exclusive access? "Smuggling magic items into our world, and into particular pairs of hands, via dollar store distribution."

Thus the "plot template" got filled out with a viable story idea. Finally.

Depending on your plot template, you may pick different key words. But the point is to identify the key decisions you're holding back from making, and then darn well make them.

Remember, writing fiction is about making arbitrary decisions. There are no wrong decisions, except for the decision not to decide. Every decision moves you closer to the story you're going to write. Ta-da.

So this is a Friday Fictionette that is actually on time. Yes, it took staying up until stupid o'clock at night, but, shut up, I don't care, it got done on time. Pretty please to enjoy the crap out of it, OK? That would be keen.

In any case, it is called "All the Flowers of the Field" and the field is a memorial lawn with graves and, yes, flowers. And an exceedingly proud skeleton. Also a live dude who wasn't intentionally modeled off of the caretaker in Peter S. Beagle's A Fine and Private Place, but turned out to bear a family resemblance.

The skeleton's name is Mr. Kneebone. How can you not love that? I'd have to revisit Mountain View Memorial Park to be sure, but I think I nabbed that name from an actual grave marker. I remember walking past it last month and thinking, "Oh, how perfect!" So, with respect to the real-life Kneebone family, here you go.

The reason I'm up so late is, I was flat all afternoon. And the reason I was flat all afternoon was, I went skating outside at the Bob L. Burger Recreation Center in Lafayette. They have a skate part and a roller hockey rink. We skated around the rink. "We" consisted of myself and a handful of Boulder County Bombers members who were back on skates for the first time, or one of the first times, after a leave of absence: skaters recovering from injuries large and small or from time during which skating hadn't fit into their lives. John was in the latter category; he'd last been on skates in December. He was determined to improve his transitions today (i.e. reversing one's orientation from forward to backward or vice versa while skating). He succeeded, and in a big way. I'm really proud of him!

Here's where the afternoon flatness came in: It was bright and sunny and stupid hot outside. We had a blast, but we also got pretty damn blasted by all that direct sunlight. John caved in first, and I stuck it out for another fifteen minutes before pleading oncoming heatstroke. (Seriously, there were a few moments between pulling the car around and acquiring various liquids from the vending machine when I thought I might actually die, or at least pass out. Thank goodness for well-stocked vending machines.)

So we got home and I immediately began applying a cold soda from the fridge to every part of my face. While reading in bed, of course. (I was rereading C. J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station from the beginning, having discovered that I'd lost the thread of the plot due to having lost track of the characters.) Didn't manage to get out of bed until something like 8:00 PM--just in time to acquire the cover photo in the Memorial Park--and still didn't manage to get back to work until ten.

But I got it done on time, dangnabbit!

We'll go skate outside again next week Friday, but it'll be in the evening, when the temperatures will be more tolerable. Presuming it doesn't rain, of course.

Meantime, happy July 4 to everyone in the U.S., and a happy weekend to all!

I've got more recipes to share! Why? Because I win at leftovers, and that is a fine, fine feeling.

I've also got this month's Fictionette Freebie for everybody. I decided on "You Could Go a Long Way in Shoes Like Those" because I think it's funny and I wanted to show it off in full. You can download the PDF ebooklet or the MP3 audiofictionette, be you subscriber or no, just as you please. Enjoy!

OK, so. Recipes! Here we go. Today, it's How to Make Paneer Without Making a Mess.

This is not originally my recipe. It isn't even a recipe, no more than instructions on how to turn cream into butter is a recipe. (Step 1: Put heavy whipping cream in a sealed container. Step 2: Shake container until the contents are no longer sloshing. You've got whipped cream. Step 3: Shake container some more until contents are sloshing again. You've got butter and buttermilk.) Paneer is just a form of fresh house cheese, which is to say, curds separated out of milk. You can find out how to make it on the internet. So did I! I follow the instructions linked from a Tea & Cookies blog post from June 2007. (I also use the Tea & Cookies recipe for saag paneer. It's the best.)

But I have also developed a method that makes it less of a pain in my butt.

But first--why do I make paneer when I can easily buy it in the store? Well, for one thing, it's very satisfying to make my own. For another, I'm terribly prone to letting the better part of a half-gallon of milk go to waste. I do not want to waste milk! Thus I make cheese.

The main innovation: I no longer boil the milk in a pot over direct heat. I got heartily sick of scraping burnt milk solids off the pan when I was done, see. Now I take my biggest stainless steel pot, and I fill it with enough water such that when I nest the next biggest pot inside it, the nested pot's bottom is only barely submerged. Milk goes in the nested pot, of course, with a lid on top to keep the heat in. Then I turn the heat to full boil and I just walk away.

Well, not too far. But from my desk in the office I can easily hear when the water in the big pot reaches full boil. It sounds weirdly like footsteps. The milk, meanwhile, not being over direct heat, isn't quite so prone to froth over and make a mess on the stove. It will also leave no worse mess in the pot than a ring of (unburnt) curd crumbs that I can knock off in seconds with a sponge.

(Caution: If water keeps slopping over the side once it's boiling, take the milk pot out of the boiler pot, then take a sturdy coffee mug and scoop out about half a cup of water. Replace the milk pot. Repeat until water no longer slops over the side.)

Milk reaches boil, lemon juice goes in, stir stir stir, strain. For straining, I use clothespins to secure a folded-over piece of cheesecloth to the top of my largest resealable leftovers container--the square-bottomed tall one I call my "soup tupperware." This is for retaining the whey. I don't like the whey to go to waste, either. (Note to self: Acquire more recipes that use whey. Besides roti.)

Drip drip drip squeeeeeeze, OK, now what? Now I have two smaller resealable containers--I think they came in a Ziplok set of four--ready to mold the cheese. It's important that they be identical, because what happens next is I nest the containers one inside the other with the cheese in between them. Very important to note that the cheese remains wrapped in cheesecloth! The cheesecloth helps wick away excess water, and it also makes it easier to extract the cheese from the mold. So the cheese-molding sandwich, from bottom to top, goes like this: Container, cheesecloth, cheese, cheesecloth, container, milk jug filled with water (better compression through gravity!). Then the whole shebang goes into the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning, the paneer comes out the cheesecloth, gets wrapped in Press-and-Seal or plastic wrap, then sealed inside a gallon-size freezer bag, then put in the freezer. Eventually I'll feel I've accumulated enough to make saag paneer with, and that's a happy day.

That's what usually happens, anyway. This week, however, the paneer is just going in the refrigerator. My roller derby team is coming over to watch film of our most recent game, and the paneer's going into my potluck contribution. My plan is to fry the paneer in ghee and add it to some sort of curry. I'm also going to cook up a big pot of vegan red lentil dal and a batch of rice. HUNGRY ALREADY.

Tomorrow I shall share the other recipe I'm quite pleased with, the one that made me say "I win at leftovers." I'm calling it Pot Pie Calzones. Stay tuned.

Behold! On this very last day of the month, we have the Friday Fictionette for the fourth week of June 2015. It's called "Every Note Passes Away Forever." It's got music in it, and also another funeral. Possibly a tiny bit derivative--I mean reminiscent--of the beginning of Tepper's Raising the Stones, now that I think about it. Sorry?

Patterns! After weeks of doing these freewriting sessions every day (or almost every day, shut up), patterns tend to emerge in the way I respond to writing prompts. After a while, it's like a metro bus system, and each writing prompt is like a stop on a bus route. Turns out, some of these stops are on the same bus route. They go to the same places, but maybe they see different sights along the way.

I'm still a bit behind and will have to choose the June 2015 Fictionette Freebie tomorrow. I'm also like two months behind in posting Wattpad excerpts. Backfilling the audiofictionettes? Have not even begun to think about it. But this is a good week for getting caught up. My roller derby team is taking the week off (a well-deserved break after the game on June 27) and some of our friends are out of town, so hopefully I'll be able to put all that sudden glut of free time to good use.

Meanwhile, I have begun reading Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs. I brought it home from the Boulder Bookstore on June 19, the Friday that was declared TorsDay in response to a threatened boycott of Tor Books. (The threatened boycott was in fact laughable, but we're SFF fans. If we can at all afford it, we'll jump at any excuse to buy more books.) Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Bennett isn't published by Tor, is he?" Indeed, City of Stairs falls under the Random Penguin umbrella. (OK, Random House Inc. But "Random Penguin" is more fun. It sounds like a chapter of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) But while my arms were full of books by Elizabeth Bear and Jo Walton and Cherie Priest and an anthology by the VanderMeers (and if you think that sounds like a heavy armful, you are right!), I spotted the Bennett and I pounced. Without dropping any books.

Bennett is also the author of the Shirley Jackson Award-winning American Elsewhere, which persists in being one of my favorite books ever. It lives on the horror end of the SFF street and it's got beings from beyond space and time, a female protagonist who kicks ass while dealing with seriously strange mother-daughter issues, no romantic subplot whatsoever, and supernaturally unreliable architecture. I am a fan of supernaturally unreliable architecture. (Speaking of which, have you read this fantastic House of Leaves/Sherlock Holmes crossover fanfic? You're welcome!).

Bennett's Locus Award-nominated City of Stairs also has supernaturally unreliable architecture (the eponymous stairs, miraculous walls that are sort of transparent and opaque at the same time, buildings stuck half inside other buildings), but the beings from beyond space are less cthulhuoid and more, well, Gods.

I'm only three chapters in, mind you. I would very much like to be four chapters in or more, which is why I'm going to end this blog post here.

So here's the Friday Fictionette I was supposed to post for June 19. It's called "All Creatures Great and Small," and it is, at least partially, about puking. (That's by way of your content warning. You may not want to read it while you're eating.) It's also about the creation of teeny, tiny, cute yet disgusting monsters after the manner of a particular fairy tale.

Today's work day went almost exactly as planned, down to taking five-minute spinning breaks out on the patio in between 25-minute sessions of writing. I'm spinning a lovely half-fleece of "black" (really a very dark brown) CVM lamb. At least, I think it's CVM. I used to have this written down on a card that I kept with the fleece, but the moths ate it along with a shameful amount of wool.

When I discovered the moths had gotten into it--this was last year when I was cleaning out the office closet at the old address--I went into Emergency Wool Rescue Mode. The first step of Emergency Wool Rescue Mode was wash it all right now. The second and subsequent steps were to allow it to freeze, then allow it to thaw, repeat until sure all moth eggs have been destroyed.

Despite the emergency washing, the wool still feels greasy. But it's nice. Lanolin is good for your hands, after all. And each flicked lock seems to stretch like taffy as I draft it into the twist. It's pleasant and easy work, and very rewarding as the yards and yards of thin single ply wind onto the bobbin.

We've been spending more and more time out on the patio since bringing home the deck furniture. John and I had breakfast out there together, along with our usual post-breakfast state-of-the-household chat. Then I brought the spinning wheel, fleece, and carding combs out, and they sat beside or on the table all day, ready for me to come out and take each five-minute break. When the five minutes were up, I could easily hear the Pomodoro Timer's "get back to work" whistle through the open office window. Neighbors passed by and waved, smiled, commented on the weather. Lawn mowers sent their buzz-saw serenades up into the sky, where small planes doing airport pattern work occasionally echoed that song back down.

Despite the heat of the summer, it's cool on the patio, cooler even than in the house. It's a very nice place to be--at least until the mosquitoes start their twilight hunt. I may start taking more of my work out there.

Hey look! It's last week's fictionette. It's called "Adventures in Posthumous Journalism," which, given Wednesday's blog post, is about what you'd expect. Weird thing is, I never got around to the idea that first kicked things off (the fanatical group that opposes utopias as leading to stagnation). Which is great. The idea that kicked things off was dauntingly huge--like, a novel's worth of worldbuilding--and that wasn't going to fit in under no 1,500 words, unh-uh, no way. Much less threatening to just let the main character make her way through the first scene of that hypothetical novel, mouthing off as she goes. But I thought I might at least get to mention the original idea just a bit before the cut-off. But no.

I should just stop issuing positive statements about timing. Yesterday was worthless. There was no getting things done yesterday. Yesterday I woke up with a headache and a sore back and a sore neck and things didn't so much get better as they got vaguely tolerable, at least tolerable enough to go to scrimmage carrying along with me the even vaguer hope that roller derby cures everything. It cured most things. Everything was a lot less sore afterwards. Well, the big sore things. There were new little sore things, but that's roller derby for you. I'll happily take on new bruises in exchange for getting rid of that sore, tight upper back.

But the moral of the story is, I'm not allowed to say things like "Tomorrow is as late as I'm letting this thing get," because some fool imp in my brain hears that and sabotages it to kablooey.

So I'll say this much: I'm not going to get the June 19 fictionette up over the weekend! My weekend is totally full! It involves a wedding anniversary date at the new drive-in theater in Denver, a sort of roller derby barn raising, a furniture shopping trip, a grocery trip, some various housewarming operations, and quite possibly even more excitement than that. So I'm not even tempted to promise the weekend.

But it'll go up just as soon after that as I possibly can manage.

So things continue to be late over here. But they are getting better! I at least managed to get a solid work session in on the Fictionette that was due out June 12. To no one's surprise, it didn't get done in the car on the way to Nebraska--but I did actually work on it then, which is something. Since then I've been nibbling on it a bit every day. I hoped to have it up by now, but I suppose it will have to be tomorrow. (It had just better be tomorrow. I am not letting it go later than that.)

It's kind of a dark one, involving a terrorist plot and a tragic death. I honestly wasn't looking forward to writing it. This is what happens if I don't get my freewriting done every day; when it's time to choose one to turn into a Fictionette, I don't have lots of choices, and I wind up having to choose the one that's the least bad. And comforting myself that I won't have to Fictionette it up until this week next month. Then "this week next month" turns into this week and I'm all, er. Really? This is what I assigned myself? Oh, hell.

I've been warming up to it over the week, though, especially since I decided the narrator would be the dead person. Writing from the point of view of a ghost, especially one who's not letting death stop her from becoming a great journalist, is kinda fun. Interesting, at least.

I don't even remember which of the freewriting sessions from this week last month is scheduled to become the June 19 Fictionette. I haven't even looked at it. Gah.

Which is not to say this hasn't been a productive week! It has! I've been more-or-less sticking to my daily plans for writing. But it's just been slow, not least because there's all this other stuff to be productive about. We've been cleaning up, rearranging stuff, and retrieving things from the rented storage unit. Also shopping for hardware. John has been slowly converting our storage closet downstairs into an honest-to-goodness workshop; to that end, he has brought back from Home Depot an honest-to-goodness workbench. Also an AC outlet that stacks into a lightbulb socket. Tomorrow or the next day, the boards-and-brick-bookshelves come home. (They won't be enough, especially since some of them are going into the storage closet, to better organize our storage. We need more bookshelves. One over there, and one over there, and also one out there.) Then Sunday, we just might, for the first time in our lives, become the proud owners of patio furniture.

And yet, with all this going on (and roller derby too), I somehow found time to post to File770.com a filk of half of Rush's "Freewill" on the topic of the Sad/Rabid Puppy Hugos Ballot Takeover of 2015. Because it got in my head and wouldn't leave, OK? These things happen! ...What?

Maybe I need sleep.

...and tomorrow it's going to take the wheel. We have an eight hour drive ahead of us, followed by quite possibly a visit to the National Museum of Roller Skating (if we get to Lincoln in time, which is, alas, not likely) and, if we've still got any energy, a session of recreational rolling around at the Skate Zone (which is pretty definite).

And then we'll be competing against the No Coast Derby Girls on Saturday. Which is the whole point of the trip.

I'm also looking at composing and publishing the June 2015 Week 2 Friday Fictionette in the car. Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to count on that. Well, that was before the week got squandered on--well, this and that. Mostly this, a little of that. We'll see.

And what about Week 1? Well, it's up. Finally. "You Could Go a Long Way in Those Shoes" is kind of comedy, kind of horror, and kind of vaguely influenced by having recently read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The writing prompts for the original freewriting session were "Underground Railroad" and "cleats." It wound up having much to do with the importance of good running shoes in scoping out the possibilities of a cross-continental subterranean passenger railroad system.

I'm undecided whether the world of this fictionette is fantasy or science fiction. It's comparable to present day Earth in many ways, including the technological, but the entire continent which provides the story's setting has sort of a basement floor. I toyed with the idea of making it a post-space-colonization planet, but I was honestly too lazy to come up with any concrete details about the history of space travel and the future tech they'd have to have. So it's more sort of an alternate Earth on an alternate North America with less urban sprawl. (Which seems like a plot hole. There'd be a very good incentive for urban centers to sprawl all about the place, as you will see.) In any case, I'd like to write more in this setting, once I know a little bit more about the setting.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say I met one of my goals with the June 5 fictionette: It's not just a story-like object. It's actually a complete story. Enjoy!

This week is going to be a tight week for me, even if I'm scrupulous about my schedule and use every hour to its fullest. The work days are squeezed between two extremely full derby weekends, with mid-year travel team try-outs just behind and a double-header in Nebraska coming up. Thus Friday will find me on the road all day long. This time I know better than to expect writing to happen in the car.

Knowing that, I still managed to be late with the June 5 Friday Fictionette. It's coming, it's imminent, it's been drafted--it's just that if I stay up until all hours finishing it tonight, I reduce my chances of getting all my work done tomorrow. Schedule scrupulosity cannot happen if I eff up the whole bed-by-one, up-by-eight thing. So.

I haven't got its title yet--my hope is that will come to me in my sleep--but it's about a sort of science fiction/fantasy version of David Moffat, whose proposed railroad will cross under the continental divide rather than over it. And there will, for once, actually be an ending rather than a cliffhanger to nowhere. Rejoice!

More tomorrow. Must engage in bedtime procedures right now.