author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So last week's fictionette is still not ready. However, there will be a bonus fictionette this month (for reasons which I will explain later), so I hope y'all will consider that sufficient means of making it up to you. And this Friday's should be on time, despite that John and I are taking off on a road trip Thursday morning, because what else am I going to do while it's his turn to drive?

Last week and the weekend wrecked me. I already talked about the epic 14-hour day of moving, right? Well, what with one thing and another, I ended up getting four hours of sleep that night. Which is where everything went wrong. That was the first falling domino that knocked over the rest. From four hours of sleep, to skating with Phase 1, to napping again, to skating at the library (which was enormously fun!) to trying to get everything else done and so going to bed late again, to the double practice on Sunday capped off with another hour and a half of helping to enable assessments for two returning skaters. (Assessments require more bodies on the track than just the assessing skaters. They need people to hit, people to hit them, people to exchange whips and pushes with, and they need a pack to fall down and get up in. They also need people to hug them and congratulate them and welcome them back, because hearts and flowers!) Then going home and pretty much dying for the day. Then kind of not moving around much Monday. At all.

Teal deer says, basically the weekend just alternated between sessions of roller derby something-or-other and very long naps. And not much else.

I could stay up late tonight to finish and post the fictionette to Patreon, but I desperately want to avoid knocking over any more dominoes. Dominoes are bad. I have to be up early to move a couch out onto the sidewalk for donation pick-up. I have to make it to Bombshells practice. I have to survive through the weekend's tournament (not to mention the drive to Indiana). And do all the other daily/weekly things to the best of my ability. No dominoes allowed!

So the April 10th Friday Fictionette and its accompanying audio file will go up early on Wednesday, April 15th. An extra week's audio will go up not too long thereafter, and everything will be on time for April 17th. That's the goal.

And next week, after the tournament, and with moving over and done with, I'm finally getting back to work on that dratted short story. So I can submit it and move on to the next thing. Really, that's the worst part about not being able to finish a project: not being able to start and finish the next one.

O dear Gods in alphabetical order, it's late, it's like 2:00 AM, why am I still up. (The blog timestamp lies. I just back-date each entry to associate it with the day it belongs to. Maybe I shouldn't.) But look! Shiny, shiny new Friday Fictionette! This one is called "Out of Order" (excerpt available at Patreon and right over here, also at Wattpad later this weekend) and it's available for Patrons in both PDF and audio flavors, depending on your pledge tier.

Yes! I am finally doing Audiofictionettes. Audio Fictionettes. Friday Fictionettes: The Weekly(ish) Podcast. (It was originally going to be monthly compilations, but then I actually started trying to create one. It'll be one at a time, thank you very much.)

Why now, of all weeks? Because I got notice that I actually have a Patron now, and they're subscribed at a sufficiently elevated tier to trigger the audio option. So I'd darn well better deliver, right?

That said, Patrons pledging $3/month are also entitled to all the audio archives as well as the PDF archives. And the audio archives don't exactly exist yet. So... here's my plan. I'm already about six months in. I'm not going to record them all in one fell swoop. But I'll record at least one extra audio a week--maybe more if time allows--and that way I'll get caught up eventually. (The recordings corresponding to a designated Fictionette Freebie will be free as well.)

I really don't have a good excuse for my day taking me until past 2:00 AM to complete. I did not get up on time. I didn't go to bed on time the night before. THESE THINGS CASCADE. Hopefully I can reset my internal clock over the weekend.

Dear March: Please enjoy your very own Fictionette Freebie! "Please To Confirm Your Appointment With BRIGHT SMILES!" is now downloadable as a PDF from Patreon by one and all. You can also read it in its entirety on Wattpad.

Thank you, March, for going out like a lamb given that you came in like a lion. Although I think we have this lion-and-lamb thing mixed up. I mean, a mild snow-flurry on an otherwise pleasant day, versus a raging bright sun blasting down like a blow torch so that a fifteen-minute walk down 30th Street gives me an evening-killing sunburn from hell--which one would you describe as lion-like? Seriously.

At least there was no ice to make footing treacherous. Aside from the aforementioned blow torch from on high, my walk to the Big O Tires was fairly pleasant. Also the good techs at Big O managed to correctly diagnose and fix our arrhythmic and unreliable turn signals. I had forgotten what a healthy turn signal sounded like! "Augh! What's that clicking noise?! ...Oh." This helped make the rest of my errands slightly more bearable.

Today was a day of running errands. Even when I was at home, I was running errands. On the phone. A lot. Because it's April and we're moving in two weeks and there is so much to do. Thus:

• Brought car to Big O for check-up and aforementioned turn signal arrhythmia.
• Attempted to get in touch with the movers we briefly did business with last fall. Failed. Left messages in hope.
• Reserved a UHaul truck for Great Big Moving Day.
• Scheduled an ARC Thrift pick-up for the furniture items we no longer want.
• Made appointment with The Cleaning Fairies for Day Before Vacating Day.
• Got back-up referral from a friend for other movers. Made appointment with other movers for Great Big Moving Day.
• Canceled UHaul reservation because Boulder Moving LLC brings their own truck.
• Called back other numbers for movers as a courtesy. Felt awkward. "Just calling to say we're not doing business with you after all! Yes, the movers we went with ARE licensed and insured, thanks! Sorry." Call back quicker next time?
• Rescheduled ARC Thrift pick-up for the following week at the new address because the movers don't start work until 9 so there was no way we'd get the furniture downstairs by 8 AM.
• Put in address transfer order with Xcel Energy.
• Go get car at Big O. Get aforementioned sunburn.
• Go to Comcast/Xfinity office to put in address transfer order. Their in-person customer service is infinitely preferable to their 24/7 help hotline.
• Go to McGuckins for all the things.
• Go to the grocery for the rest of the things.
• Arrive home. Thank husband profusely for holding down the fort during the buyer's agent's day-before-closing walk-through. Drink a LaCroix, eat an entire baglet of Brussel Bites, collapse in bed.
• Until 8:30 PM.

Did that seem like a very long list? It was a very long list. It sadly failed to contain a preliminary trip to storage--we want to get whatever items out of the house that we can now--but perhaps that was aiming a little high.

Anyway. Fictionettes and blogging. About as much as I'm up for. You're welcome!

Tomorrow: Closing Day number 1. So excited.

As promised, the Friday Fictionette for March 27. I wasn't able to get it up over the weekend after all--that's the last time I predict that a weekend's roller derby content will "go a little easier on me." (How can three hours in one day be almost as exhausting as six hours over two days? I don't get it. I really don't get it.) In any case, here it is. It's called "Not Fade Away," it's about a sinister birthday gift (among other things) and you can read an excerpt here and also here.

After "The Divorce Arch," this one was a relief to write: much more fun, much less complicated, much less fraught with unfortunate implications. It was just a straightforward urban fantasy of the "subtle portal fantasy" design--which is to say, the main character doesn't realize it when they cross from the world of the everyday into the world of the fantastical. They're going along their normal, mundane life, when suddenly The Weird intrudes and nothing will be the same again. You don't get to Refuse The Call. You're in it now, whether you want to or not.

As they say: Life is what happens to you when you're making other plans.

With this Friday Fictionette, I am all caught up at last. With any luck I'll be right on time with tomorrow's Fictionette Freebie and the first Friday Fictionette of April. I may also start producing the promised audio versions Very Soon Now. Turns out, I proofread by reading aloud anyway so I might as well do the reading aloud into a microphone and an Audacity project file. I just figured this out tonight, so, yes, there is already a recording of "Not Fade Away." Not sure what, if any, I'll do for musical accompaniment. My piano's out of tune, and it won't get tuned until we move (next week! Eek!). Maybe I'll tootle on my flute.

So. Moving! That begins happening after we close on the purchase on April 7. The bulk of the moving-stuff ordeal will be April 8--but the bulk of the planning will be tomorrow. I have all of the phone calls to make. And then we're going to start transporting the contents of our closets to storage.

In other words, please do not expect any miracles of literary productivity out of me this week or next. And maybe not the week after that, either, since that's the week culminating in the Bleeding Heartlands B-Cup Tournament. Oh dear. Basically, I'm just about going to manage fictionettes and daily blogging; anything beyond that should be considered pure buttercream frosting. (Mmm, frosting.)

Hey look! A Friday Fictionette! Just don't look too closely at the date. It was supposed to go up last week, but I only just finished it today. It's called "The Divorce Arch." It came from a from a writing prompt and a bunch of random thoughts that all coelesced into the question, "If you made divorce into a ceremony, like we already do with weddings, what would that look like?"

It was a fun question to speculate on--but I was uncomfortably aware that, since I've never dealt directly with divorce myself (and have no plans to at this time, thank you for your concern!), it will only be a matter of speculation to me. I was (and, honestly, I remain) worried that this rosy-hued vignette would look like some sort of prescriptive statement about divorce in the real world, which would be a grave disservice to everyone for whom it forms part of their life experience, and probably not a particularly enjoyable one. So this one went through a lot of drafts, a lot of restructuring, a change of main characters, and more overhauls than a vintage roadster, in my (perhaps futile) hope that the piece would infallibly come across as just these characters' experience and not me preaching about something I have no right to preach about.

(For what it's worth, I do think there should be the option of some sort of socially acknowledged ritual to commemorate the end of a relationship. It's a life-changing event, just like weddings are. But I would not suggest that every relationship ending calls for a ceremony and a party. Sometimes it's a tragedy; sometimes it's a relief. Sometimes it's something else entirely. How to view the relationship's end really should be up to the people involved in the actual relationship. That's my only point here, really.)

(Also, "hallmark cards for friends considering divorce". Somebody thought it was a thing enough to google it.)

All that aside, writing the last paragraph made me absurdly happy. And not just because it meant I'd finally finished the dratted thing, either.

So now I just have the one I was supposed to post today, and I'll do my darnedest to post it this weekend. I know, that's what I promised last Friday. But last weekend was very, very full and exhausting. This one's looking to go a little easier on me. I think I can fit it in.

Alas, but the Friday Fictionette for March 20, 2015 will be be late. I don't have a particularly good excuse for it. It's giving me trouble, and I'm giving me trouble, and so it'll go up over the weekend. Also I think the cover notes post for last week's fictionette still has to go up. Argh. I hate getting behind on things. It tends to snowball.

And there's still this short story I'm supposed to be revising. To editorial request. Why is this not done yet whyyyyyyyyy.

While I'm making excuses and admitting temporary defeat, I ought to give y'all a heads-up that things are going to get a little crowded with me, schedule-wise. Our closing date for selling this house is coming up on April 1st (no joke, ha ha). Presumably our closing date for buying the new place will be shortly thereafter. Then we're moving between April 7 and April 12. And then John and I will be taking a little road trip to Bloomington, Indiana, for a roller derby tournament on the 18th and 19th. Whether I will actually skate in said tournament will be determined by whether I succeed at assessing and getting placed back on our B team. (Despite the kind words and encouraging expectations of my league mates, I am not taking this for granted; the universe likes to smack you if you get smug.) But at the very least, we've committed to going. So that's three nights reserved at the hotel bracketed by two days of driving each way.

These are all very exciting developments, but they are also somewhat pressurizing. I suspect by the end of April my mouth will have blossomed in ulcers, which is my body's typical reaction to periods of sustained stress. I suspect I will look back on March 2015 as "the halcyon days."

Anyway. I'll do a bonus weekend blog post when the fictionette goes up, so's you'll know.

Meanwhile, I'm going to skate my legs off. I'll attend Phase 2 practice at noon tomorrow, and before that I'll join some of the Derby Lite folks for trail skating in Boulder. Then on Sunday I'll attend Bombshells practice. Which is to say, I'll gear up, hopefully knock a few items off my assessment checklist, and participate in as much of team practice as I'm allowed to given that I'm not technically on the team yet this year.

And next week I will be a busy little bee. A busy little, productive little bee. A busy little pen-wielding, fast-typing bee making large amounts of literary honey.

OK, that metaphor got weird. Let's just say I'll be busy, right?

Which is not to say it's perfect. Fictionettes are never perfect; that's the point. They're a slice of process made presentable. (Again, I really know how to sell these things, don't I?) But the rightness of the shape of the world is relevant to this fictionette. I like to give the Friday blog posts a title that's relevant to the fictionette I'm posting. Even if it makes no sense to anyone but me. When do blog post titles make sense to anyone but me, right?

But anyway! The Friday Fictionette is here, while yet it's still Friday. It is called "No One's Home." You can read the excerpt in the usual places (here at the actually writing blog, there at Patreon, and I'll get it up on Wattpad over the weekend). Anyway, it's kind of this sad little creepy thing that ends in a kind of cautious hope. It's got bittersweet layers to it--in my mind, at least. Both the cat and the human are scarred by their pasts. All they've got is each other. And then this happens, whatever this is.

I'll want to come back to it, find out more about the two characters. The human calls the cat Micah, for instance, which is short for what she actually named it, which is Formica. Like the countertop laminate. Which is one of those odd and loveable details I want to know more about.

Boilerplate about Friday Fictionettes: I post a new story-like object every first through fourth Friday to my Patreon page for exclusive download (PDF) by Patrons pledging at least a dollar a month. Think of it as a short-short story subscription service with free access to all the back-issues while you subscribe. If you're not a Patron yet, you still get access to the one I release as a freebie at the end of each month, plus, again, access to all past Fictionette Freebies. I've been doing this since September 2014, so there's a good chunk of reading material in the archives by now.

Boilerplate ends. Thank you for reading.

Now! Now I must go to bed and sleeeeeeep. Because tomorrow I wake up bright and early and go to my first roller derby practice since getting injured on January 10th. Roller derby practice! With the skates on my feet and everything! So excited!

Please welcome the latest Friday Fictionette to the family, "Please To Confirm Your Appointment With BRIGHT SMILES!," an excerpt of which you may read here. It was a lot of fun to write. I should warn you, though, it ends on a cliff-hanger. I have several ideas for what happens next, any of which could supply the material for a full-length short story. Deciding between them, now, that's the trick.

Conlorado weekend continues; the whole gang's in town now and they're over at a friend's house playing games. I'm at home because after trips to the airport and the liquor store I was kind of tired, and I'm also rather enjoying the empty house. For a little while, the whole gang was over here in our tiny living room/dining room area, and I was hiding in the bedroom with a book. I like to hear a house full of happy people, but I get overwhelmed by the bustle and crowd very easily. Most of the afternoon they were playing a game of Paperback, which looks like a lot of fun--it even has a writer theme to it!--but I couldn't see my way to squeezing into the group who were already sitting shoulder-to-shoulder around the table. So I just listened in and enjoyed things vicariously.

Yes, in fact, I proudly and cheerfully accept the label "introvert." I suggest printing it in bold-face capitals, possibly ones constructed from bright flashing neon tubes. But not where I can see them, because argh, blinking lights.

We had some delightful surprises at the liquor store. Hazel's is a great place for delightful surprises, because they have everything. They had Abita's Grapefruit Harvest IPA, which I didn't know ever made it out of Louisiana. It's one of the few IPAs I will willingly drink. They also had in their soft drink section four different handmade flavors from the Rocky Mountain Soda Company. We brought home the "Evergreen Elderberry" and the "Breckenridge Blackberry."

"We brought you local sodas!" John crowed to our friend who'd asked for interesting caffeine-free soft drinks. "It's the Boulder Way!"

And now I had better hurry up and do my PT before I go to bed--

About that. Alas, the therapist did not clear me to skate yesterday. I came in complaining of cripplingly tight calf-muscles and stabbing pains in the quads of the affected leg. ("I have this terrible pain in the diodes down my left side...") He determined these were normal reactions from the muscles surrounding an injured ligament as regular work is once more required from them and they're grumpy about it. So I have another week of strengthening things up, plus daily foam roller sessions on quads, calves, and IT bands to work the kinks out.

Thus, Foam Roller Hell, here I come!

This will be a very quick post, because today has been a very long day. It was a day involving both physical therapy and roller derby (albeit in a non-skating capacity for me; I was a penalty timer), which means by the time I got home for the night I was ready to collapse. Additionally, there were elements of The House-Buying Saga (though they were admittedly quickly dispatched) and highly energetic social times involving people arriving from out of town for the annual gathering we call Conlorado.

(Short story: One year, John came home from Gen Con disappointed that he and his friends just didn't get to play enough games together. So he invited everyone to come visit and play games in the context of a private weekend-long con of their own. Thus Conlorado was born. This is its third iteration.)

It's the sort of day where everything will get done, but some will get done very briefly and on the way to sleep.

So this will be a very quick post wherein I recommend another post: Kameron Hurley's post on Tor.com, "I Love Writing Books, So I Need To Get Better At Writing Them."

Despite having been written three months earlier, it's crossed my radar at a time when my various online circles of writerly friends and acquaintances are talking about what might be charitably described as an ego-piece by an ex-teacher who, if this is how he felt about teaching, would have been happier and would have done less damage had he quit teaching sooner. I've had it recommended to me by readers who admired it for its much-needed candor, which strikes me as a noun related to the adjectival phrase "proudly politically incorrect." I've also seen it skewered by the likes of the inimitable Chuck Wendig and the very wise Foz Meadows, who quite rightly have no time or patience for his bullshit.

Basically, the ex-teacher has a few smart things to say about how talking about writing isn't writing, and how you need to actually write to make it as a writer, and how that involves hard work and the willingness to take criticism and forge that into better writting.

And then he wraps those unarguable truths in a lot of poison for which there is no excuse.

And then his admirers say that you have to excuse him the poison, because he's just jaded and tired and has had to deal with obnoxious self-entitled grad students, and besides, you're ignoring his real point.

(And I think, wouldn't it be nice if female writers who wrapped some hard, inarguable truths in a coating of righteous wrath were supported for the sake of their good points, their abrasiveness understood in the context of how much crap they'd had to put up with? Instead of being condemned and dismissed for their anger, their harsh "tone," their profanity, if only they'd be more polite maybe they'd succeed at winning allies--)

(But I digress.)

I say, we are blessed in this world with so many great writers that the very finite nature of our time upon this earth obliges us to pick and choose among them. Everyone has their own criteria for this choice. Me, I tend to choose those who can express hard, inarguable truths without wrapping them in dog turds and arsenic.

Here, therefore, is Hurley writing about the ways in which a writer at any level, at any age works hard to improve her craft. Her article has in common with the other article the hard, inarguable truths that you must work hard, you must continue to work hard, your work will never be done. But it makes no toxic pretense of prophesying. There are no attempts in Hurley's piece to distinguish between the writers with talent versus the writers who'll never make it, nor to tell the later to give up and stop trying.

Much the opposite.

The ex-MFA dude says, if you don't have talent you'll never make it. If you didn't take the art seriously before you were legal to drink, you'll never make it. If you are currently having a hard time making time to write, if you spend more time talking about writing than you do actually writing, if you're not in fact good at writing yet, if you--

Hurley says, "So what? You're not dead yet."

If you're still alive, you've still got time: to break bad habits, to figure out your schedule, to shift your priorities, to improve your fluency, to deepen your craft, to stop talking and start writing, to make it as a writer, to decide for yourself what "making it" means, to decide that "making it" is a mirage and a chimera and that you are content to keep working at this writing thing "until the last breath leaves your body."

So no one--no writer, no teacher, no Nobel laureate--has any business telling you "you'll never make it as a writer." And why the crap should they want to? Seems a little busy-body of them. Seems like something that doesn't do themselves any good, and has the potential to do others a measure of harm. Seems like a writer should be more concerned with their own writing than with whether other writers are Doing Writing Right.

So... that went a little longer than I meant to go. But then I've been sitting on some of these thoughts all week and they just sort of exploded when I read Hurley's piece and felt this grateful wave of Yes! You get it! in response. That tends to make me wordy.

Anyway. Tomorrow there will be a new Fictionette and also progress on the story-in-revision. See you then.

Hooray! The "Fictionette Freebie" for the month of February is out and free and clear and all yours. I chose "If On A Winter's Night Two Travellers..." because, looking back at the last four months of Freebies, I thought we needed something a little more uncomplicatedly light-hearted. Granted, being stuck in a broken-down car in a snow storm outside of the range of any cell phone signal isn't exactly a pleasant situation, but then neither is getting kidnapped by vampires, and no one ever accused Robin McKinley's Sunshine of heavy-duty grimdark.

In fact, now that I've got occasion to review it, I think the narrator of "Travellers..." does sound more than a little influenced by the narrator of Sunshine. I may have been rereading that novel during the second week of February, around the time I would have been polishing this one up for publication.

So now I am all caught up on February, as far as Friday Fictionettes go.

How am I doing on the story?

...I've been avoiding it today. Which is embarrassing. I've been very diligent in everything else. I did all my physical therapy for today, despite maybe having pulled a muscle in my left calf during the lunges (please dear Gods no whyyyyy). I finished them as very small lunges, but I finished them. I had a great time with my freewriting, during which a word-of-the-day prompt got me thinking of the will-o-the-wisp at the beginning of The Neverending Story who's gotten lost despite usually being the agent of other people's getting lost. What does a will-o-the-wisp follow when it is lost? And I put up a Puzzle Pirates Examiner post. And I worked on Fictionettes, as above. And I even cleaned out the file cabinet just a bit more, and caught up on email and other online communications.

But the short story? Heavens help us.

*facepalms forever*

OK. So. Plan for tomorrow: Don't save the short story until last, because I might never get to it that way. Don't invest the task with the forbidding weight of "an hour and a half of butt in chair" or "get to work and don't stop until you've finished the scene," because I might never manage to start. Instead, try small sessions throughout the day, each one with the goal of "just open it up and do whatever you can in 25 minutes." Just keep coming back to it, the way I kept coming back to the closet doors project when that was still going on: a session here and a session there, between other tasks of the day.

I need to jump start a mental habit of coming back to the task regularly. I've been so irregular about it lately that every session has required the routine of two days spent sneaking up on it and dodging the avoidance monsters. I need to put it back in the brain space where it's just a thing that I do when it's time to do it. Ideally, I'd return to the task every day without fuss. Maybe by sitting down to multiple micro-sessions throughout a single day, I can pack many days' worth of mental habit formation into that single day. And the day after that.

It's better than dodging avoidance monsters for weeks, anyway.

Yes, I do sound like a pathological bundle of neuroses, don't I? We all have our crosses to bear. And possibly hot cross buns to bake, which sounds a lot less melodramatic than bearing crosses, and also tastier. I mean, on the one hand, you have a method of torture and execution; on the other, you have yummy sweet rolls. When they offer you cake or death, choose cake. That's the point I'm getting around to here. Writing should be more like cake than like death.