author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

There's this thing about writing that I keep having to learn, and relearn, and relearn, then learn again every time the precise context changes. It's like having to be told "the swimming pool is wet," and "the rain is wet," and "the water in the bathtub is also wet," because I never seem to mentally graduate to the point where I can just assume that all water is wet. It's really kind of annoying.

In any case, the lesson is this: The final draft doesn't come first.

I got a new story idea over the weekend, a really charming one, a sort of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret coming-of-age story that takes place in something like the world described by The Shadow over Innsmouth, centering on the friendship between the human protagonist and one of the (for want of a better term) Deep Ones. I got very excited about this idea--it kept me up late, watching phrases and images and scenes cobble themselves together on the insides of my eyelids.

Then I went to write some of it down for the next day's freewriting session... and it wouldn't come. Just couldn't get started. Typed a couple words. Erased them. Stared at the screen (which was infinitely less inspiring than the insides of my eyelids). Wrote and erased another word. It was like that Monty Python "Novel Writing" skit: "I am sorry to interrupt you there, Dennis, but he's crossed it out. Thomas Hardy here on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far, and he is gazing off into space." It's all true!

I had to deliberately, consciously give myself permission to get it wrong before I could unfreeze and get any of it written. And by "any of it" I mean a paragraph here, a slice of dialog there, disjointed bits and pieces of what I remembered coming up with the night before. But once I started jotting down those pieces, more pieces just kept coming.

The final draft cannot come first.

Today I struggled to put in my daily half hour of work on this week's fictionette for exactly the same reason. The situation was, perhaps, exacerbated by having (theoretically) already gotten the bits-and-pieces draft done during a freewriting session a month ago; this week is when I'm supposed to take that draft and polish it into perfection. But in between the bits-and-pieces draft and final draft comes something else, something more coherent than the one but necessarily rougher than the other. A second draft, maybe? Or even a first draft, since the bits-and-pieces draft isn't so much a draft at all. More like notes toward a draft, really.

So, again, nothing happened until I let myself just start writing the story down as it occurred to me, rough and unstructured as it was. Any story element I knew needed to go in there was fair game. Type them up in no particular order, just the order in which they come to mind. And, magically, structure appeared as I went, sometimes in the form of square-bracket notes telling me to "[Move the bit about Bob's plans for the evening here]" or "[Put Lenny's bit about 'work-life balance' here.]" Then continuing on as normal, confident that I could come back and perform the prescribed edits easily, now that I actually had text on the page to edit.

The final draft cannot be expected to come first.

And then there was this blog post here. I had no idea what I was going to write. I stared at the blank page (uninspiring as ever) while thoughts chased each other around in my head like fish in a bucket, all of them too small to keep. Finally I just started typing up notes about my day. Prosaic, mundane, boring notes about a boring day. Who wants to hear about my day?

Nevertheless, one of those notes...

discovered that it's ok if the fictionette isn't getting written up in perfect final draft form today. it's ok to babble a little. helped me figure out some structure that way.

...turned into what you're reading now.

The final draft, I learned (relearned), doesn't come first, can't come first, can't be expected to come first. No, not even for a blog post. This water is wet too.

I think I will write "All water is wet" on an index card and tape it to the bathroom mirror, and I'll also tape on to the shelf above my desk. Maybe then I'll stop expecting the final draft to appear on a blank page like, I dunno, Aphrodite rising fully formed out of the sea foam, ever. It doesn't happen stop expecting it to happen stop tormenting and freezing yourself with the expectation that it happen. All water is wet. Understand?

You know what's the worst? Totally unscheduled days. No, really--you get up right on time, you do your first writing task, then you think, "I have all day to do the rest of my writing," and then you go bike all over town, take yourself out for lunch, run errands, take a long nap because you just biked all over town in the gloriously warm sun--and then suddenly it's late in the evening and there is not enough time in the world to get everything done.

Well, OK, maybe you don't. Maybe you're smart. I seem to not be very smart when it comes to managing totally unscheduled days. Hence, Saturday is the Friday, etc. etc., many apologies, check back tomorrow.

Meanwhile! New fiction. The new short story is proceeding slowly in a sort of NaNoWriMo-esque way. Not as regards word-count, though. As regards discovery. I only really know what happens in one scene, which makes the whole endeavor sort of scary--but, so what? Write that one scene. It is amazing what little details pop up when writing that one scene, and what guiding stars those details can be. For instance, when the main character noticed that the weird tree had oak bark but "five-fingered leaves that reminded me of my father's maple farm"--OK, that's a clumsy sentence that could use some revision, but shut up, that's not the point. The point is, now I know her Dad runs, or used to run, a maple syrup operation. Which in turn gives me a clue about where she might have grown up, what kind of activities she might have enjoyed as a child, and also the nature of her relationship with trees. The latter is more significant than you might think; the first scene depicts a tree transforming into a man right in front of her eyes.

We're back to E. L. Doctorow analogy of writing being "like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." Some versions of the quote add the extra hazard of fog. Imagine a blizzard, too, if you like. The point of the analogy remains the same: The little chunk of road (story) that you see now enables you to drive into (write) the next chunk of road (story).

Anyway. Fictionette tomorrow. For serious. pMost of tomorrow afternoon is entirely unscheduled, after all...

So January hasn't been going so well. Mentally and emotionally, I mean. Well, and also schedule-wise. Truth is, the stuff that went bad on Christmas Day, that stuck with me. It stuck with me hard. It struck resonances all up and down my family history, and that kind of thing is hard to shake. I've been doing a lot of sleeping late, either because the bad stuff's been keeping me up late, or because I'm so tired of having the bad stuff jangling around in my head that it's sometimes easier to just stay unconscious.

And then, as you know, I've been doing a reread and rework of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which has exercises in it like "Describe three 'monsters' who had a detrimental effect on your creativity or self-esteem" and "Write a 'letter to the editor' in your defense regarding one of those monsters." Which dovetails a little too closely with the lingering bad stuff.

Now, sometimes writing the bad stuff down exorcises it, if only temporarily. But sometimes it just sticks a knife in the scar tissue and rips the old wound wide open again. I never know which way it's going to be until it's had its way with my brain, you know?

I've been trying to counter the re-wounding effect by following up the exercises with a ten-minute session of Headspace, an app for doing meditation. It's helping, but slowly, because slowly is how I learn new things. "Let the thoughts be there, but be at peace with them being there. Don't get caught up in either trying to stop them or chasing after them. Just let them be." That kind of stuff takes practice. Meanwhile, the bad stuff comes and goes in waves and sometimes I still go under.

The other night, trying to go to sleep, I thought about a dream I've had on-and-off throughout my life. In it, I would find myself exploring the walk-in attics on the upper floor of my parents' house. As a child I was always forbidden to play in there, so of course I did. I loved exploring, I wasn't unaffected by the allure of the forbidden, and I loved also that I could hide away up there and no one could find me. I even outfitted a little room in one hard-to-reach corner, with pillows and blankets and a bead curtain and candles. I figured no one would ever find it. And no one did, not until I was in my 30s at least.

But here's the thing in the dream: Sometimes I would find a little slit or hole in the pink insulation, just a little tiny claustrophobic tunnel which, if I was brave, I could crawl through it (spun glass not being a problem in dreams) and follow it down to where it turned to the right and opened up into a tiny little cave, just my size. And I could hide there for as long as I needed to until I felt safe coming out. It was my mousehole and no one could hurt me there.

Thinking about this the other night, I thought, "No one actually wants to go 'back to the womb,' not really. What one wants is a womb of one's own."

That's not the epiphany. That's just a bad Virginia Woolf pun.

Besides, it's of limited usefulness. Because trying to envision myself crawling into my little imaginary mousehole, telling myself "the tunnel is so narrow, it scrapes your memories right off, so you can hide from them too," somehow it just put me ears-deep in the bad stuff again. The walk-in attics of my parents' house were too much associated with all things family and all the painful things that the bad stuff woke up. I didn't get to sleep for hours, and I hardly managed to stay asleep for more than a couple hours at a time. (The bad stuff was conspiring with my bladder on that one. I swear, my body seems to think its main function while I'm asleep is making pee. The late thirties appear to be one prolonged battle between waking up dehydrated in the morning or waking up to pee all night long.)

The next night is when the epiphany happened. I had just finished rereading Diane Duane's The Wizard's Dilemma. Like most of the Young Wizard books, it ends with a scene in what's known as Timeheart. That's kind of like a non-stagnant Heaven, or a version of Narnia's "further up and further in" without the nasty implications in the ending of The Last Battle. What's loved lives on there in cityscapes and natural vistas of perfection that go on and on as far as the eye can see and the heart desires to explore. In a lesser author's hands, this might have given rise to some sort of hokey Moral of the Story ending. Duane is not a lesser author. The scene provides emotional closure, but it doesn't pretend there are easy answers. It just reassures the characters (and the reader) that their sacrifices were worthwhile, and that there's hope.

And I closed the book and thought, "I want to walk out into a big bright new day like that. So much better than hiding away in my mousehole. I'm tired of making myself small."

And that's what the epiphany was. Unpacked, it goes something like this:

Pain makes us small. Pain makes us make ourselves small. We make ourselves small so we can hide away from the pain, hide away from the rest of the world when we're in pain. An animal in pain hides. It makes itself small.

But making yourself small doesn't make the pain go away. So now you're so much smaller than you were born to be, and still in pain on top of it all. That sucks.

Worse, pain makes our desires small. It makes us want small things. When we're in pain, we bargain: "Just take the pain away, that's all I ask."

But we're not born to want small! We're born to want everything--love and long life and happiness and fulfillment and friends and comfort and safety and meaningful work and the ability to change the world for the better. Wanting big isn't a glitch or vice or something to be ashamed of. It's our goddamned birthright!

So I'm not going to make myself small in my head anymore. In my head, I'm going to make myself too big for the pain. It might still be there, it might still hurt, but it's not going to be my world, because my world is so much bigger than that. And I'm allowed to want it all.

So that was my epiphany the other night. Cheesy, huh? But it helps me keep the mental bad stuff at bay while I'm trying to sleep, so that's something. And eventually this thing will run its course and I'll be fine again.

Oh, and the belated January 22 fictionette is coming along nicely. It has dragons in it. Puppy dragons. Three of them. They are the best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's about where I'm at.

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

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

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

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

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

I have here, in my hot little hands, a brand new printed-out draft of "Caroline's Wake." It's about 1500 words shorter than the version I submitted last year, and, I very much hope, a stronger story. It's not quite ready to submit at this time, but give me a couple more hours to scribble in between the double-spaced lines of the print-out, and it will be.

Today is Day 3 of Actually Getting Writing Done on a Reliable, Workerlike Basis. Seriously, this week has been fantastic. I've been getting my morning shift done in the morning, and I've been using my afternoon shift to create publishable story copy. It is amazing how awesome it feels to transform writing from a guilt-inducing monster into a life-affirming achievement.

I'm not entirely sure what made this sort of productivity and dailiness feel convincingly possible this week and not, say, last week, or last year, or eleven and a half years ago when I quit my day job. But I can point to a few things that could be said to have helped.

Dropped all expectations of content writing. I got cut from first one Examiner gig and then the other, and I decided I was ready to let them go rather than fight to get them back. Examiner only paid according to some secret metric of eyeballs-on-page, which came to about $20 every third month. I was doing it because it was an outlet for babbling about stuff that interested me, not because it paid well. Which was sily, because I already have an outlet for babbling, and that's this blog here.

But this change also occasioned me reevaluating the desirability of having a content writing gig at all. Content writing obviously cuts into my writing time and capacity. Every writing hour spent on Examiner or Textbroker is an hour I'm not thinking up and writing down stories. And while a good content writing gig can be a reliable source of funds, the fact is I'm fortunate enough to have a well-paid spouse who enthusiastically supports my career goals. I can afford to take not just my writing but my fiction full-time.

And if I put all my writing hours toward writing, revising, and submitting short stories, I'm likely to actually sell a few. It's a better use of my time all around.

Which is not to say that I won't be tempted by a decent content writing gig. I did just submit a sample of my writing to a respectable organization that's looking to build a stable of web writers and editors. If that goes somewhere, well, I'll figure out how to schedule it in at that time.

Rearranged my timesheet template. I log my writing on a spreadsheet every day. That's how I know when I've done my five hours. This week I totally revamped the daily template, and it's ridiculous how much this helped. I suppose a well-organized brain is a productive brain.

I used to have my spreadsheet separated out into categories of types of writing: fiction in this block (short story, novel, freewriting), content writing in that block (Examiner, textbroker, other), miscellaneous over thataways (Friday Fictionettes, etc.). Then, if I was feeling decisive, I'd babble out a sort of schedule for the day in a column off to the right, which I might or might not look at again all day.

This week I overhauled it such that the schedule was baked right into the timesheet. Everything I expect myself to do in a work day, it's there, and in order. All the nonsense and clutter is gone. It's just Morning Pages, the Morning Shift block, the Afternoon Shift block, the actually writing blog, done. If I want to be more precise, there's room to type a description--for instance, "Short Fiction" today is described as "finish 'Caroline's Wake' to printable draft" for the first hour and "take your pen and finalize that draft!" for the second. But for the most part, my plan is just to do the next thing until I come to the end of the things.

There's still a line for content writing in the Afternoon Shift block, but mostly it just gets crossed off.

Began enforcing scheduling constraints. Before, I would get lost somewhere between Morning Pages and freewriting, or between freewriting and fictionette, and I might never come back from my long break in order to start the afternoon shift. Having reorganized my timesheet, I can now use it to determine where I break and for how long. Basically, if I'm in the middle of a block, I keep working Pomodoro style until I'm done with that block: 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. If I get to white space, I can take a longer break for a meal or for playtime, but I have to have a concrete idea of when I'll start the next block. When that time comes around, I absolutely must get back to work.

This is not rocket science. This is what I always should have done, and what I've always known I ought to do. Somehow, this week I'm actually doing it. Amazing. I'm going to attribute it in part to the overhauled timesheet, and in another part to something else:

Reevaluated how I spend my break time. I hate to admit it, but I can't actually fit an hour of Puzzle Pirates into a 5-minute break. I can't even fit an hour of Puzzle Pirates into an hour. It's like football that way. Or roller derby. The clock may say that an hour of game time passed, but it took a lot more than one hour of real time.

But I can log onto Puzzle Pirates, play a single round of the Distilling puzzle, and log off. That takes about five minutes. Or I can play Two Dots until the Pomodoro Timer's end-of-break whistle.

The weird thing is, these little self-contained puzzle games are starting to act like both a reward and a trigger. That is, they not only function as "Yay, you worked 25 minutes straight, you get a cookie," but also as this Pavlovian signal that it's time to get back to work. Finishing a "pom" means I get to play a puzzle. Finishing a puzzle means it's time to get back to work.

So, these are things that have helped. (Also, getting up early--I keep aiming for 8:00, but as long as I'm up by 9:00 I stand a strong chance of finishing my morning shift by noon.) But what also helped was simply knowing that it's been more than a year since the rewrite on "Caroline's Wake" was requested, and that's just ridiculous, and the ridiculous shit ends now. And so it does.

So the other day I was talking about how accumulating rejection letters can make it difficult to convince oneself to keep accumulating rejection letters; or, put another way, how it's hard to keep believing in the viability of a story that has accumulated a lot of rejection letters (for emotional values of "a lot"). There comes a point when the writerly weasel brain starts insisting that the reason the story keeps getting rejected is that it's no good.

Well, whatever the opposite of writerly weasel brain is--writerly angel brain? writerly sweetheart brain?--it starts to sing the moment one hears "Good news! I liked your story and sent it up to the Editorial Board for further review." Or words to that effect.

Words to that effect arrived late last week, providing me with an effective argument against weasel brain. Regardless of whether "It's For You" is ultimately accepted or rejected by the Editorial Higher-Ups, I'll be able to tell myself that someone liked it enough to put it in front of the Editorial Higher-Ups. That's enough to keep me going.

More than that--thinking about it got me excited last night for today's workday. Like, "I can't wait to write" excited. There's a logical component to it: "I can't wait to finish more stories, so I can send out more stories, so I can receive more good news about my stories! And feel good some more!"

This is a good feeling. This is a feeling I need to be able to store in a bottle, then administer to myself via medicinal measuring spoon as needed.

So there's this one story that's been waiting more than a year for me to finish revising it so I can send it back to an Editorial Higher-Up who specifically requested the revision. Never mind the stupidity of my having taken this long about it; I'm trying to focus on fixing it. I'm trying to ride this fresh new happy-excited-affirmed feeling right into the part of my day where I work on that revision. Which is why I'm writing this blog post first. Writing about that feeling makes me kinda-sorta relive that feeling. Kind of like the way writing about bad memories makes me relive the bad feelings associated with that memory? Only this time it's a good feeling.

My impressionable brain! It can be put to work for the forces of good!

(I hope!)

I brought my bike in for maintenance today. Actually, I brought it in for maintenance last week, but after evaluating all the work the bike needed, it was determined that we'd need to order a part before work could be done. Today I got the call that the part was in, so today I brought my bike in.

And here is the difference between bike maintenance and car maintenance:

Twice--both last week and today--the technicians tried to talk me out of getting service done. It started out as an attempt to lower the cost estimate by leaving out certain services that were deemed not strictly necessary. I thought about it, thanked them, and said I'd rather do all the things. I'm in it for the long haul on this bike. I'd like to care for it accordingly.

After that there were multiple attempts--first from the tech who first gave me the estimate last year, then from the tech who checked my bike in today--to convince me that, considering the age of my bike and the shape it's in, wouldn't I be better off just buying a new bike?

No, I said, I like this bike. No, I don't mean just the basket, awesome as it is. I don't just mean the seat that my butt's so accustomed to. I mean the bike. I have been riding it for more than twenty years. In that time, it's become almost an extension of myself. I don't care that at this point the only original parts on it are the handlebars and the frame. I don't care if the frame is a little dinged. It's my bike. I would like it to remain my bike. Thank you.

It's sentimental. It's probably not economical. It's certainly not 100% rational. But that's where I'm at.

Anyway, come to think of it, this is not really so much about the difference between bike maintenance and car maintenance. It's more like the difference between a vehicle maintenance and repair shop that's also a new vehicle dealer, and one that isn't. The place I took my bike sells bikes. The place I take my car does not sell cars.

OK, and the bike place probably caters to more students on tight budgets than the car place does. I do give them credit for honestly trying to save me money. But I'm pretty sure they were also, quite honestly, trying to sell me a bike.

There is probably a metaphor about writing in here, something about making the decision to throw more hours of revision at a beloved story rather than just trunking it and moving on to a new one. I am not prepared to follow this metaphor to its logical conclusions, not least because I think there are too many logical conclusions to keep track of. In any case, I didn't manage to get to the story revision today.

But I did take my bike in for maintenance!

I've bemoaned this before: I have "on" days and "off" days. On my "on" days, I'm so on. I have energy and boundless well-being and I Get Stuff Done. On my "off" days I'm lucky if I can get out of bed. I get whatever day I get--I don't get a say, they just happen to me.

Except that's not quite the case. Careful observation yields useful discoveries.

Such as: If I get some serious writing time in, if I just do it even I don't feel up to it (even if it's shaping up to be an "off" day), I'll have a reason to feel good about myself. I might feel sick and lethargic, but I won't also be feeling ashamed.

Such as: If I get my morning cup of strong Assam tea, it not only wards off withdrawal headaches (hello, mild caffeine addiction), but it makes me feel pampered and cared for. In conjunction with the rest of my wake-up ritual--morning pages scribbled at the front patio table--it makes me feel like "someone thinks I'm worth it." That someone is me, but that counts.

Such as: If I get some exercise early in the day, sometimes I stay energized for a long time afterwards.

Such as: Skating just makes me happy.

As to that last--it's a roller derby thing. Or it may be more accurate to say, roller derby (and, presumably, other roller sports) attracts people who find that, no matter how bad the day has been so far, strapping on skates makes everything at least a little better. Like, I'm on eight wheels now, I'm flying, how bad can it be?

I had cause to reflect on this Saturday. It was a very "on" day, Saturday. And there was every reason for it to have been an "off" day. It was stuffed to the gills with scheduling, it started stupid-early in the morning, and I didn't get to sleep until 2:00 AM the night before. And what sleep I got wasn't solid. And yet I had that boundless well-being and do-stuff energy and I just felt good.

The reason I had to get up early was, I had to be in Longmont for 9:00 AM and in my skate gear at the rendezvous point for 9:15. I'd volunteered to skate in a parade. I got up at 7:00 AM, managed to drag through my Saturday morning stuff in time to leave the house by 8:45, drove all squinty-eyed with sleepiness up the Diagonal Highway, found a parking spot near the parade route in downtown Longmont, sat on the car's back bumper and tugged on my skate gear, launched myself down Terry toward 5th Street...

...and suddenly realized I was feeling good. Awake. Vibrant. Cheerful and optimistic. Pain-free. Energetic. Spirits lifted. Just physically and emotionally well.

The feeling lasted all day. And this despite adding a surprise trip to the car mechanic to my already overflowing agenda. I just kept feeling good all day.

So I thought, maybe "on" days are a thing I can cause to happen. On purpose!

Today I got up and had my morning ritual of tea and scribbles out on the patio. Then I put on my skate gear and I rolled around the neighborhood for about fifteen minutes.

Then I came back to the house, had breakfast, and just dove into the work day. Bam. Got a bunch of stuff I'd been putting off for a while done, too.

Morning skate. Huh. Might have to make a habit of this.

We have a working washing machine again! I'm going to wash all of the clothes tomorrow. And the towels. And my exercise pants. And etcetera.

It was, as suspected, just a matter of replacing the lid sensor switch. Very simple--only, like I said before, I wasn't going to mess with it and maybe mess things up with either it or our home warranty policy or both. So today we had a visit from an appliance technician who opened things up, confirmed that it really was just the lid sensor switch and nothing else, and replaced that switch for us. And we gave him a check for the amount of the warranty co-pay.

And life was once more that particular sort of good that you get when you can wash your clothes without leaving the house, paying attention to business hours, and/or scrounging quarters.

The fun part was getting to see what the washing machine looked like under the hood. Our model requires one to pop off the end-caps of the front panel in order to reveal the access screws, then unscrew those screws to flip up the front panel, then simply walk off the entire chassis and lid. I didn't realize how little solid machine there was inside the big white aluminum rectangle--it's just a big flimsy metal box that gives the washtub somewhere to live. And also the lid sensor; the bit the technician replaced seemed to be attached to the inside of the chassis there.

It's OK if you're not getting a perfect visualization of the machine's innards from that abomination of a paragraph. Point is--OK, so, I'm thinking of one of John's T-shirts. The one with the slogan, "The insides of things are beautiful. Let's see what they look like." I'm feeling that slogan so very much right now.

There is probably a metaphor for writing in there somewhere. Something about the literary equivalent of taking it apart and finding out what the insides look like: examining the author's choices on a line-by-line level, or watching how they make two themes interact, or spotting that clever bit of foreshadowing on the reread. And sometimes you can't quite figure out how to take the story apart until you've had a chance to discuss it with someone else, or read an insightful review, and then you go, "Oh! So that's how you open it up and get at the lid sensor switch!" Something like that, anyway.

It's not "overthinking it." It's reverse engineering.