author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

There's been a little movement on the broken blog front. I heard back from my domain host's support people. They wanted to verify that I really was the account holder. I sent them back the requested proof that I am. Now I'm waiting some more.

Meanwhile, on the novel front, a few additional plot points and proto-characters came to light. This was in no small part due to a dream I had this morning, a rather disturbing one actually, but the disturbing ones make entertaining fiction fodder, so it's cool. (I have a strange relationship with nightmares. I wake up fascinated with them, replaying the memories with enjoyment. It's like I just got to watch a really entertaining horror-action-thriller-suspense movie in my sleep.) In that dream, I was obliged, because of careless promises I'd made, to give up several of my fingers. It wasn't going to hurt much, and the wounds would heal instantly, but it would--contrary to my understanding when I made those promises--be permanent. I was heartbroken because I wouldn't be able to play piano, flute, or guitar anymore. (You'd think "or type, or write with a fountain pen" would have occurred to me, but no.)

Once awake and thinking about the novel, I translated that into a better understanding of why Protagonist 2 had to give up her name and accept a new identity at the Magic Pixie Call Girl agency. She'd signed a long-term contract, and when time came, she found she simply couldn't bring herself to fulfill her part of the bargain, possibly because fulfilling it turned out to be a more dire proposition than she'd originally thought it would be. (Nothing to do with removal of fingers, by the way.) So the magical contract enforcement clause was triggered and she had to forfeit her name. The call girl agency gave her the improbably name of Delta Echoes. She's working hard and saving up money to buy her name back from--I dunno, the perjury pawn broker, something like that.

The name-forfeiture thing will be foreshadowed quite early when Protagonist 1 goes to fill out some routine form and is informed what will happen if anything he signs his name to turns out to be false. This will shock him. Also shocking will be the cat that one day starts talking to him. They don't have magic back where he's from. He's going to have to get used to it.

Things continue to slowly come together. Slowly. I'm very tempted to just start writing the first scene and see where it goes from there. But I have written quite a few novel drafts like that already. I want to try out this other method of novel writing, and I can't very well see how well I like it if I don't actually do it. So the planning stage continues.

My hope is, tomorrow, to figure out how the novel ends. Ambitious, I know, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

Nope, still haven't managed to carve out time for web site troubleshooting. I've begun to suspect it might be something very simple, like, say, all the files in the /journal directory having mysteriously disappeared, or maybe just a key #include. I DON'T KNOW. I haven't gotten to any point in any day this week where I've felt like I had the time and the energy to take a look.

But I did manage to sit down and nibble off a bit of Step 1. Why, that must mean I finished Step 0! Indeed. Three of the freewriting documents I read yesterday apparently lodged themselves on my mental backburner and fell into a single pot left simmering there, and this afternoon it turned into soup. It all came together while I was on a massage table, of all places, with nothing to do but relax and occasionally be stoic while a skilled therapist applied pressure to bits of my shoulder and neck that weren't ready for it but needed it very badly. (My right shoulder has not fully relaxed in years. It makes it hard to sleep at night. The chiropractic treatments are helping, but very slowly, and meanwhile I keep playing roller derby. So I'm trying to help things along by getting my upper back and neck massaged about once a month or after every bout, whichever comes first.) I took advantage of that time to mull over story ideas, and was kind of surprised to find one already there, spooling out scenes in my head.

Some wise writer said once that the best stories rely not on a single idea but on two: two story ideas that combine and intersect in interesting ways. I appear to have three. Possibly four, if the dream I woke up with this morning turns out to be useful. It was terrifyingly epic and needs to wind up in a story. I just don't know whether it will be this story. Anyway, here they are in all their generic glory:

• The Manic Pixie Call Girl Agency
• Being obliged to file for name/identity bankruptcy after breaking a magically enforced oath
• The cat started talking to its human today because it had a warning to give
• On a train incognito through enemy territory; team leader gave the order to get off-planet

The story that arises out of the intersection of those ideas is the novel I'm going to write. FOR NOW. I've written down all I know about it as of this evening. We'll see if, in the morning, I know more.

And for goodness's sake, I have got to get this blog fixed. I'm tired of posting into the void.

Hiho, yet another blog post for posterity and not the present. Another day without the wherewithal to troubleshoot the broken blog pages. But I will not let the day go by without reporting in!

Why? Because it's November, and I said I'd work on a novel in November, didn't I? So here I am. And, for better or worse, I've decided it'll be a new novel, not a revision of a previous year's draft. But at the same time I'm determined that this will be the novel that I finally make publishable and start submitting places, because it's about time. So I've got a bit of work cut out for me.

If you've been following along at home, you won't be entirely surprised that I'm trying out Rachel Aaron's novel-writing strategies from 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. Thus, rather than writing 1,667 words every day, I'll be taking my time choosing an idea and plotting it out before writing a whole bunch of words every day. I'm not too fussed about hitting 50K. Mainly, I want to write a first draft that isn't so tangled up as to make revision impossible. And I want--if not by the end of this month, than by sometime during the next month that I shall designate as a Novel-Writing Season on my personal calendar, which will probably be March--a novel I can begin shopping around to agents and/or editors.

So today I spent some time on Aaron's Step 0: "Decide Which Book to Write." I dove into the Scrivener project where I keep my daily freewriting and reread a whole bunch of documents that I'd labeled "To Do" when I wrote them. (I'll label a freewriting document "To Do" if it strikes me as having any long-term project potential. Some of them are clearly short stories. Some are novels. Some, I don't know what they are, but they're intriguing enough to be worth a second look.) And now I am going to go to sleep. Hopefully, sometime between now and tomorrow morning, possibly during a dream if I am very lucky, something I read tonight will shake itself out, fluff up all its plumage to make itself seem as big as possible, inflate its very colorful throat sac, and yell, "HEY! YOU! WRITE ME! WRITE ME NOW NOW NOW!"

If not, well, I'll take a little more time auditioning ideas and just pick one.

After that will come Step 1: "Get Down What You Already Know," which will help me decide if I picked the right idea out or if I really should go back to Step 0. But about that, more later.

So the blog is still down. You won't see this post. That's why it will be a very short post.

Basically, everything to do with pulling blog posts out of this one particular database just... stopped working, late last week. Due to absolutely nothing I did. All the posts are still there in the database, and I can view them, edit them, and add to them via phpMyAdmin, but all the webpages designed to display them or edit them are coming up 500s.

I emailed my domain host about it the night I saw it, using the email address that their website says to use, but they have been disappointingly unresponsive.

Hopefully I will finally find time to do some troubleshooting tomorrow, so I can at least say "This particular PHP library is failing" or "Code that works to pull from my writingdb database is inexplicably failing to pull from my journal database" or whatever. Or maybe I'll just find that it's something stupid that changed for no good reason and I can change it back. WHO KNOWS. NOT ME. Not yet, anyway.

Cross your fingers that you'll actually see this post in the near future. (Wait a minute...) Right. Also, here is a wooden crate, which you my open with the crowbar that you will find inside...

*sigh* Ain't technology great?

Hallelujah, would you look at that: A Friday Fictionette actually out on Friday. It's called "Wake It Up Again" (Patrons, click here for audiobook and/or ebook) and it was inspired by a chalk hopscotch in front of that five-years-dead Walmart in Longmont. I took a picture of it on my way over to Leenie's Cafe one morning, then later used that picture as a freewriting prompt. So for once the cover art actually predated the fictionette.

I'm actually backfilling this blog post from almost a week later. The blog's been down, or at least the webpages that pull the entries out of the database and display them have stopped working, and, as late as it was when I finally released the October 28 Friday Fictionette, I couldn't see the point of blogging about it where nobody could see. I have since reconsidered the value of faithfully recording my writing progress each day, which has always primarily been for my own benefit anyway, and decided to fill in the missing links after all. Besides, eventually the blog will be working again, and maybe someone will page back through the entries and see this one.

If we want to be painfully honest, the Fictionette didn't actually go up until the very wee hours of Saturday the 29th. But I do think I get some credit for staying up until that sucker was done, even though it meant not getting to bed until 3:00 AM the night/morning before bout day. I was all dedicated and disciplined, y'all. Possibly unwisely so. (If only I'd been disciplined enough to get started earlier in the day.)

OK, so, now I gotta go remember how to upload a picture and link it to this blog post without the help of my blog editing web form. Yayyyy. Laters!

First off: The new new computer has arrived. Which is to say, the computer Asus sent me to replace the new computer that I sent them for repair. After they'd had that computer for two weeks, they emailed me to say that the motherboard needed replacing, but the part was all out of stock, so they proposed to replace the whole computer instead. I had a fleeting wistful thought for the stickers already affixed to the X540L. Some of them can't be replaced. But then I compared stats. The replacement unit would be an X544L with an Intel Core i7 on board. The X540L, which I'd purchased through Best Buy for about $360, had a Core i3. That's a bit of an upgrade. I said yes.

Then I waited and waited and waited and finally emailed Asus Support with, "Is it on its way, and if so, what's the tracking number?" Then I waited and waited some more, and finally they emailed me back yesterday with "Here's the tracking number and it's expected to arrive TODAY." So I scrambled over to the FedEx website, pulled up the tracking info ("On vehicle for delivery" since the wee hours) and requested they hold it at the Boulder location because I had plans to be out all afternoon. They immediately added "Delivery option requested" to the tracking information, but--and this is critical--with no guarantee that the request would be honored.

And of course it wasn't. And of course this info got added to the tracking data where I could read it about two hours later than when it actually was delivered ("Left on doorstep / Signature not required"). And of course the next bus home from Longmont wasn't for another 45 minutes. Of course.

But when I got home, there it was, sitting in its box right under the porch light, safe and sound. And today I started moving everything onto it. Even as I type these words, my entire My Documents folder is whisking its way across the local area network, one file at a time. Next up will be my Thunderbird profile.

Secondly! Operation Pseudo-Medieval Chicken is a success. It's not very medieval, pseudo or otherwise, but it's delicious. Here's what I did, in case you want to play along at home:

1. Caramelize onions in basalmic vinegar. Basically followed the step #1 of this recipe, only not exactly. For one thing, I stopped slicing onions after two because holy scallion, that's a lotta onion. I think their idea of "medium" and mine may possibly differ. For another, I substituted basalmic vinegar for honey because that's what my mouth wanted. (Also because this looked amazing.) But otherwise, it's totally just step #1 of that recipe.
2. Begin pear, pepper, chicken proceedings in crock pot. While onions were caramelizing, I sliced up the pepper and peeled, cored, and cubed the pear. (I don't remember what kind of pepper; it was shaped like a bell pepper, but its green was much paler, and it had a little bit more heat, just enough to go with the sweet.) Pepper slices went in the crock pot first, a nice even layer, and then a nice even layer of pear cubes. Finally, the two boneless, skinless chicken breasts on top. Close lid, plug it in, turn the dial to HIGH.
3. Combine. When the onions had cooked for about 30 minutes, into the crock pot they went, just right on top of everything else. Don't even bother stirring. Then I waited and waited and waited until a thermometer told me that the chicken had reached a safe 165 degrees F.
4. Quality assurance. After devouring half the contents of the crock pot, I decided the chicken could stand to pick up more flavor, and that the pear should be better integrated with the sauce. So I hacked up the chicken until it was chunks and shreds, and I mashed up the pear beyond recognition. All components were combined thoroughly and returned to the crock pot on LOW for another hour or so, then allowed to cool, then packed away into the fridge for the best possible leftovers ever.

Dang, the Thunderbird profile is already done transferring. Guess I'll send my Firefox profile over next, right after I upload this post. AND THEN ALL THINGS WRITING.

Ah-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! And other varieties of triumphant laughter. The Friday Fictionette for September 2 is out, published, posted, uploaded, on Friday, September 2! The month is off to a great start. Also, turns out I can do the whole thing, from "Which freewriting session was going to be the basis for this week's Fictionette again?" to "DONE! Mwahahahahaaaa!" in a single day, so there. It would not be a day in which I got much of anything else done, writing-wise, but it's clearly possible.

Anyway, it's "By Moonlight, a Dream of Vengeance," which started out farcical but wound up sort of tragic and sweet. And, um, it kinda made me cry while narrating the audiobook edition. I cry easily at fiction in general, so it's not that much of a surprise and certainly not a brag. When it's my own stuff, I generally take it as a sign that I'm done, this is the final draft, stop messing with it and let it go out into the world. When it's someone else's stuff and I'm reading aloud to John, I don't worry about it; he understands this sort of thing. But when I'm trying to record an audiobook, it's a nuisance. I am sure that somewhere out there, as part of a larger guide to recording audiobooks, someone has written tips on how to reclaim control of your voice when that happens. (Without Googling, I'm almost willing to bet real money that if this exists, it's written by Mary Robinette Kowal. OK, maybe not as part of that linked guide, but I just about bet she's written something about it somewhere.)

Best I can figure: Hit PAUSE, take a few deep breaths into the diaphragm, take a few deep but narrow breaths that you can feel going up and down the windpipe, then take one more deep diaphragm breath, UNPAUSE, and, as you read the next sentence on the exhale of that breath, gently tighten your core. Also, be willing to take your time. If you have to say the sentence over and over until it has no meaning for you anymore and thus stops triggering the crying process, that's fine too.

OK, enough about that. I've also released the Fictionette Freebie for August 2016. As has become habit lately, I settled on the one with the largest word count. It's "Dr. Green Ascends to the Nether World," which may be freely and fully accessed by all in audio, ebook, and HTML formats. I hope you enjoy it!

So, pro-tip about those 12-hour Sudafed tablets. Turns out, it's not such a good idea to take one at 5:00 PM, not if they're the Non-Drowsy Maximum Strength variety. I did not actually get to sleep until... well, almost 5:00 AM, about 12 hours after I took the dratted thing. I really should have also bought a box of the 4-hour tablets, just for scheduling flexibility. Well. I'll know for next time.

Anyway, there's no way I can make it through a work day on only three hours sleep, especially if there's roller derby practice at the end of it. The last roller derby practice before playoffs, in fact. Kind of important. So once I was able to sleep I tried to stay that way for as long as I could. Which meant I wasn't out of bed until after one in the afternoon. Which meant not a lot of things got done other than the absolutely necessary.

One of those absolutely necessary things, of course, was biking up to The Diaz Farm for my CSA share. Yay, pretty pictures of delicious veg! Those two Early Girl tomatoes were the high point of this week's pick-up--the first fresh, ripe tomatoes of the season. I immediately ate one with about half a cucumber, sliced up and dressed with a creamy balsamic vinaigrette. I've been fortunate to have been getting a few small tomatoes here and there from my back porch plants--Sungold cherries, elongated San Marzanos, and little round Brillantes, all of them more orange than red (expected behavior for the Sungolds, not quite so much for the others) and probably a little stunted from their growing conditions. But these plump two tomatoes coming home from the farm today were quite a treat.

I've been thinking about ways to convert some of this bounty into road trip snacks. The carrots are obvious--just bring them like they are. Maybe chop the largest ones into sticks. Zucchini is also tasty raw. I still haven't made those carrot-and-kohlrabi fritters; those would probably transport well. My latest genius idea is sausage-stuffed chard leaves--blanche the chard until tender, put a dollop of ground sausage cooked with onions and garlic into each, then just roll the leaves up into little bundles. Kind of like dolmades, but with chard instead of grape leaves. (Baking may be involved. I forget. I need to check my recipes.) Then stick them in a plastic bag, shove 'em in the ice chest, and eat 'em cold in the car whenever hungry.

Speaking of D2 Playoffs, I've had a request to post ALL THE LINKS here. The link above features our tournament bracket (there's that link again!), showing who plays whom at what time. You can see that we start out in Game 2 against the Chicago Outfit at 10 AM Central (9 AM Mountain) Noon Central (11 AM Mountain) on Friday, August 19. After that, our schedule depends on wins and losses.

Edit: I keep saying our first game is scheduled for 10 AM because for a hot minute it was. But then they changed the schedule, giving us the noon game, and we all breathed a sigh of relief because a lot of us aren't getting into town until midnight that morning. Still, I seem unable to wrap my brain around it for the purposes of telling people when to watch us.

If you want to watch it live--and why wouldn't you? Three days of non-stop derby derby derby featuring some of the best teams internationally!--you can get set up to do just that over at WFTDA.tv. You can buy a watch pass just for this weekend, or you can buy the big ol' humongous package that covers your live derby viewing pleasure for both D2 weekends, all four D1 weekends, and Championships too:

• D2 Playoffs: Wichita, Aug 19 – 21 – BUY WATCH PASS ($12.99)
• BUY PLAYOFFS + CHAMPIONSHIPS BUNDLE (U.S. ONLY) ($75)
• BUY PLAYOFFS + CHAMPIONSHIPS BUNDLE (NON-U.S. ONLY) ($75)
• View all available watch passes for the 2016 International Playoffs & Championships

Links will take you to the page on which you'd watch the stream, where you'll be prompted to log in. If you haven't yet bought your "virtual ticket," you'll click the green button with the price tag on it. That will pop up a window in which you'll log onto Cleeng.com, which is the outfit that WFTDA uses to manage the sale of watch passes.

I'm guessing that the bundle is divided into a U.S. and a Non-U.S. version because it includes Championships, which is being carried by sports channel ESPN3 for the second year running. When major cable TV gets involved, national borders become a Thing. The pass just for this weekend does not specific U.S. or Non, and the broadcast is just your regular WFTDA.tv livestream, which is essentially an HD Youtube video--it ought to be viewable from anywhere in the world. But I have had one friend in Canada (a flagmate on Puzzle Pirates, of course!) tell me that it wouldn't even let him log on because "it hates Canadians!" I have not yet confirmed that the link above is the link he tried, though, so I'm really not 100% certain about this. I double-checked Cleeng's FAQ, and it had a lot to say about watching from within the EU and so forth; besides, Cleeng is what they're using to sell the Non-U.S. watch pass bundle. (Maybe you should log onto Cleeng via the Non-U.S. bundle, but then back out before actually buying it, and then see if you can buy the watch pass via the D2 Wichita link now that you're successfully logged in?)

Anyway, if you're outside the U.S. and want to watch us skate this weekend, let me know whether the single weekend D2 pass works for you. Inquiring minds etc.

If you don't want to, or aren't able to, watch us live, then keep your eyes on the archives, as all D2 Wichita games will probably show up there early next week. Archived footage at WFTDA.tv is always free to watch.

That's it for me tonight--I'm going to be very good and do my at-home traction, but after that I'm down for the count. I took a 12-hour Sudafed just about 12 hours ago, so with any luck I'll actually get to sleep tonight. Good luck me.

Two big good things accomplished today: Finished preparing the June and July Fictionette Artifacts for mailing out to my very patient $5/month Patrons and submitted "It's for You" to the next pro-paying market I would like to introduce it to. As I get slowly caught up on All The Things, I'm beginning once more to feel like I can manage to continue pursuing a career in commercial fiction and running a four-times-monthly self-publishing gig simultaneously.

Tomorrow's task in short fiction: Review, and probably revise, an old, old short story of mine (circa 1995) and see if it's appropriate to submit to an anthology I just now today heard about. This temporarily displaces a couple other short fiction tasks because the anthology has a submission deadline of Aug 15.

I might have got even more done today had I not slept in. Last night's practice was exceedingly effortful. (Also exceedingly bruising, but nothing new there. It makes me weirdly happy to look in the mirror and see bruises polka-dotting my shoulders and upper arms. Like ink-stains on my fingers after doing my Morning Pages with a fountain pen, it's proof that I Showed Up.) Last night's sleep was also exceedingly interrupted--like, four visits to the bathroom, something ridiculous like that. And I woke from it with that stuffy almost-headache that I used to get constantly before I went on blood pressure medication, probably because I forgot to take my blood pressure medication last night. Gah. Stop reminding me that I'm getting older, body!

As usually happens when I sleep in, I had vivid dreams. My remembered dreams have possibly been extra vivid and also more numerous due to rereading Jeremy Taylor's book Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill. I have a sizable library of books about dreaming, lucid dreaming, and astral projection. Rereading them tends to have an immediate effect on my dream recall. I value my dream diaries; they go back to my elementary school days and have been the inspiration for a lot of my fiction.

What was unusual was that I continued the same dream from where it had left off each time I went back to sleep. I honestly can't remember ever managing to do that before. Gods alone know why I would want to; it was a terribly frustrating and anxious dream about scrambling to get my things packed up to check out of a hotel room on time. Well, late. In the dream, it was already something like two hours past check-out time when I realized I had a hotel room to check out of, and my car was at the wrong end of the hotel, and the hotel was long and winding and rambly like a monster shopping mall, and as I packed up things I kept finding more things that needed packing up (hiding not only in drawers and stacked on tables but also under the covers of an impeccably made bed) that I couldn't believe actually all fit in my luggage in the first place. And as I frantically grabbed things and stuffed them into containers, two housekeeping staff members stood patiently watching me, waiting to clean up the room when I was done. One was a small woman with a cheerful demeanor who kept telling me "It's OK, no pressure." The other was a tall, solidly-built man who loomed over the proceedings, clearly there in the role of Unspoken Muscular Threat.

I don't think I was actually trying to get back into the dream each time I hit SNOOZE. I think I was just trying to cement it in memory, because I wasn't ready to get up and write it down. But every time I went back to sleep, there I was again, wondering how all these snack items ever fit into one snack bag, or why I thought I'd manage to work on all of these many quilting, needlework, and knitting projects over an 8-hour drive and weekend stay.

I think the dream had us in Wichita, but I don't think it was WFTDA D2 anxiety so much as other anxieties using the next trip I have planned as their setting. This is actually a recurring subset of a recurring category of anxiety nightmare--I had almost exactly the same dream last month, only in that dream, I raced back to my hotel room only to discover it empty because a member of the hotel's maintenance staff had a policy of confiscating anything left in the room after check-out time.

Since I just this week moved all my data back over to an aging laptop with a noisy sub-performing fan, my immediate interpretation is that I'm anxious about getting all my data backed up NOW before it gets "confiscated" at "check-out time," i.e. before the old Asus tanks and takes my files with it. I've already burned the most immediately necessary writing projects to R/W DVD, along with my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles, but it feels like a drop in the bucket. Another option that occurs to me is the lifelong anxiety about needing to get all the stories in my head written and published NOW NOW NOW because you never know when you're gonna DIE. This is a thought that regularly inspires me to close my eyes, cover my ears, and sing LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

The nice thing about both those anxieties is, there's positive action I can take to ease them. I can't get everything done in a day, but I can do a little bit to address each issue daily. I can, say, finally activate my Dropbox account tomorrow, archive the next chunk of data to disk, and, as mentioned above, get the next story ready to submit for publication.

If there is a moral to this story, that's about it: Don't panic because you can't get everything done at once. Just try to do a little every day. Not very deep, I grant you, not exactly innovative, but it's surprising how practical a cliche can be. (I guess there's a reason they're cliches.)

Another Tuesday, another pile of gorgeous edibles coming home with me from the farm. We have cucumber, zucchini, garlic, kohlrabi, rainbow chard, rainbow carrots, mixed salad greens, and bread. I'm thinking tomorrow I'm finally going to try the kohlrabi carrot fritters recipe I came across the other day.

Heavy duty cooking was out of the question today. Today I had to use my lunch break to package the Asus X540 and bring it to FedEx for shipping. That was fun. And by "fun," I mean unnecessarily worrying. I was filling out the checklist, writing up a description of the problem, and I thought, "Hey, let's just double-check that it's still happening." AND IT WASN'T. I had the laptop unplugged and sitting next to the box I was going to put it in, and just for fun I pressed the power button, AND THE DAMN THING STARTED RIGHT UP. Stayed on, too, until I shut it down some forty-five minutes later. Didn't matter what I did--opened and closed the lid, picked it up and swung it around, tilted it this end up or that end up, carried it around the house--the dratted thing acted like it had never had a battery problem in its life. Like it had never refused to turn on while I was at lunch with no AC power. Like it had never crashed and died upon my unplugging it for travel, then cheerfully reported a 98% charge when I next plugged it in and turned it on.

I wrote up an addendum. "Problem is sporadic. Please investigate battery stability regardless of whether problem replicates." Also, "Problem may be with battery incorrectly reporting a full charge. After notebook had been plugged in for several days, I was unable to recreate the problem."

Then I biked the package to FedEx and sent it on its way. Then I spent an hour or so illustrating Fictionette Artifacts over pho and spring rolls. Almost done, y'all!

I still haven't submitted the story I've been meaning to submit, which feels kind of stupid. I should do it tonight, except I'm a little worried about my ability to assemble a respectable submission in Standard Manuscript Format with post-derby brain. Maybe I should just keep typing up and illustrating that last Artifact. Only, again, there's the post-derby brain problem. Typos! And there's only so much you can do with correction ribbon, especially when you've been back and forth over that ribbon about four times. (I really should order a new typewriter ribbon.)

Things are mostly on track. It hasn't exactly been the Tuesday I was planning on, but, y'know, close enough for horseshoes and rock 'n roll.