author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Behold, another Friday Fictionette getting posted the following Wednesday. You can read an excerpt of "The Fourth Miracle of Emmaline Gray" at Patreon and, if you are so moved, become a Patron at $1/month to read the whole thing right now this second. Audio will be going up shortly after I finish this post. Wattpad... I'll probably catch up on Wattpad excerpts tomorrow.

Again, raise your hand if you're at all surprised here. I was so very optimistic--I'd do my writing in the car! And also when we arrived in Bloomington on Friday! And also after all tournament events and/or team outings on Saturday and Sunday! Which was not exactly how things went. It was kind of the exact opposite of how things went--as I would have expected had I possessed an ounce of realism during my planning stage. While John took a shift driving, I either read to him, or conversed with him, or napped, or played on my computer. While not actively doing something with my team during our time in Indiana, I was flat on the hotel bed, recovering from the drive or from the day's activities. Or cleaning my bearings and then putting my skates back together. I even failed to get my Sunday AINC reading done, because we had a 9 AM bout that morning and it didn't seem wise to sacrifice sleep and thus performance for it.

Lesson one about tournaments is this: Don't budget for anything else in the weekend other than the tournament. And allow for a day's recovery time when the tournament and all associated travel is over.

Lesson two: Mathematically, someone's gotta lose all three of their bouts and take last place. Sometimes, that someone is you. It doesn't make you a loser. It makes you a competitor, same as everyone else. The only thing that would have made you a loser is if, after the heartbreaks and mistakes and foul-outs in the second bout, your team had decided to give up and not show up for the third bout at all. But you did show up, darn it, and you fought through your best bout of the weekend. And the tournament hosts gave you mad props for tenacity in the face of adversity. And now you're home with the entire rest of the 2015 season still in front of you, and you're ready to study the footage and learn everything you can and make yourself into an even better team that'll perform better and play smarter and hit harder and earn fewer penalties and score more points next time.

Lesson two is kind of long, but that's only because it's so important.

Meanwhile, tickets are now on sale for BCB's double header season opener on Saturday, May 23. Get 'em online, at the door, or directly from your favorite Boulder County Bomber!

As expected, I haven't been able to write much this week. Any time not spent sleeping or at derby practice, has been spent moving items from our old address to our new. There have been many carloads, and each carload required multiple trips up and down the stairs that I'm so pleased to leave behind. I can almost do those stairs blindfolded by now: Eight steps down, three paces to U-turn on the landing, another eight steps down and another landing worth three paces, one last bunch of eight and three paces forward to finally descend the three steps of the front stoop.

Most of those carloads have been packed solo, either because John did it while I was at derby, or I did it while John was working. A solo carload takes longer, and it takes a higher toll on the person making it happen. I was done today an hour before we had to leave for practice and scrimmage, but it was an hour spent half asleep because I simply had nothing left for anything more productive.

Today was mostly me, and my goal was to completely empty the office closet. Six clear-bin stackable plastic drawers plus a Rubbermaid bin and a couple bags full of crafting supplies, three stackable plastic file cabinets, two big boxes of miscellaneous removable data media (CDs, DVDs, 3.5" floppies), another box full of "all manner of useful cables" according to my Sharpie memo to myself, a great variety of stationery...

...and a surprisingly large amount of my own writing. Early NaNoWriMo novel drafts printed out for revision. Copies of my short stories with critiques scribbled between the lines and in the margins. Spiral notebooks with drafts, writing exercises, and notes toward rewrites. The three chapters of The Drowning Boy that went with me to Viable Paradise in 2006 and came back looking like they had bled from innumerable cuts. (Not that they all bled red. But oh, how they bled.)

There were in that great mass of paper several copies of other people's stories that they chose to share with me or to send by mail as part of a critique exchange. But for the most part, the author whose works were contained in that box was me.

It was almost too heavy for me to lift. But I managed. I got it down the stairs and into the car without breaking either it or me. I felt strangely reassured by both of these things. The weight of that box was a reminder of how prolific I really have been. And yet I am capable of lifting the weight of my own words. There's something symbolic in that.

Still, when I pulled up to our new front door, I was happy to accept John's offer to take one end of that box and help me lift the load. Just because I could do it alone didn't mean I'd always have to.

There's something symbolic about that, too.

Sometimes I don't know what to say in these blog posts. I get to that time of the night where I need to cross "actually writing blog" off my daily to-do list (or, to be precise, check its checkbox on my list of HabitRPG "dailies"), and I find I don't have much to say. Not that I've ever let that ultimately stop me, as my nearest and dearest have learned to their chagrin. But that's arguably part and parcel of being a writer. You can't let "I don't know what to write" stop you from writing.

It doesn't help that tonight I can't seem to hold a thought in my head much longer than it takes to chew and swallow what's in my mouth. Roller derby ate my brain, and only food can give it back. Tonight's scrimmage was especially brutal, because it was an interleague scrimmage--BCB's Bombshells versus the combined might of Castle Rock 'n Rollers, South Side Derby Dames, and I think High City Derby Divas were in there too. (Look, I don't know, once the whistle blows all I see is hips and shoulders and helmets. Especially the helmet with the star on. Sometimes all I see is the helmet with the star on, and not useful things like, say, jersey colors, and I try to block my own jammer BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I DO DURING TEAM PRACTICE.) Anyway, it was a great outing. We had a rotation of two blocker line-ups and three jammers, so it really worked our endurance. It was great practice for our upcoming tournament. The opposition hit hard and didn't give an inch. All of which means I am now gobbling down egg fu young and cold sesame noodles as fast as I can shovel it in my mouth.

Anyway. When I first started blogging, my thought was, it would hold me accountable, because 1. I would not blog unless I had written that day, so 2. if I didn't blog, it meant I hadn't written. Which at the very least kept me in subject matter. If I'd written that day, I probably had something to say about how the writing day had gone.

But now my rule is to blog every weekday. In theory it should work out to about the same thing, because I'm also supposed to write every weekday. Well, every Tuesday through Friday. Although it's looking like I won't be doing farm work on Mondays, so it might be time to consider Monday a writing day. (Or I could continue preserving Monday as a Get Shit Done day. I rather like that idea. There's shit that doesn't get done unless I have a weekday that isn't a writing day.) But the sad fact is, there are days I don't get any writing done at all.

Like today. For no really good reason at all.

And then, unless something really momentous happens (like, say, closing on the sale of our home of 15 years), I wind up without much to say.

Well, I suppose I could say something like,

I slept until ten and I wished I hadn't, because what with one thing and another I wound up with no time to do Morning Pages before the representative from The Cleaning Fairies arrived. She walked through the house, took notes, asked questions, and concluded that the job would take two staff members and three hours for a total of $240. So, nine a.m. to noon on Saturday the 11th. Armed with this knowledge, I called back our buyer's agent and scheduled her final walk-through for one p.m. on the 11th. Then I realized I couldn't both be there and be at the Longmont YMCA to take my turn at training the Phase 1 skaters, so I double-checked with John that he could be there instead. He said yes. After that I spent rather a while on the phone hammering out details about the mortgage because it turns out the sale of our place lets us make a somewhat higher down payment and thus take out a smaller loan, and also get explained to me how it works that our condo owner's insurance policy is now bundled up in the mortgage payment too. Once all that was done, I failed to be productive until it was time to leave for scrimmage. At least I got to my Morning Pages, if only by 4:00 p.m., and used them to hash out with myself what the next few days are going to look like. That is, what they'll look like if I actually manage to get out of bed on time.

And I suppose I just did say something like that. But it's boring. It's full of minutiae and administrivia and excuses. Worse, it has very little to do with writing, and this is the actually writing blog, dammit. I would prefer to have a writing day to report on.

Hopefully that will happen tomorrow. If I get up on time, that is.

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.

So I was a penalty timer at the Shamrocks And Shenanigans scrimmage tonight. When you're a penalty timer, everyone comes to visit you. Everyone gets penalties, after all. Maybe not everyone on every night, but everyone eventually. If you never ever get penalties, it's questionable whether you're in the game.

When I arrived, I told our head coach, "I'm ready to be assessed! Whenever works for you." (I got injured before the league went through skills assessments and travel team tryouts. I still need to do that before I can skate with any of our teams.)

She said, "Great! Get your gear on."

And I said, "Er, tonight? I... didn't think that would be an option." I hadn't brought my gear. Drat.

By next week, though. Between Sunday practice and the following Thursday scrimmage, I should have ample opportunity to demonstrate my skills to people empowered to fill out my score sheet. After that... team practice again? Please? As soon as possible? Back with my Bombshells? Pretty-please?

Obviously this has been much on my mind.

It has been sharing space in there with something very random: the Mark Reads archives for the Discworld novels.

You know about Mark Reads? Blogger Mark Oshiro began a project some years ago to read the Twilight novels and comment on them, chapter by chapter. And, well, a lot of people came along for the ride. It wasn't so much that they enjoyed watching him suffer, per se--it was that he suffered so entertaingly. And also enlighteningly, if that's a word. His criticisms were spot-on and his pain was shared and familiar.

Inevitably, the blog community began urging him to read something he'd actually enjoy. As soon as he got through Breaking Dawn, they said, he should treat himself. Read Harry Potter, they said. Because, as it turned out, he hadn't read those books yet. There were a lot of books, beloved classics of the fantasy genre, that he'd just never been exposed to. And his fans not only wanted him to enjoy a reading experience, but they wanted to enjoy watching him experience it.

And Mark read it. And it was wonderful.

You can never go back and read a favorite book for the first time all over again. Not so long as your memory is intact, that is. But the privilege of watching someone else read that book for the first time, witnessing them falling in love with the characters you've come to know so well, that's almost as wonderful. Maybe it's even better.

Mark has since then read many, many wonderful books, and his fans have enjoyed the heck out of watching him discover all these worlds and characters. And for a commission of $20, I think it is, he'll add to his written review video footage of him reading the chapter aloud. And that's the best. His reactions are priceless, hilarious and touching by turns.

So about a year ago he embarked upon a chapter-by-chapter read-through and review of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. In--and this is important--the order that they were published. (Which means he's only now making his way through Eric.) Discworld fandom is large and it is contentious; veterans will often try to curate newbies' experiences by telling them which books to read first. "Oh, don't start with Colour Of Magic, he hadn't gotten good yet, you'll be turned off. Read Reaper Man first," or, "Rincewind is tiresome. Read the Vimes books instead," or whatever they'll recommend.

Which is understandable, but at the same time, it's kind of arrogant. Like, dude, you're so proud of having been around when Colour of Magic came out, you read them in publication order because you had no choice--you still fell head over heels in love with them. Why do you think someone approaching them for the first time today couldn't do the same? Why do you think they need you to shepherd them through the experience? And why is it so important to you that they come to the same conclusion about the characters that you did?

Sometimes it's understandable, like I said; you love a thing, you want them to love it too. You want to spare them the jarring moments of the not-quite-good-enough. But sometimes I think, there are some fans who have a bit of ego involved in being the living filter through which someone experiences the material. I suspect that, either consciously or un--, it makes them feel important.

To hell with that. Mark is going into this as completely unspoiled and unbiased as a reader on publication day would, only without the three-year wait between The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. His spoiler policy is aggressive, and I share it: If I haven't gotten there yet, don't talk about it. Allow me to experience it the way you did--without you hanging over my shoulder saying, "Oh, this is when it gets good" and "Just wait until you meet [CHARACTER] in Chapter [X]!"

I only heard that this was a thing the week after Terry Pratchett died. And it's been fantastic. I've been watching his videos or, where appropriate, converting them to MP3 and listening to them in the car. Not only does it convert these old familiar books into brand new experiences for me, but it comes at a time when 1. I wanted to commemorate the author's passing with a read-through of my own, but 2. all my books are in storage and I can't easily get to them. So I get to have Mark read them to me! And I get to hear him react to the awesomeness! And the hilarity! And the puns, dear Gods, the puns. (Oh Gods the "horse d'oeurves" pun. Mark's reaction to the pun. It takes him like three minutes to get past it, it hits him that hard. I love Mark this much, y'all.)

I've just gotten up to Mark's read-through of Mort. And it occurs to me I may never actually have read Mort before. I could swear I'd borrowed it from a friend back in the late '90s, but I'm not recognizing any of it at all. Maybe my memory isn't intact--which would be odd, for me--but maybe The Last Continent isn't the last Discworld book I've yet to read? This is such a treat.

Like I told John, "Mark's reading Discworld! Expect my productivity to dip a bit." And so it has. Drat.

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.

Hey! I made some progress on my story today! It went something like this:

I only managed one micro-session around 6 PM rather than several throughout the day, because avoidance monsters. Of course. Avoidance took the familiar form of bog-standard procrastination. "Oh, just fifteen more minutes... just read one more blog post while I eat my dinner... just use up my turns at Two Dots and then I'll get to it for sure..." It took the equally familiar form of creeping fear and dread, the usual hazy certainty that the story was awful and impossible to fix, all of which would certainly be confirmed the moment I opened the Scrivener file, so why ever open it at all?

Avoidance also took the novel form of dutiful logic. Like, I'd love to do a micro-session before my volunteer reading, but unfortunately the recording has to be uploaded by 2:45 PM, and besides I should take advantage of the time I'm alone in the house and won't have to close the door to the office to do the reading. So clearly it makes more sense to do the reading first. And, oh, I should do a second session after freewriting, but I still have to do my physical therapy, and the weight room closes at ten. And... you know, I'm running out of evening, so if I want to get my other daily writing tasks done, I'd better do them. I can always do another session on the story after I get everything else done, right?

However. I did spend about half an hour on the story. During that half hour, I got a pretty good idea of how the micro-scene I'm working on is going to go. I figured out how it's going to incorporate elements from the scene deleted from the previous draft. And I got most of it written down.

And I left the scene in a loose-ends state to entice me to come back to it tomorrow.

Here's the thing. As long as the avoidance monsters can keep me from looking at the project, they can keep me from challenging the narrative they're pushing on me. It remains a vaguely terrifying, looming thing. It's too scary to even think about. But if I can cut through the fog enough to think about it clearly, I come up with things to say to the avoidance monsters. Things like...

"Hey, even if you're right, what's the worst that can happen if I open up that file?"

"How about we open up that file just so I can see what you're talking about?"

"You know what? I don't believe you. Prove it! ...by opening up that file and showing me how awful you think it is!"

So there's that. There's also this: Wanting to write and not writing is painful. What I finally told myself was, Hey, I have the power to make the hurting stop. All I have to do is open up the story file and get to work.

So I did. And again, it sounds kind of pathetic and neurotic. It's embarrassing, is what it is. But it got me there.

Here's the thing about getting there: Now that I have indeed opened the file and worked on it, the story isn't so much a big looming, terrifying thing as it is a puzzle. It is a puzzle I have begun trying to solve. And once I start trying to solve it, I don't want to give up. I'm eager to get back to it.

So tomorrow I'll get back to it. That simple.

...I hope you have enjoyed this tour of my warped little brain. Aren't you glad you don't live in it?

Again, not dead. Again, Thursday and Friday were ridiculously tiring. Unlike last week, no headaches were involved. A lot of fun was involved, so that's good. The main takeaway is, as always, don't count on the time after a derby activity to be productive time. Even if they are non-skating derby activities, like watching scrimmage or participating in a fundraiser. They will still use up all your doing-stuff ju-ju.

Speaking of Friday: Yes, the Friday Fictionette came out. On Saturday. See above.

But that's not what I came to talk to you about today. I came to talk about goblins.

At this point, some of you may be asking, "Are we talking Jim Hines goblins or Terry Prattchett goblins?" To which the answer is, yes, if you like. Either one will do. But that's not important. The important part as far as this blog post is concerned is the role goblins play in cleaning out the brain demons.

"Brain demons" is my new phrase for those unhappy and/or traumatic memories that show up by themselves in my brain and take up conscious space there. It's a good phrase. It's distinct from "monsters," which I've adopted from The Fluent Self as a way to talk about, and to, the fears that fuel avoidance. But like "monsters," it's a term which others the mental pattern--characterizes it as some other being than myself. This is important. If the unwanted memory-reliving pattern is just me having unhappy thoughts, then I say to myself things like, "Why am I having these thoughts I don't want to have? Why can't I just let them go? Am I just a failure at Having A Brain?" But if I imagine them as inimical others attacking my brain, demons who need to be banished, I can say to them, "Why are you here, still? You are someone else's stuff. Go home already."

Monsters and brain demons can tag-team you, though. The monster arrives and voices its fear. The monster's fear becomes a brain demon when it starts taking over my thoughts when I'm trying to use my brain for other things.

Just to choose an example not very much at random at all...

After writing that blog post, a monster showed up. It was the monster of You Don't Have Custody Of Your Experiences. It's the monster who says, "I know, you're hurting, someone else hurt you, I know it's not fair, but you just can't talk about it in public! You might hurt the feelings of the person who hurt you! Their feelings are always more important than yours, you know that. Besides, if you're willing to risk hurting them, well, maybe you deserved to get hurt by them?" It is the source of that creeping dread after having published a blog post that someone, somewhere, will--correctly or mistakenly--recognize themselves in the experience I relate, and be very upset that I've related it in public. They will not be mollified by my having scrupulously withheld their name and any identifying features. They will be upset. What if they call me up or email me to tell me how upset they are? How will I handle that? How will I keep that new experience from creating yet more decade-long brain demons?

Next thing I know, thoughts of that nature have taken up residence in my brain and won't leave me alone. All weekend long.

And then, at some point, it occurred to me that I could create a proxy for the what-if. Then, every time the brain demon showed up, I could transform it by means of the proxy. (Optionally while declaiming the magic word "Riddikulus".)

So... "What if someone I don't want to hear from emails me to tell me what a horrible person I am" became "What if a goblin showed up offering me a quest I don't want?"

I can see that goblin now. He's got the usual goblin traits, those blameless features that nevertheless can unsettle unwary humans: that shifty look that comes of constantly monitoring their surroundings for escape routes, that tendency to hunch that makes them resemble a crumpled-up piece of paper with ears and elbows sticking out. Nothing weird or wrong there. But he's holding something behind his back in a kinda creepy way. He just keeps telling me, "It's for you. It's only for you. You gotta take it. You don't wanna go crazy wondering what might have happened, do ya? Accept the quest and find out!"

But I am up to here with quests. I have the Quest to Regain My Skates, and the Quest to Finish That Story, and the Quest to Sell the House. And that's just for starters. Another quest foisted on me by someone else, without my say-so? That I do not need. As for regretting missed opportunities? Look, quests are a dime a dozen. For every quest that gets turned into an epic novel about a reluctant hobbit, there are ten or more quests that were firmly refused by that same reluctant hobbit, who thought no more about it. Quests show up all the time, if you know how to recognize them. I can afford to be choosy.

At which point a bunch of other goblins arrive to gently usher this one goblin away and take him home. "Sorry about that," one of them says to me. "He gets like this sometimes. It's kind of like drunk-dialing. Very embarrassing. Sorry. Are we still on for tea tomorrow? Great. I'll bring the cucumber sandwiches."

I adore her cucumber sandwiches. She makes them with butter on one side and salmon spread on the other and just the right amount of salt on the thinly sliced cucumbers. I have in mind a lovely second flush darjeeling to accompany them, along with some fresh-baked gingersnap cookies.

The quest-bringing goblin perks up. "Tea? I love tea. We can talk about this quest over tea--"

"No, bro. You're not invited. You will never get invited to tea if you don't stop pulling this shit. Now, let's get you home and cleaned up, OK? And in the morning we are going to have a serious talk about your quest problem."

I told John about the goblin proxy. He laughed, and proposed the hashtag #NotAllGoblins. As in, "#NotAllGoblins show up at 3 AM at your door with a quest you don't want. That one who does? Other goblins think he's an asshole."

Laughter! And goblin proxies! For the win! Take that, brain demons and other evildoers!

So here is a thing I've learned from physical therapy: Apparently one of the common precursors to an ACL injury is a tendency to stand or sit with the knees "inside of the shoes."

My therapist demonstrated, which involved temporarily taking a pose that was all too familiar to this southern gal.

You know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.

I was never actually forced to do the aspirin thing (though I know some women who were). But I certainly got scolded from early childhood through high school for sitting with my legs too far apart. "You want someone looking up your skirt?" "It just seems rude." "People will think I didn't raise you right." "It's not ladylike."

Well. That was the posture my therapist briefly adopted to demonstrate what he's talking about: feet planted at hip-width, knees pointing toward each other. "Even five degrees of rotation inward, we see that as a warning sign," he said. "Ten degrees is definitely a problem."

Knees collapsing to the midline of the body are the main cause behind ACL-tears, especially among women.

So now you have one more reason to despise purity culture and enforced "ladylike" behavior. In addition to being stuffed to the gills with misogyny, this crap also sets up female athletes for a higher rate of ACL injury.

That women do suffer a higher rate of ACL injury is not in dispute. However, you're unlikely to see any official reports speculating on the role that training young women in "ladylike posture" plays in helping to cause this disparity. No, officially they're all guessing it's to do with higher estrogen levels, weaker hamstrings, wider pelvises, etc. Even the article quoted above links the "knees collapsing to the midline of the body" to weaker, less-well-developed glutes. It wouldn't be the first time a difference between the genders was explained away as purely biological, while great glaring differences in social treatment were swept under the rug.

In jumping and landing women tend to land with slightly straighter legs than men who land in a more powerful squat position with knees slightly apart....

Specific skills therefore need to be learnt in landing and jumping techniques - the principle being to land with the knee forwards and not buckling to the side – inwards or outwards. For the female, this means landing with the knees slightly apart, in a more squat and perhaps un-ladylike male posture.

This author comes tragically close to the point before missing it, and so he fails to question it. To wit: Why in heaven's name are we teaching girls and young women that certain stances, postures, and movements are "unladylike" and "male" in the first place? And why the fuck are the endorsed "ladylike" stances, postures, and movements always the ones most likely to fuck up your body down the line?

OK, so the story gained a few hundred words this time around. Not to worry. It's all part of the process. Besides, tonight's bit didn't go as well as yesterday's, so there was some "just babble and something good will come out of it" verbiage. I'm trying to stitch in a new microscene segue and I'm trying to start incorporating elements from the deleted scene, so some temporary bloat is only to be expected.

Yesterday's post about changing associations got me thinking: It works both ways. That is, bundling play and work together not only makes the work seem more like play, but it can also help change what goes on in my brain when I play. Or so I devoutly hope.

That didn't make much sense. I can make it make sense, but it's going to get a little personal.

As anyone who's heard me babble about Puzzle Pirates knows, I tend toward mini-games, puzzle-games, and classic arcade games, and not so much for first-person shooters or story-heavy RPGs. I like my RPGs tabletop; I like my video games simple.

But here's the problem, or rather the double-edged sword, about the simple clicky games: They leave a lot of room in the brain for running on auto-pilot.

This has been a bad thing, because my brain develops ruts very easily. Honestly, I think it's a form of PTSD, if a comparatively mild one. It's such that interpersonal interactions that leave me angry, hurt, feeling betrayed, and crying at the time will repeat on me for months, even years. They'll leap into my conscious mind unbidden, at which point I'll emotionally relive the damn experience and sit there crying all over again.

And whatever I was doing at the time that the painful memory came back, that activity may become associated with the memory... so that next time I do that activity, I relive the memory again. Which only strengthens the association. And so forth.

This is why Morning Pages are kind of a crap shoot. In working through the thoughts and emotions on the page, am I going to be successfully processing them, or am I just creating a trigger for them, such that I'll relive them every time I sit down at the spiral notebook? It could go either way.

Besides, how long can one be expected to process this stuff? Some of it goes back twenty years or more. Some goes back to early childhood. "Processing" it doesn't make it go away or diminish. It just means I'm having another experience of pain and anger and helplessness. Let it go? Gee, thanks--you say that like I've made a conscious choice to hold onto this stuff. I would love to let go of this stuff. But it won't let go of me. It comes to something when Cowboy Mouth's "Let It Go" and "Easy" start to feel like victim-blaming songs, you know? Like that time I tried to explain this stuff to Dad, and he just chuckled and said, "My, you sure can hold a grudge!"

Point being, certain mini-games in Puzzle Pirates are indelibly linked to certain unfortunate memories. Treasure Haul requires very little strategizing. There is plenty of room left in my head for running down the rut one more time of why that particular guy left our role playing group and what he said about me damn near fifteen years ago.

Ditto the Bilging puzzle, and the memory of sitting in an IHOP realizing that a particular freelance writing gig--which, mind you, only paid about three cents a word--was killing my brain and my soul but I felt trapped by my honor not to resign from it when I said I'd do it, and you don't go back on your word, dammit. Even if your cat just got diagnosed with cancer, you don't go back on your word! And other forms of punishing myself for daring to consider safeguarding my mental and emotional health.

Ditto the Rumble puzzle, and the pain and betrayal of a trusted friend and mentor telling me she thinks that women aren't to blame so to speak but don't they at least share responsibility for the rape that happened when they wore that skirt, went alone late at night to the party, or say "no" loudly enough and clearly enough to revoke the consent that is assumed to be given otherwise? Aren't feminists going overboard when they say that nothing but an enthusiastic "yes" is consent? She just wanted to know what my thoughts on that were; what a slap in the face that my thoughts didn't support her brave stance against modern feminism! How dare I react to her ideas by feeling less safe around her! How dare I decide she isn't a safe person to introduce friends to, if I know those friends are rape survivors! How dare I say that her beliefs support rape culture! We're friends--she's supposed to be able to confide in me without negative repercussions!

And then it gets recursive. These days, the precise memory that reruns during the Rumble puzzle is... playing the Rumble puzzle in the lobby of the Sheraton Mountain Vista in Avon while trying to block out thoughts of that interaction. While crying over it again, of course.

It's an improvement, though. It's an extra layer of emotional distance. I went from having to watch a movie of the event, to having to reread a novelization of the movie.

Still, I would like my pleasant brainless passtimes to be pleasant, not emotional mine fields. That should not be too much to ask.

So... I have a hope that parallel-tracking Puzzle Pirates and writing will help chase out some of those associations, and replace them with other ones. It would be super cool if every time I return to the Duty Navigation puzzle, that small backburner part of my brain instead remembers, say, trying to write the micro-scene segue glue that this story rewrite requires, or working out the plot of a novel.

I do not know how to break mental associations. I only know how to replace them: by having new experiences. I am trying to create new experiences for myself.

Replace the experience of dreading the scary writing task with enjoying the fun wrting play.

Replace the experience of unwanted painful memory while I'm playing with current writing project percolating while I'm playing.

It's worth a try.