author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Well, not necessarily Monday, but definitely on Monday. Monday's when I have time to get dirty deeds done (dirt cheap). For instance, I've been meaning to fix my bike's flat tire for more than a week, and I finally installed the new tube today. That is an exceedingly dirty deed, and woe betide the amateur bike mechanic who doesn't have a bottle of that magical gritty orange soap on hand. I do not. I used dish liquid. It wasn't ideal, but it at least got me to the point where I wasn't ashamed to handle fresh veg at CSA pick-up.

I poked around along Four Mile Creek on my way up to the farm. I think I've found a new crawfishing hole. There's crawfish there for sure--saw 'em with my own eyes and poked at 'em a little with a stick. (Not a lot! Just enough to see 'em raise their little claws all menacingly.) Question is whether there's enough good-sized critters there for me to go home with a pound or two once in a while. More research is required.

Planted some new additions to my crowded container garden. One of my teammates tends plants at her job, and she planted extra to bring to our practice space for a league fund-raiser. Take a plant, leave a couple bucks in the envelope. Thanks to her my garden includes three very healthy tomato plants, a thriving butternut squash, and, just since Sunday, a bit of lettuce and spinach and kale. Those last three I separated (gently) in order to plant some on the back porch where it's sunny and some on the front patio where it's shady and cool. It's an experiment!

I would take a picture only it's dark now. Maybe tomorrow.

Having a functional bike again at last, I took myself out to dinner and then grocery shopping. Couldn't resist picking up a couple more plant starts while at the store. A burly and bushy little pot of thyme so I can put a few sprigs in the greens gumbo I'm planning, and a wispy but hopeful pot of dill that might one day get big enough to flavor my egg salad. (That day is not today, nor is it likely to arrive for several weeks, so I also bought a packet of dill off the fresh herbs racks in the produce section.) Turns out that in addition to being quite stylish, my Boulder County Bombers sleeveless hoodie is also absolutely perfect for transporting small potted herbs by bicycle, one plant safe and snug in each of the side pockets.

In other news, I'm still sifting compost. I finished the first round of sifting a while back, so there's no longer a pile sitting on a tarp on the back porch. But the second round, where I take the results of the first round and sift it through a kitchen colander, that's still going on. Maybe it's about two-thirds done. Last week I took some of the resulting finer compost/soil, microwave-pasteurized it, let it cool, and then used it to repot my mysteriously dying spaths. Jury's still out on whether they'll survive--I'm still pruning yellow leaves off them--but at least they're no longer rootbound nor hurting for nutrients. I suppose the rest of it will get spread around the other household plants. Whatever doesn't go through the colander has been going back into the compost bucket with the fresh kitchen scraps and handfuls of dry leaves.

So that's the state of dirty deeds around here.

I was actually of two minds about posting to the blog today. I wasn't sure I had anything worth reporting in the normal run of things, and then I heard the news out of Orlando and I really felt like there was no point. But in the end I came here and babbled anyway, mainly because I'm supposed to post something every Monday through Friday and I've been pretty bad about that lately and I'd like to get better about it--begin as you mean to go on, sort of thing--but also because aggressively asserting normality is a valid coping mechanism. So this is me aggressively asserting normality.

Tomorrow will be an aggressively normal Tuesday. There will be writing and there will be roller derby. Both of those are aggressive and normal, each to their own degree.

(There may also be a visit to the possible crawfishing hole. Maybe.)

No, I am not going to start calling them "Saturday Fictionettes." For one thing, if I did that, I'd probably wind up posting them no sooner than the following Monday, knowing me. Anyway, here's yesterday's offering, bite-sized and a day late. It's called "Maggie, Queen of Darkness," and it comes with a content note for death-by-fire and suicide. Things got dark in this one, OK? It happens. Although, now that I think of it, it would fit seamlessly into the tradition of superhero origin stories, posthumous (cf. Spawn). But that's a novel waiting to happen. For now all you get is a scene.

Last week I had a valid, if vague, excuse for being late and generally unproductive. This week I got nothing. Bad habits come back quick; good habits take a lot of work. I'm working on it.

Well, possibly there's the fact that this week was more exhausting than most on the roller derby front. I was in four, count 'em, four interleague scrimmages between Tuesday and Thursday, and I was kind of fighting with a deeply bruised hip since Sunday. There is, I'm afraid, no good story behind the deeply bruised hip. I hit a patch of dust on the track, wiped out, and landed hard, instantly raising a thick lump of owie and also causing apparent sciatic nerve panic along the entire length of my left leg. I took myself out of practice and limped the rest of the weekend. I also limped most of Friday since I fell on it several times Thursday evening, thanks to RMRG's fantastic offensive blocking. Also my crappy luck--it didn't seem to matter where or how or in what direction I got hit, I still fell smack on the owie part. It's like owie parts have magnets in them that draw them with great force toward the nearest convenient object of blunt force trauma, i.e. the ground. Owie parts are in cahoots with gravity. I am outnumbered. Unfair.

Now, the bruises like leopard spots covering both upper arms, those probably have good stories. Problem is, I can't remember which one came from which hit, or indeed individual hits at all. Some of the bruises are probably from my teammates' fingers. We hold on tight to each other in our defensive walls.

Thing is, though, I don't like making that my excuse for not getting writing done. Down that path, derby eats writing all up. I am convinced, I insist, I demand that my derby life and my writing life coexist. I mean, yes, I volunteer for an athletic beat-down three nights a week and twice on Sundays, but I'm not the only one, and if some of my league-mates manage all that and some combination of full time employment, school, and child care, you'd think I could pull off a measly 20 hours of writing each week. Especially considering I needn't leave the house nor even the bed to do said writing, right?

Right, so. It's gone midnight and I should be in bed. Tomorrow's my day for double beat-downs and the schedule starts early. Rock on with your bad selves and see you on Monday. (And I mean it this time.)

As promised, the Friday Fictionette report. First off, it's a new month, which means not just a new Seal o' Piracy (see previous blog post) but also a new Fictionette Freebie. The freebie for May is "A Week in the Life of a Simple Houseplant" (that's the PDF; download the audio here). I have only just now released it, I'm afraid.

I have also only just now this morning released the Friday Fictionette for the first week of June, "Father Frank's Peaceable Kingdom," which slots in somewhere between the world with Spreading Sentience Syndrome and the world of "Priesthood Has Its Privileges." It's kind of a fairy tale (things must happen three times; Goldilocks must find things Too Big and then Too Small before she encounters Just Right) and it's kind of a satire and, if you read the full text, you might note that it is firmly ignoring the semi-recent changes to the Catholic liturgy. Author's privilege. Nyah.

Fictionette Artifacts for May will be produced and mailed over the first half of this week. Next week. Whatever you call the week that starts with the Monday that's two days from now.

Last week (the week beginning with the Monday that was five days ago) wasn't exactly great for me, I'm afraid. A lot of nothing got done, which means I'm now, and have been for some time, in catch-up mode. But not scrambling catch-up mode, if that makes sense. If I think about it as a week of being not lazy, not hopeless, but rather mildly ill, then it follows that I shouldn't punish myself over having been unproductive or getting things done late. Nor does it make sense to expect myself to get all the overdue things done now now now. Oddly, as a result, I am getting the overdue stuff done about as quickly as when I scramble, but there's a lot less stress and self-loathing involved. Funny how that works.

In other news, or at least other thoughts...

I have just finished rereading the Welcome to Night Vale book, which is gorgeous and funny and gorgeous. If you already like the podcast, you will undoubtedly like the book. I do, and I expected I would, and I did. If you don't care for the podcast, you might still like the book, depending on why you don't like the podcast. The book is not in Cecil's voice nor from Cecil's point of view--Cecil isn't even an active character in the book, just an intermittent voice in the background commenting on the goings-on. He's just a voice on the radio, about which the other characters think, and not always in complimentary terms. So if you're not fond of listening to Cecil on the podcast, you might still like the book.

But if you're really not fond of the sense of the absurd that is the main stand-out feature of the podcast, then you probably won't like the book. If anything, the weirdness is even more front and center, as the narrator of the book isn't constrained, as Cecil is constrained on the podcast, by the fiction of talking to an audience of Night Vale residents who presumably already know about hot milk drawers, the process for pawning an item, or why a cell phone might occasionally cause you to bleed, and thus don't need a radio show host telling them about it.

It's a book about time, and how time is weird. But it's also a book about motherhood, with its anguished uncertainties and its hopeless yearnings and its joys. It's about families, and memories, and growing up. It's about taking responsibility. (All of these are, really, subcategories under the larger heading "Time is weird.") The book quietly blossoms into poetic observations about love and life and loss and the human condition which can just sucker-punch you right in the feels. Like...

Yesterday, she had called the Sheriff's Secret Police and reported her car and her son missing. When asked for a description of the car, she described colors and shapes. This matched the police's understanding of what a missing burgundy Ford hatchback looked like. When asked for a description of Josh, she cried. That matched their understanding of what a missing teenage son looks like.

That was when I had to set the book down and sort of stare at the wall for a few seconds. The wall was unaccountably blurry.

Another thing about the book is, it ends gloriously. Just the most beautiful last two pages, and the most upliftingly gorgeous last line ever.

So. I'm not going to tell you you should read it, but I'm going to quietly sit here and think that you really, really should read it.

So last week was not such a good week, writing-wise. But I think this is an improvement? Sort of? Used to be, if I had one good day, I ended up paying for it by having an emphatically not-good day the next day. Well, the week of the 2nd was a damn good week and I paid for it with a crappy week of the 9th.

This week is firmly in the so-so middle, leaning ever so slightly toward awesome.

Anyway, the greatly belated Friday Fictionette for May 13 went up yesterday, under the greatly elongated title "A Week in the Life of a Simple Houseplant." It's about what the word "botanize" should mean, rather than what it disappointingly does.

(Hey! Hey Brassica! That's one of your tomato babies in the cover art! It's the Sungold cherry! It went into the planter today and enjoyed the sunshine! Yayyyy!)

The Friday Fictionette for May 20 will go up a day early, and not just because I want to make up for all the latenesses. No, it's going up early because Friday the 20th is Day 1 of Besterns, a three-day roller derby tournament in south Denver that the Boulder County Bombers All Stars are participating in. I do not expect any writing to get done that day, and wouldn't even if I were guaranteed to remain in the spectator role. I know this because my very first live contact with roller derby was during NaNoWriMo 2011, and I attempted to get some of my 1667 daily words logged from the stands. It did not work very well at all, except to get me noticed by someone else who also writes and skates derby, and now we are friends on Facebook. Yay!

But as things turn out, our team has been whittled to the bone by circumstance and injury such that all the able-bodied crossovers but two have been rostered for the tournament outright, and the remaining two crossovers (I'm one of them) have been rostered as alternates, both of whom will almost definitely be called upon to skate in at least one of the games. Oh, and the early Friday morning bout will be against Denver Roller Derby's Mile High Club who are ranked 8 in the world. But no pressure. All Stars gonna do what All Stars do. Always proud to be part of that, whether on the track or screaming my head off from the stands.

So tomorrow night, Fleur de Beast and Papa Whiskey (that's me and John) check into some hotel somewhere in the vicinity of the tournament venue. While he's at the coach-and-captain's meeting, I'll put up a blog post here announcing the May 20 fictionette and blathering on about whatever else is on my mind. Then we're going to get a very good night's sleep before turning our lives over to ALL DERBY ALL THE TIME for three days. And then I say hi on Monday to tell y'all how everything went.

And that's the plan.

Let's pretend it's still Friday the 6th. (I'll make it easy by editing the datestamp on this post. No one'll notice a thing.) *ahem* LOOK! It's the first fictionette of May: "The Spindle's Spell." If you guessed it's a riff on Sleeping Beauty, you're right! I've never run across a retelling that concerned itself with what the sleeping princess dreamed during her enchanted sleep. (I've also never heard anyone comment on whether she snored.)

Everything wound up late today mainly because of my knee. My knee has been giving me trouble for no good reason. I mean, yes, we had scrimmage last night, yes, I had some awkward and or dramatic falls. I took a wheel (maybe my own) to the inside right ankle bone, which made a lot of necessary maneuvers painful, which made me a klutz. But I don't recall any single incident involving my right knee.

You'd think there'd have been something, given the way it kept me up all night complaining at me. When I went to bed, it was sore, but just a little, just in this area about the size of my fingertip on the left side of the joint. A few hours after I'd been asleep, it woke me up yelling that it was stiff and in pain and if I dared bend it just wrong it would scream. And then there was just no good position to try to get back to sleep in.

We think it's nothing serious, just a deep bruise. We're keeping an eye on it. Meanwhile, the plans I had made to run some errands by bicycle were scuttled. Seemed safer to just walk and bus. More conducive to putting the knee through its regular paces under very close observation. But this in turn meant more time walking in the hot sun, which meant I was even more tired when I was done, which meant very long afternoon nap. Good news is, the knee was not noticeably worse after the nap. And it was already noticeably better for walking the stiffness out of it. So that's OK.

So the knee problem led to the walking/bussing rather than biking, and both of them led to an unfortunate encounter at the bus stop. Dude walks up, wheeling his bike, and proceeds to be that aggressively friendly asshole who treats everyone in his vicinity as owing him their attention on demand. He started with the man sitting to my left, grilling him about his shirt and whether it was "tribal" and whether he belonged to a tribe. I think the man said "yes" just to shut him up. Then, upon noticing me massaging my knee, "Hey, hey, is your knee OK? You gonna be OK? I can show you some pressure points that'll help it, it's like acupressure or acupuncture, let me show you--"

"I didn't ask," I tried to shut him up with.

It's never that easy. "Hey, I wasn't suggesting anything sexual, I wasn't going to touch you, I wasn't even flirting, I just want to show you something that will help you, I wouldn't have to touch you to do that, I could just show you on my knee--"

"I want you to leave me completely alone," was my second and final try.

"Ooh, are you going to mace me? Come on, do it! Mace me!"

And so forth while I stared fixedly down the street and away from him. By now I was unfortunately alone with him at the bus stop. I had planned to spend my bus-waiting time on my laptop or darning socks, but at this point I didn't want to give him anything else to comment on. So I just sat there and stared at the approaching traffic and tried to tune dude out. This, by the way, is why we can't have nice things.

Eventually he stopped haranguing me directly and started making up a song on the spot. "I just wanna be friends," he crooned. And then, inexplicably, "Oh, speaking of sabotage, thanks for reminding me--" Sabotage? What?

Anyway, he got on his phone and--it's not like I try to overhear these things, but dude was loud--got into negotiations with someone about a package he's expecting that's addressed in his name but to a place where he no longer works (I wonder why, she said sarcastically). It was a long call, and he was still on the phone when the BOLT showed up and he boarded...

...without his bike.

He just left his bike there, leaning against the side of the bus shelter, not locked up or anything. I think he meant to take it with him on the bus, but between his phone call and his NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO WITHHOLD ATTENTION FROM MEEEEE harassment campaign, he just... forgot it.

I could not make this up. I mean, I could, but the first manuscript critique it got would suggest that the instant karma aspect was just a little too pat, you know? A little too smug. Dude harasses woman who just wants to be left alone; dude loses his bike. This Story Has a Moral! Don't Miss the Moral of the Story!

I do still kinda want to come up with an explanation for "sabotage." There might be some fiction fodder there. I mean, what the heck was in that package he was expecting?

Hi! So, I have all sorts of reasons for the recent radio silence. They are all totes valid, too. Probably the most immediate reason is having begun last week the laborious process of replacing my 5-or-more-years-old laptop.

It wasn't the purchase that took forever. That was simple. That was, pretty much, me walking into Best Buy, finding the very small selection of laptops that weren't touchscreens or any of that expensive nonsense, and locating the display model that was all but labeled HEY I HEAR YOUR ASUS IS DYING HAVE A NEW ASUS JUST LIKE IT ONLY NEWER AND FOR A LOT LESS MONEYS.

Details for them what wants 'em: It's an X540, the one with an Intel Core i3, 4Gb RAM, and 1Tb storage. $329 before tax when I bought it on April 13th; $299 today. (Drat.) Battery is emphatically not customer-serviceable, but I'm no stranger to opening up laptops. The keyboard layout is exactly the same as the old, which is handy, except that they put the power button where the END button ought to be, and the END button on the 1 key on the number pad. This resulted in hilarious unexpected shutdowns until I finally went into the Power Options, found "Choose what happens when I press the power button," and chose "Do Nothing."

No, the thing that's taking forever is moving all my stuff and things over. It's like moving house. All my habitual programs, all my customized settings, all my files. Digging up my EditPlus registration key, which was on a decade-old ZIP disk buried in the closet. Locating and installing fonts I'd thought were standard installation features but in fact were not. Stripping the DRM off those ebooks that still need it so I can access them on the new machine. Learning that my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles will take all night to copy over.

All these file-moving operations were made even more tedious by the old ASUS's efforts to reassure me that, yes, I was right to finally replace it. Several times a day it will restart for no apparent reason, or its wifi adapter will have another existential crisis, and I'll have to start a multi-hour file transfer over again. At least the wifi failures are no longer a factor now that I've cabled the old ASUS directly into the router. As for the random restarts, I'm beginning to think that the horrendous noises I thought were a dying fan are in fact a dying hard drive.

And then there's Windows 10. Windows 10 is like Windows, Childproofed and Shiny. Like, who would ever want to edit the parameters of their wifi profiles, right? Who'd want to manually assign them a priority order when Windows will figure it out for you? Connecting you to some ambient unencrypted hotspot instead of to your own home network is just how Windows shows it cares! I'm Cortana! Ask me anything! Why don't you want to ask me anything? And why would you possibly want to prevent Quick Access from accumulating recently accessed locations to itself? I mean, yes, that means that your "Writing" folder shows up twice, because you pinned it there and you accessed it recently, but Windows knows your writing is just that important to you! And why, for goodness sake, would you ever want to create a shortcut in your start menu? Why would you want to manually edit your start menu at all? Wait, what are you doing with that Classic Shell install file? I can't let you do that, Dave...

Well, most of the kinks have been ironed out, most of the files have arrived at their new home safely, and almost all the programs I use in the course of the day have been installed. I'm living and working on the new machine now, and only occasionally going back to the old ASUS (or, in the case of one DRM-locked ebook, the old Dell) for tidbits and scraps.

And the new machine is light and fast and quiet and very nice. It's amazing how much less reluctant I am to boot up the computer and get to work when the computer isn't whining, clicking, wheezing, randomly falling off the network, or randomly choking up over mundane tasks.

So that's where I'm at. One of the places I'm at, anyway. More tomorrow...

This has not been the best of weeks, for--oh, so very many reasons. But! It is Friday, and I have posted a Friday Fictionette to the Patreon "Creator Posts" stream. I have given it the extremely imaginative title of "Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night," because we are picking up a package in one story for delivery to another. And by package, I mean character. Basically, a character is running away from his story and a U.S. Post Office driver is taking him into another. Some stories are safer to be in than others.

(Standard explanatory text for Friday Fictionettes: Click the link to read an excerpt, click the links you will find there to A. download the full text as a PDF ebooklet or MP3 audiobooklet if you're already a subscriber, or B. to become a subscriber and then revisit step A.)

I've also finally gotten around to producing the teaser excerpt of last week's fictionette, "Reviving the Legends." Additionally, I've released "The Call Is Coming From Inside the Building" as the Fictionette Freebie for March 2016, such that its PDF and MP3 downloads are now free for all to enjoy. Which means I'm almost all caught up on the Fictionette stuff (barring, as usual, Wattpad releases and backfilling all the early MP3s) except for the Fictionette Artifacts for those subscribers who may expect to see them any day now. (I've bought new stamps! They are pretty! You will see them soon! hugs & kisses!)

And that's pretty much all I've gotten done this week on the writing front. There's a possibility--just a slight one--that this may have something to do with the last three boxes full of books having come home from storage this week. (Books! Old friends! All the Patricia McKillip! Alphabet of Thorn, how I have missed you! Oooh, Robin McKinley's Shadows!) But there may have been additional factors.

By the way, there's only maybe two light carloads of stuff to bring home before that rented storage unit is empty, finally, and we can at last declare ourselves--after slightly more than a year since coming to live at our new address--entirely moved in. This is moderately exciting! And for our next trick: Installing shelves on every single wall so that all the books, sheet music, CDs, records, DVDs, and video games have somewhere to live, other than in boxes.

Hello weekend! I deserve you. *dives in*

So I got all my tax documents together today. Finally. Left it 'til the last minute, or at least the last three hours before my appointment, but I got it all done with time to spare. And as though the universe were rewarding me for completing this huge honkin' ginormous looming task, my big monstrous box of ALL THE TEA arrived early.

My favorite morning cuppa is Taylors of Harrogate Pure Assam. Used to be I could buy it at the Pearl Street Whole Foods or, in a pinch, the Peppercorn downtown. But of late nobody has been stocking that particular variety. They will sell me T of H's breakfast teas of English, Scottish, Irish, and Decaf varieties (that last one makes a very nice iced tea), but Pure Assam seems to have disappeared from the shelves. I was beginning to worry that T of H had ceased producing it, its absence was so absolute.

There really is no substitute. It has a deep, rich, malty flavor that's almost sweet despite the tannic bite it gets from my stewing the tea bag forever. (I do not add milk, whatever they say.) Irish breakfast comes close, an oversteeped high-quality Darjeeling is adequately strong (Smith's is expensive but so very, very good), but it's this particular Assam that is everything I want to wake up and write to.

And I haven't had any in months. I ordered some Organic Estate Assam from Upton's, but it wasn't quite the same.

So I finally up and ordered some. I couldn't seem to find my way to this particular product via T of H's retail site (it probably would have required a currency conversion anyway), but wound up instead on a website called English Tea Store. I put two boxes in my cart. I went to check out. And they said, WAIT! You get free shipping on orders of $50 or more, plus here's a 10% off coupon!!! So I said, OK, I'll take 7 boxes then.

(One box contains 50 tea bags. I am capable of consuming four of them a day, though I probably shouldn't.)

So today those 7 boxes arrived, each in their own cellophane wrap to keep them fresh, all stacked up in a bigger box and keeping company with the shipping slip and a bunch of plastic air pillows. And I damn well had a cuppa when I got home from all the afternoon's excitement, even though by then it was 8:00 PM and that sort of caffeine was undoubtedly a bad idea. You can see from the picture that I have drunk it all up right down to the oversteeped tea bag, exactly how I like it. And I deserved it, y'all. For all the things.

I may not sleep tonight until stupid o'clock. But I will go to bed happy.

PS. Last week's fictionette went out on time, if a blog post about it didn't: "In the Hall of the Gnome King," about one possible interpretation of the King of Pentacles. Et voila.

Saturday is once again the new Friday, because I cannot seem to keep my eyes open. All I have to do is create the cover art and upload the various permutations of the Friday Fictionette, but even that is so far beyond my current energy level, I can't even.

Which is a real disappointment given that February was going to be the month of All Caught Up and On Time!

I also haven't put the Fictionette Artifacts in the mail, mainly for lack of time to get to the post office. Both of these lacks will be rectified tomorrow.

On the bright side, "can't keep my eyes open" probably translates to a very good night of sound sleep starting very shortly. And given that the status was precipitated by several nights of not very good sleep at all and the last stand of a persistent head cold and going to all my roller derby activities since Wednesday night despite the sick and the sleep deprivation (practice on Wednesday, a late-night scrimmage Thursday up in Fort Collins against our good friends FoCo Girls Gone Derby--thanks for having us! Y'all rock!--and tonight's somewhat boozy and crowded fundraiser at sponsoring taphouse 300 Suns) well, this is kind of a "reaping what I sow" situation.

I keep hoping, every time I approach a weekend, that this time I'll hit the reset button, and everything will be awesome after that. I'm beginning to think that the very idea of a reset button is nothing more than a mirage.

Well. Blah. Tomorrow, the usual Puzzle Pirates Weekend Blockade round up at 1:00 PM or so, then, later that afternoon, I devoutly hope, all things Friday Fictionette for February Week 1.

But for now, in possibly less than a half hour, blessed unconsciousness.

This weekend started out awesome. I celebrated being all caught up by taking myself out Saturday to the Bohemian Biergarten for beef stroganoff, beer, and several hours of uninterrupted and guilt-free Puzzle Pirates fun. It was excellent. After all the scrambling to get on top of things throughout the week, it was entirely what the doctor ordered.

But then after I got home that evening I started developing this cough, and a post-nasal-drip-type sore throat, and next morning the cough was worse and accompanied by that "cold inhale" feeling at the back of my throat that I associate with running a low-grade fever, and I had to admit I'd come down sick. I'd been looking forward to practice, but as it turned out, spending most of Sunday and Monday in bed were also what the doctor ordered.

However! I am feeling much better now. I put in a full work day today, consisting of the daily "gottas" and what remained of the end-of-month Friday Fictionette stuff. By the way, the Fictionette Freebie for January 2016 is "The Wine Cellar That Wished" (PDF | MP3). I personally think it's kind of funny, but I'll admit its humor is on the grim side. That's what makes it a good free sample, though. Anyone who decides to subscribe based on that will know what they're sometimes going to be in for. (See also "The Metamorphosis of Anita Chaplain", which I also maintain is funny. Yes, there is probably something wrong with me.) So, yeah, a full work day, up and at it before noon, and an actual change of shirt which is more than I managed all weekend I am sorry to tell you. And now I'm having that peculiar run of sneezes that's my body's way of getting the last of everything yucky out of its system.

A derby friend stopped by with chicken and dumplings, and herbal tea, and an orange. She was not the only derby friend to offer sustenance and comfort upon hearing I was sick. I kind of wanted to yell "It's just a cold, jeez y'all, I'll be fine," but that's because we are typically not trained to accept kindness well. Roller derby leagues are made of kindness. There's also a formal meal train going on to help out a teammate who just got out of surgery, and less formal gestures of love and support go on all the time. There are a lot of things we don't seem to get trained in, from accepting kindness to accepting our bodies, from viewing our geeky never-done-sports selves as athletes to viewing other women as potential friends. Roller derby counteracts these toxic omissions. At least, with the right league--but I've never yet encountered a league that was wrong for this. I'm sure there are some out there somewhere, because leagues are made of people and people sometimes fail. But in my limited experience, roller derby is remedial training in self-esteem for, and interpersonal support among, women.

[And now, a brief pause to make two-handed "heart" gestures and to mutter about how dusty it suddenly got in here.]

Meanwhile! Writing things I didn't get to today but certainly will tomorrow, assuming I feel this well or better: Figuring out where to resubmitting the handful of stories that came back from their latest outings with encouraging rejection letters. Figuring out which piece of potentially salable fiction will be my next afternoon shift project. Figuring out how to figure things out. ARGH DECISIONS

Oh look! Herbal tea with orange peel. It's going to be all right.