author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's about where I'm at.

Oh, for goodness's sake. Being four days late with each week's Friday Fictionette is not the way to woo new subscribers. Well, here's the nominal January 8 fictionette, anyway: "The Magpie's Big Heist." Everyone knows magpies will compulsively steal shiny things, right? Except, as it turns out, they don't. Well, there goes one more piece of cherished folklore. And of course I didn't fact-check the legend until after I'd written and published the fictionette. Too bad. If knowing this doesn't ruin that early plot point in Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum for you, then you can suspend disbelief for this little story-like object too.

Also I released the Fictionette Freebie for December 2015. It's "The Thing With Feathers" from December 4. That's the link to the PDF; audio is here. Both formats are now free for anyone to download and read or listen. I chose that one because I just really like it. It felt good to write. I hope y'all like it too.

I was so sure I could have all the fictionette things done at least by Sunday evening. No big deal, right? I was taking the day off from derby anyway, right? Except the whole reason I needed the day off from roller derby was also the reason I couldn't get the fictionette done, nor yet anything else that would have been halfway useful: I was pretty much dead for the day. I am always pretty much dead the day after a bout. Why do I forget these things? Success at getting things done goes hand in hand with awareness of how things don't get done. My awareness is sometimes not so good.

And the problem with lateness is, it begets lateness. I am now also running up hard against this Friday's deadline to submit "Down Wind" where I want it to go; prioritizing it might impact my chances of getting the January 15 fictionette out on time.

Well, my friends, I shall do my best.

Today I'm also starting my 2016 re-read and work-through of The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron's 12-week course in creativity. It's not for everyone, but it helps me. I work through it every few years as a sort of wellness check-up. I'm not in the same place that I was in the first time I read the book, nor even the fifth time, so I'm getting new insights out of the exercises. Revisiting the chapter on Basic Tools helped me re-focus my daily Morning Pages practice--why I do it, how best to do it, what I can hope to get out of it. And the Week 1 emphasis on converting nasty, discouraging, near-involuntary brain-blurts ("There's no way I'll get through all the stuff I have to do, I'll let everyone down, it's hopeless") into positive affirmations ("I am capable. I am reliable. I am relaxed and confident. I have all the time I need to accomplish all my goals") is really useful right now. I have a lot of brain-blurts that need converting.

Perhaps later on this week I'll have more coherent thoughts to share about the process. For now I'm just trying to find time to do the process.

The blood pressure thing is going well. Like, super-well. The bottle my meds came in is labeled Nifedipine, fancy specialized terminology that basically translates to miracle juice and magic powder. I started taking it Saturday, and every day since then my morning readings have gotten lower and lower, and today they were downright normal. A normal blood pressure reading for the first time in more than a year! Modern medical science, y'all. It works. Also I got my echocardiogram scheduled at last, so that's nice.

Really, the week's off to a great start. It's just been a slow start and I don't like slow.

Now it is time to once more put myself to bed and hope the derby aches and pains go away enough to do more derby tomorrow. I'm told one eventually adjusts. Wouldn't that be nice?

Welp. I got nothing. But I saw the new Star Wars film! It was a proper Star Wars film.

And tomorrow will be a proper Tuesday. It will start with a visit to the dentist, but it will be proper Tuesday for all that. See you then.

The Friday Fictionette for December 18 is up! After some angsty deliberation (I hate coming up with titles), I called it "What Your Name is Worth," because that's pretty much what it's about. It's sort of Weird West, which isn't generally my thing; I just went where the writing prompt pointed. You know how it goes.

The link above goes to a brief excerpt hosted on Patreon. These links go to the full-length PDF and MP3 editions, which may be downloaded by subscribers at the $1 and $3 per month pledge tiers respectively. All the details about the Friday Fictionettes project are over here.

Once I got that published, I thought, "Hey, how about I post another excerpt to Wattpad?" I've been so very, very behind in posting the fictionette excerpts to Wattpad. I've been catching up, one excerpt at a time, as and when I have time. And supposedly anything that goes up on a Friday has a much better chance of being "discovered" than stuff that goes up most other days of the week, so, OK, I posted "...Champagne." That's the one from October 23, so I'm getting close to caught up at least.

And then I thought, "I have time, why not get a little more caught up in back-filling the meta-data from the earlier fictionettes?" Which is to say, the Scrivener fields in which I jot down the URLs of the PDF, MP3, and fictionette excerpt on Patreon, and the corresponding excerpt on Wattpad, and the corresponding excerpt on my blog. Not to mention title and date and wordcount and the date of the freewriting session the fictionette is based on, because I want to keep track of stuff like that. Some of these fields got added late in the game, so they were blank for many of the earlier fictionettes. Some of these fields I just forgot to fill in once in a while.

Much of the data I needed in order to back-fill the meta-data fields could only be retrieved by combing back... and back... and back through the Patreon and Wattpad archives. Both of them work like this: You go to the "Works" or "Posts" page, which loads the most recent handful of items. You page all the way to the bottom of the screen. If it's Patreon, it detects you've scrolled all the way down and says, "Loading more posts..." for a few seconds. If it's Wattpad, you click "show more," and you also wait for a few seconds. After waiting for a few seconds, it loads the next handful of items. And then you scroll down to the bottom of the page and you do it again. And again. And again.

And then I thought, "This is such a pain! Why don't I just get all caught up on meta-data right now so that I never, ever, ever have to go through this again?"

And that, dear readers, is why fictionette procedures took about four hours today.

A mostly unscheduled weekend looms. Saturday, for once, I've got nothing on the calendar at all--well, a couple of very brief errands, no big deal, but no events, you know?--so I'm going to hang out with my loving, lovable, and miraculously supportive husband. Sunday would usually be roller derby practice, but this Sunday is the third and final allotted session for travel team tryout skills evaluations, and I've already done mine. Besides, this being the final tryout session, John will probably wind up in a coaches' meeting long into the afternoon to finalize travel team rosters. I'd just be awkwardly trying to avoid overhearing confidential things while waiting impatiently to go home. So instead I'm just going to stay home in the first place. Glorious.

Then on Monday evening I fly to New Orleans for the holidays. So I suppose I'll spend Monday in a state of pre-travel stress. Yay? Yay.

I may have gotten all optimistic too soon. I forgot about the other significance of the end of November and thus NaNoWriMo: Spending December the First catching up on everything that didn't get done during NaNoWriMo.

So there wasn't all that much fiction activity in my day. There was bill paying, holiday planning, and the writing up of notes from last weekend's roller derby clinic to share with my league, as promised. (I totally counted those notes on my timesheet. It was writing, darn it, and I get credit for it. I filed it under "Misc. Content Writing - Pro Bono.") There was also an unseemly amount of sleeping late, about which the less said the better.

There wasn't grocery-getting, however. There just wasn't time. But I said we'd say nothing about the sleeping in, right? Right. Tomorrow. Tomorrow there will be groceries. Somehow.

Breakfast was fried eggs alongside slices of bread just baked last night. John baked me bread, y'all. I am the most lucky person ever.

File tonight's blog post under "I don't know what to write, but I'm supposed to write something, so here you go." I get credit for writing it, too.

It's been a very slow Monday, full of distractions and laziness. Here are some of the things I've been distracted with:

Two Dots - It's an app for Android and iPhone. It is also a very addictive game. I downloaded Bluestacks specifically so I could play this app despite my lack of smartphone. Then I downloaded Windroye when an update to Two Dots proved glitchy on Bluestacks. "Why don't you just buy a tablet?" Well, for two reasons. One, perhaps quixotically, I want all my things to work on one device. Secondly, I'm not buying new hardware just to play a free game, darn it.

The nice thing about Two Dots is that lives regenerate at a rate of one per twenty minutes, which means the distraction has a limited lifetime. Use up your lives, get back to work. Except now that I've got it running on both Android emulators (having rolled back the update on Bluestacks so that it's not glitchy there), and each "device" generates and maintains a separate life count, the distraction's duration is potentially quite long.

I promise to be a lot more disciplined about it tomorrow, though.

Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and sequels - Overall, this series is rollicking good fun. What Douglas Adams did for traditional SF with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Fforde does here for English literature overall. It focuses on the classics, but it gets its licks in on all the genres. Fan fiction, vanity publishing, and the oral tradition are not forgotten either. The story takes place in a version of the U.K. which benefits/suffers from an alternate history to ours, undoubtedly because time travel shenanigans are going on all the time. Also interfictional shenanigans--characters commonly pass in between the real world and multiple fictional ones. The books have flaws, no doubt, but the ride overall is a good on. The plots are surprisingly tightly constructed. It's hard to put these books down even on the reread.

I have copies up through One of Our Thursdays is Missing (2011), which book I am about to begin rereading. It's about time I picked up the next one, The Woman Who Died a Lot (2012). I just now tried to visit one of the websites advertised on the back of One of Our Thursdays is Missing but the domain, www.thursdaynext.com, appears no longer related to the book. One can get so behind the times.

"My father had a face that could stop a clock" is a first line that deserves to be considered in the company of all those other first lines. "The primroses were over." "Call me Ishmael." "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." "There was a boy named Eustace Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." Any first lines you like.

Reasoning with Vampires - Dana has a Tumblr. On that Tumblr, she dissects Twilight. She diagrams its sentences, critiques its commas, reminds us that sentences are not minivans, and scolds irrelevant parentheticals for interrupting the flow of the narrative--such as it is. She holds up for ridicule and horror those passages that best display everything that's wrong with the book's central romance. Might be the sort of blog that only a dedicated language geek could love, I don't know. I'm a fairly dedicated language geek. Gods forfend I ever abuse a comma again. (Whatcha doin' there, little comma?)

Dana's way with a line-edit makes me laugh out loud, sometimes for long uncontrollable minutes. Reading many posts in one sitting has a cumulative effect similar to I Can Has Cheezburger?--the funny bits are even funnier for having followed the funny bits before.

I got on a kick of rereading RwV from its very first post because Cleolinda, queen of Twilight recaps, recently livetweeted her experience reading the genderswapped follow-up Life and Death.

Hey, I never said my pastimes were particularly noble. I laugh a lot, though.

So... like I said, tomorrow I will be more disciplined. Especially since Friday I need to leave on a roller derby road trip at like 2 PM, which means all the Friday things need to be done done DONE by then. But today was Monday, and sometimes you get Distracted Niki on Mondays.

Got off to a slow start today. Might have been because it was so cold out--Boulder finally got some snow, and snow makes me want to hibernate. Could also have something to do with the righteously exhausting roller derby practice I had last night. In any case, I slept late, I dawdled a bit, I moved very slowly.

But here's where I'm at now: Two thirds the way through today's NaNoWriMo chunk-o-text, three-and-a-half hours of my workday five done, two half-glasses of red wine toward silly, and one new rejection letter to file away.

Alas, after triumphing over my year of resistance with a gorgeous completed revision, I ultimately received a rejection letter for "Caroline's Wake" from the editor who'd invited me to submit that rewrite. If you also do this freelance fiction writing thing, you won't be too shocked, I hope. This is a thing that happens. A revision request isn't necessarily a promise to buy the results. In fact, it's almost never a promise to buy. It's disappointing, of course, but the story's much better for the revision. It'll have a better chance next time I send it out than it would have had previously.

I won't send it out immediately. The rejection letter included some feedback that gave me pause. I'll see if I can't do some small tweaks in response to that feedback to prevent the problem cited from being a problem for the next slush reader who sees it.

No, the rejection letter did not drive me to drink. Please do not think that. It's just, wine is tasty, and I have some wine here, and I have nowhere to be tonight. Wine pairs nicely with popcorn. Popcorn seasoned with Cajun Land and curry powder. With red wine. My NaNoWriMo characters are also drinking red wine. I have to keep them company.

Where was I? Ah. Yes. So...

I'm also giving some serious thought to converting another story of mine to a form of interactive fiction. There's a brand new web-zine out there, Sub-Q, the interactive magazine for interactive fiction, and they're hungry for submissions. I think "Keeping Time" would be perfect for them, but it needs some work to at least prepare an interactivity proposal. I should probably play a little with Twine just to get a feel for what the kids these days are doing. But I'm thinking something like travelogue-style pop-ups for items and people whom the main character interacts with, a constant sense of the passage of time despite time being weird when you continue on a one-way trip through different worlds, maybe some choice as to which worlds the character visits but with a certain inevitability about the ultimate outcome...

I don't know. I'm still brainstorming.

But not tonight. Tonight I still need to log about 900 more words on the NaNoWriMo novel. And it's nearly midnight, so, really, I need to get back to it.

I do wish the room wasn't spinning so. Stupid wine. Tasty, tasty, stupid wine.

So I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. You may recall.

I had the ambitious but perfectly reasonable plan that NaNoWriMo would take up the bulk of my afternoon shift each work day. That is, every Tuesday through Friday, my two hours of working on fiction in the afternoon would be spent producing word count on this new novel. There are 16 Tuesday-through-Fridays in November 2015; I would therefore be responsible for 3,125 words at each session.

Easy. I typically spew some thousand words of freewriting in a single 25-minute timed session. All I have to do is make sure I work all my afternoon shifts.

Well, that turned out to be easier said than done. For reasons already explained elsewhere as well as for other reasons less good and virtuous than those, the first week of November was almost entirely a bust. I got my Friday Fictionette out, but that was all. I haven't even typewriter'd up October's "fictionette artifact" for my gracious Patron, and that's for yet another reason--at some point during the first week of November, I sprained my effin' thumb.

In the grand scheme of things, it's minor. Recommended treatment is to wear my brace whenever I can, give it frequent time under a warm water bath or heating pad, take ibuprofen strategically, and be patient. The pain comes and goes. Oddly, the thing that really brings it on is the natural hanging/swinging motion of arms and wrists that happens during upright perambulation. So I especially make sure to wear my brace while walking or running.

But I can't wear it when I skate, because I have to wear my wrist guards instead. And they don't provide as much stabilization as the brace. Which means that after Sunday's practice, my thumb and wrist were sore again, and after Monday night helping to train the Phase 1 (beginning skating skills) class, things were downright painful. Typing on my laptop this morning and afternoon was a very awkward endeavor. Attempting to pilot a manual typewriter? Unthinkable.

But when my gear came off after tonight's practice, the affected area was magically painless. Typing is fairly comfortable now. I don't get it, I don't trust it, but I'm going to take full advantage of it. If the thumb and wrist feel no worse tomorrow, I'll haul out the typewriter and see if it's manageable.

But anyway--that's what I've got to show for Week 1. Whine, whine, whine; excuses, excuses. But, as planned, I had a writing date on Saturday that got me my first chunk of 3,125. I had another successful session on Monday, and yet another today. Which means my original ambitious-but-reasonable plan still holds, except that it's now Monday-Friday rather than just Tuesday-Friday. Which is fine.

Now, I feared that I'd only have enough story idea to see me through the first three thousand words, and indeed, at the time, having written none of them yet, that was true. But it's amazing how one session leads to another. And how one sentence leads to another. And how, if you give yourself permission to follow every tangent, one throw-away line leads to several hundred words of flashback that reveal more about the character than maybe you already knew, which in turn informs the next scene, which spawns follow-on scenes and more flashbacks and maybe even plot involving incidental secondary characters you threw in just to make a previous scene work, and...

And that's how I know everything is going to be just fine.

Lo, 'tis a Friday. Have a new Friday Fictionette. "A Word in Your Ear" deals with a Princess coming of age and discovering a larger world, at the cost of the security she know in her own smaller one. Which is typically what happens when a child becomes an adult, but things are always more earth-shattering for Princesses.

The Fictionette springs in part from a Tarot card drawn for a writing prompt, and it reaches back in continuity to one of the first Friday Fictionettes ever released. The second, in fact. Ever. So there is quite probably a novel hiding in the intersection between the third week of October 2015 and the first of September 2014. Which is one of the expected results of the project. Create a new story idea every day, cultivate four of them per month into a publishable story-like object, reap presentable stories come harvest time. Not like I'm exactly hurting for story ideas, mind you. The problem has more to do with the time needed to do them justice. Nevertheless--winning!

In other news, John and I have been exceptionally good citizens. We took our mail-in ballots out to lunch and completed them. Note the date: Usually we put this task off until about two days before election day, necessitating a trip to the County Clerk and Recorder's Office to drop the ballots off by hand. But we have dropped them off in our home mailbox's outgoing slot with first-class postage attached, because two and a half weeks is plenty time for the U.S. Post to deliver them. Winning.

In yet other news, John takes his duties as assistant coach to the Boulder County Bombers very seriously. He is researching workouts--power workouts, strength workouts, endurance workouts, metabolic workouts, plyometric workouts--and I, lucky soul, get to be his guinea pig. To be fair, he too is doing workouts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but--"I want to see how this workout affects an athletically trained person," he says, "unlike me." So off I got to do Haydens and ski-jumps and depth jumps and plank hops for half an hour. And, dang it, I say "thank you" when we're done, because I know it's making me a stronger, more powerful skater.

And now I am sitting in the tub, sweating and soaking out the aches of a full roller derby week made fuller by having homework.

Winning!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I did take my bike in for maintenance!