author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So here's the Friday Fictionette I was supposed to post for June 19. It's called "All Creatures Great and Small," and it is, at least partially, about puking. (That's by way of your content warning. You may not want to read it while you're eating.) It's also about the creation of teeny, tiny, cute yet disgusting monsters after the manner of a particular fairy tale.

Today's work day went almost exactly as planned, down to taking five-minute spinning breaks out on the patio in between 25-minute sessions of writing. I'm spinning a lovely half-fleece of "black" (really a very dark brown) CVM lamb. At least, I think it's CVM. I used to have this written down on a card that I kept with the fleece, but the moths ate it along with a shameful amount of wool.

When I discovered the moths had gotten into it--this was last year when I was cleaning out the office closet at the old address--I went into Emergency Wool Rescue Mode. The first step of Emergency Wool Rescue Mode was wash it all right now. The second and subsequent steps were to allow it to freeze, then allow it to thaw, repeat until sure all moth eggs have been destroyed.

Despite the emergency washing, the wool still feels greasy. But it's nice. Lanolin is good for your hands, after all. And each flicked lock seems to stretch like taffy as I draft it into the twist. It's pleasant and easy work, and very rewarding as the yards and yards of thin single ply wind onto the bobbin.

We've been spending more and more time out on the patio since bringing home the deck furniture. John and I had breakfast out there together, along with our usual post-breakfast state-of-the-household chat. Then I brought the spinning wheel, fleece, and carding combs out, and they sat beside or on the table all day, ready for me to come out and take each five-minute break. When the five minutes were up, I could easily hear the Pomodoro Timer's "get back to work" whistle through the open office window. Neighbors passed by and waved, smiled, commented on the weather. Lawn mowers sent their buzz-saw serenades up into the sky, where small planes doing airport pattern work occasionally echoed that song back down.

Despite the heat of the summer, it's cool on the patio, cooler even than in the house. It's a very nice place to be--at least until the mosquitoes start their twilight hunt. I may start taking more of my work out there.

...and tomorrow it's going to take the wheel. We have an eight hour drive ahead of us, followed by quite possibly a visit to the National Museum of Roller Skating (if we get to Lincoln in time, which is, alas, not likely) and, if we've still got any energy, a session of recreational rolling around at the Skate Zone (which is pretty definite).

And then we'll be competing against the No Coast Derby Girls on Saturday. Which is the whole point of the trip.

I'm also looking at composing and publishing the June 2015 Week 2 Friday Fictionette in the car. Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to count on that. Well, that was before the week got squandered on--well, this and that. Mostly this, a little of that. We'll see.

And what about Week 1? Well, it's up. Finally. "You Could Go a Long Way in Those Shoes" is kind of comedy, kind of horror, and kind of vaguely influenced by having recently read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The writing prompts for the original freewriting session were "Underground Railroad" and "cleats." It wound up having much to do with the importance of good running shoes in scoping out the possibilities of a cross-continental subterranean passenger railroad system.

I'm undecided whether the world of this fictionette is fantasy or science fiction. It's comparable to present day Earth in many ways, including the technological, but the entire continent which provides the story's setting has sort of a basement floor. I toyed with the idea of making it a post-space-colonization planet, but I was honestly too lazy to come up with any concrete details about the history of space travel and the future tech they'd have to have. So it's more sort of an alternate Earth on an alternate North America with less urban sprawl. (Which seems like a plot hole. There'd be a very good incentive for urban centers to sprawl all about the place, as you will see.) In any case, I'd like to write more in this setting, once I know a little bit more about the setting.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say I met one of my goals with the June 5 fictionette: It's not just a story-like object. It's actually a complete story. Enjoy!

Because it's about a mural depicting a shipwreck. It's called "Shipwreck in Progress." It's also about family relations, and maybe doomsday.

And now I have almost two whole weeks to prepare the next Friday Fictionette because May 2015 is a month with five Fridays in it, and I get fifth Fridays off. Nyah!

So I've changed my mind about my hummingbird visitor. Now I think it's most likely a male black-chinned hummingbird who looked red-throated only because I was seeing its neck feathers through the optical illusion of its wing-blur. In any case, it's been back countless times and seems to like what I've got on offer, but it still tries to drink out of the songbird feeder from time to time.

I tried to doctor up the songbird feeder with chili powder, because I've just about had it with the squirrel that it's attracted. It was cute at first, but when it's sitting in the planter and eating the leaves off the just-sprouted sunflower seedlings, it's just not funny anymore. The planter was already propped up on top of a bucket, but that sucker actually scrabbled up the sliding glass door to get into it. I have no idea how, but the noise its claws made on the steel frame of the door woke me up in time to watch it visiting the "salad bar." Now the planter has been moved further away from the wall, and what seedlings remain have been transplanted indoors to give them a chance to grow a few more leaves.

Today was the first sunny day I'd seen in what feels like weeks. It was sunny from morning right up until early afternoon, when we got a hailstorm. But before that I got to open up windows and doors and just let that warm air in, carrying with it all the songs of the birds and the occasional mew of the neighbor's adorable and affectionate black cat.

At one point I heard bagpipes, and I went out to hear them better. It's Memorial Day, and we live within view of a large funeral lawn with many a war veteran's tomb. It was pleasant, if solemn, to stand in the sun with my mug of tea and listen to the pipes playing "Amazing Grace," occasionally interrupted by the sound of the fighter planes doing their flyovers.

I did my Morning Pages late, and I did them on the back patio. In addition to sun and songbirds, there was the smell of a propane grill. Down on the lawn across the fence, some neighbors in the next condominium campus were having a picnic. When the big guy in the football shirt said, "Who wants more brats?" I very nearly called out, "Me!" They smelled that good.

And that's about all I've got. Lazy holiday Monday, a new Fictionette, and a bunch of bird-and-squirrel TV. I hope your Monday has been as pleasant. Cheers!

Let's concentrate on the positive. We got the piano tuned today! And the piano bench is sort of fixed, enough to sit on at least; Monday I hope to have it fixed in a more permanent fashion. So I sat down and played the piano today for the first time since we moved. Since months before we moved, in fact.

In the piano bench, which I emptied out in order to fix the piano bench, there's a heap of sheet music that belonged, I think, to one of my aunts. I suspect they were handed down to her from a previous generation. There is a Victor Herbert songbook with pieces whose copyrights range from MCMVI to MCMXXXIII. Victor Herbert died in MCMXXIV, which is the copyright date on a couple of the songs in the book.) I played through one of them--as best I can, that is, which is to say slowly and with many pauses to figure out the next chord. It was pretty dang melodramatic. I think it was supposed to be a cheerful song, though.

In other cheerful news, we have a hummingbird. Or multiple hummingbirds, I don't know. They jingle-buzz around the building, on both sides, and you can often catch sight of one zipping from tree to tree. I hung a feeder outside my office window in hopes of having hummingbirds visit me while I write, but almost a week went by and they didn't find it. Then, today, a hummingbird buzzed our patio window--just flew right into the balcony space and hovered meaningfully in front of the sliding glass door. "All right, already," I said, and moved the feeder from the office window to the patio. And now we have a new friend.

Back when we lived in Oregon, we had a hummingbird feeder outside the kitchen window. We weren't always vigilant about keeping it full, but the hummingbirds were not shy about telling us it had run dry. They'd start buzzing every other window of the house, upstairs and down, hovering outside the glass and going vvvrrrreeeee! in a pointed kind of way. I think today's visitor was doing something like that.

I brought a pair of cheap field glasses to the bedside so I could get a closer look next time the hummer came in for a sip (which it did about once every 20 minutes for the rest of the afternoon), but I haven't quite identified the species. It's got a gray-or-green body, a white-or-light-gray chest, and a reddish throat, which could be one of several species that WhatBird.com suggests for Colorado. My best guess is a male broad-tailed hummingbird. I suppose it could also be a calliope, but I didn't notice that striping/striation pattern in the red/maroon throat of my visitor. (WhatBird.com does not suggest the ruby-throated hummingbird this far west.)

One more happy thought: Roller derby tomorrow! Our first home bout of the season--at least, this will be the first competitive event we're hosting in 2015. The January event was a mix-up tournament. Tomorrow's will feature actual rated-and-ranked teams. I'll be skating with the Bombshells against the visiting team from Pueblo in the first bout of the evening--that'll start at 6:00 PM, with the frontman for Big Head Todd and the Monsters as the celebrity whistleblower starting the first jam for us. Right after that, our All Stars will take on Denver Roller Derby's Bruising Altitude.

I was going to put an article up on AXS.com about the event, but literally minutes before I was ready to upload the article, I got an email from AXS saying that they would no longer accept "game-related sports news or timely recaps." Argh. I was not prepared to try to turn it into some sort of "5 things to watch for" listicle at this late date, either, so I just let it go. You get this blog post instead.

$15 at the door! Doors open at 5:30! I'm assuming Georgia Boys will be there, with barbecue and mac & cheese for all. I know there will be lots of local beers and distilled spirits for the grown-ups. Come watch me skate, and then come see me at the fund raiser table during the All Stars bout (at halftime, of course; otherwise you should be watching the All Stars skate, because they are awesome) and help us keep our travel fund in the black! And speaking of the All Stars, keep your eyes on them this season. Latest WFTDA rankings put them at #33, which means this year may well be Boulder's D1 debut.

Meanwhile, it's Friday, and there is a conspicuous absence of Fictionette. I hope to get it up this weekend (where have we heard that tale before? but I really, really mean it this time. Well, Monday for sure). It was taking me longer tonight than I'd budgeted for, and it didn't seem wise to stay up late with such a big day looming over me tomorrow. So you will just have to stay tuned for tales of painted shipwrecks and sinister countdowns, I'm afraid.

Ok! So. Got a Friday Fictionette for you. It's the one for May 1, so I've still got last week's and this week's to go before I'm all caught up. But! I have been doing all sorts of catching up things, and then some.

First things first. The May 1 Friday Fictionette is called "To Come Before The Queen" (click for excerpt and also links to full versions). At 779 words, it's probably the shortest one I've posted yet. Any shorter and it would feel like a waste of time to publish an excerpt. But it's precise. Once I had the basic structure and story in mind, I set myself the challenge of writing only half the dialogue such that the other half could be inferred. It's a neat exercise, and it forces you to really think about word choice.

I wanted the cover art to be a huge honkin' commercial oven like the one the pastry chef baked hundreds of breakfast treats in every morning, back in the university dorm cafeteria where I worked in the mid-90s. You really could imagine a grown woman climbing in and sleeping in it at night. Alas, Google gave me very slim pickings. I might as well have just photographed our own oven (in which John, incidentally, has been baking lots of bread and other yummy things lately; I am, even more so than usual, a very fortunate spouse).

Another thing I caught up on this weekend: I typed up a Fictionette on my typewriter for the first time! See, at the $5/month pledge tier, I send you one of the month's Fictionettes typed up on an actual typewriter with actual typos and everything. Also illustrated capitals, watercolor doodles, and other unique surprises. Now, in my eternal optimism, I limited this tier reward to the first 10 Patrons to sign up for it. However, I think I'll have to lower it to 5. Why? Because 1400+ words on a typewriter takes a lot longer than I remembered! And not just because I'm no longer able to touch-type flawlessly in QWERTY! (I lost that skill when I learned the DVORAK layout. Apparently my fingers only have room for one layout for typing 90wpm with my eyes closed in.)

At least we now live on the bottom floor, with nothing beneath us but the garage. I'd be worried about shaking the floorboards otherwise.

So that was cool, and it's already gone out in the mail. (I was going to take a picture, but I forget to before I sealed it up in the envelope. Oh well. Next week!)

And here's one more cool thing I did this weekend:

I wrote a whole brand new story.

I did! It was for a contest on Codex, the annual Title Rummage Sale, where you pick a title from the virtual hat and then you write a story for it. I just barely made the lower word limit, and the story is about as drafty as a draft can get, but I finished it and I uploaded it and people are going to read it. And then I can make it better, and submit it somewhere.

That's exciting! It's been months since I last submitted something anywhere! Despite my intention to send out something new every month, and resubmit something every week! Well. Better late than never, right?

Also also also, I cleaned up the office. I took most of the boxes and things that have been hogging the floor and the futon since we moved in, and I shoved them all in the closet. Actually, I arranged them neatly and thoughtfully in the closet such that they can be accessed whenever necessary. So now I have a functional closet, and I can sit or sleep on the futon, and I can walk from the office door to the office window without dodging boxes.

How awesome is that? So awesome.

I... I think I have to make snow-angels in the carpet again.

'xcuse me.

Wonder of wonders, a Friday Fictionette that is on time. With accompanying audio, Wattpad excerpt, and everything. Who's impressed with me? I'm impressed with me. Especially since I stayed in bed until an embarrassingly PM hour, all achy from last night's endurance scrimmage and also tempted into devouring a book from cover to cover before venturing forth for a shower and a late start to my writing day.

(The book was Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go. It hooked me good and hard, despite moments when I wanted to yell at the author for arbitrarily prolonging everyone's state of ignorance about Important Matters. "It is time to tell you everything," says knowledgeable character, who will promptly be Interrupted By Reasons Or Bad Guys. Otherwise, I loved it. Now I need to hunt up the sequel, The Ask and the Answer.)

In any case. This week's Fictionette is "The Hole in the Middle of the Block," which is sort of a haunted house story, sort of a best friends story, and maybe possibly sort of unintentional Doctor Who fanfic. The cover art photography is mine. I went for a walk around our new neighborhood and eventually found a good stunt double for the house in the story. Also, there's a lovely little nature walk around the teeny tiny private lake just north of us.

That was the first time since the day we closed on the house (April 7, to remind you how long ago that was) that I found time to just walk around the neighborhood and let my feet get to know the place. I need to make time for that more often.

I also found time today to plant seeds! I've got lettuce things and spinach and squash things and cucumber and watermelon and tomato and pepper and corn and beans and parsley and dill and chives all in the soil now. Which is not to say they'll all necessarily come up, mind you. My balcony container gardening style is haphazard and hopeful. I just fill all available space with all the seeds, then I thin what comes up, if anything comes up and needs thinning, if I can bear to thin them. I'm a terrible softy when it comes to thinning.

Greetings from Columbia, Missouri, home of the 87th Missouri FFA Convention! We reached Kansas City, KS/MO by about 7 PM and felt we had it in us to push on. Discovering that the convention had eaten up almost every single hotel room in Columbia almost made us regret that decision. But the check-in clerk at the Red Roof Inn, who was the one to give us the worrisome news, volunteered to call over at the Budget Host Inn (which was sufficiently off I-70 that we might not have found it ourselves), ascertained that they did indeed have a vacancy, and gave us directions down the road.

And now here we are. We've brought our suitcases and computer bags in for the night, had some munchies out of our travel snack arsenal, and gotten comfortable. I've traced my skater number on my arms with henna so they'll be nice and dark come Saturday afternoon. (Don't worry; I'll wrap them to protect the sheets from getting henna stains overnight.) And I'm planning to sleep with my boom-mike headset on for its big, ear-covering cushions. The FFA attendees appear for the most part to occupy the central intersection of the venn diagram of "young," "noisy," and "oblivious," and I don't want to be woken up all night.

So I guess we drove some 10 to 12 hours today. Didn't really feel it. I took Boulder to Goodland, KS. John took over until Salina, KS. Then I took us into Columbia. It was fun. John and I used to do mega-epic road trips back in our college days, when we had the whole summer to play with. We'd go all the way from southern Oregon to New Orleans and back in two weeks. This is our first multi-day road trip since then, but we seem to have retained the knack. The knack requires a satisfying variety of travel snacks and drinks, more music than we'll ever need in a month, and a high tolerance for each other's company in a small space. All of which we have. The modern laptops and the AC inverter that plugs into the cigarette lighter only make things that much easier. We joke that in another life, or an alternate universe, we'd team up to drive freight for a living.

When we left Boulder, it was pouring down snow and visibility was crappy. And traffic on I-270 was horrendous. But once we were on I-70 we left all of that behind... just in time to drive through not one but two thunderstorms in Kansas. (The forecast said "slight chance." I suppose we just got lucky.) But in eastern Kansas, as the terrain got hilly, the weather got gorgeous. Everything was lovely until sunset, when we hit Kansas City. Then it was dark, which made it hard to tell if anything was lovely. I thing most of it was intercity sprawl; the town names seemed to come at very frequent intervals.

Oddly, I did not manage to get any writing done in the car. John only took one driving shift to my two, and during his shift I ended up reading aloud from a copy of Mind Gym (Gary Mack and David Casstevens) which the All Stars coach is having everyone in the team take turns borrowing and reading. It's a little cheesy at times, this book, but it's given me some good insights, and just in time to use them, too.

(So I'm trying to make up for that lack of writing and other daily duties tonight before I go to sleep. Good luck me.)

I'll arrive at the tournament pre-bruised. Sunday's practice involved all the hitting drills you can possibly think of, and my left upper arm is now sporting two huge, colorful, and perfectly round "derby kisses." They're showy even by derby standards; even other skaters have been commenting on them, or just making that hissing wince noise. The coach said it looked like someone had stood me up in front of a tennis ball service machine. Everyone told me I should take pictures, so here's one with the bruises and the numbers made of fresh henna-goop applied on top of Sharpie.

And that's all I got for now. Time to go do my daily foam roller hell while John takes a turn reading to me. Goodnight!

All right, already, it's up. "The Moon and the Mage's Gloves" is the Friday Fictionette for April 10, available in PDF and MP3 formats for Patrons at the appropriate tiers. Link goes to the excerpt posted to Patreon. The Wattpad excerpt is not yet up, nor is the one on the blog, nor yet the extra audio I meant to get to--but I'll get to those real soon now.

It felt damn good to sit down and write that thing. Even if it was only a slight, thousand word piece, it was writing and it felt good. It felt like, "That's what I'm supposed to be doing with my days." I look forward to doing more of it in the car tomorrow.

Speaking of which: I've washed my safety gear, I've put my derby wear through the delicates/hand-wash cycle and the air-dry cycle, I've gone to Target for brand new C9 "Champion" brand fitted knee pants to replace the pair that got a hole in during last season's final bout, I've bought road trip snacks at the grocery, and I've put in the car those things belonging to our league which my teammates who are flying entrusted us to take in the car. Am I ready to leave? Almost. By 9:00 AM tomorrow morning, I will be.

Am I ready for the tournament? Well. Tonight's practice was... well, it wasn't our sharpest, I'll say that much. But everyone showed up, so we had all our jammers and both of our blocker line-ups on the track. And our league's head coach as well as our team coach were there to work our butts off. And after our practice, our team coach revealed the secret that, at the beginning of practice, she said she'd share with us at the end. "The secret is this: You have to have a crappy last practice before your bout. It's a good omen."

It wasn't that crappy. Should I be worried...?

Nah.

Bloomington, Indiana: Here we come!

...pending a stopover in Kansas City! ("Do you mean the one in Kansas, or the one in Missouri?" I don't know! We'll find out when we get there!) And a freakin' whole lot of I-70!

With many an apology, I must sadly announce that this week's Friday Fictionette will be late. Now: Raise your hands, anyone who is surprised by this. Seriously, I thought I'd be able to get at least a little writing done in between stuff-moving carloads and roller derby practice. Turns out I was wrong. My intention is to finish it up and post it tomorrow afternoon between my morning roller derby obligation and my evening one. I'm hoping this will turn out to be possible.

I'm happy to say, though, that in one respect I am most definitely not late. John and I will relinquish possession of our old address on time tomorrow, having emptied it of all our possessions today. Finally. It required pulling a 14-hour day today on that job, maybe eight or ten carloads, I don't know. I don't even want to talk about that last carload. I was hitting the despair cycle of project fatigue and bodily exhaustion. It showed. Also, it is amazing how little seems to fit in the Saturn wagon when we're trying to get stuff out of the old house, but how very much there seems to be in the car when it's time to unload into the new. Does it multiply in there? Does it become extra slippery?

Nevertheless, by about 10:30 PM we were able to walk through a completely empty house, and by 11:00 PM we were unloading the final carload at our new home. (Which is now, of course, choked with boxes and random piles of stuff. But we have all the time in the world to get it organized. It's OK.) Even before we'd quite begun unloading, we'd already placed our order for late night delivery from Golden Sun, because celebratory comfort food is the best. My celebratory comfort food will be chicken egg foo young and a cup of hot-and-sour soup.

Now I just have to compile the packet of things to give to the buyer's agent tomorrow. Shouldn't be too hard. All the owner's manuals are in the file cabinet, neatly sorted. Except possibly a few that are still in the great big packet of paperwork from the original purchase. But I know exactly where that is too, so everything's fine, right? Right? Please? *sob*

My feet are ridiculously sore. I can't say I'm looking forward to putting skates on them tomorrow. But I'm sure once I'm on wheels I'll feel better. That's usually how it works. A good night's sleep can't help but help, too.

Very, very soon, life will get back to normal. Or about as normal as life ever is around here.

Things Become Irrelevant. The housewife contemplates the laundry machines. She has options now. She can run a small load on half the water. She can tumble her yoga pants and sports bra on an hour of the air dry setting. It won't be a waste of quarters. Quarters are no longer of pressing concern. Maybe there doesn't need to be a quarters jar anymore, just a single jar for all the household loose change. Later, the housewife will realize that she forgot a load of T-shirts in the dryer. There will be a moment of panic before she remembers she can leave those T-shirts there all night long, and no neighbors will care.

Meeting the Neighbors. The roller derby skater opens her front door, expecting nothing more than a brief wait for her ride to practice. Instead she encounters a pair of young deer. They stare up at her from the sidewalk, as though caught in the act of daring each other to ring the doorbell and run. Skater and deer simultaneously engage in a pretense of nonchalance. If it's a contest, the deer win. They amble away towards a not-very-distant lilac bush. The skater is too delighted to keep a straight face. She watches them snacking on the shrubbery until her teammate arrives to pick her up.

Care and Feeding of Your First Hot Water Boiler.
"Help! I can't get any hot water for the tub!"
"What?"
"I need a hot bath, and the water's coming out lukewarm!"
"I... just can't. I don't know. I'm tired and I need to eat. Can I not deal with this?"
"Wait, it's OK--there's this dial thingie on the boiler thingie, and it was set to VACATION. When I turned it, it started a fire! Look, it's all blue and stuff!"
"Good. That's good. Good for you. We're good now, right?"
"Yeah, I set it somewhere between WARM and HOT."
"Good."

Paradigm Shift. The author sits at her desk, writing with teal ink in a spiral notebook. It is her desk. On the desk is her computer, her printer, her electric kettle and her favorite cup of tea. The routine has been enacted countless times before. But all these things are in a room that is entirely new to the author. Thus she is writing at her desk in her office for the first time. She remembers a previous move, when the cats slinked and yowled in the empty rooms of a new apartment, how they only began to settle down when the humans unloaded the cats' familiar, beat-up, second-hand arm chair from the U-Haul trailer. How they gravitated to it immediately, how they curled up around each other on the stained and much-scratched cushion. The author understands them better now. The move wasn't real until the desk arrived. She can finally convince her habitual self that this isn't a hotel, they won't be packing up again and going home. They are home.