author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This is another one of those unfortunate weeks where the Friday Fictionette will have to be a Weekend Fictionette. I could blame yesterday's scrimmage, which was fantastic but left me exhausted enough to use "roller derby recovery" as an excuse to sleep late the next day. I could blame that, but I won't, because that's not the problem. The problem was, when I finally got up, I rolled over, grabbed my library copy of The Bone Clocks, and didn't put it down again until I'd reached the end.

My problem is, I have very little self-discipline around books.

Now, this weekend is a weekend containing no less than eight hours of roller derby doings and a good friend's birthday party, so I'm going to have to be clever about eking out enough time to get the fictionette up while we can still sort of kind of call it December: Week 2. Clever and also somewhat strict with myself. (Alas. It is no fun whatsoever to be strict with myself.) But not so strict that I don't let myself get enough sleep, because, well, roller derby. Athletes need sleep!

But at least I finished the library book, so that temptation is behind me.

The Bone Clocks is by David Mitchell, who also wrote that Cloud Atlas whose movie adaptation everyone was raving about not so long ago. In this book, he's created a huge sort of puzzle box that solves itself for you slowly, piece by piece, over the course of one woman's lifetime. In many ways it felt like a more mature and nuanced version of what Sheri Tepper was trying to do with Beauty. It's got a very similar story structure--at least, superficially so--and it voices very similar concerns. But it strikes a much more convincing balance between "Some things are just wrong, mmkay?" and "It's always more complicated than you think." And when it was over I not only cried a little at the end, but I found myself more prone to crying over other things, both happy and sad, for some time after I'd closed the book. It was as though the book stayed not so much in my conscious thoughts as in my emotional circuitry, magnifying everything else I felt for the rest of the afternoon.

It's either science fiction or fantasy depending on your point of view. Maybe a little of both. It has a science fictional tendency towards exploring future outcomes of present day action. It has a fantastical approach to psionic powers, reincarnation, and the afterlife. It has a terribly realistic viewpoint on disasters both past and present, but it never quite robs the reader of hope. It dangles what feel like hundreds of loose threads over the course of the story, and all but I think two of them get woven back into a satisfying resulotion. (One of those unresolved threads is a real humdinger, though, I gotta say. [ROT13]Pevfcva'f zheqre jnf fhccbfrq gb znxr gur cbrzf trg angvbany nggragvba, ohg gurl ner va snpg arire zragvbarq ntnva.[/ROT13] This bugs. But by the end of the book I wasn't thinking about that. I didn't actually think about it until hours after I'd finished, because everything else about the book was so good.)

It wouldn't be fair to give me all of the blame for my unfortunate binge-reading. I think Mitchell has to shoulder some of the responsibility. He wrote a book that was very, very hard to put down. I'm going to have to wait some time before checking out Cloud Atlas. Purely out of self-defense, you understand. Can't afford to have days like this every day.

Oh, goodness. Today. Today got sabotaged. Weren't nobody's fault but mine, neither. OK, sure, I could say the cat shredded my homework, but I'd have to admit that the only cat here was me. Let me tell you all about it.

So, firstly, remember Late Night With Fruitcake? (This is what I should have called yesterday's blog post.) I was up even later than that. Turns out, after the fruitcake bakes for three and a quarter hours, then it wants to be removed from its tube pan half an hour after being removed from the oven. So I was actually up until three.

Which meant I didn't get up this morning until almost 10:30, and still didn't feel like I'd gotten enough sleep. So not only was I up late, but I was moving slow. My morning shift didn't happen, is what I'm saying.

Secondly, I had a few tasks to complete for my roller derby league. I'm part of the committee that makes home bouts happen, and my role within that committee is pretty much everything to do with tickets. And the thing about tickets is, nothing to do with them is a surprise. I had all the info I needed to get things done over the weekend. But did I? No. I procrastinated until suddenly everything had to be done today.

And there went my afternoon shift.

Most of the writing I got done today, I got done after we left for tonight's derby practice. John needed to be there super early, so I dropped him off and then ran away to a cafe in Gunbarrel for an hour. Then he had to be there super late, so I picked at this week's Friday Fictionette from one of the trackside spectator couches. "Write wherever you are" is a rule I usually have the luxury of ignoring, but today I really paid heed.

On the plus side, you can now buy tickets to our upcoming New Year Roll Out mix-up tournament! You can just come to watch, or you can register to skate in it. If that's your thing, I mean. I know a lot of people whose thing this definitely is. It's certainly my sort of thing. I will probably be skating in it.

In other news, it turns out I will not be spending Solstice Night on a train somewhere between Fort Morgan and Omaha. Amtrak coach fare was ridiculously expensive. Seems I waited too long and all the "saver" seats were sold out. As much as I love traveling by train, there is a limit to how much I'm willing to pay for the privilege; $450-ish each way is well beyond that limit. My next strategy would be to send my accumulated Amtrak Guest Reward points, but that was already a non-starter because of blackout dates.

So, feh. I'll be flying home on the 21st instead. If I have the energy, I'll even stay up all night and keep a fire burning through the longest night of the year; they do have a fireplace. It's out by the hot tub. It'll be a lonely Solstice vigil, but a comfy one.

I'll be flying back on the evening of the 31st. Which is neat, because I hear that Southwest give out a little free champagne on New Year's Eve. (Or is that only for overnight flights? Do they only do that at the stroke of midnight?) Also they have wifi on board for a nominal charge. So there's the possibility of a champagne toast and Puzzle Pirates at cruising altitude.

But that's not until the end of the month. Here's my plan for tomorrow: A lot fewer excuses and a lot more productive writing time. You can go ahead and hold me to it, too. For one thing, I'm going to bed on time tonight. For another, I already got my bout ticket duties done today. NOTHING WILL STAND IN MY WAY.

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.

Unexpected things are unexpected. Unexpected things are the reason why a writer's gotta do the right thing.

For instance, when I don't get up on time, I lose a couple viable working hours from my day. And when the day happens to not only be scrimmage Thursday, but a particular Thursday in which it turns out we need to get to the practice space two hours early, well, it turns out I kind of needed those morning hours I denied myself by sleeping late.

(It's not that I didn't know we needed to get to the practice space early. It's that I didn't know how early we'd need to get there. Taping the 10-foot marks takes longer than I would have expected. Also the track was needed for a returning skater's assessment before scrimmage, too. Two hours was not enough time, turns out.)

But here I am, at the IHOP in Boulder after Thursday scrimmage, feeling unusually virtuous and ready to get my work done! I had a plan for my work day, darn it, and I'm going to stick to it! I'm gonna write that Boulder Writing Examiner article I've been meaning to write, right, the one about a particular new local Meetup group that's kind of exciting, OK?

Then I login at Examiner.com and discover I don't have the ability to publish articles anymore. I just have the ability to "Become an Examiner." I think I let too much time go by without publishing, and they canceled me.

I suppose I could re-apply. But--why? If I'm going to take up precious writing time with a content writing gig, maybe I should hold out for a content writing gig that pays better. At least somewhat. And if I'm going to take up writing time with blog posts about being a writer in Boulder, well, why not just keep it here on the actually writing blog (since it's actually about writing) where I'm the one in charge of how I go about it?

So, anyway, that was an unexpected thing too.

I'm late, and I'm going to be even later. I just put up the PDF edition of the Friday Fictionette for August 28, "How Featherkind Got Its Song." Patrons pledging at least $1/month can download it right this second. Hurrah!

And now I must run to pick up John at the airport. Since I'm coming from and returning to Avon, Colorado, we're looking at a round trip between four and five hours. That means the following probably won't be up until tomorrow morning sometime: the MP3 edition (available to patrons pledging $3/month), or the excerpt (available to everyone), or the Fictionette Freebie for August 2015. Damn and blast.

But hey, now you've got something to look forward to, right?

Talk to you then.

In some ways, today rocked. In others, it was made of fail. Guess which one all things writing-related fell into?

This week's Friday Fictionette, as well as the blog post of substance that should accompany it, will appear tomorrow. Today, I'm turning in early. Sorry, y'all.

G'night.

So this morning was Go Time. John had to get to the airport for an 11:45 a.m. flight, which meant leaving the house at 9:00. I set my alarm for 8:00 so I'd have time to do my Morning Pages before we left. (I get to click the happy habit plus-mark on Habitica if I do them immediately upon getting up. Clicking the happy plus-mark gives me gold and experience points.) And I went to bed reasonably on time last night, so I figured even with a little reading in bed I should get enough sleep.

Well, that alarm went off. I hit snooze and lay back down. And then memory hit me like an elbow-guard to the face. "You're not allowed to snooze," memory said. And I wanted to cry. You know that feeling? You're just settling back into the pillows, and then you remember why you can't afford to go back to sleep? And you realize that it is no longer your turn to sleep, and you do not get another turn for another--what, eighteen hours? You know that moment of utter despair?

In that moment, all the angst of my teenage years revisits me with a tackle-hug. Only not like a tackle-hug. There's nothing huggy about it. There's just a tackle.

So, influenced by the unreliable mean brain chemicals of being half-asleep, I said to myself, "Eff it. I'm going back to sleep. I'll do my Pages after dropping John off at the airport." (I have to click the sad habit minus-sign on Habitica if I don't do my Pages immediately upon getting up. Clicking the sad minus-sign makes me lose hit points.)

But as I settled into the pillows once more, defiant and cranky, I realized two things:

1. My body suddenly didn't want to go back to sleep.
2. I was seriously craving tea. Like, fantasizing about it.

I have very little control over whether 1. happens. Nearly forty years in this body, I still haven't figure it out. Bodies, y'all! Am I right? I'm totally right. But something I do have control over is my morning routine. The routine goes like this: Get up, make the bed if it's empty, start the kettle, water the plants, pour boiling water over tea bag, take tea and notebook and fountain pen and possibly bottle of ink out to the patio table, do Morning Pages. Given enough repetition, all those things become associated with each other in interesting ways.

I wasn't looking forward to getting up and beginning the routine. But in my mind, the thought of the routine tasted like a strong cup of Taylor's of Harrogate Pure Assam. And I wanted that taste in my mouth very, very badly.

So I got up. And I got my Pages done on time. And I got John to the airport early. And it was all because I was craving my morning cup of tea.

They say that it's not too smart to rely on specific tools for your writing routine. What if your special fountain pen breaks, or you can't find your lucky notebook, or Scrivener crashes and won't get up again? What if there's no T. of H. Assam tea in the house? The associations you create to help you write can also hinder your writing if they break down.

But when they work, hoo boys 'n girls do they work.

It is seriously amazing how much inspiration you can get just listening to conversations in a bar. Annoying conversations. Held by conversationalists that are absolutely not your people.

That's my new theory. Bear with me for a bit.

Derby practice is done, and, is as our common practice, John and I have stopped for food before going home. It's a restorative process. I need food (hungry athlete is hungry) and John needs food and decompression time (coaching tends to use up all his extrovert capital). And I need some dedicated writing time because today went all to hell.

Seriously, I was on a great track to get everything done before derby. I was up on time, I got right to work--and then the washing machine died.

It died in the middle of a load of clothes which John needs to pack tonight, because he's getting on a plane for Detroit tomorrow so as to help coach our All Stars at D2 Playoffs this weekend. And the clothes he needs to pack are now just sitting there in a tub of water, going nowhere.

It's probably the lid sensor switch, but I wasn't about to try to DIY that sucker on the spur of the moment, especially since such efforts would probably not play well with our home warranty thingie. So I called the home warranty people, and they called an appliance service, and a tech is going to come out on September the 8th.

Meanwhile, my assignment is to wring out the clothes, rinse them in the bathtub, wring them out again, then put them in the dryer for an all-day session on Auto Dry Moisture Sensor Something Or Other. And John's assignment is to take the other load of laundry to the laundromat, and bring it home in time that my derby jerseys can air dry.

And my work day, the one that was off to such a great start, is now all shot to hell. It's not fair.

But here I am hours later, preparing to hit the reset button on it all over a beer and also a pizza with shrimp and green onions on top. And there's this four top right behind us loudly sharing stories about waking up drunk in strange places and also the One That Got Away And Thank God For That. And they... are so very much not my people. And they're loud and right in my ear and I want to hide under the table and--

--and it occurs to me that no, I don't need them to shut up; I need to be taking notes. I don't know how to write people who aren't my people, not without turning them into some sort of caricature. I need to be taking notes and expanding my character-creation repertoire here.

So... I'll be over here in another editor window, jotting down whatever I can remember. See you later?

I think I have a barometer in my head. I woke up with a headache that lingered all day long, and all day long my ears popped and itched. Then this afternoon it rained for the first time in what feels like weeks. It's as good a theory as any, right? I should start keeping track, develop a chart showing the correspondence between changes in barometric pressure and days where I feel like crud.

Actually, it's a crappy theory. Data from Denver International Airport shows about the same range of pressure for yesterday as today, topping out at 30.3 on both days. And I felt fine yesterday. Granted, that's a high for the past seven days, rising from a low on Friday of 29.9--maybe it's a delayed reaction? Maybe I feel like crud on the second day after barometric pressure reaches a new high and stays there? I'm totally stretching for an explanation here. Any vaguely plausible nonsense will do.

Other theories include PMS and also maybe not drinking enough water last night after a high-sodium dinner and a beer. I dunno.

In any case, the result was me dragging around the house in a constant state of blah. I have no interesting reports to make, writing related or otherwise. Just a plea for do-overs on today.

Oh, here, have a recipe for Leftovers Day Crawfish Chowder:

1. Melt a tablespoon of butter in a medium pot over medium heat.
2. Chop up half an onion and throw it in.
3. Chop up a good handful of potatoes leftover from a crawfish boil.
4. Add any other leftovers from the boil that float your boat: garlic, sausage, mushrooms, corn, whatever.
5. Once onions are soft and potatoes are softer, add about a pint of the stock you made from the crawfish shells. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, simmer for a few minutes.
6. Mash the potatoes a little.
7. Add however much milk gives a consistency that says "chowder" to you. Simmer a few minutes more.
8. Devour. Repeat if still hungry.

So that was dinner. So I made something today. Tomorrow I shall no doubt make something else.

Some days are just low-energy days. I don't like it much, but I still haven't figured out what to do about it.

Talking about yesterday. Yesterday I dragged myself out of bed about an hour late, more like two hours, and then I spent the rest of the day dragging around. Could barely get through my pages, and couldn't seem to stay upright. Eventually 6:30 came around and found me at team practice, but even after our off-skates exercises I was still dreadfully low-energy--yawning and drooping as I skated warm-up laps around the track. It was like I couldn't quite get enough air.

I wanted to blame it on not going down to the creek that morning like I had for the past few mornings. The five-minute walk in the sun and fresh air must help get the blood moving at a faster pace, right? And the creek has an energy all its own, chattering away downstream, stair-stepping down a sequence of miniature waterfalls and, y'know, just being running water. This was the first morning in a while I hadn't started out that way--whether fishing or not--and I figured it had an effect.

But for one thing, no amount of going for a walk, writing on the patio, or sitting out by the little lake out back seemed to help. And for another, this morning I also started off late and indoors, and I felt fine. I went outdoors later, yes, but by then I'd already observed in myself a greater store of get-up-and-go than was alloted to me yesterday. I didn't even have to try, to feel that way. It was just there.

I've had this theory that when I wake up all low-energy like that, I need to go for a jog, go biking, take a long walk, do something to get my body revved up. And if my day continues in a dragging, drooping sort of way, it's my fault for not "fixing it" like that. Except if I'm still feeling droopy after doing fifteen minutes of jogging and core work and plyometrics with my roller derby team, well, there goes that theory.

I take multivitamins, I have a daily cup of strong unsweetened black tea, I try to eat right, I exercise like woah, why've I gotta have days like that? How do I make them go away?

All I can do is push through them, focus on one little task at a time and force myself to get that task done. Then the next one. Then the next. Which, honestly, doesn't sound like a very kind way of handling the problem. I just don't know of a better way.

In happier news, my new laptop battery came in. I might drag and droop, but my laptop can now say "3 hours 30 minutes (80% remaining)" and mean it, too. To celebrate, I went down to the creek and enjoyed an hour of writing without worrying about whether my laptop would crap out on me. And when we went to the IHOP after scrimmage tonight and the host asked us, "Do you need an outlet tonight?" (we're regulars, he knows we usually ask for a seat with an outlet) I pointed at John and said, "That's up to him," and felt smug about it.

So here's to finishing off the week on a high note tomorrow, with a smidge of luck, a lot of determination, and to the best of my ability.