author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

So what with the Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project going so well, I guess I can post the Fictionette Round-Up for August 2021. Actually, I could have posted it... *checks notes* ...any old time in November, since the August 27 release went up on Nov 1. Welp, here they are now: links to, and teaser text from, the short story-like objects originally scheduled for the first four (and only four) Fridays in August:

Friday, August 6, 2021: "The New Undertaker" (ebook, audio) In which we have a changing of the guard, about which the old guard is ill-informed. This wasn't an apprentice. This was a usurper.

Friday, August 13, 2021: "When It Calls, You Have to Go" (ebook, audio) In which some parties withstand unearthly temptation, and others enthusiastically give in. Tom still hadn't come home.

Friday, August 20, 2021: "Who's Afraid of the Dark?" (ebook, audio) In which we visit lodgings with a most unusual innkeeper. Of course, you, dear reader, are too sophisticated to believe in vampires.

Friday, August 27, 2021: "King of All He Surveyed" (ebook, audio) In which revisit a beloved bedtime story. I'll tell it to you exactly the way I remember my mother telling it to me.

"Who's Afraid of the Dark?" is the Fictionette Freebie for the month. That's the one you can read and/or listen to without having to be a Patron at any tier. Check it out! I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope you do too.

So you remember how I described the three-day process for producing overdue fictionettes in a hurry? I said Day 1 was for the babble-draft, Day 2 was for the final draft, and Day 3 was for production? Yes, well, about that: it turns out the final draft stage is not the work of a single day. Typically it's been more like "extra practice drafts and eventually a final draft" and it's been creeping into Day 3. This has not, fortunately, thrown any wrenches in my schedule. Turns out since the production stage only takes about an hour and a half or so, I can fit some last minute drafting and polishing on Day 3. Heck, the one time I didn't finish production until the morning of the next fictionette's Day 1, there was still plenty of time left in the day for the scheduled babble-draft session.

(Besides, late uploads would be pretty much invisible from where y'all are standing, what with them not going live until the following Friday morning.)

What I've learned is, not only is this 3-day schedule working, but it's got some room for flex in it. So that's good. Especially since the one for September 24 is giving me trouble. So, you know how the Friday Fictionette for any given week is based on a freewriting session from the corresponding week in the previous month? (If not, now you do.) Well, sometimes I choose a freewriting session not because it would positively make a good fictionette, but because it is the least bad of my options from a week of slim pickings. "Future me is going to hate me for this," I'll mutter to myself as I copy it over.

GUESS WHAT. Past me was a jerk.

It's OK. After today's session of babbling on the page about it, I feel kinda almost secure about maybe attempting a real practice draft that might magically transform itself into a final draft beneath my very fingers. Maybe. I hope.

On a Friday.

Um. Well, there should be time in Saturday for whatever doesn't get done tomorrow. Theoretically.

So far, so good. So excellent.

We're on day 8 of November, and I have made 100% of my writing goals thus far. Morning Pages every day, freewriting every day, and sufficient daily work on the overdue Friday Fictionettes that I have indeed uploaded a pair of fictionette posts (one for the ebook, one for the audio) every third day. (If you visit my Patreon, count up the new posts, and come up short, remember that, from this point onward, they don't go live until the following first-through-fourth-Friday.)

My other goals are more like 98%. There were a couple days when I neither skated nor got to my physical therapy homework, but I definitely exercised, considering those days included Friday when I regularly handle heavy boxes of food and Saturday when I helped my roller derby league move into our new practice space.

And I've been more or less faithful to my sleep schedule goals; if I let midnight slip or snoozed a bit past 8:30, at least I wasn't up until three or in bed straight until noon. What's important is, I'm getting enough sleep and I'm getting up in time to start writing in the morning every morning. That's aided the push for dailiness tremendously.

Another thing that's helped is, I've gone back to regularly attending the co-writing sessions available to Cat Rambo's online community. The morning session is at 9:30 AM my time, and the afternoon one is at 3:00 PM. Each session comprises three 30-minute "sprints," before which attendees share what they intend to use the sprint for and after which we report on how it went. So on the days my schedule allows me to attend, I know exactly when my writing can and must happen, and for how long.

It's a schedule. I spent several months being severely allergic to schedules. I guess I'm not anymore. Brains are weird.

What I've not gone back to doing is keeping a timesheet. Turns out, tracking my hours isn't worth the inadvertent barrier to starting work that it turned into. I think about going back to it, and then I think about how nice it is to just open up the Scrivener project and dump words into it without ritual or rigmarole. How pleasant it is to just forgo all the bureaucratic rituals and throat-clearing exercises and just start.

At one time, that spreadsheet was useful to me because I needed to gather information about my writing process: what time of day is best for me to write at? How long do I go before I run out of oomph? How long does it take to produce a Friday Fictionette from a finished text? I think I have a pretty good idea of those things now, so I'm scheduling my days accordingly as much as possible. I may go back to timesheet-as-data-gathering after November, when my daily round will change significantly by, for instance, going back to my regular weekly submission procedures and hopefully making a dent in my story-revision queue. (Also attempting to post here daily. I take forever with these posts. Argh.) But for now my schedule is appropriate to my November list of Daily Required Items. Further data-gathering is not urgent at this time.

Now, shortly after I quit my day job to write full time with my husband's support, I used a spreadsheet to assuage my guilt. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't just taking a permanent vacation. I was still working, dammit! See? I put in my five hours today! Unfortunately, that had a tendency to lead to more guilt if I didn't make my five hours.

The timesheet has historically been useful, on and off through the years, in helping me end long, depressive non-writing slumps. But I'm finding that strategy less useful for that now, as the thought of setting up the daily timesheet has increased my avoidance rather than lessened it. So it's time to let the dratted thing go.

So what's working for me instead? A whole bunch of things mixed together, that's what.

There's what I think of as "imaginary external accountability," where I state my goals and intentions somewhere public, thus making myself feel obligated to live up to them so I don't disappoint the version of You, the Reader who lives in my head. Hence blog posts like this one.

Then there's actual external accountability, where I've shared my goals with my fellow writers in the aforementioned co-writing sessions, one of those goals being to regularly show up. I know they're expecting me and they might ask me how the big Patreon Catch-up Project is going. I want to be there and give them good news!

There will be, hopefully, the momentum I build up by following this schedule all through November. I'm hoping that my current routine will take on the force of habit and more or less perpetuate itself through December and beyond.

But probably the most important component is how pleased and proud I am at the end of a day where I met all my goals, checked off all my items, and am happy with the process I made. Look, if I can keep up this pace, I will be entirely caught up on the Friday Fictionette release schedule by December 17! I'm excited about that! I want to make that happen! And not being constantly behind schedule will open up so much time and energy for other stories, other projects, other goals, to which I can bring the same kind of energy and attention I've been putting toward this ficitonette-every-three-days initiative--now that I know I have that kind of energy and attention available.

And I'm just going to be happier with myself and less stressed out. Imagining that less-stressed and more optimistic version of Future Me is probably my biggest motivator to keep up this pace and meet my daily goals.

All right, maybe this is just Week One optimism. Everyone doing NaNoWriMo in the classic mode gets super-excited about their novels during Week One. But then comes the Week Two Slump. I'm hoping the non-noveling equivalent does not lie in wait for me. If I encounter a slump of my own... well, I'll reread this blog post to remind myself of reasons to be excited, that's what I'll do.

(Sometimes the Imaginary Reader on whom I'm basing my Imaginary External Accountability... is me.)

Let's just write October off as non-existent. To heck with October. It's November now, and you know what that means.

No, I do not have a novel to work on. I have something much more pressing: the dratted Friday Fictionette release schedule. I haven't been on top of it since September of last year, and now I am now precisely two months behind. That is ridonkulous. So my NaNoWriMo will be about fixing that, in part if not in whole. Also about fixing my writing LIFE, because seriously.

So I have goals. Well, I have two overall goals: 1. get caught up on Friday Fictionettes, and 2. instill and strengthen habits for a more sustainable writing life. But in the service of those big overarching goals, I have this list of small, concrete daily goals, and they go like this:

• Get to bed on time by midnight
• Get up between 7:45 and 8:30
• Morning Pages every day, as soon after getting up as possible. (No computer nuthin' 'til they're done.)
• 1,000 words, ish, freewriting to a prompt every day.
• Significant progress on the current Friday Fictionette (see below).
• Some physical exercise: either skating or my physical therapy homework.

That's it. Those are the required daily items for November. I'm demoting submission procedures and the production of submittable materials to "Nice to Haves" for the month. That frees me up to let "significant progress" take however much time it needs.

So, what's "significant progress" on a fictionette? It's completing one of the three main steps in Friday Fictionette production. That phrase makes it sound so dang industrial, doesn't it? Ergh. Like a factory assembly line. Only it kinda is, and there are three stations in the factory.

1. Babble-draft. This is where I reread the freewriting session I've chosen as the current fictionette's base material, then flail about on the page in search of the story's final form. There will be a lot of disjointed questions, notes, ideas, etc. Babble. Usually includes some practice drafts as I try out different approaches. If I'm lucky, there's an "a-ha" moment where it all comes together. More often, layers of babble and practice draft and process eventually result in me having a solid plan for writing the final draft. Once I have that solid plan, this step is done.

2. Working and Final Draft. This part is basically plotter-style NaNoWriMo, or the process Rachel Aaron describes in her book and on her blog: I come to this writing session knowing what I'm going to write, and so I write it. A few more discoveries may yet be waiting along the way, but they're unlikely to change the fundamental structure of the story at this point. Then there's some final polishing and word-count reduction. Then I'm done. Except for the Author's Note, of course. Argh. What am I gonna put in the Author's Note this time? After some overthinking and stress, I come up with something, and then I argh all over again because titles, y'all. But then it's done.

3. Production. Narrating, recording, and producing the MP3 version. Creating the cover image. Compiling to PDF, ebook, and HTML. And finally throwing all those elements into a couple Patreon posts which, if I'm on top of things (ha! ha!) I will then schedule for publication at 8:00 AM on Friday. This all sounds like a lot, but it's the easiest bit, really. It's the most factory-like of the whole assembly line. Takes maybe an hour and a half.

So. "Significant progress" means doing one of those three things. Every day. Which theoretically means I could be All Caught Up in 3 X [Number of Overdue Fictionettes] days, right? Only there will inevitably be slippage, because I suck, or maybe it's just life that sucks sometimes. But! I fully intend to suck less in November. I'm off to a great start! 100% completion yesterday and today. Checked off every item on the above list. Yesterday, in fact, was a Working/Final Draft and Production day for the August 27 fictionette. And today, in addition to being Babble-Draft day for the Sept 3 release, also afforded time to work on a new poem which I hope to submit to Eternal Haunted Summer, and to do a small spot of submission procedures, too. And this blog post. While also holding down the fort waiting for an on-site computer repair technician who never actually showed. And then going to derby. Which was a footage watching party instead of actual skating, because weather, but hey, that's why I did my PT today.

All of which goes to say: NaNoWriMo Days 1 and 2 have been complete successes... so much so that I'm nervous about the inevitable crash. About waking up tomorrow and thinking, "Shit, now I have to live up to the level of production I achieved on Monday and Tuesday," and then just collapsing under the weight of self-expectation. Plus, tomorrow's Wednesday, and Wednesdays are infamous for failing to exist around here.

Except tomorrow's a Wednesday in November, and November is going to rock.

Because I said so.

So there.

I've spent most of October running as fast as I could to stay only marginally behind, which is why blogging didn't happen. Blogging is kinda low priority. Except I really shouldn't let more time pass before announcing this:

"Reasonable Accommodations", my sonnet about a were-deer in corporate hell, will be included in the Winter 2021 issue of Departure Mirror Quarterly. Look for it in January!

Departure Mirror Quarterly is a brand-new magazine of speculative fiction and poetry. Its content is meant to reflect the belief that, in the words of editor Arthur Robert Tracy IV, science fiction and fantasy "is a genre that transports us out of our reality while giving us a medium to reflect on our reality and to consider what can and should change. It’s both a departure from and a mirror on reality. It's a Departure Mirror."

I am honored that they considered my poem a good fit with that philosophy.

The first issue, Fall 2020, is live and available in three ebook formats (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). You can download it for free from this page here. Its table of contents is sparkling with gems, some bittersweet, some uplifting, all well worth your time, eyeballs, and brain-space. And do spread the word! Even in the best of times, brand new publications live or die by word of mouth, and COVID-19 has put its thumb on the "die" side of pretty much every scale (except maybe for Zoom futures, if Zoom futures are a thing). So download yourself a copy and tell all your SF-loving friends to do the same!

Meanwhile, I see by the editor's blog that Dreams & Nightmares #116 (the issue that includes my poem "The Ascent of Inanna") has been printed and subscriber copies have hit the mail. If you are not a subscriber, you might consider becoming one. A six-issue subscription is $25 to North American addresses and $30 elsewhere, and a lifetime subscription is $90 wherever you are.

In other news, I am still two weeks behind on the Friday Fictionette schedule, so there will be no October round-up just yet. I will be scrambling to catch up for the foreseeable future. That notwithstanding, I do plan to participate in National Novel Writing Month, after my fashion; but more on that in another post. Good night!

Hi. It's been another week. Almost two. And I'm still having trouble keeping the novel on my radar. This certainly has to do with all the time management problems I strategized about last post, but only in part. There's another problem larger than all of those combined.

The self-appointed gurus of writing with their demoralizing pronunciations that pass for "advice" like to say that no real writer would have trouble finding time to write. If you want to write, they say, you darn well make time, and if you don't, well, you must not want to write that badly, huh? And despite the utter toxicity and privilege behind that so-called advice, I must grudgingly admit that in this very particular case, it's applicable. I don't want to work on the novel. When I think about the novel, I do not get excited. I fill with dread and embarrassment instead. So, no, I don't go out of my way to make time for it, and I often forget even to put it on my daily timesheet.

And for once it's not just the usual miasmic avoidance dread that afflicts almost every project I work on at some point or another. No, this is very specific avoidance dread. It comes into play for a very specific reason. That being, this novel sucks.

No, it really does. I'm not just suffering from revision pessimism when I say this. No. This novel draft is really, really terrible. And it's not just because I spat it out during National Novel Writing Month. I've got plenty of NaNoWriMo drafts from over more than a decade of participation, so I've got some basis for comparison here.

The main problem is, the main character is unlikeable. No, this isn't just widespread social misogyny speaking. She's actually kind of horrible. She does and says and thinks horrible things off-hand, and it's got nothing to do with how I envisioned her character or what I was trying to do with her character arc. There are so many places where my margin notes say "Stop that. That's obnoxious." and "Gah, I hate it when people do this in real life, why is Gwen doing it?" I think mainly I was just trying to log my daily 1,667, and I guess I got a bunch of wordcount out of letting her indulge in whatever behavior enraged me the most about certain people I had the misfortune to encounter repeatedly that month? (Note to self and others: Being a NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison does not oblige you to endure bullying and bigotry at your write-ins in the name of Being a Gracious Host.) So the more I examined the 2006 draft, the more I realized what a jerk my protagonist was, and the less time I wanted to spend in her company. Thus I find myself avoiding the novel now.

So that's the big problem. There are others, none of them particularly daunting on their own. It's set in New York City but the people behave like they live in a stereotypical rural small town. Fine. I can fix that. There are so many ways I can fix that. I have no more idea how the story ends than I did in 2006, but that's fine. That's a story drafting issue, not a revision issue. Story drafting is my favorite part of this writing gig. The motivations driving two of the major side characters are implausible, to say the least. Cool. I'll brainstorm on it. Brainstorming is fun.

These are all fixable things! And they should be fun to fix. But during the read-through, the combination of the plot's aimlessness and the protagonist's horribleness rather dampened my enthusiasm. So I've been avoiding the whole shebang.

I mentioned other drafts. Maybe I just chose the wrong draft to spend time with? Maybe I should pick up one that I'm more excited for, one that's objectively less terrible? Maybe... but revision pessimism is still a thing, even if it isn't the only thing. I'm dreadfully afraid that whatever novel draft I pick up with the intent of Finally Finishing a Novel, time spent examining it will leave me similarly unenthused.

So this is the novel I'm going to work on, despite my misgivings. The Bookwyrm's Hoard. And I'm going to work on it by pretending I'm not revising an existing draft at all. The existing draft is just a 50,000-word outline, a collection of story ideas, a place from which I can start writing a brand new story. A story that happens to share mostly the same characters, setting, and premise, but a new story nonetheless.

And new story ideas are where I'm a superstar!

So the thing about the novel is, it's a NaNoWriMo novel. As such, it's got certain features that are making it a challenge to edit.

Way back in the day, when I was more active on the NaNoWriMo forums, there was a particular category of "advice" that popped up at the beginning of the month. "When you're reaching for 50,000 words, every word counts," certain contributors would say, "so make sure you spell out every contraction and every acronym! Write 'do not' instead of don't, 'Personal Identification Number,' instead of PIN. Be conscientious about this and you'll hit 50K in no time!"

This would invariably make me *facepalm*. I mean, fine, if you think of NaNoWriMo as a game, there's nothing wrong with wordcount-padding strategies to help you win it. But if you think of NaNoWriMo as the motivation to finally write the first draft of an eventually publishable novel, why in heaven's name would you send your character to use an Automated Teller Machine on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Why would you strew your first draft with litter when you'll only have to clean it up at the revision stage? I mean, yes, first drafts aren't perfect, sure, and sometimes you do babble out any old thing as a placeholder for those names or details you'd rather not break your current flow to research. But that's a different animal than deliberately inserting crap that A. you know is crap, and B. serves no purpose other than to pad your word count!

Look, I compose my drafts on 4thewords. Every day is NaNoWriMo when you've got monsters to battle. The interface counts words as they are typed, rather than words I commit to saving, and yes, I will take all sorts of advantage of that. I will happily babble and keyboard-smash my wordy way into a story idea. But that babble is actually serving a purpose. I think out loud on the page; that's the only way I find out what I'm thinking. If the babble weren't genuinely part of my process, if it weren't serving my art and my career, then I might as well win my monster battles by copy-pasting Wikipedia entries for all the good it would do me.

So. Those are my holier-than-thou thoughts about NaNoWriMo. So you can imagine my chagrin when I discovered that I, too, was playing the game of Wordy For Word Count's Sake back in 2006. And, y'know, I'm pretty sure I knew that's what I was doing at the time. Maybe I wasn't omitting contractions or spelling out acronyms, but I was definitely--just for instance--having my protagonist list the songs on favorite albums, or having her say in quoted dialogue something that she'd already told the reader via first-person narration. I was absolutely padding my wordcount with crap that I knew was crap and that served no purpose in the draft or to my process, except inasmuch as my process was "win NaNoWriMo."

And now it's my job to clean it up.

Thanks, past me. Thanks awfully much.

In other news, the granny square afghan continues apace. Here, pictured above, are the squares I've begun or finished, laid out according to the pattern's directions for assembly. I think there's a metaphor in there for assembling a second draft novel out of first draft scenes, but I don't really feel like going into it. Dealing with the novel itself is hard enough as it is; I don't need to deal with it on the meta level as well.

About that novel: The easy part is almost over.

I have imported into the new Scrivener project seven chapters comprising in total 13 scenes and 26,455 words. Since the entire novel is just over the NaNoWriMo finishing line of 50,000 words long, that means I've imported half of the existing novel in about a week. Taking it slow, remember. Reading each scene through and jotting down notes along the way.

The problem is, my notes are already saying things like, "You don't know either, do you?" and "Ah, still need to figure this out, I see."

In one of the scenes I imported today, a teenager, Tess, says to the protagonist, Gwen, "Have you found Mrs. Nimbel's quill pen yet? It's important!" and Gwen says that no, sorry, she hasn't even had a chance to look for it, what with trying to save the bookstore from a really nasty and unfounded reputation in the neighborhood, trying to stay alive long enough to do that, and, oh yeah, trying not to miss the deadline on her next book. "Can you tell me why it's so important?"

This is where the reader (who is me) says Yes, please tell us! What is up with the damn quill?! And Tess... does not tell us. She says, "You mean you don't know? You expect me to believe you practically grew up in this bookstore, and now you own the place, and you don't know? You don't know anything, do you?" Whereupon she runs off in a passion and loses herself among the bookstore shelves.

Which is where I say to the author (who was me), "You don't know either, do you? You never figured it out at all. Oh crap. That means I'm going to have to figure it out. Great."

So, yeah. I'm only halfway through the easy part in terms of word count, but I'm very much almost to the hard part in terms of content. I'm very much almost to the part where I have to come up with the answers I failed to come up with fourteen years ago. And then I'll have the harder part still to do, which is to make it all hang together as an actual novel I might consider sending out to agents someday.

See, I remember thinking up the quill. I remember being so damn proud of it. I'd gotten to one of those middle-of-November crisis points where I had no idea what to write next, so I pulled one of my usual tricks: I reread my material so far looking for a throwaway detail that I could make into a plot point. I found a description of Mrs. Nimbel's desk with its permanent inkwell, and how Gwen remembered watching her dip a quill pen in that ink to write special notes and letters and even sign credit card slips. Ah-ha, said I, that quill pen will be the engine that drives the next third of the novel! It's gone missing, and Gwen has to find it in order to save the bookstore! I'll figure out the details later.

I guess later is now.

Amusingly, when Tess comes back out from among the shelves with a book to buy and an apology for her tantrum (which Gwen, not being a total jerk, meets with an apology of her own), she and Gwen exchange email addresses so they can talk about it later. You know what that means, right? Come on. What happens in pretty much any story full of intrigue when a secondary character has vital information but, instead of revealing it right away, tells the protagonist that they will have to tell them later?

Well, no. There will be no underage deaths in this book. But Tess is probably going to have to be the next kid to go missing, isn't she?

If I didn't write that in the first draft, I'm damn well writing it into the second.

I have happy news today! One of the three stories that sold back in January has now been published--it is online where you can read it and everything! "The Rarest of Prey," what I've been referring to as "that tacky little unicorn drabble," is now live for your reading pleasure at Daily Science Fiction.

Meanwhile, I continue plugging away at all the daily and weekly writing tasks...

This morning's freewriting session resulted in a couple potential poems, one about the pandemic, the other about prejudice, and both depressing as heck. (Sometimes poetry is like that.)

This week's Friday Fictionette is slowly but steadily taking shape. That's particularly reassuring to see, since this one started out more nebulous than most.

Another page of a very overdue Fictionette Artifact got typed up. The very last of the the ribbons I ordered back in January 2017 is on its last legs, so I placed an order for more yesterday with Ribbons Unlimited--and they've already been shipped! Should be here Thursday. They are not just speedy, but solicitous, too. In response to a note I included with my order, the proprieter called me up on the phone to reassure me that, despite a change of verbal description, the part number I had ordered was indeed compatible with my particular typewriter (a Tower "Quiet-Tabulator" from the 1950s that an acquaintance in Oregon sold me for $50 back in, oh, 1998 or so).

The early novel revision efforts are inching along. I wrote The Bookwyrm's Hoard using a very early version of yWriter. Possibly version 2? I installed version 6 and it didn't want to open the novel directly; instead, I had to use one of its Import Earlier Version commands. 2006 was that long ago in software years. In any case, I've created a Scrivener project and have begun importing the draft, chapter by chapter, scene by scene. (I'm up to Chapter 3.) As each scene gets imported, I read it and make notes broadly identifying areas I need to fix or pay special attention to. (There are a lot of problems need fixing. Some of them are very embarrassing. No, I'm not going to list examples.) I'm trying not to judge but rather to observe and acquire data. I'm also getting surprised a lot. I remembered the basics of the plot, such as it was, but there are loads of details I'd forgotten, and some of them are actually a delight.

And of course there was dinner. (Bonus food content!) Native Foods said "Hey, it's Takeout Tuesday! Double points if you order today!" so I was like, OK, fine, let's try your fancy Plant-Based Roast. I scheduled an order for 5 PM delivery. It arrived right on time. My hunger also arrived right on time. Only problem was, the fancy Plant-Based Roast arrives frozen solid and requires an hour and a half in the oven. Whoops. Good thing I had also ordered a 4-pack of their burger patties. Those cook up in about 5 minutes on the stove.

The roast, when it was finally done, was delicious. Also it will feed me for days. (Just me. It's not really John's thing, although the burger patties might be.) A+, would recommend. Just understand that, once it arrives at your door, you aren't going to get to eat it for at least two hours, and schedule your delivery accordingly.

April is Camp Nano--basically National Novel Writing Month but in April and with a summer camp theme. I've never really gotten into it. My annual participation sputtered out around the time I decided that twelve years in a row, ten of them as a Municipal Liaison, was a lot and I was ready to set that particular tradition aside for a bit. (My apologies to anyone who's been hanging out in my "[USERNAME] wants to be friends!" queue for the last 5 months--I only just logged in today and saw you there!) Besides, I was tired of how few short stories I had out on submission at any one time, so I decided I'd get back to my novel-writing attempts once I had a more healthy stable of submittable manuscripts.

Thanks to last year's 100 Rejections goal and corresponding Submit Every Day initiative, and the ways in which I've continued those patterns this year, my stable of submittable manuscripts is much healthier, and I think I'm ready to spend a month focusing on novels again.

My Camp Nano goals--and, to be clear, I'm still not really participating in Camp Nano, not in the social aspects of it, anyway--I'm not joining a "cabin" and I don't feel the need to add new virtual write-ins to my life at this time--my goals for April are very modest. They are as follows:

• Review existing novel drafts on my hard drive.
• Pick one to begin completing and revising this month.
• Spend a little time each weekday doing that.

That's it. No end-goal, no X-amount of words written nor even a strict Y-amount of time to accumulate by the end of the month. I'm just folding novel-writing activities into my day-to-day writing life, into the slot on my timesheet reserved for Revising Stuff Destined For Commercial Submission. And the novel is allowed to take priority over short fiction and poetry. The latter two aren't going away, of course; I've got four new poems to revise and submit thanks to the poetry-writing contest on Codex I participated in last month, and this morning's freewriting session gave me hope I might yet get an entry into Escape Pod's Flash Fiction Contest for 2020 after all. But I have plenty of short works ready to submit and resubmit "'til hell won't have 'em," so this year's collection of rejection letters won't stall out just because I take a month to see where I'm at in regards to long-form fiction.

At this time, I've completed the first two items on the above list. I found myself falling in love with the first couple chapters of 2005's NaNoWriMo effort, Right Off the Page, in which a character goes missing from the protagonist's latest work in progress. But that's the second book in a vaguely planned series. Happily, the next year I took a stab at writing the first book, The Bookwyrm's Hoard, in which that same protagonist inherits a hometown bookstore and discovers its unusual quirks. So that's the book on which I'm going to focus the efforts implied by the third listed item. I'll see where that gets me by the end of the month, and whether I'll want to continue with it or with a different novel for the July edition of Camp Nano.

Bonus food content! So one of our old roller derby friends used to host a "Potluck of the Month Club", but then she moved out of state. Inspired by all the virtual hangouts that the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated, she scheduled an online potluck for yesterday. So John and I made cheese enchiladas and refried beans, which we sat down and ate in front of the computer while logged into our club reunion via video conference. There were a lot of smiles and laughter and gossip and also some ranting and commiserating. It was good. A+ would virtual-potluck again.

And right now this minute I am eating french fries that John made for me. John makes very good french fries.

So hey, I'm back. Why so long? Well. Remember how I said I got sick? And remember how I said, "at least I'm on the mend"? Yeah, no. Possibly I was fooled by that brief feeling of well-being that comes with a really effective dose of pseudoephedrine. In actuality, I wasn't just sick but SICK. Like, the kind of sick that consists of maybe two, three days of pitched battle between the viral infection and the immune system... and two to three weeks of healing the damage this did to the respiratory system and sinuses. I'm now in my third week of having returned to a normal level of physical activity and I still come home from roller derby practice with my throat raw from all the unreasonable requirements I'm putting on it. You know, that air goes out and air comes in at a moderately accelerated rate? Yeah.

And before you ask, yes I got my flu shot. Back in October. I believe in herd immunity! For all I know, this actually was the reduced-severity version of the flu one might get after a vaccine. Or maybe it was just a really, really nasty cold. I don't know. It was awful, is what it was, and I pretty much ditched any pretense at attempting to continue my NaNo Rebel Self-Challenge.

And you know what happens when, after two weeks of effort fomenting new work-a-day habits, you suddenly just stop? It's like those two weeks never happened. Supposedly I'm all better now, but I'm having the hardest damn time getting more than minimal work in every day. I suck.

But this is a new week and I am blogging again so some good things are possible! Also my excuse for not getting much work done today is this: I COOKED A LOT. Am cooking. I am cooking a lot, and also, depending on your point of view, adventurously.

It started like this: While I was in New Orleans, Dad's lady-friend brought us some head cheese, or "brawn" as they call it on the east side of the big puddle, from a favorite butcher on the road from Baton Rouge somewhere. (I didn't get the details.) And, wow, hot damn, had I forgotten how much I liked head cheese. I was introduced to it as a youngster, and already my tastes were proving to be preternaturally Cajun, in the sense of the Justin Wilson "They'll eat anything" punchline. I adored it. I adored it this time around, too. We devoured cold slices on crackers. It was amazing.

So a few days later I arrived back in Boulder, too sick to think about anything other than how awful being sick was. Took a while for my appetite to return. Once it did, I spent a few days just cycling through my habitual sickbed comfort foods. But once I was done with that, wow was I craving cold slices of head cheese on crackers. But I didn't know where to find it. It's a bit outside the usual run of deli meats, and presumably less popular in the Rocky Mountain Region than in the Cajun South.

So after some hesitant inquiries at the Pearl Street Whole Foods, where the question was met with blank stares and "what's that?" I did some research online and came up with a short list of places in Boulder County to rule out before making the trek down to some definite sources in Denver.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped in at the first on my list, Blackbelly Market. They were the closest to home. Also their website mentions utilizing the whole animal, a hopeful sign if one is looking for an offal product. And, as it turns out, they do make head cheese! Just not right now. But they invited me to call after the new year and ask them to set some aside for me. Mission accomplished!

Still, now I was curious about the second location on my list: "Longmont Packing #1," a butcher shop fairly convenient to an appointment I had that evening. I resolved to visit. Turns out, it's the carnicería right next door to Guacamole's (where I satisfied a craving for menudo that sad Saturday morning when I discovered that the Sancho's location in the north Boulder DMV mall had closed). Head cheese not being a particularly Latino offal meat product, I didn't think I'd find any there. (Note: Apparently I'm wrong about it that; Wikipedia says it's very popular in Latin America.) But I might as well go in and see what else I might find, right?

But here's the thing. It's stupid. I'm embarrassed about this. But when it comes to those places that primarily serve the area's Latino community, I'm, well, shy. I get self-conscious. I know I look like someone who couldn't possibly know her way around the aisles, someone who might ask stupid questions or say stupid things, someone who will almost certainly necessitate an English-speaking staff member at every transaction. And, OK, yes I'm semi-fluent in Spanish, but--and this is the really stupid thing--I'm generally too embarrassed to even try. I get anxious about screwing up in laughable or even offensive ways, or just coming across as a self-congratulatory show-off.

Look, I told you it was stupid. Nevertheless, there it is.

So I went in! Yay! And then spent a couple minutes wandering the aisles just psyching myself up to interact with anyone. I stared with great concentration at the various canned chilis as though seriously considering the comparative merits of various brand names. I might have kept this foolishness up for quite some time had I not worked my way over to the produce aisle and discovered that they had mirlitons! OK, chayotes. Same thing. Right there and then, visions of The Holiday Casserole of My People gave me the drive to get over myself already and head over to the meat counter in search of shrimp and actually ask, in Spanish, about the available varieties. Did they have the really tiny ones? No? Just the ones on display here? OK. No, no thank you. But one lengua de res, por favor. Because I saw those on display just a few feet to the left of los camarones, and it got me remembering fondly a beef tongue stew I wanted to try making again.

Anyway, I'm kind of proud of myself now. Not for successfully posing as bilingual for whole five minutes--it is not a particularly unique skill and I'm only so-so at it--but, I mean, for shoving my self-consciousness and anxiety to the side and managing to function in spite of them.

Long story short, that is how I came to have a soupy version of this Basque-style beef tongue stew waiting for me in the slow cooker after roller derby practice. And it was amazing. As amazing as Cajun head cheese on crackers? Unclear. I'll have to get back to you after side-by-side comparison.

And what of the mirlitons? That will be a story for tomorrow.