author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

OK, so, since the last time I ended a blog post with vague promises about "tomorrow," a lot of tomorrows happened, to nobody's surprise.

So what did the intervening undocumented tomorrows consist of? Well, some of them involved me driving down to New Orleans for my 30th high school reunion! It was great! Turns out, the people I grew up with are all stellar human beings and I like hanging out with them! I was in town a few days on either side of the big event, visiting friends and family, writing a little, skating a little, eating a lot of good food--all pretty much expected features of a visit home.

Then, on the Wednesday morning I was packing the car to drive away, Dad tested positive for COVID-19 and I realized I had a sore throat and a runny nose myself. Yup. I done got it again. Thankfully, the spread seems to have been limited to myself, my dad, and my brother when we had dinner together Monday night. No one else I visited that day or the day before reported symptoms. So it seems unlikely that I encountered the bug among, or introduced the bug to, the Alumni Weekend/Class of '94 Reunion crowds on Friday and Saturday.

This has been a mild case, as covid goes. And a good thing too, since I still needed to drive the 20-hour return trip to Boulder. Thank goodness for cough drops and hand sanitizer.

For my two previous bouts with covid back in 2021, I isolated in the office/second bedroom. But this time around required a more ironclad plan. John's about to host a small private gaming convention, and he needs to present zero risk to his guests. So we agreed that, after passing by the house for a brief non-contact exchange of goods, I'd check myself into a nearby hotel to isolate.

Annnnnnnnd I'm still here. Still testing positive a week later. I DON'T LIKE IT. But over the past couple days I've regained enough energy and physical well-being to sit up and play games on the computer and even write! Yes! Today's been especially good. Got a full "morning shift" in, took a guilt-free nap, and now here I am writing a blog post like I haven't done since February.

Now, at the end of that previous blog post, I suggested I might get back to talking about actually writing. AND SO I SHALL. Sort of. Here we go:

Barbara Baig's How to Be a Writer
(Being a Rather Grumpy Book Review)

So I recently had occasion to install Google Play Books, and it turns out that when you install Google Play Books, you get a bunch of freebies. Well, I did, anyway. Almost all of them were writing books:

• Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Write That Book Already!
• Les Edgerton, Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go
• Barbara Baig, How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play
• Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Story Structure Architect
• Theodore Cheney, Getting the Words Right
• Marilyn Ross and Sue Collier, The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing
• Writers Digest Books, The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing

And then there was The Oera Linda Book, which purports to be a Thirteenth-century manuscript but is in fact widely held to be a Nineteenth-century hoax or forgery. From 1922 on, it got really popular among the Nazis. Why Google included that, I dunno.

But anyway, here I am at Isolation Station with lots of time on my hands, trying to discipline myself into using that time for writing, and I figure, why not dive into this selection and see what we find? I started with the one by Baig, because it sounded like it might freshen up my Morning Pages and freewriting practice with a little extra playfulness.

I'm 23% of the way in, and I don't think I'll be finishing it.

How to Be a Writer is basically an introduction to writing-as-practice and the value of freewriting. These are concepts I'm already extremely familiar with. Which is fine. I knew going in that I was not going to be the primary audience. But I did hope that it might offer a few new-to-me insights. Or at least be enjoyable to read?

Turns out, not so much.

Put it this way: Imagine someone said, "Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron were very good for their time, but their hits were 40 and 30 years ago. It's time to repackage their tools for a new generation. And while we're at it, maybe remove all that inconvenient spirituality. We don't want to scare anyone off..." Well, then, you might get something like How to Be a Writer... if you also had a very poor opinion of the new generation's reading comprehension.

Look. It is fine to devote a few early paragraphs to how writing is a skill just like baseball is a skill, and, like baseball, it benefits from regular practice. That is a perfectly cromulent beginner-level truth. It is, in fact, the argument for this book's entire existence. But, having stated it in the introduction, and then having expanded on this thesis throughout Chapter 1, why continue trying to convince us through Chapter 2? We are now already convinced. We do not need the point belabored further. We certainly don't need to introduce Chapter 3 with a paragraph-long quote from Tim McCarver's Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans about how baseball players make it look easy because they have been practicing. But all right, fine, include that long quote if you must. But then for heaven's sake don't continue for two further paragraphs that do nothing but paraphrase that quote! We read the quote already! We don't need it explained to us!

At this point I'm beginning to wonder whether she thinks her readers are not just beginners at writing, but also at thinking, that a concept this simple should need to be developed painfully, slowly, and with great repetition and as many sportsball comparisons as possible, over nearly a quarter of the book's page-count. Or perhaps there was an assigned minimum word count that had to be reached?

These are, admittedly, not kind things for me think about an author. But I am not best disposed toward an author who seems to assume I can't keep a thought in my head for five minutes at a time.

(To be scrupulously fair, Goldberg compares writing to running at least as often as Baig compares writing to baseball. But then, Goldberg herself is a runner. There's no hypothetical "when we see a runner in a marathon, we are seeing the result of months of daily practice" here. It is her own running practice, and her own writing practice, too, that she puts on the page. She is writing in specific detail from her lived experience, and not from an abstract course syllabus in her head.)

All right. Fine. Shifting from Goldberg to Cameron here: Let's say this book is deliberately meant to be something like The Artist's Way but for the two-thousand-teens. Why, then, having reached the 23% mark, have I noticed no quotations--neither the chapter-heading epigraphs or the "like so-and-so said" anecdotes--that aren't old enough to have been included in The Artist's Way in the first place? In fact, I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them were included. I think that's why I recognize so many of them. (Well, the McCarver quote dates to 1999. It would have had to wait for the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Artist's Way.) Do you think no writers have said anything quotable more recently than that? And why are all the writers you're quoting--not to put too fine a point on it--men?

(And why, for the love of little green crickets, is one of those men Woody effin' Allen? I mean, it's a quote about the importance of having a daily routine. I'm pretty sure other writers with less objectionable histories had daily routines in 2012 and would have been happy to talk about them!)

Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe later on in the book there are really nice quotes from Ursula K Le Guin and Nnedi Okorafor. Maybe there will also be insights unique to this author and to the decade in which she's writing. I'll never know, because what I have read so far has not inclined me toward continuing.

So, yeah, I'm sitting here in a hotel room, eating tonight's DoorDash delivery, and getting very homesick for my physical library with its well-thumbed copies of much better books. (I am also homesick for my husband, and for my bunny, and for the ability to cook myself a meal from scratch...) But I'll be there Sunday morning at the very latest. Until then, there's always the public library's online catalog.

(But only a semblance, mind you. Life has been Full of Things, as we shall see here.)

Hello! Hi! Is this thing on? *tap tap tap* It would appear I am blogging again. Yay!

So anyway, what all has happened since June? Well.

I had some technical issues. There was a long, drawn-out oopsie with this website, where suddenly, starting in mid-April, I couldn't log into any private directories, and after lots of frustrating back-and-forth with my domain host's support--I mean, lots, like, MONTHS during which they tried to sell me SSL certificates, they lost track of the issue among all the different support technicians involved in the email chain and had to have it explained again, and failed to even investigate the problem as I reported it--but eventually someone finally did investigate--and it was revealed that my .htaccess files were pointing in the wrong direction. The pathway that was JUST FINE up until that point in mid-April suddenly became invalid. And why was that? Well, it couldn't possibly be because some process or other had deleted the relevant .htpasswd file from where it had lived for decades, could it? No, of course not!

All of which is to say that I'm low-key in search of a new domain host. I'd love it to be a small, woman-owned business, but I know that lightning like DrakNet can't be expected to strike twice. (My current host, a small orange, is the company to which the owner of DrakNet sold the business when she was ready to retire from it.) I'm having trouble even finding alternate webhosts at all--I mean, where webhosts means "the people who store your files on a server so that domain registration can point to it, and give you access to databases and scripting and certain out-of-the-box software you can use if you wish" rather than "someone who'll design your website for you and/or give you a limited template content management system because you don't actually know HTML or CSS, let alone PHP or mySQl."

And then searching for "woman-owned webhosts" on Google was even more fraught. That's how I stumbled upon an intriguing forum thread from 2007 in which answers to same question ranged from "Silly feminist, why do you care about the business owner's gender?" to "Women won't own webhosting companies until webhosting is made simple enough for their ladybrains to understand." In the 21st century, y'all. I guess this is the techbro version of "women don't write hard science fiction because they can't hack the science, lol."

Anyway. Anyone know anything about Earth Girl LLC?

I went to WorldCon! Incidentally, this involved taking my very first train trip since 2020. Amtrak has long since stopped requiring masks on board, more's the pity, but I traveled in sleeper so I could close the door on my own private roommette, and I had my meals brought to me in my roommette, and I wore a mask every time I left my roommette, so I felt pretty well protected.

WorldCon was in Chicago, where the sister of an online acquaintance of mine has a condo up the north end of the Magnificent Mile, and so the two of us stayed there without charge, which was really nice. It did mean a commute of a little under a mile between our lodgings and the convention, but whatever, that's why I brought my skates. I did a lot of skating in Chicago, not only to and from the Hyatt Regency but also up and down the Lakefront and the Riverwalk. It was great!

And it appears that, after all this time, I've finally reached that point in my con-going where I cobble together my schedule based less on what panels I want to see and more on the people I'd like to hang out with. Oh, I went to panels, sure, and a poetry workshop, and a craft circle too. And I did throw my name in the lottery for Table Talks with Big Names in the Industry. But more often I signed up for a Table Talk because "Hey, I know that person from Codex or Viable Paradise or from Cat Rambo's online community. It would be nice to spend some time chatting with them." And that was lovely.

This was my first time attending WorldCon since 2011, when it was in Reno. Turns out I still very much enjoy the experience and hope to do it again in two years when WorldCon goes to Glasgow. I also very much still enjoy taking the train--and I'll be doing that again Very Soon Now, because...

I'm going to World Fantasy in New Orleans! Got my attending membership some months ago. Finally got my hotel room yesterday. Today I had a chat with Dad about logistics for family-and-friends visiting before the con, and later today or maybe tomorrow I'll wrangle my Amtrak dates.

The idea behind visiting Dad and them before the con is so that I don't expose any high-risk loved ones to whatever I might have chanced to pick up during the con. World Fantasy has posted the same COVID-19 policy as WorldCon did--which is to say, must be vaccinated to attend, must wear masks properly at all times--but risk remains, so might as well be smart about this.

I'm very much looking forward to a convention in New Orleans. I'm looking forward to Halloween costumes and people-watching and good food. I'm looking forward to skating around the French Quarter! I'm looking forward to visiting the Royal Street Rouses to equip myself with snacks and beer. I'm looking forward to wandering between convention programming items with a bottle of Abita in my hand, because it's Louisiana, suckers. Although I suppose with public masking required I may have to plan my beers with somewhat more precision than I did during World Horror 2013.

Anyways, that's coming up, and I'm stoked.

I skated a whole heck of a lot of roller derby! We had our season closing event on September 17, pretty much right after I got back from WorldCon. We set up the venue Friday night and on Saturday there were three (3) bouts, two of which I personally skated in. I was sooooooore afterward, but very happy.

In the intraleague mixer, my team won by three points. That's a seriously close game! There was a point midway through the second half where it was tied at 150, and I had to bite my tongue because most of my teammates would prefer not to know the score actually, and I prefer to respect my teammates' needs for preserving their Game Mentality. (This is a subtweet.) But I did sidle over to one teammate I knew did like to know the score, to whisper "Eeeeeee it's tied it's tied it's tied!!!!" and she went "Eeeeeee!" back.

Eeeeeeee!

The last game of the night was us versus Denver's C team, who beat us authoritatively but told us at the afterparty that we'd made them work hard for it. We were pretty proud of the score we put up against them.

So. Turns out, that was my last roller derby experience to date, because right after that event...

I caught COVID. Alas! My two-and-a-half year record for avoiding the plague came to an end when I tested positive on September 22. I'm fairly certain of the how, when, and from whom of contracting the virus, but all I'll say here is that it was most likely not directly from skating on the 17th, but rather from a social outing later that weekend.

Obviously I hold no grudge whatsoever against the person I got it from. They didn't know they had it until two days after they passed it on to me, and I didn't know I had it until I'd had plenty of time to pass it on to John. Once I knew, I tried to isolate, but that was probably a futile endeavor from the start. He tested positive a couple days after I did.

We'd both just gotten the new booster, like, less than a week before we got the virus. So aside from not having the benefit of a full two weeks post-shot, we were fairly well protected. That's probably why our symptoms were no worse than those consistent with a really obnoxious cold. But I had that dreaded rebound--return of symptoms plus new positive test--that turned my Day 7 into a new Day Zero, so I'm only on the exit ramp now.

But I am on it. I will say that with certainty. It's Day 7 again, I've gone three days with no symptoms at all, and I tested negative yesterday. Hoping for another negative test tomorrow morning, and feeling pretty confident I'll be able to leave the house and go among the nice people again Real Soon Now. With a mask on, of course.

(Maybe then the dreams about "What am I doing out among people when I'm contagious? And why aren't I wearing a mask?!" will taper off. Because yeah, I got those. Multiple times. Thanks, brain.)

And those are the highlights. There's probably more, but this is a long enough post already, and I might as well save some for tomorrow. Because I am going to try to blog again tomorrow. And the day after that. So do please stand by.

Oh hey how is it the 30th already? Welp.

No regrets, though. The month has gone more or less to plan. Well, other than my weekends having a tendency to disappear in a puff of roller derby. In my defense, it wasn't just regular practice but also holiday parties and trail skating and all the activities associated with moving into our new practice facility. This past week, we put down the Sport Court and then we taped a track outline and then we were all like, "Well, we know we said no practice Tuesday night because of Thanksgiving but hey, let's skate Tuesday night anyway because NEW FLOOR WHO DIS?" And yes, Tuesday is not a weekend day. What's your point?

Anyways, some writing time was lost here and there, and I am slightly behind on my big ambitious Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project upload schedule. But only a little! There is one, count it, (1) short-short story-like object that should have gone out by now that has not. That is an entirely surmountable bit of slippage. I can soak that. It'll go up and be released this Friday along with the other two that ought to be, and everything will be back on track for a December 17 ALL CAUGHT UP celebration. (A private celebration. That takes place in my head.) And there should be an October 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up post next week. JUST YOU WAIT.

What else? Well, tonight I am in Steamboat Springs, doing about the same thing I do with all my days except less roller derby, more writing, and a different subset of the Rocky Mountains out my window. To be entirely specific, I am currently sitting at a table in WildPlum Grocer (and coffee shop, and bar, and liquor store) enjoying the writing-at-a-cafe sensation I have so rarely experienced since March of last year. It's also nice to get out of the hotel room. It's mostly comfy and has a nice view, but my poor feet got sick of dangling. The only table or desk set-up in that place is sort of bar-stool, and I am a short person who can't even reach those tall chairs' support bars. And I needed a slight change of scenery from my change of scenery, I guess.

("What are you going to do in Steamboat?" we get asked. "Enjoying the opening week of skiing?" No, we don't ski. "Then... um... what exactly are you doing?" BEING HERE. Shut up.)

More news of note: Before we left Boulder for this little vacation-like activity, I bought a whole bunch of dried fruit and nuts. FRUITCAKE WILL HAPPEN THIS YEAR. And now you know.

Hello, neglected blog! I haven't posted to you since, what, early November? And we've still got a pandemic on. Even with a vaccine just around the corner, we're gonna be in pandemic mode for a while. So let's talk a little about how this whole pandemic thing has changed winter in Chez LeBoeuf-Little.

The big change is, we don't get to host our annual Winter Solstice All-Night Open House & Yule Log Vigil. Which admittedly isn't the blow felt by, say, Average American Household not getting to hold Extended Family Christmas. But it's still a shame. I like cooking metric tons of seasonal food and then getting surprised by who winds up coming over at three in the morning. I like sharing my eclectic Pagan traditions with my friends and neighbors. I would have enjoyed the heck out of introducing Holland to our guests (although Holland may not have enjoyed it; he can be skittish around new people.) It's a sad thing. But it's a necessary thing. I accept the necessary sad thing.

And it's not like I can't fix myself midwinter pie, tomato-orange soup, and a pitcher of the world's best egg nog ("world's best" because my friend's recipe is amazing, not because I'm particularly good at making egg nog). But there'll be no one but me in the house to consume them (none of the above are to John's taste), so I'll have to make somewhat less than a metric ton.

On that note, there won't be a fruitcake this year. That, too, seemed like a lot of food to make for only myself to eat. Usually about half the cake gets sliced up and mailed to friends and family around the country and a couple outside the country, but again, pandemic. I'm just not sure about the wisdom of producing foodstuffs with my unverified and unprofessional bare hands to be sent out into the world for others to eat at this particular juncture. Maybe I'm overthinking it; there are no known cases of anyone catching the novel coronavirus via food. But wouldn't it suck to be the first? More realistically, shopping for bulk dried fruits and nuts is kind of fraught right now. Whole Foods shut down its bulk food zone and replaced it with an Amazon Prime delivery staging area. Lucky's North reopened their bulk aisle, and they made gloves and hand sanitizer available to shoppers in that aisle, and no one uses them but me. Possibly an exaggeration, but after the third time cheerfully chirping at a random fellow customer, "Oh, they want us to use gloves! They're over there," I get this strong impression.

So. No fruitcake. No party. But hey, no superspreader behavior, either, so ultimately it's a win.

One nice change was that John was able to come with me to Avon this year. Usually he can't; it would mean time off from work, and generally he's used up most of his vacation time with gaming conventions by now. But this year 1. no gaming conventions, and 2. he's working from home every day. So there was no reason he couldn't work out of our room at the Sheraton Mountain Vista.

So we went. We bundled ourselves into the moving bubble that is our Chevrolet Volt, we wore our masks and used hand sanitizer on our way to check into the hotel, we used sanitizer wipes to extra-special sterilize the luggage cart that hotel staff had probably already sterilized, and we brought enough food from home that we didn't need to visit the grocery but once late in the week. And then we proceeded to work and play more or less like we do at home, in isolation but with a different selection of scenic views.

It was great. We cooked each other meals and also explored our take-out and delivery options. We watched some good TV. We read some good books. I skated around Lake Nottingham a few times because the weather was amazing. Meanwhile, Avedan sent us pictures of Holland being adorable for her. (Avedan apparently does not count as new people. Holland was comfortable enough around her to entertain himself by giving her sass with both barrels. He was glad to see us when we got home, but I suspect he did not miss us.)

"But Niki," I hear you say, "this is the actually writing blog. After a hiatus of more than a month, aren't you going to blog about the actually writing?" Yes! I shall. Writing has been Actually Happening. It's glorious. But about that, more tomorrow. This post is long enough already!

As promised, the Friday Fictionette for February 7 went out today. For once it's just a fun bit of fluff, "How the Royal Stablemaster Won the War." The TL;DR summary is "A plan requiring a horse is doomed to failure if it does not take into account that a horse is a living being with needs, a will, and a mind of its own." The Douglas Adams quote concerning the inevitability of forming opinions about the person who sits on your back all-day-every-day makes an appearance. Here's your links to the Patron-locked ebooks and audiobook. I don't think the links are reversed anymore, but if the one takes you to the other, then the other will surely take you to the one.

So that's what I did this morning. Then this afternoon I darn near finished the entire text of tomorrow's release--another fun bit of fluff, which is probably why it came together so quickly--thus increasing the probability that it gets posted on time and I reach Happily Ever After that much sooner. On the other hand, my husband decided to take tomorrow off (it's his birthday!), and he proposed we use that time to finally watch Steven Universe Future together. So that brought the probability of a February 14 release back down again. I believe that makes a zero net movement of probability.

But about that afternoon fictionette work: I decided to bring it to downtown Brighton. I was going to be in Brighton for scrimmage tonight anyway, and City Hall has a convenient charging station I like to plug the Chevy Volt into, and also there's this library. And I got that work done at the library. And that is a minor miracle.

See, me and the library in Brighton have had a rocky relationship. It is a beautiful space with fantastic resources and very helpful staff! It is also completely devoid of that stereotypical "Sshh!" library culture. To some, that probably sounds refreshing. No stern-faced librarians shushing you unreasonably! But what it actually means in practice is kids of all ages yelling at the top of their lungs and running around. It means adults holding shouted conversations across the stacks. It means there is no reliable quiet zone anywhere in that sunny and well-appointed space. I suppose the community doesn't particularly want one. That's their right and their choice, but it's utterly alien to me.

Also I have had some really strange encounters there. Once, the staff member helping me out had to apologetically interrupt our session for the four police officers who'd quietly materialized around us. That was startling. Some ninety seconds earlier, there was this kid, I don't know what he was up to, but it was probably less than 100% above-board because the staff member told him No, Wait, Stop, and he ignored her until she damn near body-blocked him. I have no idea whether the two incidents were related. I have no reason to assume they were.

I don't know. I just find the whole place very weird. But it's so beautiful! So I keep going back! And having very unsettling encounters. And feeling this unreasonable sense of betrayal because IT'S A LIBRARY I SHOULD BE ABLE TO GET WORK DONE IN A LIBRARY WHY CAN'T I GET WORK DONE IN THIS LIBRARY?!

But last week it finally occurred to me that I could use a study room. They have three of them lined up on the sunny side of the building. All I needed to do was get a library card, and then a study room could be mine for a whole two hours. I could go in and close the door and make all the noise go away. Or, well, not so much go away as get distant. That's enough to make it something I can tune out, which is amazing, because I am not good at tuning stuff out. Some glitch in my brain is convinced that any words spoken within my hearing range are addressed to me and I need to pay attention. But I went in there and closed the door and all the shouting voices sounded far enough away that my brain accepted that they were not my problem. Even when the study room next door was being used today to watch a movie, the noise was muffled enough that just turning on my own music drowned it out.

Which hasn't ended the unsettling encounters, you understand. Some guy stood and stared at me through the study room door for an uncomfortably long time. I'm not sure why. (I have a few guesses.) But that door was closed, so once I turned to get him out of my peripheral vision, I didn't have to care. There was writing to do, and by golly, I did it.

So now I can get work done at the library in Brighton, and everything is right with the world. The End.

Guess where I'm blogging from!? I'm blogging from the train! In COACH! ...Apparently trains get more civilized east of the Mississippi. Or maybe there's just fewer dead zones so that it seems worth getting a hotspot up and running. In any case, I'm on the Cardinal, having boarded at its originating station in Chicago and staying right on to its last stop of New York City. And there is wifi.

I'm heading to Montreal for Scintillation 2019. Everything sounds like a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to author readings, outings for dim sum and tea tastings, walking tours of various bits of town, tabletop games, and of course all sorts of panels. But I have to get there first.

It has been an adventure. I knew it would be an adventure going into this. I bought the fare reassuring the ticketing agent on the phone, "Yes, I know. Three nights on board. That's fine. I like trains." And I do! But, let me tell you, I have never been more glad of an impending twelve hour overnight layover than I am now.

My layover between Denver and Chicago was only to be three hours, which felt uncomfortably lean. Look, you take the California Zephyr with any regularity, you know there's a lot of potential for mishap and slowdowns between San Francisco and Chicago. And indeed the train was two hours late into Chicago, just late enough to keep me from relaxing. I spent the hour between trains walking one big and slow clockwise circle from track 26, around the track area, into the main terminal, over to gate C, into the line for boarding (pause for half an hour because boarding started late), then shuffling slowly in that line from gate C over to track 28. You will notice the proximity of 26 to 28, yes? Well. When my shuffling, shambling queue came alongside Train 50, I couldn't help but notice that proximity, either. Physically, mechanically, I could have stepped off Train 6, crossed the platform, and boarded Train 50 in under 5 minutes. Unfortunately, Amtrak connections don't work like that unless you're so desperately super-late that they're actually holding up the departure of the train just for you. And thankfully things weren't that desperate.

So, OK, I got my steps in for the day, as the kids with the FitBits do say.

Those two hours of late, by the way? There was this one half hour in there that was absolutely fascinating. Apparently Amtrak had left a car to be repaired somewhere east of, oh, Osceola, Iowa? Maybe? And it had been repaired. So our crew was tasked with picking it up and dragging it into Chicago. Like, "Oh, hey, while you're out, could you pick up some milk and a dozen eggs?" Only instead of groceries it was an Amtrak passenger car. So I was that passenger, the one who runs off to the back of the last coach to watch the goings-on over the engineers' shoulders. I was on my best behavior, though! I kept my mouth shut and did not bother them with questions. Some of the crew got out to manually throw (or shove) the switches that directly and visibly switched the lie of the tracks so that we could back onto the spur where the car for pick up was. The engineer on board kept saying into the walkie talkie, "Give me three more cars. Give me about a car and a half more. Twenty feet, nice and easy." And thus we backed, ever so gently, right into the orphaned car. Then they did a bunch of stuff I couldn't see to attach the car, then we waited a while, and then we went on our way, one car longer.

Anyway. Train 50, the Cardinal, has a single-decker coach with modern, comfy seats and, by Amtrak standards, very little leg-room. For comparison, in the upper level of the double-decker coach on the California Zephyr, I'd had so much room for my short little legs that I couldn't reach the footrest attached to the seat-back in front of me. The fold-down desk was just useable if I extended my seat's leg rest and sat on that rather than on the seat itself. Not complaining! It was spacious. It was comfy. Just, it was a bit of a surprise to be get on the Cardinal and be reminded of an airplane. First class in an airplane, maybe, but still.

And this worried me because I was going to be in that coach car for twenty-eight hours. (Twenty-eight! Haha ahaha ha. But see below.) Fortunately, I didn't have a next-seat neighbor until sometime past noon the next day, so I was able to curl up on my pair of seats and sleep cozily enough, at least until my knees started complaining about having been too long in a bent position. (Aging! I'm telling you.)

Did I write? Why yes I wrote. I have been writing. I have been doing all the writing every day on every train. I did some freewriting that turned into a flash fiction piece that has muscled its way onto the revision workbench despite said workbench already being occupied. I made some progress on the latest overdue Friday Fictionette. Also I battled 4thewords monsters and submitted a manuscript because, as stated above, there is wifi on this train, so I could do those things.

OK, well, much of West Virginia was dead zone. But then much of West Virginia was too beautiful for gluing eyes to the laptop screen anyway, so.

But here's the thing: Throughout today, this train has been getting more and more behind schedule. It had picked up a forty-five minute delay overnight, and this steadily increased to an hour and a half by the time we got to Charlottesville. Then we hit Washington D.C., where I gawked out the window at the Iconic Architectural Features of America's Capitol, like you do. (I saw the Washington Monument and I think I saw the back end of the White House. It was hard to be sure. It was dark out, and the big double rectangle between me and the recognizable dome could have been just a bigger version of any random IT office back in east Boulder.) And we came to the station, and we stopped, and we stayed there a long, long time.

They had to change off the diesel engine for electric, to start. That was planned. Then they had to do something arcane with the brakes, which was not planned. Then the other passengers in coach started shouting at the Amtrak crew like spoiled children, and I upped stakes and departed for the lounge car where it was quiet.

And then. And then and then and then. Just before the stop in Wilmington, Delaware, there is drama. There is a man who has been in the bathroom a long, long time and is not responding to the crew. I mean, he's not in medical distress, as far as they can tell, but he refuses to come out. And other passengers indicate that earlier conversations with said gentleman made them think he might be doing drugs in there. OR SOMETHING. And the coach attendant is all, "That's going to slow us down some more, because we're going to have to call the police to deal with him." Cue the shouting and the wails of despair and "Please, Lord, just let us reach Philadelphia!" I'd just returned to my seat toward the front of coach. I turned right around and parked myself in the last seat in coach, as far from the shouting and wailing as I could get. Because I've got a sleepless night in NYC ahead of me, and I need a nap.

The stop at Wilmington wasn't actually all that long. As we pulled away, I saw the aforementioned gentleman being questioned on the platform by three police officers. I suppose extracting him didn't turn out to be all that difficult.

So. I'm going to be at least two and a half hours late into New York Penn Station. Which is fine. Once I get there, I have until around 8:00 AM to board my next train. My only regret is, we're going to get in after all the groceries close, and I had wanted to pick up a few things. Well. One of them opens again at 5:00 AM, so maybe I'll get to do my shopping after all.

Meanwhile, you know what's open all night long in New York City? This Korean BBQ place. So it doesn't matter how late I get in, I'm still getting my order of kimchi kalguksu or maybe galbitang or, I dunno, something delicious. Also I have not counted the number of karaoke bars in the neighborhood but a glance at Google Maps tells me that number is upward of A LOT. So it'll be fine.

But I should probably take that nap now.

Hello. I have just driven through a lot of Kansas. This weekend is the War of Wheels tournament in Salina, and I'm here to cheer on the Boulder County Bombers Screaming Mimis as they compete. It's going to be a lot of fun and very exciting and I am looking forward to it but what I'm really looking forward to right now is a good night's sleep because, woo, driving through a lot of Kansas.

Currently I'm at the Ambassador Hotel and Convention Center, and it's... weird. Which I supposed I should have expected. I know better than to take the cheapest hotel Google finds me. I mean, I've seen what happens when teammates do that. They come up to you at the afterparty asking wistfully, "Does your hotel have towels? Clean ones?" But in this case, the very cheap price was tacked onto a convention center. They host conventions! How bad can they be? Also, free breakfast.

And, well, they're not sketch. They're just weird. OK, from the outside they look sketch. To start with, the signage is difficult to make out--I went up and down the block a few times before I spotted it; Google unhelpfully told me "turn left (after the Subway restaurants)" and, well, that describes the driveways of about four hotels as well as an ice cream shop (Braum's) and something that looks like a rebranded Steak & Shake (Spangles!). All I could see was a big red A on black sign presiding over a seriously depopulated parking lot in front of an extinct Irish pub. But inside, it's this huge, cavernous space, four or five levels of balconies jutting out over what's unmistakably a hotel and convention center lobby, with lots of brass banisters and foliage-topped half-walls partitioning out the wide carpeted areas containing tables and chairs and, incongruously, random toy dispensers. You know, you put in a quarter and you get out a little plastic egg with a trinket inside? Yeah. And those toy dispensers make more light than the actual interior lighting of the space, which is super dim. I mean, I described it as "cavernous" advisedly. It's like a town carved into the walls of a great big cave. Also it kind of reminds me of the Christie Lodge in Avon, that one time I stayed there, only, like I said, not as well lit, and instead of pho there's BBQ.

And the place is simply deserted, undoubtedly because there are no conventions going on at the moment (unless you count the "Welcome Baptist Church!" signs visible through the windows near the locked and unlit convention center entrance; maybe it's a convention every Sunday morning) and also because the roller derby tournament hosts reserved their special rate block with the Quality Inn on the other side of the highway. I've run into a total of... three other guests, I think. Hardly anyone seems to be staying here right now. This underground cliff-dwelling is a ghost town. Or, at least, so it seems tonight. Maybe I'll get a better sense of the hotel's current population when I go over for the complimentary breakfast in the morning.

My room is pretty basic. It has the usual assortment of hotel furniture. There is a bathtub, which puts it ahead of some hotel rooms I've stayed in. Honestly, I can't complain.

But back to the actually writing, about which, this blog.

This week has been rough in terms of productivity. I managed about half of a late-starting Monday before getting pleasantly distracted by John's playing Dicey Dungeons. (That's an excellent fun time, by the way. Totally worth whatever Steam is charging for it. I may end up buying it myself.) Then neither of us managed much sleep (and not for lack of trying), so my Tuesday turned into pretty much nothing but recovering from that sleepless night in time to be functional at derby practice. I missed my daily submissions procedures and everything.

Then Wednesday I opened up my mail and found responses to five different submissions.

That's a lot. I've just gotten used to the idea that, with my one-sub-each-workday challenge, I may well have a rejection to log more days than not. OK. Fine. But five? Five submission responses? Accumulated only over 48 hours? That's... well, that's something that only happens when you have a lot of manuscripts out on submission at once. Which isn't something I've ever had before this year.

Here's the thing. Only two of those five responses were rejections.

One of the remaining three was from the Denver Horror Collective, which just reprinted "First Breath", to square away payment details with me. The contract said X amount within Y days of publication, and, hot damn, that's exactly what happened. That's always nice. Well, I say "always," but it's not like I get to deal with the post-acceptance part of the submission process often enough for "always" to mean a lot. This was only my second sale of 2019.

The other two? Were my fourth and fifth sales of 2019. Which is to say: ACCEPTANCE LETTERS. Yay!

I may have yelped and run out into the living room shouting, "It's a two-acceptance day! Eeeeee!" And then I may have tackle-hugged my husband. If so, he took it in stride.

One of those acceptance letters was for an old poem ("Your Disembodied Friends Would Like to Remind You") that I pulled out of the archives for a serious overhaul in order to submit it to a brand new horror quarterly. The other was for a previously published story ("Lambing Season") I'd submitted for reprint to an established podcast. Both should go live later this year. As usual, that's about all I can say until things develop further. In the meantime, please enjoy imagining me doing the happy dance. Any kind of happy dance. What kind of happy dance would you do? That one will be fine.

(If you are wondering, "Fourth and fifth? What happened to the third publication?" the answer is, "Didn't I mention that I sold a poem a couple weeks ago? I sold a poem called 'At Night, the Dead' a couple weeks ago. It'll be out later this year." Again, more details later.)

So my week may have slid into a rough patch, but Wednesday's inbox goodies really perked it right up! ...just in time for it to get all chaotic again what with the solo road trip and the roller derby tournament.

Yay!

I got a rejection letter today! That makes four of the one hundred I want to acquire in 2019, and the first in response to the avalanche of daily manuscript submissions I began sending out mid-April. It's working, it's working!

Meanwhile, Hi. I'm in a hotel room in Eagle, Colorado. Tomorrow I skate with the Boulder County Bombers "All Stars" in the Melee in the Mountains tournament. Our first game, against the Chicago Outfit, will be at noon. And I am super tired and ready for bed.

It doesn't help that I just walked down to the Park 'n Ride to retrieve my car from where I left it charging at the free public charging station, only to discover when I got there that I'd left my car keys in the hotel room. So I decided the car can just stay there until tomorrow morning. I'm not unhappy that I went for the extra walk, though. Walks are nice.

But now I'm really tired. Therefore the rest of today's writing update will be super fast and super brief.

Ahem.

• Still way behind on the Friday Fictionettes, but I got a decent nibble in just now on the one for April 19.
• I kept up my daily submitting streak. Over lunch, I sent "First Breath," with its Colorado ski-town setting, to a Denver-centric anthology that might reprint it.
• Over meatloaf at the Eagle Diner, I managed a brief talk-to-myself session on the current short story revision.
• Also at the diner, I did some similarly brief freewriting, resulting in what looks like a solid "zero draft" for a brand new short story.

To be painfully honest, I have to admit to overestimating my submission streak the other day. At the time, Habitica reported a 9-day streak on that particular daily task, but it's very generous in preserving my streak so long as I use my Rogue powers of stealth to avoid damage from uncompleted dailies. Looking at the Submission Grinder, I see that today's submission brings me up to seven days of daily manuscript submissions, one each weekday from April 18-26 inclusive. Also I did one April 16. So it's not like the ongoing achievement loses any impressiveness after the correction. I'm still pretty damn pleased.

So. Today I did a Boulder Food Rescue shift, packed for a weekend trip, and drove three hours from Boulder to Eagle, and I still managed to do all my weekday writing things. That's pretty darn cool. Here's hoping I can do the same Monday despite Saturday's tournament, Sunday's drive home, and Monday's much-needed recovery activities.

The train station in Raton, New Mexico is little more than a tiny waiting room cared for by dedicated WWII veterans who really, really, really want to help you with your luggage. (Honestly, the gentleman offering to take my suitcase looked like he could easily fit in it, at which point I could then bench press the whole ensemble.) However, there is this little gift shop across the street ("The Rat Pack"?) where the staff will happily stow your bags in the back room so you can enjoy beautiful downtown Raton while waiting for your train. I have, accordingly, been enjoying this comfy, friendly cafe and its delicious lunch fare.

Outside, the weather has cycled from sunny to light flurries of snow to sunny again. I hear there will be eight to ten inches of snow tonight, but by then I'll be well on my way to Chicago and my connection with Train 59, the southbound City of New Orleans. And the weather in New Orleans for the next few days is forecast to be perfect skating and biking weather. Also great weather for parade-watching.

What with the actually writing blog still being down (didn't find time this past week to poke at it, unfortunately), I've been turning the Monday Muse into something of a blog substitute. So this week's Monday Muse contains, in addition to the writing prompt associated with March 22nd's Friday Fictionette, the story of why I'm in Raton and not, as originally planned, in Denver Union Station waiting for the arrival of the eastbound California Zephyr. The tl;dr version is "blame climate change."

And that's about all I've got to report today.

I thought Amtrak only offered mobile hotspots in the sleeper cars, but it turns out that the City of New Orleans typically sets one up behind the snack bar, too. So I spent most of my ride from New Orleans to Chicago ensconced at a cafe table. Working? Nooooo. When I get unexpected internet access, I use it to procrastinate. I caught up on a lot of my online reading, is basically what I did. Then I realized it was almost ten o'clock and if I was going to have a 100% day I'd better do it before today turned into tomorrow.

Thus, the NaNoWriMo Rebel Report for November 14:

Morning Pages: ...are a lot harder to do on a train that's rocketing north from Champaign toward Chicago, then they are on a train that's stopped on the tracks west of Ottumwa. Can't complain; we got to the station right on time, or as near as makes no difference. But it's a good thing I don't rely on being able to reread my Morning Pages later. And my handwriting kind of sucks at the best of times. Anyway, they got done.

Freewriting: Yesterday's got done in the wee hours. I had just read a lot of microfiction involving the intersection of "demon" and "cute & sentimental" (for example) (see also), so I decided my writing prompt would be "Write about a demon pony." The demon pony's name was Midnight, and he had a tendency to burn things with his drool.

As for today's, that'll be my first task once I've boarded the California Zephyr in a few hours.

Friday Fictionettes: Ditto on all counts: Yesterday's was very late, and today's will happen on the train. After several days of nibbling at the story, I hope to finish the draft today. It shouldn't be too hard; all the narrative beats are more or less determined. But there will probably be surprises in the details that show up when I fill in the outline.

Short Story Revisions: See above. This one I'm feeling kind of stuck about. I'm hitting that point in story development where I have to make choices about what happens and how and why, and I don't want to decide. I like all the possibilities. I'm considering taking advantage of the fact that this is a Weird Multiple Timeline Story to have all the cake and eat it too. I mean, why not make "it happened this way, but it also happened that way" a plot point?

Anyway. I hope to spend enough time on it this afternoon that I can resolve some of these quandaries and start producing something other than babble-notes. It's likely. Last couple times I rode the California Zephyr, there were no mobile hotspots, not even in the sleeper cars, so there oughtn't to be internet to distract me. However, there's always Merge Dragons. BUT I WILL BE STRONG.

Submission Procedures: I have a bit of time after I post this but before I get on the train to send some manuscript somewhere. So I will.

Blogging: As you see.

I was disappointed in my choice of work environments inside Chicago Union Station. It was too early for the bar to be open, and there was no place in the food court with access to a plug. That was a deliberate choice on the part of station administration; there are outlets, but they've all got panels closing them off. Well then, so. I'm currently propping up a table in the Corner Bakery Cafe that's just outside Chicago Union Station, at the Jackson Street entrance. I had their Anaheim panini, despite being disappointed that no Anaheim peppers were involved in its making. Maybe I shouldn't find that disappointing. I mean, the town of Anaheim CA is about more than just delicious roasted peppers. But as far as I can tell, the only thing differentiating the sandwich's eggy filling from, say, a Denver omelette, was the inclusion of avocado. Is avocado necessarily an Anaheim thing? For that matter, who decided that ham, cheese, onions, and green bell pepper is a Denver thing? These claims seem tenuous at best.

(Diner chain Gunther Toody's attempts to answer the Denver omelette question. Tl;dr: They don't know, either, but they have a few guesses that might interest you.)

(Did you know Gunther Toody's had a blog? I had not known that. I guess if Dot's Diner can have a blog, so can Gunther Toody's. Did you know Dot's Diner had a blog?)