author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

First things first. Today is a first Friday; you get a Fictionette. "In the Shadow of Next Tuesday" is its title. It's kind of fun and silly, and it's also kind of bittersweet. And I totally want to pet the stilt-o-dile.

In other Fictionette news, the Fictionette Freebie for October 2015 turned out to be "How the Lassie Didn't Go East of the Sun and West of the Moon". Turned out--I say that like it just happened, all on its ownsome, like I didn't have a vote. OK. I decided to go with the Friday Fictionette for October 2. In any case, the complete text is now available to one and all as a slick little PDF you can print or just load up in your favorite reader, and as a bite-sized MP3 of me reading the fictionette to you as a bedtime story or during rush hour traffic.

So that's your Fictionette news. Now, about that National Novel Writing Month...

So last year I abstained for the first time in more than a decade. I'd just retired from precisely a decade of being Boulder's NaNoWriMo Municipal Liaison, and I had a short story revision I was excited to work on, and, well, "because it would be a shame to break my twelve-year streak" seemed insufficient reason to stress myself out. So I took last year off. Well, this year I finally got that short story revision done, and I decided I'd do NaNoWriMo to celebrate that. Yay, a whole month of nothing but glorious fun wild delirious discovery draft! A whole month during which two hours of each writing day may be spent exploring a brand new story and holding myself to absolutely no standards of quality!

Well, today's Day 6 and I haven't logged a single word yet.

Drat.

It's OK, though! I had already planned on... let's see, 50K divided by 16 workdays in November... I'd already planned on writing 3,125 words per session; I just have to work some of those sessions on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. Which is fine. I'll be meeting an old NaNoWriMo friend (who is also now a roller derby friend--the Venn diagram overlap of my writing circle and my derby circle is of surprisingly significant size) for a late lunch and writing date tomorrow, so even if I get nothing logged tonight I'll be off to a great start this weekend.

It will all be just fine.

Despite an original cunning plan to spend the last days of October in productive plot-brainstorming mode, I never quite figured out what I was going to write. Then on November 1 my freewriting session resulted in a sort of cross between Ursula K. LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven (dreams that rewrite the world) and the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life" (if you don't keep the godlet happy, he'll send you to the cornfield). I am mildly concerned that this idea will last me for roughly 5,000 words before dumping me in the proverbial cornfield. But that's the risk one takes. If I have to describe the protagonist's breakfast like it was Dónal and Mórag's wedding feast, then I will do that. That is, after all, how NaNoWriMo goes. Like the founder of the annual shindig says, No Plot? No Problem!