author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

At least one post per week: Check. I have not been uniformly On The Ball since last post, but this much I can do.

This week's post will be my "what I had published last year" roundup. It will be fairly short, because 2022 was not a great year for writing new things or submitting regularly. But there were some things published:

New poetry: "On the Limitations of Photographic Evidence in Fairyland," Eternal Haunted Summer, Summer Solstice 2022 (theme: Other-Than-Human Realms).

In fairy folklore, there's a story that turns up now and again involving a human who gets invited into Fairyland to perform some necessary function, and has to have magic ointment applied to their eyes in order that they might see true while they're there. Much later, after their return home, a fairy looks them up in their day-to-day and asks them, "Which eye is it you see me out of?" Turns out they did an imperfect job of removing the magic ointment, which means they've got a loose end to tidy up. Can't be having random humans going around able to see fairies clearly! So the human answers, "The left eye," and the fairy says "Cool, thanks," and immediately puts out the human's left eye. As opposed to dunking them in a handy ditch to just, y'know, wash the ointment out. Because fairies are cruel and capricious and, above all, dramatic.

Anyway, I wanted to play with that trope, such that the "eye" that had to be put out was the photographer's camera (the photographer's services having been engaged for an important fairy wedding). The fairy would smash the camera, and maybe even blind the photographer (see above: cruel and capricious), but of course the photographer still has the negatives, which they would pass down to future generations along with the story of the photographer's adventures.

One day I will actually write that poem. Or story. It could be a story. In any case, it wasn't what I wrote in time for this submission deadline. I wrote this other thing instead.

Reprint poem: "Reasonable Accommodations," The Future Fire issue 2022.62

My poor little corporate weredeer first appeared in Departure Mirror Quarterly Issue 2 (Winter 2021). You can still download that issue, but you'll have to do it from the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine," because the publication sadly had to close its doors before Issue 4 came out. In which issue, incidentally, another poem of mine they'd solicited had been set to appear. Alas. That poem remains unpublished, and not for want of my sending it out. Maybe 2023 will be its year.

Reprint story: "Survival, After," Apex Magazine 2021 (or via Weightless Books)

Originally published and podcast by Apex Magazine in August 2021, this story was included, along with every other story they published in 2021, in the magazine's yearly anthology. I understand it's their biggest table of contents yet! There's lots of amazing stuff in there that quite frankly blows my little tale out of the water, so it's well worth the price. Yes, you could just go read all the stories for free on the website, but the print anthology, in addition to being extremely convenient in providing all the content in one handy codex (no need to click all over the place! Just turn the pages!), is a truly gorgeous artifact. It would look beautiful on your bookshelf or your coffee table.

Reprint story: "First Breath," penumbric speculative fiction mag vol vi issue 4 (December 2k22)

Originally published in Ellen Datlow's vampirism anthology Blood and Other Cravings (Tor Books, September 2011), this is my most reprinted work--less because of its classic staying power, I think, and more because it's the story I keep sending out in hopes of getting it reprinted. But this is its third outing (not counting its debut) so I guess editors like it. (Previous reprintings: Denver Horror Collective and the Tales to Terrify podcast.)

I'm saddened to discover the purchase pages for the original anthology are gone. But I suppose every anthology must go out of print sometime. You can still find copies via that online retailer named for a river in South America, because of course you can, but it's no longer available via Macmillan Publishing or Barnes & Noble that I can see. So instead I've linked the Publisher's Weekly write-up, which actually name-checks me (I was a "newcomer"! I arguably still am) so that's kinda cool.

I suppose that will be one of my 2023 goals: Get "First Breath" reprinted again.

Anyway, that's the 2022 Publications Roundup. As you run off to click the links and check them out, do check out the rest of the relevant issues (or the relevant year, in the case of Apex). There's some great stuff in those tables of contents, written by some enormously skilled wordsmiths, and you need to get your eyeballs on 'em STAT.

Until next week!

Good afternoon! Yesterday's episode of Story Hour went very well. I'm pretty sure I only mispronounced two words, maybe three. I read my short story "Survival, After," which wound up pairing very well with Brian Hugenbruch's heartwarming "An Elicitation of Thursdays" in that both stories just pile on the weirdness paragraph by paragraph until you just give up and say, "OK, fine, jerky is nocturnal and puke can have great handwriting, whatever, everything about this is perfectly normal."

If you missed it, never fear, the recording will live on for as long as Facebook endures, and you don't need a login to watch it.

So. Thing the really Second. Referring to two Things of great potential stress I had accomplished on a day in late March. One of them was getting my laptop ready to ship for repairs. The other thing was this:

I had finally decided it was time I stepped away from my volunteer gig with the Audio Information Network of Colorado.

I had been reading for them since... oh, I forget. A good few years before they changed their name from Radio Reading Service of the Rockies to what it is now. A few years yet before I quit my day job with Wall Street On Demand. So... 2002? 2003? A good long while, in any case. Long enough that, as much as I still believed in and supported their mission, the only reason I was still doing it was because I had been doing it so long. Twenty-years-ago-me had decided to do it, and present-day-me hadn't really reevaluated that decision.

It was time to move on. With fondness and some regret, I emailed my resignation... and gave some thought to where present-day-me might like to spend those eight-to-ten hours a week.

First off, the easy answer: More writing! I'm not going to tell anyone else that they should write every day, but, notwithstanding my recent rant about YES WRITERS GET WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS OFF DAMMIT, it turns out I really shouldn't. If I don't write every day, it messes me up. I lose my rhythm. If I take the weekend off, I tend to lose Monday too, just trying to get back into the swing of things, and then Thursday comes too soon--so much for a productive week!

So maybe I don't want to take Fridays and Sundays off. Maybe I can use those newly freed-up morning hours for at least an abbreviated version of my Morning Shift.

And. Well. Have I? Um. Sometimes. New habits are hard, y'all. But more often than not, yes, yes I have, and it's a good thing.

Secondly, there's something else I've been meaning to do for a very long time. Something else at the crossroads of "volunteer" and "read aloud." And that something is LibreVox.

Turns out, I like reading aloud, but I want to focus on narrating fiction, both for my own enjoyment and to strengthen my resume in this regard. So about ten years ago, I formed the intention of volunteering for LibreVox. I even made a post on their forum introducing myself and everything. And then, what with one thing and another, the years went by. I never even recorded a one-minute test file, which is the very first step volunteers are supposed to take.

So I guess now I stand a better chance of finding time to do that. Good luck me!

Next time: Hell, I don't know. Probably some whining about how writing new poetry is hard. Because it is. Stay tuned.

Today is the happy day! My story, "Survival, After", is now live on the website of Apex Magazine. The issue it's in debuted some weeks ago for subscribers to read in its entirety, but today my story became available for all and sundry, subscriber or not. You can read it here.

You can also listen to it at that link, too! Or via the page for Apex Podcast Episode #80. I'm thrilled beyond words not only for KT Bryski's brilliant production of the episode, but also for her giving me the opportunity to read the story. This is my first time doing fiction narration outside of my own Friday Fictionette Project--reading fiction on someone else's podcast, how about that?!--and I'm so grateful to be given the chance.

In other writing news, my most-reprinted story and first professional sale, "First Breath," will be reprinted again! But not for a little while yet. I've signed the contract, but the magazine has a lead time of a good handful of episodes. I'll give you more details as we get closer to release date.

And in writing process news.... this week is weird. Last week was weirder. The week before last sucked. Over the years, I have constructed this huge, detail-oriented edifice of rituals and routines in the service of Getting The Work Done, and it has, for the most part, worked--but sometimes, depending on how much avoidance and/or executive dysfunction I'm suffering, that edifice turns into a barrier. Like, "Oh, shit, it's almost 10 AM. I should be writing. But I'm going to have to do nothing BUT write, no distractions, for twenty-five minutes at a time, which sounds like an AWFUL act of penance. And also I need to set up my timesheet, and also before I can get to the Overdue Thing I have to do the Daily Things That Come First, with all the rest of the rigmarole and hoops to jump through, and--hey, how about I just play this stupid clicky game for another half hour? And another half hour after that..." And that's how the whole day goes, for days at a time. And that's what week before last was like.

Don't get me wrong--like I said, the edifice of routine and ritual usually works. It's structure, and I need structure. Without structure, my day tends to float away from me. But sometimes structure is itself the thing that avoidance accretes to, like barnacles on a sunken ship's hull. And when that happens, I can do one of two things: I can try to muscle through somehow, or I can say "to hell with timesheets! To hell with the daily order of operations!" and just, y'know, open the file of the Overdue Thing and start doing it, self-discipline optional.

So my timesheet is still on timeout. The order of operations has returned, sort of, but it's an informal checklist rather than a clock-scheduled list of tasks. And I'm allowed to just drift between the task at hand and the stupid clicky game if I want. Look, when some of the avoidance arises, stupid as it sounds, from "oh, no, getting started on the next writing task means putting away the mindless clicky game for twenty-five whole minutes," it's amazing how much of that avoidance simply evaporates if I give myself permission to keep messing with the mindless clicky game while doing the writing task. Write a few sentences, click a few things, write a few sentences more. Like that.

Like as not, the way it turns out, once I start the writing task, the writing accrues sufficient momentum of its own to make me totally forget about the mindless clicky game after all.

Brains! How do they even brain?! I dun geddit, y'all. But whatever. We work with what we've got, or we don't work at all. And the work has to get done somehow. So here we are.

And now it's time for another bowl of the crock-pot posole that's been happily simmering away since noon, and that has been on my mind ever since tonight's roller derby practice started. I tell you what, you want that happy warm emotional hug of "Somebody loves me!" when you walk in the door after a long and tiring day, you want to get yourself a crock-pot and a recipe for something long-simmering and hearty. It's a really lovely feeling.

Hello, the blog! Have I got some news for you! Today is July 6, and July 6 is release day for Apex Magazine #124. Check out that gorgeous cover art. Check out those contributor names! (How did I end up in such astounding company?)

So the way Apex does it is, the whole issue is available for purchase and to subscribers now. But if you wait long enough, the whole issue will be free on the website. My story, "Survival, After", will be released on August 3. Meanwhile, the first story that's been released on the website is "Eilam Is Forever" by Beth Dawkins. It is, in part, a story about things going spectacularly wrong on a generation ship. It's also, very poignantly, a story about loneliness. You should go read it right now. Go on. This blog post will still be here when you get back.

Excited yet? Need more hype? Author Leah Ning has livetweeted her way through the whole issue, and her mini-reviews are super hype. (I'm so very, very thrilled by what she said about my story! Hearts and flowers and rainbows!)

If after reading that thread you just! can't! wait! for the stories to all trickle their way onto the website, you can buy the issue, subscribe, or become a Patron to get instant access in varying shapes and sizes.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Apex Magazine's Kickstarter, launching on July 19, that will help support their continued existence through 2022 and, hopefully, beyond. Visit that link to be notified when the campaign goes live.

So that's what I've got for you today. Tomorrow I may have a certain amount of whining to do about my extremely inefficient writing process. But today I got nothing to make but happy noises. Hooray!


So, just to remind y'all that the author is a New Orleanian author, lemme tell you what happened this week. So yesterday, OK, the payment for the short story I sold to Apex Magazine arrived via PayPal. Hooray! So today I decided to celebrate the sale, as I had not tangibly celebrated it yet, by splurging on mail-order oysters. In fact, I ordered the gift bundle (it's a gift for me! From me!) on the strength of it including a free shucking knife and gloves, reason being, I don't own any yet and I probably should, and I don't want to make a special trip to--where would I even buy an oyster shucking knife in Boulder, Colorado? A restaurant supply store, I suppose. Or I'd have to mail order it from somewhere and try to get the two separate shipments to coincide. Hell with that. This is easier.

Anyway. Oysters coming mid-March. Forty of 'em. I'm gonna slurp up a dozen on arrival, then chop up the rest for kimchi. (That link there, that's the recipe that got Dad's whole hunting club asking, "Niki's coming home next week, you say? Will she make us kimchi again? Tell her to make it spicier this time.")

All right, yes, I could have been responsible and left the money in my PayPal account against actual household necessities. But it's not like we're relying on my story sales to make household ends meet. (Hoo, girls-n-boys, would we be in trouble if we were!) Besides--a sale to Apex Magazine! The hell to the yes that deserves celebrating!

(Don't worry, it only cost about half the check. I'm sure I can find something responsible to do with the rest.)

So for my next trick, I'd like to see if I can get "Lambing Season" reprinted again. It initially appeared in NAMELESS Magazine #3 in March of 2014. (You can still purchase the issue as an ebook from that link for $3.99. I recommend it; there's a lot of good stuff in there, including a haunting story by my friend and colleague Nicole Cushing.) It's been reprint only once so far, as episode 413 of Tales to Terrify, narrated beautifully by Summer Brooks, on December 19, 2019. (You can listen to it there for free, along with a retrospective of the horror of the two-thousand-teens.)

...And that's probably a good thing. The only having been reprinted once, I mean. Because... Wow there's some problematic bits in the story. Which I completely overlooked when I wrote the story because Hi there, white privilege! Without even having laid eyes or ears on it since the Tales to Terrify outing, I knew I'd need to revise the opening a titch. Here's the second paragraph so you can see what I mean:

I'd so badly needed to escape. Months had passed since I'd last been able to relax. In my mind, I was always on duty, no matter what the clock said. Then my partner went to the hospital on a bullet fired by a twelve-year-old girl, and I started suspecting everyone I met of being armed and dangerous. The chief suggested I take off the uniform and badge for a while before I wound up shooting someone for startling me.

Wow. Just... wow. That sounds like nothing so much as a "Blue Lives Matter" defense of the cop who murdered Tamir Rice. "How was he supposed to know it was only a toy gun? Some of those urban kids out there, those little monsters'd shoot you soon as look at you. You try taking time in one of those neighborhoods to verify if the gun is real, you're dead."

Eeeuuurgh. No. So much no. There is no way I'm submitting that story to be reprinted with that opening. Should be simple enough to fix, though. Instead of a crisis of paranoia, the main character can have a crisis of conscience over her partner having shot a child, and the rest of the department rallying around to defend him, and maybe the protagonist's reluctance to join in the defense is why the chief suggests she take a temporary unpaid leave. Much more believable of a scenario (except for the crisis of conscience part, I fear), and a lot more defensible then what's there now. Because, face it, what's there now is doing white supremacy's work of upholding the narrative of cops who are more wronged than wrong-doing even when they've just fired a bullet into a Black child's body, or knelt on a Black man's neck until he suffocated. As though that had anything to do with justice and keeping the peace. My God. No. I will have no part of even appearing to support those abominations. Not if I can help it. Not any more than I already have, Gods forgive me.

(Virtue signaling? Damn straight I am, and what's wrong with that? The bigots are out there signaling to each other all the time with their dog-whistles and bullhorns everywhere from the corner store to the Capitol. The rest of us are gonna damn well "signal" that we stand four-square against that shit. Got it? Good.)

Except it's not going to be as simple as fixing the opening, turns out.

The manuscript was still in one long LibreOffice RTF, so the first thing I did tonight was pull the manuscript into a Scrivener project and break it up into scenes. There were hard-coded tab-indents, too, so I had to remove those by hand because Scrivener for Windows still doesn't have find-and-replace for special characters. So that required traveling paragraph by paragraph through the whole story. Which meant I was lightly skimming the text as I went along. Which resulted in my realizing the racism kinda permeates the whole story.

I'm not going to get into the details at this time. It's not that I'm worried about spoiling the story for you; you can go read or listen to it right now if you haven't already. No, it's that I know, with a sinking, that I have yet to uncover all the details. Right now I just have a general impression of the dehumanization of non-white people in this story. And you could argue that it's not just the shepherds but all the townspeople too who are under Maud Shempf's sway, they're all going to wind up fleeced and turned into mutton eventually. But the predominately (implied) white townspeople get to act like human beings, even so, while the predominately (heavily implied) black and brown shepherds get to have "dead shark stares" while they menace the protagonist (including with a gun!). And yeah, that could stand as a metaphor for the way systems of authority regularly dehumanize non-white people--but that's not how it looks on the page at this time. At this time, it looks hella racist, and it makes me cringe.

So I'll be taking my time the rest of this week going over the story with a fine-toothed comb, trying my damnedest to blunt its capacity to do harm. It may take more than a week, in which case I'll put it aside temporarily, because the next story in the revision queue has a deadline. But then I'll come back to it, because this is job that needs to be done right more than it needs to be done in a hurry.

Whew. I warned y'all a while back this blog was gonna get political from time to time. Because the alternative is to be silently oblivious, and all that does is prop up the status quo. And the status quo has really gotta go.

If I'm being honest, my initial impulse is to announce these things in a manner something like this:

WHEEEEEEEE TWO ACCEPTANCES IN ONE WEEKEND and OMG I SOLD A STORY TO AN ABSOLUTE DREAM MARKET AAAAAAAAAA!!!!! I'M GONNA FAINT--

but that seems unprofessional. All the authors I admire tend instead to calmly and professionally post matter-of-fact announcements about where you can find their writing and/or hear them read their writing. So I'm going to try to be a professional about this.

*deep breath*

"Apotheosis" (poem) to be reprinted in The Future Fire - "Apotheosis" was originally published in the Summer Solstice 2019 issue of Eternal Haunted Summer. It was the first poem I wrote, and the first poem I published, after a poem drought of about twenty-five years. (I really don't know why I spent so much time not poeming. It seems rather silly of me in hindsight.) It will now be the first of my poems to be reprinted.

When will it be out? Current rough estimate is April. Emphasis on "rough." Might have a firmer estimate in a week or so. Stay tuned!

"Survival, After" (short story) to be published in Apex Magazine - This is where I start hyperventilating. Apex! Effing! Magazine! *wheeze* After I got the acceptance letter, I spent the rest of the evening emitting screams and other strange noises at random intervals, startling the bunny and making myself hoarse. It's a good thing John wasn't home at the time. I was insufferable.

And this story! I love this weird little story with all of my heart. To have it finally find a home--and for that home to be Apex! Effing! Magazine!

It began as a 750-word entry in a Codex contest, where it fared relatively well. (Codex contests are the source of a not insignificant portion of my published works. Codex is made of awesome.) Then it sat around in the "I really should revise this" pile until Shimmer Magazine announced its imminent closure and kicked me in the butt. But of course my time management is on point (that was sarcasm) and so I barely touched it until deadline day, when I pulled a five-hour forced march of panic and despair to create and at last submit the new 3,500-word draft. As history shows, it did not get accepted on that outing. The editor, who'd once sent me a revise-and-resubmit request which did not ultimately result in a publication (hey, it happens), sent me the kindest and most wistful of personal rejections, regretting that we would not get to work together on a Shimmer story after all. I regretted that too. But hey, now I had a new story ready to be submitted to all the other places!

I submitted it to twelve of the other places over the following ten to twelve months. And then I submitted it to Apex. And here we are.

This, too, I do not yet have a firm date for. I'm told it'll likely be in Issue 124, maybe 123. That's just an early estimate, though. As scheduling firms up, I'll let you know.

I will be featured in an upcoming episode of The Story Hour - One of many examples of how the pandemic is why we can have nice things, The Story Hour began as a way to pierce our shut-in, isolated bubbles with live story-sharing. They put out a call on Twitter recently for published authors who might want to participate, and, as it happens, I've had some things published recently that I'd quite enjoy reading to a live audience. So I volunteered.

Of course I had to go and choose two stories which both make me cry at the end. I knew that already, but then I did a practice read-through in order to get a concrete idea of how much time each of them takes to read, and I found out it's worse than I thought. Well. I'm just going to have to practice a lot until I get better at holding it in, or until I've read these stories enough times to have worn out the effect.

The Story Hour airs live on Facebook and Zoom every Wednesday evening at 7:00 PM PST (so 8:00 PM here in Boulder, Colorado), and if you miss an episode live you can listen to its recording via Facebook. This one I have a date for! Unless something changes, I'll be reading on May 5, 2021. It's a ways out, but I'll remind you as we get closer.

And that is my first Upcoming Author Appearances and Publications post of 2021! Ta-da!

So remember when I said that my first pro sale, "First Breath," would be on the Tales To Terrify podcast this year sometime only I had no idea when? Well, it's up now! It went up on October 12 in Episode 350, and you can listen to it here.

I had the weirdest reluctance to listen to it. Well, maybe not so weird. Maybe it's related to the way I have to leave the room if someone is reading something of mine; if I stay there, I'll be on pins and needles, trying to read reactions into every shift or sigh--"They yawned. Are they bored? They keep recrossing their legs, are they uncomfortable? Do they think I'm a freak because I thought up stuff like that and put it in a story?" I guess I had similar discomfort with the idea of hearing someone else read my story out loud. In my gut I was sure that, hearing it, I'd finally see what an awful, stupid, shameful thing I'd written and put out into the world--

Stop that, I told myself; you know perfectly well that a prestigious editor already thought this was worth putting in an anthology. And this is a Hugo-nominated podcast; its editor clearly has good taste--and he chose to run your story. Your story has not suddenly become awful. Press play.

I listened to the episode on my drive out of Avon Sunday morning. My story comes first, narrated by Michelle Kane, and she does a good job. I mean, I have quibbles, as I expect I would no matter who read it because it's my baby and they're not me; but they're only quibbles, and not worth going into. Most importantly, I was gently crying by the end, so, go her, and go me.

Thing about that story is, I keep forgetting it's a horror story, and, moreover, a vampire story, or at least it has a sort of vampirism at its heart. I didn't write it with vampires or the horror genre in mind. But it's clear the vampire aspect was a factor in the choice of story to pair it with: Victoria Glad's "Each Man Kills," originally published in Weird Tales in 1951. Now, there's a vampire story, one springing from under the cape of Dracula himself.

Anyway. I hope you get a chance to wander over and take a listen.

Time now for the NaNoWriMo Rebel report, covering today and the weekend we just left behind us. The short story is, I'm still at 100% on my self-challenge. Here are the details.

Morning Pages: (Weekdays only.) Did them today, but lollygagged on my way there. It was like I couldn't bear to admit it was Monday. Used them mostly to make sense of my vague sense of dread about all the things I had to get done today: it's my first full day back in Boulder, but also my last full day in Boulder before I leave again, so we're back in travel prep stress mode. It helped to write down the specific things I had to do, make a concrete list of them, and make a plan to hit each one. It made the scary big cloud of dread into an achievable agenda.

Freewriting: I'm happy to report that I did this faithfully each day of the weekend as well as today. But I'll admit that on Saturday and Sunday I put it off until almost the end of the night. Saturday I actually played Puzzle Pirates again--my crew on the Cerulean Ocean was defending an island, and I wanted to help. After four rounds, I pulled myself away and got to work. I had to put off all my writing work until evening today, too, but for a better reason--I had to prioritize some travel prep errands first.

Over the weekend I began using the 50 Creative Writing Prompts at NowNovel.com. This is a series of exercises for focused writing practice. They feel a little like classroom assignments. They remind me of working my way through Ursula K. LeGuin's Steering the Craft, which was also full of classroom-like exercises for focused writing practice. I did exercise 1 on Saturday and exercise 2 on Sunday.

Today's writing prompt came from Chuck Wendig's series of flash fiction challenges; I've been working my way backwards through his archive, doing one a week. Here's the one I did today.

Fictionette Development: Pretty much part of the same writing session as freewriting over the past three days. Each session was kind of small, in keeping with the philosophy of "at least do a little." By the end of Sunday I had finished the Monday Muse post and set it for scheduled release--I love it when I can do that, it means I am perfectly on schedule--and today I babbled to myself on the page about what the piece due Friday will look like.

Commercial Fiction Production/Revision: (Weekdays only.) More babbling. Made a list of questions that would have to be answered as I expanded the original flash piece into a full-length story. May have encountered some answers along the way. Will have to sleep on it.

Submission Procedures: (Weekdays only.) So, about Friday. You know how I said it was late and I wasn't going to do anything more than just think about where to send "Survival, After" next? Well, turns out, I figured out where to send it next--and discovered that they'd be closing to submissions Saturday afternoon. So I sent them the story then and there. Go me!

Today was just for record-keeping. Logged that "First Breath" was now published at Tales To Terrify; logged that the place I sent "Survival, After" had sent an acknowledgement of the submission. Pretty much left it at that.

Blogging: (Weekdays only.) And there you go.

Tomorrow's work day will be prioritized according to what must be done before I get on the train, which is to say, while I can still access the internet. So Tuesday's blog post should show up sometime in the afternoon rather than stupid-o-clock at night. At least I won't have to stress about getting in my daily 444 on 4thewords.com; since I have continued writing this post well after midnight (its date stamp notwithstanding), I've extended my streak through Tuesday the 6th already. That's a relief. However, I'm currently battling a 24-hour 3,000-word monster, and I'm not finishing that sucker tonight. Guess I'll have to blog it to death from Denver Union Station tomorrow afternoon.

'Til then!

Ahoy. This blog post comes to you live from Loaded Joe's in Avon, where Friday Nights mean Karaoke with Sandman. I brought the tail end of my work day here--ok, well, I admit it, I brought most of my work day here. At least half. Which means typing and singing along at the same time even more than usual. Which means that, now and again, I'll end up typing the lyrics of whatever song is being performed, and I'll have to go back and figure out where I really left off. MULTITASKING! Yes.

[Author's turn to sing! Author couldn't decide, so she went with that old standby, "What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes. The crowd is very supportive tonight. It always is, though. Love this place.]

I've been in Avon, Colorado since Sunday afternoon, on my annual "aaaauuugh finally it's off-season I'M RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME" week. I've spent it mostly quietly, walking around town, hanging out in the library, watching the Saints game at Loaded Joe's, dropping in with the 10th Mountain Roller Dolls for a practice, writing, avoiding writing, excoriating myself for avoiding writing, finally getting back to the writing... kind of the same as at home, really, only ALL BY MYSELF and not in my own house where I can suddenly discover the need to do the dishes and the laundry.

OK, well, there are dishes and laundry in a resort-style hotel, yes. BUT NOT AS MANY.

I'm done with moths, by the way! Did I say? Yeah. I put forth a heroic effort on the night before I drove out of town, emptying the closet to the bare walls, cycling batches of clothes through a 170-degree oven for 50 minutes at a time, wiping things down with diluted vinegar--you know the drill--and I didn't get to sleep until three. BUT NOW I AM DONE. The last stronghold of the months has been CLEANED OUT. OK, well, it's possible that there a few hanging on in the office and some desultory preventative cleaning may be advised. But the confirmed active infestations are done.

[Author pauses while a duet gets up to sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and the entire establishment joins in, anthem-style.]

That's the sense of accomplishment and completion I drove away from Boulder with. And here I am. And now it's time for the Day 2 of the NaNoWriMo Rebel Report.

Morning Pages: More or less on time. A much better morning--one hundred percent percent less headache, for one thing--but took it slow. I am on vacation, dammit! Most of the first of the three pages was just writing down what I dreamt. I have trouble sleeping through the night these days, so it's always a good sign when I wake up with a bunch of dreams to write down. Foremost among the dream imagery was a bull nosing up to the front door of a suburban house, and me thinking, "That's weird, usually it's deer."

[Author pauses to appreciate the host and his partner in crime dueting on "Home" by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. With customized lyrics.]

Freewriting: Got that just now here at Loaded Joe's. Came up with an idea for a whole damn novel. That happens a lot, actually. It doesn't exactly make me happy. I always get this sense of despair like, I will never live long enough to make novels out of all these ideas. I suppose that's the wrong attitude. I should be thinking, "I will never run out of ideas as long as I live." But what I'm really thinking is, I will never run out of homework. Well, that's what you sign up for when you decide to be a writer, Niki. Deal with it.

The prompt was from the weekly Reedsy newsletter. I wholeheartedly recommend this newsletter. They give you five prompts every Friday and challenge you to submit a story based on one of those prompts to their weekly contest. Deadline is always midnight Eastern of the following Friday.

The Friday Fictionettes Project: Woo-cha! Got it in one. One DAY. I would like not to have to do that again, but: the Friday Fictionette for November 2 is up, and it's called "The Chance of a Lifetime." It's about the drawbacks of immortality and what might be done about 'em. Patrons pledging $1/month may download the ebook, and Patrons pledging $3/month may additionally access the audiobook. Everyone else, just wait up and the freebie for the month will be released when November's over.

Real Fiction Stuff for Real Money (I Hope): So, last night, I brushed the dust off a short-short I'd written for a Codex contest early this year and gave it a read-through. Wound up making like a hundred words or so of notes on the sucker and getting excited about it all over again. I'll hit it again for about five minutes before bed tonight.

Submission Procedures: Soon as I'm done with this blog post I'm going to figure out where to send "Survival, After" next. I may have mentioned this before, but it, too, started as a flash piece for that same contest. What am I thinking--of course I mentioned it before. I remember whining endlessly in this here blog about how the revision kept getting longer and longer and OH MY GODS WILL THIS NEVER BE FINISHED? Well. It did, and it's heading out again tonight. Or at least I'll figure out tonight where to send it, and send it on Monday. Look, it's late, OK? I'm three beers in.

Blogging: Et voila.

[Author's runs away to sing "Here I Go Again" in front of a very drunk and supportive crowd. Love y'all bunches!]

It's November 1! Everyone around these here bloggish parts knows what that means, right? Pardon me while I commit derivative doggerel:

Remember, remember, the first of November:
Character, story and plot;
It's now Wrimo season, so now there's no reason
to put off that novel you've got.

Only, I am not noveling this year. That's OK. I don't always. But I do always observe NaNoWriMo in some way. (This is what they call being a NaNoWriMo "rebel.") When the whole internet explodes in word sprints, word wars, writing prompts, and mutual encouragement, it's a great time to set myself some writing challenge or other, and that's what I'm doing this year.

My challenge to myself is this: 30 days of accomplishing every writing task on my daily list.

It's the same list I've been trying to accomplish for, well, years, I guess. Every day, let there be a session each of freewriting and Friday Fictionette progress. Every weekday, let there also be progress on some commercial fiction project (usually a short story) and the usual manuscript submission procedures, and let there also be a blog post. Like this one. Hi! And let every weekday begin with Morning Pages, because that's how I give my brain a daily tune-up.

Only, now that it's NaNoWriMo, let there also be no excuses. No missed tasks! No more "drat, I didn't get it done before derby" or "blast, I only have 15 minutes." As I keep telling myself, if I can't do a lot, I'll do a little; it's better than doing nothing at all.

This blog began as a way of tracking my progress through what was probably my second NaNoWriMo ever. After NaNoWriMo was over that year, I used it to track my writing progress in general. I blogged to report that, yes, I had showed up on the page today, too. Sort of an accountability thing. Regardless of whether anyone was reading. It was like Natalie Goldberg's trick of calling a friend's answering machine and leaving a message saying "I'll be at the cafe at 5:00 PM tomorrow to get some writing done. Join me if you like, but don't tell me whether you're coming. See you there, or not!" Having left that message, well, now she had to show up, didn't she? Same thing here: Someone could be reading, so I'd better uphold the commitment.

But of course I've drifted away from that focus over the years. I also blog about non-writing things, like roller derby and addictive clicky games. Or I'll go for weeks without blogging, even though I've been writing, because I just keep running all out of evens by Blog O'Clock. Alas.

This month I intend to blog every weekday, because it's one of my writing tasks, and doing all my writing tasks every day is what I'm challenging myself to do this November. And I'm going to focus on reporting to y'all (accountability!) my successes and failures at this challenge.

Accordingly:

Morning Pages: As soon as I was functional this morning. This wasn't immediate; I had an awful headache starting at about 4 AM--a rare thing these days, thank goodness--that made it hard to get moving after the alarm clock went off. Some days, just getting up and putting pen to paper is a righteous accomplishment.

Freewriting: Kept it short, because I had a lot of other things to do. About 10 minutes and 600 words. Writing prompt courtesy of the Writer Igniter.

Friday Fictionette Project: Finally pushed the one due last week out the door. Made it the Fictionette Freebie for October: "Living Undercover," in which we wonder if the sacrifices have all been worth it. Then started babbling out a draft for tomorrow's release. I've been suffering from a chronic Perfectionism Infection where these are concerned; it makes me take longer drafting the suckers, but at the same time, because the pressure of Must Get This Right heightens the avoidance factor, it makes it harder for me to force myself to sit down and do them. I'm going to try to--this sounds awful, but I hope you know what I mean--care less about quality. These are meant to offer readers a glimpse into my writing process while holding me to the challenge of producing a flash-length story-like object on a recurring deadline. They are not meant to be perfect. I have to remember that.

Submission Procedures: I never did report, did I, that my story came home from its "second date" knowing that there would not be a third? Alas. The Editors-in-Chief decided to pass on it. I still need to log that R in my database and figure out where to send that sucker next. I haven't done this yet, I wanted to get this blog post out while it was still November 1, and it's quite late tonight. So, under the rubric of "Do a little if you can't do a lot," I'm just going to log the rejection and leave resubbing the story for another day.

Commercial Fiction: By the same token, I haven't left myself a lot of time for this; I'll pick a story that needs revising, read it over, and jot a couple notes down.

Blogging: Why, so I have!

That's the Day 1 report--see you tomorrow. Happy NaNoWriMo, one and all!

Manuscript submissions can be thought of as something like internet dating. Manuscripts go out and meet editors. Both hope that something will click. Most often nothing does. Maybe the editor says "Not for us at this time," or maybe the author looks at the contract and says, "That's way too rights-grabby for me." And then there will be no second date. But sometimes that first date results in a match made in heaven.

Sometimes the author is like those guys Teresa Nielsen Hayden recalls less than fondly in her epic blog post Slushkiller.

An eon or two ago, when I was a girl and occasionally went on dates, I observed that there was a species of young man who’d be perfectly pleasant right up to the point where I declined to go to bed with him. Then he’d turn nasty and angry—all bridges burnt, not even minimally polite. It was clear that the sole thing that mattered was whether I’d put out.

Please, for the love of little fuzzy kittens, don't be that kind of author. It is much better to be the author who considers the whole thing as, at worst, an opportunity for a pleasant night out. I won't lie; this is made easier when the rejection letter says nice things about the manuscript. I'm only human. I respond well to encouragement. But even an impersonal, businesslike form rejection can be an encouraging thing. It means I succeeded at doing the business part of writing. I sent the thing out, and even though it came home again, I like to think it left a good impression. I like to hope I'm making friends and even fans among the editors and/or slush readers, that maybe they look forward to reading my stuff regardless of whether they can buy it. And maybe the next thing I send them will be more their type.

You can't build that kind of relationship if you're the sort of lout who throws unprofessional tantrums when someone tells you no.

I'm aware at this point that my metaphor has shifted a bit. At first it was the manuscript that was going out on dates, then it was the author, then the author was the dating service which sent the manuscript out on dates in hopes of finding The One. Only it's not ever just "The One," because there's reprint rights. The One For Now? As in, serial monogamy? Because, even though each market will want a period of exclusivity, when that period is over you are (that is, the manuscript is) free to play the field. But then the dating pool will be limited to those markets who don't mind not being The First. Annnnnd I'm going to stop right there before we wind up comparing "No reprints, original work only" to toxic attitudes toward women with sexual histories, which comparison is unfair, no good, and wrong no matter which party you're talking about.

Metaphors are, by nature, limited. Life is like a box of chocolates and ogres are like onions, but not in every way.

What I'm actually trying to say here with this tortured metaphor is, one of my manuscripts has been asked out on a second date. Yes! My little story got bumped up the editing chain! That means it's not actually worthless and unpublishable! At least, not at first glance. Not so's the first reader could tell. So I'll be over here on pins and needles until the Editor-in-Chief makes the final call.

Meanwhile, I have great hopes that this will be the week I finally get caught up on all things Friday Fictionettes. The offering for October 5th is this close to being ready for release. Wouldn't it be nice if I could release it tomorrow? Only I've got a dentist appointment, a handyworker coming over to give us an estimate on a couple small projects, and either roller derby practice or a roller derby work party. So the name of the game is low expectations. I mean, we see how well I did with unreasonable expectations, yeah? Not Well At All. So all I will promise is that I'll get some work done on the thing tomorrow, at some point, and we'll see where it goes from there.