author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This has not been the best of weeks, for--oh, so very many reasons. But! It is Friday, and I have posted a Friday Fictionette to the Patreon "Creator Posts" stream. I have given it the extremely imaginative title of "Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night," because we are picking up a package in one story for delivery to another. And by package, I mean character. Basically, a character is running away from his story and a U.S. Post Office driver is taking him into another. Some stories are safer to be in than others.

(Standard explanatory text for Friday Fictionettes: Click the link to read an excerpt, click the links you will find there to A. download the full text as a PDF ebooklet or MP3 audiobooklet if you're already a subscriber, or B. to become a subscriber and then revisit step A.)

I've also finally gotten around to producing the teaser excerpt of last week's fictionette, "Reviving the Legends." Additionally, I've released "The Call Is Coming From Inside the Building" as the Fictionette Freebie for March 2016, such that its PDF and MP3 downloads are now free for all to enjoy. Which means I'm almost all caught up on the Fictionette stuff (barring, as usual, Wattpad releases and backfilling all the early MP3s) except for the Fictionette Artifacts for those subscribers who may expect to see them any day now. (I've bought new stamps! They are pretty! You will see them soon! hugs & kisses!)

And that's pretty much all I've gotten done this week on the writing front. There's a possibility--just a slight one--that this may have something to do with the last three boxes full of books having come home from storage this week. (Books! Old friends! All the Patricia McKillip! Alphabet of Thorn, how I have missed you! Oooh, Robin McKinley's Shadows!) But there may have been additional factors.

By the way, there's only maybe two light carloads of stuff to bring home before that rented storage unit is empty, finally, and we can at last declare ourselves--after slightly more than a year since coming to live at our new address--entirely moved in. This is moderately exciting! And for our next trick: Installing shelves on every single wall so that all the books, sheet music, CDs, records, DVDs, and video games have somewhere to live, other than in boxes.

Hello weekend! I deserve you. *dives in*

OMG a Friday Fictionette released on an actual Friday what is the world COMING TO. Also, consider yourself warned that "The Call Is Coming From Inside the Building" get out of there.

So this new work schedule of John's is having a salutary effect on my own. Unless I have a very convincing reason to stay in bed (like, say, the morning after skating in two epic back-to-back interleague scrimmages that left me sore and gloriously multicolored, just for instance), I get up when he does, whereupon we have breakfast together before he heads over to the office. And then I actually get a full day of writing done according to the master plan for world domination through workerlike fiction production. And life is magical.

The quest for breakfast also sent me about half a mile up the road on my bike to a nearby farm whose sign in their driveway advertising Fresh Eggs has been catching my eye every time I head up to roller derby practice. This would be The Diaz Farm, which, it turns out, in addition to selling farm-fresh eggs daily for $5.50 the dozen, is accepting CSA sign-ups for the 2016 season. I am all over that. 2016 will be the year of eating super locally, with pork sausage from the pig farmer who skates on our B team and rents us our practice space (her derby name is Baconator, naturally, and everything about her is made of awesome), and chicken from McCauley Family Farm where I used to volunteer (and may again someday, who knows), and now fresh veg from The Diaz Farm which is literally in my neighborhood considering I can darn well get there on my bike, rain or shine, in under 10 minutes. Given their extreme proximity, which is convenient given my lack of daytime access to a car, I asked them if they were taking volunteers. The answer was, not yet but we'll let you know. They are a very small operation.

Yesterday I turned one of those McCauley chickens into one of my very most favorite recipes from Kenneth Lo's The Top One Hundred Chinese Dishes, "Whole Chicken Soup with Chinese Cabbage (Bai Cai Ji Tang)." This sent me on another bicycle quest, this time for Napa cabbage. The little international grocery at Valmont and 28th can always be counted on to have that. Also fresh okra at any old time of the year. Also, and I was entirely unprepared to discover this, mirleton (aka "chayote"). I suspect my next chicken dish will be chicken and andouille gumbo on a stewed okra base with a side helping of shrimp and mirleton casserole.

You know what else you can get at international groceries? CDM coffee. Truly, New Orleans is another country.