author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Heh. "Tomorrow." But y'all know how that goes by now.

So the ephemera reading went really, really well! I was super nervous, of course, but that never changes. Still, I was grateful to be able to go first, so that I could give the other authors and artists the attention their lovely words deserved without being distracted by still being nervous.

How lovely was lovely? Very! Shimshon Obadia's poetry did that thing where every word they said caused me to reevaluate every previous they'd said, so that I was out of breath and mind blown by the time they were done. Stephen Granade's piece began in the wry, witty genre of list format fiction, completely failing to prepare me for that tiny snowball of understated emotion that brought an avalanche of "I'm not crying YOU'RE crying" down on everyone's head. And Ai Jiang's three flash pieces were masterfully haunting, turning simple images and innocent phrases ("Don't scratch, children") into gems of creepy loveliness, or lovely creepiness, that will stay with me for a long time.

(Above links go to @ephemeraseries's live-tweeting of each author/artist. Yes, there's a thread about my reading too. They said such nice things!)

Bonus: I got to treat everyone to BUNNY ZOOMBOMBING just before we went live. Holland saw me on the sofa and said "Oh, is it treat time?" and, well, yes. Because he asked so adorably, it was.

You can listen to the replay via ephemera's YouTube channel--click through to VIDEOS and it's Episode 28--or you can just click on this link here.

You'll next be able to hear me read live online during Story Hour on May 25. I don't yet know which author I'll be paired with, and I probably won't know which of us will go first until we're in the "green room" a few minutes before the show, but I can guarantee a good time for the whole hour long, because Story Hour is awesome like that.

So that's one bit of info I've been owing you. Here's another: the January Friday Fictionette Round-up. (I've also got the February round-up ready to go, but let's leave something for next blog post, right?)

Friday, January 7, 2022: "The Book People of Bloomsbury Falls" (ebook, audio) In which we find out who's best at identifying them, and what happens when we're right. Talking about them wasn't good for my temper.

Friday, January 14, 2022: "A Changed World" (ebook, audio) In which Sleeping Beauty wakes up and discovers who currently owns the world. "You know our law. Accept no gift without accepting the debt."

Friday, January 21, 2022: "One Last Spectacle" (ebook, audio) In which we know that whatever happens, however strange, must be the Magician's will. And we applaud. The automata were always unfailingly responsible and polite, which we all thought reflected well upon the Magician.

Friday, January 28, 2022: "Just Doing My Job" (ebook, audio) In which fairy dust is one hell of a drug. That's my job: to remind her that an ordinary life is worth living. One of my jobs, anyway.

Looks like I still haven't designated any of these the Fictionette Freebie for January. Let's make it "The Book People of Bloomsbury Falls." I'm particularly fond of it and would love to enable you to download it without worrying about a subscription.

In addition to the February round-up, I've also got more computer woes to gripe about. But I also have an impending poetry reprint to celebrate! And a bunch of hours in my week that are about to get freed up! So you can look forward to some of that news tomorrow.

Or, indeed, "tomorrow."

Hello the blog! I have an announcement for y'all: TOMORROW, March 16, I will be a guest reader on ephemera.

ephemera is a dreamy Toronto-based reading series (which has gone virtual for the same reason everything post-2020 has gone virtual) chaired by KT Bryski and Jen Albert. It's held the third Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. It typically features three guest author readings and a performance, all stitched together by the hosts' quirky continuity shenanigans. I have no idea what those shenanigans will consist of this time; the Twitter announcement says "BRING-YOUR-OWN-THEME" which could mean anything.

How this came about is, last year I worked with KT Bryski on the podcast of "Survival, After." I was, and am, immensely grateful to her for giving me the opportunity to narrate my story for that podcast, and grateful again that she remembered my work positively enough to invite me to be part of her show. And now that I've listened to a few older episodes and read the notes for a few more, I find myself gently wibbling to the tune of "Holy shit they've had some big name authors on this show!!! What the heck am I doing here?!" So it all feels very star-studded and amazing.

Anyways, I'll be reading a ten-minute miscellany of poems and flash fiction which aren't connected by any particular theme at all, except perhaps that they are all A. tiny, and B. hard-to-find: it's all stuff that either isn't online at all (due to being published in a print-only publication) or can only be found with the help of the Internet Archive "Wayback Machine" (due to the online publications they were published in having been discontinued). The poems are relatively new. The flash stories are relatively old, but I'm still proud and fond of 'em.

Again, the show will be TOMORROW - Wednesday, March 16 - at 7:00 PM Eastern / 5:00 PM Mountain, and, as things currently stand, I'm scheduled to read first. You can tune in live or watch it later via the YouTube channel.

In other news: I'll be appearing on Story Hour again on May 25, and (keeping things vague until contracts are signed) I appear to have sold another poetry reprint. The technical issues I lamented last time appear to be all cleared up; Space Invader has been working perfectly since it returned home. And this week is tryouts week as my roller derby league prepares a roster for our first competitive game (i.e. versus another league, that league being Pikes Peak Derby Dames of Colorado Springs) since 2019.

Tomorrow: the Friday Fictionette round-up for January. As soon after that as possible: the Friday Fictionette round-up for February. (Have I mentioned I am very, very tired of being constantly behind schedule. Well. I will soon have more time in my week to deal with things--but about that, more later.)

To heck with all that aspirational talk about wanting to blog more than twice a week. If I can manage once a week, I'm doing pretty well.

Today was more challenging than Wednesdays usually are. Today I had a much-anticipated visit from an on-site computer repair tech, and the visit unfortunately did not result in all of my problems solved. Here's the quick version of the story. (Heh. "Quick.")

For the last couple months, the Alienware M15 (which I like to call "Space Invader" because I'm a child of the 80s and I grew up with an Atari 2600 in the house) has been growing increasingly unstable. The main problem has been its tendency to freeze-crash and need a hard reboot. At first I thought it was a matter of asking too much of it (a frustrating assumption, this being a *gaming laptop),* but it also crashed wen I was running only one of my resource-heavy games, or zero. Eventually a pre-boot diagnostic reported that I had a failing hard drive. Yep. That would do it.

I reported this to Dell, and Dell ordered the parts, and I backed up everything-I-mean-everything to the old Asus in preparation for a fresh Windows install. Meanwhile I kept using Space Invader as usual, but with the extra steps of 1. immediately backing up each change to every file, session, or preference, no matter how small, and 2. rebooting it a lot. And then Dell informed me the parts weren't available, so I'd be limping along like this for a while longer. Argh.

Yesterday I got the good news that the parts were in stock again, had shipped, and would be in the tech's hands, and thus inside my laptop, today. Hooray! And great timing. By yesterday afternoon, poor Space Invader had become entirely unusable, obliging me to work off the old Asus, and wow was I looking forward to not having to do that anymore. The old Asus is slow. BUT. Turns out, the hard drives Dell shipped out, while being identical in capacity and function, were only half the length of the originals. They could be slotted in but they couldn't be bolted down. This would have been fine in a stationary machine. It's less ideal for a machine I'll be schlepping around in my backpack and in the car.

The tech sent in the order for the correct replacements, and arranged with me for a new visit tomorrow. He installed the new-but-wrong-sized hard drives so that I'd at least have limited use of my good computer. And I rejoiced. For tonight, it would be less of a home than a hotel, a place where I could bring my toys (data, programs, etc) but could not keep them (because everything gets zooked tomorrow). But it would be less obnoxious than waiting five damn minutes for Firefox to boot up on the old Asus.

And then the Windows install FAILED. One! More! Dratted! Thing! To go wrong! It's fine, it's OK, I eventually remembered I could press F12 for boot options. I did so and told it to boot from the Windows-installing USB. The Windows install started over from scratch, and this time it succeeded. Hooray!

But by now all I want to do is sit back in the tub and do brainless things, like read blogs and click on Harvest Land or something. To hell with my Afternoon Shift. I was drained. Well. At least I have written this post. It's not the post you thought you'd be getting next, but it is a post. Huzzah.

That said, considering this may be the only post you get this week (though we shall see), I should mention to any of y'all who are local to me that THIS SATURDAY, February 12, 2022, Boulder County Roller Derby is hosting our very first public game in over TWO YEARS and maybe y'all should come? If doing so is compatible with your current risk management strategies, I mean? Click here for event details! (It's Facebook, but the post is accessible even if you don't have an account. I checked.) Also, do yourself and my home team a solid: use the code "BLUE" when you buy your tickets. Good for a couple dollars off your purchase! Also good for Team Blue. We're kinda competing about this. So remember: The code is "BLUE". Not any other color. Just BLUE. As in Team Blue, who'll be the ones wearing the blue bandannas among those skating in the black jerseys for TEAM LOVE-TAKERS!

Our bout is the second bout, but don't even think about missing the first one. That's the one showcasing our juniors' skills and accomplishments. Y'all, we are so proud of them. They are the FUTURE of ROLLER DERBY and they make it look like a bright future indeed. So please arrive in time to cheer them on!

I have some more leftover thoughts from last week. They regard an incident I've already regaled y'all with before, but that blog post was more than three years ago, and besides, it turned into such a tangent during the initial draft of last week's "here's my schedule" post that I can only conclude that it's important that I get it off my chest. Again.

If you followed that first link, the one to the post from November 2018, you probably see what I mean. If not, 's OK, you don't have to. I'm going to rehash it here.

So, last week, while delineating the Afternoon Shift part of my Monday through Thursday schedule, my first instinct was to describe those tasks as "real writing." You know, as opposed to the stuff I do during the Morning Shift that doesn't really count as writing and I only do it anyway because I'm a wannabe-writer loser who's constantly Wasting This Precious Gift of Time and playing around instead of working. Well, I corrected myself and said "career writing" instead. But even that phrase is a problem. It contains a tacit admission that what I do with my Morning Shift is orthogonal, irrelevant, to my writing career. As though the elements of my writing process that support and enable the creation of publishable works, but are not themselves directly involved with creating those publishable works, aren't part and parcel of my writing career.

This is not an original metaphor, but: As well tell a professional football player that nothing other than the actual game counts as part of their career. Not stretching before and after practice, not cross-training, not sports nutrition, nothing. As well tell a musician that scales and arpeggios and practicing specific techniques are wastes of time. Unless they are practicing the piece they are going to perform, or actually performing it, or maybe writing a piece they intend to perform or record, then they're not really making music.

I know this. I feel it. Yet every time I mention morning pages or my daily freewriting or even the Friday Fictionette project, I hear those condescending voices in my head saying, "But, Niki, after all that, what time is left for you to actually write?" And feel obliged to justify why morning pages, why freewriting, why this weekly self-publishing project that I'm constantly behind schedule on and stressing myself out over, when I could be taking all that time to write and sell more short stories and maybe finally a novel.

Why? Because those daily and weekly exercises are part of my creative process. They are part of my practice. They make the publishable works possible and they are non-negotiable. And I need to stop giving in to the guilt and shame I feel when I tell my co-writing colleagues that I'll be working on one of those things during our next sprint. I'm going to feel guilty and ashamed, sure, because brain's gonna brain and what can you do, but I don't need to act like it.

(I mean, yes, I'd like to begin getting up a little earlier so that I can do my morning pages before co-writing rather than during, but only because that would mean two sprints available for that day's Friday Fictionette efforts rather than just one.)

Hell with it. I'm going to Own My Damn Process and spend a few blog posts talking about why these exercises are valuable to me. And yes, I've blogged tiresomely on that precise subject before. But it's a new year, and I have new thoughts about them. Or new ways to word the old thoughts. Something like that. It's worth taking a look and seeing what's filed under those categories in my head right now.

On a maybe related note, I'm rethinking what days I can blog on. I got so very much stuff done yesterday, just this amazing amount of stuff, not a moment of time wasted whatsoever, and yet I didn't get to the "daily" blog post before it was time to get ready for roller derby. I guess that means there really is no room in a Tuesday for blogging. So maybe blogging happens on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays? Or maybe just Wednesdays and Saturdays because Friday is a day off? Except I'd really like to post more than twice a week? Which I haven't in a really long time?

Argh. Look, I'm gonna feel it out and see what works. Stay tuned.

So yesterday I laid out my schedule for Monday through Thursday. What about Friday, you may ask? Well, Friday is a day off. I started to jot that down in yesterday's post, but it soon became clear that I have a whole 'nother post in me purely on the philosophy of "Yes, I do get to have days off" and I should probably save that tangent for tomorrow.

Welp, now it's tomorrow.

Here's the thing about Friday: It's full of things. It starts off bright and early with recording a couple shows for AINC, the Spanish-language programming this time. One of 'em has to be uploaded for noon, but I will not be at home for noon, because I've got my Boulder Food Rescue shift from about 10:45 AM until 1:00 PM or so. And then there's whatever groceries need getting at whatever stores. And then I am tired, so by the time I'm home and have put all the groceries away, it's nap time, like seriously, and I am not very good at getting up from a nap and being productive. Pretty much the whole day is shot for further productivity.

This is a thing which has given me angst and guilt over the past few years. I've whittled down my Friday expectations from a full day to a half day to just 25 minutes of freewriting, come one, can't I at least do that? No? Well, then, I guess I'm just a lazy good-for-nothing so-n-so who isn't really a writer.

In fact, no. Obviously what I need to do is just stop expecting writing to happen on Fridays.

It sounds obvious, yes, but deciding that is sort of kind of a breakthrough. And it flies in the face of the internalized Wise Writing Mentor voice that says, "Being a writer means having homework every day for the rest of your life. Being a writer means you don't get weekends and holidays." And whoever thought those were reasonable things to say?

(I honestly don't remember. I want to pin it on that panel at World Horror Convention 2002 that was Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe in conversation, but it doesn't sound like the kind of thing Neil Gaiman would say or co-sign. My impression of him has always been that he's far too kind to do the "You must do X to be a real writer" schtick. It might have been one of my instructors at Viable Paradise in 2006, maybe Jim Macdonald, but if so, only after he emphatically reminded us that "Under the right circumstances anything I tell you can be wrong." Because, again, I don't see Uncle Jim as insisting on Only One Right Way to Be a Writer, no matter how strongly he feels that a short story is a key lime pie.)

Anyway, I damn well get Fridays off. I also get Sundays off, because they, too, start with 1. AINC reading (the Sunday edition of the Employment Opportunity News this time), 2. roller derby practice, and then 3. a very hard nap. They may also, depending on schedules, transition into Quality Family Time. But despite the lovely writing date that SFWA schedules for every Sunday afternoon with rotating author and editor hosts, Sundays very rarely involve writing.

And accepting that no writing will meaningfully get done on Friday or Sunday, and therefore not guilting myself over that writing not getting done, is part of my Write Happier in 2022 initiative.

But what about the Friday Fictionette? You may well ask. And I will tell you. Here's the plan: I upload that sucker by Thursday, and I schedule it to automatically go live on Friday at 8:00 AM. No actual work on Friday required. Ta-daaa!

But what, you may then ask, what about Weekend Warrior, whose prompt goes live on Friday and whose deadline is Sunday night? If you take Friday and Sunday off, when will you write your Weekend Warrior stories? ...Well, I guess that's what Saturday's for, isn't it?! Sheesh.

I thought I'd talk a little about my schedule today, because it seems like a January sort of thing to do--not quite a New Year's Resolution, just part of evaluating in concrete terms what works and what doesn't--and besides, all the big kids are doing it. So here's the Monday through Thursday routine I've sort-of kind-of settled into for 2022, which seems to work so far:

8:15 to 9:15 AM, ish - Get out of bed and do the morning chores. Give Holland (the bunny) his breakfast pellets, check his water and hay and daily treat box for if they want topping off. Water the plants if they need it. Take care of myself, too, which can be hard to remember, especially if I'm rolling out of bed closer to 9:15 than to 8:15.

I am the least useful hybrid of night owl and morning bird. I stay up until 1:00 AM, I have a very hard time getting out of bed at any time, but if I don't get to work in the morning, work won't happen. I re-learn this lesson every time I sleep in and then utterly fail my intention to write in the afternoon. Besides, there are afternoons that don't happen because reasons. So I've got to get up and bank some writing time before noon, just in case.

Looking at John Scalzi's blog post, I find it fascinating that he takes a little time before he starts writing to check email, blog comments, and other social media. I have a hard time tearing myself away from those sorts of things with any promptness. Hours will seep away without my noticing. So I don't touch them until my day requires it. I will, however, click around a little bit on whatever clicky games I'm currently unhealthily obsessed with (right now the big one is Harvest Land, and if you want, you can shoot me a friend request via code ffp4zphx. I'll accept pretty much any friend request so long as your avatar isn't awful and your name isn't obviously a way to get away with something toxic).

9:30 to 11:30 AM or so - The Morning Shift. I've sung the praises of Cat Rambo's community co-writing sessions before, and I probably will many times again before I'm through. The morning co-writing session starts at 9:30 my time, so I log on to Zoom and get to work with everyone else. The structure is three 30-minute work sprints on mute bracketed by brief check-ins: sharing with each other how the last sprint went and what we plan to do during the next one. Generally, I'll use the morning sprints for my "dailies and weeklies," like this:

1. Morning Pages,
2. Idea generation (freewriting to a prompt), and
3. Work on the current Friday Fictionette.

But sometimes I'll put those off until the afternoon because I'm playing catch-up with some tasks I wasn't able to get to the day before. Like today! I really meant to write this blog post yesterday, but what with yesterday being a catch-up day too, I didn't. So I'm working on it now.

Noonish to 2:45 PM - Lunch break? Yeah. Get a bit of something to eat. I am very bad about breakfast, so by now I'm probably HONGRY. I'll also have some non-writing work waiting for me, like my physical therapy homework--I have a much better record of getting that done if I do it during my lunch break. Wednesdays I've got a show to record for AINC (the Employment Opportunity News: job ads from all over Colorado). And if it's January (hey, look! It is!) I'm probably participating in the annual Weekend Warrior contest on Codex, so now's a good time to read, score, and comment on a few more of this week's entries.

Now's also when I finally get to my email. And also play a little more on the clicky-games, because it's lunch break, right?

3:00 to 5:00 PM or so - The Afternoon Shift. There's an afternoon co-writing session at 3:00 PM my time, so if I can, which is not always the case, I log in and join the crew. For these three sprints, generally I'll try to work on what I think of as "career writing"--writing and revising stories and poems for commercial publication. Also submitting same, and tracking the results of said submissions. I'll also try to get a blog post in, like this one, but that is proving tricky to fit into the afternoon shift along with the rest. As you can no doubt see by the extreme occasionalness of this blog. It's a work in progress.

After 5:00: I Have A Life. I'm trying very hard to say that, at this point, the work day is over. And some days, it really has to be. Like on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I have roller derby practice (and yes, we are back to that after the aforementioned saga), I have to make time to get ready to go to practice (pack up my gear! change my wheels? have some dinner, dang it!), and I have to accept that no work is happening after practice.

In reality, on days that don't end in derby, I feel like I have to pull a third shift, an Overtime Shift as it were, to finish up whatever didn't fit into the first two. Or get to whatever chores I didn't manage over lunch. Or, or, or...

Here's the thing: there's always more stuff I want to do than there are hours in the day to do them in. I am instinctively uneasy with free time. So I'm trying to practice saying, "Today's work day is over. You have put in your hours. Now you have left the office. Rest, play, and do whatever it is tomorrow."

That, too, is a work in progress.

Today's special: The December 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up (meant to have it up last week, but, y'know, see below) and some ill-advised cookery! But first: the state of Chez LeBoeuf-Little.

I posted the full saga to my Patreon, in the free-for-everyone Monday Muse posts that serve as a sort of extra blogging vehicle, but here's the tl;dr gist: I got well and truly exposed to COVID. For reals, yo. The closest people in the chain of contagion to me were all responsible, careful people, but the world is full of people who are irresponsible and careless and also environments where one has no individual control over who breathes breaths with you. Also the world is full of bad luck and shitty circumstances that affect the careful and the careless alike. So I am passing no negative judgment whatsoever upon anyone involved when I say that, for certain, I was in close contact with someone who tested positive shortly thereafter.

I lucked out--all my subsequent tests came up negative. I'm willing to draw the cautious conclusions from this that 1. masks help a lot (I was masked and so were they), and 2. so do vaccines ("Vaccination does significantly reduce transmission from vaccinated breakthrough cases but does not completely eliminate it." -Tara C. Smith, Kent State University epidemiologist) So mask yo'self and get jabbed, why don't you?!

Also: Appropriate COVID testing gives the info needed to make informed choices! I am even more pissed at someone who wasn't involved, that being the person who used to be in one of my social circles, who flounced out of said circle, declaring that she would never get vaccinated, never wear a mask, and never let anyone "stick a swab up [her] nose" (!!!) so it follows that if she'd been the one who came to our gathering infected, none of the rest of us would have known in anywhere near as timely a manner because of her virulent (indeed) anti-testing stance. Anti-TESTING! I just can't even. (She's a parent! Presumably she's had her kids tested for strep throat once or twice! That too involves sticking swabs in orifices! And the swab goes farther down your throat for strep, gag hack arrgh, than it goes up your nostrils for COVID tests! We are past the era of swabbing the frontal lobe via the nostril! I've been tested four times now, and they barely ever reached the bridge of my nose!) But, y'know, that selfish jerk self-selected out of that social circle, so she wasn't there to infect us and obstruct our attempts at contact tracing. So I guess I gotta be grateful to her for being forthright and honest about her anti-social views.

And because the person who came down with symptoms was not a selfish jerk with anti-social views, they 1. got tested and 2. let the rest of us know. (And 3. they had been vaxxed to the max, which--see above--probably helped prevent their passing it along, and certainly helped keep them home and out of the hospital. And they tell me they're recovering well.) John and I got the alert and made the choice to quasi-isolate until PCR tests 5 days after exposure came back negative. So I am grateful for caring, responsible friends, for free-and-easy drive-up PCR testing, that both John and I work from home, and that the various people I had to inform on a last-minute basis that "I can't come in and do the thing, I've been exposed to COVID" were extremely understanding.

Honestly, that it took this long for me to get a confirmed exposure is a glaring neon sign that I'm 1. lucky as hell, and 2. privileged like woah. I am surrounded by responsible people, I can work from home, I do have access to good, free testing and good, affordable masks (McGuckin, y'all - just picked up a couple N95s. Size small). I'm grateful, and I realize things could have gone very, very differently, especially if any of the above weren't true.

Nevertheless, good fortune notwithstanding, there was some aggravation and emotional toll which delayed a few things on the writing front. But yes, at this time, I have released all of the December 2021 Friday Fictionettes. They are as follows:

December 3: "Burning Bright" (ebook, audio) In which supernatural security methods find their failure state, but also get debugged. There are borders for a reason.

December 10: "Symbiosis" (ebook, audio) In which we need each other, though we may not know it. The Field of Gears was off-limits, especially to a sickly half-grown like Laurel.

December 17: "Incognito" (ebook, audio) In which some play-testing happens. "It is said that the Goddess of Mercy walks among us in humble guise, the better to judge the hearts of Her people. Beware, lest She judge you harshly."

December 24: "Across Great Distances" (ebook, audio) In which a secret is betrayed and another is vouchsafed. Mehtai shouldn't have answered. She knew it even then.

The Fictionette Freebie for December 2021 is "Across Great Distances." You can download it if you so choose without any need to part with fiat currency. But if you like it well enough that you'd like to read or listen to something of its general length and weirdness, and by me, every week, and the existing freebie archives going back to August 2015 just aren't enough for you, or maybe you just wanna be one of the cool kids who gets to read/listen the very moment a new fictionette drops--which is darn well gonna be every first-through-fourth Friday from now on, just like it says on the tin, because I'm about to get ALL CAUGHT UP this week--the how-to-do-that info awaits you over here.

Now, at the top of this post I promised you some ill-advised cookery action, and ill-advised cookery action you are gonna get. Because as soon as I got that last negative test result back, I went the hell to McGuckin and I bought a whole bunch of bits and bobs that various home fix-it projects were waiting on. A new multicooker was not on my shopping list, but I've been needing a new multicooker for a while, so when I saw the 8-quart Instant Pot Duo on the end-cap on my way from, oh, split rings and snap hooks, I think it was, to where they keep the acetone... well, reader, I bought it.

And I had this recipe for Dal Makhani waiting for me patiently in a saved browser session, and I hadn't made myself dal of any stripe since the Fagor LUX Multicooker stopped working, so I was super hype for dal. Only I didn't have any whole black gram in the house. All I had was red lentils. So I swapped in red lentils. And, reader, that was a mistake, because black gram takes more time to cook than red lentils do, as I should have figured from seeing it thrown into the same pressure cooker session with red kidney beans. By the time my red beans were soft enough, my lentils were beyond mushy. They had become the broth.

Which, as it turns out, was perfectly tasty and I would do it again. (Although probably not it exactly. Probably I'd let the kidney beans pressure-cook alone for half an hour, then add the red lentils for an additional pressure-cook session.) But before I did it again, I'd try laying in the actual ingredients as called for in the recipe, and actually following the recipe as written. It's not like I can't get all the right ingredients. It's not like India's Grocery isn't right there. I might be heading there this very Friday, actually, because at some point I acquired a packet of frozen shaved beef (thanks, Wild Pastures!) and I know exactly what to do with it.

I should probably do the November 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up, because next week I'll be doing the one for December. YES! I will be all caught up next week! Only about a month later than I originally planned, but hey.

November 5: "On Lightning Plain" (ebook, audio) In which we defy the gods. "Ah, go easy. New in these parts. No clue about the weather hereabouts."

November 12: "An Emerging Talent" (ebook, audio) In which a late-blooming sorcerer finds her magic at last and makes an enemy for life. "But if I show that I have sorcery of my own, doesn't that change things?"

November 19: "The Cursed Mascot" (ebook, audio) In which we scale up. Lost every game since you bought the ugly thing? Maybe you should review your training curriculum.

November 26: "In Memoriam" (ebook, audio) In which we make everyone perfectly safe. But her husband didn't want to hear about it. One didn't talk about magic in polite company.

The Fictionette Freebie for November 2021 is "The Cursed Mascot," which is preachy as hell but I don't care, it was a lot of fun to write. Go ahead and download that sucker if you wanna; it is now an unlocked post, so you don't need to subscribe at any tier to access it.

Well, Happy New Year, everybody. How was yours? I hope like heck it did not involve RAGING WILDFIRES. Because I have it on good authority that those suck.

(In case you were wondering and/or were worried, John and I are fine. We're a few miles north of the areas that were evacuated for the Marshall Fire, so our home was never in any concrete danger. THIS TIME. It had been so dry this winter, with very little measurable snowfall right up to the end of the year, that any spark could ignite the next catastrophe. We were fortunate to be spared this time around. We are also extremely aware that fortune today doesn't guarantee fortune tomorrow. It's kinda sobering to think about.)

I have a bunch of things to blog about over the next few days. Today I think I'm going to blog about New Year's Non-Resolutions.

I don't really make New Year's Resolutions. They strike me mostly as an opportunity to set myself up to fail. So much of the tradition seems to involve enumerating all the ways I suck, scolding myself for them, and attempting to be a person who sucks less. This is perhaps an ungenerous way of looking at the New Year's Resolution tradition. It is nevertheless representative of the tradition's historical role in my life.

But I do have some small changes to make to my day-to-day routine and to my self-expectations that, I hope, will make me, if not a less sucky person, then a happier person, someone who approaches the daily work without so much dread and self-recrimination.

I'm making some small changes to my schedule. I'll be expecting less from myself on those days when I know I'll have less to give. I'll be reserving more time for those goals that have gotten shortchanged in that respect of late. And I'll be reevaluating my relationship with writing with a focus on why I write.

This blog post by Chuck Wendig brought that into sharp relief for me: "Writer's Resolution, 2022: The Necessary Act Of Selfishly Seeking Joy"

I think we get caught up in the process, in the product, and we forget to identify and embrace those parts of writing that bring us true satisfaction and happiness. We started writing for some reason or another, and it's easy to lose a hold on that reason.

It's been a good long while since I read Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, but one of the bits that stands out fresh and sharp in my memory is the image of the author leaping out of bed in his eagerness to start the day's writing. And wow do I envy that. It's more common for me to wake up in a state of dread, knowing that all those things I blithely planned the day before have now come due, and I'm not ready. I'm just not ready.

I've often blogged about, complained about, lamented and griped about, my constant struggle with avoidance--with the difficulty of simply sitting down and getting started. And I have several strategies that can help with that, depending on the day. Co-writing sessions and their pressure to be punctual and productive. The "I'll just" method of replacing the Big Scary Task with a smaller, less threatening task ("Instead of revising the story, I'll just open the file and reread the current draft."). Letting external and internal deadlines convince me that I gotta do the thing regardless of whether I wanna.

But I wanna wanna. That's the whole point. Strategies for convincing myself to do the thing that I don't wanna do, they all sort of ignore that the whole root of the problem is that very don't wanna in the first place.

Instead of looking forward to writing, I'm dreading it. What a sad place for one's lifetime ambition to live!

I would like 2022 to be the year of remembering, in specific and sensory detail, all the reasons why I originally decided to be a writer. Why I wanted to write. Why making up stories and playing with words made me excited and happy. I'd like to recognize the moments when I do genuinely look forward to writing, and pay attention to how that feels, and why I'm feeling it, and see if there's some sort of anchor or trigger for that feeling that I can deploy at will.

And I want to explore the reasons for the dread, too. Like, what am I really dreading? Not writing itself, surely. What experience am I afraid of having? What unpleasantness am I assuming will be part of the writing process that maybe doesn't have to be?

I don't expect to 100% solve the problem of avoidance this way. But I'm hoping to mitigate it. I think that's reasonable.

Whatever I figure out, or even whatever I'm trying to figure out, you'll no doubt hear about it here. So, er, buckle up, I guess?

Hell yeah! "More tomorrow" actually happened! It probably wouldn't have happened if a friends date hadn't fallen through, leaving me at loose ends for the evening, but the evening I can't make lemonade out of those lemons is the evening when THE LEMONS WERE A LIE anyway.

(When and why did we decide "lemon" was slang for "a bad deal"? Lemons are tasty! They smell nice too! A bit of lemon juice in my water bottle before roller derby practice and my hydration improves significantly!)

So, briefly, to report on the Recalibrated Catch-Up Project: I'm still on track. For the November 19 release, Step 2 ("the real draft") was not finished on Day 2, but I did finish it up on Day 3. It's getting uploaded tonight or at the very latest tomorrow morning, and then it goes live on Friday.

Sometimes a story doesn't come together easily at all. Doesn't matter how long or short the story; anything from flash to 6K has the potential to be either a breeze or an ordeal. The November 19 Friday Fictionette was an ordeal, though not as "ordeally" as November 12 was. (No surprises there. November 12 was a novel-length idea I was trying to compress down to flash. Which: No.) And the difference between an ordeal and a breeze is in the answer to the question "Can I write a full draft in a single setting?" Or, for longer stories, "Can I go the entire session without hitting the 'I don't know what to write next' wall?"

I have a Process. It goes like this:

1. Think about the story.
2. Write the story.
3. Stop thinking about the story.
4. Write more of the story.
5. Return to Step 1.

That's kind of glib and not precisely accurate. It's more like, I have two active modes, which are "thinking about the story" and "writing the story," and I switch between the two when I get to the end of the progress I can make via the one I'm on.

Frustratingly, through, sometimes I can't make progress in either mode. That's when the passive mode, Step 3 above, comes into play. Go do something else. Think about something else. Better yet, go to sleep. Stop thinking about the story and let the story think about itself for a while.

This is what makes a compressed schedule for Friday Fictionettes such a challenge. If I'm trying to get one finished in three days or less, well, there's only two sleeps it can benefit from.

I tried to account for that these past few days by scheduling myself two specific sessions per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. (Monday and today, it worked well. Yesterday was trickier because I had roller derby practice, but I was able to turn the 20-minute drive into an active "thinking about the story" session, which got me a plan for this morning's "writing the story" session.) And today I got the last bit untangled during a sort of mix of thinking and not thinking--I mean, I planned to go for a walk and actively think about the story, but mostly I just thought about the crows and the hawk that I saw.

tl;dr - If I've only got three days to work on a story, my best bet is to turn each day into two or three mini-days. It worked this time, anyway.

Speaking of derby, I have derby news! We are hosting a public bout on January 8. You can find all the details on Facebook: Preps vs. Goths! January 8! Doors at 5 PM, First Whistle at 6!. "Preps vs. Goths" is the theme for the adult bout, but there will also be a JUNIORS bout (theme: Freaks vs. Geeks) and we couldn't be more proud!

Here is the online ticket sales page. Extra special hint from me to you: Using the discount code "Fleur" (as in, the short form of my derby name) to get $2 off the price of your ticket! (Discount code is caps-sensitive. Upper-case "F", lower-case "leur".)

(Do go read the FB event page; you don't have to have a Facebook log-in to read it, and that's where the most up-to-date COVID protocols for the event can be found. Those details will most likely be evolving between now and bout day, so keep an eye on it.)