author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

It is seriously amazing how much inspiration you can get just listening to conversations in a bar. Annoying conversations. Held by conversationalists that are absolutely not your people.

That's my new theory. Bear with me for a bit.

Derby practice is done, and, is as our common practice, John and I have stopped for food before going home. It's a restorative process. I need food (hungry athlete is hungry) and John needs food and decompression time (coaching tends to use up all his extrovert capital). And I need some dedicated writing time because today went all to hell.

Seriously, I was on a great track to get everything done before derby. I was up on time, I got right to work--and then the washing machine died.

It died in the middle of a load of clothes which John needs to pack tonight, because he's getting on a plane for Detroit tomorrow so as to help coach our All Stars at D2 Playoffs this weekend. And the clothes he needs to pack are now just sitting there in a tub of water, going nowhere.

It's probably the lid sensor switch, but I wasn't about to try to DIY that sucker on the spur of the moment, especially since such efforts would probably not play well with our home warranty thingie. So I called the home warranty people, and they called an appliance service, and a tech is going to come out on September the 8th.

Meanwhile, my assignment is to wring out the clothes, rinse them in the bathtub, wring them out again, then put them in the dryer for an all-day session on Auto Dry Moisture Sensor Something Or Other. And John's assignment is to take the other load of laundry to the laundromat, and bring it home in time that my derby jerseys can air dry.

And my work day, the one that was off to such a great start, is now all shot to hell. It's not fair.

But here I am hours later, preparing to hit the reset button on it all over a beer and also a pizza with shrimp and green onions on top. And there's this four top right behind us loudly sharing stories about waking up drunk in strange places and also the One That Got Away And Thank God For That. And they... are so very much not my people. And they're loud and right in my ear and I want to hide under the table and--

--and it occurs to me that no, I don't need them to shut up; I need to be taking notes. I don't know how to write people who aren't my people, not without turning them into some sort of caricature. I need to be taking notes and expanding my character-creation repertoire here.

So... I'll be over here in another editor window, jotting down whatever I can remember. See you later?

It was just a regular cleaning. There was no anesthetic involved, no surgery, no deep probing beneath the gums. It was just a regular dental cleaning.

Nevertheless, dear reader, it kicked me in the teeth.

After the dental hygienist was done with me, I managed enough energy to stop for groceries on my way home and put them away when I got there. Then I visited the creek to bring home the crawfish traps I hadn't been up to bringing home yesterday. (With the exception of a very juvenile specimen, small enough to resemble a centipede with pincers, they were empty.) Then I began to contemplate the work ahead of me today, and got as far as starting the electric kettle for tea before I realized two things:

First, that my gums were sore. I mean, really sore. Like, that background noise in my body that won't stop that I'm just noticing and now that I've noticed I'm not going to be able to stop noticing? That's my mouth. Hurting. All over.

And secondly, I was so sleepy that the thought of remaining upright and doing productive things with pen and paper and/or computer keyboard was physically painful. Apparently, getting up at 7:15 a.m. combined with an hour of enduring uncomfortable and sometimes painful manipulations of the mouth results in exhaustion.

So that's why my homework's late, Teach. Basically I took a half day off for sicksies. (Also, I spent a few minutes just leaning against the walkway wall and staring at the deer that was just hanging out, chillin' on the front lawn under a shade tree. Deer here is a regular occurrence, but that doesn't mean I'm about to get over it.)

But enough whining. Here's what's up for the week:

Revision efforts have brought the current draft of "Caroline's Wake" right up to the bit where Demi gets to talking with Andy, and not quite to the bit where Bobbie Mae starts dancing on the table. My assignment is to not lose the overall sense and desired pacing of the scene, while cutting about 200 words that I had thought helped the scene achieve that sense and pacing but in fact don't. So the play-by-play of the song and dance has to go, but Demi and Andy's conversation which partially reacts to the song and dance needs to stay, and to somehow imply that things are still going on and time is passing all around that conversation, while taking up a lot less space on the page. Did I mention that revisions are hard? Revisions are hard.

Content writing needs to get a bit more balanced. I've been blogging the weekend blockade round-up for Puzzle PiratesExaminer, along with monthly limited edition things (got a post planned about the limited edition Olympian Class Sloop, which I have purchased and am happily sailing around the Lacerta Archipelago), but my posts for Boulder Writing Examiner have been few and far between. And I'm out of practice finding content for that column. So I'll be working to come up with two posts a week. If nothing else, I'll post reviews of work that's eligible for the 2016 Hugos, thus doing my bit to help encourage people to nominate for next year.

Fictionettes -- do you know, I am really, really sick of being behind on the Wattpad excerpts? And of not having even a little musical accompaniment or other sound effects for the audiofictionettes? I know I keep saying this, but I'm going to really make an effort to push through that backlog.

Submissions procedures have slowed down, mainly because I haven't received any preternaturally fast rejections in the past couple weeks. Before that, it seemed like I'd on Tuesday I'd submit a story and log the submission, then on Wednesday I'd be logging its rejection and figuring out where to send it next. Quick responses can be cool--goodness knows authors complain enough about the wait time between submission and response--but they also have a cumulative effect of making me insecure about sending that piece out again. "Everyone keeps rejecting it! Every day, a new rejection! Is this story really ready for prime time after all?" Which is silly, because plenty of stories gather twenty or fifty rejections before finally finding a home. But insecurities don't have to be rational to be emotionally effective. Now that the cycle's slowed down a bit, the insecurities surrounding it are attacking with a bit less intensity. Which is good. But I haven't properly taken advantage of that lull, which is not good. So this week I want to get a few more stories into the slush, so I can be insecure about more stuff at a time.

So those are my aspirations for the week. I hope to look back on them from Friday's scenic lookout and say, "Yes, I did good this week." At least I'll have the advantage of not starting tomorrow with a sore mouth.

Today was crawfish Monday. I made sure of that, because next week I'll be in Avon, CO and unlikely to do any crawfishing. Not just because I don't know where the good crawfishing spots thereabouts might be, and not just because the water might already have gotten too cold for crawfishing at that altitude, but also because crawfish caught west of the continental divide are subject to certain restrictions to do with preventing the spread of an invasive species. (More here.) So I set the traps last night, and went out for a morning and an afternoon session of fishing with bacon-baited twine.

The traps, by the way, aren't exactly the most labor-saving device. It's not like I wake up to find an extra pound of mudbugs in there. At best, they just give me a small head start. Those four in the mesh trap this morning, and the one in the plastic 2-liter bottle trap, were five crawfish I didn't have to fight with individually nor wait for them to approach my line. Lagniappe!

I tried to do my freewriting out there, but my computer decided to crash. Both times. Not while I was inside reading blogs and eating lunch, no. While I was outside working in Scrivener. The computer just stopped responding and had to be shut down hard. And when I started it up again, the document in my Scrivener project was gone or blank, despite having saved it multiple times.

I suspect this had something to do with my computer wanting a Windows update and then a restart. Windows will let me put off these tasks indefinitely, but I've noticed that in the meantime it will punish me by running slower and glitchier. After the first crash, I came inside and installed the update. The computer took advantage of the second crash to do all the things it has to do after restarting post-update. There have been no crashes since. Just in case, though, when I recreated my freewriting page yet again (the only available back-up I could find was incomplete) I made a new copy of the RTF every five minutes or so and pasted it to my desktop.

The freewriting prompt words were "fingerprint" and "informant". I began sketching in a character who could hear fingerprints, and was convinced anyone could learn to do it if only they put forth the effort.

Meanwhile, I am full and happy on Crawfish Potato Curry, featured in the accompanying photo (taken from my flip phone since my 10-year-old Kodak EasyShare C300 finally died). Because Crawfish Monday means Recipe Monday, I shall now tell you all about it.

The total catch count was 29, most of them on the large side; they weighed in at 1 lb 11.5 oz and yielded 4.7 oz meat from tails and those claws I thought it worthwhile to pick. Actually, that was the weight on only 28 tails; I ate one straight out the boil to test the seasonings. And they did need testing, because I got experimental with those. Instead of doing the usual Cajun Land blend, I went off script and tried for a flavor that would better complement a curry. So:

• 1/4 C coarse red pepper flakes, like what Maangchi uses for making kimchi
• 1 T cracked peppercorns
• 1 T kosher salt
• maybe 2 tsp cumin seeds
• maybe 1 T garam masala
• about 5 cloves, cracked
• a large "thumb" of fresh ginger, sliced lengthwise
• 2 bay leaves

Bring to a full boil, add about 5 quartered Yukon Gold potatoes, boil for 20 minutes, add crawfish, boil for 3 minutes, remove from head, add ice, let soak for 30 minutes.

The result wasn't as spicy as the strong hot pepper smell during boiling had led me to expect. Next time, I might go with 1/2 C pepper flakes. Might also skip the cumin seeds as they didn't much come through, and the garam masala because that note seemed unnecessary. The bay, ginger, and cloves carried the day.

Meanwhile, I followed the directions on a packed of red curry paste. It called for 1 tsp. whisked into one can of coconut milk over high heat. I went with 2 tsp. instead because the color looked wimpy. This was to be allowed to simmer and thicken.

In a large frying pan, I heated canola oil and sauteed about a quarter of a big yellow onion. As they got softer, I tossed in the potatoes from the crawfish boil, cubed. When the onions were translucent and the potatoes starting to turn a little golden, I poured in the curry sauce.

Then I processed the crawfish. Tail meat and the meat from the larger claws went in a bowl. The "fat" eggs, and other edible substances from the heads (does anyone know what that creamy layer coating the inside of the shell is? Is that the true fat, as opposed to the yellow stuff that everyone just calls fat but is actually the hepatopancreas? Is it some kind of insulation against colder waters? Why are you giving me that grossed-out look? IT'S DELICIOUS) went straight into the potato-curry sauce while it simmered, for that extra crawfishy flavor.

When I was finally done peeling tails and picking the claws, I turned off the heat under the sauce and stirred in the meat. Then I stuffed my face with crawfish potato curry over microwaved leftover rice. AND IT WAS AMAZING.

And now I have told you about it. The end.

Hey, look! I got through this without the computer crashing on me!

Hola! So it's Friday again. A fictionette appears! In this corner, chthonic beasts from the darkest depths of the earth. Opposing them: a quartet of careless picnickers and their unfortunate army of disposable gladiators and household staff. It's called "A Fine Day for a Picnic," and it's unabashedly a satire of E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy.

Now, to be fair, I enjoy rereading those books. But they always hit a sour note when the children, piqued that one of the servants is fed up with their bad behavior and is threatening to bring such to the attention of their mother, will threaten their politically powerless serf with something or other that will undoubtedly lead to them getting sacked. Or they'll play horrible pranks on them. Or they'll take them away on their magic carpet and dump them on a desert island, and leave them there, and say, "Good, serves Cook right for being so horrible to us." I'm really not sure where Nesbit stood on social injustice, but she doesn't exactly go out of her way to show that the children are wrong to do this. In fact, it might be argued that since the Cook wound up queen of the savages (CW: racism) and happily married, it was good for the kids to carelessly strand her on that island. Argh.

So I sort of indulged in this short-short story about a nice afternoon outing with a high body count. Enjoy, I guess?

(The Word Dash writing prompts for that day, by the way, were "jugular" and "junket.")

So there's a fictionette out and a blog post done before 8:30 p.m. on a Friday, just for a change. Success! But on a less successful note, right after declaring war on my short story revision, I sort of knuckled under. I have no good excuse. All I can do is extend the mission to next week and keep working at it. I will get there eventually...

But, however, not tonight. Tonight I'm about to drive down to Denver, put on my skates, and do some ROLLing around. So now I will finish scarfing down my leftover gumbo, print out my electronically signed waiver, throw on something roughly similar to what I used to wear in high school, and get the heck outta here.

The repaint job on our building is over, as far as our unit is concerned. They've got a few more units to finish tomorrow, but our front patio and back balcony are all done. Everything we had to bring inside is outside again, with the exception of the bird feeder--I found out it's against our HOA rules and regs. Which is sad, but fair; if you're worried about raccoons, it makes sense to ban animal attractors. We can put our hummingbird feeder out, but that's the one exception.

The back balcony was the last thing, and the paint crew got to it yesterday. I was in the guest-bedroom-turned-office in the front of the house, but I could hear the racket of ladders--ladders being extended and put in place, people jumping down from ladders onto the balcony, people climbing up ladders to the balconies above ours--when they arrived.

It reminded me of something:

It’s this idea of ownership, I think, which is twined so closely with responsibility and duty: this little patch of earth is indisputably yours, and you must take care of it, because no one else will.

But I think I sensed that this concept of ownership was a lie even then. I knew there were countless infrastructural and financial systems whose whole beings were devoted to allowing me and every other person on the block to engage in this happy fantasy. And for them, there were no boundaries. The men who came to check the meters or the gas or cable lines were perfectly within their rights to hop a fence or open your gate and stroll right in.

A fantasy, in other words, must be maintained. And for it to be maintained, it must be violated from time to time, its fragile penumbra punctured by outsiders going about their day to day business.

That's Robert Jackson Bennett, on a very particular fear that inspired his novel American Elsewhere. Only, of course, in that story, the officially sanctioned trespassers are up to something rather different than checking the meters and maintaining the cable. They're not necessarily men and women, either.

But it's a fair point even without the special pleading of horror/fantasy. We lock the door at night and when we leave the house, and we close the office window that looks out onto a ground floor patio. But because the back-of-house access points are some ten feet off the ground, we feel safe leaving them open so that the evening breeze can freshen and cool the bedroom and living room. And it's all an illusion, pierced the first time someone--legitimate or no--comes around the back with a ladder. Hell, the illusion of security wouldn't even survive a single person who didn't mind breaking glass. And yet we lock the door and feel like we've done the whole of our duty thereby.

It's not so much that I have faith that no one will break in, or that no one will steal the patio furniture if we leave it out overnight. It's just that I choose not to think about, because if I think about it, it scares the crap out of me and makes me paranoid as hell. And that ain't no way to live.

Makes a great basis for writing horror, though.

Hello universe! I have a front patio again! Theoretically, anyway--the paint crew finished up the last bits of the front of the building that pertained to our unit and the two above us, so I think I get to put the plants and patio furniture out front again. I've decided to do that tomorrow; it was too chilly and rainy to do tonight. The plants mightn't like it. The wood folding table and chairs definitely wouldn't like it.

Which reminds me: it's about time I gave the furniture another oil treatment. Once a month was the suggestion at the store, and I'm trying to be very good about maintenance and product longevity.

So tomorrow morning I might actually get to start my writing outside--which is to say, outside on the patio, rather than outside at the creek. Then I might just get to leave everything out there on a permanent basis once again.

Meanwhile, the balcony out back is still waiting for the paint crew to come back through and paint the trim. And the plants that live out there are still hanging around the living room. The most successful of our tomato plants is sort of drooping all over everything; I was going to tie it up against the wall, but obviously this plan had to be delayed. John's little sunflower never made seeds, presumably for lack of pollination action. And my squash, denied the ability to range freely all over the floor, is attempting to climb the walls, the screen door, the mystery pepper plants, and, showing a certain amount of desperation, the parsley next pot over.

So much for the household status report. My writing status report is less interesting (IMHO), but since that's what the blog's about, I shall blog it anyway.

Finally made my way back to my Boulder Writing Examiner gig. Just submitted for review tonight an article about John Scalzi's visit to Fort Collins this Sunday. I'll give you a link as soon as I have one. My relationship with Examiner's new review process has been a mixed bag thus far; one article was approved pretty much immediately, but another--a rather timely one, actually, the Puzzle Pirates weekend blockade roundup--was sent back to me with a request to remove specific dates from the headline, and never did get approved in time to be of use to anyone. So clearly I still have some things to figure out. This time, at least, I've got several days before the article I'm trying to get approved becomes obsolete.

I'm also finally making my way back to the rewrite of "Caroline's Wake." Embarrassingly enough, it has almost been a year since an editor returned it to me with a very specific rewrite request, complete with a marked-up copy of the manuscript and everything. I'm not happy with myself about this. The editor told me not to worry about a deadline, but this, I must admit, is ridiculous.

Why have I let it languish for so long? Well, I could say I've been busy. I could cite moving house, my busy roller derby schedule, other writing deadlines I've imposed upon myself... but when I look back over the past year, it's obvious that I've been able to get some things done. Whenever I can't get everything done, this short story revision has been the first thing on the chopping block. I've been avoiding it. It's that simple.

But why? Why avoid following up on a fantastic response to one of my stories?

I suppose that, while I'm between the rewrite request and the new submission, I'm in a state of potential. Great potential! And the thing about states of potential is, they're no-risk until you try to act on that potential. Where it's at now, the story has been given a strong vote of confidence and no rejection yet.

Basically, it's that thing where the writer doesn't finish because "unfinished" has more possibility than "finished." Until it's finished, it can't be pronounced a failure. Until it's sent out, it can't be rejected.

Which is, logically, a ridiculous excuse. But emotionally it makes so much sense.

Still. Emotionally, it's also got me in a state of stagnation. I'm producing very little new fiction while I'm sitting here frozen on this rewrite request. Knowing that I'm in the middle of one project makes it hard to justify starting other projects. So while this doesn't get done, very little else gets done either. I need to move. The unfinished dragon needs to be finished!

So that rewrite is now my mission for this week. Wish me luck.

Ha! I pun. This Friday's Fictionette is called "The Once and Future Hot Potato." Get it? "Don't get caught..." *Grooooan.*

It's about a kids' game, of course, but also about nostalgia and memory and divergent timelines. As always you can read the excerpt by following the link... and scrolling down to the text below the huuuuuge photo. (That's the original photo I used in this week's cover art, taken with my flip-phone at its highest quality photo setting. It's kind of blurry and very, very big.) If you want to read the whole thing, you should follow the links at the bottom of the excerpt to the PDF and the MP3. (Or just click them here.) If you are not already a subscriber to Friday Fictionettes, those pages will provide you with everything you need to become one with minimal fuss.

Meanwhile, over at my main writing gig, which is the writing and attempted selling of short fiction...

So I got a rejection letter today. This is not a surprise; I've been sending out a submission almost every day (yay!), and some of those markets are very quick to eliminate whatever it is they don't want. This particular market took about a day. They're the kind of place you send everything first, because if they say Yes you get a not-insignificant per-word pay rate in a prestigious professional magazine, and if they say No you won't be waiting long to find out.

No, the surprise was the paragraph added to the usual familiar form email, the paragraph reminding me to please in future use Standard Manuscript Format.

How embarrassing. I have been sending out manuscripts in Standard Manuscript Format for over twenty years now. I do not, by this time of my career, need to review an example. I'm more likely to err on the side of old-school Standard Manuscript Format by forgetting to change my underlines to italics or my Courier New to Times New Roman where a market specifically requests it. I was mortified to see that paragraph. Good Gods, what a newbie I must have looked.

Then I opened up the file I'd sent them, and was further mortified.

It was a mess, y'all. Both headers, the first-page header and the all-subsequent-pages header, were on the first page. Which was otherwise blank. Which was followed by nine other pages that were blank except for the all-subsequent-pages header. Which was followed by a page that was almost just as blank, but with the title. The next page had my byline. Then another blank page. Then, a page with just the first paragraph of the story.

Things didn't look normal until page 15, where the second paragraph of the story appeared and was followed by the third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs, and so forth, continuing as normal until the end of both story and document. But of course, by then, the damage was done. I'm amazed they read it at all (I am reasonably certain that they did).

Of course I looked like a newbie. What a total newbie mistake--to send along a manuscript file sight unseen.

So this is your Public Service Announcement, friends and colleagues: Before you hit SUBMIT, always open up the file and make sure the Manuscript is acceptably Formatted according to Standards.

(Also maybe don't make any changes in Open Office. Make all changes in Scrivener and recompile. Open Office is apparently notorious for terrible RTF support.)

Today was an improvement. Instead of sleeping late and dragging around the house because of headaches and sinus pressure, I slept late and dragged about the house for the sheer pleasure of being pain-free for the first time in two days. Seriously, we are talking no small amount of bliss here.

Also, I had a dream I wanted to dwell on, or perhaps dwell in, for a little while after initially waking up with it. It involved moving into a new house, entertaining a very small child guest therein, and discovering an oven mitt full of cat hair that was defying the laws of physics. I blame late-night reading of the blog and other writings of Robert Jackson Bennett. On the one hand, the bit about acknowledging property boundaries for the communal fiction that they are, and recognizing the implied nightmare therein; and on the other hand, the bit about the Roomba.

So I got started late, but I did get started. I got busy with my submission procedures: I logged two rejection letters and sent one of the rejected stories back out again to a new market. One of the rejection letters was, happily, a response to a query letter I sent out last month seeking the status of a story I submitted last year. While I'd always prefer the story be accepted and published, it's a relief also to have the story simply pop free and be available for me to submit elsewhere. Which I hope to do tomorrow.

I got busy with overdue blogging: I finally wrote up the results of my recent Puzzle Pirates Seal o' Piracy experiments for the betterment of all. Examiner has recently moved to a new editorial model where everything you submit must be reviewed before it'll go live. I was disappointed to not be immediately placed on their list of writers the quality of whose output is sufficiently trusted that they can automatically bypass the review stage, admittedly. But given that I uploaded the post just before leaving for scrimmage, and the post had been approved and published by the time I got home, I can't complain too much. We'll see if they're just as quick at Saturday mornings; the blockade round-up is timely stuff.

Then I got home from scrimmage and got busy in the kitchen. Have I mentioned Ad Astra: The 50th Anniversary SFWA Cookbook? It's a cookbook. It's handsomely covered and conveniently spiral bound. You can buy a copy, physical or electronic. I'm in it, hawking my crockpot red beans and rice on page 154, but more to the point, a handful of handy, tasty, quick & easy mug cake recipes are in it. These are recipes where you mix everything up in a mug and then microwave the resulting batter, and you get a one-person dessert that honestly took more time to pull out and measure all the ingredients than it did to cook.

I made the Banana Cake from page 30 in one of my large tea/soup mugs. I had bananas turning black in the fridge, after all, but it's been so hot, I've been reluctant to bake more banana bread. Microwaving a mug for four minutes produces a lot less heat and just as much deliciousness. I did it twice, because the recipe only called for half a banana, and what else am I going to do with the second half of the banana? And that was fine. It was delicious twice. I had one of them before my humongous antipasta salad (we ordered Blackjack Pizza when we got home from scrimmage, and I honestly find that salad with all its cold cuts and bacon and olives and cheese and hugeness to be more filling and more fulfilling than pizza), and another afterwards. With a beer. An Abita Turbodog, to be precise.

I should point out, though, if you should acquire a copy of Ad Astra (and you should! Money well spent and for a good cause!) that the bit about "1/4 c baking powder" has got to be a typo. When you look at the other mug cake recipes, and when you look at the 1/3 c flour and pinch of salt in this one, you realize 1/4 tsp is a lot more likely. I have mentioned this to the wonderful and hard-working editors, in case they are putting together an errata page.

I'm pretty sure my red beans and rice recipe came out as intended. I skimmed it, anyway, and it looked OK. Maybe next time I make the stuff I'll use Ad Astra instead of my usual index card cheat-sheet and double-check.

I think I have a barometer in my head. I woke up with a headache that lingered all day long, and all day long my ears popped and itched. Then this afternoon it rained for the first time in what feels like weeks. It's as good a theory as any, right? I should start keeping track, develop a chart showing the correspondence between changes in barometric pressure and days where I feel like crud.

Actually, it's a crappy theory. Data from Denver International Airport shows about the same range of pressure for yesterday as today, topping out at 30.3 on both days. And I felt fine yesterday. Granted, that's a high for the past seven days, rising from a low on Friday of 29.9--maybe it's a delayed reaction? Maybe I feel like crud on the second day after barometric pressure reaches a new high and stays there? I'm totally stretching for an explanation here. Any vaguely plausible nonsense will do.

Other theories include PMS and also maybe not drinking enough water last night after a high-sodium dinner and a beer. I dunno.

In any case, the result was me dragging around the house in a constant state of blah. I have no interesting reports to make, writing related or otherwise. Just a plea for do-overs on today.

Oh, here, have a recipe for Leftovers Day Crawfish Chowder:

1. Melt a tablespoon of butter in a medium pot over medium heat.
2. Chop up half an onion and throw it in.
3. Chop up a good handful of potatoes leftover from a crawfish boil.
4. Add any other leftovers from the boil that float your boat: garlic, sausage, mushrooms, corn, whatever.
5. Once onions are soft and potatoes are softer, add about a pint of the stock you made from the crawfish shells. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, simmer for a few minutes.
6. Mash the potatoes a little.
7. Add however much milk gives a consistency that says "chowder" to you. Simmer a few minutes more.
8. Devour. Repeat if still hungry.

So that was dinner. So I made something today. Tomorrow I shall no doubt make something else.

Once again, I got last week's Friday Fictionette done on time, but, due to evening plans (watching roller derby at the Fillmore and supporting my Boulder County Bombers All Stars!), never managed to get a blog post up. Please pretend this is that blog post, at least for a few paragraphs.

Anyway, the Friday Fictionette for August 7 is "Mucking Out the Kelpie." It name-checks Maureen Johnson's short story "The Children of the Revolution" in the author's notes, but as far as its fantasy subgenre goes (the care and feeding of magical creatures), it's really got more in common with Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven and Carrie Vaughn's short story "The Temptation of Robin Green." It's about having to do a dangerous, terrifying job whose mundane dailiness has made it just plain tedious. And also kind of gross. I mean, kelpie shit. Ew.

In other fictionette news, I'm slowly catching up on posting excerpts to Wattpad, at which point I will begin to be able to think about such things as filling out the audiofictionette archives and maybe composing a few simple piano ditties to include in the recordings.

Since today was Monday, I got to spend much of it playing Puzzle Pirates (getting my Seal o' Piracy trophy for August! woot!), sitting on the couch watching John play Skyrim, crawfishing down at the creek, and cooking and eating my catch. I caught an even 40 and settled for a very simple crawfish boil for one out on the patio. Then I made stock with the shells. I had a couple bags of shells from previous adventures stowed away in the fridge, but as it turns out I don't actually have a pot sufficiently sized for four pounds shells and eight quarts water. So I did a half-batch. By the time that was done, I declined to do a second half-batch, because it was 11:30 and I was tired. (I only began crawfish boiling operations around 8:00, just to put that late hour in context.)

I am now sipping a warm, savory cup of crawfish stock and contemplating another Puzzle Pirates session.

Tomorrow, being Tuesday, means back to work with a seriousness. Hopefully there will be interesting writing-related things to report at that time. Til then, I'm clinging to my last shred of weekend and you can't take it away from me!