author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Hey, look, it's tomorrow, and I'm dang well writing a blog post. And I'm going to start it off with more maddeningly vague news of a celebratory nature: Today's email included two rejections (one a form and one personal) AND ONE ACCEPTANCE. That's three acceptances in a single month and I'm starting to wonder when the other shoe will drop.

Maybe it already has dropped. I mean, just for example, if you're a Rush fan--and I'm a huge one--January got off to a rocky start, to say the least. (I don't feel I can blog about Neil Peart's passing yet. Maybe not ever. It's too big and sad, and others have said anything I could have said about it much more eloquently.) And if you're a sports fan, you just got some pretty terrible news this weekend about Kobe Bryant. The year 2020 is being totally tactless about how it hands out its good and bad news, just utterly failing to read the room. "Hey, so, don't be mad, but I killed off one of your lifelong heroes. Sorry, kid. Everyone dies eventually. But, hey! I'm making sure you get a ton of stuff published! So... we still cool?"

2020: The year of Really Good Stuff and Really Bad Stuff. Just like every other year in human history, I guess. I hope others affected by the Really Bad Stuff have some Good Stuff of their own to balance things out and make the Bad Stuff easier to bear. Because 2020 owes all of us a goddamn debt, right? Let's make it pay through the nose.

So, OK. This post was supposed to focus on the Good Stuff, so let's do that.

My two big fiction sales in 2019 were reprints, and I was glad of them, but they did leave me wondering if I'd ever write any publishable prose ever again. The flurry of poetry successes isn't to be sneezed at, true! But short stories are where my heart lives, and I began to doubt whether that love was requited. Then came the sales to Daily Science Fiction and Cast of Wonders, which made me do the Happy Dance Incessant! And yet those were pieces written in 2014 and 2018, respectively. What if I just... never wrote anything good again? What if I was doomed to sub and resub the same stable of stories, either placing them or trunking them ("trunking" is filing a story away as unpublishable and not submitting it anywhere anymore), maybe reprinting a few, but never successfully finishing new publishable works again?

(I believe that cognitive behavioral therapy calls this "catastrophizing." I'm kinda prone to it, if you hadn't noticed.)

So, hey, turns out that's not the case. The story that just now today got accepted for publication was written in its entirety during the first week of January. Hm. Well. "First week" is overstating things. I'd say 90% of the drafting and all of the editing was done on deadline day, because me and responsible adult time management are hardly ever in the same room and also not on speaking terms. I stayed home from roller derby practice to finish it, which meant I finished it Under Pain of Regret--I'd have desperately regretted skipping practice and not had a story submission to show for it. But I did finish it, I did submit it, I felt good about it, and I went to bed hardly regretting the lack of skating in the previous 24 hours at all.

And now that story's been accepted, which not only makes me feel that much less guilty about skipping practice that night, but also helps to reassure me that, there, Niki, you see, you can still write new stuff and get it published! Look at you, writing and selling new stuff like a real goddamn writer and everything!

I'm also pretty pleased because one of the hardest things to do is take a story that was specifically written to a particular market's theme and then try to sell it somewhere else. I'm still kind of annoyed with myself for failing to revise that old bringing-potato-salad-to-the-cult-meeting story in time to submit it to Galactic Stew, and that theme was just "spec fic in which food is important." This theme was much more specific. You just know that the editors at all the other markets are going to be like, "Ye Gods, not another story about Kangaroos from Alpha Centauri! Rejections must be going out for the Marsupials in Space anthology. *facepalm*" (Note: My story was not about Kangaroos from Alpha Centauri. If you like the idea of a Marsupials in Space anthology, feel free to Kickstart it yourself, because I don't think it actually exists. Yet.) For this reason the Clarkesworld guidelines list "stories written for someone else's theme anthology or issue" among their hard sells. So I'm rather relieved not to have to worry about a new home for my very specifically themed story at this time.

OK, so, well, that was a heck of a lot of blog post to write about something I'm not even sharing useful details about yet. Hi. This is my brain. I hope you've enjoyed your visit. MORE LATER. Good night!

So this past Friday I received an email indicating that the contract I signed Tuesday was complete, all parties had signed it and everything, so this thing is real and I can tell you everything now:

My very short story, "The Soup Witch's Funeral Dinner", originally a Friday Fictionette and the Fictionette Freebie for March 2018, will be produced and podcast by Cast of Wonders, part of the Escape Artists podcast family and the leading voice in young adult speculative short fiction. I do not at this time have a specific air date, but I will report the moment I receive one.

Or at least the moment I have a moment to blog after that.

I may have mentioned that this is one of my dream markets? Very much so yes. I've been listening to a lot of their recent episodes, pretty much every time I've got a drive of at least twenty minutes' duration--and January is a great time to listen to Cast of Wonders, since that's when they replay their favorites from the previous year with all new commentary from the staff member who fell in love with each story--and I keep telling myself, "This is awesome wonderful fantastic fiction and someone decided my story is good enough to hang with them."

I can't quite get over it.

The acceptance letter includes a reminder that, hey, obviously we like your stuff--please send us more the moment we're open to submissions again! So OK. I shall.

I'm currently writing this post off-line. Every other Monday I'm in Longmont for the evening, charging the Volt at Village at the Peaks and putting in a work session at The Post Brewing Company in Longmont. The chicken is amazing, the beer is tasty, and the bartender is good company. Unfortunately, their wifi has been kaput for a couple months now. But! I have a new flip phone! It's an Alcatel Go Flip, rather an epiphany after the 8-year-old Samsung M360 I was limping along with until it took a fall onto cement a couple weeks ago and cracked its housing and severed the connection to the display. And this brand new flip phone, it has a wifi hotspot as long as I don't mind spending my entire teeny tiny data plan allowance on it. So I was able to do today's Submissions Procedures session and enjoy the Post's amazing roast bird with garlic mojo--right up until I ran my phone out of battery. At which point I switched to composing blog posts offline.

(Update: I will probably be increasing my data plan just a little. Tonight's hotspot session used about 45 MB mobile data, and my grandfathered plan only includes an eensy 25 MB. Which was more than sufficient when I had a phone that never did more with data than send or receive the odd photo, when the sending or receiving of photos could actually be bothered to function. It didn't always. Hell, the Samsung couldn't even surf the web without choking on SSL. But things are different now, and I'd better adjust.)

This phone--well, it's kind of like when John and I got the Volt. We simply could not get over the fact that we now owned a vehicle with modern features like cruise control. I can't get over that I have a phone with wifi and an mp3 player and viable import/export of .vcf format contacts over bluetooth and the ability to access its storage via my laptop over USB. Things any old modern dumb phone ought to be able to do. Things that should not be so exciting except that I'm enjoying them for the first time now. Whee! "Hey, who else is available to time someone's 27-in-5?" says the coach, and "Me me me me!" says me. That's how stupidly excited I am to have a stopwatch with a lap counter on my phone. (The Samsung did not have a stopwatch. It did not have a timer. It had a function called "Countdown" which was exactly the same as a calendar reminder only without the ability to input a text memo.) Listening to podcasts in the car is a lot simpler now; the phone has less storage space than my laptop, but it's a hell of a lot less clunky to deal with at stoplights. Also it doesn't fool the car into thinking I have a passenger who forgot to buckle their seat belt.

Oh! So, if anyone out there reading this is familiar with the Alcatel Go Flip: I found one review claiming that it can handle .m3u playlists, but it didn't go into detail, and I can't for the life of me figure out how. Meanwhile I'm kludging playlists by editing tracks' Album metadata. If anyone is able to share a more graceful way to make the Alcatel Go Flip do playlists, I'm all ears.

All for now--I'm trying to keep my blog posts short and sweet so that 1. they don't take me an hour and a half to write a post, and 2. I stand a chance blogging once daily rather than weekly or, gods forfend, monthly. More tomorrow AND I MEAN THAT THIS TIME. Good night!

I have a couple new pending publications to announce for the New Year!

...Wow, that sounded a lot like the way last blog post started out. Of course, last blog post was almost a month ago. Twenty days, anyway. More or less. What'd I wrap up that post with, something about how "tomorrow" I was going to share a recipe? Sheesh. Hold that thought, though.

Here's the thing. When 2019 ended, three of my outstanding submissions were in HELD PENDING FURTHER CONSIDERATION status. Which is always a hopeful thing, but more often than not ends in REJECTION, PERSONAL. I have learned to get my hopes up only so far when I receive a HOLD notice.

And then on January 11, two of those HOLDS converted into ACCEPTANCES.

I can tell you in detail about one of them: Daily Science Fiction, well-respected purveyor of exactly what it sounds like, will publish my drabble, "The Rarest of Prey", in the coming months. The estimate I was given was two to three months, but thanks to intel from acquaintances I know this may in practice mean anywhere between 10 and 90 days. So you might as well just make a visit to DSF part of your complete breakfast. Read stories, love stories, rank and comment on stories, and maybe even support the stories so that the stories continue to appear in the green and white boxes. You won't be sorry!

The other story soon to be published will in fact be a reprint, and if you follow my Friday Fictionette project, you may already have read it; it's a past month's Fictionette Freebie. It is soon to be reprinted by one of my dream markets and I am over the moon. I should be able to reveal more details soon; I just returned the contract with my signature today.

I keep visiting each story's submission status on each publisher's interface and hitting REFRESH just to reassure myself that it's really real, it absolutely happened, two of my dream markets actually sent me acceptance letters this month. Payment's small beans because the one is only 100 words long and the other's a reprint, but it's a huge deal on my Wanna-be Writer Bucket List. Thus, I am happy dance for the forseeable future.

OK. So. I promised a recipe. Turns out I did already post the mirliton casserole recipe a whiles back, so you can click that link, or you can read on for...

Multi-cooker Recovery Dal: a tale in three functions

...for when you've just got home from roller derby practice (or tryouts!) and you're hungry but also too tired and brain-fried to cook anything complicated. Multi-cookers are GREAT for this. You may be familiar with The Instapot; I have a Lux Fagor Multicooker, which is less revered the internet over but does basically the same thing. Like so:

1. SAUTE function: 5 minutes. Couple tablespoons canola oil (or a tbl canola and a tbl mustard if you can get it); half an onion, chopped; couple cloves garlic, smashed and minced. If you have a bunch of root vegetables from last fall you're trying to use up, chop 'em up and throw them in. It'll make it more filling. I like parsnips. When onions are soft, add black pepper, cayenne pepper, salt, turmeric, whole cumin. Those last three are key. Don't stint. Toss in any additional fancy peppers and salts that make you happy. If you haven't got any mustard oil, toss in some ground mustard at this time, too. (Mustard oil must be labeled EXTERNAL USE ONLY/NOT FOR CONSUMPTION in the US because of reasons. I got mine at India's Grocery around the corner here in Boulder. If it's a massage oil product, double-check that it's 100% mustard oil and not full of random other ingredients. I'm all, erucic acid, sure thing, but shea butter? Hard pass. Anyway...) Stir the spices around in the sauteeing veg until your kitchen smells wonderful (about a minute).
2. PRESSURE/HIGH function: 15 minutes. I add 3/4 cup red lentils and 4 cups water, give it all a good stir, and then seal the lid tight and start the pressure cook function. (I watch it like a hawk for the first few minutes to make sure steam isn't escaping out the sides; I think the lid's gasket is already starting to wear out. Boo.) When the 15 minutes is up and the pot beeps at you, turn the knob from PRESSURE to STEAM, i.e. perform a pressure quick-release. We are all far too hungry to wait on the natural release method, and besides, them beans are cooked. You can serve 'em up now and devour 'em. Or, if you can bear to wait just a few minutes longer, you can do what I do, which is to poach an egg in that glorious mess, like so...
3. SIMMER: 5 to 7 minutes. Depends on how hard you like your egg poached. Just crack that sucker in there, hopefully without any bits of shell accompanying it, put the lid back on, and start the simmer function for the desired time.

When next the timer beeps, all that remains is to ladle yourself up a bowl and just try not to burn your mouth in your impatience. Which is thoroughly understandable. It's been half an hour since you got home and you need your protein!

Bonus: Enjoy in the bathtub with a soda and/or adult beverage of choice. LOOK, I DON'T JUDGE.

I have a couple new publications to announce for the holidays!

First, for Winter Solstice, we have the latest issue of the Pagan literary journal Eternal Haunted Summer. It includes my poem "Hold the Door", a tongue-in-cheek contemplation of homesickness framed by an invocation to Papa Legba.

Second, for New Year's Eve or reasonably thereabouts, we have Episode 413 of the Tales to Terrify podcast. It features my story "Lambing Season" as read by the excellent Summer Brooks. It went live on the last Friday in 2019, and I've only had a chance to listen to it today. (I'm always nervous about hearing someone else read my stories. Then, when they're done, I always wonder why I was nervous.) It's longer than most of my stories, and a bit of a slow burn. Enjoy it with a mug of tea while wearing something warm and fuzzy.

On Winter Solstice, our Yule Log, a formidable chunk of elm, burned all night long and then down to ash. A friend and I had the first test slices of this year's fruitcake, shared some very tasty brandy, and worked on hand crafts together. Mine was a pair of socks that had been lurking unfinished in my bookbag for far too long. I finished them. (They are warm and fuzzy.)

John and I spent the last weekend of the year down in Colorado Springs with family near and extended, old and new, local and out-of-town. Mostly we cooked and ate good food, watched a lot of football, and took a healthy amount of naps.

One of the things we ate was a mirliton & shrimp casserole produced somewhat by committee: I brought seven mirliton that I'd bought recently and not yet got around to cooking, and I added to it the remaining portion of the shrimp Dad brought up from Louisiana and the onion, green pepper and celery that our hosts volunteered from their stash and chopped up. (The author's chronic homesickness was nicely assuaged, if temporarily.)

Another thing shared was a big chunk of the fruitcake, which was a lot closer to acceptably boozed up by then. The addition of candied citron turns out to have been an asset after all. Whew!

I may regale you with the casserole recipe--or, as "recipe" is saying too much, method--tomorrow, if I haven't already done that on this blog at some point or other. But not tonight. Tonight I am keeping my blog post short and to the point.

& so goodnight!

So I'm baking a fruitcake today.

I almost didn't bother. It's less than a week until Winter Solstice, so it won't really be ready to open up at the annual all-nighter Winter Solstice vigil and open house. It won't have had time to soak up enough booze. Besides, I don't even have the wherewithal to host the all-nighter this year anyway, so why bother with a fruitcake?

And then I thought, screw it. I like fruitcake. I like mailing slices to long-distance friends. And Dad's going to be in town shortly after Christmas, and he likes fruitcake. So let's do this thing.

But let's also be kind to myself about it, all right?

So when I browsed Whole Food's bulk section for dried fruits, I prioritized stuff that didn't need chopping up. I got raisins, both golden and Thompson. I got currants. I got blueberries, sour cherries, and cranberries. The only things I got that needed chopping up were the dates and the prunes. Why prunes? Prunes are tasty. Also they are easier to chop up than dried figs.

Then I forgot about "be kind to myself" long enough to pick up a Buddha's Hand Citron and make plans to candy it. Which I finally got around to doing last night.

Want to play along at home? Here's the recipe I used.

So his ingredients list includes weights for everything except the citrons themselves. Two citrons, the recipe calls for. But in the introductory blurb, the author refers to "one 8 ounce (240g) fresh citron", so I assumed the recipe called for 480 grams of chopped up citron. I also assumed from "cut them up into 1/2-inch cubes" that including the pith of the citron was OK. Thank goodness. I hadn't been looking forward to carefully peeling the zest off a fruit so inconveniently shaped for applying a peeler. I wound up with about 375 grams of citron and adjusted the other two ingredient quantities accordingly.

The bit where you're supposed to "blanch the citron pieces in barely simmering water for 30 to 40 minutes, until translucent" was a lie. Some 75% of the fruit was nicely transparent by minute 45; the remaining 25% only got part of the way there over an additional 45 minutes. This seems extreme even given how widely my citron pieces varied from the prescribed 1/2" cube. The next step took forever too. You'd think at a high altitude it would take less time to boil off sufficient water to result in 230-degree syrup, but my candy thermometer didn't reach the magic number for at least an hour. It was 1:00 am by then, so instead of leaving the citron to sit in the syrup for an hour and then straining it, I left it to soak overnight. I went to bed.

In the morning, the pot contained a block of something that was too soft to be called "citron brittle" but certainly too solid to pour. So I stuck that pot inside another pot to heat it in a water bath until it did pour. I poured it into a strainer and left it there as I went about my morning. When I came back, what remained in the strainer was more or less one solid mass again, so I rinsed it with boiling water (I'd have to rinse it for the fruitcake recipe anyway) until I had individual pieces which I could scatter on parchment paper to dry.

This was not what was meant by "being kind to myself." But I've been snacking on candied citron all morning, which is by no means a bad thing. And I'm kind of eager to do it again, knowing what I know now. For instance:

• The recipe told me to use the coarsest sugar I could find. The coarsest I had on hand was raw turbinado, which has a molasses component that I probably could have done without. This made the syrup much darker than in the recipe's photos. It also probably made it stickier.
• I'd probably skip step 4 and proceed directly from "we have reached 230 degrees" to "Strain."
• I might try doing it with just the zest. I'd hate to lose the slight bitter note from the pith which compliments the sweetness so well, but it might make blanching the fruit take a lot less time.
• The reason I did this at all was Whole Foods being out of candied ginger when I went fruitcake shopping. Maybe next year I'll candy my own ginger. I'll be able to cut fresh ginger into the long, thin shapes I prefer, rather than trying to cut up already candied ginger cubes. Fresh ginger is much easier than sticky candied ginger is to cut.
• And I'll darn well start earlier than 9:30 at night!

So now all that remains is to actually bake the fruitcake later this afternoon or evening. That's the easy part.

As for Winter Solstice itself, while I'm not going to announce to every social circle that I'm holding party space open all night long, I'm still going to hold vigil, keeping a fire lit the whole night through and waiting for the return of the sun. That part of the ritual is my own personal Pagan religious observation. I'll always do that, party or no party. And I'll probably still cook all the things I usually cook, because when else do I get to drink home-made eggnog and eat medieval midwinter pie?

And I'll probably spend a good part of the night writing like it's the first few hours of NaNoWriMo. Or the last. If any friends in the area want to join me in writing or crafting, or reading stories aloud, or reciting poetry, or other such quiet celebrations of creativity, my door will be open to you from sundown on Saturday night to sunrise on Saturday morning.

And the fruitcake won't really be ready by then, but we can give it a taste.

So I learned some things about myself and my workflow this past November. To start with, I learned that I very rarely manage to fulfill all my goals for a given day. Doesn't matter whether it's a kind and even coddling low-bar list, or a ludicrously over-ambitious goal that is sure to end in failure and self-loathing. Be it ever so reasonable, I'm not going to get through it. Some imp of the perverse, an attack of inexplicable fatigue, or just the usual cocktail of anxiety and avoidance, will waylay me between the start of a checklist and its finish. I'll try! I'll try really hard! And I'll tell myself, "Hey, self, if you're any good at all, you'll do this." And then I don't, so I come away feeling like I am in fact no good at all.

But I will try. The fear of feeling like I'm a no-good horrible lazy-ass hopeless case will provide enough motivation at the beginning to get me moving, and then I'll keep going on that momentum for a bit before the self-loathing kicks in, and I accept that I suck, and I shut down.

OK, it's not always as dire as that. Some days things are a lot more positive! The excitement about getting all this stuff done will kick me off, and the happy feeling of accomplishment over the first tasks will keep me going... and then exhaustion will kick in, or the sudden realization that I am TOTALLY OUT OF TIME, and I'll come to a halt while two or three items remain undone.

Either way, I'll generally get about two-thirds of the way through my agenda for the day.

So here's the epiphany: Over-ambitious goals don't have to end in failure and self-loathing. If I make myself a list that's about 130% as long as a list of reasonable length, I can trick myself into getting the reasonable portion done. And if I set my mind right at the beginning of the day, I can forgive myself the undone portion of the list as having been intended as bonus items anyway.

Brains are weird! If explicitly tell myself "These last few items are just lagniappe," I'd expect to completely fail to take those items seriously at all. I'd expect to ignore them, treat the rest of the list like the "real" list, and then only get about two thirds of the way through that. And yet I do find myself trying really hard to get to those bonus items. In video games, I have a completist mind set; this may be the brain-glitch I'm taking advantage of. Still, that being the case, I'd expect to experience a lot more crushing disappointment in myself when I don't complete the list. But somehow the message from that morning lingers: "If you get to these, awesome, but no big deal if not."

It all feels very contradictory. It's certainly not a strategy I deliberately set out to try. I more or less stumbled into it during the latter half of November, when I got really determined to finish and upload all those overdue Friday Fictionettes. I missed some days' revision and submission sessions, but dang I wrote some flash fiction on hyperdrive! And I felt good about it.

Speaking of which: The Friday Fictionette for November 15 just went up yesterday. It's called "The Story Master" (ebook, audio, blame the southern accent on a conversation we had over dinner Tuesday night) and it's based on a recurring family bullying incident, only replace "older cousins and sadistic uncle" with "horrible, sadistic ghost." Also, replace "Stephen King novels" with "graphic tales of violence and abuse, some possibly perpetrated by the ghost when he was alive." The graphic tales are only alluded to, not spelled out on the page, so I don't think any content warnings are called for here. The only one getting triggered here is me; for the rest of the afternoon, my brain kept reliving and futilely reinventing all the greatest and most toxic hits of that era. An overactive imagination can be a terrible thing, y'all. Anyway, I hope to release the November 22 Fictionette by the end of the weekend.

Back to the daily grind. The lesson I've taken away from all this is,

1. When setting my day's agenda, consciously distinguish between "must do" and "nice to have".
2. Put the "must do" components first, the "nice to haves" later.
3. When I complete a task, take a moment to just bask in the happy of it before going on to the next.
4. When ending for the day, consciously congratulate myself on how much I got done. Remember and relive the post-task happy. Refuse to scold myself over incomplete items.

As alluded to above, my brain is very good at reliving past trauma. It will do it on autopilot and it will do it on infinite loop. But it seems like I ought to be able to put that facility to use in positive ways.

When I was in college, I worked my first regular "real job" at the dorm cafeteria. The length of the shift looming ahead of me seemed terribly daunting. To encourage the hours to pass more quickly, I'd imagine listening to an album I knew and loved. I'd get it started by visualizing an audio cassette tape player's capstans turning while the first song "played." After that, the whole album would run through in my head, one song after the other, and it would almost be like really listening to it on the stereo. It wasn't quite on the level of true auditory hallucinations, but it was the next best thing.

So if my brain can do that, then it can certainly go and sit inside another good memory of my choosing. So that's what I'm going to practice, going forward.

Hello blog! Long time, no write. I've been getting a lot done--November kept me super busy!--but blogging keeps falling to the bottom of the priority list. Which is a shame, because there's some good news I'm way overdue to report.

First off, the Fall 2019 issue of Sycorax Journal went live round-abouts Halloween, and my poem, "At Night, the Dead", is in it.

Second, a reminder that the debut issue of The Macabre Museum, with my poem "Your Disembodied Friends Would Like to Remind You" in it, is available for purchase on Amazon or for download via Patreon.

Third, a reminder that you should keep an eye on the podcast Tales To Terrify, as the episode featuring my short story "Lambing Season" is imminent. It's supposed to go up by the end of the year, and, well, there's only four Fridays left in 2019. So. Imminent.

Lastly, a new poem of mine has just been accepted for publication! More details when it goes live, which should be more or less on the Winter Solstice.

So how was your November, friends? Mine was busy. I didn't participate in National Novel Writing Month, but I spent much of the month in the online company of those who were, which is to say, with other users of 4thewords and other members of my Habitica guilds. So I joined in the fun and set myself a modest goal for November. It was simply this: to not miss a single day, from November 1 to November 30, in doing my daily freewriting. And I did it! There are 30 files in the November folder in my Daily Idea scrivener project, and two of those files turned into poems that have gone on to be submitted. One of them is still out, awaiting a decision; the other is the one that just got accepted today.

I also haven't missed a daily freewriting session in December so far. Only two days in, of course, but it feels like November did a good job cementing the habit down hard. The idea of skipping a day, even on a weekend, just doesn't feel right anymore. Let's see how long I can hold onto that.

I also set myself the less modest goal of catching the hell up on everything Friday Fictionette. Unfortunately, I'm still about three weeks behind on the every first through fourth Friday release schedule, but I'm hoping to get back on track very soon. I just uploaded the November 8 offering this afternoon ("Two Weeks By Daylight", ebook here, audiobook here, it's about a werewolf on the moon) and have high hopes for pushing the November 15 fictionette live tomorrow evening. The November 2018 Fictionette Artifact hits the mail tomorrow (yes, I'm a year behind on those--huge apologies to my $5 Patrons) and all the monthly Fictionette Freebies I ought to have unlocked by now will be unlocked by the end of the week because why the hell not? It's not like it involves much more than editing the post and changing the status from "Patrons Only" to "Public"! *Sigh.*

Anyway, the above is probably why I never managed to blog at all for the entirety of November. Wait, let me check... Yep, my last blog post was on October 28. Oddly enough, there was leftover kimchi jjigae in my refrigerator then, and, since I cooked some yesterday, there is leftover kimchi jjigae in my refrigerator now. Apparently, if we want me to blog, we have to feed me kimchi stew. I mean, I'm not complaining...

I'm still getting over the gluey aftermath of the week-long cold that hit me upon my return to the Denver area. I'm very, very sore from yesterday's yoga-for-derby-skaters session, which, possibly because the yoga instructor knew her audience, turned out to be more of a two-hour conditioning session masquerading as a yoga session. Also there is a lot of snow outside.

Good thing I have a ton of leftover kimchi-jjigae in my refrigerator.

This is a statement requiring several caveats. Or possibly one big caveat, from which all the other caveats flow, which is to say, I made the stuff, so don't expect a high level of fidelity to the recipe as written.

I use Maangchi's recipe, which is a good place to start. Possibly the best place to start. Maanchi's blog is my absolute go-to for all Korean cuisine. Read it, love it, bookmark it, eat it, order the cookbooks, watch all the videos. She's wonderful, and she makes a point to lead her non-Korean fans gently by the hand through the maze of unfamiliar cultural touchstones and unfamiliar ingredients labeled in an unfamiliar language. Her recipes are great, is what I'm saying.

It's when the recipe falls into my hands that all the trouble starts.

First off, I don't pay much attention to ingredient proportions. I mean, it's soup. Stew, actually, not that this changes much. I approach kimchi-jjigae with the same mindset as I approach all soup recipes, which is this: It's soup. It is not baking. It does not rely on precise chemistry. It will tolerate variation and substitution. In fact, this is how I approach a lot of recipes that aren't soup. I've substituted yellow squash for carrots in tomato soup because I had squash and not carrots in the house at the time and the whole thing was going through the blender anyway. I substitute parsley for cilantro in any recipe calling for cilantro because I don't like cilantro, and I will substitute carrot greens for parsley if I have the one on hand but not the other. I'll typically double any recipe's call for garlic or green onions, because there's nothing in my opinion that can't be improved thereby. There are things I won't bother measuring because life's too short. It all turns out fine, but it's worth knowing, if you're ever in a position to eat stuff I cook, that this is how I cook.

So my kimchi-jjigae wound up with a full package of tofu rather than half a package, because I don't do tofu by the half package. It also wound up with two and a quarter pounds of pork belly rather than a half pound, because after defrosting the slab of meat I'd rather not put myself on the "use the rest before it goes bad" doomsday countdown. Besides, I like pork belly. I also like green onions quite a bit, as mentioned above, so I put most of a bunch in the pot where the recipe called for two, and most of the rest of the bunch in at the end where the recipe called for one. And then I'm not sure how close I got to the recommended pound of kimchi plus quarter cup kimchi brine, because I didn't bother weighing, draining, or otherwise measuring the contents of the two jars of kimchi I had in the fridge before I dumped it all in.

Those two jars consisted of one (1) jar of McCauley Family Farm's "radish root chi" and one (1) jar of Farm Hand's Organic Spicy Napa Kimchi. Neither of these contains fish sauce, so I glugged a generous glug of fish sauce into the pot. Neither is as spicy as I really want, either, so where the recipe called for two teaspoons hot pepper flakes I used two tablespoons. I'm not even sure how much gochujang I used; I carved out, with difficulty, a big lump of what was in the very outdated tub in the fridge, and figured it would dissolve eventually like bouillon. (Look, how bad can outdated gochujang go? It is made of hot pepper! Over time it stops being a paste and starts being a sort of sticky lava rock, but, hey, no big deal, I just start using a knife on it instead of a spoon.) The results still weren't hot enough for me, so there may be more of each added during subsequent stovetop reheats.

Oh! About that pork belly. It came from 63rd Street Farm. They do meat shares, and then any pork not already earmarked for meat shares gets sold to general CSA members on share pick-up day. I bought some. 63rd Street Farm also provided the daikon radishes, two of which I added in an attempt to approximate the anchovy stock flavor without actually making the anchovy stock featured in Maangchi's kimchi-jjigae recipe. (I also added about a teaspoon anchovy paste. Someone commented in asking Maangchi about substituting anchovy paste for dried anchovies. Maangchi said no. If you can't get dried anchovies, better to just skip the anchovy stock entirely and use beef or chicken stock instead. My answer to that was, I'M USING ANCHOVY PASTE AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME. But I did also toss in a big lump of Better Than Bouillon roasted beef base, just to hedge my bets.) I'll probably pickle the rest of the daikon radish I got from my CSA share according to this other recipe from Maangchi; it actually calls for Korean radish rather than daikon but I'm willing to take my chances.

In defrosting and slicing up that pork belly, I learned a thing! This has been your random biological fact of the day.

Anyway, point is: When I say I'm making kimchi-jjigae, this is a random example of how the process might go. Having been warned, if you're still interested in having any, come on over. But do it soon if you're doing it because it might all be gone by tomorrow evening.

(I'm not opposed to making more, mind you. It's not like it's going to get any less winter outside for the next few months.)

It's very nearly Halloween, which means it's also very nearly RELEASE DAY for the inaugural issue of The Macabre Museum, "a quarterly horror literary journal and online gallery featuring fiction, poetry, and art." You can pre-order the issue for Kindle on Amazon, but if you're a supporter of the Macabre Museum's Patreon, you can get the digital issue into your hot little hands (so to speak) right now this minute as well as snag yourself exclusive access to the online gallery.

The reason I'm bothering telling you so is not just because horror poetry is a pretty cool thing which you should support and read and enjoy, but also because this issue features one of my poems: "Your Disembodied Friends Would Like to Remind You". (This is one of the poetry sales I somewhat coyly announced late in the summer. The other is still waiting on its contract and publication date; stay tuned.) The poem is--well, I've been calling it an interrupted sonnet, but apparently that term is already taken, so let's try this: It is a blank-verse sonnet with lines of free verse interspersed throughout. The sonnet describes an everyday scene of a father and son talking over breakfast; the free verse lines describe something altogether more horrific. Think of it as a cold open for a sort of CSI/X-Files crossover TV show.

Content warning, if you wind up reading it, for harm to a child and for graphic description of a dismembered body. Just so we're clear. This is supernatural horror with a heavier emphasis on the horror part than is my usual.

In other news:

I just got a full-length short story back from my writing group with a pretty clear roadmap for revision. That's exciting. It's been a while since I had a new full-length short story to shop around. This one started as a response to a submission prompt for The First Line, and that was its first slush outing, but, as expected, it came home with a rejection letter. It was still very rough at the time. Also it's SF-horror in the Lovecraftian mode, and, word is, The First Line doesn't typically accept speculative fiction at all. Not that I'm going to stop trying them, mind you--their prompts generally turn into stories worth polishing up and sending out. Like this one.

I'm also about to throw a new flash piece into the slush arena, a trick-or-treat story in the tradition of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Its first incarnation was an attempt at Reedsy's weekly flash fiction contest, back before they started grabbing up the first publication rights of every entrant and not just the winner of the $50 prize. (I recommend subscribing to Reedsy's weekly writing prompts email. I recommend absolutely nothing else about Reedsy.) Later, I chopped the story down to 500 words and entered it into a Codex contest. The feedback it got served as guidance for yesterday's revision, in which I expanded it back up to about 850 words. And today--today it hits the slush!

I'm almost caught up with the Friday Fictionette release schedule. All the posts still overdue had October 2019 release dates, and look! it is still October 2019. That's as hopeful as things have been for months. Getting caught up there gives me a little breathing room to start moving hard on all those overdue Fictionette Artifacts. I miss my typewriter, y'all!

And then there's NaNoWriMo. I intend to commemorate NaNoWriMo in some way or another; I just haven't decided precisely how. I just might write a brand new novel draft from scratch. *gasp!*

There's also this convention I just went to--but that's definitely a story for another day.

Guess where I'm blogging from!? I'm blogging from the train! In COACH! ...Apparently trains get more civilized east of the Mississippi. Or maybe there's just fewer dead zones so that it seems worth getting a hotspot up and running. In any case, I'm on the Cardinal, having boarded at its originating station in Chicago and staying right on to its last stop of New York City. And there is wifi.

I'm heading to Montreal for Scintillation 2019. Everything sounds like a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to author readings, outings for dim sum and tea tastings, walking tours of various bits of town, tabletop games, and of course all sorts of panels. But I have to get there first.

It has been an adventure. I knew it would be an adventure going into this. I bought the fare reassuring the ticketing agent on the phone, "Yes, I know. Three nights on board. That's fine. I like trains." And I do! But, let me tell you, I have never been more glad of an impending twelve hour overnight layover than I am now.

My layover between Denver and Chicago was only to be three hours, which felt uncomfortably lean. Look, you take the California Zephyr with any regularity, you know there's a lot of potential for mishap and slowdowns between San Francisco and Chicago. And indeed the train was two hours late into Chicago, just late enough to keep me from relaxing. I spent the hour between trains walking one big and slow clockwise circle from track 26, around the track area, into the main terminal, over to gate C, into the line for boarding (pause for half an hour because boarding started late), then shuffling slowly in that line from gate C over to track 28. You will notice the proximity of 26 to 28, yes? Well. When my shuffling, shambling queue came alongside Train 50, I couldn't help but notice that proximity, either. Physically, mechanically, I could have stepped off Train 6, crossed the platform, and boarded Train 50 in under 5 minutes. Unfortunately, Amtrak connections don't work like that unless you're so desperately super-late that they're actually holding up the departure of the train just for you. And thankfully things weren't that desperate.

So, OK, I got my steps in for the day, as the kids with the FitBits do say.

Those two hours of late, by the way? There was this one half hour in there that was absolutely fascinating. Apparently Amtrak had left a car to be repaired somewhere east of, oh, Osceola, Iowa? Maybe? And it had been repaired. So our crew was tasked with picking it up and dragging it into Chicago. Like, "Oh, hey, while you're out, could you pick up some milk and a dozen eggs?" Only instead of groceries it was an Amtrak passenger car. So I was that passenger, the one who runs off to the back of the last coach to watch the goings-on over the engineers' shoulders. I was on my best behavior, though! I kept my mouth shut and did not bother them with questions. Some of the crew got out to manually throw (or shove) the switches that directly and visibly switched the lie of the tracks so that we could back onto the spur where the car for pick up was. The engineer on board kept saying into the walkie talkie, "Give me three more cars. Give me about a car and a half more. Twenty feet, nice and easy." And thus we backed, ever so gently, right into the orphaned car. Then they did a bunch of stuff I couldn't see to attach the car, then we waited a while, and then we went on our way, one car longer.

Anyway. Train 50, the Cardinal, has a single-decker coach with modern, comfy seats and, by Amtrak standards, very little leg-room. For comparison, in the upper level of the double-decker coach on the California Zephyr, I'd had so much room for my short little legs that I couldn't reach the footrest attached to the seat-back in front of me. The fold-down desk was just useable if I extended my seat's leg rest and sat on that rather than on the seat itself. Not complaining! It was spacious. It was comfy. Just, it was a bit of a surprise to be get on the Cardinal and be reminded of an airplane. First class in an airplane, maybe, but still.

And this worried me because I was going to be in that coach car for twenty-eight hours. (Twenty-eight! Haha ahaha ha. But see below.) Fortunately, I didn't have a next-seat neighbor until sometime past noon the next day, so I was able to curl up on my pair of seats and sleep cozily enough, at least until my knees started complaining about having been too long in a bent position. (Aging! I'm telling you.)

Did I write? Why yes I wrote. I have been writing. I have been doing all the writing every day on every train. I did some freewriting that turned into a flash fiction piece that has muscled its way onto the revision workbench despite said workbench already being occupied. I made some progress on the latest overdue Friday Fictionette. Also I battled 4thewords monsters and submitted a manuscript because, as stated above, there is wifi on this train, so I could do those things.

OK, well, much of West Virginia was dead zone. But then much of West Virginia was too beautiful for gluing eyes to the laptop screen anyway, so.

But here's the thing: Throughout today, this train has been getting more and more behind schedule. It had picked up a forty-five minute delay overnight, and this steadily increased to an hour and a half by the time we got to Charlottesville. Then we hit Washington D.C., where I gawked out the window at the Iconic Architectural Features of America's Capitol, like you do. (I saw the Washington Monument and I think I saw the back end of the White House. It was hard to be sure. It was dark out, and the big double rectangle between me and the recognizable dome could have been just a bigger version of any random IT office back in east Boulder.) And we came to the station, and we stopped, and we stayed there a long, long time.

They had to change off the diesel engine for electric, to start. That was planned. Then they had to do something arcane with the brakes, which was not planned. Then the other passengers in coach started shouting at the Amtrak crew like spoiled children, and I upped stakes and departed for the lounge car where it was quiet.

And then. And then and then and then. Just before the stop in Wilmington, Delaware, there is drama. There is a man who has been in the bathroom a long, long time and is not responding to the crew. I mean, he's not in medical distress, as far as they can tell, but he refuses to come out. And other passengers indicate that earlier conversations with said gentleman made them think he might be doing drugs in there. OR SOMETHING. And the coach attendant is all, "That's going to slow us down some more, because we're going to have to call the police to deal with him." Cue the shouting and the wails of despair and "Please, Lord, just let us reach Philadelphia!" I'd just returned to my seat toward the front of coach. I turned right around and parked myself in the last seat in coach, as far from the shouting and wailing as I could get. Because I've got a sleepless night in NYC ahead of me, and I need a nap.

The stop at Wilmington wasn't actually all that long. As we pulled away, I saw the aforementioned gentleman being questioned on the platform by three police officers. I suppose extracting him didn't turn out to be all that difficult.

So. I'm going to be at least two and a half hours late into New York Penn Station. Which is fine. Once I get there, I have until around 8:00 AM to board my next train. My only regret is, we're going to get in after all the groceries close, and I had wanted to pick up a few things. Well. One of them opens again at 5:00 AM, so maybe I'll get to do my shopping after all.

Meanwhile, you know what's open all night long in New York City? This Korean BBQ place. So it doesn't matter how late I get in, I'm still getting my order of kimchi kalguksu or maybe galbitang or, I dunno, something delicious. Also I have not counted the number of karaoke bars in the neighborhood but a glance at Google Maps tells me that number is upward of A LOT. So it'll be fine.

But I should probably take that nap now.