author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

It's already midway through December and I owe y'all a Friday Fictionette round-up post. But first, a report on the Great Big Catch-up Project.

There was slippage. There was significant slippage. There was sufficient slippage that I had to recalculate my schedule and my expectations. At this point, returning to my three-day/step process (1. babble draft, 2. real draft, 3. compile/produce/upload), I will be All Caught Up by the end of the month. Which is to say, by the end of the year. Which still gets 2022 started off right, but does mean a couple more weeks of this accelerated pace and prioritizing the Friday Fictionette project over all else.

Nevertheless, I did manage to submit two poems at the end of last month, log their rejections yesterday, and submit a story today. And also make this post! (Finally.) So my writing life isn't being entirely monopolized by the catch-up initiative. Only maybe like 98%.

So here's the Friday Fictionette Round-up for October 2021!

October 1: "Transplant" (ebook, audio) In which we flourish and thrive. She'd stopped being able to move her right arm at all a couple days ago.

October 8: "One Oracle, Two Swords, and a Thief" (ebook, audio) In which we're only following orders. He wondered whose death the Hex Queen had bound to such a banal purpose.

October 15: "The Old Weaver Retires" (ebook, audio) In which someone other than the usual suspects sets off on an adventure. She'd never enjoyed weaving. It was why she'd run away to the Palace in the first place.

October 22: "Revisions" (ebook, audio) In which time travelers micromanage your life. At times you grow tired of your advisers from the future.

The Fictionette Freebie for October 2021 is "The Old Weaver Retires". You can follow the links above to read it in the ebook format of your choice (available in epub, mobi, and pdf) and/or download the audio version (narrated by the author) regardless of your subscription status/pledge tier or lack thereof.

All for now. Probably more tomorrow. Until then!

Oh hey how is it the 30th already? Welp.

No regrets, though. The month has gone more or less to plan. Well, other than my weekends having a tendency to disappear in a puff of roller derby. In my defense, it wasn't just regular practice but also holiday parties and trail skating and all the activities associated with moving into our new practice facility. This past week, we put down the Sport Court and then we taped a track outline and then we were all like, "Well, we know we said no practice Tuesday night because of Thanksgiving but hey, let's skate Tuesday night anyway because NEW FLOOR WHO DIS?" And yes, Tuesday is not a weekend day. What's your point?

Anyways, some writing time was lost here and there, and I am slightly behind on my big ambitious Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project upload schedule. But only a little! There is one, count it, (1) short-short story-like object that should have gone out by now that has not. That is an entirely surmountable bit of slippage. I can soak that. It'll go up and be released this Friday along with the other two that ought to be, and everything will be back on track for a December 17 ALL CAUGHT UP celebration. (A private celebration. That takes place in my head.) And there should be an October 2021 Friday Fictionette Round-up post next week. JUST YOU WAIT.

What else? Well, tonight I am in Steamboat Springs, doing about the same thing I do with all my days except less roller derby, more writing, and a different subset of the Rocky Mountains out my window. To be entirely specific, I am currently sitting at a table in WildPlum Grocer (and coffee shop, and bar, and liquor store) enjoying the writing-at-a-cafe sensation I have so rarely experienced since March of last year. It's also nice to get out of the hotel room. It's mostly comfy and has a nice view, but my poor feet got sick of dangling. The only table or desk set-up in that place is sort of bar-stool, and I am a short person who can't even reach those tall chairs' support bars. And I needed a slight change of scenery from my change of scenery, I guess.

("What are you going to do in Steamboat?" we get asked. "Enjoying the opening week of skiing?" No, we don't ski. "Then... um... what exactly are you doing?" BEING HERE. Shut up.)

More news of note: Before we left Boulder for this little vacation-like activity, I bought a whole bunch of dried fruit and nuts. FRUITCAKE WILL HAPPEN THIS YEAR. And now you know.

So what with the Friday Fictionette Catch-up Project going so well, I guess I can post the Fictionette Round-Up for August 2021. Actually, I could have posted it... *checks notes* ...any old time in November, since the August 27 release went up on Nov 1. Welp, here they are now: links to, and teaser text from, the short story-like objects originally scheduled for the first four (and only four) Fridays in August:

Friday, August 6, 2021: "The New Undertaker" (ebook, audio) In which we have a changing of the guard, about which the old guard is ill-informed. This wasn't an apprentice. This was a usurper.

Friday, August 13, 2021: "When It Calls, You Have to Go" (ebook, audio) In which some parties withstand unearthly temptation, and others enthusiastically give in. Tom still hadn't come home.

Friday, August 20, 2021: "Who's Afraid of the Dark?" (ebook, audio) In which we visit lodgings with a most unusual innkeeper. Of course, you, dear reader, are too sophisticated to believe in vampires.

Friday, August 27, 2021: "King of All He Surveyed" (ebook, audio) In which revisit a beloved bedtime story. I'll tell it to you exactly the way I remember my mother telling it to me.

"Who's Afraid of the Dark?" is the Fictionette Freebie for the month. That's the one you can read and/or listen to without having to be a Patron at any tier. Check it out! I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope you do too.

So you remember how I described the three-day process for producing overdue fictionettes in a hurry? I said Day 1 was for the babble-draft, Day 2 was for the final draft, and Day 3 was for production? Yes, well, about that: it turns out the final draft stage is not the work of a single day. Typically it's been more like "extra practice drafts and eventually a final draft" and it's been creeping into Day 3. This has not, fortunately, thrown any wrenches in my schedule. Turns out since the production stage only takes about an hour and a half or so, I can fit some last minute drafting and polishing on Day 3. Heck, the one time I didn't finish production until the morning of the next fictionette's Day 1, there was still plenty of time left in the day for the scheduled babble-draft session.

(Besides, late uploads would be pretty much invisible from where y'all are standing, what with them not going live until the following Friday morning.)

What I've learned is, not only is this 3-day schedule working, but it's got some room for flex in it. So that's good. Especially since the one for September 24 is giving me trouble. So, you know how the Friday Fictionette for any given week is based on a freewriting session from the corresponding week in the previous month? (If not, now you do.) Well, sometimes I choose a freewriting session not because it would positively make a good fictionette, but because it is the least bad of my options from a week of slim pickings. "Future me is going to hate me for this," I'll mutter to myself as I copy it over.

GUESS WHAT. Past me was a jerk.

It's OK. After today's session of babbling on the page about it, I feel kinda almost secure about maybe attempting a real practice draft that might magically transform itself into a final draft beneath my very fingers. Maybe. I hope.

On a Friday.

Um. Well, there should be time in Saturday for whatever doesn't get done tomorrow. Theoretically.

So far, so good. So excellent.

We're on day 8 of November, and I have made 100% of my writing goals thus far. Morning Pages every day, freewriting every day, and sufficient daily work on the overdue Friday Fictionettes that I have indeed uploaded a pair of fictionette posts (one for the ebook, one for the audio) every third day. (If you visit my Patreon, count up the new posts, and come up short, remember that, from this point onward, they don't go live until the following first-through-fourth-Friday.)

My other goals are more like 98%. There were a couple days when I neither skated nor got to my physical therapy homework, but I definitely exercised, considering those days included Friday when I regularly handle heavy boxes of food and Saturday when I helped my roller derby league move into our new practice space.

And I've been more or less faithful to my sleep schedule goals; if I let midnight slip or snoozed a bit past 8:30, at least I wasn't up until three or in bed straight until noon. What's important is, I'm getting enough sleep and I'm getting up in time to start writing in the morning every morning. That's aided the push for dailiness tremendously.

Another thing that's helped is, I've gone back to regularly attending the co-writing sessions available to Cat Rambo's online community. The morning session is at 9:30 AM my time, and the afternoon one is at 3:00 PM. Each session comprises three 30-minute "sprints," before which attendees share what they intend to use the sprint for and after which we report on how it went. So on the days my schedule allows me to attend, I know exactly when my writing can and must happen, and for how long.

It's a schedule. I spent several months being severely allergic to schedules. I guess I'm not anymore. Brains are weird.

What I've not gone back to doing is keeping a timesheet. Turns out, tracking my hours isn't worth the inadvertent barrier to starting work that it turned into. I think about going back to it, and then I think about how nice it is to just open up the Scrivener project and dump words into it without ritual or rigmarole. How pleasant it is to just forgo all the bureaucratic rituals and throat-clearing exercises and just start.

At one time, that spreadsheet was useful to me because I needed to gather information about my writing process: what time of day is best for me to write at? How long do I go before I run out of oomph? How long does it take to produce a Friday Fictionette from a finished text? I think I have a pretty good idea of those things now, so I'm scheduling my days accordingly as much as possible. I may go back to timesheet-as-data-gathering after November, when my daily round will change significantly by, for instance, going back to my regular weekly submission procedures and hopefully making a dent in my story-revision queue. (Also attempting to post here daily. I take forever with these posts. Argh.) But for now my schedule is appropriate to my November list of Daily Required Items. Further data-gathering is not urgent at this time.

Now, shortly after I quit my day job to write full time with my husband's support, I used a spreadsheet to assuage my guilt. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't just taking a permanent vacation. I was still working, dammit! See? I put in my five hours today! Unfortunately, that had a tendency to lead to more guilt if I didn't make my five hours.

The timesheet has historically been useful, on and off through the years, in helping me end long, depressive non-writing slumps. But I'm finding that strategy less useful for that now, as the thought of setting up the daily timesheet has increased my avoidance rather than lessened it. So it's time to let the dratted thing go.

So what's working for me instead? A whole bunch of things mixed together, that's what.

There's what I think of as "imaginary external accountability," where I state my goals and intentions somewhere public, thus making myself feel obligated to live up to them so I don't disappoint the version of You, the Reader who lives in my head. Hence blog posts like this one.

Then there's actual external accountability, where I've shared my goals with my fellow writers in the aforementioned co-writing sessions, one of those goals being to regularly show up. I know they're expecting me and they might ask me how the big Patreon Catch-up Project is going. I want to be there and give them good news!

There will be, hopefully, the momentum I build up by following this schedule all through November. I'm hoping that my current routine will take on the force of habit and more or less perpetuate itself through December and beyond.

But probably the most important component is how pleased and proud I am at the end of a day where I met all my goals, checked off all my items, and am happy with the process I made. Look, if I can keep up this pace, I will be entirely caught up on the Friday Fictionette release schedule by December 17! I'm excited about that! I want to make that happen! And not being constantly behind schedule will open up so much time and energy for other stories, other projects, other goals, to which I can bring the same kind of energy and attention I've been putting toward this ficitonette-every-three-days initiative--now that I know I have that kind of energy and attention available.

And I'm just going to be happier with myself and less stressed out. Imagining that less-stressed and more optimistic version of Future Me is probably my biggest motivator to keep up this pace and meet my daily goals.

All right, maybe this is just Week One optimism. Everyone doing NaNoWriMo in the classic mode gets super-excited about their novels during Week One. But then comes the Week Two Slump. I'm hoping the non-noveling equivalent does not lie in wait for me. If I encounter a slump of my own... well, I'll reread this blog post to remind myself of reasons to be excited, that's what I'll do.

(Sometimes the Imaginary Reader on whom I'm basing my Imaginary External Accountability... is me.)

Let's just write October off as non-existent. To heck with October. It's November now, and you know what that means.

No, I do not have a novel to work on. I have something much more pressing: the dratted Friday Fictionette release schedule. I haven't been on top of it since September of last year, and now I am now precisely two months behind. That is ridonkulous. So my NaNoWriMo will be about fixing that, in part if not in whole. Also about fixing my writing LIFE, because seriously.

So I have goals. Well, I have two overall goals: 1. get caught up on Friday Fictionettes, and 2. instill and strengthen habits for a more sustainable writing life. But in the service of those big overarching goals, I have this list of small, concrete daily goals, and they go like this:

• Get to bed on time by midnight
• Get up between 7:45 and 8:30
• Morning Pages every day, as soon after getting up as possible. (No computer nuthin' 'til they're done.)
• 1,000 words, ish, freewriting to a prompt every day.
• Significant progress on the current Friday Fictionette (see below).
• Some physical exercise: either skating or my physical therapy homework.

That's it. Those are the required daily items for November. I'm demoting submission procedures and the production of submittable materials to "Nice to Haves" for the month. That frees me up to let "significant progress" take however much time it needs.

So, what's "significant progress" on a fictionette? It's completing one of the three main steps in Friday Fictionette production. That phrase makes it sound so dang industrial, doesn't it? Ergh. Like a factory assembly line. Only it kinda is, and there are three stations in the factory.

1. Babble-draft. This is where I reread the freewriting session I've chosen as the current fictionette's base material, then flail about on the page in search of the story's final form. There will be a lot of disjointed questions, notes, ideas, etc. Babble. Usually includes some practice drafts as I try out different approaches. If I'm lucky, there's an "a-ha" moment where it all comes together. More often, layers of babble and practice draft and process eventually result in me having a solid plan for writing the final draft. Once I have that solid plan, this step is done.

2. Working and Final Draft. This part is basically plotter-style NaNoWriMo, or the process Rachel Aaron describes in her book and on her blog: I come to this writing session knowing what I'm going to write, and so I write it. A few more discoveries may yet be waiting along the way, but they're unlikely to change the fundamental structure of the story at this point. Then there's some final polishing and word-count reduction. Then I'm done. Except for the Author's Note, of course. Argh. What am I gonna put in the Author's Note this time? After some overthinking and stress, I come up with something, and then I argh all over again because titles, y'all. But then it's done.

3. Production. Narrating, recording, and producing the MP3 version. Creating the cover image. Compiling to PDF, ebook, and HTML. And finally throwing all those elements into a couple Patreon posts which, if I'm on top of things (ha! ha!) I will then schedule for publication at 8:00 AM on Friday. This all sounds like a lot, but it's the easiest bit, really. It's the most factory-like of the whole assembly line. Takes maybe an hour and a half.

So. "Significant progress" means doing one of those three things. Every day. Which theoretically means I could be All Caught Up in 3 X [Number of Overdue Fictionettes] days, right? Only there will inevitably be slippage, because I suck, or maybe it's just life that sucks sometimes. But! I fully intend to suck less in November. I'm off to a great start! 100% completion yesterday and today. Checked off every item on the above list. Yesterday, in fact, was a Working/Final Draft and Production day for the August 27 fictionette. And today, in addition to being Babble-Draft day for the Sept 3 release, also afforded time to work on a new poem which I hope to submit to Eternal Haunted Summer, and to do a small spot of submission procedures, too. And this blog post. While also holding down the fort waiting for an on-site computer repair technician who never actually showed. And then going to derby. Which was a footage watching party instead of actual skating, because weather, but hey, that's why I did my PT today.

All of which goes to say: NaNoWriMo Days 1 and 2 have been complete successes... so much so that I'm nervous about the inevitable crash. About waking up tomorrow and thinking, "Shit, now I have to live up to the level of production I achieved on Monday and Tuesday," and then just collapsing under the weight of self-expectation. Plus, tomorrow's Wednesday, and Wednesdays are infamous for failing to exist around here.

Except tomorrow's a Wednesday in November, and November is going to rock.

Because I said so.

So there.

Oh, I get it. This week, Thursday doesn't exist. Well, drat.

Of course, I say that as though it just happened to me, rather than being a function of the choices I've made throughout the day... but sometimes it just happens that the right choices are harder to make. Ah well.

So since I don't have a lot of Actually Writing to talk about, I'll share a book report instead. One of the creators I follow on Patreon is author Billy Martin. Now, I'm reasonably fond of his writing, so when he posted that his favorite Halloween story is The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes, I hied me over to Barnes & Noble and picked up the ebook. (I have a rather large amount of gift card credit in my B&N account thanks to years of futzing around with Swagbucks and Rewarded Play, and I've got things set up to port their ebooks over to calibre with a minimum of fuss. So that's why B&N for spur-of-the-moment ebook purchases.)

All in all, it's been a rather delightful read. I'm not done yet, mind you; I'm having too much fun reading it aloud to myself, and that takes a bit longer than reading silently. So I'm only up to the end of the chapter that introduces Weeny Witch, which calibre tells me is just about at the halfway point. I cannot, therefore, give you my thoughts on whether it sticks the landing, but I can say that the journey has been overall a joy.

The plot, briefly, is this: After an afternoon of being regaled with stories about the wickedness of Old Witch, Amy resolves that Old Witch must for her sins be banished to the top of a bare and lonely glass mountain--but if Old Witch is very good, which is to say, good as real, right, regular little girls reckon it and not as wicked witches do, why then, Old Witch may come back for a hurly-burly on Halloween. And so Old Witch, under protest, attempts to be good, and her progress is strictly monitored by Amy, Amy's best friend Clarissa, and the stern spelling bee Malachi.

It probably sounds very twee, and it kind of is, but only in the way that a story by E. Nesbit is twee. Say, The Book of Dragons, or of course Five Children and It. The details of Amy and Clarissa's day-to-day are lavish and true, from the neighbor's linden tree with the rope swing hanging off it, to the rules about witches' hats, to the minutia of witches' rituals (the "backanally" dance, the wiggling, the correct position from which to recite one of the greater abracadabras), to the various lessons learned in Witch School. And all the while the narrator feels like another character herself, one who's sharing knowing glances with you over the heads of the characters and otherwise acknowlegding your expected reactions to the events that befall them.

One thing I didn't expect going in: it's metafiction, or partially so. Old Witch is a character in the stories Amy's mother has been telling her for a long time now, and when Amy and Clarissa perform their feat of "banquishment," it sounds like they're playing make-believe. Every event in the chapters featuring Old Witch appears to be caused by Amy's imagination. And yet... a real little red cardinal bird flies Amy's letters up to the bare glass mountain for Old Witch and the Little Witch Girl to read. When the Little Witch Girl gets lost on her way to Witch School, she winds up in front of Amy's house and spies the children through the window. And it's Little Witch Girl herself who causes Amy and Clarissa--by means of her greatest abracadabra thus far--to be magically transported to the house atop the glass mountain for her birthday party (for just because she stays six forever doesn't mean she can't have birthday parties!). The lines between fact and fiction get charmingly blurred, and that's where the magic happens.

On the downside, the book has a troubling tendency to equate "fair-haired" and "blond" with "pretty." Little Witch Girl is blond, which is "very unusual in a witch," and when she arrives, Old Witch is "weak with wonder at the dazzling spectacle of a beautiful fair-haired little witch girl." And of course when Amy and Clarissa show up at the birthday party, all the black-haired witches are fascinated with their fair hair and their colorful dresses. It doesn't come up often, but when it does, it feels downright colonial--like those bad old stories claiming that natives of the Americas, never having seen white people before, worshiped the Europeon explorers as gods. At one point, I double-checked the publication date and was surprised to find it as recent as 1960, and not contemporaneous with E. Nesbit's books (Five Children and It was originally published in 1902).

And no, I'm not going to wave it off as "of its time"--I take a very dim view of that excuse, as it not only gives racists the privilege of determining the norm for the era, it also erases the viewpoints of people of color. Like, every time someone says "Nobody knew that was a problem back then," they're ignoring that the people whom those words or behavior hurt damn well knew it was a problem.

Like I said, it doesn't come up often, and mostly I can tune it out. But I'm not going to sit here like an oblivious white woman and unilaterally declare it no big deal. I'm honestly not sure I'd feel comfortable reading it to young children who are already getting enough racist messages from our society without this book smuggling racist beauty standards into their ears under the guise of Halloween fun.

I bring this up not because it ruins the book for me but because I can't in good conscience just not mention it. Consider this a content note. Otherwise, this book is being a delight and a joy and I'm getting a kick out of it.

And that's my book report. Good night!

Hullo! This blog is not dead. Furthermore, actual writing happened today. On a Wednesday, even! UNHEARD OF. Generally my Tuesdays are epic and my Wednesdays are nonexistent. But this week both Tuesday and Wednesday were productive--and on a human scale, which is much more sustainable.

I've been experimenting with different scheduling brain-hacks, trying to see how best to trick my brain into behaving itself. Today's experiment involved a "done by" rather than "start at" check-list. "Let's see. Task one is my Morning Pages, which I'm in the middle of now" (Morning Pages tends to be where I figure out the shape of my day) "and I should be done by 1:00 PM. Next I have to record the Wednesday show for AINC, which I ought to be able to get done by 3:00 PM. Then the daily freewriting--that usually takes 25 minutes, but let's say done by 4:00 PM..." And so forth.

The unexpected benefit of all this was, although I had an idea that one task's "done by" was really just code for the next task's "start by," if I missed that start-by time by a few minutes, I didn't suddenly feel like I'M LATE I MISSED THE START TIME WHAT'S THE POINT ANYMORE. I knew I could get it done by whatever done-by time I'd intended. If I got it done early, I could futz around with clicky-games for a bit. Or I could futz around with clicky-games while I did the task, so long as I still got it done by the done-by time.

So, basically, we're talking about One Weird Trick to lessen the pressure and anxiety miasma surrounding certain writing tasks. It reminded me of Havi Brooks's "code words" strategy, although perhaps not at the same level of mental role play as the example she gives in the linked blog post. Today it worked. Who knows if it'll work tomorrow--tomorrow I may have a very different brain on--but I'll try it and see.

So, having gotten all my work (give or take a checklist item) done by a reasonable time of the afternoon, I had time to make salsa.

It has been a good year for tomatoes. A very, very good year. Every week, 63rd St. Farm has been sending me home with some five to eight slicing tomatoes and a selection of heirloom tomatoes, saucing tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes. It sort of piles up. And then there's a bit on one of the really pretty heirloom tomatoes that's starting to look iffy if not downright moldy, and that's how you know it's high time to do something with these tomatoes, y'all.

The Conservatory Kitchen Presents: Improv Tomato-culling Salsa

1. Starting with the oldest, worst-looking tomato in the bunch and moving up from there, cut off the bad bits and see what's left. (The aforementioned heirloom with the moldy spot cleaned up surprisingly well!) Put the good bits on the kitchen scale until the kitchen scale says 2 lbs or thereabouts. Take these accumulated good bits, dice 'em and chop 'em and mangle 'em, and stick 'em in a big bowl. (Bigger than that. You need room to stir, OK?)
2. To this add about a quarter pound of diced onion--yeah, that half-an-onion that's sitting around in the crisper drawer (dear Gods, organic yellow onions are HUGE these days), that'll do--and maybe three green onions and five nice-sized garlic cloves and oh, hey, something hot. Five serrano peppers sounds about right. (Serrano peppers are another veggie I've been accumulating.)
3. Spices. Very simple. About a teaspoon dried oregano and about a half teaspoon ground cumin. Fresh ground peppercorns of all colors: black, white, pink. More than that. KEEP GRINDING. Maybe a teaspoon of salt? More? I dunno, the chips you're gonna dip in this mess are gonna be salty already, aren't they?
4. Stir stir stir. Taste. What do you think? Did I forget anything? No, I left out the cilantro on purpose. Can't stand the stuff. More for you, right? Hm. Maybe parsley. Maybe a diced peach if one's rolling around the fruit bowl.
5. Let sit in the fridge until party time. If no parties are in the offing, throw one for yourself. Show yourself a good time. You deserve it.

And there you go. Salsa. By the time I was done, I only had about 15 tomatoes left in the house and maybe 10 serrano peppers. SHUT UP, THAT'S PROGRESS.

Hey, you know what I haven't done in a while? ("Upload a blog post?") Quiet, you. I mean, a really long while. ("Um...") A Friday Fictionette Roundup, that's what!

Quick obligatory recap, given how long it's been: The Friday Fictionette Project is where I turn some of my daily freewriting into semi-presentable short-story-like objects four times monthly for your amusement, confusement, and (hopefully) delight. The ebook version of each is available to Patrons at the $1/month pledge tier, and those pledging $3/month additionally get the audiobook version, which I narrate. One out of four fictionettes I'll designate the Fictionette Freebie for that month and unlock its posts for public consumption.

As with everything in my life, I am behind schedule, but for the most part I have been uploading something every first through fourth Friday. (I don't know what happened last week, but I hope to make up for it with two uploads on Oct 1. They'll be the fictionettes originally scheduled for August 13 and 20. You see the problem.)

Having recently finished all four releases originally scheduled for July 2021, I shall round them up here for your convenience.

Friday, July 2, 2021: "Leveling Up" (ebook, audio) In which a hero receives his just reward. Or is that come-uppance? The traditional reward was half the kingdom and a royal heir's hand in marriage--but maybe that was thinking too small...

Friday, July 9, 2021: "Bride of the River" (ebook, audio) In which our protagonist was right all along about their creepy classmate's creepy family. Sort of. "Fine. But if they wind up slaughtering me for Sunday dinner, don't say I didn't warn you."

Friday, July 16, 2021: "Pilgrim's Voyage" (ebook, audio) Being a sort of New Passenger Orientation for a somewhat perilous journey (and its rather more perilous destination). Does something to you, coming under the Goddess's eye. Makes words seem a little, I dunno, noisy.

Friday, July 23, 2021: "Where the Streetlights Never Come On" (ebook, audio) In which we go for a Saturday morning drive that lasts all day and maybe forever. Uncle Garrick never took Harold's friends with them on their adventures. He only ever took Harold.

"Where the Streetlights Never Come On" is the Fictionette Freebie for July 2021, so feel free to click the links and go check it out regardless of whether you're a paying Patron.

("Hey, but what about the ones for May and June? The last round-up post you did was for the March fictionettes.") I said quiet, you.

And that's what I've got for you today. Dare I promise anything for tomorrow? I have to admit, my daily writing routine has been kind of crap lately. I mean, when it works out, when I stick to it, it's awesome. But I've been kind of crap about sticking to it. Weirdly, I tend to be best at Tuesdays and Thursdays, in spite of those being my roller derby practice days. More like "because of." Knowing that after 6:15 I will be good for nothing but skating and then maybe a beer brings that necessary urgency to my scheduling. If I want to get everything done, I have to stick to certain timelines. I stuck to them today, gosh darn it! Like GLUE!

Tomorrow? Eeesh. Not gonna think about tomorrow just yet.

Heyyyy, it's another blog post. Two in two days! Go me. Only I am here to report that no, I did not manage to adhere tightly to any sort of schedule on this tightly scheduled Thursday, so, y'know, booo.

I have some Excuses. Actually, I have one main excuse. You know how when something has gone wrong, you can say to yourself, "I will deal with it later tonight," but the Wrongness continues scritching and scratching at the back of your head anyway, this awful persistent distraction that just won't let you concentrate on anything else? Yes, well, I was distracted with getting my blog back.

(This is also why, if I don't manage to do anything else writing-wise today, I'm damn well posting this blog post. Because I need to gripe.)

I didn't realize anything was wrong until I went to post last night's entry. I'd composed it in 4thewords, no problem, copied it into Scrivener, yup, compiled to HTML for proofreading in Firefox, awesome, pasted it into my homebrew blog-editing web-interface, so far so good, and finally hit PUBLISH. If that sounds complicated, well, I complicate everything. It's my brand. The upshot is, the only part of nicolejleboeuf.com I've touched thus far is the private directory with the server-side password prompt protecting all the controls whereby nobody but me gets to post, edit, or otherwise fuck things up.

But someone else had already fucked things up, as I would shortly find out.

After I hit PUBLISH, the next order of business is to rebroadcast the post on social media. I have an RSS feed, hand-coded in PHP from MySQL just like everything else on this website, which dlvr.it scans for new material to auto-post to Twitter. But it doesn't auto-post to Facebook anymore because Facebook took away their ability to auto-post to personal pages years ago, and I'm just not dedicated enough to set up a Totes Professional Facebook Author Page. Sorry. My Facebook presence is just me under all my hats, ink-stained writer cap and roller derby helmet and witch's hat and whatever else looks must-have to my questionable fashion sense.

So I do the Facebook rebroadcast by hand. I head over to the nicolejleboeuf.com home page, incidentally making sure the new post shows up on the RSS round-up without weird errors (I need to fix something in the encoding, but until then I just avoid quotes and ampersands in the blog post titles), to snag the link so I can paste it into a Facebook status update. Once I do that, I'll note the URL and date in that post's custom metadata on Scrivener, and then I'm done.

Well. I headed over to the home page, and damn if it didn't say "Sorry, no RSS for you. Can't read the data. Sucks, dunnit?" Well, not in those words, of course.

So of course I panic. Not only did I hand-code this blog and the related manuscripts-and-submissions database interface (which continues to be incomplete, because I suck, which is why I still have to do a lot of submissions logging directly into MyPHPAdmin), but most of the code I haven't touched since, oh, 2003. And every once in a while my domain host upgrades the default PHP install, some bit of code or other becomes depreciated, and my website breaks. So I was like, argh, it's 10 PM, I do not have the wherewithal to play hide-and-seek with depreciated code bits. I'll deal with it tomorrow. And then I promise I will proactively comb through my code for anything that's depreciated by PHP 7.0, and then I will upgrade from 5.6 to 7.0, and I will be FUTURE PROOF. For some small segment of future, anyway.

Well. Tomorrow comes around. I get up. I do the bunny chores. I make myself tea. I do a couple writing tasks that absolutely have to be done First Thing in the Morning. (One of these is a short story critique that I promised a friend the other day. If I accomplish nothing else, I can now feel virtuous about keeping that promise.) Finally I pull up EditPlus and tell it to Open Remote via FTP so I can get some debugging done. There follows a period of 20 minutes or so during which the FTP won't connect and neither will my email and the domain host's server status page isn't even resolving but we won't go into that because eventually everything does connect and I find out the problem is both bigger and smaller than I'd thought. To wit:

The whole public blog folder, nicolejleboeuf.com/journal, is kaput. 500 Internal Server Error. Even on index.html, which has no php code whatsoever. It's not my code. It's something in the file structure.

A bit more poking around and dredging my technical memory for "how did I used to deal with this back when I was actually fluent in Programming?" and I figure it out. But because I do not assume you are fluent in Programming, it'll take some explaining. (If you don't need the explanation, you can just skip to the next dramatically single-sentence paragraph.)

So, remember that directory that's private? Where I do that first bit of blog uploading? That I have to enter a password into my web browser to get into? OK, so, that's enabled by a special file called .htaccess that lives in the folder and specifies stuff like who's on the guest list and what password they need to use to prove it. It can specify other stuff, like that index.php is your default web page and not index.html, that sort of thing, but it's the password protection stuff that's important for this story, because that's what was kaputting my blog.

The private directory's .htaccess file had been copied into the public /journal directory.

Very specifically that .htaccess file. I know because it said AuthName "Niki's Weblog: Staging Area" and everything. And I really must emphasize that I did not do this. I don't know how it happened, and I've got a support ticket in to my domain host to see if they know, because this sort of thing can leave a web developer feeling distinctly uneasy.

But the good news was, the solution was super simple. Delete the offending file, and I've got myself a blog again. And an RSS feed. And a blog round-up widget on my front page. And everything.

And then suddenly it was time to go pick up this week's veggie share at 63rd Street Farm, and then come home with the veg and put it away, and make myself some food, and putter away at nothing in particular, because I am now in the two-hour window between the farm and the roller derby during which nothing gets done.

Well. This blog post got done, anyway. Which is more than I can usually say for the Thursday PM doldrums.

If I am very good and do not join my leaguemates for beers after practice (wistful sigh), I may actually get the rest of the writing done. Which is to say, I might manage about 15 minutes on each of the three tasks I had hoped to get done. Which would be better than not doing them at all.

Here's hoping.

This being the actually writing blog, I'm gonna blog about actually writing. Today I actually wrote. It's a good thing.

As I mentioned last time, I've been having trouble. My relationship with time-management has become fraught. More fraught than usual, I mean. I got to where the very act of planning my writing day, with a check-list and a schedule and everything, sent me fleeing into the wordless night. Things didn't get done. Things were bad.

So I gave myself permission for a few weeks to just sort of float along through the day, dabbling with whatever writing task came to mind, telling myself it was play and not work at all. It was safe to start writing because starting didn't commit me to continuing. It didn't require "clocking in" and it didn't require putting away the stupid clicky games because it didn't require Dedicated Butt-In-Chair time. I could write a sentence or two while running a rewarded ad in my stupid clicky game, for example. No pressure. Just play.

This was emotionally helpful, but not very pragmatic for a writer with several simultaneous projects and a handful of self-imposed deadlines. I got further behind on everything. Also, I discovered that the non-writing things I had scheduled in relation to scheduled writing tasks got forgotten half the time because the writing tasks were no longer scheduled. So that wasn't very sustainable.

So I've kinda-sorta gone back to having a schedule. It's a looser version of the schedule I got burnt out on. Instead of "Write X from exactly Y:00 to Y:25" it's more like "Start X sometime during the Y o'clock hour and go for as long as it takes to defeat a Knusha." (A Knusha is monster in 4thewords. It takes 1200 words to beat a Knusha, and you have 600 minutes to do it in. This is not hard.) Things get tighter when they have to, like when I've got a Tuesday full of appointments, but on a day like today when I don't have to leave the house, there's some float tolerance built in.

So this week I'm revisiting "Making Friends" and starting, slowly, tentatively, in a floating sort of way, to revise it. I hadn't touched it since sending it to my critique group about a year ago. Yesterday I got an idea for improving a scene where the pace had got bogged down, and though I never got to the keyboard about it, I did a bunch of working it out in my head during the drive to roller derby practice. That counted. I checked "Story Revision" off my to-do list for the day. Today I spent a few minutes typing up some concrete notes in the margins. That definitely counted. Tomorrow I'll make a first attempt at writing the new material. We'll get there.

I also wanted to actually get to this blog today, and now I have done that. Hooray! Another little victory for my collection.

Tomorrow will be one of those tightly scheduled days. My hope is that the loosely scheduled days like today will bolster me with enough positivity and achievement that I'll have the wherewithal to stick to a tight schedule on a day like tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. I'll report back and let you know. If not tomorrow, then at least sometime later in the week. Or at least sometime before another month has gone by. One blog post a month seems a little sparse.

Anyway, 'til then.